Oh, Essential Elite: One Shot Vaccination, Please!

It turns out that the three vaccines authorized in many countries are extremely efficient within ten days of the first shot. Thus several countries and jurisdiction, including Great Britain, have decided to give the first jab of the vaccines to as many people as possible (second jabs shall be given three moths later, when there is plenty of vaccine to go around0. As it is the virus kills 3% of those getting COVID (world statistics on December 31, 2020: 61,021,080 cases had an outcome; 59,198,954 (97%) Recovered / Discharged. 1,822,126 (3%): Deaths

It is now well-known which kind of patients the virus tends to kill. Those should be vaccinated first. Instead, the elite, in some major “democracies” decided to vaccinate itself first.

Pfizer’s Vaccine Offers Strong Protection After First Dose
By Noah Weiland and Carl Zimmer
Published Dec. 8, 2020, Updated Dec. 22, 2020

WASHINGTON — The coronavirus vaccine made by Pfizer and BioNTech provides strong protection against Covid-19 within about 10 days of the first dose, according to documents published on Tuesday by the Food and Drug Administration before a meeting of its vaccine advisory group.

The finding is one of several significant new results featured in the briefing materials, which include more than 100 pages of data analyses from the agency and from Pfizer. Last month, Pfizer and BioNTech announced that their two-dose vaccine had an efficacy rate of 95 percent after two doses administered three weeks apart. The new analyses show that the protection starts kicking in far earlier.

So why not to go with the first shot on as many vulnerable people as possible? Older people and people with “co-morbidities”? I pointed out that Kamala Harris and her immoral husband a multi-million dollars a year Big Law attorney, both aged 56, basically stole vaccine from old people who would die from having no vaccine.

Patty Ann D. objected:
“Kamala Harris is an essential worker. She deserves to have the vaccine.”

The essentials deserve. I will resist the joke of observing that we need politicians as much as we need dictators, which is all that they are. The US Vice Presidency is a particularly anti-democratic office, because one person can then become president whom nobody voted to become president. The first US presidential impeachment occurred when Democrat Johnson succeeded Republican Lincoln (killed for having freed the slaves). VP Johnson was suspected of not hating enough the ex-Confederates… Gerald Ford became US president, although nobody had voted to elect him VP (corrupt VP Agnew had resigned, an so did Nixon).

A shocking discovery in 2020 has been how many workers are NOT essential. All we need is politicians to order us around, thanks to their experts specialized in killing people with COVID, Amazon and China. We certainly don’t need love. Cuomo, governor of New York, who killed around 10,000 old people by sending COVID cases to their nursing homes (instead of installing them on the Mercy ship provided by Trump), got the elite Pulitzer Prize, for joking about it, and making the elite laugh so hard about the outrage of it all…

As it is we are seeing the elite getting vaccinated, because it argues that it is “essential”. As many shots are kept in reserve so that the elite can get superb vaccination, for sure. I personally know an hospital administrator (not an MD), who works at home, or miles from patients, who is young (40s)… And she got vaccinated. Meanwhile, people are dying in raging pandemic in high density housing.

Coronavirus SARS-CoV2, the COVID virus, in blue… A “democratic” virus, apparently

But the reasoning is always the same: the elite is essential, so the elite should get vaccinated first. the vaccination of Harris’ husband was symbolic of this, and a teaching, fully accepted by the multitude. By the same token, a recent 200 billion dollars stimulus went mostly to the top 1% (120 billions of it). Law firms with multimillionaire lawyers jetting our the world (even now), flaunting laws and common sense, got “COVID stimulus” sometimes above ten million dollars…

When one deprives citizens of the best education, one deprives them of sense of critique. This is what the decaying educational system has achieved. Average citizens became cows watching the train of the elite pass by, in a different, superior, world. So, when the elite declares they alone deserve to live, the cows agree: they don’t want to get in trouble.

However, one shot vaccination now could save millions of lives among the non-elite, worldwide. Are common low lives so nihilistic that they still do not care, when confronted to that notion?

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: Politicians, even not even thirty years old, or downplaying COVID, are getting vaccinated. Ocasio-Cortez, a representative for a district in The Bronx, New York, 31 years old, enjoyed the vaccine available to members of Congress. “The COVID vaccine became available to members of Congress last night and we are urged to take it as part of a continuity of governance plan so I’m heading on my way there…” 

Reminder: in recent days, up to 3,700 US citizens died, in just one day, from lack of vaccine… most of them elderly. To make sure the self-declared essential elite gets its second jab as soon as possible, dozens of millions of doses of vaccines are not distributed. Ah, but nothing like been “governed” by ex-bartenders in a continuous fashion…

Refusing To Vaccinate: Are Our Experts Homicidal Cretins? Or Just Corrupt? Drunk On Power?

The Pfizer/BioNTech mRNA vaccine passed its class III trial with flying colors, more than 95% success rate (no symptoms, and basically no grave case of COVID). It was then authorized on an emergency basis. Forty millions doses were expected to be produced by the end of 2020. However 20 million doses were kept in reserve.

Why? To make sure the elite gets its second shot, thus superb immunity? We were indeed told that it was to make sure that there would be enough second doses a month later. The reasoning is, at best, idiotic: as production is ramping up, there certainly would be enough doses a month or two later. Actually the head of research and development at Pfizer, a woman, said exactly what I just said (but she has to be discrete).

Come to think of it, that reasoning, that shots have to be kept in reserve, is so blatantly idiotic it cannot be the truth. The Class III trial of that vaccine has shown that considerable protection from COVID appears after just ten days of the first dose (quickly around more than 50%, more than the flu vaccine). Presumably the “experts” had time to get informed of this significant fact. Although I suspect that they spend so much time with celebrities, plutocrats and power types or their stockbrokers, that they perhaps do not have enough time to read the latest science. (Not kidding: the esteemed Dr. Fauci had time for Kim Kardashian and no less than 36 hollywood and rapping celebrities; he was against banning travel, before he was for it, and against masks, before he was for them; hey, jumping all around like an illogical goat helps his fame…)

A friend of mine who is a top lawyer told me half the doses were kept in reserve to make sure that the 1%, the power brokers, the elite of politics, wealth and celebritism had enough vaccine to flaunt its privilege. 

More prosaically, why do some individuals aspire to so much power over others? Simply because that tells us, and them, how much more valuable those individuals are: they are worth saving and we are not. Their lives are so much more worthy. Let them have vaccines, while we do not. They are our gods, we shall pray at their feet, while they prey on us.

Watch, in places such as California, thirty-something teachers, who are paid full time, not to teach, because their unions refuse to teach, getting priority for COVID vaccinations. 

Kamala Harris and her husband, both 56 years old, are superior beings: they should get a vaccine they need 1,000 times less than an older person, who will then not get it, because the old and common do not deserve to live, but she does. You the commons, have to learn to be a worm with a smile…

US Vice President (“elect”) Kamala Harris is in perfect health, and 56 years old. She, and her 56 years old husband, received the coronavirus vaccine. People more than 65 years old, have 90 times higher probability of dying from COVID, & are not getting the vaccine, while relatively young super healthy politicians get it. Equality for all to see. We The People die, while our dictators do their best efforts to live, and flaunt it!

Friend Vikki Stefans objected: “She’s in Congress with a bunch of goofballs who attend unmasked WH parties though. I’d say the exposure risk is pretty high and the leadership example matters too. She DID let Joe go first!!”

