Preaching Total Obedience By Submission To Supreme Irrationality

IF YOU OBEY FOLLY, YOU WILL ACCEPT ANYTHING, INCLUDING INFAMY

Politicians and policies are often insane. This is not accidental, but a method of control: accept to be ruled by folly, tyranny will be sweet, relatively speaking.

Pelosi, Speaker of the House, was standing next to Harris, Vice President of the world’s mightiest country. Both temples of reason were wearing masks. They have been vaccinated for four months with mRNA COVID vaccines of 95% efficiency. Even if one of the two had the virus and gave it to the other, nothing would happen. Of millions who got a vaccine authorized in the USA, nobody died of COVID passed the first ten days following inoculation. 

What are those two mighty potentates preaching then?

Are Pelosi and Harris preaching that the mRNA vaccines they received do not work? That would contradict the science they claim to follow (although neither of these mighty women did any scientific studies beyond what was mandatory in high school, they defeated Trump and his vaccines financing by claiming they and their obsessive masking had science on their side [1]). 

One has to understand that both are professional politicians and extremely wealthy and powerful creatures. They stand at the very top of the world’s pyramid of inequity, injustice and unequal distributions of powers. They don’t just stand at the top, they are the symbol of unequal power, and that the fate of humanity depends upon a few. 

Insanity rules. President Joe Biden addresses a joint session of Congress, Wednesday, April 28, 2021, in the House Chamber at the U.S. Capitol in Washington, as Vice President Kamala Harris, left, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of Calif., look on. (Chip Somodevilla/Pool via AP)

And what do those two potentates show, and want us to learn? That they are completely insane. Yes, they want us to know of, and learn to respect their complete folly. Folly is the message and the new religion.

When the USA preferred to invade Iraq, kill a few million there, foster the Islamist State and prop up the price of oil to make fracking profitable, the US propaganda outfit known as the New York Times, especially its multiple prize winning Tom Friedman, rolled out the insanity argument, as something very serious.

The argument went this way: it made no sense to invade Iraq, and that is why this folly precisely made (meta) sense [2]. 

Why did it make no sense? That was conceded in the end, thanks to critique like yours truly, or the French government. All the arguments rolled by Biden or Bush were lies: there were no weapons of mass destruction, and the fiercely secular Saddam Hussein was Al Qaeda’s most determined enemy. 

That is why the New York Times seriously rolled out that meta-argument: once all countries realize that the US leadership was completely insane, and could engage in total war, just because it did not like a particular country, everybody will be so scared, they would obey the USA. That was an even more grotesque and war criminality ladden discourse that the one Athens made to the Mellians.

Athens: “…since you know as well as we do the right, as the world goes, is only in question between equal power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must…”.

USA under Bush-Biden-Tom Friedman-New York Times: “the strong has a duty to be insane, so the weak can be persuaded to quake in fear and do as they must…”

The praise of folly has long been a method of governance. Ancient religions are deliberately mad, to teach terror and submission by the very madness we are supposed to worship. If you revere maximal irrationality, you can’t think. If you can’t think, you can’t complain.

That was the whole idea of Christianism, and why Roman emperors imposed Catholicism carrying, if one objected to it, the penalty of a torturous death (edicts of Theodosius I, Gratian and Valentinian I, Roman emperors, circa 381 CE).

Christianism is full of irrationalities: God is almighty, but His Son dies on a cross; God tortures sinners, but He makes sin possible; Christianism is a religion of love, so it brandishes somebody being tortured to death to instill respect for love; God loves humanity so its preachers will burn you alive if you don’t obey them; and so on… 

The usual explanation for those irrationalities is that the ways of God are mysterious. 

That is itself a mystification. 

In truth, the message of Fourth Century imperial Roman Catholicism was the same as that of the leaders of the US attacking Iraq: we have the prerogative of irrationality, even on something as important as terrorizing humanity. Actually, you should be terrorized, because we are irrational… and lethally so.

There is plenty of evidence that elites have always used that trick of looking completely insane.

Once, as a child, I met a large male chimpanzee in the wild. He could have torn m to pieces in seconds. Instead, screaming as one thousand furies he ran to a rather small tree, and that already made no sense. He climbed to the top, howling bloody murder, moved its limbs in all sorts of ways, got the poor tree to oscillate in all directions close to the breaking point. That chimp looked like the most crazed creature in the universe. And that was exactly the message it wanted to convey. It was inhabited by a force out of any intelligibility. No sane predator would come in the general vicinity. I discovered later that this was a systemic method with chimps, one could call it a method of government of the jungle according to chimp. It explained why predators avoided them. Baboons tried the same method, of instilling respect by projecting obvious madness, even charging lions on the ground, when they could go up in the trees.

Exhibiting madness as a method of governance is how elites stay in place. When the Maya elites failed Mayan civilization, by proving unable to manage a megadrought, it no doubt used similar methods, by waging the logic of war instead of the logic of the environment. The vengeance of We The People was in the end terrible, and the elites were terminated in the most gory fashion (something similar happened during the Jacqueries of the Fourteenth Century, when plutocrats got roasted… and the mood of the balance of terror would extent through the French Revolution of 1789, four centuries later).

By wearing their masks, Harris and Pelosi say: yes our message is self-contradictory, the vaccines work, thus we wear masks; but it is the message of power; folly is what we call the truth, and if you are good, you will obey our irrationality by not even daring to observe it.

Meanwhile, Biden, unmasked in front of the two masked furies, was rewriting US history grotesquely.

Will they get away with it? The lurid power turgid insanity brings is a very bad example to give to the thermonuclear armed fascists around the world. We saw this in the 1930s. Be it in imperial Japan, Nazi Germany, Stalin’s USSR, the meta understanding the dictators made of the “democracies” was the same: they are weak, and they are afraid of our irrationality, they will submit if we act irrational enough.

That rational interpretation of irrationality was the explicit computation of the Japanese High Command: irrationally attack the USA at Pearl Harbor and in the Philippines, and the USA will be terrified into submission. The commander of the Japanese Navy, Marshall Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, Harvard educated, thought that argument was crazy, and said so (!)… But when talking to people who think insanity is a method of government, calling an argument crazy is not enough to make them think, they believe it’s a compliment. So Yamamoto went along, until he was shot down by long range P38s in a deliberate execution, crashing into a steamy jungle (the US had cracked the Japanese codes).

The apparently insane attack, and rule, the US and the world, with their irrationality, and they believe the world will be terrified into submission, and their class will stay on top. Well, what happens if their irrationality is not enough of an example?

Worshipping flagrant insanity is the ultimate submission.. and the ultimate trap.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In truth obsessive masking masquerade caused megadeath as it persuaded people that masks were protective in close quarters, although they are not. Masks are micrometric, SARS-CoV2 is nanometric; a net made for tuna can’t catch plankton. Don’t ask Harris and Pelosi what a nanometer is… And do not even ask Fauci, who financed the virus lab in Wuhan to enhance ACE2 receptor function on Yunan bat coronaviruses…    

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[2] Any logic makes sense only if it comes with a meta-logic. To make sense of sense, one needs meta-sense. This is the hard core (meta) conclusion of Twentieth Century (meta) logic, from famous theorems of Godel, Tarski, etc.

Greenhouse Crisis: No New Science, No Progress. Where Is The Science in Biden Climate Project?

More than 174 billion dollars for electric cars does not impact the climate crisis. Yet it’s what the Biden genius is proposing. If anything, massive subsidies in electric vehicles make the ecological crisis worse: we would have to dig the entire planet for lithium all over, and it will not make a dent on overall CO2 production: digging requires CO2 production, oh Biden genius! (Instead, helping create a hydrogen infrastructure would be useful, all the more as much of the natural gas infrastructure can be repurposed that way; that was done in France in the distant past, for decades; 20% hydrogen mixed with CH4 works very well). 

The USA, as it does periodically, is displaying its future virtues in the matter of climate, giving the entire planet lessons. By now, everybody educated enough, and smart enough, and honest enough, should be able to understand that these US administration lessons are lessons in hypocrisy. Altogether, the US emitted more GreenHouses Gases, than all the jurisdictions which ever existed… Although China is now taking the lead, with one new coal plant a week or so; China installed 38.4 gigawatts (GW) of new coal-fired power capacity into operation in 2020; that’s roughly 30 large nuclear reactors equivalent in coal plants, in just one year: long live the Paris climate accord (for China to pollute as much as possible). 

