ZONING Makes Berkeley A RACIST Dump, While Posing As Progressive

A century ago or so the city of Berkeley, known as the most progressive, made decisive progress towards apartheid by introducing “Zoning Laws”. Those amounted to separate the housing of the masters from that of the slaves also known as servants, or “colored”. Namely much of the city was “zoned” for the wealthy as “single family homes”. At this point, in 2021, the zoning for “single family homes” is down to around 50%. I have heaped public scorn on this in Berkeley and adjoining city, and the pseudo “Democrats” are now becoming aware of the racist aspect of this policy… and that it is more progressive to change these racist laws than to talk about the supposed ongoing pain of slavery 146 years after it was outlawed all over the USA. If people are deranged psychos because of something that happened to an ancestor five generations ago, they need to see a shrink. However if a city perpetuates racist laws because it only focuses on hereditary culpability, something which does not exist, that’s an ongoing crime.

This statistics is from all over the San Francisco Bay Area, population eight million (roughly Switzerland in population, but with a bigger GDP). What this say is this: in area with zoning approaching nearly 100% as “single family homes”, there are basically NO “blacks”. It is all white with 20% “Asian”. Nota bene, the “blacks” had ancestors in the USA generally for at least two centuries (from the coming of slaves)… Whereas the “Asians” are typically fresh immigrants averaging one or two generations in the USA.

The USA is a racist country. How do I know this? Well, start with government documents asking you what your “race” is. Of course in a state like California where one can meet blonde “blacks” with green eyes and German-Jewish-Cherokee ancestry what race is would seem beyond challenging, but rather impossible. But the “one blood drop rule” comes to the rescue of hopeless observation: if one has, or seem to have, one African ancestor, one is “black”.

The Nazis were not as drastic: On 11 April 1933 the Nazi regime promulgated the First Supplementary Decree for the Execution of the Law of Restoration of the Professional Civil Service, colloquially known as the First Racial Definition. This implementing decree stipulated that a person would be regarded as a racial Jew for purposes of the law^[1] if he had one Jewish parent or one Jewish grandparent, i.e. if the ancestor was “of the Jewish faith.” So one could get away from the definition of being a Jew if none of one’s grandparent was considered to be of the Jewish faith. That enabled millions of Germans more or less descended from Jews to survive. 189,000 recognized as Jews served in the Wehrmacht, though (35,000 Jews were turned into “Honorary Aryan”, thanks to Hitler’s pen… such as the Marshall who invaded Norway for Hitler).

But in the USA, oh, no, no: if you had an African in your ancestry, you are a “black” and your ancestors are slaves and you deserve reparations. Never mind that Obama’s father was a Kenyan who was called to Harvard: that makes his daughters, who descend from slave masters also slaves who should ask for reparations from Harvard (presumably, in this crazy logic).

That people of color “live with the consequences“, and that those should be changed is valid when the institutionalized mentality is still in place… But claiming one’s ethnicity, per se, makes one a victim is sheer racism.

And using racism to fight racism is worse than barking up the wrong tree. For example, zoning laws, kept in place by so-called “Democrats” are sheer racism, apartheid… and need to be changed right away. They also constitute a MUCH GRAVER CONSPIRACY THAN “Q-ANON”. By orders of magnitude. So so-called “Democrats” should clean up their own racist conspiracies, instead of brandishing red herrings.. such as Q-Anon.

Talking instead about imaginary victims of enslavement three centuries ago is grotesque, when millions go homeless or without health care… from so-called “Democratic” policies. The somewhat disgusting city of Berkeley instituted ZONING “laws” a century ago.

They still have them, and thousands living in the world’s worst condition while hyper wealthy Pelosi pontificate, a mile away from the worst filth in the world (according to the United Nations, no less!)

When some individuals who are themselves racist, because they only view as “mattering”, peculiar skin colors, or ethnicities, or religions, come to whine they descend from “slaves” or descend from some some holocaust, and thus need to rule with a conspiracy of their own, they show the wrong way. Many of the slave descendants also descend from slave masters… Who in them are we going to trust and moan about, since they claim they are perfused and animated by the condition of these long dead ancestors? And many of the holocausted generations ago, had ancestors who just whined, whereas others fought. Personally I descend from neither slave or slave master… Yet I was visited by much greater trauma, as many in my family fought fascism and paid the ultimate price…

My young uncle, Daniel Dondey, a star geologist, and a pacifist progressive friendly to, and liked by, the rebels, was only 28 years old when some fanatical fascist(s) shot him in the head. He was like a big brother to me, the only one I had. Yes, I spent the rest of my life being traumatized by that tragedy. However, I harbor no hate, just a passion for understanding how to avoid such horror, and extreme dislike for behaviors promoting ignorance and violence. My uncle would have certainly agreed. I should say, he agrees, because he keeps on living in my head. He may have died, from the hate of others, but I keep on waging the war against hatred with an ardor I would certainly not have experienced otherwise.

The essence of racism is exclusion; on the basis of mostly imagined or superficial criterions, a group is identified and excluded… using alienation, also known as the “cancel culture”. Now the plutocrat propagandists have succeeded to persuade the bleating herd of self-described “progressives” and so-called “Democrats” that alienation is progress and media owned or financed by the world’s richest families, is its prophet! A new religion, that of the Golden Ass!

Patrice Ayme

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P/S1: Some reply I made to some pseudo-thinker, the type who reads in one minute what should take an hour, who had called me a racist, after seeing the title of “ENSLAVED BUT SAVED” (where I explained, from detailed evidence, that the 388,000 souls imported from the African slave trading system to North America slave owners would have been probably killed in Africa, because the continent was then operating at its ecological limit; that does not excuse that said slaves were not liberated right away; nor of course the enslavement of succeeding generations, soon to be millions…). So here is my reply to that vicious insulter:

You are extremely offensive to me by misinterpreting grotesquely what you call my diatribe like 100%. I did not ever insult you before, but you just insulted me. Insulting people by asserting they said what they did not say, especially when accusing them to be racist, is itself racist. Replacing someone’s correct discourse by outrageous lies and vicious racist statements is one of the pitfalls one should not fall into if one is for true progress.

Anyway, you are just an American, so you play holier than thou, insulting people, to pose as morally superior as to foster your racist agenda. I am an African, and Africans understand very well what I am saying, about US racism. Progressive Africans understand it particularly well (as one of the recent links I had in the essay showed) If you have “no mental space” to understand something, then, at least, do not attack people by associating them to racist Jim Crow and the like. Hurling racism at others is often the first sign of racism. In Africa, not mentioning the skin color of people comes with mother’s milk. In racist USA, skin color is a perverse religion, as with the religions of “origins”.

As I said, I started the “1619” idea, so I am aware of the problems of institutionalized perversity, and your assault, against someone you chose to misunderstand completely is a demonstration of it. And your ignorance of what “indentured servitude” consisted of is no excuse either. Like the haters from all over, you do not realize you make someone into a monster, just because of your own desire to do so, combined with historical ignorance.

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P/S2: [For non US readers, the symbol of the “Democratic” Party is the… ass! Hence my allusion to the “Golden Ass” instead of the “Golden Calf” found in the Bible’s Old Testament (And the Republicans, of which Lincoln was one, is the elephant…]

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For more background, Berkeleyside can be consulted:

In 1917, the United States Supreme Court ruled in the Buchanan v. Warley decision that it was illegal for municipalities to use zoning for purposes of racial segregation. Yet because Berkeley’s zoning plan was not explicitly racial, the ruling did not stop Berkeley from being zoned for low-density in East Berkeley and high-density in the flats in order to maintain the racial and class order.

“The classic and explicit arguments for zoning were the need to ensure public safety and protect the health and the general welfare of the population,” wrote Hirt. However, “racial and class prejudices played a key part in the emerging zoning story, since it was minorities and the poor who were perceived as the greatest danger to property values in general and to single-family residential areas in particular.”

Zoning was not the only mechanism used by private interests to segregate the city for their benefit. Racially restrictive covenants, which were fundamental to the development of the zoning plan, and later redlining, shaped Berkeley to a large degree. In 1925 and 1926 the California Real Estate magazine praised the Berkeley Realty Board for its “service” to the “community at large” for its ability “to organize a district of some twenty blocks under the covenant plan as protection against invasion of Negroes and Asiatics.”

