HOMO, DEBATING ANIMAL

What is the nature of the genus Homo? Good, or evil? A tool maker? A weapon designer? Such are the traditional questions. They have a simple, and powerful answer, underlying all questions: Homo is a debater. The traditional questions are irrelevances which assume that it is in our power to prefer to be good or evil, when push comes to shove… or that we are the only ones withtools or weapons. And as if humanity didn’t demonstrate both good and evil, and sometimes in the same individual, in ample fashion, and as if animal intelligence had not shown nearly all human propensities… but one! 

What is the nature of a lion good, or evil? Silly question, of course: a lion needs to kill other animals to live. His colleagues, red in fang and claw, may find him morally excellent, while the devoured prey has no name for such evil as being devoured alive. And yet lions share, and not just meals. Some species of saber tooth felids fed their handicapped fellows. Sweet killers.

Humans are the ultimate predators. Humans don’t just eat animals and people, but they also devour land, the sea, the atmosphere, and now, soon, planets. Power characterize humans. For good and evil… And all this power arises, ultimately, from human debate (to beat thoroughly, etymologically).

So whether humans are good or evil is a silly question: the nature of humanity should be clear ethically speaking, it’s basically an extension of leonid ethics: kill as needed, whoever, whatever. And sometimes procreation, that is, love is the best weapon of evil. When the Rolling Stones, who are still touring, wrote one of their early songs, they mentionned that there were two billion people living on Earth. Now there are eight billion. With current technology, “renewable” and intermittent ot not, a population of eight billion is unsustainable. Some countries, such as Japan, are on track to half their population. Others have still fast growing population and their main governemental economic effort is to prepare for (nuclear) war.

Homo has been the land’s supreme predator for millions of years, and certainly for the last 100,000 years (Homo Sapiens Neanderthalensis exterminated Cave Bears 50,000 years ago). A killer, neither good not bad, just doing what needed to be done, to live as long, and prosper as much as could be done… like those Allied troops disembarking in France in 1944 (my dad was one of them). The Allies landed to kill Nazis of whom millions had to be killed to perceive the correctness of democracy, and the error of their Nazi ways. But the point is that quite often the Allies killed as many civilians as Nazis…

Homo is good and, or, evil, depending upon the perspective. In particular, civilization did not make human beings good or bad: civilization amplifies everything, all powers, in particular, civilization amplifies goodness, just as it amplifies evil, and quite often, both at the same time.

A complicating factor, though, is that more is different: this is well known in, say, solid state physics: phenomena appear in a multitude which cannot happen with a few. Civilization is what makes everything more, thus different.

Plutocracy, the method of harnessing the power of evil, using compounded power to leverage evil, enables oligarchies to rule indefinitely (nobility in France was 2% of the population for more than a millennium). Plutocracy is a form of malignancy which can go metastatic, until all of society is corrupted by it. Plutocracy is the most problematic disease of civilization, because civilization amplifies the plutocratic effect. So we end up with cultural oligarchies leveraging evil in all aspects of mind. 

Philosophers have proposed specific definitions for human beings. Homo Faber, the homo which makes tools, was proposed by Bergson. But many animal species use tools, and more would, if they had hands the fingers of which have delicate motor control. Before that delicate motor control became an enormous advantage, one needed enormous imagination… and a lot of scientific practice. Intelligence was not enough: my dog understands subtle finger motions… but he is more than one hundred million years away from developing hands (short of dogs with hands from bioengineering, of course).

What is different in human beings relative to animals is human debating power, which is enormous. Humans can do more things than any other animals, and they first spend an even greater amount of time considering what it is exactly that they are going to do. And this is what debate does, what debate is.

Obviously chimpanzees also have violent arguments. Screaming chimps running around with enormous teeth and eyes jutting out of their skulls, should not be derided, they are exhibiting the most basic mental foundation of debate, the passion for the importance of mental dominance. Chimps’ debating hysteria make clear that, evolutionary speaking our common ancestor was already a primitive debater, and that this activity was most important and most violent, and it is why “debate” means to beat thoroughly. First you beat thoroughly, then you become the alpha male, and you decide what everybody will do. Such is the chimp level of debate, and far from being something to despise, the fury for and against mental domination forged the emotional machinery enabling to express passion for the spirit.

We advanced more than chimps in our debating power in the last ten million years, this is the main difference between us and them, and our fine motor control was entangled with that. In Homo, a long evolution brought the dominance not so much of the alpha male as the dominance of the alpha argument which rules. The alpha male is a biological organism, the alpha argument a subtle mental organization, basically a piece of mathematics written in neurology. We became natural born logicians and mathematicians…. And much of this logic and mathematics, born from observing the universe, came to model it ever better, in a constant dialogue between our minds and the rest of reality out there.

Smilodon populator by Mauricio Anton. 400 kilograms, South America. Exterminated by Homo Sapiens, 10,000 years ago. Why? We debate better! .

Ultimately, good and evil do not matter as much Ultimately, good and evil do not matter as much as the better debate. The first debater of the selves are the selves themselves. Human brains are multitudes, and with themselves and in the night, they debate. As they do, better, more meaningful, more significant, more threatening or more potentially rewarding pathways are traced in potential realities’ decision trees…

These considerations have very simple consequences:

SCHISMOGENESIS IS A GOOD THING:

Schismogenesis literally means “creation of division”. The term derives from the Greek σχίσμα skhisma “cleft” (borrowed into English as schism, “division into opposing factions”), and γένεσις genesis “generation, creation”. Famous UK-US anthropologist Gregory Bateson created the notion in the 1930s, to deplore certain forms of social behavior between groups. He and his followers to this day, have not understood that this is a methodology extremely ancient and well-known in France, the “esprit de contradiction“… But of course, Bateson was a French hater, who thought that Prussianized Germany should rule over Europe, and racist president Wilson was a “pathologically honest man“…. and the Versaiiles Treaty was a deception which caused Nazism by demoralizing Germany, So Bateson would not know the advantage of contradicting his superiors, or anybody who made his carreer.

The spirit of contradiction and the pleasure of engaging in it is central to debates. The spirit of contradiction makes mentalities and ideas fight in life and death struggles, neurohormones to the max. No better way to end up thinking out of all and any box…

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ANTI-DEBATING OLIGARCHIC IDEOLOGY SUCH AS CHRISTIANISM AND MONEYVERSITIES ARE BAD:

The fascist horror known as Christianism, and its derivatives, have to be extirpated in all their negative aspects (both Christ and Muhammad, as preached, have some positive aspects). Not so much by going aspect after aspect (say like cancelling the Christian interdiction of all and any abortion), as has been done, but by pointing out that Christianism was first of all, a weapon against debate.