This US virtue signalling is not just dishonest, but doubly dishonest, as usual: the emission of GreenHouse Gases (GHG) per capita has gone up in recent years in the US, from 16 tons up to a probable 18 tons in 2022. None of what Biden proposes will reduce this, as he refuses carbon taxes and carbon pricing, on a matter of principle. Not just this, but Biden proposes to cut the only leg carbon reduction rested on, innovation (by discouraging investments in new technology, by proposing the world’s highest capital gain taxes… Yes, the world’s highest… Above 55% in leading states…)

As it is right now, roughly 40% of emissions of CO2 are caused by 10% of humanity (Europe and North America). If there was a proverbial “equity”, worldwide, then CO2 emissions should be multiplied by ten (China is acting on this, and India rushing to follow… as is their right). Instead of wasting 174 billions on electric car, genius Biden should spend 174 billion dollars on (research in) thermonuclear fusion… That would enable to build a fusion production plant within a decade… Or then invest in 4th generation nuclear… or invest in an hydrogen economy. So why 174 billion on useless, polluting electric cars? Hey so that Biden friends can make money… This already happened under Obama. Friends, as early privileged private investors… Maybe AOC is on it? She liked those designer clothes… Surely Pelosi, that, we know for a fact is invested in the right stuff before companies go “public”…

By comparison, to the prospective emission of 18 tons of CO2 per person in the USA, France makes do with 5 (five) tons per capita. However, France paid a hefty price, in decreased GDP, lots of regressive taxation, and a chronic revolt (“Gilets Jaunes”, now discreetly cancelled by Facebook, the arbitrator of Thought on Earth). 

One can argue that the colossal increase of relative advantage in GDP per capita of the US relative to Europe has been caused by the advantage that enormous fracking brought to the US: the graphs are parallel. 

What else? Basically, the US gets its energy for free, while the Europeans have to perform like monkeys in a circus to get fuel (be nice to Saudis, be nice to Putin, be nice to the Americans, be nice to Chavez/Maduro, etc.) 

Biden scoffs all the way to the bank: fracking over 12 years of Obama-Trump has put the US ahead. Biden is ready to cash out. So Biden claims he will do great things about the climate… But without carbon tax nor carbon pricing, nor innovation. There will be giant subsidies for electric cars… One may as well subsidize lawn mowers. 

And where does the Lithium and other Rare Earths come from for all these batteries? China (see the one coal plant per week Xi climate plan, above). The Trump administration’s authorization of one lithium mine in Nevada (with approval of the local Native American government), brought three lawsuits: too much acid, too much water, to extract all this lithium. Better let the Chinese do it among Uighurs, in the Tarim Basin, we don’t want to pollute Nevada. And where does the electricity for electric cars come from? Fossil fuels, mostly. 

In super green California, sun and wind provided only 22% of the electric generation energy in 2019 (latest year). Notice the two words “electric generation”, they are crucial, each in its own way: exploring what they exactly mean will expose the gross lie: it’s mostly all smoke. Yet, California has made enormous efforts, and is basically the most energy efficient US state.

Coal is dying for reasons which have nothing to do with renewable energy, and that’s why coal died in Europe, well before the impact of wind and sun. Why are the US at 18 tons of CO2 per year per capita, and only 5 (five) tons in France?Because of the absence of major carbon taxes in the USA.

Digging a bit in the numbers of renewable energy is not readily done, because headline propaganda is very active, and people have little patience for the truth, which is rather catastrophic, and the opposite of headlines. 

If one looks at the total energy usage in California one realizes that electricity is just 15% of California energy consumption. Moreover, that electricity divides into 9% from electricity generated IN California, and 6%, imported from outside (a one million volt direct current line comes down from the states of Oregon and Washington, directly into Los Angeles. A similar line comes from the Hoover dam on the Colorado river in Nevada). 

California sun and wind is 22% of these 9% of total California energy made in California, as electricity. In other words, not even 2% of California total energy consumption is from renewable sun and wind! So much for the renewability of it all. Hot wind and smoke, all of it! In the same general mood of brazen fakery, private school addict governor Newsom of California announced today that the state regulators should evaluate phasing out all offensive rock oil production in the state by 2045 (California is one of the world top fossil fuel producing states).

As it is, even augmenting considerably renewables in say the South-West of the USA, which has plenty of sun and wind, changes nothing much to the GreenHouse Gases contribution: an enormous fossil fuel infrastructure has to be kept as a backup, for when the wind doesn’t blow and the sun doesn’t shine, as happened in California last summer. If one built it, one will use it, this fossil fuel infrastructure, and as it is, it has to be used; there is not enough storage for the pitiful “renewable” production, especially with empty dams. 

To cut emissions of GHG seriously one has to replace fossil fuels by nuclear, fission or fusion (to reach places the sun doesn’t much, and there are many of those). Also, one has to do as Europe does, and institute huge carbon taxes. Ultimately, though, one has to have no illusion: the GHG crisis will require the mass deployment of new energy, nuclear and hydrogen (or hydrogen derived). One cannot pave the ground with solar panels, tear the landscape with transmission lines, and operate giant washing machines in the sky all over (windmills; the newest of which are taller than most skyscrapers). Only fundamental research in basic science will solve the planetary crisis of GreenHouse Gases. Innovation is key. 

Such misleading virtue signalling on the part of government is counterproductive, because it enables public opinion, its makers, and leaders to feel comfortable and think of other things. It reminds us of Catholic missions sent to better exterminate the Natives. But counterproduction is often what is exactly intended (I hope Machiavel covered that one).

Much of the “infrastructure program” of Biden targets “human infrastructure”, a laudable goal. But, once again, is it what is really intended? 

One should start with schools. The USA’s top schools used to be public (say in 1950). But now such schools are “defunded” (like the police) in the guise of “equality”. 

An indirect proof of that is the sight of politicians (including Biden and Obama, those loud “democrats”) getting their children in the most expensive private schools. In the same spirit of hypocrisy, public union teachers literally refuse to teach, while admonishing us for “accountability”. Some public teachers’ union leaders joined the fray by getting their children in… private schools [1]. 

What causes a dissonant cognitive mess in climate and infrastructure? Uncritical admission of irrealism in too much of the influential population. Biden talks the talk, but he walks in the opposite direction, while insisting he is going the right way. Media carefully don’t notice…

Biden got the most votes than a US president ever got… followed by Trump. The difference in the number of votes was six millions… And of these six millions, 5.5 millions came from… California, this temple of hydrocarbons and plutocratic hypocrisy (where yours truly is located, in full view of San Francisco…) So basically, Biden is California, at this point: talking the talk, walking the other way. None of this is coincidental. The temple of hypocrisy voted for the great master of hypocrisy and dissonance…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The head of a California teachers union has been blasted as a hypocrite after he was caught dropping off his 2-year-old daughter at her private preschool, since Spring 2020 — despite saying it was unsafe for children to be back in classrooms. “Meet Matt Meyer. White man with dreads and president of the local teachers’ union. He’s been saying it is unsafe for *your kid* to be back at school, all the while dropping his kid off at private school,” a group known as Guerilla Momz said on Twitter.

Meyer, president of the Berkeley Federation of Teachers, has fought for what he called the “gold standard” for the educators — saying the schools should only reopen to in-person learning when the teachers are vaccinated, among other criteria, KQED reported… Similar hypocrisy was demonstrated by the governor of California, who, while keeping public schools closed, sent his four children to private school. Hey, he can afford it; he owns eleven (11) companies, including a winery and a resort at the major olympic resort of Squaw Valley (soon not to be called “Squaw” because it reminds us that the natives were exterminated…)

Woke You: Police Violence In US, Is Systemic, Not Racist

Sitting On Suspects Until Death Is Violent, Not Racist. SYSTEMIC RACISM IS HIDDEN SOMEWHERE ELSE... And claiming that it is where it is not is part of the process hiding and protecting systemic racism.