The vision of McDuffie and the real estate owners of East Berkeley was largely achieved. Through legal means, they created a plan for land use that reinforced the racial and class divisions from which they directly benefited. Unlike restrictive covenants and redlining, the zoning code remains today.

Energetically, We Are Still Mostly Neanderthal. We Need More Science, Not More Puritanism

Neanderthals used coal 80,000 years ago, as an energy source [1]. Hydrocarbons are still our main energy source, and we did not find an energy technology which can replace it. In energy procurement, we didn’t progress much. Indeed… The Chinese mined and used coal 6,000 years ago, the Ancient Greeks used it for metal work: the Greek scientist and student of Aristotle Theophrastus (c. 371–287 BC):

Among the materials that are dug because they are useful, those known as coals are made of earth, and, once set on fire, they burn like charcoal. They are found in Liguria [Italy]… and in Elis as one approaches Olympia by the mountain road; and they are used by those who work in metals.

In 12^th Century China, iron works, fed by coal, produced more pig-iron in just one region than the whole of Britain produced in Britain annually in the 1700s. The Aztecs also used coal for decoration and fuel. Many want to go “green”… evoking pleasantly the color of chlorophyll, soft and tender, soothing salad of soft feelings. Instead, real energy, that from the Sun is white-hot, as seen from space (the Sun’s color mellows down to yellowish after getting through Earth’s thick atmosphere… the equivalent in density to ten meters of water… and 100 kilometers in distance).

The Paris Climate Accord clownish signatories pretend to believe we will solve the climate crisis through abstinence in the most democratic countries, or through copious helpings of wishful thinking. In truth, they were just promoting themselves.
Biden has rejoined Paris like a Crusader rushed to Jerusalem. Left to the old instruments we have to create energy, it will be a bloodbath: when the Crusaders entered Jerusalem, blood came to their knees (they themselves declared).
Right now Brazil is destroying the Amazon, to convert it to agricultural exploitation, China and India, with a combined population of more than three billions, are constructing coal plants at a record pace. All this is Paris chic. COAL PRODUCTION IS AUGMENTING:

Coal production from Paris Accord signatories is augmenting spectacularly, and scheduled to augment much more. Tightening the belt of the West will not change this much, although the coal policies of Poland and Japan are to be deplored, the lack of alternatives is to be deplored even more.

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In the matter of CO2 production, what should progressives push for? Getting out of Neanderthalian technology for good, in the dimension of energy. There is no cause for panic: we, our civilization, can take serious melting of the poles, with an overall augmentation of two to three degrees centigrades above the present. It would be dramatic, sea levels will jump, and so will droughts and floods, but it would be survivable. What we cannot take is to see CO2 emissions keep on climbing because we did not develop replacement energy. 

Keeping on climbing in CO2 production is what the Paris Accord convened implicitly to do, because it did not aim to bring forth an effort towards researching and developing a new energy source, instead pretending viciously that what we have technologically is enough. Instead, it is not. We need more science.

*** 

Dreams of space colonization, or of a “non carbon” future collide with a simple fact: our compact energy source is still hydrocarbons. At best, methane, CH4. So-called “Green Hydrogen”, hydrogen made from “renewable”sources would not be useful in space, because it would have to come from H2O, which is more precious… in space. On the ground, a complex economy around “Green Hydrogen”, storing renewable energy as hydrogen or derivatives thereof, will take many decades to develop, and require huge amounts of hydrocarbons to install. Energetically, we are still Neanderthals.

Reciprocally, though, if we had compact thermonuclear fusion, we could start colonizing space right away, enabling a de-concentration of resources. Mars’ land area is equal to Earth land area. It looks easier to colonize Mars than the bottom of the seas (a question of pressure differences). SpaceX style robotic rockets could land factories on Mars and start to build cities and make habitat and oxygen.

Another nuclear technology, fission, could reduce travel times in the solar system, and augment the payloads carried, by using nuclear fusion heavy duty nuclear tugs which would commute between Earth and various celestial bodies… Including Ceres, which has two drastic advantages on Mars: plenty of easy to access water, and a very low gravity well.

So it all boils down to energy.

Although we do have photovoltaics, they are not very efficient (20%-45%), and they need large surfaces… and also the Sun! So our main energy source is still fully Neanderthalian!

We need ENERGY progress… And create a new powerful, convenient, 24/7 energy source, as the Neanderthals did… when they alighted lignite.

Something which strikes me about proposed space colonies is the waste of space in the proposed concepts. Of course, in the beginnings, we are not going to try to recreate Iowa in space. Agriculture will probably be hydroponic, concentrated… Starting with Moon colonies: the Moon has a lot of solar energy, especially on these tall crater rims by the south pole on which the sun does not set… And the Moon has water, much more than we thought it had… There again, caught in the regolith, so it has to be energetically extracted…

Water on the Moon, or Mars, will all boil down, but we need energy.

Fortunately, NASA is seeing the light again. Perseverance, which just landed on Mars, is NUCLEAR powered. Solar energized probes failed, because they were solar (dust covered the panels, not enough energy anyway). NASA is also realizing that nuclear fission will enable us to get to Mars in 6 weeks, not 8 months.

Of course the anti-science,anti-technology, anti-colonization, anti-reason critters are seriously in the way… Although their ancestors were colonialists… and not necessarily nice colonialists or slave masters… At least Kamala Harris is discrete on that one (Her ancestor Mr. Harris was a wealthy English lawyer cum slave owner)… Not like Michelle Obama… Let me explain: Obama cut down hydrogen research, to the bone, Trump re-established it. Although Biden presents himself as science president, demonstrated by wearing two masks while vaccinated, investors are not clear about whether he is not saying one thing, to cover the fact that he is doing the opposite, as Obama did. 

And the first real hard data indications on Biden’s science drift are not reassuring: whereas under Trump the overall US Congress mandated science budget augmented 17% a year, average, the first Biden budget has only an augmentation of 1% of the science budget, a small fraction of real inflation.  

We would probably already have a functional thermonuclear fusion reactor, if the spending in controlled thermonuclear fusion was open full throttle (ITER was pushed back ten years from lack of funding…). Basically controlled thermonuclear fusion is, at this point, a question of figuring out the details (ITER does not use the best magnets possible, because it does not use High Temperature Magnets; also ITER does not have an energy production system attached, something that will make heat disposal harder to achieve!)

Instead the so-called “Democratic” Congress wants to spend 120 million dollars, in the latest “COVID” stimulus budget, building a tunnel in Silicon Valley below San Jose (several hundreds of millions were already spent on the same system last year… Under Trump). Silicon Valley plutocrats did not want to hear the train anymore, and thus have delayed electrification of railroad lines! The existing train line passes next to Atherton, the wealthiest city in the USA, made of palaces next to downtown Palo Alto (I have two train lines below my windows, I survive… But my wealthy (ex)friends in SV in their leafy ten million dollars homes can’t stand the possible rumble… although they don’t mind the roar of their private jets… to go skiing…)  

Why are the anti-colonization critters so loud? Because, as with animal rights, passion about nothing much diverts from debating the ongoing much more severe real problems, such as the molding and selling of our souls by the tech monopolies, and their financial sponsors, for profit…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Mousterian site of Les Canalettes, France (dating to ca. 73,500 years BP) was the first such site discovered in 1996 (more have been found since). It was determined later that there were plenty of trees around at the time, that could have been burned, and that our ancestral Neanderthals burned coal and, or, bone, for technological reasons (the absence of flames enables to heat surfaces such as flint, better; similarly ancient iron production with coal made steel, which is better in several ways than iron)

An English summary of early Neanderthal coal research research (Goldberg and Sherwood 2006:29) concludes as follows:

“Les Canalettes is a shelter in the Causse du Larzac region of France. It contains Mousterian remains dating to the last glacial, about 73.5 ka. Most interesting is the occurrence of what appears to be burned lignite, which was likely used as fuel and was available as close as 5–15 km from the site, well within the acquisition zone of raw materials. Analysis of wood remains in the site suggests that people used coal when wood was in short supply. Furthermore, experiments by Théry-Parisot demonstrated that the occupants were familiar with some of the burning characteristics of the fuel. For example, adding lignite to a fire which no longer exhibited flames added significantly to the burning duration, thus permitting rekindling of the fire at a much later stage and prolonging the ability to heat. In addition, the study found that a hearth mixed with dried wood and lignite, consumed 4 times less wood than a hearth simply using rotted wood. These results provide important insights, suggesting that Neanderthals exhibited a clear knowledge of the combustible properties for diverse fuels.”