Christianism was a terror imposed by Roman emperors, mostly by the fiercest autocrats, Constantine I and Theodosius I. Constantine, son of an emperor, boiled his second wife, executed his son, killed his nephew and assassinated all the priests of Egypt, who had offended him by being eunuchs, among other exploits of a ferocious nature. (“Saint”) Constantine also invented Catholicism (“universalism” in Greek) and called himself the Thirteenth Apostle. Roman emperor Theodosius I, sixty years later, following emperor Gratian, decreed in 381 CE that heresy (making a choice in religious matters) was passible of any penalty the imperial government would decide, including expropriation, torture and death. Heretics were called “insane maniacs“… by the emperor Theodosius himself.

Making any mental choice on the arcane nature of the universe a potential death sentence killed debate. The empire fell to theological and intellectual fascism, to add to the pre-existing fascist rule. “We The People” couln’t do a thing as the oligarchies ruling civilization made pacts and treaties with fierce invading barbarians (the alliance between Theodosius I and the Goths being the most prominent example; the Goths enabled Theodosius to win over Arbogast and his Frankish army in 394 CE… But the same ones would sack Rome in 410 CE… But there were other alliances, such as with the Huns themselves, and Aetius, 60 years later, did his best to persuade the Goths and then the Franks… to not crush his friends the Huns he was all too familiar with…)
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In 393 CE, the Western Empire rose against Theodosius, under secular and Pagan leadership, but, thanks to a freak storm, was defeated at the battle of Frigidus river, in September 394. In 395 CE, the German invasions started while the bishops took control of Rome (hiding behind Stilicho), and going full “woke”. Bishops outlawed the death penalty, including against murdering highway men, so suddenly roads became impassable, and murder a growth industry. And so on.
When the Frank took control of Catholicism, they reestablished tolerance and nobody was burned for heresy (until the year 1026 CE). However, as the feudal-plutocratic order rose again, it found conveneient to instrumantalize Catholicism again, and Catholic terror was reimposed, notably by exterminating all Cathars, from Anatolia to South France, five millions of them.
Christianism literally created Islamism: Islam was encouraged by the two most prominent Christians in Egypt and Arabia, who both knew Muhammad, and made him all sorts of gifts (including a slave woman who gave him his only son).
Christianism is intrinsically opposed to human freedom, and mental debate, hence the human species

Another example: Moneyed universities, by restricting access to the few, kill or restrict debate, as they create a superior, restricted, exclusive elite, a class… superior in all but for debating… and that’s not an optimal evolution…

The cancellation culture is the opposite of debate. It emanated from top universities, and this was not a recent phenomenon. When I got to self-declared superior US universities (Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, Berkeley), I could not understand what was going on? Where was debate? 

Several times, some prestigious intellectual figures of such universities attacked me in public with extreme violence out of the blue. This sort of flaming insult is now ubiquitous on the Internet, but I saw it started in universities… as I was close to the bottom of the hierarchy, I was rather baffled… Only now do I understand that these major figures, some of them supposedly friends, were telling me I did not belong, and wanted to make clear to all that dissent, even of the debatable kind, would not be tolerated…

In insight, I see it is the concept of debate itself which was targeted… 

It took me years to figure it out a bit, and now my impression has been ever more reflected upon, deepened, and structured: those self-declared top universities were not about debate in as much as class. The advice they gave served an elite, those paying for the fancy buildings and the endowed chairs… And this general feeling that pleasing the elite was what excellency meant is why the climate crisis has got even worse… and we are barely starting there. Ultimately moneyed interests, another name for the Deep State, did not want a debate: they depend upon the fossil fuel industry, which provides 84% of the world’s primary energy. And that in turn depends upon their tax free status, hidden within huge tax codes…

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DEMOCRACY’S GREATEST STRENGTH: DEBATE

Democracy, especially of the direct sort, is a better debating society, thus more human, and superior in fostering ideas honed by debate.

We are human, more human… Why? Because we debate better!

And happy new year!

Patrice Ayme

Why Did France Cease Fire With Nazis June 22, 1940?

The short of it: Because France had enough to be stabbed in the back by the USA, or, more exactly its leadership, the Deep Plutocratic state. Many guessed, deep down inside their minds that Nazi Germany was just what it was: an instrument of the USA. To be stabbed in the back once during and after World War One was enough (the US had broken the blockade of Germany in WW1). OK, that’s not the conventional answer, and nobody dared to say this aloud, before yours truly…. But history should also be the history of the subconscious. Now the details are numerous and full of evil, a real forest of them…

The French Republic was deliberately attacked by the entire army of fascist racist Prussianized Germany on August 2 1914, without even a war declaration. The Prussians intended to take France out, then Russia, and force Britain to negotiate. The Prussians believed they had the tacit, if not explicit approval of racist America. However, 5 weeks later, the French army nearly annihilated the German army. US plutocrats helped to break the Franco-British blockade, enabling Germany to fabricate high explosives. In the end, the US relented and the blockade worked and the French explosive production was more than ten times Germany by 1918.

In 1918, the US flew to the rescue of Franco-British victory… and then confiscated it. In the crucial battle of July 1918, only two US divisions were engaged (and were annihilated), in the company of a Senegalese division (which tended to make no racist German prisoner, and, and because, reciprocally). However the French engaged 45 divisions in the same counter-offensive, behind a deluge of explosive fire. The head Prussian (and future Nazi) Luddendorg told the fascist in chief, the Kaiser, that they had lost the war.

France had won the war, but the losses had been enormous. Officially 1.4 million KIAs. However, real losses, counting hundreds of thousands of MIAs, and thousands of executed deserters, were around two millions, around ⅓ of the 18-27 years old got killed. Just one single day, in August 1914, 27,000 French soldiers died during furious French offensives. And all this for what?

In 1919, French suggestions to do away with Prussian-German war capabilities were blocked by the USA, which proceeded to rob Germany blind, and make Germany into its own thing, for its own US plutocrats, one Wall Street plan after another. French PM Clemenceau declared France would be again at war with Germany within 20 years, as happened (and often with the same individuals… for example Hermann Goering, prominent in WW1 as he was in WW2)

The head of the German central bank, a creature of JP Morgan, the most prominent US plutocrat and then the eponymous bank, organized hyperinflation in 1923 to not pay repairs for the enormous deliberate damage to the French and Belgian industrial belts and their flooded, exploded mines and factories. That was fine with the US plutocrats, who viewed the European empires as the greatest obstacle to their rule over the entire planet.

US plutocrats proceeded to finance and arm Mussolini, Hitler and Franco (also fuel his imperial majesty Hirohito, so that he could kill lots of Chinese…) Meanwhile, through their control of US media, US plutocrats fabricated the pro-fascist ideology known as “isolationism”, which the US Deep State (the entanglement of US plutocracy with the US government) used to empower the Axis and its friends (Stalin among the latter, as US plutocrats, some of them “democrats” as US president Wilson of 1914, developed his oil fields, among other things…)

In 1939, France, followed by Britain, had enough with Hitler, who now wanted to do away with Poland. They threatened war, and marshalled their enormous resources and credit, especially in the US [1]… so Hitler made his alliance with Stalin official. Communists followed Stalin, even in France, so many in the French military, who already detested the “Popular Front” of 1936, led by PM Blum, a Jew, were reluctant to arm in a timely fashion the thousands of modern fighter planes France had… among other things. All too many traitors admiring Nazism were found in France.