A white officer pushed down on a suspect’s neck, while a “black” officer pushed on his back. Ebony, ivory, cuffs and asphalt, pressure and death. It was not a racist problem: during the entire trial of Chauvin, racism held no place in the courtroom. It was the violence which was on trial, not race. And that will become clearer when the “black” officer, Alexander Kueng, who sat on George Floyd’s back, is tried.

Police are extremely violent in the USA, because the population is violent, armed and dangerous. It is a chicken and egg problem: over a long time, violence evolved, and here is the US. 

Something as simple as putting one’s driver’s licence in a trunk can get you shot, as a towering white officer once told me: that’s “extremely dangerous both for you and me!” So he called for reinforcements with flashing bright red and blue lights (no, I had not done anything, except for having my baby in the back in her baby seat; I actually sent my lawyer to complain, and the officer, after harassing me some more, disappeared from the City…) 

So here we are with an officer, Chauvin, who was found guilty of murder for sitting on a handcuffed suspect, a violation of human rights widely practiced… worldwide, including in France (which has its own police sitting murder problem). 

The tragedy has been widely represented as an example of “systemic racism”, and Biden has repeated that lie, unfortunately. It is possible that racism was at play… yet two of the four arresting officers were non-”white” (moreover, Chauvin knew Floyd as fellow security guard). But the fundamental reason for this murder was not racism, at least not racism from the police.

Where is racism? This is the key question. Racism from refusing to build low income housing, yes. Racism because the average police officer hates “blacks”, no (Chauvin does not seem very racist, he was married to an Asian). In some US states, non-whites are a majority, and that’s reflected in the police. California is only 36% “white”.The Minneapolis superior of Chauvin, the police chief is “black”.

The New Police Chief of Oakland, California, LeRonne L. Armstrong, told truth to power, April 12, 2021. The City Council gave him ten million right away, to shut him up

That the USA is a racist country, institutionally speaking, there is no doubt, starting by the governmental mania of asking about and classifying people according to “race”. Up to the 21 century, laws targeted people of different races: only the white on white interactions had no interference with “race” considerations. In many states, up to recent decades, inter-”racial” marriages were unlawful. 

In truth, the average contemporary US American citizen is not racist. Only 60% are “white” (and only 36% in California, the engine of the USA, as I just said). As of 2019, here is the distribution of the U.S. population by race and ethnicity:

• White: 60.1% (Non-Hispanic)… and many of these “whites” are actually “mixed”…
• Hispanic: 18.5%
• Black: 12.2% (40 millions)
• Asian: 5.6%
• Multiple Races: 2.8%
• American Indian/Alaska Native: 0.7%
• Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander: 0.2%

But the very violent police behavior of the police is a matter, and manner, of survival… for the police, let alone the population. 

In 2020, US police killed 27 apparently unarmed “blacks”(often not “black at all, there are 40 millions African-Euro-Americans in the USA, most of whom have “white” ancestors; there were even “black” slave traders, we have pictures of some, they are more black than those they hold the chains of…)

As Reuters put it in a post correcting what it called fake data:

According to the FBI’s Expanded Homicide data from 2018, the most recent report of this kind Reuters was able to find ( here ), 80.7% of the murders of white people were committed by white offenders (2,677 of a total of 3,315) while 15.5% of the murders of white people were committed by Black offenders (514).

The social media post also alleges white offenders committed 2% of the murders of Black victims. According to the FBI’s data, 8% of the reported murders of Black people were committed by white offenders (234 of a total of 2,925) and 88.9% by Black offenders (2,600).

FBI data from 2017 also follows this trend: 80.2% of white victims were killed by white offenders, 8.9% of Black victims were killed by whites, 88.5% of Black victims were killed by Blacks, and 16.1% of whites were killed by Blacks ( here ).

[Notice that Reuters uses a capital letter for “Black”, but not for “white”, thus exhibiting racial bias for all to see very simply!] These are the murders we know of. Nearly 10,000 “blacks” were killed in 2020, mostly by “blacks”. And, consecutive to defunding the police, the murder rate has tripled. The Okland new police chief complained about the “tremendous increase in violence”. I heard him, but was unable to find the long quote, at least ten lines, as it was washed from the Internet by the propaganda organizations. The chief was so clear and strident that the Oakland City Council immediately gave him another ten million dollars!

This is the best I found:

OAKLAND — Police Chief LeRonne Armstrong on Monday decried the city’s recent spike in violent crimes — including six homicides in six days in East Oakland — before urging city staff to cover what he called necessary costs for enforcement details. In remarks Monday afternoon at police headquarters, Armstrong addressed the recent fatal shootings and sideshow activity, describing it as “completely unacceptable.”

“It’s tragic for the community to have to deal with this level of trauma and pain,” Armstrong said. “My heart goes out to all of the families that have lost loved ones as a result of this violence.”According to this news organization’s count, Oakland police have investigated 41 homicides this year, including one early Saturday and two Saturday night, compared to only 14 investigated homicides at this time last year. The city logged 109 homicides in all of 2020. After tallying other current counts related to the year’s grim toll in violence — 159 shootings vs. 2020’s 79; 149 car-jackings vs. 2020’s 57; 340 robberies vs. 2020’s 226 — Armstrong laid bare recent department budget cuts’ impacts and practical effects.

“[T]hose millions of dollars were resources, they were officers,” he said. “They were officers in our ceasefire team, our crime reduction teams, community resource officer teams, traffic officers. We lost all of these resources, and we see the tremendous impact that that loss is having on our community.” He then called on Oakland city councilmembers “taking votes for CARES Act funds, hopefully reallocating resources to the department.” “This is a tall task in the city of Oakland to address this violence, but you can’t do it without resources. This city has to value the lives of our community members,” Armstrong said.

OAKLAND, CA – APRIL 12: Oakland Police Chief LeRonne L. Armstrong is photographed during a press conference on Monday, April 12, 2021, in Oakland, Calif. Armstrong discussed the rise in violent crime. 

In response to a question about tactical staffing over weekend shifts in response to current sideshow enforcement, Armstrong called specific details necessary. “When you have three homicides in a 24-hour period, that is taxing on your police officers,” he said. “It forces us to use those resources that should be dedicated to reducing violent crime and trying to apprehend the people responsible for these shootings to addressing sideshows. But there’s still not enough resources to do both.”

“Sideshows” are completely illegal dangerous car driving, at maximal speed, in circles, making a great amount of noise and smoke, masking gunfire, making sideshows convenient to shoot people. In 2020, Oakland California, had 109 investigations for homicide. In the first three months of 2021, that was up to 41 homicide investigations. There was one murder every other day. In Chicago there were 51 known homicides in January 2020 alone (Chicago, population three million, is six times Oakland, so Oakland has proportionally more murders).  

Reforms, in depth, have to be accomplished, to restructure society. However, right now the “reforming” movement is led by “woke” plutocratic corporations, many of which employ slave labor in China… And own all the media, tweaking it in detail, news item by news item. The Supreme Court just sided with Google, which had stolen Oracle Intellectual Property (“fair use”)… Google which uses dirty tricks to exact ever more income (when one reaches a private website, Google runs its own ads…) 

The basic trick of a plutocracy is to divide We The People, until so much control is achieved that We The People can be rendered completely stupid and supine (the latter stage was clearly achieved in Rome under Justinian, and this resulted in the Nikka insurrection which was stamped out with an enormous bloodbath). Claiming that We The People is racist divides (especially when We The People is not). So for example, allegations of hatred against “Blacks” led to attacks against “Asians” from pretty basic psycho mechanisms. Similarly, too many allegations against “Whites” will certainly lead to a “White” backlash. Some of these “Whites” are actually “Blacks” by other standards, for example the leader of the “Proud Boys” (who is partly hispanic and “black”).  

So this was a murder trial about police violence, itself a consequence of societal violence thriving on lies, as when politicians claimed the murder was all about “systemic racism”.  Judge Peter Cahill, the (Democrat!) Minnesota judge presiding over Mr. Chauvin’s trial, said he wished politicians would avoid talking about the case after Rep. Maxine Waters (D., Calif.) urged people to “get more confrontational” if Mr. Chauvin weren’t convicted for murder, and that it was first degree murder in her opinion. The judge said Ms. Waters’s comments may have given the defense grounds for an appeal.