An Infestation of Bacteria, COVID Doctors, etc: Medicine Turning Scientific, Slowly

Knowledge of the biology of the human body is slowly turning increasingly scientific, rather than primitive, erratic, anecdotal, epidemiological, and chimp-like methods used in present medecine.

There is progress on many fronts. For example why do different cancers find “different soils” to grow on (the observation dates from the 19C)? Lung cancer goes to brain cancer. Breast cancer goes to the liver and ovaries. Prostate cancer goes to bones. More than 70% of lung cancer is caused by smoking. After diagnosis, more than 50% of lung cancer patients keep on smoking. They have poorer outcomes. It was just discovered that nicotine neutralizes the main anti-cancer mechanism in the body (in a complicated fashion).

The question of diet is not obvious. For decades, the “pyramid” of the FDA and NIH ruled. Plenty of carbohydrates at the bottom, a few animal fats at the top. But Japan underwent a spectacular reduction in strokes after 1960. Japan had the highest number of strokes in the world. What changed? Hamburgers, cholesterol. More of it. It is now a consensus that the Japanese vegan diet of the last 12 centuries made for fragile arteries, by not providing with enough cholesterol.

A good guidance would be to eat like humans are supposed to eat, namely as our ancestors did, for hundreds of thousands of years. Hence the “paleo diets”. But what did the ancestors eat? Clearly, lots of meat: we are the carnivorous ape. That means much animal muscle and fat. Lots of nuts too, with their fat. But it turns out that our ancestral Neanderthals also cooked vegetables, and ate them (more recent discovery). What sort of vegetables and tuber? That’s not clear: our present grains, wheat, rice, corn, etc. have been bioengineered by humans (as dogs, cattle, chicken and pigs were). Guided by these discoveries, I eat, think and feel, increasingly prehistoric.

People taking statins occasionally, like yours truly, are aware that they can destroy muscle: all human cells are surrounded by cholesterol, like the mRNA vaccines of Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are surrounded by nano lipid envelopes.

Those mRNA tech vaccines fixed Ebola in 2020 and are fixing COVID. The spectacular regression of COVID in the last few weeks is caused by the COVID vaccination of dozens of millions of superspreaders known as medical personnel, in the last two months. (Hail to Trump’s Operation Warp Speed!) The mRNA vaccines were initially researched and developed as anti-cancer vaccines: it remains to see if they can work that way.

Statins are naturally occurring antibiotics, naturally occurring ones have been around for more than a billion years. They have plenty of various effects, including immune suppression against inflammation, and a school of thought is that their positive effects dominate that way (that’s mostly how I use them nowadays). The effect is similar to hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) and that’s why both have been used to regulate immune storms of COVID (timing is very delicate). HCQ works very well for rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and SARS-CoV 1. It is increasingly becoming clear that COVID is mostly an auto-immune disease by the third week (as COPD is…)

In most human diseases though, one thing is clear: they are related to aging. Fighting them piecemeal will not work. What has to be fought is aging. It turns out that just three genes can rejuvenate neurons (at least in mice). By the way COVID gets in neurons, than to the olfactory bulb, at the contact of which SARS CoV 2 can stagnate in air slowed down enormously by mask wearing… Causing “Long Covid” in children…

To the surprise of specialists, hydroxychloroquine, which stops SARS 1, and in vitro against many viruses, does not work well against COVID (if at all; results are not clear, some MDs being strongly for it, others MDs against it). Similarly, the masks may have contributed more to the pandemic, as they provided a false sense of security, while preventing to prevent the aerosols, by making the naive believe they were the solution… when actually they hindered the real solution: ventilation, HEPA filters, distanciation…

Applying the so-called “scientific method” is the way out. What is the scientific method? Common sense on steroids. For the masks, for example, there were no serious studies. But supposing the masking worked would of course lead to spreading, if in truth it did not work. And this is exactly what happened.

The scientific method also revealed that COVID was aerosol, as top Japanese specialists got it on the cruise ship, while fully, tightly, and thoroughly masked. The only explanation was that the virus was an aerosol.

Meanwhile COVIDIOTS started to wear two masks, egged on by the covidiotic CDC: they will develop “mask lung”.

By the way, I am Moderna mRNA vaccinated… That works. And I wear a mask only when forced to (although I would not breathe around people, until my vaccine kicked in…)

Life is complex quantum computing on the go.

Progress in biology comes from unusual quarters. People survive in the International Space Station for a year (they have to be carried around, though…) It will be telling how long humans can survive on the Moon if a station is built there. 1/3g there… healthy humans may be getting by with a mix of reduced gravity and heavy load carrying exercise, using machines, such as exoskeletons…
Indeed, it turns out serious runners spend most of their time as couch potatoes (I can testify to this)….

ianmillerblog

One of those things you probably don’t need to know (but I am going to tell you anyway) is that there are more bacterial cells in your gut than there are cells in your body. This may seem weird, but remember much of your body, like water, is not cellular. And, of course, there is more than just one type of bacteria, indeed according to aNaturearticle from last year, there more than one hundred times the number of genes in the gut than there are in the human host. That, of course, gives a lot of scope for studying, er, colonic material. And yes, some people apparently do that, and there are some “interesting outputs”.

With such a range of “starting material” to study, the first step was to break the bacteria into four enterotypes. One of those sets, labeledBacteroides2, is associated with inflammation. Thus 75%…

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Animalism Is Not A Humanism

More Is Different. Similarly, Humanism Is More Than Animalism. Identifying Humanism To Animalism Is Incorrect, And No Way To Progress.
All advanced animals, including squirrels, have consciousness (by definition of “advanced”). But animals have more or less consciousness, and much more, or much less, can be very different. Studies on worms have shown that as little as three neurons can endow a worm with apparent free will: three neurons, free will. But of course worms do not have consciousness and free will as we do.

An analogy will help the wise: an isolated ensemble of very few particles is endowed with, and controlled by, quantum properties; however an ensemble of many particles, with few exceptions (Bose-Einstein condensates) is a classical object: more is completely different. The quantum description vanishes, the classical description replaces it. Similarly and for the same reason, from quantum to classical, or a variant thereof, the animal description disappears and the human description appears.

In the end, we are completely different from squirrels.

Now, of course, should one be a Nazi one may want to consider people to be no more than animals, so the Nazis elevated animals to the level of humans, to better exterminate the latter. After all, one exterminated insects with Zyklon B, and, having identified people to insects, the Nazis could then exterminate the former like the latter… with the same insecticide!

Our ancestors 60 millions years ago, resembled squirrels, but they ate insects. Our descendants became ever more brainy, in great part because of their carnivorous diet and habits: running after potentially dangerous prey while clinging to branches requires much intelligence… while squirrels, content to much on nuts, a less demanding task neurologically, stagnated neurologically. A quick look at evolution tells us that squirrels are probably 100 millions years away from civilization (should all of their deadly competition, namely primates, magically disappear; with primates to eat them, squirrels would never get there, to civilization, because predators tend to stay smarter, and primates are dozens of millions of years of intellectual superiority over squirrels).

To claim ever more intelligence makes no difference in grounding morality should be a well-known pitfall.

Civilization’s progress ever since there are animals and they think, is called humanism.

Animalism is not a humanism. Sentient mussels are not conscious chimps. Much more mind is completely different.

Patrice Ayme

Magnolia (named after French botanist Magnol), Monterey cypress, Luna… Berkeley CA, 2/23/2021 Do other animals appreciate beauty? Some apparently do. But surely not as much as humans do.

