American Ruling Class: A Cancer That Will Devour Civilization, If Nothing Is Done

 All societies develop ruling classes. It is a very bad flaw of civilization: those oligarchies contradict the nature of humanity (liberty, equality, fraternity), and the nature of optimal intelligence (ideas from all over, competing for the best thinking; not just in the self-service of a tiny elite).

Why do ruling classes develop? Fundamentally, elitism is intrinsic to civilization. Civilization harnesses exponentiation: power grows proportionally to itself. For example, the more people, the more manpower, thus the more food production, the more irrigation workers, the bigger the defense budget, etc. Consequences of this exponentiation of human power can be dire: the Sumerian cities were destroyed in a flood of biblical proportions, caused by the ravages visited by human deforestation, agriculture and herding. Similar situations arose in Europe and Japan three millennia later (however, powerful medieval governments stopped these ecological devastations brutally before something).

But the same situation plays inside: political power exponentiates (not just financial interest from loans). That means the wealthiest and,or, the most powerful become increasingly, from one generation to the next, ever wealthier and powerful. This happens as classes, not just individuals. For example Harriman, the railroad baron, had two sons highly influential not just the US Democratic Party, but with Stalin and Hitler (one of them got decorated at the highest level by both; his wife became ambassador to Paris).   

Ruling by the few is intrinsic to civilization. Look at China with its, until recently, mostly independent 5,000 year old history.

The father of China’s big chief, Xi Jinping, was so important that the entire Red Army of Mao found refuge in the province this general held. Such auspicious beginnings at the very top of the Chinese elite, fed Mr. Xi and his all consuming, righteous hubris. A few years among the peasants under the Red Guards just fed his thirst for vengeance of whatever, whoever, did not fully appreciate his greatness. Let’s hope he has a good shrink. Doesn’t look like it, though…

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The preceding is modified from a published comment to NYT answering America Has a Ruling Class

[Matija Medved] The ruling elite of the USA imagines itself as by the people, from the people, for the people. In truth, growing for 150 years, it’s a new aristocracy, so far diluted by the growth of the empire it rules, by hiding that this is exactly what it is doing

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So what to do? Before having a strategy, we need those who can write down a strategy to be aware of the problem, and its seriousness. We are not living in more primitive times, when civilizations came and went. Destroying one brought another. And time had time. 

Notice that, after the collapse of the Tang empire, China tended to be invaded by foreigners a lot, and thoroughly: Uighurs, Jurchens, Mongols, Manchus… and even a tiny bit by France and Britain, and later powers in conflict with the Boxers; China tends to talk a lot about this late aspect, which was NOT significant; the real problem had been caused not just by those occupations lasting centuries, but the degeneracies which led to them. In any case, Chinese civilization slowed down enormously. In the West, it was worse: two enormous collapses, the Bronze Age Collapse (BAC), 32 centuries ago, and the Roman Collapse (RC, starting by 395 CE, death of Theodosius I, my chronology) showed that civilization is fully reversible. In both cases, literacy got killed (more so with BAC). The Roman Collapse was very complicated, because it was accompanied by the rise of the Frankish civilization, which was more advanced than the Greco-Roman one in the domains of ethnic and religious tolerance, diversity, equity (inheritance equally divided), slavery (outlawed), universal citizenship (everybody was a Frank, even Pagans, Jews, Syrians, Arians, not just Catholics).

The point though, is that all this happened over centuries, civilization had time. Nowadays, because of the unpredictable rule of an autocrat like Mr. Xi, the world could wake up tomorrow, at war. It does not take too many H bombs for a real bad day. Xi is not the US elite, of course, but just something that the US elite contributed to grow… same as Hitler, Mussolini, or Franco, or even Hirohito… Yes, Hirohito: why didn’t the US got his divinity’s oil supply off in 1937? When he invaded China, not just Korea and Manchuria?

Tolerance, if it is tolerance of evil, can be a cancer. It was found recently that nicotine affects directly immune system anti-cancer mechanisms. If Xi is a cancer, the US elite is nicotine. More generally this is happening because of mono-thinking in plutocratic, elite universities… Cancelling the existence of the errors of the past cannot be done. That’s cancelling the book we have to learn from. What needs to be cancelled is elite thinking claiming that birthright elite doesn’t exist.

The mephitic influence of the American elite extends worldwide, by implicitly flaunting itself as something that needs to be emulated. Nothing wrong with elitism, as long as it is genuine elitism of thought. But intellectual fascism, the rule of just a few ideas, from a few people and their instrumentalized institutions, is its exact opposite.

Patrice Ayme

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Here are extracts from the NYT that the preceding reflections complemented: 

America Has a Ruling Class

Why do members of the political elite insist that they’re not? By Samuel Goldman

Mr. Goldman is a political scientist and literary editor of Modern Age: A Conservative Review. March 30, 2021

America’s most powerful people have a problem. They can’t admit that they’re powerful.

Take Andrew Cuomo. On a recent call with reporters, the embattled Mr. Cuomo insisted that he was “not part of the political club.” The assertion was confounding because Mr. Cuomo is in his third term as governor of New York — a position his father also held for three terms. Mr. Cuomo has also served as state attorney general and as secretary of the Department of Housing and Urban Development.

Or think of Avril Haines, the director of national intelligence. After her appointment was announced, Ms. Haines declared, “I have never shied away from speaking truth to power.” That is a curious way of describing a meteoric career that includes stints at exclusive universities, a prestigious judicial clerkship and important jobs in foreign policy and intelligence before her appointment to a cabinet-level office overseeing a budget of more than $60 billion.

This sort of false advertising isn’t limited to Democrats. Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri, for instance, has embraced an image as a populist crusader against a distant “political class.” He does not emphasize his father’s career as a banker, his studies at Stanford and Yale Law School, or his work as clerk to prominent judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts. The merits of Mr. Hawley’s positions are open to debate. But his membership in the same elite that he rails against is not….

Both strategic and generational factors help explain Al Gore, who claimed to represent “the people versus the powerful” in his 2000 campaign against George W. Bush. Compared with a Yale graduate, son of a former president and grandson of a senator, perhaps Mr. Gore — a Harvard graduate, incumbent vice president and son of a senator — did count as one of the common people. But Richard Nixon, an object of boomer hatred, inveighed against the status quo as bitterly as any hippie. Refusal to accept responsibility is not just a boomer quirk. Its roots lie deep in American culture.

…we should stop confusing consumer preferences with power. Popular culture relies on the outdated clichés of starched linens and vaguely British accents to indicate privilege. This anachronism encourages public figures to signal their outsider status with aesthetic posturing. On the left, that often means the vaguely bohemian manner cultivated by Ms. Haines, who once operated a bookstore that hosted readings of erotic literature. On the right, it tends to involve exaggerated machismo and embrace of working-class signifiers.

… We should judge public figures by the arguments they make and the results they deliver, not whether they eat caviar, kale or capocollo.

… we need to learn from historical figures… We honor and study consequential historical figures because they were flawed human beings who made incredibly hard decisions. Canceling their stories and monuments prevents us from understanding why they succeeded — and failed.

Finally, we need to be honest: America has a de facto ruling class. Since World War II, membership in that class has opened to those with meritocratic credentials. But that should not conceal the truth that it remains heavily influenced by birth. Even if their ancestors were not in The Social Register, Mr. Cuomo, Ms. Haines and Mr. Hawley were born to families whose advantages helped propel their careers. Admitting the fact of noblesse might help encourage the ideal of oblige.… Ultimately, the change must come from the powerful themselves. Just once, I’d like to hear a mayor, governor or president say: “Yes, I’m in charge — and I’ve been trying to get here for my entire life. I want you to judge me by how I’ve used that position, not by who I am.”

Avalanches Teach Well. Nature Is The Ultimate Teacher.

George from the New York Times is “saddened to learn of … a near record of avalanche deaths, nearly all in closed areas… I spent countless days on the slopes and never once did I ever think it wise to risk my life on un-groomed or out of bounds areas. I appreciate the thrill of skiing on virgin snow, away from others, but at what price? These senseless deaths and the risk of life of those tasked in recovery is too much a price to pay. Substantial fines should be levied for those daredevils, lifelong suspensions and cost of rescue should be billed.”

I replied this:

@george You propose “substantial fines” for “daredevils” who… dare to go out in nature? “Senseless deaths“? When does death make sense? Worldwide, the number of deaths by avalanches of the “daredevils” who dare to go in nature during winter is less than 150 a year…. while traffic accidents on roads kill 1.35 million a year. Everyday, 3,700 people are killed in collisions on roads.

I doubt that all these road trips “made sense”. One thing I am sure of, is that many things do not make sense nowadays, precisely because people have lost touch with nature, its beauty, its perils, the intelligence it requires, and the sense it provides. We need leaders who remember nature, because nature still rules. 