Patrice Ayme replied:

The leadership of flaunting privilege? I know a high density living place with more than two thousand residents with a COVID outbreak. Many individuals therein are aged more than 80 years old. I asked several local authorities to get vaccinations authorized. They ignored my request: city hall said they did not worry about such things. The County Health Officer, prone to issue fascist orders of the nonsensical type, replied they had lots of requests… But my request was on behalf of the largest high rise in the entire 1.6 million inhabitant county, a Silicon Valley county full of single family homes with a median price above a million dollar. 

So twenty-five year old teachers who refuse to teach, and are living in single homes, are getting vaccinated, though. Half a mile away a high density situation just saw five hundred forty (540) COVID cases out of 540 residents, some elderly. No vaccines, a few deaths already. I say Ms Harris is the example of privilege, as is her privileged Big Law partner husband.

They show that the elite considers it important to tell us that they deserve to live, and we do not. Why is it so important? Because it is unfair, so it invites We The People to think of the guillotine. A conflict is created, and conflicts keep the otherwise mentally vacuous busy, providing a distraction from their ambulatory nihilism.

Patrice Ayme 

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I suggested a few weeks ago to do only the first shots. Now Great Britain just opted for the common sense policy. From the New York Times:

Britain became the first country on Wednesday to give emergency authorization to the coronavirus vaccine developed by AstraZeneca and the University of Oxford, opening a path for a cheap and easy-to-store shot that much of the world will rely on to help end the pandemic.

In a bold decision to accelerate vaccinations, a British government advisory body directed clinicians to give as many people as possible their first dose of a coronavirus vaccine, without reserving supplies for planned second doses.

Instead of administering the two shots within a month, clinicians will wait as long as 12 weeks to give people their second doses, the government said, a decision that applies to the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine as well as the Pfizer-BioNTech shot that Britain authorized early this month.

With the vaccination rollout moving slowly in both Britain and the United States, British officials were heeding calls to delay the second doses as a way of giving more people the partial protection of a single dose. Matt Hancock, the health secretary, said people would start receiving the AstraZeneca vaccine early next week.

…

The Oxford-AstraZeneca shot is poised to become the world’s dominant form of inoculation. At $3 to $4 a dose, it is a fraction of the cost of some other vaccines. And it can be shipped and stored at normal refrigeration temperatures for six months, rather than in the ultracold freezers required by rival vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, making it easier to administer to people in poorer and harder-to-reach parts of the world.

When given in two, full-strength doses, AstraZeneca’s vaccine showed 62 percent efficacy in clinical trials — considerably lower than the roughly 95 percent efficacy achieved by Pfizer and Moderna’s shots. For reasons scientists don’t yet understand, AstraZeneca’s vaccine showed 90 percent efficacy in a smaller group of volunteers who were given a half-strength initial dose.

[The latter point needs to be demonstrated with certainty… but is plausible…]

In Britain, Professor David Salisbury, formerly responsible for the country’s immunization program, has campaigned to delay the second shot until all high-risk people have had the first dose. After two weeks of declining infections, new cases have risen sharply in the U.K. since the beginning of December, apparently in part from a mutation making the virus 56% more transmissible.

On December 22, former long term U.K. Prime Minister Tony Blair said that proceeding with the previously planned second-shot schedule would result in “colossal” damage in terms of infection rates, deaths and economic impact.

The ORIGINS OF MATHEMATICS: PHYSICS OF AXONAL NETWORKS

There are two languages: common language, which is messy, and mathematics, which is much more precise, and contains basic physics. Indeed, all common languages are more or less isomorphic (same shape and preoccupations). 

Mathematics is the part of common language which, given precise axioms, is the simplest and irreducibly deduced from those simplest notions (in physics, thus nature). “Physics” is a compendium of how nature looks, for sure, or how it works, de facto. How nature looks, as deduced from experiments, has varied in the last 100 million years… and that description is getting increasingly precise, as demonstrated by our ever greater power in making nature do as we wish. 

But how nature works inside brains has become ever more powerful and precise ever since there are brains, and they have grown. Neurology is an emergent part of nature. Thus it is factual, being natural, and we also call its basic architecture mathematics, when we describe it. For example, basic category theory looks like the simplest abstraction of basic neurology restricted to the simplest axons…

Thus elucidated, counting becomes a matter of neural networks. 1 + 1 = 2 can be directly envisioned as a semantic description of a (very useful) neural network which has appeared in advanced species. That makes “2” a description of some neuronal architecture. There is no free will there. “2” is just the label for a particular type of neural network found in nature.

Proof that our brains contain Quantum Physics; because they contain a description of light, and the best there is, no more, no less… OK, to get Maxwell equations, something like dF = 0 & d*F = C, we would have to do more math, but you get the idea… It’s not just that mathematics describe better, mathematics leads to physics (the right math, that is…).

As a result of being the product of emerging neuronal networks, there is no more free will in “2” than in the Iron nucleus (Fe 56). And so on it goes: “pi” is the length of the circumference of a circle of radius 1. No free will there, either. 

Nor is there for multiplication of real numbers. Even better: one gets in complex numbers by trying to build a multiplication in the plane which generalizes the multiplication of real numbers. There is a way to do this (multiplying distances to the origin, adding angles from the real axis): it enables us to get square roots of negative numbers… some numbers which multiplied by themselves, have a negative square. Not much freedom there. But then something spectacular happens: this gives the best description of light (including momentum, energy and polarization)… And as such becomes the basic language of Quantum Physics.

How could that all be?

Does that mean that our brain and how we build networks there, is not free from Quantum Physics? Indeed. Let’s inverse the question: how could the brain be free of Quantum Physics, considering, well, that Physics, Nature in Greek, is Quantum? Would that not be considering that brains are not natural? 

If somehow there is no free will in the nature of the neural networks (and thus mathematics) we build, where could free will be? Well, in which kind of networks we decide to build, then? The networks themselves, at their simplest, are mathematics, and thus mathematics is digital… So is language. Being digital, and finite (in its mode of construction) make languages and mathematics, limited and pre-ordained. But Quantum Physics itself is based on a continuum, and that brings the freedom… of the butterfly effect. Free will is a subtle thing.  

The famous mathematician Richard Dedekind said numbers were the work of God, and the rest of mathematics the work of man. It is probably wiser to acknowledge that we, or at least our mathematics, are the work of physics… self-describing…

Patrice Ayme

Injecting Three Genes Could Make Cells Young Again? Rejuvenation Around The Corner?

This is the year when genetic engineering is on its way to save millions of lives: messenger RNA vaccines are a success… Some other attempted vaccines against COVID have rather failed (the rather traditional Sanofi-Pasteur is an example). 

And maybe more than millions, but even billions of lives may be in the process of being saved from COVID. Because, after all, the coronavirus could well mutate in a more contagious and more lethal way. More contagious mutations of the coronavirus have been discovered (“56%” more contagious in the latest UK estimate). More lethal coronavirus could happen any time. Increased lethality is apparently what happened to smallpox in the last millennium: as human populations augmented, the virus could become more lethal, while surviving as a species. This is the gist of studies of Viking corpses, who seemed to have lived with a less lethal version of smallpox.

The injection of messenger RNA wrapped in exotic Lipid Nanoparticles (LNP) in hundreds of millions of people has brought alarms in some circles. Some evoke “Site-Directed Mutagenesis” (CRISPr falls into that…) 

Spooky name, SDM! Well done STM will cure thousands of diseases. For example, all cancers. SDM is developed by some companies as a cure for infarctus and angina. The idea is to promote the growth of blood vessels by an injection of the appropriate genes in the distressed area of the heart.

One could hope that mutating genes causing aging could well bring rejuvenation. It is pretty obvious that aging is gene related, because even closely related species of rodents can age at strikingly different rates. Considerhe house mouse (Mus musculus) and the white-footed mouse (Peromyscus leucopus): the latter has a greater than 2-fold greater life span and metabolic potential than the former.. Thus science is increasingly confirming that aging is a selected mechanism, not just fate, entropy and inertia. 