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P/S: this is the second essay on the “Animalism Is Not A Humanism” theme in a few days. What is going on? There is obviously a deep propaganda campaign launched suddenly by the plutocracy promoting the opposite, namely that animalism is humanism. Plutocrats are animals, but we should think of them, all of a sudden, as human (that seems to be the secret message supposed to imprint our subconscious: you are just an animals, thus we are all equal, rich or poor, commander of the world, or not). This time the spark to my reaction above, a comment which I sent to the New York Times, was an article in the New York Times 2/23/2021, today… in the NYT’s philosophical series called “THE STONE“. My comment was blocked, as it put the plutocratic newspaper to shame. Here are extracts of the NYT’s article, with comments I add now (those were not sent to the plutocratic propaganda paper, naturlich!):

Humans Are Animals. Let’s Get Over It.
It’s astonishing how relentlessly Western philosophy has strained to prove we are not squirrels. By Crispin Sartwell; Mr. Sartwell is a professor of philosophy.

If one were to read through the prefaces and first paragraphs of the canonical works of Western philosophy, one might assume the discipline’s primary question to be this: What makes us humans so much better than all the other animals? Really, it’s astonishing how relentless this theme is in the whole history of philosophy. The separation of people from, and the superiority of people to, members of other species is a good candidate for the originating idea of Western thought. And a good candidate for the worst.

[Patrice Ayme: As I explained, more is different; that’s a well known idea. One snowflake doesn’t make an avalanche, and cannot behave as one; many snowflakes make an avalanche, a completely different agent; one neuron does not make a civilization, dozens of billions of trillions of them, entangled, over the fullness of time, do. The transition from quantum to classical mechanics is the best example; that analogy is a hard data point great philosophers did not have before: Quantum Physics, in full, dates from 1924…

The so-called “philosophy professor” Sartwell pursues: The Great Philosopher will, before addressing himself to the deep ethical and metaphysical questions, pause for the conventional, ground-clearing declaration: “I am definitely not a squirrel.” This is evidently something that needs continual emphasizing.

Rationality and self-control, as philosophers underline again and again, give humans a value that squirrels lack (let’s just stick with this species for the time being), a moral status unique to us. We are conscious, and squirrels, allegedly, are not; we are rational, and squirrels are not; we are free, and squirrels are not.

We can congratulate ourselves on the threat averted. But if we truly believed we were so much better than squirrels, why have we spent thousands of years driving home the point?

[It is of course not just “Great Philosophers who make that point. People eat squirrels casually; when they eat Mr. Sartwell and his ilk, they thank the gods, at least so I have been told…]

Sartwell: One difficult thing to face about our animality is that it entails our deaths; being an animal is associated throughout philosophy with dying purposelessly, and so with living meaninglessly. It is rationality that gives us dignity, that makes a claim to moral respect that no mere animal can deserve. “The moral law reveals to me a life independent of animality,” writes Immanuel Kant in “Critique of Practical Reason.” In this assertion, at least, the Western intellectual tradition has been remarkably consistent.

[Here Sartwell mixes up things. Mortality is one thing, morality, another. We may all die tomorrow, it does not mean our morality dies with us. That rationality gives us some of our dignity is one thing; love, or even hatred, gives us dignity too. That advanced animals are rational cannot be denied: reason is what the brain produces. That reason endows an eagle with dignity cannot be denied either. If an eagle behaved like a rabbit, it would have less dignity… Now Sartwell speaks of Kant, professor to slave traders, a philosopher extolling the slave trade, and who is to reason what the slave trader is to commerce… Kant was deeply immoral, and his law most noticeable, is slave trading. kant is to the western intellectual tradition was lung cancer is to breathing…]

Sartwell: “The connection of such ideas to the way we treat animals — for example, in our food chain — is too obvious to need repeating. And the devaluation of animals and disconnection of us from them reflect a deeper devaluation of the material universe in general. In this scheme of things, we owe nature nothing; it is to yield us everything. This is the ideology of species annihilation and environmental destruction, and also of technological development.“

PA: Humans became humans because they ate meat. Otherwise we would have big bellies like chimps, gorialls and all too many Americans have. Meat gave superb nutrition, allowing to shorten the gut. Gorillas and chimps know this, and try to kill preys as much as they can. But they are not superb killers as the evolving members of the genus Homo became. Pure veganism is NOT healthy. This being said I look forward lab meat… But then why should there be cows around? Is not a world without cows poorer? Supposed I was on a lonely planet, and god would lend me Sartwell for 20 years as company, until She made Sartwell disappear in a cloud of smoke. Should there be Sartwell, or no Sartwell? Is it moral to have Sartwell? Did he suffer?

A paradox is that the animalists tell us to stop eating animals to be like animals. But animals eat animals. Even cows do. So if we would be animals like animals, we would eat animals like the animals do.

Sartwell: Further trouble is caused when the distinctions between humans and animals are then used to draw distinctions among human beings. Some humans, according to this line of thinking, are self-conscious, rational and free, and some are driven by beastly desires. Some of us transcend our environment: Reason alone moves us to action. But some of us are pushed around by physical circumstances, by our bodies. Some of us, in short, are animals — and some of us are better than that. This, it turns out, is a useful justification for colonialism, slavery and racism.

PA: The USA is the world’s top exterminationist country. How was that done? By having Hollier-Than-Thou Puritans, such as professor Sartwell, treating native Americans as if they were animals. Sartwell is still at it, indeed, a century later, in the guise of the opposite, just as the Puritans were. What he is doing is attacking reason… And this is exactly why he did not publish my comment (which was the part above before my name).

Then Sartwell accuses Aristotle, Socrates, Plato, Hobbes, Descartes, and Freud of opposing “nature” and “reason”. But of course reason comes from nature, as we do, in us and the rest of animals. I have myself attacked Aristotle as a plutocratic philosopher, and he was a plutocrat himself (the person who Aristotle put in charge of his estate was no less than his friend Antipater, the plutocrat who defeated Athens and turned her in an official plutocracy where only the wealthiest could vote…).

Sartwell: “Socrates divides the human soul into two parts. The soul of the thirsty person, he says, “wishes for nothing else than to drink.” But we can restrain ourselves. “That which inhibits such actions,” he concludes, “arises from the calculations of reason.” When we restrain or control ourselves, Plato argues, a rational being restrains an animal.

In this view, each of us is both a beast and a person — and the point of human life is to constrain our desires with rationality and purify ourselves of animality. These sorts of systematic self-divisions come to be refigured in Cartesian dualism, which separates the mind from the body, or in Sigmund Freud’s distinction between id and ego, or in the neurological contrast between the functions of the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex.“

PA: So Sartwell even accuses neurology to distinguish higher thought production and panic centers such as the amygdala… The ratio prefrontal/amygdala being presumably unfair to squirrel, and thus favorable to my culinary instincts orbiting roasted squirrels…

Sartwell finishes in a trainwreck:”I’d like to publicly identify this dualistic view as a disaster, but I don’t know how to refute it, exactly, except to say that I don’t feel myself to be a logic program running on an animal body; I’d like to consider myself a lot more integrated than that. And I’d like to repudiate every political and environmental conclusion ever drawn by our supposed transcendence of the order of nature. I don’t see how we could cease to be mammals and remain ourselves.”

This of course mixes everything up, although some of the points are correct… Of course we are not classical logic programs, we are quantum, so we have consciousness and free will. “Mind-Body Dualism” probably originates in the duality between Quantum and Classical. The “Quantum” is wholly about the integrated whole, accomplished through entanglement… We are out of nature, nature herself becoming transcendental, and of course we don’t necessarily have to have boobs to be, or stay human… Humanity has long transcended much of humanity and will transcends some more very soon… Including aging, which has a pervese effect on all of human culture…

***

P/S 2: I value squirrels: I had a pet squirrel in Africa, for many years. I also had a parrot, Mimi. I got more attached to the parrot, though. She was very argumentative… when she didn’t want to go back to her cage, for the night, she would fight. As her wings were not clipped, she would fly around like a dragon from Game of Thrones, threatening all sorts of mayhem, just for show… Unfortunately, after years of fun and games, she died from avian flu of some sort, creating great sorrow.