Another point is that condemning people to only go to resort for the wealthy is in poor taste, and feeds the engine of inequality. Traditional ski resorts are immensely expensive, both to those who go there, and to the planetary environment. One could actually wonder why they are not submitted to hefty carbon taxes. They are churches of environmental destruction where the faithful gather among the fuel, noise and machinery. Is that what we want to teach and encourage? Bring crowds, machines, pollution to pristine nature, and fine those who get out?

Avalanche in Sion vallee, Suisse: the Rhone flows through it. Sometimes avalanches, even in Switzerland, have been known to flatten entire forests. In the 17C, French peasants in the Vars area sued to Royal government for having cut giant meleze trees (larches) for building forts, exposing thereafter their villages to avalanches. The trunks of such immense trees can still be seen at the Montdauphin fort, and are much larger than any in existence today… A testimony to the ravages of man upon nature…

Cost of rescue is another matter. Generally European “daredevils” all have insurance both for health and rescue. The former comes from universal health insurance in Europe, the latter is readily available and covers dozens of millions of people there, because it is very cheap. 

Nature is dangerous. Danger is how nature teaches best. Life is a deadly disease, after all, but it’s also a mistake to focus on that. I was caught once in a giant rock avalanche above an unfathomable icy abyss. My survival, and that of my partner, was so miraculous that, would someone tell me such a story in its gory details, I would not believe it. Never. It is actually a most unlikely story of survival. To this day, although I was there, saving my life by playing superhero with inhuman powers, I cannot believe what happened. I know what happened, I can describe it, in detail, but still it was such a miracle that I understand why miracles make people believe in divinities.  

My two closest friends, and other friends, not as close, died in avalanches. In the Alps, in Himalaya. All of them, before they had children. Untimely death goes with mountaineering. I miss them, but since we will all die anyway, we may as well do it learning tough lessons. Because we can teach them, to all of humanity.

One lesson avalanches teach? It is not because it looks extremely unlikely, that it will not happen, and then, worse than imaginable. 

Other activities in nature can teach similar lessons. For example I swam many times at a place called Black Rock in the Hawaiian island of Maui, a towering cliff of black lava, overhanging, twenty meters above the water, twenty meters below, 400 meters long. I would swim in the shadow (the cliff is north facing), on the theory that I would see sharks if there were some, and they would not see me, if they were in the lighted part, out at sea. I got to befriend a giant green sea turtle, the largest I have ever seen, who would come visit me at the tip of the cape. Nobody was swimming that north facing cliff. But the south side, next to a honey sand beach, with short rocks, was very crowded, including swimmers who would jump  in. The north side was, is, super wild, with magnificent corals… I was super foolhardy to swim there without the full armament suite I used in Africa: harpoon and extra long, sharp combat knife for fighting off sea creatures… But, besides sea turtles, I saw no sharks. However I noticed the paucity of large fishes, which told me that there were sharks around. Later there were two lethal attacks, including one on the safe side of the rock, where the crowds were. A large, experienced 60 year old man was attacked and bled to death, in spite of immediate rescue from life guards. The shark, of unknown species, was not caught.  

Still, should one avoid the sea? No, but, should I go back to Hawai’i, it would be wise to go dive, fully armed. Some will sneer that I exaggerate… But I am familiar with long swims in the ocean. I have seen white sharks in the water twice, and one was the biggest white shark I have seen (including in videos). When one sees documentaries with plenty of sharks swimming around innocently, those sharks are not behaving like the sharks I have known in the seas; they probably bumped into cameras, or cages, or were otherwise trained… Another pitfall is the artificially low number of fatalities reported from shark attacks; the danger on a solitary diver is much greater than for a group; in underdeveloped regions, many deaths go unreported, or people are smart enough to not go swimming… 

Ah, lightning… Lightning kills a lot in nature. I am familiar with it as a mountain runner: I prefer to run with clouds, to avoid thirst and heat stroke, and mountain clouds have the tendency to turn into spectacular storms, which provide the natural caffeine of . The closest I have seen lightning was as a child, three meters away… I got caught by super intense lightning storms four times while climbing.

From all this, I learned how precious life was, and how close to disaster one can be. Not just for oneself, but for others… Some claim to be “Stoics”… The “Stoa” was a pillar in Greece, and some guy talked from the bottom of it. Ever since so-called “Stoics” have taught each other, the two most famous being those old crooks, yet excellent writers, Seneca, who led the Roman empire for five years (when his student nero was not paying attention yet), and Marcus Aurelius (who ruled the empire 20 years).  Marcus harassed to death a small number of christians, for no good reason, Seneca was well known for his astronomical corruption (while teaching that riches impoverished). Seneca himself, and that is not commented on usually, admitted in his letters that, in his times already, “there are no more philosophers”. Why? Because Romans had learned to only listen to their master’s voice. Romans were not listening to nature anymore. If one wants to be genuinely stoic, one has to learn to listen to the snow in the woods, because yes the snow talks, while contemplating the fresh mountain lion tracks one is following to ease one’s way (yes, another of my pastimes; I got mountain lions warnings more than once; the first time I heard the sound I had no idea what it was). 

Nature is the teacher. That’s where history, logic, science and the imagination come from. Nature is truth. We need nature raw, untamed, free to express itself.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: And we need philosophy schools learning from nature to have the largest following, rather than herds praying to a nailed scarecrow, a caravan raider, a guy below a pillar (stoa), a replete prince watching his navel, or a docile submissive anxious to please masters (Xi’s idol, Confucius)… Actually none of these is as much of a problem as Putin or Xi, the worsts popes today. President Biden, observed that he had spent longer with Xi than any other US citizen. In a refined analysis, Biden said that, just as Putin, Xi is persuaded only autocracy, by opposition to democracy, can resolve the complex problems of today’s world. This is of course absurd. But, as Biden pointed out this leads to, once more, a conflict between oligarchy and democracy. If Xi and Putin had learned from nature, they would know that they are inviting disaster: if anything, the law of averages always win, and having two gigantic countries led by just two men, that’s completely out of average behavior…

When Did Nazi Commanders Realize The War Was Lost? September 3, 1939!

September 3, 1939 is the day the Nazis understood they were going to lose the war. Before that fatidic day, the Nazis always got their way. That fatidic day in 1939, they saw they would have to fight the world’s most extended empires, that is, to fight the world: all of Africa, most of Eurasia, Canada, Australia.

The Nazis should, and some did, at least subconsciously notice a crucial historical ingredient. Any sane person would have noticed that France and Britain had a child, the United States of America, an obstreperous child… But their child nevertheless, quite healthy, of gigantic proportions, and even greater ambition… The Nazis also knew, because they tried to duplicate them, that the USA had, when need be, genocidal capabilities.

In spite of their alliances with Stalin, Mussolini and Hirohito, how could the Nazis win the triple alliance of France, Britain and the USA? The disaster was obvious, and even inside their puny brains, they perceived it.

Top German generals themselves had arrived to the same conclusion two years before, when they realized that the Nazis really intended to take so many risks that war was unavoidable… And the generals knew that Germany was obviously not ready to fight France and Czechoslovakia.

A problem in stopping the march to war had been that the Nazi leadership believed that racist and class-ridden Britain and America were not going to follow the multi racial, colored, Africanized, socialistic and Jewish led French Republic in unhinged hatred of the Nazis (the socialist Jew Léon Blum was Prime Minister of France twice… while Hitler ruled…)

Thus, the top German generals and admiral reasoned, if Britain and the USA declared that they stood with France, and would go to war, should the Nazis attack, they, the top German military command could make a coup against the Nazis. An admiral actually told casually US diplomatic personnel the plotters were ready to kill Hitler if need be. However the crafty Anglo-Saxon leaders informed Hitler of the plot. Paradoxically, this reinforced Hitler’s belief that the Anglo-Saxon leadership was on his side, the racist, anti-French, anti-Semite, anti-Bolshevik front…

***

After the fall of the Spanish Republic to the fascists, with the crucial help of Mussolini and Hitler’s Luftwaffe, on April 1, 1939, British leadership finally decided to remove the gloves, and discreetly joined the Polish-French defense Treaty, in the addendum. At that point, the Nazis were stuck, they got the impression it was too late to back off, and they decided to scare France and Britain some more, by making their alliance with dictator Stalin official.

It did not work. But the Nazis could not stop themselves, from the considerable inertia of all the forces they had launched, including their own mindset. They could only feel that they were doomed.

I am not trying to be cute. The Nazis were at a loss about what to do.

On September 3, 1939, Hitler was in the Reich Chancellery. 48 hours earlier, Great Britain and the French Republic had given the German-Austrian dictator 48 hours to get out of Poland. More than nervously, a crowd of the entire German Nazi government was milling around Hitler’s gigantic office, and the hallways leading to it.