Rejuvenation has already been achieved with neurons in the eye. At least so is the claim in a peer reviewed paper in Nature: “Reprogramming to recover youthful epigenetic information and restore vision” by

Yuancheng Lu, Benedikt Brommer, etc, December 2, 2020. The gist is that cellular ageing is essentially epigenetic. Turning back the clock with three genes (OSK) restores vision in mice. Three genes may make cells young again.

Abstract: “Ageing is a degenerative process that leads to tissue dysfunction and death. A proposed cause of ageing is the accumulation of epigenetic noise that disrupts gene expression patterns, leading to decreases in tissue function and regenerative capacity [1,2,3]. Changes to DNA methylation patterns over time form the basis of ageing clocks [4], but whether older individuals retain the information needed to restore these patterns—and, if so, whether this could improve tissue function—is not known. Over time, the central nervous system (CNS) loses function and regenerative capacity [5,6,7]. Using the eye as a model CNS tissue, here we show that ectopic expression of Oct4 (also known as Pou5f1), Sox2 and Klf4 genes (OSK) in mouse retinal ganglion cells restores youthful DNA methylation patterns and transcriptomes, promotes axon regeneration after injury, and reverses vision loss in a mouse model of glaucoma and in aged mice. The beneficial effects of OSK-induced reprogramming in axon regeneration and vision require the DNA demethylases TET1 and TET2. These data indicate that mammalian tissues retain a record of youthful epigenetic information—encoded in part by DNA methylation—that can be accessed to improve tissue function and promote regeneration in vivo.”

Turning Back The Clock, Advancing Civilization

As Nature puts it [Biology adverse types can jump to my conclusion below]:

Sight restored by turning back the epigenetic clock:

Neurons progressively deteriorate with age and lose resilience to injury. It emerges that treatment with three transcription factors can re-endow neurons in the mature eye with youthful characteristics and the capacity to regenerate. Ageing has negative consequences for all the cells and organs in our bodies. Our brains are no exception. Neurons in the developing brain form circuits that can adapt to change and regenerate in response to injury. These capacities have long been known to diminish over time, but the molecular shifts that underlie this deterioration have remained mysterious. Lu et al.2 show in a paper in Nature that neurons of the eye can be programmed to revert to a youthful state in which they reacquire their ability to resist injury and to regenerate. The authors’ findings shed light on mechanisms of ageing and point to a potent therapeutic target for age-related neuronal diseases.

Retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) reside in the eyes and thus outside the skull, but they are bona fide brain neurons. They initially develop as part of the forebrain. Subsequently, RGCs extend projections called axons out of the eye to make connections with neurons in the brain itself. These axons — which join together to form the optic nerve — survive and regenerate if they are damaged early in development, but not after they reach maturity3,4. Evidence indicates3,5 that this shift is intrinsic to RGCs, rather than reflecting changes in the surrounding cells.

Myriad studies have searched for factors that can prevent or promote RGC survival and regeneration. 

Lu et al. asked whether it is possible to revert RGCs to a younger ‘age’, and whether doing so would allow the cells to regenerate. They infected RGCs in mice with adeno-associated viruses. These harmless viruses had been genetically engineered to induce expression of three of the ‘Yamanaka factors’ — a group of four transcription factors (Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and c-Myc) that can trigger mature cell types to adopt an immature state6. Such an approach normally comes with hazards in vivo: Yamanaka factors can cause cells to adopt unwanted new identities and characteristics, leading to tumours or death7. Fortunately, Lu and co-workers found that they could circumvent these hazards by expressing just Oct4, Sox2 and Klf4 (together called OSK)….

Why might reprogramming old RGCs to a younger state promote regeneration and restore vision? An emerging model in the field of ageing is that, over time, cells accumulate epigenetic noise — molecular changes that alter patterns of gene expression8, including transcriptional changes and shifts in the patterns of methyl groups on DNA. Collectively, these changes cause cells to lose their identity and so to lose the DNA-, RNA- and protein-expression patterns that once promoted their youthful resilience9,10. Given the growing excitement about DNA methylation as a marker of cell age, the authors asked whether OSK expression somehow counteracts the negative effects of ageing or axon injury on DNA methylation.

The RNA components of a cell’s protein-synthesizing machine, called the ribosome, are encoded by ribosomal DNA genes that steadily accrue methyl marks with age. The ribosomal ‘DNA methylation clock’ is therefore considered to be a reliable estimate of cell age11. Lu et al. found that damaging the axons of RGCs accelerated ribosomal DNA methylation in a way that mimicked accelerated cellular ageing, whereas OSK expression counteracted that acceleration, indicating that tissue injury in general might be a form of accelerated ageing…

For decades, it was argued that understanding normal neural developmental processes would one day lead to the tools to repair the aged or damaged brain. Lu and colleagues’ work makes it clear: that era has now arrived.

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Preventing ageing, replacing it with rejuvenation, will have tremendous consequences. It is not just tremendously desired by those who love life. It is also tremendously needed, for philosophical-psychological reasons. To be developed, another time.

Patrice Ayme

Socialism Or Capitalism? An Erroneous Debate

Socialism or capitalism? Many simple minds love that one quandary. One could as well debate whether the Moon is red like a bathtub, or green like charcoal. A war of the red herrings [1]. All political systems in existence are socialist, all are capitalist. Civilization is impossible without having high enough capital per capita to build walls. Civilization is all about socialization too. And the socialism it entails.

Interestingly the Greco-Romans did not make a difference between socialism and capitalism, so they probably already realized the distinction was meaningless. Instead they distinguished seven sorts of political regimes according to the degree of authoritarianism. Most prominent were, in practice:  

• Democracy – power (kratos) to the people (Demos; adult male citizens).
• Oligarchy – rule by few (oligos) individuals.
• Monarchy – rule (arkhein) by one individual (inherited, or not).
• Tyranny – rule by an individual who had seized power by unconstitutional means.

Marx appeared, and advocated “dictatorship”. Of the “Proletariat”. It is not clear he understood what he was talking about. Its modern emulators in China seem to understand that “proletariat” means “army”. In which case, apparently, the Roman emperor Augustus, who was pretty much put in power by his own army (and he couldn’t have said no), was then a… Marxist?

Dictatorship in the Roman Republic was an office attributed in extreme emergency. An individual was given constitutionally all and any power to fix a crisis (typically a military crisis). It was expected that the dictator would resign promptly after fixing the crisis. Some generals were made dictators several times (Camillus), some served as little as 12 days (Cincinnatus). However Caesar did not resign after his second dictatorship (he could argue the military emergency was still on-going in the North East and East of the Roman empire, which they were)… And then Caesar made himself dictator-for life (he had good reasons for this). Thus the office was so blemished that it was never officially reinstituted: emperors became dictators in practice, but not in name.

Until Marx, who thought dictatorship was glorious, and apt to fight “capitalism”. The persons who, in 1945, mustered the most capital at their command were the US president and the Soviet dictator… the latter supposedly a “Marxist”. Capital can be human, or material.

Vice Presidents from hell…

In any case, the obsession of Marx with “Das Kapital” was misplaced. The capital at the disposition of humanity has augmented. Exponentially. That’s a problem for us through its impact on the biosphere. Impact is controlled by policy, and policy should be controlled… spiritually, by the best mind available, not by dictators. Indeed how to get the best mind? Through the best debates, and a better debate involves the largest best educated multitude.