Feb. 23, 2021

Mania Form Mafia

As Nietzsche said, folly is rare in the individual, but the rule in the collective. Why it is so is very instructive. I have  explained this: mania cement tribes together, and collective crime unifies best. That doesn’t mean the collective is always wrong. All learning is cultural, thus from a mass of people, thus massive. When an element of culture is erroneous enough, it will bring nefarious consequences… which unite those who believe and participate in that mania. Indeed nothing unites better than common criminality.

It is a fundamental chimp instinct. Then an entire group of chimps get together to go on the warpath, hunt, hurt or, and, kill other chimps, as a matter of territory, hence ecology.

Examples of commonly practiced mania are scapegoatism, another the religion of Abraham, religions with human sacrifices, all sorts of racisms and tribalisms, etc. The crime is not accidental, but unifying. Crimes against truth and common sense are most… common as they present the further advantage of reducing brain work..

Follies are not necessarily useless, far from it. Paradoxically, folly helps reason, by exploring all possibilities, and instills strife, thus it is adaptive to the species which rules the world. Folly suggests and cleanses, by creating the very excesses which identify all the possibilities and diminish the human ecological load. In particular insanity expands the logics to the max. (Yes, this is Erasmus stood on his head…)

The advantage of mass delusions is partly why insanity is rare in the individual but the rule in cultural sets (epochs, nations, religions, etc. Another reason, besides the extremely sophisticated one evoked above is the fact that criminal follies bind tribes best… And plutocracies can exploit these and unite the people that way. See:  “Delusions That Bind”

Belinda Smith

Patrice Ayme

 -I like it, except if you could maybe rephrase the part about the religion of Abraham (singling out Judaism would be anti-Semitic.) For example: most atheists single out no belief. There are also three separate religious groups that come from the Family of Abraham.

Answer to Belinda Smith:

Judeo-Xto-Islamism is just the “religion of Abraham”. Calling them “monotheism” is abusive to other religions which also believed in a supreme being… The religionS of Abraham all emanate from Judaism. It is not anti-Semitic to observe this, because it’s a fact. which can be verified by reading the Bible or the Qur’an (something I do all the time, for fun). As happens with sects, they tend to hate each other. Sunni religious texts (Hadith) enjoin that all jews have to be killed before the Final Judgment can happen. This is not being anti-Jewish or being anti-Sunni to notice this. It is just describing faithfully some related ideologies.

Wisdom cannot listen to the complaints of idiots.

Many view Jesus as a “Rabi”… and Jesus was certainly a Jew… That he was a Jew prevented Christians to exterminate Jews (although they came close many times)… Christians, or more exactly Catholics, exterminated everybody else (99.99% of Samaritans, 100% Cathars, etc.).

Muhammad took refuge in Yattrib, a Jewish city, but later eradicated a Jewish tribe there. And elements of Islam are very clear that Jews are a serious problem with a lethal solution (once again, not an interpretation singling out a religion groundlessly, it’s literally there, in writing).

The Republican Romans outlawed all religions which practiced human sacrifices (so the Celtic religion was 100% eradicated, and the Carthaginian religion went underground). I will review the essay for possible anti-Semitic misrepresentation, though. I am agnostic (I do not pretend to be god by claiming there is no god).

Graduating from the human sacrifice mood as a unifier advanced civilization. One point I make is that the religions celebrating Abraham as founder (Islam, Xtianism, Judaism) celebrate the willingness to commit infanticide to please the boss as a community building criminal mood… In a way that was just not so blatant as to fall under Roman interdiction. So, basically, Abrahamism fosters the mood to do anything to please the boss.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

Listening to Christian preachers of US Protestantism (“Reform”) one basically listen, under the para ble of the Jewish people seizing land “given by God”, to the praising, as a religion, of the seizure of land, making war to, and killing the original inhabitants (who were, I think, Semites, nota bene…)

Collective madness is a complicated subject, with pros and cons. One may want to keep that in mind as Internet censorship is ever more practiced all over (not just Xi’s dictatorship).

Patrice Ayme

Animalists And Nazis: A Common Hatred For Humanity

WHY NAZIS WERE ANIMAL RIGHT ACTIVISTS

Animal rights extremists (“animalists”) pontificate that humans are no better than mice, or roaches. Whereas humanists believe that humans are vastly superior to mussels. Mussels have no culture. Mussels have no intelligence. 

Animalists retort that human beings have no particular place in the universe, so they have no more rights than animals, who have no particular place in the universe either. Earth’s blue dot in a vast black universe has no particular significance they can discern, so why should humans have any meaning or worth either? 

Nefarious fools and hypocrites ask questions which they know are too stupid to be answered. What are we going to tell them? If you need to ask that question, you do not deserve an answer?

Human with descendant of dinosaurs displaying flight mastery. Animalists will have us believe than the human is not more worthy of consideration than the heron. I love herons, and I want them around, but I love and esteem humans more. (Berkeley, 2/20/2021)

Animalists have apparently not enough culture and, or, intelligence, to afford humanism. They make a show of displaying their virtue by saying they will not hurt any soul… while other humans, who do hurt animals, or are open to the possibility of animals getting hurt, are thus bad… an inferior sort. They themselves hurt animals, like most of us do, indirectly. and often they intend to eradicate entire animal species by depriving them of utility, but… never mind they are busy accusing you, not themselves. 

Animalists, having little culture and not enough history to not know the essential here. They do not know that this tactic of accusing humanity in the guise of worshipping the animals is not new: the NAZIS used it. The Nazis claimed they were animal lovers. To not hurt animals, Hitler was a vegetarian, and, he said, because animals were made to suffer so much [1].

The Nazis passed, to great fanfare, animal rights laws to prove to the world they were good people, of superior moral fiber. In 1933 the Nazis passed laws regulating the slaughter of animals. The suffering of lobsters in Berlin posh restaurants was a particularly sensitive subject. Animals could only be killed after anesthesia. Mistreating your pet could get you two years in prison (especially for opponents of the regime, as Roman emperor Theodosius did with opponents he accused of heresy). The Nazis also banned the forced feeding of ducks to produce foie gras… just as Californians would do later with French delicacies. Hermann Goering announced an end to the “unbearable torture and suffering in animal experiments”. It was let it be known that anyone who treated animals as inanimate property would be sent to a concentration camp. That Nazi animal circus was all for show… and to institute the following dual principles: that Nazis were of a superior moral fiber, as adjudicated by animals, while common humans were no better than animals. So humans could be treated like animals, why not? Animalism as a humanism fit with exterminationism just right. Naturlich.

It is highly likely that today’s animalists also want to make animals out of us, as the Nazis did. Animalism is akin to dehumanization, the worst sort of murderous racism. Once one believes that people are like ants, one has achieved the essence of the worst aspect of Nazism.

So why are there so many animal rights activists of the exaggerated type nowadays? Because they represent the ultimate nihilism which talks. It is the entire freedom they found to protest. Because they are cowards.  In a world they do not understand, master, or approve of, they want to play holier than thou… and are looking for a safe outrage. Also many are simple opportunists, or idiots who believe they detected in science a continual demotion” of humans. Telling human children or their parents that they are worse than flies because they kill flies,while flies do not kill them, is also, for pedophobe sadists, a dream come true [2].

Animalists know, deep down inside that we will not use insecticide to deal with them precisely because we are not, as they are. Nor will animalists commit suicide, as they should, because any human being, even a vegan one, kills animals, day in, day out. Instead, their main mission is to demote humanity and to demote reason, with hypocritical protests which signify only they want the power of mobilizing attention towards their ant-like existence… 

Animalists’ nihilism is thus most useful to plutocracy, its servants and the establishment. Because extreme animalism diverts mental energy towards fake, self-contradictory debates, removed from basic reality. Thus the kleptocratic elite can keep plundering the biosphere in peace, while animalists tell those who try to organize the resistance against feudal forces that they are… worse than beasts.