First came the British declaration of war. Then the French one, a few minutes later. Hitler said nothing. He went to a gigantic window and looked at Berlin. Von Ribbentrop, the Foreign Minister, who had insured Hitler for years, that Britain would not join France, was aghast, but silent. Nobody said anything. The minutes went by, Hitler still watching Berlin. Eight minutes elapsed, said some witnesses. The crowd was silent.

Then Hitler turned around, and with an anger none of those present had ever seen before, said in the loudest and most savage voice:”NOW, WHAT!!!???”

Nobody said anything. The Nazi elite was obviously crestfallen.

The lessons of the past were obvious to them, and staring them in the face. They were gripped by fear. In 1914, Germany felt ready to attack the world… and attacked. In 1939, Germany was obvioulsy much less ready than in 1914, and her adversaries were stronger.

***

Starting in 1912, the so-called “Second Reich” had meticulously prepared a surprise attack to annihilate the French Republic (the “First Reich” had been founded by the Frank Charlemagne).

In August 1914, the entire German army, but for eight divisions protecting Eastern Prussia, attacked France. Germany had twice the population of France, and had been preparing its world war attack for twenty months. The French resistance was ferocious: day after day of butchery. Just on August 22, three weeks in the German all-out attack, furious French counterattacks cost the French 27,000 soldiers killed in action, all wearing red pants. German losses are unknown, but they were so serious that, in their rage, the Germans committed well-documented atrocities. Worse was to come: a monster counterattack by the French armies on September 6, using thousands of motor vehicles, even taxis, nearly destroyed the German armies which had to promptly retreat and entrench themselves.

In 1914, the German army was ready to fight a world war, even though the timing was everything: first France had to be defeated before the British army could be created and intervene in significant numbers. Then Russia, known to be slow to mobilize, had to be defeated thoroughly, and Britain somehow to be persuaded to make peace. US and Dutch “neutrality” would enable to break the British blockade. But then, of course, the French nearly destroyed the German army, so the entire plan collapsed.

In 1939, Germany was absolutely not prepared to fight a world war. When it dawned on German generals that Hitler was using tactics so dangerous that he was going to cause a world war, they decided to organize a coup, as early as 1937. But Britain and the US told Hitler, of the preparations the German generals had naively informed them of, so the coup petered out.

***

Now, on September 3, 1939, what the German generals had feared, happened: war with the two superpowers, the world empires of France and Britain… With America waiting in the wings. Germany was allied with… its natural enemy, Stalin. The entire German army was invading Poland. 110 French divisions were mobilizing in the west. French tanks forces were much larger than the German ones, and with better tanks. Together, the French and Royal air forces were larger… navies did not compare; the two democratic allies had a much larger fleet, with aircraft carriers… The Nazis had only two modern battleships, no aircraft carrier. The blockade had strangled Germany in World War One… even though the US and the Netherlands had enabled to evade it for a while. But now the Netherlands had to be invaded to fight Britain. Obviously, for the Nazis, the situation was grim. They had persuaded themselves, for years, that Britain would never side with France in opposition to Nazism, that the two allies would never declare war… that the Nazis would be free to attack in the east (that was made explicit with Britain during the negotiations leading to the British-Nazi Naval Treaty). And now what?

Finally, after a silent disarray caused by Hitler’s savage outburst, Hermann Goering, second in power in the Nazi regime, head of the Luftwaffe, among other things, calmly, and sorrowfully, declared:”If we lose this war, God help us all.”

Throughout the Second World War, Germany was horse-drawn. Why? Not enough oil, to start with. Also, hard to believe, blinded by their hubris, Hitler and his idiotic colleagues in the National-Socialist Party had not anticipated war against highly mechanized France (and soon the highly mechanized British, Russian and US!) Yes ten Nazi Panzer divisions, and a few other units, were highly mechanized, but that was it.

It looked completely impossible, even to Hitler and his second in command, Goering, that Nazi Germany could defeat France and Britain… even to the Nazis. Britain had not much of an army, as usual, but a formidable Navy. France had the world’s strongest land army, and a significant navy. Together the French and British air forces were superior to the Luftwaffe. Even the Nazis, in spite of their colossal stupidity, could see this.

France had a gigantic empire spanning the globe. Britain had an even bigger and wealthier empire, spanning the globe. British empire forces and French empire forces provided enormous manpower, from all over, many of them expert at war.

As in World War One, the French and British navies stood ready to strangle Germany, by cutting off vital supplies. High explosives and food in World War One. In World War Two, high quality iron came from northern Sweden, transited through Norway, and sailed down the coast, facing the main Royal Navy gigantic basis at Scapa Flow in the Orkney Islands.

If anything, the situation was worse in World War Two: Britain and France had access to world oil. They could blockade Germany. And the strangulation did happen: Nazi Germany would run out of oil so much it could not train air crews, and had to drag jets with oxen. Said jets had aluminum engines that would burn up in a few hours because the rare elements needed to make high temperature steel alloys were not available anymore, after declaring war to everybody, etc.

Britain and France had also access to world finance, and could make deals with US companies to manufacture whatever they needed. This is actually how the superlative fighter of World War Two was created: France and Britain made a contract with a little known US manufacturer, with tougher requirements than for any other aircraft prior. Thus the “Mustang” was born, as a Franco-British aircraft (later the US Army discovered it was superlative and ordered it in great quantities to escort bomber streams over Germany)

***

So why did the Nazis persist in a war they were sure to lose? Mental inertia, hubris… To avoid disaster, the Nazis had to give up on Nazism, surrender, or trust in God.  “Gott mit Uns!”, God With Us, proclaimed their belts. In the first ten months of the war, a perverse God sided with Nazism, indeed, from a whole succession of unlikely events, several miracles, the incompetency (at best!), if not betrayal, of the French top commander, Gamelin, and the betrayal of France and Britain by their ungrateful American child (and apparent correspondence between Hitler and the top inspector of the British armed forces, the pro-Nazi ex-king…) 

***

History does not just repeat, it repeats mental behaviors.

So when looking at Chinese dictator Xi, or the Russian czar, please do not underestimate their mental inertia and hubris. They could well ride, of their own volition and hubristic stupidity, a world war they would be bound to lose.

It is not because one is an anachronism, and feels like one, that one does not ride history to one’s doom! It is precisely the opposite! Xi and Putin are anachronisms, enraged tyrannosauruses snarling furiously at forces which spell their worlds’ doom. This is precisely their anachronistic despair which make tyrants so dangerous.

Twice Germany’s leadership fell into the trap of mental fascism in the Twentieth century, and US bait and switch. Once should have been enough: the lesson is apparently hard to learn.

Why France and Britain did not fall in the same fascist trap is simple: they had been the European superpowers, 14 centuries in the case of France, eight in the case of Britain, even before Germany was created as a state. That’s a total of 22 centuries in which to make mistakes, but never mistakes so bad as to terminate the state. Thus French and British leaderships had plenty of time to learn about the pitfalls of mental inertia and hubris, and learn to avoid their exaggerated expressions. France was pretty much continuously at war… But never so seriously as to compromise the state: it took two centuries to defeat fascist all too Catholic Spain, for example… Never fighting too hard in southern Italy or northern Europe… But still hard enough to create the Netherlands on the way…

To help Russia, China, and the world, then, one must do what was not done in the 1910s, or 1930s. What we need now is a united democratic front, ready for anything. The US now cannot anymore hold back, let other democrats struggle, while favoring dictators in the hope they would overstretch themselves. If the USA had told racist German fascists clearly that it would side with its parents in the end…. Neither World War One, nor World War Two would have happened. Reason would have prevailed. It did not, because misinformation and disinformation was rife.

Patrice Ayme

Western Leadership Caused One Million Dead With Covid… From Racist Disregard Of Japan

Leading Western countries made a number of giant mistakes with COVID. Many Western countries actually, following the policy in Wuhan, forbade people to go outside… even now in France people are limited to 10 kilometers in 20 departments… Yes, with half a billion people vaccinated worldwide, France and Germany and other European countries are in hard lockdowns, with few people vaccinated, an abysmal failure of the European Union. In Great Britain, the pandemic has been crushed, because half of the population is already vaccinated (thanks to one shot policy and the home-made Astra-Zeneca-Oxford, Trump financed vaccine).

Mistakes of Western leadership caused the death of more than one million (by comparing with how many people would have died, had the death rate being the same as in Japan… which it would have been, if one had learned from Japan, what Japan learned, from that ship). Those mistakes were entirely avoidable, if science, observation and reason had been deployed: Japanese experts determined very early on that the virus was airborne, as their own experts caught it while visiting that cruise ship, the Diamond Princess in Yokohama.

So the Japanese people was told by its government of AVOIDING the three “Cs”:

AVOID:

1 Closed spaces with poor ventilation.

2. Crowded places with many people nearby.

3. Close-contacts.

There was no mask mandate in Japan. Masks are not just ineffective, they can be outright dangerous, and most mask types have now been outlawed in Europe (one can see them in profusion in the USA; they can multiply COVID transmission by five when turning big droplets in aerosol too fine for any mask to stop). Moreover, masks make people feel secure and let them loiter in situations where they will get the virus if they stay around long enough. If you can smell cigarette smoke below your ten superposed masks, you can get COVID: the virus is the same size, 100 nanometers.  