The paradox is that the accusation of “systemic racism” is itself part of societal violence, by dividing We The People confronted to plutocracy and its enablers, against itself. A great part of the violence is from zoning laws, which prevent the construction of low income housing where the jobs are. Also tying up health care to jobs, subsidies for the wealthy, the Biden law of 1994, which broke up black families, etc…

Patrice Ayme 

War And Climbing Are Tales Of All Passions

We Climb Therefore We Are?

Climbing is the tale of all passions. Where the essence is reached. The top of the world is littered with corpses. Littered with ambition and selfishness too, not just selfless heroism. Mountains bring out the extremes. The extremes of humanity: life, death, what human beings consider reasonable behavior… which, in many cases, turns out to not be reasonable at all. Climbing teaches life, and how human values can dominate it.

So a question mountains always bring is how come reason vanishes up there, and how come do human beings persist in taking enormous risks, just because they can and it brings fame. Mountains bring new Achilles ready to kill to achieve fame, and the one they kill is not named Hector, nor for exacting revenge, but it is themselves they kill, and for flimsier reasons.

Nevado Chacraraju at sunrise from Chopicalqui camp. Cordillera Blanca, Peru. America del Sur.

It has always been true that climbing mountains is a great way to find out about human nature. Nature does not care about humanity. Humanity is here to give nature a soul. That soul, that human soul, is the most astounding object in the universe. It is the very fact that lives are at stake, that life is in the balance, for no good reason, which makes climbing irresistible. Gods used to live among the mountains. By entering the peaks, though, and rolling the dice with life itself, human beings make themselves into gods, telling the universe that life and death, and all human passions are just what they play with, and roll around like dice.

This doomsplay makes climbing divine. In one day, one hour, one second, entire lives are lived and universes born and created.

The dirty and not so little secret about humanity is that it is all about creating and destroying. And sometimes, having life in the way is the best way to be alive.

“Si vis pacem, para bellum“, the Romans used to say. If you want peace, prepare for war. But preparing for war does not mean just having bigger and better weaponry. It also means to have bigger and better psychology, it means to understand the enemy. It means to understand that the enemy’s psychology is no less than the climbing psychology: it is not because the odds of surviving are low that the feat shall not be attempted. Actually, it is the other way around. It may well be, with some characters (say Xi, China’s dictator) that, the lower the odds of surviving, the more tempting the adventure.

It is important to understand that war, like climbing, is attractive for reasons pertaining to the very inconveniences it fosters, discomfort, pain, fear, and death. When Japan and Nazi Germany went to war, the odds that they would win were extremely low (they both got very lucky initially). But the very fact that the odds were low made the wars they started, more attractive, as, the more deadly and frightening the mountain, the more tempting it is to scale it.

War is not just entertained as politics by other means, but, just like mountain climbing, is as the very root of what it means for human beings to be alive in full… even if that means disdain for life itself… precisely because it means disdain for life.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S 1: An implicit background to all this philosophy is that our ancestors were climbers, and carnivores, at least for 100 million years. Climbing… and fighting… come to us more naturally than walking on two legs. They are more part of our creation-given logic.

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P/S 2: Some of the (mildest) core of this essay was sent to the New York Times as a comment on an article of Mallory and Irvine (who came very close to Everest’s summit in 1924). My comment was blocked. I mention this, because it shows how much the plutocratic newspaper worries about molding its readership’s mind. The same day another comment of mine on “Cancel Culture” was also blocked. Ezra Klein, from Vox and now the NYT, argued that “Cancel Culture” was just legal maneuvering by corporate America. I added that “Cancel Culture” was the oldest thing in English American culture: after all, the Native Americans were “cancelled”. Well, the NYT cancelled that comment… Climbing may not be everywhere, but fighting is…

Wisdom Is A Matter Of Wealth And Taste

Wisdom? Wisdom is relative. Wisdom in a lion is not wisdom in a chimp. In either case, it is wise to listen to the forest. Wisdom for a Chinese Communist is not wisdom for a true democrat. Wisdom in autocrats may be to be reminded always, that democracies have the intelligence of the many, which is greater than the intelligence of the one, however great the one is deemed to be. And that the fury of the many is always greater than the fury of the one.

Wisdom defines our species, Homo Sapiens. Wisdom, weaponized, is how we conquered the biosphere (give and take the occasional microbe). “Sapiens” comes from sapere “to taste, have taste, have a flavor,” from Proto Indo-European root sep- “to taste, perceive“. The wise are creatures of greater wealth in taste. Mussels only taste the sea, we taste the universe. There is no wisdom without the wealth of taste, and the wealthier in taste, and perception, the greater the wisdom. Diversity of input brings greater intelligence in animals and humans. But to leave mental space to input, one needs to be open to perception, and, in particular, to listening to others… and the universe.

However, we live in an age when, because of a lag in understanding and legislation, social networks fanaticize participants by feeding them mostly what they have an inclination towards and exponentiating on that tendency they themselves enhance, and feed. In other words encouraging participants to listen to themselves ever more. This is exponentiating intellectual fascism, and the opposite of wisdom, which gets greater, the more it maximizes the wealth of variegated tastes it is exposed to.  An accompaniment to this fascization of thought is virtue signalling [1]. Virtue signalling signals that one puts appearances above debate. But debating (even with oneself) is how thinking is elaborated and finally happens. Thus virtue signalling, as old as empires, is in contradiction with wisdom, the fruit of debates, and the essence of humanity… Now, of course, contradicting wisdom only help fascist empires…

This said, new wisdom, not previously culturally generated, then crystallizes into being by retreating to the proverbial desert or mountain top, re-abstracting what new perceptions may all mean in new logic. Being open to perceiving the world is one thing. To improve the world by contributing our inner mental world, new and improved, logically and emotionally, is the final step which concretizes greater cultural wisdom.

“A mind that is stretched by a new experience can never go back to its old dimensions.”- US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes. Holmes fought all the important battles of the US Civil War as a youngster, and then, following his father, enrolled in Harvard Law School. Holmes, one of the few Justices ever viewed as a scholar held that: “The life of the law has not been logic: it has been experience.”Indeed, logic is nothing else, but experience.

Want wisdom? Perceive maximally, then refine the logic.

Patrice Ayme

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Socrates was supposedly humble, but in truth, he absolutely was not. No towering thinkers can ever be humble. because if they were, they won’t tower. Wisdom is not saying one is not wise, it is saying that wisdom is a work in progress, yet most visible to the wise.

Note for conventional thinkers of reduced type: English-speaking philosophers opine that wisdom is a matter of knowing what is fundamental and then living accordingly. Professional philosopher Robert Nozick claimed:

“Wisdom is an understanding of what is important, where this understanding informs a (wise) person’s thought and action.” This is saying nothing: what is important for a Nazi or a viper, is not what is important for a conventional humanist. What is important for a head hunter is not what is important for the anthropologist studying him. The question is how to determine what is important better than those who are more stupid did.

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Note for followers of Rolling Stones: In “Sympathy For The Devil“, Lucifer (Lux-Fer, light-bearing) is presented as a “man of wealth and taste”… Right on target!

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[1] Spanish historian Francisco Veiga argued that “fascization” characterized the ascent of Franco. So I was not the only one to invent the concept.

Redemption Requires Better Cognition

We are ruled by plutocrats, and the media they own, molding minds… They have instilled their values to the entire system… Including fostering deliberate lack of capability for increased cognition as a fundamental value. 

Plutocratically financed politicians have long installed laws which encourage homelessness, destitution, an underclass. For example San Francisco dynamited high density cheap housing, decades ago, to great applause, replacing it by what are now four million dollar homes for the wealthy. San Francisco considers that a family of four earning nearly thrice the median US family income is poor and needs financial aid…(That does not mean the family gets the aid). 

When one looks at health care spending, the truth is blatant: the US spends much more for inferior results, that the other leading countries. The difference, seen from afar, can be depicted as corruption. And indeed many health care professionals are much wealthier in the US, and politicians are wined, dined, and financed by their lobbyists. 