Think about it: France was at war with the axis: Germany, Italy, Japan, plus the Soviet Union (German tanks were fueled by Caucasus oil). France had started the war with more than 5 million soldiers plus 300,000 British soldiers, but during a few fatidic days in May 1940, the French army got cut off from the rear. The hyper powerful Third French Armored division, just north of the German armor spearhead could not move: its fuel lines were cut off. It was a sort of giant Pearl Harbor on an unimaginable scale: millions of elite French soldiers were cut off from behind.

God had turned Nazi, and organized a succession of miracles which favored the Nazis. It’s a long story, and there were too many miracles, such as the case of the German plane which crashed with the plans that the French had anticipated… So the Nazi general Von Manstein and Hitler tried something real crazy. They had to.

Nazi tanks in the Belgian Ardennes

They had to go crazy because the French army was too powerful… and time was working against them, considering the immense resources and populations of France and Britain with their world empires. At Hannut in Belgium, 380 French tanks confronted 664 German tanks. The better armored and more powerful French tanks block the Germans for two days. The Germans lose 195 tanks, the French 105… mostly to Stuka bombers. This is world war two’s first tank battle, and the French win it. The drama, though, is to the south: disbanded Belgian soldiers coming out of the Ardennes forest.

The end result is that the Nazis launched a completely deranged offensive which had every reason to fail spectacularly, causing the annihilation of the Nazi army: 44 divisions jammed through three narrow roads in the Ardennes forest, including 7 out of 10 Panzer, the armored divisions. However, miracle after miracle: the Belgian army did not deploy there the few anti-tanks troops they needed to stop the German columns… thanks to a not enough British and French aerial reconnaissance, Belgian neutrality, lots of amphetamines, the Nazi army pierced through and cut all the crack French armies from behind. 

Nazi troops crossing the Meuse at Sedan, May 13 1940. Notice the destroyed bridge behind.

The Nazis used the entire Luftwaffe to break the one French Reserve infantry division at Sedan. The British Second armored division which was supposed to be behind the French 55th was not there, and the long range guns from the Maginot line didn’t fire (both facts are unexplained, at least, to me!) Guderian, commander and creator of the German armor was at its desk in the panorama hotel, directing the offensive. A hit by a British bomber on an amunition dump, caused the huge boar head above him to fall down, and Guderian nearly got decapitated. A few days later unstoppable French B1B heavy tanks came in immediate proximity of German headquarters (again with Guderian inside), but, in the night did not detect the German staff and left. 

Besides the hand of fate, and enormous quantities of amphetamines, some of it as candy, the Nazis got tremendous help from the French commander, Gamelin, who could not have done a better job if he had been Hitler himself. Gamelin was weak, stupid, didn’t like aviation, and feared German spying pathologically, to the point he would not use the radio.

Thanks to Pervitin, the Wehrmacht kept going without sleep for 30 plus hours – enabling them to plough through the Ardennes forest without getting bogged down. Allied troops confronted almost superhuman, suicide bomber style soldiers who seemed to know no fear, attacking relentlessly. During the entire armor dash across France, the week starting May 10, 1940, so it was, day after day, niht after night. Later the Nazis deplored many officers dying of heart attacks, so they diminshed the usage of Pervitin. All of Nazi Germany was using it, and should have screamed:”Sieg High!” instead of “Sieg Heil!” There were chocolate candy versions of methamphetamins: a chocolate version for pilots and tank crews known as Fliegerschokolade (flyer’s chocolate) and Panzerschokolade (tanker’s chocolate)

Gamelin launched the French reserve of seven armored divisions into the Netherlands (as far as it should have been). His second in command told him there was a danger that the Nazis would cut the entire French army from behind… as happened.

Also that the Prince of Wales informed Hitler where the weak point was, helped considerably (“The Windsor File.”published in 1997 by Paul Sweet, a former U.S. Foreign Service officer and historian gave the Nazi background of the ex-king)… so did suicidary charges by bomb laden Nazi engineers.

Ultimately, the First French army blocked all the German army, and enabled the British professional army to escape (Dunkirk).

At this point, by June 1940, the treachorous US president did not deliver his “guarantees” to France (whereas Canada landed divisions in Britanny which were immediately beaten back by the Nazis). France could have kept on fighting, by evacuating to North Africa… and should have. Churchill, and the UK Parliament proposed a unification of France and Britain (to hinder Nazi extermination of the French). However, a few leaders in France, who ended in Vichy, felt that the same sacrifice as in 1914-1918, with the USA reaping all the fruits, once again, was not the wisest course. At that exact moment, France was at war with all the fascist powers, Germany, the USSR, Italy and Japan. The only ally was Britain, which mostly had an Air Force and a Navy. Half of the German Air Force had been destroyed in six weeks of combat, and France had 2,500 modern fighter planes in North Africa alone (plus a larger Navy than Hitler’s).

In 1936, US oil had allowed the Nazi Air Force to transport a rogue army to destroy the Spanish Republic. Hitler, encouraged that way by Von Ribbentrop, his foreign minister, thought that Britain loved Nazism, and the USA, even more so. Hitler would find out he had been played when first Britain declared war, and then the US flooded the USSR with crucial military aid in 1941, before cutting the US oil flow to Japan… Top German generals had wanted to get rid of the Nazis in 1937. They had asked for Anglo-American diplomatic support. Instead the Anglo-Americans denounced them to Hitler (who forgave them… he had no choice…) Thus many leaders, in France or Germany, thought the US approved of Nazism. Roosevelt rushed to recognize the illegal Vichy coup and sent his right hand man, 4 star admiral Leahy, as “ambassador” to Vichy…

France had enough elan to declare war to Hitler in 1939. The US never found that elan. The war was lost in four or five days in May. It had nothing to do with elan. If the Nazi army had been detected in the Ardennes the Nazis could have been defeated. If the 7th French army had been kept in reserve, with its seven armored divisions, the Nazi armor would have been cut off, and the war won right away. If the 2,500 modern fighter planes which France had at the ready on the theater had been engaged from North Africa where they were flown, France could have resisted indefinitively. But what for, as long as the US winked to Hitler?

It seemed wiser to make a ceasefire with Hitler (it was NOT a peace treaty). As it turned out, France suffered around one million deaths all told in metropolitan France, plus two million in Indochina (because of the Japanese war of liberation there, I’m ironic).