Conclusion: Japan suffered less than 10,000 dead so far, less than 1% of the deaths of the USA and Europe combined… without any lockdowns. WITHOUT ANY LOCKDOWN: lockdowns themselves bring death, decrepitude, misery, economic and social collapse.

A recent New York Times article went through the experiment of room with window open, and room with window and HEPA filter (HEPA filters glue the virus by Van der Waals force). Conclusion: masks do nada. Window open works, and with the HEPA, no problem.

One student with COVID contaminates an entire room in minutes, and the masks will be as effective at stopping COVID as they are at stopping cigarette smoke. New York Times graphics and Harvard modelization.

The rule of at best idiotic, at worst financially corrupt experts in the West has caused one million dead, and probably ten times this damaged for life by the virus, let alone their families and enormous social and economic damage… Including for millions now with advanced cancer, and other deadly diseases, because hospitals were not functioning normally. 

Inequities should be brought up for insider trading with homicidal intent. Let me be clear: I was personally invested in some companies which, rightly, profited from the pandemic. By giving money to Moderna or BioNTech, say, ten years ago, investors made those companies possible. So, instead of having half a billion dead from the virus, we will get away with only a few million dead (right now, three millions). That’s fine and moral.

Investing in biotechnology has not been easy in the last decade or more. However, by February 2020, it became obvious that advancements in biotechnology were necessary. Soon Trump invested ten billion dollars in vaccine development after the CEO of Moderna, a French guy, told him he could mass produce a very effective vaccine in three months, using brand new science, mRNA tech.

Once again, great. At the time, doctor Deborah Birx, hero of AIDS, United States global AIDS coordinator for presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump between 2014 and 2020explained that masks would not work and why. Her reasons were cogent, and duplicated what the Japanese had said. 

This is how the West got COVID: from COVID gas and ineffective masks, plus the ideology of massive protection from a few layers of paper or cloth. COVIDIOCY and Interbeciles have been rampant, they killed. But were the experts corrupt? That is one question. The conclusion is that the public health experts were only expert at making mistakes. Socrates warned us against not being led by experts. But what about those with a good reputation at expertise, completely unjustified? The Japanese were led, for decades by criminals posing as experts, who could only be stopped with atomic bombs. They apparently learned to be more circumspect, careful, and modest with expertise…

Yet a number of experts, pressed for lockdowns and a mask mandate. The combination was bound to make the pandemic way worse. Just to make sure it would get even worse , countries such as France, following the monstrosities in Wuhan, forbid citizens to get out of their homes (except with what the Nazi military occupation government called “Aussweiss”… and even then just for an hour, a temporal restriction Nazis did not have). 

The worse the pandemic was going to get, the better for the companies trying to find treatments and develop vaccines. The question is this: how many of these experts were invested in biotechnology, pharmaceutical stocks? 

Was the petulant Dr. Fauci invested in such stocks? Or playing the smart idiot on TV, not afraid to contradict himself 100% within months, for all to see? It’s great to see an 80 years old act so juvenile… But not when millions die as a result.

Sometimes idiocy is a coverup for unfathomable nefariousness. Let’s not be naive, and ask for criminal inquiries. Were our experts simple idiots, or were they invested? Invested in making a bad situation way worse? As they did?

Patrice Ayme

If The Universe is Flat, How Could There Have Been A Big Bang?

The Standard Big Bang model, the Λ-CDM model, considers that there was Dark Matter from the start. What is it made of? No answer so far; both speculative theory and experiments have come up empty. The Big Bang is supposed to fabricate a number of things, none of them behave like Dark Matter. According to specialists, there seems to be a few exotic possibilities left (“Axions”, etc.) So this looks tenuous: their reasonings are too convoluted and depend upon too many axioms. 

The Big Bang model exhibits a plethora of axioms, thus the Big Bang itself is not beyond any suspicion, In My Not So Humble Opinion (IMNSHO). 

The most blatant case is this. Right, there is a cosmic expansion going on, and also a cosmic ageing: these are obvious facts easily established with powerful telescopes. But there is a blatant philosophical problem: a couple of independent axioms doing the same thing at different times. We have TWO  cosmic expansions, none of which is explained by deeper considerations. 

The one which came first was the expansion caused by the Big Bang, initially observed first more than a century ago. It just is: by 1920, astronomers were busy showing that groups of galaxies were flying away from each other, and the more away, the faster (that they could discover that from their grainy and messy pictures is amazing; the guy with the biggest scope, Hubble, carried the prize of eternal renown). 

The other cosmic expansion was a complete surprise. The first inkling of it were found in refined mathematical analysis in the 1960s (mathematician Segal pointed out that the expansion looked quadratic, not linear; he was ignored by the masses). The universe is expanding at an accelerated pace: there is surplus of energy out there. It is called “Dark Energy”. The obvious question I have asked is why would there be two inflation mechanisms, both unexplained? Maybe there is just one. And the Big Bang is an illusion, just a snapshot of Dark Energy applied over 100 billion years or so. (There are inklings this could be true as some stars are nearly as old as the universe…)

Part of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. The faintest galaxies here are supposed to be 13.4 billion years old or so. The problem is that then, the universe was obviously completely flat already! How far must flat go before it’s obviously a problem?

The observed cosmic vacuum energy is roughly zero. Here by “observed” is meant observed as interpreted by using a theory of gravitation, aka “General Relativity” (GR). Roughly the main equation of GR is: Curvature = Energy. If energy is huge, so is curvature, and light beams (which define geodesics in GR spacetime) would immediately converge. They don’t.

We have to think about what this means. Spacetime is highly curved around masses, but not so on the largest size. Why should we think it was ever different? Because of the “Big Bang”? That’s a circular argument.

The Paucity of hypothesis philosophy will go on assuming there is only one cosmic inflation, Dark Energy, and that the Big Bang is an illusion driven by a desire to believe our times are special. (I know some will say Helium was created in the Big Bang… But I am not sure: given enough duration, couldn’t stars make all of it? 

As Einstein himself pointed out, the curvature is precisely defined, but the right hand, energy side of the GR equation is not. He was imminently qualified to say so, as by 1912 he and colleagues (starting with Planck himself!) had discovered vacuum energy.

It is traditional to brandish 10^120 as the energy of the vacuum. But that’s obtained by cutting the universe into Planck size boxes first. Then one gets a mass of 10^96 kilograms per cubic meter, 10^46 times the mass of the Sun. Basically all Black Holes, shoulder to shoulder. The ultimate high explosive. Silly stuff.

In SQPR, the number of oscillations of the Pilot Wave is de facto bounded. This also limits the QFT analysis independently of the Planck size, and at a much bigger scale. It also can be all computed. But nobody in the rest of academia was ever interested, aside from… Feynman and De Broglie  (whereas my ultra-finite approach to math attracted the attention of a number of top mathematicians, who bothered to check whether their own work would be immune to it…)

To come back to the initial question, Dark Energy answers it: the universe is flat because its engine is Dark Energy, and it’s not that mighty an engine. No “inflaton” there (the short period of inflation of space at 10^23 times the speed of light that Soviet and then US cosmologists suggested to try to reconcile theory and observations). As I pointed out in the past, given enough time, we don’t need the Big Bang. If the Universe is one hundred billion years old, many cosmic riddles vanish. But right now the official truth is that the universe was created 13.7 billion years ago (thanks to heavy fudging of cosmic, and comic, proportions). It reminds me of when Lamarck was looking through his microscope at fossils of mollusks million of years old, and the Christian church proclaimed that the universe was only 6,000 years old (that was less old than some oral traditions, let alone Hindu mythology or Persian history)…

Patrice Ayme

***

SQPR assumes that the wave function collapse is a force, the Quantum Interaction (QI). That means first that the definition of force of Buridan, something which modifies trajectory, is extended to just having something which causes an effect (that was already the case with the weak force…) Second anything having an effect is retarded. So QI goes at speed, say 10^23 c… Now, third, the nature of the quantum collapse is to shrink the quantum wave W onto itself (namely the quantum wave goes from all over the Hilbert space H, to an eigenvector within it, so collapse: W–> {*}) if the energy of the wave is the sum of the square root of the square of its curvature, it can be extended only to a limited number of cycles before it goes non linear, thus collapses, by interacting with another stray quantum wave, W’…

Sexism Promotes Inequality, Feudalism, War: Why Cuomo Must Go

Work relationships have to be just that, work relationships. In the human species, males and females are not very different in physical capabilities, and not at all in mental capability. Thus societies run by men only is a phenomenon tied to the sort of war-like societies which have characterized civilizations for the last few millennia.