Here is a description of Xi Ji-Ping, the Marxist dictator. As a youth, at fifteen, he was sent seven years to a destitute small village of cave dwellers. There was no school. He brought books with him:

“He brought two suitcases of books with him and borrowed many more, reading them obsessively and absorbing ideas, according to people who have spoken with him. Some of the frayed volumes are displayed in one cave, including “Lenin on War and Peace,” Hemingway’s “The Old Man and the Sea,” two books on foreign policy by Henry Kissinger and the collected writings of Field Marshal Erwin Rommel, who pioneered Nazi Germany’s blitzkrieg tactics.

Years later, he would mention his reading frequently, quoting from foreign or Chinese classical works and boasting that he mastered the core tenets of Marxism in the village.

Some who know him see that as a conscious emulation of Mao, who prided himself on his literary prowess. Others detect a sensitivity about his lack of formal schooling. A former secretary to Mao, after meeting Mr. Xi in the 2000s, described him as having “elementary school level” education.

Mr. Xi won a place to study chemical engineering at a university in Beijing in 1975, but as a “worker-peasant-soldier,” selected before competitive entry exams and regular teaching resumed.”

So the world’s second most powerful man has only a formal elementary school education, and is full of vengeance and anxiety, as he saw his family being mistreated: Xi went from “Princeling” to being threatened three times with execution by “Red Guards” (much admired by addled brain great philosopher Jean-Paul sartre…)  So now Xi has established a dictatorship, rather than aiming at democracy. The wall Street Journal pursues in

How the U.S. Misread China’s Xi: Hoping for a Globalist, It Got an Autocrat
Early hopes that Xi Jinping would want closer integration with the U.S.-led global order have become one of the biggest strategic miscalculations of the post-Cold War era

Visiting Mexico as vice president in 2009, Xi took a thinly veiled swipe at the U.S. “Some foreigners, with full bellies, who have nothing better to do, point fingers at our affairs,” he said. China didn’t export revolution, poverty or hunger, he added: “What else is there to say?”

In 2010, he visited Chongqing and endorsed the Maoist revival championed by Mr. Bo, the city’s party chief, which included mass performance of revolutionary songs.

The following year, the party was thrown into turmoil when a former Chongqing police chief fled to a U.S. consulate in China and alleged that Mr. Bo’s wife had murdered a British businessman. She was convicted and jailed for life. Mr. Bo got a life sentence for graft and abusing power.

The scandal eliminated from contention for the Standing Committee the one person with comparable clout to Mr. Xi’s, and gave him an opening to target other powerful individuals in coming years for allegedly conspiring with Mr. Bo to seize power.

It also brought to a head the internal debate over China’s future. Critics of liberalization, especially among princelings, prevailed, arguing that only a strongman could save the party.”

There you have it: murders, extravagant corruption, life incarcerations replace elections. This is what dictatorship entails. This sort of abuse of power in a few hands may also have been why Rome’s founder and first king, Romulus, may have been assassinated (and he was not the last). Now when it is possible to kill others among the elite, who are well defended, it is even easier to kill Uighurs. Plenty of them (not that I suddenly adore Muslim Fundamentalism… But there are better ways to fight it…).

Ah, well, all “globalists” are fundamentally “autocrats”, because globalism does not profit the Natives (when it is more prominent than localism). So, when someone, presumably elected somehow, becomes “globalist”, that someone betrays its electors…

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Hitler Hier Kommen Wir:

Xin Ming, a Party School professor, said in an interview arranged by the government press office that Mr. Xi’s Marxism was an updated version that incorporated some Western and traditional Chinese thinking, and considered Communism a distant, yet-to-be-defined ideal that would not be realized even by the centenary of Mao’s victory in 2049.

Other scholars studying Mr. Xi’s doctrine say its Marxist content is limited, noting that he doesn’t advocate class struggle or eliminating private property, and that he has cracked down on both Marxist student activists and liberal voices.

They see it as a fusion of Mr. Wang’s thinking with new left, neo-Confucian and other illiberal ideas in an attempt to unify the party, legitimize Mr. Xi’s concentration of power and forge a new model of authoritarian government.

Some detect the influence of Carl Schmitt, a German legal theorist whose ideas the Nazis used to justify unlimited executive power. Chinese scholars who advise the government have invoked Mr. Schmitt in recent years, including Jiang Shigong, a Peking University law professor who helped devise Beijing’s policy on Hong Kong.

In a recent essay, Mr. Jiang described Xi Jinping Thought as a “new system for comprehensive party leadership of the state,” arguing that the introduction of the rule of law in China after 1979 had undermined the party’s authority.

“This new party-state system is undoubtedly an important organizational part of the China solution” whose ultimate goal was “creating a new order for human civilization,” he wrote.”

Mr. Xi faces a mounting backlash abroad, especially from democracies alarmed by his Muslim internments, Hong Kong crackdown and aggressive diplomacy.

Even some in the party think he has overreached and may face resistance to any effort to continue ruling after 2022. Few people, inside or outside the party, would bet against him though.

“There’s something about Xi Jinping’s political schoolcraft which suggests to me that he is capable of navigating what I think will still be a stormy period ahead,” said Mr. Rudd, the former Australian prime minister. “There’s a steeliness to him.”

Rudd met several times with Xi, because China needs coal, and Australia has it. In all this, what is amazing is the power of a few to lead the planet by the nose. The critique should not be just directed at Xi, who is a half educated parrot (parroting Marx, Confucius, and Mao, in increasing order of importance). In the West the most advanced and powerful democracies, expertly advised by their corrupt and, or, incompetent medical authorities, are contemplating more than one million dead from COVID… A disease born of China, but essentially eliminated from there.  

Make no mistake: if a dictator is really extremely smart and honest, it can be excellent for a country. Even if as brutal as Ivan the Terrible. Examples are Catherine of Russia (actually originally a German princess)… who may have been a murderess, but expanded Russia considerably. Another is Elizabeth I, who resided the Gran Armada splendidly, among other things… A dictator can even improve civilization significantly: consider Clovis of France (Consul and elected king… Though…). Or Peter the Great of Russia, who modernized Russia considerably, crushed the fanatical, obscurantist “Old Religion” Christian Church (executing some of the worst perpetrators with his own hand)… And smashed the Swedish army deep in the Ukraine… The greatest, most positive dictator of them all was Julius Caesar, of course. Caesar had engaged in a colossal set of reforms (not just the calendar and draining the swamps). Had Caesar lived, we may still all talk Latin.  

Caesar, having been exposed to maximal danger many times, was a weird dictator who was all too keen to pardon his most lethal enemies. That cost him his life, and may have set back civilization considerably (Caesar’s heir Octavianus, although extremely gifted, was no cosmic mind, and keen to insure his own survival as mission number one). 

Caesar, Elizabeth I, Peter and Catherine were superlatively educated and intelligent: their enlightened rules did not happen by accident. So, naturally enough, for one Caesar, we get hundreds of Philippe II of Spain, an Inquisition obsessed fanatic who got power from his honest father (Charles Quint, Charles V)… Ultimately dictatorship, in the average, makes civilization stupid. Caesar had inherited a severe dysfunctioning of the Republic caused, in part, by not enough centralization… that enabled the plutocrats to play the periphery against the center.

The split between the haves and havenots has grown so big that the haves, in the phenomenon of plutocratization, seem determined to require to ever more vicious methods of mind control, in full view in China, and which have been extended to the connected West (connected, Internet-wise, and also connected to China, that is Xi). But the more mind control, by the few over the multitude, the more stupid the population: consider the Late Roman Empire, with its dying intellectual activity. How did that happen? Dictators hated thinking.