France was still in the fight. An example: On May 10, 1941, in a night raid on London, three Nazi Heinkel 111 were shot down. All victories were scored by French pilots. Pilot Officer Demozay of 1 Squadron shot his down over East London, whilst Pilot Officer Scitivaux and Pilot Officer Emile Fayolle, both of whom were serving with 242 Squadron, had their encounters over the London Docks. All three ‘kills’ were confirmed. Fayolle would go on, sink 28 Nazi boats and become RAF squadron leader. He died crashing in the Channel after being shot by German flak.

In June-July 1942, two years later, a French army lethally wounded Rommel’s Afrika Korps… the Nazi commander, Rommel himself, said it (so did Churchill). At the time of D Day, the French resistance occupied 17 divisions in south France, plus a few elite alpine divisions, including all Nazi SS paratroops in the Vercors combat (had they been used in Normandy, they may have been enough to throw back the allies in the sea).

By 1945 a million man French army (23% of the Western Allies’ army) crossed the Rhine under fire. In the last 5 weeks of the war, the French army, pushing through south Germany into Austria suffered 5,000 dead, 35% of the number of deaths as the US army (and a bit more than the British).

Following the war, the USA, having given half of Europe to Stalin, including Poland (!), proceeded to replace the Europeans worldwide, by a process called “decolonization”… thanks to an abuse of language.

Maybe the US Deep State should stop undermining France as it just did in Australia with submarines and helicopters?

In World War One a draw was snatched out of military victory, thanks to the intervention of influential Anglo-Saxon individuals motivated by greed or racism (the famous Keynes was an example of pro-German racism). The French army wanted to finish the work in 1918, occupy Germany, and try the criminals against humanity who had launched World War One. The US blocked that idea in 1918. This finally happened in 1945… And the problem posed by the Prussian racist and exploitative ideology from the Eighteenth Century found its final solution….

All well considered, the French Republic should have united with Britain, as proposed by Churchill, and pursued the war from North Africa. Blocked by the French Navy and French Air Force, plus planes ordered in the USA by France and Britain, the Nazis would not have been able to cross the Mediterranean (even with only the Brits in the fight, they could not make it enough to provide the Afrika Korps…)

That would have changed many things in ways hard to visualize. However, French losses may well have been higher.

Patrice Ayme 

139 Polish fighter pilots volunteered to join the RAF. Some expert French pilot also did. Émile Fayolle above was squadron leader RAF. Died in combat at the age of 25. Émile Fayolle had been a squadron leader in the French Air Force too. His squadron was based at Warmwell. He was a commandant FAFL (Forces aériennes françaises libres). Germany quickly ran out of expert pilots, as too many died in combat, mostly during the Battles of France and England in 1940, and lack of fuel, after attacking the USSR prevented training, so, later in the war, all too many German pilots could barely fly their planes. The most famous French pilot who died in combat was Saint Exupery, author of the Petit Prince, off Marseilles in 1944.. Émile Fayolle died in combat five months before Hitler declared war to the treachorous USA..

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Left unsaid in usual description of WW2 and why Hitler wanted so much to attack in 1939, is the attempted preparation of a coup against the Nazis by the German military in 1937. Hitler knew that the generals were still plotting (and would attempt a coup in 1944). The German generals and admirals had asked in 1937 for Anglo-Saxon diplomatic support. Instead the treachorous Anglo-Saxon leadership denounced the generals to Hitler… So Hitler knew time was working against him, because French hostility was relentless, and both France and Britain were rearming monstruously, using credit and US industry.

An example: France and Britain launched the Mustang, P47 program, using a little known aircraft company, under their own specifications, mostly speed and endurance, in the USA. The plane was so good it got adopted by the US and became the main supremacy fighter.

Are Anti-Nuclear Ecologists Promoting Mass Murder?

Viewing tree huggers as mass serial killers may sound counterintuitive, even offensive. And yet… the Nazis were fanatical ecologists. That they fester to this day in Germany should come as no surprise, that’s called atavism. Germany plans to augment its already enormous imports of coal, and then, in its defense, whines that it will get even more gas from its friendly assassin, the nuclear armed tyrant Putin… In a new pipeline going directly to Germany while avoiding Ukraine, so that serial killer Putin can attack Ukraine as much as he wants without hurting any German.

Germany, prompted by its latest “green” government, is closing its last nuclear reactors, replacing them with the world’s most polluting coal source, lignite. See pretty picture below (well, I don’t find it pretty, but German ecologists, or rather, pseudo-ecologists, full of rage as they are, find it pretty, no doubt). 

Germany ranks 4th in the world for Coal consumption, accounting for about 22.6% of the world’s total consumption of 1,139,471,430 tons. ). German CO₂ emissions from power generation rose by 13% in 2021. If you ask me, sanctions should be applied (and I drive an excellent German car; I am not anti-German, just anti-Nazi).

“Coal is the single largest source of global carbon emissions, and this year’s historically high level of coal power generation is a worrying sign of how far off track the world is in its efforts to put emissions into decline towards net zero,” Fatih Birol, the executive director of the International Energy Agency, said in a press release. The amount of electricity generated from coal is expected to hit an all-time high this year… and so is the usage of coal in industry (to make steel, etc.)

Lignite coal mine in West Germany. For scale, look at the church in the distance. This is a transverse view: the mine is many miles long.

The hilarious part (sort of) is that the anti-nuclear rage of the so-called “ecologists” is reminiscent of the ecological extremism of the Nazis. But there is something even more sinister: all electric generation could be nearly carbon free if nuclear reactors had replaced fossil fuels. 

As it is, though, 84% of primary energy production, worldwide, is from fossil fuels. Thus anti-nuclear ecologists are the best friends of fossil fuels and the climate catastrophe…

But it gets even better than that: pacific nuclear energy in the West has basically never killed anybody (and recent designs are 100% safe). Whereas, according to the WHO, fossil fuels kill at least 10 million people a year.

Thus pseudo-ecologists are not just probably paid by fossil fuel lobbues, but on top of that, they are encouraging mass murder. Worldwide. 

There will be no serious mitigation of the impending climate catastrophe without mass deployment of (various) nuclear technologies and (various) hydrogen technologies (liquid H2, ammonia, fusion, etc.). Fusion is no mirage: generating more fusion power from a laser machine than was used to heat and compress was achieved in California in fall 2021.

The day is approaching when the largest iceshelves in Antarctica will disintegrated in giant icequakes… Tomorrow or in ten years… In any case, soon. A systemic error affected polar heating computation: it was underestimated by a factor of two (because latitudes starting at 60 degrees were counted, far below the polar circle, which is at 66 degree). So the polar latitudes (above 66 degrees north) are warming four (4) times faster than the rest of the atmosphere globally. Hence nearly five degrees of warming, in centigrades (around 10F).