Now, just as war should take a neglectable position, so should demonic males who refine their brutal skills by predation and raw dominance of females. Up to the Middle Ages, women have always been the prime status symbols of domineering males. Fighting for Helen (who had willingly followed a prince of Troy) launched a thousand ships. 

Keeping women in a submissive and subjugated role is a form of training for a society full of inequality and war. 

Beyond the sexual harassment and the gender discrimination looms the principle of the demonic male in command, instituting inequality. Thus, it is not just direct sexual attacks of the grossest sort which was to be proscribed, but also the light and subtle sort. To try to run civilization without females participating is worse than just oppressing half of humanity, and it is even worse than cutting humanity in half. Indeed mothers are on the frontline with infants and an oppressed mother will transmit to a child a submissive epigenetic, thus abating the creativity and freedom of the human species. So this is not just about one man, Cuomo. It is about freeing humanity from a feudal past.

Patrice Ayme

***

[Submitted to NYT as a comment to a Cuomo article; published 24 hours later, after 1,500 more presumably more worthy comments, after making sure nobody would read it.]

Serena Williams Not Serene. Sometimes it’s more moral to get very angry. Serena knew very well she was treated rough because she is a woman

Serena Willams: It’s the final of the US Open, and I’m competing to win my 24th Grand Slam against Naomi Osaka. It’s the beginning of the second set, and the umpire thinks he spots my coach signaling me from the stands. He issues a violation—a warning. I approach him and emphatically state the truth: that I wasn’t looking at my coach. “I don’t cheat to win. I’d rather lose,” I said. I walk back to the court and lose the next point. I smash my racket in frustration; he issues another violation and gives a point to my opponent. I feel passionately compelled to stand up for myself. I call him a thief; I again demand an apology. I tell him he is penalizing me for being a woman. He responds by issuing a third violation and takes a game from me. In the end, my opponent simply played better than me that day and ended up winning her first Grand Slam title. I could not have been happier for her. As for me, I felt defeated and disrespected…

“What could I have done better? Was I wrong to stand up? Why is it that when women get passionate, they’re labeled emotional, crazy, and irrational, but when men do they’re seen as passionate and strong?”

So often, in situations similar to mine, when men fight back against the referees, they’re met with a smile or even a laugh from the umpire, as if they’re sharing an inside joke. I’m not asking to avoid being penalized. I am asking to be treated the same way as everyone else. Sadly, that’s simply not the world we currently live in…

This incident—though excruciating for us to endure—exemplified how thousands of women in every area of the workforce are treated every day. We are not allowed to have emotions, we are not allowed to be passionate. We are told to sit down and be quiet, which frankly is just not something I’m okay with. It’s shameful that our society penalizes women just for being themselves.

Ever since I was a little girl, I’ve felt a need to voice my opinion and be heard. Some may not like it, and to be honest, that’s their prerogative. I respect it. Growing up as the youngest of five girls, I learned that I had to fight for everything I wanted. And I won’t ever stop raising my voice against injustice.

As a teenager, I was booed by an entire stadium (I took the high road and even thanked those who didn’t want to see me win). I’ve been called every name in the book. I’ve been shamed because of my body shape. I’ve been paid unequally because of my sex. I’ve been penalized a game in the final of a major because I expressed my opinion or grunted too loudly. I’ve been blatantly cheated against to the point where the Hawk-Eye rules were introduced so that something like that would not happen again. And these are only the things that are seen by the public. In short, it’s never been easy. But then I think of the next girl who is going to come along who looks like me, and I hope, “Maybe, just maybe, my voice will help her.”

From: https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a28209579/serena-williams-us-open-2018-essay/

A Good Reputation Is Bad For Revolutionary Thought

Spinoza was offered a top university professorship. He declined it, and kept at his job, grinding glass to make the world’s most advanced lenses. Spinoza, who had given away his family fortune, to be free of common life, prefered living like a loser… breathing silicon, which is not good for the lungs, he died from it.  Spinoza prefered to think great thoughts, rather than to succumb to the seductive songs of the establishment. So it is, and has to be, for most top thinkers. In other words, when totally ignorant individuals posing as “moderators” on the Internet, threaten much more advanced thinkers with various punishments, or insult what they imagine to be their backgrounds, they should remind themselves that human beings can be so different from one another, that those higher up in wisdom and creativity may as well be interacting with different species, when they interface with the vulgar majority.

Once, long ago, I had this dream that I was resting, in the form of a sort of seal, on a lonely ice floe floating in the middle of a pristine blue sea under an azure sky. There was no other seal anywhere in sight. It was lonely. Supposing that hell is others, does not mean that loneliness is paradise, apparently. When I checked the fishes, I realized that they were armored, and primitive, straight out of the Silurian. I felt very much alone, and why was it, I had no idea. But so be it: “All loneliness is guilt”–thus speaks the herd. [Thus Spoke Zarathustra, First Part, “On the Way of the Creator”.] But all and any herd is obsolete, as far as creation is concerned… And what is more human than creation as a crown?

Spinoza’s family was forcefully converted to Catholicism around 1536 CE, when the Inquisition started to torture Portuguese Jews, converting them to Catholicism forcefully. Spinoza’s grandfather fled to Nantes, France, but then was expelled in 1615, due to France being then ruled by a Medicis banker queen and her fascist goon, Richelieu (after the unfortunate assassination of henri IV in 1610 CE). The Netherlands welcomed Sephardic Jews, though (they converted back to Judaism). Spinoza’s father Miguel was a successful merchant and became a warden of the synagogue and of the Amsterdam Jewish school. A pillar of society.

However, on July 27, 1656, Spinoza was issued the harshest herem, ban or excommunication, ever pronounced by the Jews of Amsterdam; it was never rescinded.

“The Lords of the ma’amad, having long known of the evil opinions and acts of Baruch de Espinoza, have endeavoured by various means and promises, to turn him from his evil ways. But having failed to make him mend his wicked ways, and, on the contrary, daily receiving more and more serious information about the abominable heresies which he practised and taught and about his monstrous deeds…” Spinoza no doubt denied the immortality of the soul; he rejected the notion of a transcendent, providential God—the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob; and claimed that the “Law” (i.e., the commandments of the Torah and rabbinic legal principles) was neither given by God nor binding on Jews. 

Spinoza’s masterpiece (published posthumously) was “Ethics”.  Happiness and well-being lie not in a life enslaved to the passions and to the transitory goods we ordinarily pursue, nor in the superstitions that pass as religion, but rather in the life of reason. To reach these ethical conclusions, Spinoza first demystified the universe. 

Representation of Johanne d’Arc rendered 73 years after her vicious, torturous execution. However retrograde some aspects of D’Arc philosophy were, she certainly made a point that women could be at the forefront of civilization, fighting for what they thought to be right. No reason to stay subjugated, humanity always said. She spoke truth to power (read her letter to the King of England!)… The essence of the human condition…

***

Hegel said, “The fact is that Spinoza is made a testing-point in modern philosophy, so that it may really be said: You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all.”^[31] Twentieth Century philosopher Gilles Deleuze named Spinoza “the ‘prince’ of philosophers.”

In his lifetime, Spinoza published just one book under his name.  His Theological-Political Treatise, was published anonymously to great alarm in 1670. A critic called it “a book forged in hell by the devil himself”.

Would Spinoza have become Spinoza if Spinoza had cared about his reputation among his god-given peers? The answer is obvious: no. Acquiring a bad reputation among cultural retards was crucial. The solution was to go somewhere else and find better peers.

***

If one looks at the panorama of the top 100 thinkers of all times, as determined by the major ideas they contributed to civilization, one is struck by their maverick characters: nearly all of them were mostly very WEIRD (WEIRD in the usual and then technical sense). Top intellectual creators generally got entangled with authority, typically getting enormous support and enormous opposition from the establishments: the paradigm of this situation is Archimedes, financed by the Syracuse tyrant, and assassinated by a Roman soldier for the impertinence of drawing geometry in the sand. Even more so, 13 centuries later, Abelard found himself in combat against Catholic Fundamentalism of the mass lethal type, in a homeric struggle against “Saint” Bernard. Abelard’s allies were formidable, but the theocratic fascists won (at least until Luther, another four centuries). Buridan, an even greater giant of thought, had a life that was nearly as eventful.

Abelard, making my point: “Logic has made me hated in the world.”^[17]

“The key to wisdom is in doubting and questioning. In doubting we come to skepticism, and in skepticism we come to investigation, and via investigation we come to the truth.“^[18]  

That top thinkers are WEIRD, I have been saying this for decades, but now the subject is broached a bit, somewhat naively, and part wrong, in a book by Joseph Henrich the head of the department of evolutionary psychology at Harvard University:

The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous.