Emperor Domitian banished philosophers from Rome, except the Stoics, as Stoicism is to wisdom what a carpet is to dirty footwear… Then, in the same spirit, or lack thereof, “He robbed Rome of her best and noblest sons, unopposed. No hand was raised to avenge them,” wrote Juvenal...

Fast forward two centuries, well passed the rule of Trajan, an enlightened dictator (circa 100 CE). While retired in Sicily, the superbly learned philosopher Porphyry wrote Against the Christians (Κατὰ Χριστιανῶν; Adversus Christianos) which consisted of fifteen books. Porphyry died in 305 CE. Soon after, the dictator Constantine (a Christian saint, and “apostle”, no less) condemned, and then banned and ordered to publicly burn Porphyry’s works. Some thirty Christian apologists, such as Methodius, Eusebius, Apollinaris, “Saint” Augustine, “Saint” Jerome, etc., responded to his exquisite critique of cretinism. In fact, everything known about Porphyry’s arguments is found in these refutations, largely because Theodosius II ordered every copy burned in A.D. 435 and again in 448

In the end, civilization collapsed. Civilization did not collapse from too much socialism, or from too much capitalism, or from socialism and capitalism fighting each other to death. Actually the filthy wealthy plutocratic families were often also filthy wealthy church families, as all and any really wealthy family could afford a bishop in its ranks, besides Roman  and Germanic noble ancestry.

What destroyed civilization was too much power in too few hands, because, if nothing else, it brings stupidity. This is what Xi proposes as a panacea, and what Biden has always lived accordingly to.  And “globalism” is both a convenient excuse, and a marvellous tool to do so…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Some linguistic philosophers argued that philosophical debates were often about displaced semantics (Wittgenstein, Austin, etc.), it made their fame. 

Being Human, Or When Taking Risk Is Most Cautious

More than a million human guinea pigs have been vaccinated with a brand new type of vaccines, RNA vaccines, within two weeks of planetary wide experimentation. Immunity is apparently conferred, although we do not know for how long. The consequences long term of these vaccines are unknown, because the virus these vaccines vaccinate against was unknown a year ago. We don’t even know if they will not cause “enhancement”… a dreaded consequence of some attempted vaccines… Apparently not. Trump took enormous risks when he forked out billions (to Moderna), and promises of more billions (to both Moderna and Pfizer and BioNTech) in his operation “Warp Speed”. Reality check: we do not have yet a vaccine against HIV, which killed 35 million people. At least.

I am zero vaccine skeptical: I will take one of the two RNA vaccines ASAP. But taking risk is second nature to me: a week without risk is basically unknown to me, when I am not sick or under repairs… I just want to congratulate humanity for taking risks with these vaccines. Individuals familiar with real sports know well that the way out of a risky situation is often to take more risks.

SpaceX demonstrated what everybody thought was commercially impossible: landing rockets profitably

NASA of course landed LEMs on the Moon, and some devices on Mars; NASA also demonstrated two landings or so of a large rocket in the 1990s… But did not get any further guidance from hedonistic presidents or the US Congress; however NASA research certainly demonstrated that landing rockets was possible. Now SpaceX is re-using its Falcon Nine rockets’ first stages on a regular basis, breaking costs.

SpaceX is developing its “Starship”, a reusable second stage, which could go to orbit, all by itself, from the surface of Mars (long story, another time). SpaceX uses the experimental method. And that means it breaks things:

SpaceX SN8 Starship, shortly before its demise, belly flopping itself up, and then exploding from RUD, Rapid Unscheduled Disassembly (upper frame)

The method of taking serious risk and breaking things ought to be applied all over technology… And even science. Not just to apply the experimental method, but as a moral imperative.

Why? Because we are already breaking the biosphere in more than a dozens ways, pollution allowances and time are running out… We are destroying the biosphere simply because we know no other ways...

Some have said, and will say: then stop everything… Forget technology, and its prowess, let’s just celebrate Biden, Prince William, Kim Kardashian and her sidekick, Doctor Fauci, on our smartphones.

However, we cannot drop the effort towards future technology, because it would stop many crucial life supporting systems, bringing the death of billions. The present systems are unsustainable, this is why they have to be replaced. Those life supporting systems have to be replaced by sustainable technology, which will have to be more sustainable, smarter, more advanced… But does not exist yet.

For example it is imaginable that we could replace the presently extremely polluting maritime transport by much faster, light automated sailboats on foils, crisscrossing the oceans (the technology is under development, mostly in France).

To develop the new technologies we need to keep the biosphere alive, we cannot just do modelling, that’s too slow, and incomplete. Instead, we have to experiment and break things. That is what the history of science says. Thus SpaceX shows the way. This way should be applied to hydrogen technology, and fusion… But also all over biotech. Injecting so much of humanity on a rushed basis with RNA vaccine is a good start.

Besides there is a more general question. We, humanity learn from mistakes, and always have, because mistakes are part of experimenting. We are a scientific species, and even our ancestor species were also into experimental science. That’s why they conquered clothing and fire… More than a million years ago. Thus, we learn from risk taking. Refusing risk is refusing learning. No doubt, then, that longing for risk is core to the human experience, and is a teacher. Those who refuse risk do not gain eternal life, but they lose in the will to greater intelligence, the essence of humanity.

Patrice Ayme

Genetic Freedom: Virus Mutating, Borders Closing

Several European countries closed their borders to Great Britain on 12/20/2020, because the SARS-Cov2 virus mutated in a form which is “70% more transmissible” say British authorities… which themselves applied a ferocious lockdown inside the UK. Now this was fully predictable.

In related news, analysis of old Viking remains seems to have revealed that they had smallpox (“variola”) but of a less lethal sort… a millennium or so, ago. Vikings are prefered, not because forensic doctors are systemic racist, but because corpses are best conserved in a cold climate. So smallpox adapted by becoming more lethal. Why? asked a lawyer friend of mine. Simple: as there are many people, a virus can afford to kill its host. And the more people, the more people can the virus kill, and thrive. A giant human population creates a giant ecological niche for lethal microbes.

One could say that virus and other lethal microbes are Gaia’s reaction to the human infection, my lawyer friend pointed out. Indeed. But the human infection is smart.

RNA vaccines are a GIANT plus. They were initially devised for cancer. Little advertised, a RNA vaccine ELIMINATED this extremely lethal RNA virus EBOLA in 2020 from the Congo (RDC). It was a minus 80 C vaccine… a little complex to transport in the wild tracks of the rainforest…

If RNA vaccines are made to work against cancer, they will be a testimony of the goodness of venture capital applied to science… There has been a tremendous ramp up in the venture capital and associate Intellectual Property and legal areas in the last ten years. The idea with cancer is that each individual cancer is unique (same for antibodies cocktails against COVID). Once specific surface proteins are identified with their messenger RNA, one envelops the whole thing with an irritant (“adjuvant”), and… voila! The immune system gets furious against the adjuvant and exterminate anything associated to it… in particular what is covered with the characteristic protein the mRNA coded for… Messenger RNA vaccines are eminently adjustable, and following the mutations of the virus should not be a problem… Once the present stock of vaccines is injected…

Universe, here we come. Gaia, your meek viruses shall not stop us. Perversely, indeed, they will help us vanquish cancer, and acquire GENETIC FREEDOM.

Mini-brain’ bioengineered from human stem cells. The ball is about one third of a millimeter and contains about 30,000 neuron-like cells. The cell nuclei are blue. The SARS-CoV-2 virus is stained red, indicating that a small fraction of brain cells carries a large number of virus particles. This means that virus has multiplied enormously in infected cells.