This is serious, while German “ecologists” are not. Progressive Germans love to hate Trump for the climate, but, under Trump, US CO2 emissions went down, whereas German CO2 emissions, looking forward, are going to go up. A lot. Making smileys to Putin doesn’t improve matters. Enough hypocrisy then: that was a Nazi trait. And 100 million killed per decade is killing on a Nazi scale: this is what the Nazis achieved, on their own and by dragging mostly Japan with them…

Patrice Ayme

On That Harvard Traitor To Democracy…

In a Boston Court, a Superstar of Science Falls to Earth
A jury found Harvard chemist Charles Lieber, chair of two departments, guilty of lying to the federal government about his participation in China’s Thousand Talents recruitment program. It took less than three hours to find him guilty of this and three other counts [1].

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Dr Lieber says: “This is embarrassing. Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.” Well, not true. Only true in a society where all people doing science would do it, not because of science, but because of greed. Being driven by greed is not happening in a scientifically healthy society. Many scientists do not work in science because they want glory, but because they want to advance knowledge, or the honor of the human spirit. Relatively few are driven by Nobel greed, which is neither noble nor the best steed one needs to ride to figure out the unknown. Nobel greed is a form of corruption, and one corruption leads to the next, with bills stuffed in brown paper bags. 

It is crucial to maintain technological superiority over China in scientific sectors with potential military applications. In the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, democracies partially lost their scientific and technological lead over racist, fascist Prussianized Germany, and that brought among Prussian German leaders a military hubris which help them launch two world wars. The exact same psychological mechanism could happen with present day China, which, in its official constitution, is a “dictatorship“.   

Technological science is more than just science. Much of it is military activity in disguise. And dictatorships are enemies of democracy… On a planet which is shrinking by the day, as our technology expands. Top scientists carrying brown paper bags full of cash given by the dictators commit high treason against democracy.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The  not so famous Chinese university in Wuhan had money to spend — “that’s one of the things China uses to try to seduce people,” Dr. Lieber said in the interrogation… We want to know what the other seductions are…

But money wasn’t the reason, he said. By training young Chinese scientists in the use of technology he had pioneered, Lieber hoped to burnish his credentials with the committee that decides the ultimate scientific honor.

“This is embarrassing,” he said. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”

A federal jury found Dr. Lieber guilty of two counts of making false statements to the U.S. government about whether he participated in Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed by the Chinese government to attract foreign-educated scientists to China. They also found him guilty of failing to declare income earned in China and failing to report a Chinese bank account.

Dr. Lieber’s was specifically asked about his participation in the Chinese program, and denied it. His own lawyer presented Dr. Lieber  as a victim: “the world’s greatest nanoscientist is facing multiple felonies.”

Since 2008, Lieber’s laboratory at Harvard received research grants totaling $18 million from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

A three-year contract emailed to Dr. Lieber in 2012, and displayed to the jury by prosecutors, identified Lieber as a “One Thousand Talent High Level Foreign Expert,” entitling him to $50,000 a month, plus about $150,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5 million for a laboratory, which they called the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory.

A portion of Lieber’s salary was deposited in Lieber’s secret Chinese bank account and the remainder — an amount he estimated as between $50,000 and $100,000 (who is counting?) — was paid in $100 bills, which he carried home in his luggage.

“They would give me a package, a brown thing with some Chinese characters on it, I would throw it in my bag,” he said. After returning home, he said, “I didn’t declare it, and that’s illegal.”

In January of 2021, Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was arrested on suspicion of hiding affiliations with Chinese government institutions thus allowing him to secure $19 million in U.S. federal grants.

Conversing with the F.B.I. agents on the day of his arrest, Dr. Lieber reflected on international funding in research, saying that relationships with foreign partners were never as straightforward as they seemed at first. “Early on, if someone said, ‘We’ll give you this title and we’ll pay your travel to and from,’ you don’t think anything about it,” he explained, but partners “always want something from you.”

“A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess,” he said. He added, “that’s one of the things China uses to seduce people.”

Wisdom = Plutocracy? That’s What Plutocratic Academia Has Been Teaching By Example. Low Rung Academic Workers Exploited

US academia all too often looks like a criminal enterprise to rip off students with US government  complicity.  What a worthy educational system we have.  The depraved angle below I have long kept up my sleeve: I have extensive personal experience from it. I observed that most, otherwise tops, professors’ souls were ruined by it… Ruined souls don’t make for superior wisdom.

I was employed by US Academia and contributed financially, cognitively, and with my work to three prestigious universities (Columbia, Stanford, UC Berkeley). I was horrendously exploited… To the point it’s too painful to describe… But at least I can approach the subject… And I was not the only one, but more like the rule. Since those rough times, things have changed, the low rung employees of academia, after decades of struggle have finally been allowed to unionize. However the struggle is far from finished. The situation is so gory that even the Wall Street Journal, not usually tender footed about low lives, is indignant about it… and rightly so. 

Before showing the editorial of the WSJ, let me jump to conclusions: top academia is paid fortunes. One could say: because they are geniuses. However, closer inspections show that top academia is more into looking good than being good: much effort is spent socially rather than intellectually. Research papers and ideas often come from the lower rungs, not the gleaming summits. My opinion is that the system selects, all too much, for bad top academicians, deliberately, individuals more interested by greed than brains. My friend Feynman arrived at the same conclusion (and resigned from Academia)… A recent paper from PNAS (Academy of Science) showed that the flurry of papers in top fields produced increasingly bad research… Something known for a while: years ago, US biotech companies had found that only 11% of research results, in peer review, were reproducible.

This system is no accident. It is more like a vast conspiracy. As Major General Butler wrote in his 1935 book War Is a Racket…  Academia is a racket. Consider the following editorial of the Wall Street Journal:

“United Auto Workers of the Ivy League.

A brawl over pay at Columbia challenges academic solidarity with the working class. By The Editorial Board. Updated Dec. 18, 2021 4:22 pm ET

What do Deere & Co. and Columbia University have in common? Their workers are represented by the United Auto Workers and have gone on strike this fall seeking higher compensation. Yet the contrasts are instructive about the state of higher education.

Many Columbia class sections have been canceled since early November, and final grades have been thrown in jeopardy due to a seven-week strike by the Student Workers of Columbia-UAW, which includes 3,000 graduates and undergraduates who assist with teaching, grading and tutoring. Columbia recently told undergrads they could choose to receive a pass-fail in any course this semester in “appreciation of how difficult this term may have been for you.” …

While workers at companies like Volkswagen and Amazon have rejected unions, Big Labor is winning with university employees. Last week the UAW was recognized as labor representative for 17,000 student researchers at the University of California. About a quarter (100,000) of UAW members are university employees.

***

It’s worth reflecting on why unions are having more success on campus. No doubt academic workers are liberal. But it’s also true that they are often treated poorly by universities to support high-earning administrators and tenured faculty.

Consider Columbia, where many student workers earn little more than New York City’s $15 hourly minimum wage. Columbia this spring offered to raise its minimum hourly wage to $17, and the salary of doctoral candidates with 12-month teaching appointments to $42,350. Students rejected the proposal. Columbia’s latest offer is $20 an hour and $43,621 for full-year positions.