The reason for the weirdness of superior creators is extremely simple: elaborating new thoughts, new ideas, new emotions, new ways, new technology, new science, new art, new critique, new language and new attitudes is the most human endeavor, but it requires walking on other souls, on common people’s minds, and kicking them around. So the commons kicked back, and since there are so many of them, the situation of edge thinkers is always difficult, brittle, uncertain, lonely and often painful and lethal. 

One can see this plainly with the Internet, and what I call COVIDIOTS, and Interbeciles: there are incredibly vicious, prompt to “cancel”, characters out there, in great hurry to find subjects to trash with their hatred. 

The mask masquerade was pretty stupid: it fully backfired, by making the pandemic way worse; I was only verbally threatened in the wilderness half a dozen times (I wear masks inside stores, of course)… but it is still the masks got politicized to the point, it is literally impossible to talk about it (“social” networks and some media block comments on it; meanwhile Europe, finally seeing the obvious, outlawed most masks…). 

If one gets incredibly stupid feedback, it does not just lowers the debate, it cancels the need of cultural transmission, a great, and characteristically human instinct. Imagine talking to a dog: do you feel motivated rolling out the most sophisticated arguments ever imagined? 

Now imagine the dog is vicious: what to do? As a mountain runner, I know the answer well: grab a stone… most vicious dogs are smart enough to understand that kind of argument. Another idea is to move away from where vicious dogs are. That’s exactly what  Spinoza did, he changed cities.

More generally doing less than state of the art meditation lowers a genius’ creativity. So Spinoza gifted the family business to his brother, and kept grinding his lenses, getting a very small income from it, much of it from friends. Yet, it was not just lens grinding, it was a state of the art of science activity. Spinoza, favouring small objectives, debated microscope design with Christiaan Huygens. He collaborated on calculations for a prospective 42-foot (13 m) focal length telescope, the world’s largest, which was realized ten years after his untimely death, using the lens he had worked on. 

Huyghens himself was the mathematical physicist who invented the pendulum clock, the dispersion-less telescope optics, elucidated the centrifugal force (1659 CE) and is the creator of the  wave theory of light (which has won, as far as I am concerned); he was financed by… the French dictator Louis XIV. (Louis loved to think of himself as an intellectual, and he was, just of the fascist type…) The fact Louis financed Huyghens illustrates the fact most of the geniuses did not have an academic career: universities existed for a millennium, but most top thinkers had troubled, or non-existent relationships with them. Actually just the opposite: universities often opposed intellectual progress. An amusing illustration is that Darwin had no academic position, evolution being outlawed in English universities: Darwin and Lyell had to go to Scotland to be taught Lamarck’s theory of biological evolution. 

Lamarck’s bad reputation was mostly due to his success: the hard core Christians hated him. Lamarck had demonstrated, thanks to mollusks and the microscope, that biological evolution happened naturally, and was many million years old. The god of the Bible, the Jews, and master terrorists Constantine, inventor of Catholicism, and Theodosius, inventor of the Inquisition, was definitely in contradiction with the facts.

Universities are crucial to civilization, but also to the establishment which rules said civilization. Universities naturally attract individuals more obsessed by their reputation relative to the universities’ sponsors, the establishment, than maverick thinkers keen to show that their predecessors did not know how to think optimally. 

One does not make omelettes without breaking eggs, and the bigger the omelette, the more eggheads have to be broken. Revolutionary thinking never has been, never will be, nor should it ever be, popular. This is the lesson of Socrates’ Death.

The greatest thinkers will study cockroaches, but won’t fall in love with them… nor should they.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Note: This essay honors two of my philosophical adversaries, implicitly raising them to the top 100, Johannes d’Arc, and Socrates.I disapprove of the blonde Pucelle for nationalism: a unification solution had been found to the “100 year war”; without that solution the war went on for another 4 centuries.  The world would have been very different if the united kingdom had been made of France and England, as it was twice, for centuries, prior. So I proposed uncharitably that it may have been better, had she been roasted earlier.

Yet, D’Arc carried a bigger message: anti-establishment, gender equality, and indominability of the human spirit serving justice… although here the justice served was debatable… 

The same applies for Socrates, in his judgment against Athenian democracy…Socrates, Plato and Aristotle served plutocracy, in the end: they destroyed democracy. Yet, that attack of Socrates was partly justified, from lack of democratic institutions moderating the people’s moods. 

Nevertheless Socrates should have been free to speak, be it only to offer the occasion to trash his point of view: Socrates was not the one who had acted the most nefariously… Just the one who had established the most vicious mood antinomic to democracy. Cancelling him with hemlock did not help Athens, because it deprived greater thinkers to rise to the occasion and demonstrate how to override Socrates (as the Roman Republic and the European Middle Ages did, by creating democratic institutions…) 

Life Could Have Evolved On Mars, That Was A Major Advance In Understanding.

The most important point with Mars is the following, and it is already established, except for what would be one gigantic scientific surprise pertaining probably to biology. Life Could Have Evolved On Mars.

Imagine just this: that Mars would have been twice larger in radius. The martian radius would then be 6,800 kilometers, ten percent bigger than Earth. Assume next that Mars had been of the same density as now. Thus its mass would be 2^3 = 8 times its present mass. Now the gravity on the surface would be different. From the [mass/(distance)^2] law of gravity (which is older than Newton, and true to this day), one sees Martian gravity would become 8/(2^2) greater. In other words, two-thirds of Earth’s gravity.

So a bigger Mars would have found it easier to keep its atmosphere… and in particular the most potent greenhouse gas, water vapor. 

In the last decade, the extent to which water was present on Mars has surprised everybody. The memory of water is all over Martian geology (marsology?). It’s not just the traces of rivers and ripuarian plains as above, but also enormous amounts of sediments, carbonates and silicates… The drama of mars was that water was robbed by Solar Wind and the dreaded Coronal Mass Ejections… (The latter could total our present electric and electronic technology.)

 Martian rocks look normal, like Earth surface rocks: there are carbonates, sediments, and normal-looking lava. Yet… Think about that. Martian density is a tad below 4 grams/((cm)^3): 3.93 g/cm³. Earth density is 5.51 g/cm³

What’s the origin of the difference? The core of the Earth has lots of iron… but not just that. Earth is actually the densest planet: it is denser than Mercury (5.43) and Venus (5.24). The gas giants are of course much less dense, denser than water by a third (Jupiter) or two-third (Neptune)… Saturn, if one could put it in a tub on Earth, would float, with only ⅔ immersed…

I have long viewed the core of the Earth as a giant nuclear reactor, and my good friend the geophysicist Mark Jellinek, a Miller Fellow, became very angry about this, and we stopped seeing each other because of this scientific debate, where he defended the status quo, which was then that the Earth was releasing heat mostly from contraction (as Jupiter does, supposedly) and latency. Since then the consensus has gone my way. My approach was that of a physicist

This Earth Nuclear Reactor is life giving, because it enables Earth to generate a powerful magnetic shield which wards off the 400 kilometers per second solar wind, and probably reduces the atmosphere robbing potential of Coronal Mass Ejections (CME).  

Venus has no self-generated magnetosphere… differently from Mercury, Jupiter, or Saturn; Mars is too small to have a churning metallic core, so has no magnetosphere, thus CMEs tear the Martian atmosphere away, in particular water. Instead Venus has an induced magnetosphere. A pathetic device that could not prevent Venus from being deprived of all its hydrogen, hence water, torn by the solar wind, especially during Coronal Mass Ejections CME.  

Having not much magnetosphere on Mars is a bit less of a problem: Venus is 100 million kilometers from the Sun, Mars, 240 millions kms. So solar radiation on Mars, per surface area, is one sixth of that of Venus… Venus is a torrid hell, from too much greenhouse, while Mars is too cold, from not enough greenhouse.

Superficially, Venus and Earth are sister planets, both rocky, with roughly the same mass. However there is a huge difference, deep inside: Earth has a giant metallic churning core, and Venus doesn’t. This means that habitable planets to generate life need more than the right mass: they need the right core. I have made that argument many times. 

Now back to our twice-bigger, eight times more voluminous Mars. Suppose now we endow it with a big radioactive, high density core: we could get to the same mass and gravity as Earth. Then there would be a magnetic field (there is plenty of Iron, Fe56, on Mars, that’s why it’s red!), the CMEs would have been less of a problem, the CO2 and H2O would have been retained…. However with plenty of H2O, Mars would have frozen over, sent back the radiation to space, and it would be a shiny crystal snowball…

Not easy to win at terraforming… NASA agrees that terraforming Mars by using Mars itself is impossible with present technology … However, what NASA did not consider is that a foreseeable technology would be just to harness the solar wind, or get water from Jupiter (not its satellites which have plenty… and we need it there)

The main point of this essay is this: at first sight a larger Mars could have sustained life… Supposing that some of the mass which went to Venus had gone to Mars… However, a more refined analysis shows that Earth also found, and stole the radioactive core necessary to generate a magnetic field making the sustainable evolution of life possible. Ergo, the Solar System had just enough for one Earth where it happens to be …

Some have argued that discovering life on Mars would be a gloomy event: it would show that life is common in the universe…. as I think and this essays shows. What the pessimists say is that then, if life is common, there have been plenty of technological civilizations in the galaxy, but no galactic empire, so all these civilizations were crushed by a mysterious event, a systemic occurrence. But the gloomists’ logic is too rapid. Life on Mars now gone or near extinctions proves instead my point: there may be hundreds of billions of habitable worlds in the galaxy… So what? The evolution of life on Earth took more than four billion years. On Mars, the evolution of life may have been sustained for a billion years, and then the planet got dessicated, hostile to life… A typical case in my view [1]… Forty billion Earths does not mean that more than one could develop animals, let alone a civilization beyond stones and sticks.