To save the biosphere from those who are red in fang and claw, one will have to retain common sense. Arguing that those who kill animals, any animal, are worse than beasts is no way to basic smarts. It is the way to Nazi-like lethal lying madness.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Hitler posed an animal lover… As a vegan, the Fuhrer smelled terrible, as he emitted gas all day long, inconveniencing his generals. Also his veganism was so exaggerated he had to take all sorts of drugs, and was completely diseased, with de facto premature aging, Parkinson, etc. People who knew Hitler and were familiar with his diet relate that he did not consume meat as part of his diet during the war. Several witnesses—such as Albert Speer (in his memoirs, Inside the Third Reich)— wrote that Hitler used vivid and gruesome descriptions of animal suffering and slaughter at the dinner table to try to dissuade his entourage from eating meat. An examination of Hitler’s remains carried out by French scientists in 2017 found no traces of meat fibre in the tartar on Hitler’s teeth. Obviously, Hitler was making a show of displaying save-the-animals virtue. It was widely expected that, if the Nazis had won the war, they would have denied killing anybody in any concentration camp (they had dozens of thousands of those, most of them small). They could have pointed to their blatant love of animals.

***

[2] Many flies and other insects carry deadly diseases which kill millions of people every year (that does not mean I am for chemical insecticides; I am for birds, who eat insects, and mechanical devices). In Africa I would cover myself with a thick sweater by 45 Centigrade heat (110F) to shelter from tsetse flies, a sort of deer fly. Tsetse carry sleeping sickness, and can fly as fast as a car drives. Sleeping sickness is a dreary disease. African (not European) cattle resist it.

Life Is A Riot

 

THAT LITTLE RIOT… NOTHING. BUT THAT BIDEN IS WORSE THAN TRUMP, A BIGGIE.

So Trump was dis-impeached, the plan of preventing the President to run again failed. At least that way. The Demoncratic forces will have to find another way… Meanwhile the Biden presidency is proceeding… Along the lines set by Trump. This is very interesting in several ways: basic Machiavellianism at work, and also the global plutocratic forces having perhaps learned something important: China is not the Third Reich, Trump had got an important point there. Also Biden flew a B52 escorted by Saudi F15s: an other important message, this time to china’s would-be ally, Iran.

That little riot, around and inside the US Capitol, incompetently managed by the Capitol police, was not a coup… And Trump’s free speech to go out and fight has little to do with that major police failure… The Federal government had proposed to help, days prior, and the capitol police declined because of “bad optics“.

What was a sort of passive aggressive coup was that the so-called “Democrats” impeaching Trump quite a bit for more than 4 years, by accusing him of being a Russian agent. The opponents of the so-called “Democrats” will remember this continual impeachment (which drowned reality in an ocean of lies). What was much more of a coup was that those who conspired to invade Iraq, in violation of international law, were never tried… or not even suspected by the sheeple, thank to plutocratic propaganda!

Democracies have riots, it goes with the concept of the People Power (Demos-Kratia). Debate itself is the core concept of democracy, and “debate” means beating up completely. Agreed, in a civilization functioning optimally, it is best that individuals do not get hurt physically, or even psychologically… But the later is unavoidable: the Socratic method, as related by Plato, could be very harsh.

Progress means turmoil. The best way to generate better, that is newer, ideas is emotions, even passions, thus turmoil. Idea making means trouble making…

And thus trouble making should be cracked down upon only when clearly it violates the law.

And free speech ought to be rarely in violation of the law. When free speech goes too far, one should go the British route, the way the French used to do it, and have the police give a “warning”. And circumstances are crucial. Say somebody writes on the Internet:”Kill all whites!”. That’s different from a teacher teaching children with:”Kill all whites!”

Is that a coup? Or a comedy organized by a self-declared “Nordic Shaman” (pictured, with horns)

So that little riot was not a coup. In a coup, even a self-coup, the army is involved. When ignorant Trumpists marched on the Capitol, it is not them, the rioters, who got tacit approval of the army. Quite the opposite. The Capitol Police had declined the help offered by the National Guard. I have been in a country during a coup, that’s something else entirely. Or look at Myanmar/Burma last week for what a coup is. I have ALSO been in street riotting (many times, and not on the side of law enforcement). The Capitol Police was incredibly incompetent. Since 1871, no riot ever breached a serious public building in Paris… with much more numerous, powerful and determined demonstrations (including one where more than 100 individuals got killed). The lack of nerves of the US elite calling that little riot a coup is part of the “Manifest Destiny” problem, a kind of hypersensitivity of the elite for any inconvenience coming its way. The fact the present president is held, in cogent circles, as a criminal against humanity is not “whataboutism”. Only those who don’t mind killing millions of foreigners say such a thing. It never happened in the history of the US, and rarely in the history of the world. Do you have any idea of the monstrosity visited upon Iraq? Is it un-American to notice it? Why?

One can be wrong by deliberately ignoring right.US citizens do not know the US attacked Afghanistan secretly on July 3, 1979, to provoke a Soviet reaction in 1980… Under DEMOCRATIC saint Jimmy Carter. US citizens should learn this, it is a moral imperative, because the initiation of massive war by the USA in the Middle East, in several alliances with ultra violent Muslim Fundamentalists, killed at least 5 millions… and the mood of secrecy and viciousness presiding over this assault is still NOT suspected, let alone examined. One needs to learn about the fact US leaders engage in secret wars: it is a coup against humanity and a war crime. Because they could get away with that, US leaders could get away with various crushings of rights, within the US.

So where are we at? Biden, so far, is leaving the meat, the core, the essence of the Trump era… in place. All the changes, so far, are cosmetic. The border has become porous: in a few weeks, the invasion situation (3,000/day, it is said) will become obvious, and Biden will say:”Sorry, but we have to do something!”. Same story, basically with the pipeline. Magically, the economy is not free of fossil fuels. As long as Canada is allowed to sell its tar sand poison, it will be transported… Doing it with a pipe in as lesser evil. And the Paris Accord will not change a thing: if anything it encourages those increasing the most their pollution (China, India, Poland)… to do even more so. Not that they are culprit, really, it’s the absence of new technology which is the cause of the problem, and that’s where the real fix is (aside from taxing the most polluting activities).

In any case, something real progressives ought to keep in mind:

COVERT ACTION MAGAZINE.COMBiden’s Key Role in the Crime of the Century: The 2003 U.S. Invasion of Iraq – CovertAction Magazine

Biden has much to do, if he wants history to forgive him for inciting and helping to invade Iraq (among other global plutocracy friendly conspiracies he was a principal of). We have to wish him luck, but we will verify, step by step…

And the way? NASA’s Perseverance, the Plutonium powered robotic rover cum helicopter successfully landed on Mars. A magnificent success including entering the atmosphere at 11 kilometers per second, around 400 times per unit of mass the kinetic energy of the fastest bullet, followed by a deceleration of ten gs (ten times Earth’s gravity), then braking with a hypersonic parachute, followed by braking with rockets, and finally a “sky crane”… There is no way forward but with much more and much better tech.

In 1976, the two US Viking landers found biological activity in Martian soil. The results were disbelieved (that’s OK)… But then its was not tried to repeat the experiments… And that’s not OK. Indeed the experiments are so far unexplained. The original head of the Viking project now believes life was detected.

Some will scoff about the interest of finding life on Mars. But biology on Mars, if it exists, is sure to advance our understanding of biology on Earth. Science is like that: any experiment helps, positive or negative. Even the very humanly costly COVID experiment… helps. Helps whom, what? The essence of humanity, to go where no monkey has gone before…

Life is a riot…

Patrice Ayme

Bad Internet? No, Bad Profit Monopolies & Bad Education

Trump said it himself; he is the symptom of a deeper problem, he became president because his predecessors had “done such a bad job”. And why did the predecessors do such a bad job? What was this bad job? The rise of inequality in the West has brought a misallocation of resources, and, more devious, hidden below the surface, deliberately bad education “justified” by the pseudophilosophy of “postmodernism” (which puts in doubt the very notion of truth, so that we can’t criticize our masters). The misallocation of resources in turn sent jobs, dignity and know-how to cheap factories overseas, and life expectancy down the drain (“Obamacare”) [1].