Patrice Ayme

WHAT DREAMS ARE AND WHAT THEY DO

Dreams are fundamentally simulations of situations which can be imagined. This is their main function and evolutionary utility. That’s why and how they appeared. Dreams prepare our neurobiology to react to potential real worlds… which we have not experienced yet, like a bear appearing suddenly after making itself as flat as rug…

Dreams also are also… built to help guess new interpretations of situations that we may have encountered already. Yes, dreams are built! Dream machinery is the fundamental scientist, setting up thought experiments in universes we can’t imagine yet… before the dream happens.

Indeed, before the experiment, there is always the thought experiment. Before the idea, there is always the dream. Dreams are more about construction of appropriate neural networks… than interpretation… although dreams can also make neural interpretations of situation which have been encountered.

To understand how that could be, how these simulations… and stimulations… which we call dreams, could occur and leave a trace, one has to understand the consequences of a completely revolutionary idea: ideas and dreams correspond to neural networks within the brain… One has also to understand a further step in complication: that emotions derive, in part from generalizations of neural networks (and the topological influences, not to say computation, the neurohormones they secrete… operate).Neural networks are real objects, not dreamy stupidities a la Plato not belonging to the “real’ world. Existence in the real world means energy and inertia. Thus dreams appear from energy and inertia, and acquire existence from them. It matters, literally, matters in the physical sense, what we dream. Dark Dreams Matter.  

It’s not us who do stuff in dreams, but rather dreams which make us into what we are.

In other words, ideas, dreams and emotions all have physical reality, they are sets of physical objects (embodied categories to use mathematics). But they are also different notions from each other: ideas can be consciously visited (that’s probably enacted by sets of connection to a higher level “meta” layer of neurons… probably in the frontal cortex)… 

Dreams are only preparations of ideas… ideas, the stronger networks, can get consciously inspected, because they are stronger and connected to the meta-conscious layer. The weaker networks correspond to the subconscious (or the nearly conscious) and when those are activated, in sorts of chain reactions, we experience what we call dreams… Shall we have them again and again, Hebbian reinforcement occurr, making them stronger and thus into emerging consciousness…

The mechanism fostering dream states is the shutting down of parts of the brain which actively, or passively, suppress other parts of the brain. This happens naturally during sleep (it can also happen from variegated training, for example meditation, deepsea apnea diving, etc.). Hence the connection of dreams with sleep… But day-dreaming is definitely possible, whether in awake or “woke” states: it’s just a matter of shutting down inhibitions. (The woke/cancel culture is then a giant dream-like state of freedom from a previous perception of reality, and inhibitions…)

Having the capacity of dreaming, and that of imagination, which is related, means that human beings are ready to handle, as if they had experienced them, situations which never occurred before in experienced life… Or which were not even imaginable consciously! But those circumstances did occur in dream life… and left behind half-cooked neural networks…. But half ready networks means that they can turn into functional networks quickly. Hence the capacity of human beings to adapt to situations unforeseen in real life, but already experienced in dreams…  

Dreaming, and imagining, make human beings more intelligent, as the brain trained with the science of the imaginable in anticipation of whatever may come along.

We are the thinking animal, and that means thought experiments upon not just the realities we experienced, but also thought experiments upon the realities which live only in our minds.

According to Plato, Socrates enjoyed the advice of “daemons”, and many thinkers have argued that some inner voice advised them to do some things, or prevented them to do some things. When philosophers look inside themselves. they are searching for this inchoating neural networks… where the future, or alternate, often better, more real versions of reality lay [1].

Patrice Ayme

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***

[1] “You have often heard me speak of an oracle or sign which comes to me, and is the divinity which Meletus ridicules in the indictment. This sign I have had ever since I was a child. The sign is a voice which comes to me and always forbids me to do something which I am going to do, but never commands me to do anything, and this is what stands in the way of my being a politician.” — Socrates, Plato’s Apology

The point being that politicians do not do introspection, searching for this inner, tentative networks. All politicians do is read. manipulate and exploit public logical and emotional networks: politicians’ minds are intrinsically about the past and the mob, that’s why they should be cancelled, as the end-all, be-all . Whereas intelligence is all about creativity and the future. And creation starts always with new neural networks… Deep inside.

Masks Worse Than No Mask For “Virus Nasal Retention”.

Wearing a mask could be more dangerous than not wearing one at all when it comes to warding off COVID-19, in realistic setting, one more study has found. And the study was done in conditions tweaked towards minimizing viral upload!

This modelling study focuses on surgical masks, which surgeons have successfully used for many decades. It does not mean surgical masks don’t work for surgery: they do. Indeed, surgeons use their masks just once and have been trained in their use, which is most particular (don’t touch the mask with non sterilized hands, and that just once, etc…). That newest troubling study was published Tuesday in the Physics of Fluids. The New York Post talked about it the next day. Then the article was removed by Physics Of Fluid. Big Pluto Brother had apparently taken umbrage.

After I made fun of the censorship on the Internet, the article re-appeared (with politically correct sanctimonious tweaks added). Here is the start of “Effects of mask-wearing on the inhalability and deposition of airborne SARS-CoV-2 aerosols in human upper airway“:

ABSTRACT: Even though face masks are well accepted as tools useful in reducing COVID-19 transmissions, their effectiveness in reducing viral loads in the respiratory tract is unclear. As I had been saying… It gets better:
“The viral load in the nose was particularly examined with and without a mask. Results show that when breathing without a mask, air enters the mouth and nose through specific paths. When wearing a mask, however, air enters the mouth and nose through the entire surface of the mask at lower speeds, which favors the inhalation of ambient aerosols into the nose.” Got that? “… wearing a mask… FAVORS the inhalation of ambient aerosols into the nose… And where does that go? In the exposed neurons of the olfactory bulb. The COVID virus infects neurons directly.

From the conclusion: “The results of this study show that wearing a zero-filtration mask can lead to a higher deposition rate of particles smaller than 10 µm (i.e., PM10) in the upper airway for all flow rates (15 l/min–60 l/min) and mask resistance matrices considered. This seemingly counterintuitive observation may be attributed to the altered pressure and airflow fields caused by the mask, which further changes the inhalability of the particles and subsequent deposition in the upper airways. The overall lower speeds of the respirable particles after wearing a mask, as well as an increased area of respiration, can increase the chance of respirable particles to land on the face or being inhaled into the mouth and nose. This unexpected finding raises an alarm that wearing masks with very low filtration efficiencies may lead to a higher chance of deposition of ambient aerosols and thus can do more harm than protection. In this study, we assumed a 65% filtration efficiency of the mask, which is typical for a three-layer surgical mask, for all particle sizes….“

And still better, and still clearer:

“The finding that particle dosimetry can be substantially different with and without a mask calls for cautions in health risk assessment with face coverings. The practice of estimating airway doses with a mask by simply scaling the doses without a mask can introduce significant errors. Furthermore, current mask filtration efficiency (FE) testing, for instance, using TSI 8130, only provides an integrated FE value for polydisperse aerosols and does not differentiate FEs among particle sizes. It is well expected that the mask FE varies significantly with particle sizes. Even though this study adopted an identical FE (65%) for all particles considered, further studies with a mask are warranted to include the mask FEs that are specific to different particle sizes. Likewise, complementary experimental studies are needed to measure the particle-size-dependent FEs for different types of masks.The nose has a unique role in this COVID-19 pandemic for several reasons. It is the first physical barrier of our body to keep ambient aerosols from getting into the respiratory tract; unlike the mouth, the downward nostrils can effectively prevent large particles from being inhaled due to their large inertia. The nasal mucus and immune cells constitute the second line of defense against invading viruses.⁴⁸ However, the nasal goblet secretory cells are also one of the three confirmed binding sites for COVID-19 viruses, where two necessary enzymes for cell invasion, ACE2 (angiotensin-converting enzyme 2) and TMPRSS2 (type II transmembrane serine protease), coexist.⁴⁷ This explains the usage of nasal swabs in COVID testing.⁴⁶ The other two sites with these two enzymes coexisting are the surface epithelial cells of the alveoli and the ileal absorptive cells in the small intestine.⁴⁷ In this study, we found that the protective efficacy of a mask for the nasal airway decreases at lower inhalation flow rates. Particularly at 15 l/min, the nasal retention of 1 µm–3 µm ambient aerosols is even higher by wearing a 65% filtration mask than without a mask at all. This situation is expected to worsen for flow rates lower than 15 l/min or wearing a mask with lower filtration efficiencies.”