Ah, last but not least. A big discovery overall, is that from the poles of Mercury to the ice mountains of Pluto, the Solar System turns out to be surprisingly inhabitable… because it’s full of water in many unexpected places. It is imaginable life could have developed on Europa, even Enceladus… And certainly Mars. It’s all there for the taking… Although microbial Martians would be a serious problem… there is little doubt that, armed with fusion, we can settle, say, Ceres…. All we really need is to fabricate compact thermonuclear reactors, to generate all the energy colonization and terraforming will need (although on Mercury, solar panels will do just fine).

Scientific understanding proceeds in subtle ways. The more we understand about Mars, the more we understand about life, and that is just the beginning. Life probably started there, and then degenerated, as life sustaining water was torn away. The Martians existed for a while, but they were biologically retarded… How similar was that life? Did we, Earth life, originate there? What consequences for life throughout the galaxy? And for civilization, looking backwards and forward?… Not even Pluto is the limit…

Mars will double the real estate readily accessible to humans…

Patrice Ayme 

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[1] The fate of Mars can enlighten the Drake equation. At first sight we have a planet, Mars, where life died after a billion years. Also life may have got started on Venus, and died there for a similar reason (no magnetic shield). We don’t know how many times a planet is both in the radioactive belt and the habitable belt. Being really gross about it, we can say that, even in an hospitable star system as Sol’s there was (1/3)^4 ~ 1/100 that life lasted long enough to evolve animals…

Truth Destroying Moderators On Facebook: How To Fix It

An Example Of Truth Censorship on Facebook, This morning I got this message on my Facebook page, in a bright orange panel. Yesterday at 10:27 PM Your comment goes against our community guidelines so only you and the group admins can see this post. Later they made part of my account only visible to myself for ten days… For just relating a piece of history.

Here is the offensive comment of mine which was censored by Facebook “moderators”: 

Patrice Ayme commented on Les Clark’s post: “By The Way, for the Nazis, Japanese Lives Mattered. Nazis extolled the Japanese race”.

My statement was of course entirely correct. The Nazis officially considered the Japanese to be the “Master Race of the Orient“. Except for rare occasional obvious poetry and jokes, I try to only utter the truth on the Internet (jokes are too easily misunderstood). Maybe moderators at Facebook do not know enough English? “Extoll” means to praise, glorify, or honor; “extol the virtues of one’s children”; “glorify one’s spouse’s cooking” exalt, glorify, laud, proclaim. 

One must then say that the problem with this statement of mine which was censored is that it is entirely correct. The bread and butter, and the entire personalities of all too many in the Facebook moderators “group” system, is to promote lying. And the more egregious the lying, the more powerful the ‘moderators’ feel. It is a vicious exponentiating circle. This is a serious problem, as it promotes manicheism, violence, lies, and tribal behavior. In one word: racism.  The increased violent tribalism has been a drug, augmenting profits. However, it will bring the explosion of civil society (and thus increased inequality and plutocracy). Thankfully I found an obvious solution for Facebook, which is quite easy to implement (the solution is at the end of this essay).

THE CHINESE MUST GO. Push them off that cliff! US anti-Oriental racism was LEGAL and strong for generations… While it was actually ILLEGAL, in Germany, even in Nazi Germany! American racists think that this truth has to be hidden, so I get censored. Some Facebook moderators are themselves racist Americans, and they hide this by making a disingenuous show of being rabidly anti-Trump. But say something hinting at American racism not condoned by Soros (famous plutocrat financing some types of anti-racism) and his ilk, and they will censor you.

For the background to see why my censored comment on Nazism and the Japanese race was correct, here is Wikipedia in Nazi Racial Theories: 

East Asian races equal to Aryans or declared “Honorary Aryan”

The Han Chinese and Japanese races were both considered the “Aryans of the East”, “Honorary Aryans” and the “Herrenvolk of the Orient” (i.e. the “Master race” of the Orient) by Nazi Germany.^[6][7]

In 1945, Adolf Hitler said:

Pride in one’s own race, and that does not imply contempt for other races, is also a normal and healthy sentiment. I have never regarded the Chinese or the Japanese as being inferior to ourselves. They belong to ancient civilizations, and I admit freely that their past history is superior to our own. They have the right to be proud of their past, just as we have the right to be proud of the civilization to which we belong. Indeed, I believe the more steadfast the Chinese and the Japanese remain in their pride of race, the easier I shall find it to get on with them.^[8]

Adolf Hitler had allowed Han Chinese soldiers to study in German military academies and serve in the Nazi German Wehrmacht as part of their combat training.

Here is some more background: 

Adolf Hitler had supported the Empire of Japan as early as 1904, when during the Russo-Japanese War it had defeated the Russians, which he considered a defeat for Austrian Slavism.^[14][15] He made a number of other statements expressing his respect and admiration for the Japanese in his book Mein Kampf.^[16][17]

Although they belonged to a different evolutionary race than the Germans did, the Han Chinese and the Imperial Japanese were both considered to have sufficiently superior qualities as were people with German-Nordic blood to warrant an alliance by Nazi ideologists such as Himmler. Himmler, who possessed a great interest in, and was influenced by, the anthropology, philosophies and pantheistic religions of East Asia, mentioned how his friend Hiroshi Ōshima, the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, believed that the noble castes in Japan, the Daimyō and the Samurai, were descended from gods of celestial origin, which was similar to Himmler’s own belief that “the Nordic race did not evolve, but came directly down from heaven to settle on the Atlantic continent.”^[18]

Karl Haushofer, a German general, geographer, and geopolitician, whose ideas may have influenced the development of Hitler’s expansionist strategies, saw Japan as the brother nation of Germany. In 1908, he was sent to Tokyo by the German Army “to study the Japanese Army and advise it as an artillery instructor. The assignment changed the course of his life and marked the beginning of his love affair with the orient. During the next four years he traveled extensively in East Asia, adding Korean, Japanese, and Mandarin to his repertoire of Russian, French, and English languages. Karl Haushofer had been a devout student of Schopenhauer, and during his stay in the Far East he was introduced to Oriental esoteric teachings.”^[19] It was based on such teachings that he came to make similar bestowals of his own upon the Japanese people, calling them the “Aryans of the East”, and even calling them the “Herrenvolk of the Orient” (i.e. the “Master race of the Orient”).^[6]

Nazi Foreign Minister Konstantin von Neurath and its Foreign Ministry explained to Japanese Ambassador Nagai that Germany held no prejudices against other races but merely opposed the mixing of races. This position was repeatedly used and mentioned in publications and statements made in subsequent years. In Mein Kampf, Hitler expressed the conviction that the mixing of races would result in the depreciation of racial value, since the “lower” race would devalue the “superior” race and, unlike “pure” races, weaken the offspring….

***

So I told the truth and I was censored for it. Why is this? The censors were US citizens, they want to feel good about US racism.  They don’t want US readers to read the USA was more racist than Nazi Germany, in some ways. That’s even worse than realizing most Nazi theories originated by observing what was “successfully” done in the USA.

But the USA is a racist country, all too many of the Facebook censors are themselves racist, so they are natural born cancelling of the truth propagandists. They are “America First and Above” racists. They want to hide all this nuance and data.

There was notorious LEGAL racism against the Chinese in the USA in general, and California in particular: Chinese workers were mistreated, despised and forbidden to bring families in. The United States Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, signed into law by president Arthur, forbade Chinese males to come to the USA (except if wealthy, of course). It followed the US Federal Law called the Page Act of 1875 which banned Chinese women from immigrating to the United States.

The case of the Japanese is well-known: the “Democratic” administration of Roosevelt deprived them of their liberty and incarcerated them in concentration camps, without any rationale whatsoever, except US for delirious racism.

***

So now to suggest something to Facebook. Facebook uses volunteer “moderators” to adjudicate truth within Facebook. The problem is that some of these moderators are only moderators in name. I was unjustly censored and cancelled for telling the truth. I should be able to appeal to the central command at Facebook for action against these lying moderators…. Who are not moderators, but the exact opposite: those who fight the truth are encouraging violence, abuse, oppression, tribalism, strife and racism. Such violators should be warned, and, if they persisted in blocking the truth, forcefully removed from their moderator positions. 