To all this the New York Times reacts by shooting not just the messenger, but the message itself. Democracy Is Weakening Right in Front of Us. Is technopessimism our new future?  …”online behemoths like Twitter, Google, YouTube, Instagram and Facebook have created a crisis of knowledge — confounding what is true and what is untrue — eroding the foundations of democracy.”

The New York Times rolls out the big guns of plutocratic universities in charge of establishment defense (nota bene: I had a professional relation with Stanford… and hold the university dear…)

Nathaniel Persily, a law professor at Stanford, summarized the dilemma in his 2019 report, “The internet’s Challenge to Democracy: Framing the Problem and Assessing Reforms,” pointing out that in a matter of just a few years

the widely shared utopian vision of the internet’s impact on governance has turned decidedly pessimistic. The original promise of digital technologies was unapologetically democratic: empowering the voiceless, breaking down borders to build cross-national communities, and eliminating elite referees who restricted political discourse.

Since then, Persily continued:

That promise has been replaced by concern that the most democratic features of the internet are, in fact, endangering democracy itself. Democracies pay a price for internet freedom, under this view, in the form of disinformation, hate speech, incitement, and foreign interference in elections.

“Most democratic features of the internet are endangering democracy itself“? Gee, what to do? Is the Stanford professor suggesting to shut down “most democratic features of the internet?” Would not that be convenient to the establishment to preserve only the non-democratic features of the internet… to save what the establishment calls “democracy”?

Instead, of course, thinkers such as yours truly, want to use the Internet to expand DIRECT democracy. The Internet could, and should, allow citizens themselves to debate and vote laws… As Athenians and Republican Romans could.

Trump, Trump Derangement Syndrome, and the apparent erosion of democracy that the Internet contributes to, are symptoms of a deeper problem: a lack of education [2]. And it is deliberate, as the Internet lockdown, which is confined mostly to public schools, demonstrate (countries such as France have kept their public schools open, mostly, and certainly did not give preferential treatment to private schools!).

Today’s adults were not exposed to enough dispassionate debate, especially in history. In particular, art history. Logic, mathematics, science, and especially the history of science were not drilled sufficiently, starting in primary school. Thus, an imbalanced view of the universe and how it works, was conferred.

But not just that: a capacity and desire for children to learn interesting worlds were forsaken. 

The present Internet is indeed built to increase passions, for profit. Very advanced methods are used to promote clickbaits of all sorts, all appealing to the basest instincts, because, the baser the instinct, the stronger the passion, and the stronger the passion, the more attractive the participation to tribal fury. The Internet has been very good at capturing the tribal instinct.

Truth is not necessarily nuanced, but getting to it oftentimes is. Children have to be taught this, the subtlety of how one gets to truths. If they have not been taught to be astute in evaluating information, children are not going to be taught how to do it within an Internet which targets passions, instead of cold logic.

Thus a way out maybe to break the connection between rising passions of the tribal type and rising corporate profits. Maybe social networks should be turned progressively and increasingly into public utilities. As it is people with very little education are in control of the asocial Internet networks, and exert bovine censorship. A prestigious (analytic) philosophy university professor, a woman, Harriet Baber, expressed, in a very cogent comment, her dismay about the lack of basic education of her students: her “comment contravened our community guidelines and has been deleted” (too bad it did not copy it when it was showing). Bemoaning lack of education has become a crime: to insure a return to the kingdom of the beasts will be enforced by the… beasts. 

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Lack of education and poor education were put in striking relief by the COVID LOCKDOWN. Where I live the Bay Area County has 332,000 students in school. 31,000 of these are in private school, enjoying “in-person” teaching. The public school children (including my own daughter) are condemned to extremely poor schooling, by zoom, for only a few hours a week. “Democratic” governor Newsom, whose eleven companies got millions in stimulus money, is also sending his four children to private school (as a suffect of the plutocratic Getty family, Newsom has the means). So the “Democratic” governor children are getting educated while children of the common folks are turned into uncomprehending beasts… All this in the name of “Democracy”…

For more than a month, in the run-up to the US presidential election, history lessons supposedly on Ancient Egypt, Sumer, Babylon, were replaced by intense “democratic” propaganda pro-Biden. The Principal was posing, on the Internet, below a huge poster with the raised fist of “Black Lives Matter”. Of course this elitist lady is 100% white, and lives in a multimillion dollar home, in a zone where only multimillion dollars homes are legal (the Berkeley hypocrite mood which launched that sort of racist zoning a century ago, is eroding, thanks in part to the colossal scorn of yours truly… Yes, they prefer to talk about “busing”… That doesn’t concern their children…)

*** 

[2] The hoaxes that Trump was elected by Putin, or that the interference of Trump in Ukraine was impeachable, and in particular worse than the blatant and obviously illegal intervention Biden boasted about on tape… were not invented by the Internet. Those hoaxes, which most “liberals” are supposed to believe, lest they be excommunicated, were old fashion propaganda using the Big Lie technique, to sabotage the Trump presidency.

What the plutocratic owners of the media were aiming at was to prevent Trump to enact reforms, and changing the moods too deeply. Paralyzing society by confusing moods is crucial to the exponentiating plutocracy. The first impeachment trial enabled the elitists “Democrats” of the US Congress, truly corporate shills, led by corrupt Pelosi, to get out of the previously agreed upon accord with the White House to sue the Internet monopolies reinforced under Obama.

The end result was that Google (which steers search results to its own profit) got sued by Trump alone, with a one year delay. Thankfully, president Biden has left, so far, the Justice Department free to pursue that criminal inquiry against google (one may fear that Obama would have stopped it, considering his record; perhaps Biden is determined to get even with all his corrupt sponsors? One may hope… I wish Biden makes as many (good) reforms as possible. So far Biden is leaving the core of Trumpism intact, covering that up with lots of noise, smoke and mirrors… A good thing…)

Core of the quadrangle of Stanford University, which was founded in honor of the one and only child of Senator Stanford and his wife, after he died. Their son died at the age of 15 on a family trip to Italy, from typhoid fever. Within a few hours of his son’s death, Stanford said to his wife, “The children of California shall be our children.” A good thing (Stanford was the railroad magnate who built the train going east to the rest of the USA). That demonstrated that a plutocrat using Chinese workers (in bad conditions, but not necessarily his fault, the California legislature was racist …) can turn into a contributing hero to civilization. I am not necessarily against hero worship, or for wealth bashing. My relationship with Stanford is correspondingly love-hate. But i think love and smarts can win. Top universities are irreplaceable.

Potential Armageddons Are Best Fought With Transparency, Not Mental Subjugation

The establishment is conspiring for implementing an even more thorough mind control than it has already achieved. To do so, it intents to control “truth”. I agree “truth” is the number one problem, but having the establishment control it makes it worse: it is the penultimate stage of civilizational collapse, just before the plebs, We The People, realizes that they had been had, and roast the plutocrats on spits (as literally happened during the “Jacqueries” of the 14C; this clearly happened when the Mayan civilization collapsed, when city-state after city-state saw its elites burn and gods destroyed by the enraged people finally aware of the incompetency of the governance they had been submitted to). So established thinkers say what they are expected to say, justifying their salaries. by suggesting everybody should carry Big Brother, or should I say Big Facebook? Around the neck, 24/7:

How vulnerable is the world?
Sooner or later a technology capable of wiping out human civilisation might be invented. How far would we go to stop it?

The Apocalypse is not far around the corner…

Any human population contains more than an “apocalyptic remnant”, a subpopulation of individuals who are evil-bound. Arguably, this is potentially the case with everybody, given the appropriate circumstances to trigger the behavior. Preventing the apocalypse will require more openness, and transparency, debate and truth, instead of trying surveillance, closure, lies and mental control of the population… that latter instruments of subjugation will actually make it easier to trigger the apocalypse, by letting only a few access the ultimate power of knowing other minds. 

Absolute power corrupts absolutely: those who have the absolute power of mental cognition of others will worry about losing that power… and at a reaction to the unjust subjugation they exerted. Protected by the secrecy and power conferred to them to prevent the apocalypse, terrified at the idea of losing their power, they will obsess to find means, any means, to keep the power secrecy and censorship confer… And they will have those means, precisely because they exert censorship. This happened for real at the end of the Roman Republic. The Senate exerted censorship. It did not stop there; Cicero, to Caesar’s outrage, overrode the constitution, and executed without trial Roman citizens, arguing from a mix of emergency and secrecy (conspiracy of Cataline). 