The UAW wants $45,000 for 12-month appointments and a minimum $26 hourly rate for non-salaried workers, with annual increases. The union says a single adult had to make at least $45,285 to live in Manhattan in June 2020—before this year’s inflation.

“Columbia made $3.1 billion in returns on its investments this past year alone,” the union says, adding that its demands for a three-year contract would amount to a mere “3% of its increase in net assets from investments.” Columbia charges $63,530 in undergraduate tuition and fees ($82,584 including room and board), which over four years is as much as the cost of a house. President Lee Bollinger earns roughly $4.6 million, and full-time professors make on average $268,400. 

It’s fair to ask why the university can’t afford to pay student workers—many of whom are being buried in debt that they may never be able to repay—more given they do much of the teaching and grading.

The university has nonetheless held firm and last week warned that striking workers might not be offered positions this spring. The union has accused the university of retaliation and filed unfair labor practice charges with the National Labor Relations Board. Columbia says it is offering PhD students “one of the most generous packages of any university in the country.”

… you have to smile at what the Marxists might call the contradictions of academic production. When Kellogg Co. last week threatened to replace striking workers, President Biden called it “an existential attack on the union and its members’ jobs and livelihoods.” Deere and Kellogg pay their factory workers more than Columbia does its academic grunts. Kellogg says most workers at its cereal factories earned $120,000 last year.

Democrats seem less perturbed by the Ivy League school’s hardball bargaining. … encouraging the university “to strengthen its efforts in good faith bargaining.”

Columbia’s faculty have also professed solidarity with student workers, which costs nothing. But they haven’t stepped in to help deliver the education for which undergrads are paying a small fortune. Deere and Kellogg used salaried workers to keep their plants running during union strikes. Is it too much to ask tenured professors to grade exams?

Companies that underpay workers and mistreat customers won’t survive long. But universities with brand names have a captive clientele as well as steady subsidies in the form of federal student loans. This is why many were able to get away with keeping classes remote last year without discounting tuition.

The next time you hear professors lecture about inequality in America, ask them about the state of the academic working class.”

Well, I have done just that when I was in the midst of it all. It were as if I lunched in public on dogs poop for all to see and smell: the repulsion I inspired was without compare with any sort of contempt I have seen anywhere… about anybody.

***

The main teaching of academia as a plutocratic system is to teach plutocracy is good. And the best way to do that is to teach by example… This is what Aristotle did, teaching monarchy (a sort of ultimate plutocracy and oligarchy) as the best form of government. 

Teaching that plutocracy is good means teaching that greed, inequality, inequity, oligarchy and the exploitation of lower classes by higher classes, are the essence of goodness. No better place to show that explicitly, and for all to see, than academia.

Things have improved. When I was in academia I saw extreme abuse akin to slavery, chronically and systematically. All the way to murder (at Stanford, of all places!) I knew very well some of the victims and some of the perpetrators (some of whom got the highest honors, in more than one country). 

Perelman, the top mathematician who was involved directly with some of the same characters I initially innocently befriended, left mathematics as a result. He said he did not want to cause a scandal… (The article I linked to presented Yau and Hawking as friends… they were not. Yau despised Hawking… wrongly so, and i told him.)

In a sense I was even more silent… especially as nobody need to listen to me, nor wanted to. But now, if even the WSJ  talks about it… I may as well lift some of the veil.

None of this is an accident. The present university system is rotten to the core: it teaches delirious hypocrisy and exploitation is the way of wisdom, and to wisdom. No, it’s the way of plutocracy. But such is the goal of present day academia: teaching that plutocracy = wisdom. This is one of the reasons why major dangers, such as the rise of dictators (roughly equivalent and related to the rise of plutocracy), the danger of nuclear war, and the climate catastrophe, have been under-appreciated. This is also why major opportunities were passed… But it is not too late to learn… and the situation has improved: low rung educators can now unionize in top universities…

Patrice Ayme  

Exploiting intellectual workers out of greed is not wise, and the road to hell, because it ensures that it will select for the worst.

Billionaires Avoid Taxes By Borrowing Their Life Style, So Tax Their Borrowing!

Tax the personal borrowing which sustains the billionaires’ lifestyle… as if it were income… because it is! (Put a cap to avoid taxing personal borrowing below the .1% elite, say… Also that does not mean that borrowing for growing a business should be taxed; so for example SpaceX could borrow, not be taxed, but Musk buys for himself a 100 million dollars palace with borrowed money, tax…) OK, I have been saying this for more than a decade and last with:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2021/10/26/a-smarter-suggestion-to-tax-hyper-wealth-tax-borrowed-money-used-as-income-for-consumption/

Democratic Senator Elizabeth Warren@ewarrenDecember 13, 2021: When someone makes it big in America—millionaire big, billionaire big, Person of the Year big—part of it has to include paying it forward so the next kid can get a chance, too.

Elon Musk childishly replied: “You remind me of when I was a kid and my friend’s angry Mom would just randomly yell at everyone for no reason,” he wrote.

“Please don’t call the manager on me, Senator Karen,” he also said. (“Karen” is slang supposed to indicate racist white woman).

Paying taxes is serious business. Civilization depends upon taxation. Because the cancer which kills civilization ifs plutocracy (for example when Rome got infected by plutocracy, it turned from republic to monarchy, and died…) Thus I claim that the fundamental reason for taxation is to PREVENT THE APPARITION OF A PLUTOCRACY (Rome had 100% tax above 50 million dollars).

As it is, Musk could become a trillionaire in dollars, thanks mostly to government subsidies, while paying basically no taxes… and then transmit the whole thing to his armada of children, still paying basically no taxes. And this has already happened: these armadas of descendants of children of billionaires are constituting the core of the Deep State. Example: Anderson Cooper, one of the US TV most celebrated talking head, for years at CNN, is directly descended from what was once the wealthiest family in the US. This sort of inherited money is hidden in plain sight in foundations, anonymous companies, Delaware, etc… Bill Gates’ mom, while a director at IBM, made her son’s, and her family’s fortune by giving Bill the monopoly while contracting with IBM of something the US Federal government funded universities had developed… Etc. Musk’s own fortune has much to do with NASA and then Obama’s policies. NASA basically did much of the fundamental research on landing rockets (see the LEM, Lunar Exploration Module, a Moon landing rocket…), and then gave the contracts…

A gigantic Hawaiian island was bought on 350 million dollars of borrowed money of a billionaire notorious for paying no taxes. Ultimately the non tax paying plutocrats will expropriate us all, and reduce us to living below bridges.

In this exchange, the inability of the otherwise brilliant Musk to raise above primary school level is a very clear example of what happens with oligarchy and plutocracy: individuals who are highly successful in some domain (say milking the government), and thus deduce they are gods of understanding, and the atlases on which Earth rests…. So their very power, which is already too big, feeds their hubris, turning it apocalyptic.