Yesterday I sent an extract of an interview of President Jimmy Carter’s National Security Adviser to a major US newspaper. The interview was never published in the USA on Main Stream Media. He explained that the Afghan war was launched deliberately by the US. Guess what? The newspaper blocked my comment: it’s very important the readership stays biased. This plutocratic cognition box, small and tightly closed is how the plutocracy keeps on going, increasingly dividing We The People against ourselves. 

Two coalition airstrikes eliminated Islamic State fighters and facilities in the Nangarhar and Jowzjan provinces of Afghanistan, Feb. 6, 2018. The U.S. dropped more bombs and other munitions in Afghanistan during the first ten months 2018 than in any other full year since at least 2006, when documentation began.

Yesterday, the New York Times ran an editorial on the origins of Afghan war (which killed millions). For the NYT, the Afghan war started with 9/11. I sent the truth: the US launched the war on and before July 3, 1979. Under Carter. I also sent the proof.NYT censored my comment… They always do on this particular point, although I quote Carter’s national Security Adviser. So that the NYT readership can keep on believing the US was the innocent victim in a war it launched, killing millions, the ultimate form of racism.We need better morality. The strict point is that just not knowing what one is doing should not be enough to deserve forgiveness, in contradiction with what the pseudo-crucified implicitly implies. The key, and crux is that better cognition is a prerequisite for progress, and nearly so for justified forgiveness (in contrast to calculating forgiveness).

The war of the USA in Afghanistan started by proxy in the 1970s. Then on July 3, 1979, president Jimmy Carter signed a secret order. An interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, reveals this. It was never published in the USA. Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secret until now, is completely different. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention…. That secret operation was an excellent idea… The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire… What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Muslims or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

The US Deep and Dark State launched a war which killed millions.

You want woke? First learn English, and then history. Real history, not just what they plutocrats and their universities told you was history.

Perverse Christianism has infected cognition with a reduced notion of redemption. Time to get rid of it. If one wants to deserve forgiveness, one should know more than one did before, when engaging in sin, error, malum prohibitum, etc. In democracy, properly done, we are all responsible, including of not protesting when one should (good side of Black Lives Matter)… But, without proper and better cognition, all is for naught….

Patrice Ayme

P/S: Guess what? The New York Times just published my comment, 24 hours late, when nobody will read it, and after I waxed lyrical in several places about their racist censorship (racist because killing a few million Afghans is not worth mentioning: only special color ives and lives are worthy; Afghans don’t count…) Did the NYT consult with the Deep Dark State?… Girls want to know… This delayed-publication-of-comment trick is one way the NYT mostly censors me, without really censoring me all the time… On the positive side, that forces the censors to read me. and feel bad about their perverse deliberate state of ignorance…

Why shouldn’t Iran be allowed to enrich Uranium from its natural .7% presence of U235 up to 20%?

A sphere of 400 kilograms of 20% U235 with 80% U238 is 34 centimeters in diameter, and gets spontaneously supercritical (extremely dangerous, sometimes fatal) studies have shown. Now, adding a few tricks to this 20% enriched core enables to lower the critical mass a lot. (Beryllium reflects neutrons back to the core, quadrupling neutron density; thick, strong tamper for example in U238, bottles down the chain reaction, while adding to it with fragments of exploding U238; core with tritium, lithium deuteride adds neutrons of appropriate energy; an exterior neutron source starts the chain reaction.) 

The Iran nuclear bomb problem is geopolitical: if Iran gets the bomb, a world war is much more likely. Indeed several Arab countries and Turkey, maybe Azerbaijan and its deadly enemy Armenia then of course large and mighty Kazakhstan, would get the bomb… So those who have the bomb already (China, Pakistan, India) would bomb up some more, meaning they would have to acquire much more capability to engage in nuclear war, thus lowering the trigger point… (India purchased Rafales from France in part because they can be used as hard-to-stop nuclear bombers.)

• French thermonuclear explosion Canopus, 2.6 megatons, 200 times Hiroshima, 24 August 1968, Fangataufa, Tuamotus, South Pacific. The explosion was beyond the horizon, 35 kilometers away, but the shock wave (initially hypersonic) is only a mile away (look at the black clouds).

Logically Israel would have to strike Iran first (with the approval, not just of the West, but of plenty of Arabs, who should, and do detest Aryan Iran much more than Semitic Israel…)… and strike hard. Some Iranian facilities are deeply buried. Although they tend to spontaneously explode in recent years, maybe one will need to use nuclear bombs to help them with the on-going fireworks. 

A few countries agreed to stop or reverse their nuclear bomb programs (Argentina, Brazil, and South Africa which had officially seven bombs). Why? One cannot have dozens of countries with nuclear bombs… if one wants to avoid a nuclear world war. If bombs start to get used, the tendency will be to go all out and use reduced arsenals before they get taken out.

Pakistan has many of its bombs into deep caverns below its enormous mountains. hard to get to without precision bombing or nuclear bombs. The Islamist Republic of Pakistan is actively developing nuclear weapons, and long range rockets to carry them. Experts project that Pakistan may have the 5th largest nuke arsenal by 2025 with 220-250 warheads. A nuclear war between Pakistan and India would have a high probability to involve China if India “wins”. One has to realize that Islam has a serious violence problem (Islam won over the already violent, and holocaust prone, Roman catholics by being even more violent…). Nuclear war, once launched, will prove highly contagious.

Meanwhile, for the first time in more than a generation, the French military is preparing for an “Engagement Majeur” (major war)… within a few years and France has augmented its war preparation to 2% of GDP. Differently with what happened in 1870, 1914, and 1939, this time, at least under Trump, the preparation for war is involving the USA… which has now replaced Britain as France’s major military collaborator… Not that Britain is unwilling: it simply does not spend enough although it is close to the 2% of GDP, and is also augmenting its military spending, having lifted its cap on nukes by 40%… and so is Germany (greatly at France’s urging). Whereas the US, France’s rambunctious child, spends 3.4% of GDP on defense… The nuclear bomb collaboration between France, Britain and the USA dates all the way back to 1939… Should Iran develop nuclear weapons, European military spending will augment enormously.  

Some will whine disingenuously: why can Israel have nukes, and not Iran?

Well, Israel, starting way back, say with the Judean War (circa 70 CE, two millennia ago), has been submitted to persecution. First from the Romans, then from the Roman Catholics (a worse species, actually), and finally the Muslims … said Muslims were parroting their friends the Catholics: Muhammad got two high quality slaves as gifts from the Catholic bishop of Alexandria; but Muhammad’s relation with the Jews was cross after he exterminated a Jewish tribe in Yathrib; the Qur’an is full of absurd insults against Jews from all sorts of angles [1]; the Hadith is way worse). This is not to be taken lightly: after a revolt of the Samaritans, the Roman Catholics basically eradicated them… there are 2,000 left today!

Then came the Hitler madness, when Luther’s torturous dreams against the Jews were enacted into a Holocaust. By 1949, top French nuclear physicists of the CEA were collaborating with Jewish colleagues to give the just (re) created Israel, the Bomb. So the Israeli bomb is first of all a defensive weapon. At this point, Israel is basically the nuclear arm of the Semites, that is, the Arabs… Considering its tiny size relative to giants like Iran, Israel has no reason to attack, and a good reason not to (too risky).

If they build them, bombs, they will use them, bombs. Whether they want it, or not.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] From the Cow (second chapter in the Qur’an):

[2.87] We made a covenant with the children of Israel: You shall not serve any but Allah and (you shall do) good to (your) parents, and to the near of kin and to the orphans and the needy, and you shall speak to men good words and keep up prayer and pay the poor-rate. Then you turned back except a few of you and (now too) you turn aside.

[2.88] And they say: Our hearts are covered. Nay, Allah has cursed them on account of their unbelief; so little it is that they believe.

[2.98] Whoever is the enemy of Allah and His angels and His apostles and Jibreel and Meekaeel, so surely Allah is the enemy of the unbelievers.

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[4.160] Wherefore for the iniquity of those who are Jews did We disallow to them the good things which had been made lawful for them and for their hindering many (people) from Allah’s way.