Now wait… What is the normal respiratory volume per minute under mild exercise? Twelve liters per minute, thus well below the threshold above. It is lower at rest: 8 to 5 liters per minute. So the research article above established that the “NASAL RETENTION AT one to three microns… is EVEN HIGHER BY WEARING A SURGICAL MASK THAN WITHOUT A MASK AT ALL.” So the person wearing a surgical mask is gathering more coronavirus into the nose than if a person wearing no mask! And this is with particle ten times larger in diameter and one thousand times bigger in volume than the SARS-CoV2 virus. Below one micron, the FE, the Filtration Efficiency, of masks surgical or N95 decreases…

A new three-layer surgical mask is 65 percent efficient in filtering “particles” in the air — but when used, that number drops to 25 percent, according to the study. By “particles’ what the researchers mean is 2.5 micron droplets… Thus 25 times larger in diameter than the SARS-CoV2 coronavirus (which is only .1 micron across), and thus more than ten thousand times more voluminous than said virus. As I have explained, experimental results, and, independently, a bit of thinking, suggest that the virus does not hesitate to discard orders from the authorities, and offends by travelling on smaller fomites. That implies that only HEPA filters can stop the coronavirus in enclosed spaces.

Researchers from the University of Massachusetts Lowell and California Baptist University say that masks slow down airflow, making people more susceptible to breathing in particles — and a dirty face mask can’t effectively filter out the tiniest of droplets.

HEPA filters and UV Cs can completely eliminate the virus. Masks cannot. Worse, increasing evidence show masks seem to make the situation worse. Indeed, the problem is whether masks are so ineffective that they are worse than NO masks. The grossest, thus first order, epidemiological evidence says so.

To reach their findings, researchers used a computer model of a person wearing a pleated three-layer surgical mask to track how the face covering affected airflow and how particles passed through. They also looked at how the tiny droplets settled onto the face, in the airway and where they land in the nose, pharynx or deep lung. They found that wearing a mask “significantly slows down” airflow, reducing a mask’s efficacy and making a person more susceptible to inhaling aerosols into the nose — where SARS-CoV-2 likes to lurk.

“In this study, we found that the protective efficacy of a mask for the nasal airway decreases at lower inhalation flow rates,” the study said. Basically, slow inflows unable the virus to settle in what it loves, nasal cavity recesses… The pleats of a face mask also significantly affect airflow patterns and their efficacy changes with more use, the researchers found. The team plans to study further how mask shapes affect protection from COVID-19.

“We hope public health authorities strengthen the current preventative measures to curb COVID-19 transmission, like choosing a more effective mask, wearing it properly for the highest protection, and avoid using an excessively used or expired surgical mask,” said Xi.

One more demonstration of the inefficiency of masks is that the French president, Macron, got COVID on December 16, 2020. Macron always wears a mask in public. Who has a vested interest in going on with that lethal Mask Masquerade? Well not just those invested in Biotech stocks without any revenue (that’s a good thing), but also those who lied about masks so much, they cannot go back without losing face, and maybe their clout (that comprises many politicians and Western health authorities).

As I said, the only way to curb the virus, aside from brutal medieval style lockdowns, is to wash enclosed spaces with Ultra Violet C and HEPA filters, and avoid the “3 Cs”. Some countries (Singapore) have enacted this.

In related news, Alphabet Inc’s Google on Thursday faced its third major lawsuit as a group of 38 U.S. states and territories filed an antitrust complaint accusing Google. These lawsuits were launched by the Trump administration… After being delayed nearly a year by the Impeachment proceedings against President Trump… There had been a deal with Congress to institute such lawsuit, but the hoax that Trump acted improperly in Ukraine (to which he sent anti-tank missiles, which turned out to be more effective at stopping Putin’s “Little Green Men” than the MREs, Meals Ready to Eat, that Obama had send to the Ukrainian army…). Other lawsuits have accused Facebook to have colluded with Google… While Facebook is alleging to the European Union that Apple is acting as a monopoly of its own (which of course it is).

Those news are related because the social media outfits and the other plutocratically owned, or funded, media are entirely culprit of the failure of thinking out there. Obama revered Reagan: and the “left” reveres Obama, thus Reagan. What did Reagan do for rationality, let alone the “left” ever? Still, Reagan nationalized thousands of banks, and Obama, none, in a much worse banking crisis. This has been rendered possible by a population which has replaced feeling as ordered by the masters come before the most basic logic, let alone observational capability. Yesterday, California had more than 62,000 new cases of Sars-CoV2… And more than 400 dead. With mandatory mask law, amply demonstrating that masks are part of the problem; without masks, from a similar COVID occurence density, the same lockdown decrease the epidemic in Spring. I seem to be the only one not wearing a mask outside of food stores (nearly the only sort of store one can go to these days).

Amusingly I made the mistake of going to Whole Foods two days ago. The gigantic line was extremely COVID dangerous: enclosed space, vast throng of masked cretins breathing each other’s air. I will not go back, but clearly this sort of crowding is exactly what not to do.. And it should be illegal. But Amazon (which owns Whole Foods) is one of the corrupt “Democratic” leadership sacred cows (with Microsoft, to whom Obama gave the “Medal of Freedom” (as Bill and Melinda), Apple, Facebook, Alphabet, etc…) it can do what it wants.

It does not please me to write such articles. I do it as a public service, as so many people are dying, just because the “experts” in command are more like incompetent idiots flaunting their furious superiority by posing as higher beings who know more by thinking less.

“Life … is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

― William Shakespeare, Macbeth. Well, not exactly, this is MacBeth talking. Macbeth killed to become king (OK, he didn’t kill three millions in Iraq). So this is a nihilistic general, now king, talking. Life, according to our masters, is a tale signifying nothing, told by idiots. As observed. Most of these deaths, as I explained, were easy to avoid, had one avoided the “3Cs”: Closed spaces, Crowded places, Close proximity. So why did the idiots want that massacre? Precisely because the masters are trying to inure us to the notion of a meaningless life, told by idiots.

The Biden transition team is stuffed, up to the highest level, with big monopolistic tech executives and ex big monopolistic tech members, and they are obviously there to cash in the huge sums of money they put into Biden’s campaign. Those masters of propaganda did well for themselves, and bad for civilization in recent years. They will be anxious to stop the many lawsuits now launched by governments against their monopolies. One of the Trump administration lawsuits alleges violations of Labor Law, no less. Progressives should react while they still can. As the mask fiasco shows, common sense has disappeared: thanks to the mandated mask law in California, the lockdown is proving ineffective, and COVID has exploded there. Previously, without lockdown and no mandate masks, new daily COVID cases in California peaked at 12,000 in July. This week daily cases reached above 62,000 in California, in spite of a mandatory lockdown… Obviously, because of the mask mandate… What else?