Putin is an example of that hubris characteristic of those who have way too much power: Putin wrote, he says by himself, a 5,000 words historical essay… which brings Putin to the conclusion that whatever is happening in Ukraine is… genocide! Millions of Russians killed! No less! Nobody is going to dare contradict the Czar: world war, here we come! Don’t laugh: the AXIS Beijing-Moscow, although not formal, is a de facto reality…

Musk between 2014 and 2018 made around 15 billion dollars and paid 455 millions in taxes, a tax rate of 3%… More recently he paid ridiculous amounts of taxes, one year just $68,000, while owning an archipelago of palaces (one of them worth around 50 million next to San Francisco), and his private jets, paid by the always generous taxpayers…

This is not just a question of equity for the world population, but of sanity of the world population: the plutocrats, worldwide, as in Russia, control the media, thus cognition, information, deliberation, reflection, even meditation… and of course their own opposition, which the meticulously financed, as George Soros himself explained painstakingly many times over many years…. to his fellow plutocrats, telling them that their own world order depended upon total mastery of all those aspects of their freedom.

History shows vast spans of time, with subjected population, slowly sinking until an adversary invaded and finished the dying civilization.

Musk pretends that he wants to save civilization, and SpaceX, basically the for-profit part of NASA, is a crucial part of this. Musk is a great innovator, like the brilliant Nazi engineers who made liquid hypersonic rockets fly… after nine centuries of solid fuel rockets which could only fly a few miles. But such engineers, in the end, are highly replaceable. If the US government put as much faith and vigor in a controlled thermonuclear fusion research program, we would have such a reactor connected to the grid in a decade (the financial effort on controlled H fusion is certainly of the order of 1.2% of the effort on rockets… And financial, not technological or scientific constraints have been primary, say with ITER, and other H program, and this is why China has caught up…)

What is deadly, for civilization, thus all of us, is the leaders of the world, the plutocratic influencers, a la Musk pushing their oligarchic agenda. For all of Musk’s and his sibling genius, they would have been nothing, had their father not been extremely wealthy… And Obama and before him, the Silicon Valley’s venture capitalist mafia. The latter financed Musk and his brother while they were… illegal aliens. No reconduction to the border, as for normal folks. Instead, they were given US citizenship. We will not say that South African racial masters have little problems finding friends in the US… Oh, well, here I go: I know women of color, and I have myself observed tremendous racism in Stanford, Silicon Valley and Palo Alto, places which I have frequented for much longer than Musk…

But we will say that, be it Soros, Or Musk, or Putin, or Xi, too many individuals with little cognitive power have way too much influence. Primary school with nukes…

Patrice Ayme

Science Fiction Has Arrived To A Planet Near US

We are in a science fiction situation, our spaceship, Earth, is under attack by the aliens who lead us into Armageddon. The CO2 catastrophe is a comet crash in slow motion. The nonlinear effects are sneaking in, like the permafrost gun. But they could explode anytime: permafrost has twice the CO2 content of the present atmosphere… Also the ocean will die from CO2 making carbonic acid, killing the oxygen making plankton. The ocean absorbs around one third of the CO2.

Funny thing is that, once the nonlinear effects kick in bad, it’s exponential, feeding on itself… What are we going to do? We will need to terraform Earth in reverse, using… thermonuclear reactors extracting CO2 from the atmosphere, and sending the CO2 into basaltic rocks, at huge energetic cost. It will work, but we need thermonuclear fusion… first… No other forms of energy will be powerful, and Return On Investment good enough. Here I compute the ROI in AWE (Absolute Worth Energy)… not currency… The ROI on intermittent energy is all too low…

Whether we like it or not, science fiction has arrived to us, as a war of us against ourselves, and the most pleasant way out is more science fiction… Notice in passing that, should a comet appear on a collision trajectory, only thermonuclear bombs could deviate it, or explode it away in divergent bits. No other method could work. So H bombs have their advantages…

Great progress has been made in non-explosive thermonuclear fusion recently in several countries, including China, South Korea, USA… Of course a frantic flurry of anti-thermonuclear articles occured.. Probably paid or influenced by the fossil fuel party… With carefully crafted anti-nuclear titles as in Slate: Future Tense:The Theranos Trial Shows Why We Should Be Suspicious of Nuclear Fusion. By Charles Seife, Dec 08, 2021

… A completely misleading title: actually, Mr. Seife meant “suspicious of nuclear fusion startups”… Now some may wonder why to worry about the cackles of low lives… But then look at the investment: Biden, the big time climate guy, spends countless billions on electric cars and plugs (Elon Musk just said it was a poor allocation of money)… But just not even half a billion on thermonuclear research, all of which constitute contractual obligations, some under international treaties (ITER). The point is that the fossil fuel cacklers have a real influence on planetary steering, because our “leaders” (to use Obama’s self-glorifying grotesquely misleading semantics) are not “leaders” at all, they are just prostitutes paid by those with the most capital, the fossil fuel industry In 2019, around 84% of global primary energy came from coal, oil and gas. The International Monetary Fund recently updated its comprehensive report on global fossil-fuel subsidies. It arrives at a staggering conclusion: In 2017, the world subsidized fossil fuels by $5.2 trillion, equal to roughly 6.5 percent of global GDP. Now of course, The Atlantic (owned by Steve Jobs’ widow, specialist in pro-plutocratic, Plutocratically Correct, window dressing) contest the logic of the IMF, just because it shows too clearly where the power is. The Hidden Subsidy of Fossil Fuels: A new report says that the world subsidized fossil fuels by $5.2 trillion in just one year. But that calculation is less tidy than it seems. By Robinson Meyer…

As officially the part of word GDP of fossil fuels transactions is around 7%, one can see that roughly 15% of world GDP is fossil fuels… So fossil fuels, let alone the financial and diplomatic sectors attached to them, is the most prominent socioeconomic actor of the planet. It is naive to believe it does not control any croaks coming out of famous ecologists [1]. 

And this is why governments have invested so little in all things civil nuclear. There are exceptions, namely in countries not controlled by the Western plutocratic mafia: China, India, Korea… There it’s the opposite, of course. China is at the forefront to the world’s effort on Thorium reactors and thermonuclear fusion…

Our “leaders” …to use again Obama’s self-glorifying grotesquely misleading semantics, hiding his ignorance, servility, but not crass hubris… are not “leaders” at all, they are just prostitutes paid by those with the most capital, who control their future and that of their well-compensated “experts”.

The main criterion then, to be considered an expert by the world’s propaganda machinery, including the plutocratic universities, becomes not just “expertise” per se, but how the would-be “expert”, to be called upon, by the powers that be, will serve the principals, namely those who pull the strings… of the world.

So silly gutter logic has an influence on our “leaders” minds: after all, that’s where they live… thus all they can understand, however their good will… Common citizens, forced to live in the gutter by the rats employed by the billionaire class, and their hidden descendants, have started to notice this, and are replying in kind, rat to rat. It is high time…

Yet, the reality is, that we need expertise like never before, and it better be correct. Our science fiction starship, the biosphere of planet Earth, is severely compromised by our activities, and even its oxygen supply is threatened…

Earth Out Of Oxygen: GLOBAL HYPOXIA

Beauty: don’t be home without it!