[5.33] The punishment of those who wage war against Allah and His apostle and strive to make mischief in the land is only this, that they should be murdered or crucified or their hands and their feet should be cut off on opposite sides or they should be imprisoned; this shall be as a disgrace for them in this world, and in the hereafter they shall have a grievous chastisement,

[5.51] O you who believe! do not take the Jews and the Christians for friends; they are friends of each other; and whoever amongst you takes them for a friend, then surely he is one of them; surely Allah does not guide the unjust people.

[5.64] And the Jews say: The hand of Allah is tied up! Their hands shall be shackled and they shall be cursed for what they say. 

[5.73] Certainly they disbelieve who say: Surely Allah is the third (person) of the three; and there is no god but the one God, and if they desist not from what they say, a painful chastisement shall befall those among them who disbelieve.

[5.78] Those who disbelieved from among the children of Israel were cursed by the tongue of Dawood and Isa, son of Marium; this was because they disobeyed and used to exceed the limit.

[6.146] And to those who were Jews We made unlawful every animal having claws, and of oxen and sheep We made unlawful to them the fat of both, except such as was on their backs or the entrails or what was mixed with bones: this was a punishment We gave them on account of their rebellion, and We are surely Truthful.

[9.30] And the Jews say: Uzair is the son of Allah; and the Christians say: The Messiah is the son of Allah; these are the words of their mouths; they imitate the saying of those who disbelieved before; may Allah destroy them; how they are turned away!

[9:34] O you who believe! most surely many of the doctors of law [rabbis] and the monks eat away the property of men falsely, and turn (them) from Allah’s way; and (as for) those who hoard up gold and silver and do not spend it in Allah’s way, announce to them a painful chastisement….

[16.118] And for those who were Jews We prohibited what We have related to you already, and We did them no injustice, but they were unjust to themselves.

[17.4] And We had made known to the children of Israel in the Book: Most certainly you will make mischief in the land twice, and most certainly you will behave insolently with great insolence.

[62.6] Say: O you who are Jews, if you think that you are the favorites of Allah to the exclusion of other people, then invoke death If you are truthful.

Can Life Evolve On WOWs?

Around stars, there are “habitable zones”, defined by water on the surface. Several years ago, introduced my own subtility, the “radioactive zone”, where planets have a very active radioactive core, which I viewed as necessary for life. It turns out that new developments (2021) buttress my case (life living off radiation, see below). 

Probes sent around the solar system have revealed water to be much more common than expected. We expected the solar system to be a desert, with just one blue water planet. Well, there is an enormous blue planet in the Solar System, Neptune (blue because CH4 absorbs the red and yellow light). Others may not be blue, but they are full of water. Three worlds seem to have worldwide oceans, below the ice: Callisto, Europa, Enceladus. Move away, old concept of habitability! In general, WORLDWIDE OCEAN WORLDS (WOWs) seem common in the galaxy.

Habitability, that is availability for Earth life colonization is one thing. Clearly many worlds are habitable in the Solar System after extrapolating a bit from present tech.  Another concept is indigenous bioevolvability… a planet where life could evolve. There are going to be a tiny fraction of bioevolvable planets, relative to habitable planets, because catastrophe will be many.

Thus another possibility, unforeseen and new, is life evolving outside of the traditional habitable zone… in WOWs… Worldwide Ocean Worlds… Europa may have twice the water oceanic volume of Earth. Can life evolve on a WOW? We (PA and Ian Miller, see below) do not think so.

Indeed, at first sight there could be more than refueling possibilities for humanity in WOWs. There could be native life. Viroids, maybe?… (Once we have mastered thermonuclear fusion, hydrogen, thus water, will be important because that’s what we will need the most in space, for colonization…) In any case, the concept of WOW augments considerably the habitable zones. In the Solar System, the presence of water may make more than half a dozen worlds colonizable by humanity… once we have compact thermonuclear fusion. This includes Pluto. (Mercury, Luna, Mars, Ceres, Europa, Ganymede, Callisto, Enceladus, Pluto…) 

Water worlds on moons around giant planets may be the way to exo-life (because they have tides, angular momentum stability, comet protection, are geologically alive, etc.). In any case the plethora of water worlds means the galaxy is eminently and imminently colonizable, and colonization is what we do…

In my not so humble opinion, I think it is likely that WOW will have no life, because life requires lightning and cosmic & solar radiation to appear and evolve ever greater complexity in a timely manner, in the genetic material of said life… Both lightning and radiation are found only on the surface of planets… Intriguingly, this idea may be why terrestrial life became more advanced than oceanic life on Earth! Marine mammals are advanced, right… But they evolved on the continents. 

Huge tides would help too, by mixing things up… Plus a mighty nuclear engine inside the planet to bury carbon with plate tectonics in an homeostatic way, and fabricate a huge magnetic shield. (I have proposed that nuclear fission helped in the creation of Luna; my theory would require that Luna and Terra have the same exact isotopic composition… As observed… If that is correct, a huge IF, it would mean that having a big moon, or being a big moon, is a requirement for evolving sophisticated, Earth style life…)

But of course whether WOWs can evolve sophisticated life is an experimental question: missions should be flown to try to detect organic activity… And the Viking experiments on Mars (which apparently found life!) should be repeated (that was refused for “Perseverance”!)  It is rather baffling that a big effort was not made by, say, Europe, to find evidence of life on Europa. Are they all spiritually dead yet, out there? Just waiting for America to design vaccines for them? 

My friend Ian Miller, a chemist, with a broad science background, has opinions on the scientific aspects of life on other worlds:

ianmillerblog

on April 5, 2021 at 10:47 pm said:

My argument is there is no life under ice on Europa. Reasons include no nitrogen (there is more sodium in the extremely tenuous atmosphere than nitrogen, unless the analyses are wrong), and no significant carbon. Additional reasons include no possibility of reproduction because besides no nitrogen and carbon: phosphates would sink to the bottom, no real mechanism to make lipid equivalents (too wet and cold), and no mechanism to make phosphate esters. The only one so far discovered that is plausibly abiogenic is photophysical, so it needs light, and no phosphate esters, no reproduction. Enceladus at least has nitrogen and carbon, but I think the light is still a killer, as is the limited phosphate.

There is one further issue. Abiogenic chemistry in oceans suffers from the problem of dilution. Even if you can get condensation reactions to work (very difficult in water, without light or enzymes and you can’t start with the latter) the dilution effect means polymers are always far too short to be useful, like two mers.“

Patrice Ayme: Wow (pun intended). Very interesting comment Ian! One sees the chemist unfolding wings of understanding. Basically you say Europa’s chemistry is not rich enough. However, there may exist a carapace of 80 kilometers of ice above the Europa ocean… so what we may see may not be much. And Callisto seems also to have liquid water (it generates a magnetic field). 

You seem to be saying that life started on land? One can have concentration in ponds… on land, like in tidal pools. However, continents seem to be an emerging feature on Earth: they are the foam from tectonic plate activity… Thus they may have started after life (????)

On the face of it, except for cephalopods (no culture there), culture bearing animals on Earth evolved mostly on land (that’s my point). Land animals have had migrations for 300 million years apparently, and collective migrations mean culture and society. Instead of dilution, I look at the greater occurrence of genetic evolution through mutations… on land.

Finally there is this:

Now it turns out that bacteria in sediments below the ocean floor use radioactivity as power source: The contribution of water radiolysis to marine sedimentary life

(Justine F. Sauvage, Ashton Flinders, Arthur J. Spivack, Robert Pockalny, Ann G. Dunlea, Chloe H. Anderson, David C. Smith, Richard W. Murray & Steven D’Hondt 

Nature Communications volume 12, Article number: 1297 (2021)) 

Abstract:”Water radiolysis continuously produces H2 and oxidized chemicals in wet sediment and rock. Radiolytic H2 has been identified as the primary electron donor (food) for microorganisms in continental aquifers kilometers below Earth’s surface [This hydrogen is mostly produced by alpha and gamma radiation inside the sediments; this is the point]. Radiolytic products may also be significant for sustaining life in subseafloor sediment and subsurface environments of other planets. However, the extent to which most subsurface ecosystems rely on radiolytic products has been poorly constrained, due to incomplete understanding of radiolytic chemical yields in natural environments. 