But the tech monopolies block that information and reflection…

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The essay above referred mostly to how masks protects from absorbing the virus (answer: they don’t). The question of emission is different, and was treated in other essays. Basically masks functions as emission centers, under jaw motion, the incrusted fomites laden with virus fly away and stay suspended… For hours or until UVs do them in… which doesn’t happen inside, in enclosed spaces, as UVs from sunlight do not reach there! Brains… don’t leave home without them…

Anti-Intellectualism Is Why Rome Went Down, And So Could We

Thinking completely new thoughts is highly disturbing, even to professionally creative thinkers. Systems of thoughts are systems of neural networks, and changing them requires a lot of energy, thus will. So, at the first sign of really new ideas, or emotions, those with little experience in the dynamical systems of thought, and why it is important to improve them, feel under personal attack. And they are. So they panic, get enraged, and hurl anti-ideas and insults, all the more as they see reason, their sort of reason, under assault.  

The question then, for creative thinkers who have to interface with the Commons, is always the same: should we accommodate lesser minds and their brutish inclinations? And the answer, from Socrates, to Demosthenes, to Hypatia, Boetius, Abelard, Giordano Bruno, the historian Marc Bloch, the philosopher and logician Jean Cavaillès, is always the same: never accommodate those  who want to kill creative thinking. Never, ever. Death is the better way.

Why? Because the will to new and better thinking is the distinctive essence of humanity. This is what babies and children do. And if we stop doing it, all we hold dear will disappear. All that will be left will be nihilism, ex nihilo.

This sort of consideration, how intellectual Rome was, may sound arcane, but it is all very pragmatic: Rome never succeeded to foster creative thinking of civilization class. Rome did not have this sort of meta-cultural tradition. Romans were very intelligent, but pragmatic. And perished as a result. Importing Greek thinkers, as Rome did for generations, did not really work, as, in the end, Roman generals outlawed creative thinking in general, and the Greek sort, in particular. You see, creative thinking was inconvenient, too hard, not respectful enough of the established order… too unmasked… 

Imperial Rome was so anti-intellectual that engineers and inventors were paid by the state to not divulge their inventions, especially if they improved productivity. The theory is that such inventions would have augmented unemployment. Europeans, once they cancelled slavery (Bathilde, circa 655 CE) had no such qualms. By 1,000 CE, windmills and watermills were found by the dozens of thousands (6,000 watermills in England alone by 1068 CE).

The final result of this anti-intellectualism was that Rome could not see far in the distance, or deep in its own structures. But then, of course, it could not happen once the Republic existed only in name, because it was fairly clear that it had been captured by a gang of bandits.

Basilica Of Maxentius And Constantine (the former died in the Milvian bridge battle against the latter…). The trees are huge, by the way. A 15 meters tall statue of Constantine used to stand in front of it. Only its head survived. Basilica were buildings with multiple functions in Rome; they became strictly religious under Christianism.

Bis repetita with the Muslim Caliphates. The reason why the Caliphates went down was, basically, the same anti-intellectualism as Rome (for the good and simple reason that islam learned this anti-intellectualism from Rome). Why did Europe not succumb to anti-intellectualism too? 

Because after the Roman state demise, the legal establishment, the religious establishments (Christian and Jew), the military establishment, all parted ways, while the Roman plutocracy embraced the barbarians: it was all a big mess… which gave a modicum of freedom, competition, diversity and the spark of intellectual debates (after all, Charlemagne talked three languages, Frankish, Latin and Greek… and took himself for King David!) 

For example, 250 years after Charlemagne, a maverick such as the Normandy Duke, William the Bastard, soon to be a Conqueror, supported maverick intellectuals who identified god with reason… Or more exactly, reduced god to reason (the Pope was furious, but couldn’t do anything as William had a much bigger army). 

Whereas in Islam until recently one could not say that the combination of hydrogen and oxygen makes water, but only that hydrogen and oxygen, god willing, result in water. Allah supervised all of Islam, including the simplest gestures, even during the so-called “Golden Age of Islam”. Whereas in contemporaneous Europe, blasphemy came as naturally as sex jokes, and everything was for the better when both got mixed and the lecherous local priest ended emasculated… (See the “Fabliaux”)     

Capture by a gang of evils and devils, war criminals and criminals against humanity, not just bandits, is the condition sine qua non of plutocracy. 

In the recent elections in the USA, strong bias, in many ways was exerted by the plutocratic monopolies. Those monopolies had been created by the preceding regime (“Bush-Obama” [1]). They have a vested interest in seeing the friendliness to monopolies resurrected (Trump is suing Google and Facebook). 

The politics the tech monopolies pushed was not just to eliminate their tormentor, Trump. They also pushed an agenda of voting favorable to themselves. It is striking that, in California, rabidly “democratic” (Biden plus 5.5 million!), the pro-plutocracy propositions passed. Deep thinking shows something is wrong here: is California pro-democracy, and “left” (as it claims) or pro-plutocracy and pro-Neofeudalism (as the voting for plutocratic propositions indicates)? Further twist: the “Democratic” Party was officially against these plutocratic propositions, by the way, it’s not just me…

Deep thinking ponders: is not something fishy going on? How come a Trump hating California votes for plutocrats? Is this another proof that the pro-Biden vote was fundamentally pro-plutocracy? Right, it’s a point I have been trying to convey, approaching with a granular analysis… Or maybe Californians just do what their masters tell them to do?   

Indeed a population seemingly addicted to demonstrating obedience, wear masks even in the wilderness, a new form of debasing voodoo in which even Europe at the peak of the Black Plague of 1347 CE, did not fall (then only doctors wore masks). Thorough stupidification precedes ultimate plutocratization: we are no doubt on our way…

Fundamentally, leading civilizations lead from leading thinking. For example, Rome led Italy, Greater Greece, Etruria, so all her competitors, neighbors and adversaries by being the first to introduce a hoplite army, under, and thanks to king Sergius Tulius. Not only this endowed Rome with the best army in Italy, it made Rome into a democracy (after a delay from the insane reign of Tarquinius Superbus). Later, when Rome fought powers, she was typically the democracy and certainly the republic… from better thinking, and won, by better thinking.

Reciprocally, when the government of imperial Rome after Augustus, now a plutocracy, refused to think to solve Rome’s problems, no doubt that was for the obvious reason. Indeed, the most lucid of the plutocrats in total power could guess that deep thinking would have led the people to conclude that they, the plutocrats, consisted in the deepest problem intelligence was affected by. So, the problems went unsolved, festered ever more. Rome first deperished in its analytical capability, and then perished. 

If a civilization cannot sustain leading, progressing thinking, it will perish, one way, or another. Not just that, but the thinking has to be good enough to master the problems at hand. The problems we have now, a potential climate catastrophe, nuclear weapons, the Neo-Feudalism plutocracy is enthusiastically cruising towards, and an on-going Sixth Mass Extinction are all potentially biosphere terminating events. So we are going a bigger boat for our intellectual adventure as we face this tsunami of man-made cataclysms…

And yes, it will hurt to think new ideas, and foster new emotions. But there is no other way. Humanity reminds me of a solo climber way off the deck, and no matter the pain and the fright, the only way, no matter what is up… At all and any cost.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Obama adopted the plan of Bush which consisted in giving public money to private financing firms of his own liking… Instead of nationalizing them, first (as Reagan had done in a similar crisis). That was the most important, and fateful, decision of Obama’s reign: it brought increasing financial influence, plutocratization and inequality. As the launching of this deplorable policy was from Bush, it is cogent of evoking the regime of Bush-Obama. Truly what else did Obama do? Aside from augmenting the profits of the healthcare industry?