Punishing moderators who censor truth deliberately would make Facebook more truth friendly. The same principle should apply all over the media. Instead, in the present system, common Facebook participants who may err are punished, instead of being taught the truth.

This is a problem with all media. Countless times, I sent comments to the New York Times (among others) to correct egregious errors. They did not publish a single one while generally encouraging the lies by publishing often hundreds of comments pertaining to the same article, fostering their initial lie. This is not a matter to be taken lightly. It should be illegal. Just an example: some of the lies of the New York Times had to do with the invasion of Iraq promoted in 2002, effected in 2003 (I have been a NYT subscriber for decades).  

Truth shall set you free, whereas those who enforce lies shall subjugate you.

Patrice Ayme

COVID Vaccination Passport Mandatory

Authorities should require a COVID vaccination passport which will give rights that non-vaccinated individuals will not have. This will not just encourage the entire population to get vaccinated. It’s a matter of life and death. Indeed, we cannot go on like this. The virus attacks not just the lungs, but also neurons directly. Its long term consequences in survivors seem more adverse than in other viral infections. 

When the pandemic started, nobody important seem to worry very much (except for Trump who blocked travel from China, and then was universally criticized as a racist, including by the Democratic Speaker Pelosi who went on the embrace San Francisco’s Chinatown… as if it had anything with Trumps’ block. I wrote an essay: 450 Million Dead Possible? Something To Take Seriously, Right Away. At this point it looks that we will get away with less than ten million dead… But that may be wrong. Vaccination, fast and soon is how to prevent this. We have a window of opportunity (I am already fully mRNA Moderna vaccinated, by the way so I am doing as I preach…)

Indeed, aside from all the dead that already occured, a further danger is that if the virus is allowed to circulate much longer, more contagious and, or, more lethal variants will probably evolve (as is happening already). People are not allowed to drive without insurance, although that is mostly a financial problem. Why should individuals be able to circulate without vaccination, when that is a life and death problem other people are then assaulted with?

The SPIKE PROTEIN harpooned human cells. But now in some variants of the coronavirus, the spike has mutated, and taken the shape of a much more effective GRAPPLE. On March 12, 2021: 99 million cases of COVID had an outcome: 96,266,000 (97%) Recovered / Discharged.
THREE PERCENT DEATHS: 2,652,000 (3%). At this rate, if four billion people got it, there would be 120 million dead….Studies in Iceland show that for one person with symptoms, another doesn’t have any… But variants change everything.

Should individuals be able to circulate without vaccination, when that is potentially a bacteriological assault onto other people? Even more so when travelling overseas: a drastic failure of the WHO, the CDC and the European Medical Authority has not to have duplicated what China (!) did, and sever international travel when that would have bought time in the pandemic. The first country to sever travel was Taiwan (Republic of China). Others duplicated this, for example the PRC, as I just said, or New Zealand. Australia mostly stayed outside of the pandemic, with drastic measures against travel. These countries can now vaccinate, and escape the mass death… Which will be above five million before soon (it is officially approaching 3 million, but there is massive undercounting, for example in Africa).  

To go from one country to another, one needs a passport nowadays. This is strange. Up to World War First, there were no passports.Indeed, 99% of travellers, at least, present no danger. So why are they controlled?

BUT, a traveller carrying a new variant of COVID is very dangerous. Manaus, the capital of the Amazon, with more than two million people, and a very youthful population, got a massive COVID pandemic in Spring 2020. A pontificating scientific study even published in Science (Science doi: 10.1126/science.abe9728), September 2020, proclaimed that Manaus had gained herd immunity…. In May 2020, the death rate in Manaus had been nearly five times the normal rate. However, things changed in November: suddenly cases of COVID shot up, to the point the city ran out of liquid oxygen. Clearly, new cases had surged again. Here is some of the tale in the New York Times, that medium which loves to censor me:

Virus Variant in Brazil Infected Many Who Had Already Recovered From Covid-19. By Carl Zimmer, March 3, 2021

The first detailed studies of the so-called P.1 variant show how it devastated a Brazilian city. Now scientists want to know what it will do elsewhere. New studies of the P.1 variant that ravaged the city show that it can reinfect people who have already had the virus, and may make vaccines weaker.

In just a matter of weeks, two variants of the coronavirus have become so familiar that you can hear their inscrutable alphanumeric names regularly uttered on television news. B.1.1.7, first identified in Britain, has demonstrated the power to spread far and fast. In South Africa, a mutant called B.1.351 can dodge human antibodies, blunting the effectiveness of some vaccines.

Scientists have also had their eye on a third concerning variant that arose in Brazil, called P.1. Research had been slower on P.1 since its discovery in late December, leaving scientists unsure of just how much to worry about it.

“I’ve been holding my breath,” said Bronwyn MacInnis, an epidemiologist at the [Harvard-MiT] Broad Institute.

Now three studies offer a sobering history of P.1’s meteoric rise in the Amazonian city of Manaus. It most likely arose there in November and then fueled a record-breaking spike of coronavirus cases. It came to dominate the city partly because of an increased contagiousness, the research found…

Worse: naturally induced immunity against the first version of SARS 2 did not work well against P.1… However tests on the mRNA vaccines (Moderna and Pfizer-BioNTech…) show that they still work (although the antibody count is down, there are other antiviral mechanisms activated by those vaccines…).

NYT: …“experts said it is a variant to take seriously. “It’s right to be worried about P.1, and this data gives us the reason why,” said William Hanage, an epidemiologist at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health.

P.1 is now spreading across the rest of Brazil and has been found in 24 other countries. In the United States, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has recorded six cases in five states: Alaska, Florida, Maryland, Minnesota and Oklahoma.

“The findings apply to Manaus, but I don’t know if they apply to other places,” said Nuno Faria, a virologist at Imperial College London who helped lead much of the new research… To reduce the risks of P.1 outbreaks and reinfections, Dr. Faria said: “The ultimate message is that you need to step up all the vaccination efforts as soon as possible, you need to be one step ahead of the virus.”… researchers in Japan were making a similar discovery. Four tourists returning home from a trip to the Amazon on Jan. 4 tested positive for the coronavirus. Genome sequencing revealed the same set of mutations Dr. Faria and his colleagues were seeing in Brazil. Dr. Faria and his colleagues posted a description of P.1 on an online virology forum on Jan. 12. They then investigated why P.1 was so common. Its mutations may have made it more contagious, or it might have been lucky. By sheer chance, the variant might have shown up in Manaus just as the city was getting more relaxed about public health measures….

Tracking P.1 from its earliest samples in December., it was found that, by early January, P1 made up 87 percent of samples in Manaus… By February P1 had taken over completely.

NYT: “Combining the data from genomes, antibodies and medical records in Manaus, the researchers concluded that P.1 conquered the city thanks not to luck but biology: Its mutations helped it spread. Like B.1.1.7, it can infect more people, on average, than other variants can. They estimate it is somewhere between 1.4 and 2.2 times more transmissible than other lineages of coronaviruses.

…. But it also gets an edge from mutations that let it escape antibodies from other coronaviruses. They estimate that in 100 people who were infected with non-P.1 lineages in Manaus last year, somewhere between 25 and 61 of them could have been reinfected if they were exposed to P.1 in Manaus.

The researchers found support for this conclusion in an experiment in which they mixed P.1 viruses with antibodies from Brazilians who had Covid-19 last year. They found that the effectiveness of their antibodies dropped sixfold against P.1 compared with other coronaviruses. That drop might mean that at least some people would be vulnerable to new infections from P.1. Dr. Faria said “an increasing body of evidence” suggests that most cases in the second wave were the result of reinfections.

It’s all very simple: do as Israel did. The green pass is authorized by Israel’s Ministry of Health. It can be a physical document or downloaded to a person’s phone. It is required for activities like going to the gym, dining inside a restaurant, attending a theater performance with up to 500 people indoors, or even a gathering in an event hall with up to 300 people…

And worry about the children too: the initial, milder COVID kills children ten times more than the flu… Not just that, but, for one death, there seems to be ten cases with longish COVID. Thus COVID may well affect children one hundred times more than the flu (which is already a serious disease, and which create immunosuppression in the lungs for months, facilitating deadly pneumonia…)

The longer SARS-CoV2 is around the greater the probability to evolve more contagious and deadly mutations. It is just a matter of time and chance: the more people have it, the more the virus can afford to kill its hosts, and still be around… Because of the variants, and the fact that the more time the virus is allowed around, the more variants, we have to exterminate that coronavirus. Just as was done for smallpox. Only universal vaccination will allow to do so… Fortunately, the mRNA vaccination technique can react even faster than virus variants spread: Moderna is already testing vaccines designed specifically to handle some of the new mutations… Science is forging ahead, law must follow…

Patrice Ayme