… we show that all common marine sediment types catalyse radiolytic H2 production, amplifying yields by up to 27X relative to pure water. In electron equivalents, the global rate of radiolytic H2 production in marine sediment appears to be 1-2% of the global organic flux to the seafloor. However, most organic matter is consumed at or near the seafloor, whereas radiolytic H2 is produced at all sediment depths. Comparison of radiolytic H2 consumption rates to organic oxidation rates suggests that water radiolysis is the principal source of biologically accessible energy for microbial communities in marine sediment older than a few million years. Where water permeates similarly catalytic material on other worlds, life may also be sustained by water radiolysis.

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/04/no-star-no-problem-radioactivity-could-make-otherwise-frozen-planets-habitable

ianmillerblog on April 6, 2021 at 3:06 am said:

Yes, Patrice, what I am saying is that the Jovian system is deficient in nitrogen and carbon, which is why Ganymede and Callisto have no atmosphere worth mentioning, while Titan has. It has to do with the ices that formed the planets. What I am saying is that as the ices warmed up, first the N2 and CO that helped form Neptune vaporized, then the argon and CH4 that helped form Uranus, then the methanol and ammonia that helped form the Saturnian system, leaving the Jovian system essentially with only water and solids.

I think the basics of life came from underground, with geologic processing, and life probably started around fumaroles. the reason being it was easy to get wet-dry cycles. With splashing cycles it is possible to get APM and UPM to form RNA fragments of u to 100 mers in a few hours, so the next trick is how to get AMP and UMP, and that is where sunlight comes in. It is not so much to provide energy, but rather to provide very high vibrational energy from an excited state decaying through internal conversion, which is why we use ribose – it is the only sugar that forms a furanose, and the furanose form is the only form that can relay the vibrational energy. That’s my view, anyway.

The radiolytic provision of hydrogen is interesting because life had to use hydrogen for the early anaerobes. There is obviously a lot more to life than what I outlined above, but I think that would be the way it started because this alone gets reproduction AND catalysis started.“

Radioactivity has been ignored all too long in the evolution of life, indeed. Radioactivity was considerable in the past, when life emerged, because Earth was covered with U235… Yes, a concentration of which exploded above Hiroshima… There used to be one hundred times more! Before I come back to that in a future essay, let’s momentarily conclude:

And now a final word for those who believe that wisdom should not worry about other planets: there are two types of wisdom. Mussel wisdom, clinging to the rock one knows well, and human wisdom, clinging to the hope one does not know yet. Humanity and its ancestry has clung to progress as the examination worth having most. We have brains to progress. It was always so, and those believing something else, were wiped out, and always will be.

Patrice Ayme

Cuomo And His Admirers: Bully Lovers

Too much power into too few hands.

We need to be controlled by superior ideas, not highly successful bullies. To change this requires changing the nature of politics and “leadership”: instead of trying to elect miracle leaders, we need to find out what the better ideas are, and accept to be ruled by them, the better angels of logic and compassion. So we need to learn to aspire to be led by debates, not by bullies. 

Representative democracy, as we have it now, disingenuously represents that a few individuals represent all of us. They can’t. It’s a lie to pretend they can. Democracy should not be about the one replacing the many. Democracy should be about people power (what demos-kratia means), and the power of the people is what comes out of the debates of the people: suggesting ideas, adjudicating them, modifying them, and accepting them. As long as we look for brutish “controlling” autocrats, to “lead” us, we will get them. Cuomo is just the latest blatant example. It is the aspirations of the political system, what the “demos” wants, which need to be changed. As long as we prefer to listen to lies rather than finding the truth, we will be the victims of pseudo-progressives and pseudo-democrats.  

New York Times: “You can’t call yourself a progressive champion while cutting school funding and Medicaid. You can’t call yourself a progressive champion while fondling young women and making them feel as if they are only valued for their high heels and short skirts. You can’t call yourself a progressive champion when your quest to assert your dominance leads to needless death. But Mr. Cuomo has tried to pull it off by using his political might to divert our attention.

The unmasking of Mr. Cuomo’s aggressive and abusive tactics offers a moment for us to reflect on the kinds of leaders we want and the best ways for them to pursue change. “I am a controlling personality,” he writes of himself in his new book. “But you show me a person who is not controlling and I’ll show you a person who is probably not highly successful.”

This is wrong. Requiring our leaders to be ruthless makes it harder for women and people of color to enter the halls of power. It associates competence with cruelty, which is something white men are allowed to brandish but other leaders are not.

The NYT says that we should have known about Cuomo long ago. Yes, starting with the fact his dad was NY governor too, so he inherited the job. But not just that: democrats should know they don’t have democracy, as it is, and structural reforms are needed.

Patrice Ayme

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More NYT on Cuomo: “For Mr. Cuomo, government has always been a show, and that was the case long before he won an Emmy for appearing on TV with PowerPoint slides. His flashy policy actions were paper thin, a veil for his pointed attacks on the most vulnerable.

In truth, he has long championed deep austerity even as he has touted high-profile progressive social issues. As early as his first year in office, he crowed about a “historic and transformational” state budget that reduced spending by more than 2 percent, in particular through reductions for Medicaid and education. The budget also eliminated some services for domestic violence victims and the homeless.

He has been at it ever since. In 2019, he clashed with newly empowered leaders of his own party in the Legislature when he resisted an increase in spending on education and other social programs. The next year, as a health crisis hit, he was still insisting that he couldn’t complete a state budget without cutting Medicaid. He has long opposed education increases, even for the neediest schools. When Congress sent coronavirus relief funding to the country’s highest-poverty schools in March 2020, including those in New York City, Mr. Cuomo cut the exact same amount from the state budget that the city would normally receive, wiping out the new money with a stroke of his pen. (This came after he had the gall to accuse Democrats in the State Legislature of failing to increase funding for poor school districts in 2019.)

All along, before the pandemic and during it, he has refused to consider raising taxes on the wealthy (until very recently),

His focus on his own image over and above improving life for New Yorkers has bordered on the absurd. Beginning in 2014, Mr. Cuomo installed more than 500 “I Love NY” signs along our highways as a PR move, despite being told that the Federal Highway Administration wouldn’t allow them, costing the state a $14 million fine. (The signs themselves had already cost $8.1 million.)…

We still don’t know if, or when, Mr. Cuomo’s many scandals will ultimately depose him. But whenever he leaves power, New York should be ready to pick a different kind of leader. It would be a mistake to replace Mr. Cuomo with someone who pursues actual progressive policies with the same brutal aggression. We need someone who can get things done without leaving a path of abuse in his or her wake.

America Was Always A Governmental Project

The colonization of the West Indies, Central and South America, but also North America, were all governmental projects manipulated by private individuals. The “Crowns” of Spain, France, Portugal, England (in that chronological order) financed them. And so it was for centuries: government first, organized everything. The myth that the “Free Market” colonizes all, and is the ultimate organizer was just a (self-serving) myth invented by US plutocracy to better colonized all. Wait, some will say, aren’t you contradicting yourself? No, century or so was a period when the wealthiest individuals in the world, US plutocrats, acquired a variable, but occasionally domineering level of control of the US government: cursus honorum, as the Romans used to call it, American style.

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with the government, in a real democracy (people-power)… Except for the flaws Athens exhibited in its short lived total democracy dominance (namely over-passionate, poorly studied, hubristic and intemperate decisions). Now Athens had a basic problem: it was not the domineering military power (Sparta was stronger on land, and Persia was immensely stronger on land, more than equal at sea). Right now, the West is domineering militarily. but democratically incomplete. Biden is trying to grow government. He can be exactly what the doctor ordered, IF done right (spending where government spending will change the future for the best).

Governmentalism, done right, is growing, and has to grow… Be it only because it works so spectacularly in China,while the “free market” is failing spectacularly in Europe (see the European COVID debacle; Europe did less well than China, or the US, the latter mostly at the origin of the vaccines, through Trump’s efforts).

Overall, since the Communists took control, China has been driven by smart (and violent) governmentalism… when the government intervenes in all ways. For example, the Chinese Communist Party intervenes decisively by outlawing marriage with close relatives (which bolster kinship). What the CCP was doing was to impose frantically laws similar to those of Western Europe. Western Europe, led that way mostly by France, had been, for two millennia, the prime actor of governmentalism. England, a subsidiary of France initially, was not far behind.