Plutocracy means: evil-power. Using evil means confers power that should not be used. And first of all among evil means is knowing all what other people think and do (consider asocial networks right now, selling our souls to whoever is interested by buying them). This is the ultimate evil because it enables to reduce thinking to monothinking, the ultimate intellectual fascism. That destroys mental diversity which feeds human intelligence, hence human wisdom, our genus’ essence.

The reason for the “Apocalyptic Remnant” being within all individuals is evolutionary. The genus Homo has dominated the planet for millions of years during which it became the greatest threat against the ideology which supports it. So Homo had to cull Homo. This is the :original Sin” Christianism deplored… But it does not go without knowledge, thus wisdom. Indeed wisdom is power and power ultimately means dominance. 

Thus worrying about human beings having too much power is nothing new. It has been the case for millions of years. Holocausts and cannibalizing the enemy were the solutions. That there will be more of this in the future, as there were some in the past is no reason to panic now, and throw the baby, human intelligence, with the bath.

Instead the solution is to become more intelligent. 

In 1935 Irène and Frédéric Joliot–Curie were awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for the synthesis of new radioactive isotopes. In 1937 Irène discovered that Uranium 235 could sustain a chain reaction, and had an entire correspondence with her German colleague Otto Hanh about this (Hahn did not believe her). In January 1938, Irène and Frédéric Joliot–Curie went to see the Ministre de la Guerre, and told him nuclear bombs were possible. The Minister of War then withdrew all and any patents about nuclear energy, and what came to be known many years later as the Manhattan project was launched. Disinformation, including giving the Physics Nobel in 1945 for Irène Joliot–Curie’s discovery, has obscured this history… But it was one of the factors in the invasion of Norway by the Nazis, as they knew France had Norway’s largest dam producing heavy water for use to slow down neutrons in nuclear reactors. Ultimately collaboration between France, Britain, Canada and the US produced nuclear bombs, and the Nazis were left out. The cooperation between the scientists was fully open, but it was closed to the exterior word: French general De Gaulle was told in 1944 by a French science leader of the Manhattan project in Canada that “une ville, une bombe”… whereas Truman learned of the bomb only when he became president. 

The case of the Hubei virus shows that transparency saves lives, and mitigates potential apocalypses: in the latest finding of the WHO (February 14 2021) there were at least 1,000 cases of COVID in December 2019, with 13 variants. That was kept wrapped in secrecy. Several months were lost in which containment and vaccines could have been prepared.  

People devolve into the Dark Side and the apocalypse, an un-covering, when the Dark Side and reality are revealed, when they have to, because there are no other solutions. Transparency, debate, intelligence and wisdom will find solutions, given enough openness. This is the way, going forward.  

PA

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Various intellectuals have instead argued towards closing society. This was an answer to them. More detail in a buffing up of that essay soon, no time now

On Pathetic French President Macron And His Lack Of A French Vaccine

To understand the world better, it helps to not just look at one country. Thanks to Trump financing massive financing of Moderna, I got injected by the mRNA Moderna vaccine roughly a year after COVID appeared. That incredible success led by the Moroccan born and raised Belgian PhD Doctor Moncef Slaoui was greatly Trump’s making. One can see this clearly by comparing with France.

France has been an abysmal failure in the matter of COVID vaccines. All the more shocking as France led the way, both in the discovery of mRNA and making a vaccine out of that… Seventy and thirty years ago, respectively. That failure has everything to do with being led by financier, instead of a maverick hack (Johnson), or a developer (Trump).

I know that critters with intellectual pretensions are supposed to despise Trump as a bullying idiot and praise Macron because he talks English, honors the established order, and is a financier. However, with his vaccines, Trump is saving many times more millions than Biden killed by invading Iraq, and Macron compromised the world’s vaccine effort.

Meanwhile the Biden government gave the order to never mention “Operation Warp Speed” again… Although Biden himself used the expression in January 2021, some of the crafty propagandists below him told him that the expression reminded people who brought five successful vaccines by financing them handsomely (Trump).

It is highly likely that, had Biden and company been in charge they would never have financed vaccines as OPERATION WARP SPEED did. How do I know this? Look at France. Or, for that matter the European Union in general: the successful vaccine effort in Europe was financed by… You guessed it… Trump. Unbelievable. But true.

Oh, there is French vaccine which works… But it is financed by Brexiter… and French speaker Boris Johnson, the British PM. Neither France of Macron or the famed European Union, finance that French vaccine. So, paradoxically, Brexit finances French Biotech, which neither the EU nor France finances.

Meanwhile, France is getting vaccinated by Trump financed vaccines…Trump spent nearly ten billion dollars financing the first three (UK authorized) vaccines: 4 billion for the mRNA Moderna vaccine (Moderna is a US startup led by a French CEO who stunned Trump by telling him he could mass produce a vaccine within three months if given billions); 2 billions for the Pfizer-BioNTech mRNA vaccine (Marrying giant US Pfizer with a German Startup with mRNA tech led by a Turkish immigrant), and billions for the vaccine made by Astrazeneca, a British-Swedish company led by a French CEO who is an MBA and a veterinarian, in collaboration with the UK University of Oxford (which is around eight centuries old). Those vaccines are remarkably efficient…

France was supposed to go back up to 3% research/GDP. But then France got led by a lawyer married to a billionaire, a professional politician from ENA (a kind of MBA for gauche caviar, dominant in French governance), and finally a finance public servant turned money changer

in Marseille, France, the head of the intensive care ward at La Timone Hospital observes that the EU stumbled at the starting line of the vaccination program. Not counting Britain and its 120,000 (minimum) COVID deaths, the European Union has more than half a million COVID deaths (and probably much more).

“There was a clear lack of anticipation. Then a lack of doses. Then we didn’t vaccinate the right people,” said Dr. Julien Carvelli.

Let me go at it in (shockingly scathing) French for the French readers:

Il est révélateur que la France de Macron, qui méprise tellement les USA de Trump pour cause de prétendu fascisme, agit de facon bien pire. Il serait inimaginable pour Trump ou ses supporters de refuser le droit de revenir a un citoyen. Et c’est bien normal. Priver les français de leur citoyenneté est un fascisme inexplicable… depuis l’occupation par les Nazis. Par exemple, je suis vacciné (COVID mRNA, Moderna). Pourquoi ne puis-je revenir ou je suis né? Suis-je un Juif sous l’occupation Nazie? Même ces victimes là pouvaient rentrer. De facon générale, l’incurie de Macron est effarante: les Français sont vaccinés avec des vaccins Américains (Moderna) ou Americo-Allemands (Pfizer-BioNTech). la France (et l’UE) a refusé de faire ce que Trump et Boris Johnson ont fait: financer des startups de biotech pour sauver les citoyens, et le monde. Même quand ces citoyens sont français.

Voici ce qu’en dit Associated Press: “French pharmaceutical startup Valneva had big news in September: a government contract for 60 million doses of its coronavirus vaccine candidate. The buyer? The United Kingdom — not the European Union, as might be expected for a company on the banks of the Loire. “What a true waste,” bristled Christelle Morancais, president of the Pays de la Loire regional council, as she tried to wrap her head around the missed opportunity. The British, she told The Associated Press, “rolled out the red carpet for this company, helping with financing and the set-up. … And we were powerless.”

Macron est fondamentalement un inspecteur des finances tourné riche tripoteur d’argent chez Rothschild. Et maintenant il bafoue les droits des citoyens… sans se préoccuper du bon sens ou de la constitution. Macron est un president de plus qui a désindustrialisé la France… cette fois la déclassant au point de tuer des citoyens. Même Putin en Russie, et le dictateur Xi en Chine ont produit des vaccins pour leurs citoyens…et le monde. Le vaccin Russe marche a 91% d’après le Lancet. La France est le seul membre permanent du Conseil de Sécurité de l’ONU sans son propre vaccin… Minable. Et meurtrier.

Patrice Ayme