(I prefer the word “governmentalism”, to “statism” which is too… static. The most dynamic societies have practiced “governmentalism… but were, precisely, far from static. Landing on the Moon, a government project, was not static!)

In 2020, massive intervention of the US government in private research, through development funding and rewards brandished, brought the spectacular arrival of half a dozen vaccines (“Operation Warp Speed”). The European Union did nothing similar to what Trump did, brutal governmentalism. Instead Europe waited for private enterprise (much of it now financed by Trump or… Boris Johnson!) to come up with solutions. So Europe failed monstrously, and now depends upon Trump financed vaccines. Now this is not exactly about Trump: governmentalism and mercantilism (governmentalism applied to “free trade”) have always been American traditions.

The part of America which became the USA has long been a government enterprise. English America was first founded by the “West Country Men”, a group of famous plutocrats which had included Sir Francis Drake, who died in an American military expedition… and where King James I would be most prominent.  

The Erie Canal made New York the economic capital of the USA, displacing Philadelphia.

The English North American colony, the 1607 project, was founded by the Virginia Company, a joint-stock entity which was empowered by the Crown to govern itself… with the help of military officers (such as the fierce and experienced Captain John Smith who was part of the governing council). So, from the beginning, the North American colony was a joint military-government-investors venture. 

Biden wants to augment significantly government spending, in a reversal of the Reagan program of considering the government as the enemy. There are powerful antecedents to this: Roosevelt, Eisenhower, JFK and LBJ. Ike rose the marginal tax rate to 91% (a bit higher than Truman left it).

Nowadays, what needs to be industrialized correctly is the entire world. In particular, in the long term, no more fossil fuels, no more deforestation, no more environment killing plastics, chemicals, heavy metals, phosphates, etc.

This reconfiguration of the world economy can only happen at the direction of governments. Taxation, anywhere in the world, just as the economy, anywhere in the world, or democracy, anywhere in the world, is a global problem. There never was, and never will be, a free market as the adjudicator of all things economic: it is the government itself which is the adjudicator. The government determines what freedom is, and what the market is. 

Around 655 CE, the government of Queen Bathilde of the Franks ruled that trading slaves was unlawful: this restraining of the free market led to investments in education and higher technology, making Europe what she became: a fulcrum of progress and relative freedom… As usual the link is indicative; I do not fully agree with the description of Bathilde as given by Encyclopedia Britannica; in particular, the British encyclopedia lies about Bathilde freeing only Christians. Bathilde [correct spelling from contemporaneous 7C, Seventh Century Latin documents] OUTLAWED SELLING and BUYING SLAVES… Even from OUTSIDE FRANCIA: more exactly, a slave bought outside Francia was automatically freed when brought into Francia. The religion, ethnicity, gender and origin of the slave did not matter; the slave was freed. The Bathilde governmental policy of outlawing slavery did not just change the socioeconomy of Europe, but of the planet.

She outlawed slavery: Most important political leader of the planet? Ever?

All the great civilizations have been driven by smart governmentalism: Darius greatly improved the Achaemenid Empire by experimenting with the free market, while engaging in massive government spending in all sorts of infrastructure, canals, some underground, irrigation, communications, roads, state banking, a powerful navy, etc. China built a giant canal system, over millennia, and had a powerful educational system. Nowadays the most important spending should be research in fundamental science, something the “free market” and its greed can’t provide for… The world CO2 crisis can only be solved scientifically, not fiscally

Bidenomics consists, roughly speaking, of more of what I call “governmentalism”: large-scale public investment paid for with more taxes. 

The Biden administration infrastructure fact sheet alludes to part of that history, declaring that the plan “will invest in America in a way we have not invested since we built the interstate highways [Ike] and won the space race [JFK, LBJ].” I have long advocated to bring back the Dwight stuff — with much higher government investment as a share of gross domestic product than we do now, and also much higher tax rates on both high-income individuals and corporations.

The era of big government investment and high taxes on the rich coincided, not incidentally, with the US and Europe’s 30 glorious years the greatest generation — the post WW2 decades of rapidly rising living standards….

Public investment and progressive taxation in America in particular and the greatest civilizations in general goes back much further than the mid-Twentieth Century.

An example is the construction of the Erie Canal between 1818 and 1825. It imitated what the Romans and the French had done. When Marius’ legions arrived in Provence and waited two years for the savage German invaders to deign showing up, he occupied his soldiers by building a canal. The land which came to be known as France would keep on building canals, at government expense, for another two millennia. 

Unlike the privately owned canals of 18th-century plutocratic Britain, the original Erie Canal was built by the government of New York State, at a cost of $7 million (in 1818 dollars). This was carried out over the years 1818 to 1825. The canal is a 363-mile  (nearly 600 kilometers) waterway that connects the Great Lakes with the Atlantic Ocean via the Hudson River in upstate New York. It connected New York City to the Great Lakes, and through Chicago, to the Mississippi system. 

The legislative act allowing bonds to be sold to finance the canals’ construction specified a maximum interest rate of 6 percent… apparently was the interest rate which the bonds actually paid. Over the period from 1824 to 1882 the total tolls collected amounted to approximately $121 million. This ranged from $300 thousand in 1824 to $4.5 million in 1862. Thus the canal paid for itself in less than twenty years.

Britain had immensely wealthy individuals and banks, the USA did not (both the US Revolution and presidents such as Jackson made sure to keep away European plutocrats and their banks). So governmentalism was a necessity in the USA. As a share of state G.D.P., the canal was probably the equivalent of  $1 trillion today

Big public role in infrastructure continued down the generations, and it was accompanied by a policy not of “Free Trade” but “Mercantilism“: the US government would mostly maneuver to advantage private enterprise and greed, at the cost of all and any notions, including basic decency or filial piety… for example profiting from World War One by selling to racist fascist invasive mass homicidal genocidal Kaiser Germany what it needed to keep fighting World War One, by evading the Franco-British high seas blockade; this caused great suffering and weakening of France and Britain, the parents of the USA.

The US government would send the US Cavalry, massacre and clear the Indians, and distribute their lands around the newly built railroads. Land grants enabled railway construction and universities. Teddy Roosevelt finished the Panama Canal (started by the French Ferdinand de Lesseps and his French banks). F.D.R. brought electricity to rural areas. Eisenhower built the interstate freeway network.

So what is today’s infrastructure to be built? Mostly fundamental science. We need to leap scientifically: COVID was just a little warning. Very sophisticated scientific advances (mRNA vaccines and Adenoviruses gene carrier vaccines) enabled to solve the crisis promptly. Meanwhile the climate and toxic crises are squeezing ever more the world ecology. After the enormous expansion of the world population, it is to be feared that, barring spectacular scientific advances, cannibalism may come back. After all, it was practiced in the original English colony of 1610 CE, not just the Donner Party of the Nineteenth Century.  

When India was created as a modern country, respect was paid to Islam: (wealthy) Muslim men were allowed to follow their religious edict, the Sharia, and marry several women. Meanwhile, China, duplicating Europe, was explicitly outlawing polygeny. So India was created with a low level of government intervention, the opposite of the brutal dictatorship of the CCP. India was then wealthier per capita than China. Now China is much wealthier than India in capital (but not in capita).

In 2015, the India Supreme Court found that secular law should apply to Muslim men too. Thus governmentalism has been on the rise in India… And so has been the economy. The smartest governmentalism implies the smartest laws, the smartest “free market”, the smartest tech and science, and the smartest driver of them all, the smartest smarts… The latter point escapes autocrats. As Biden (who has personal experience with them) pointed out, autocrats such as Putin and Xi think the world has become too complicated for democracy and requires autocracy. Well, it is democracy, democratic governmentalism, which created that more complicated, smarter world. Yet, yes, it is a fine line, sometimes democracy backfires, as Socrates pointed out luridly, indeed, there are all sorts of thin red lines not to cross. But, done right, democratic governmentalism can’t be beat.

A piece of advice: too much spending giving money directly to low lives, is what was started in Rome, and it brought only the opposite of what it claimed to want to achieve. Besides many “Republicans” may resist it (rightly). The way to improve civilization the most is through education, availability of work, and fundamental science. A consensus should be buildable in that perspective.

Patrice Ayme