Earth is not just an habitacle, it is also where all values dwell, starting with beauty and love. Enormous warming and acidity in oceans cannot be avoided anymore, but at least we can still ensures we stay stuck with Jurassic conditions… Let’s do it!

Patrice Ayme

[1] It was apparently well known, among the governing and intelligentsia circles of France, that Nicolas Hulot, a quasi-saint of ecology who created a famous ecological TV series, Ushuaia, was a sex pervert inclined to rape teenagers among other exploits of a Jurassic nature… However, so powerful are the modern establishments and the solidarity, let alone conspiracy atmosphere they bring, that the perversions of Mr. Hulot stayed a secret for decades… Even though a 19 year old, granddaughter of a French president, complained to plenty of establishment people. She was apparently drugged and then raped. When she finally formally prosecuted the matter, the facts were prescribed… But this is just one case out of many and, decades later, the French police has started what it claims to be a systematic inquiry.

Some may say that they don’t see what a sexually perverted creep does in this general picture. However the establishment is excellent at pushing forward flawed characters, not just from affinity for them (qui se ressemble, s’assemble), but also because this way the establishment, under the implicit threat of blackmaily can make them do whatever they want.   

So, among other honors and power positions, all over the world, Nicolas Hulot, the hugely popular green activist was named ecology minister in May 2017.  One of Hulot’s victims said that two or three people had advised her while in Costa Rica: “’Avoid situations where you are alone with him. If you’re working, it’s in the hotel restaurant, not in your room. When you are on the boat, lock your cabin at night. Don’t open if he knocks on your door at night, pretend to be asleep.’ There was an ecosystem around this personality that allowed this abuse.”

The leadership of this planet is an ecosystem we have to get rid of, lest they rid of our beautiful life… As they already tried with COVID, insisting on masks and lockdowns, instead of ventilation, HEPA filters and vaccine developments (most vaccines were developed by Trump, Putin and Xi, so to speak; Trump financed 20 of them. How many vaccines did the European Union finance, in 2020? In truth, zero. The EU commission authorized 4 vaccines so far. Three of them financed by Trump, and the fourth financed by Trump and UK PM Boris Johnson (not my friend)… the latter separately financed a French vaccine that neither the EU nor France financed… The US Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine got billions from Trump, but initially was a German startup vaccine… Not financed by EU or Germany! This grotesque situation belongs to a science fiction novel, where the villains present themselves as the opposite of what they truly are, and get adulated by the stupid masses…

Without Fundamental Research, World Is Heading Towards Energy Disaster

The economy and health (of the world) has no future, if new clean, low carbon base energy sources are not developed for  primary energy production. That means hydrogen (with derivatives) and nuclear (including thorium and high efficiency high temperature small reactors). Maybe  immense storage batteries are developable too, if breakthroughs are possible and happen… But we don’t really know if science fiction batteries could be made…

Now the point is this: hydrogen and nuclear must be developed, but government assisted research is needed. Otherwise what will happen is a squeeze between increasingly expensive fossil fuels, in which not enough investments happened (for good reasons, but that’s besides the point) and intermittent energy, which can’t replace the fossils…

As can be seen, INTERMITTENT energy (wind and solar) amount to nearly nothing. If we were only looking at electricity production, wind and solar would be more important, but still pretty ridiculous…

Such research should be a major part of the economy, but it is not. Instead all ponder if one more gas pipeline from dictator Putin to Europe should be made to flow… While conveniently avoiding Ukraine… Enabling an attack there.

These questions may not look economical and social… But they have the potential of dominating the economy, and society, short range and long term.  Complementing the intermittent energy production with hydrogen had been delayed too long. Unfortunately, the initial high scientific budget for new energy research shrank to nearly nothing, in the last version of the spending bill presented by the government. 

Without much more fundamental research, disaster is coming.

And let’s say it’s research of the details: we know hydrogen and nuclear work. It’s just a matter of figuring out the details. On the fundamental research front, LLL, Lawrence Livermore Laboratory, a US government facility just produced the first thermonuclear energy positive reaction…, and that by a factor of five in the energy directly absorbed by the imploding Deuterium-Tritium pellet [1]. Temperature was in excess of 100 millions Kelvin and pressure in excess of 100 million atmospheres… Only government labs can afford to get that fundamental…

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Total energy release from fusion: 1.3 megajoule, total laser energy input, 1.9 megajoule…  

Quantum Weirdness, Or Not?

This is a foretaste of (more of) my own considerations on the subject of nonlocality.

A particular interferometer (below) is one reason why I believe in nonlocality, bomb or no bomb (see below for explosive considerations…).

Nonlocality is pretty obvious with a pinhole: the photon/electron spreads after it, it has “sensed” the size of the hole: sensing at a distance, that’s nonlocal.
The Quantum formalism, namely waves all over, parametrized with time, is intrinsically nonlocal.

And what’s wrong with nonlocality, anyway? I ask Einstein.
Nonlocality is how to get out of the homunculus theory… Namely that smaller is just like big, except smaller, ad infinitum…
Instead nonlocality says that smaller is everywhere… No homunculus anymore… The paradox, nonlocality, becomes the solution to this non sequitur, this infinite logical loop, that “smaller is just the same“… We know, from General Relativity, that smaller at some point becomes different: Planck length…

In the Mach-Zehnder Interferometer, Ian says below, that ”it seems the wave goes both ways but the photon, which acts as a particle, can only go one way.” How do we know that? That the photon acts like a “particle”, while in flight? As  Niels Bohr would point out, we have not grabbed a photon in flight. That the photon is received and emitted as a particle: we know that. It does not mean it’s a particle in flight, though… I call that Einstein’s Error:

EINSTEIN’S ERROR: The Multiverse

In 1905, his so-called Wonder Year, Albert Einstein presented a theory of the photoelectric effect. The new idea came in just two lines. However I boldly claim that Einstein’s theory of the photoelectric effect, although crucially correct, was also crucially wrong. Einstein said something he did not need to say, introducing as a fact the theory that there is such a thing as a particle-in-flight. Etc.:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/einsteins-error-the-multiverse/

ianmillerblog

How can you test something without touching it with anything, even a single photon? Here is one of the weirder aspects of quantum mechanics. First, we need a tool, and we use the Mach-Zehnder interferometer, which is illustrated as follows:

There is a source that sends individual photons to a beam splitter (BS1), which divides the beam into two sub-beams, each of which proceed to a mirror that redirects them to meet at another beam splitter (BS2). The path lengths of the two sub-beams are exactly the same (in practice a little adjustment may be needed to get this to work). Each sub-beam (say R and T for reflectance and transmitted at BS1) is reflected once by a mirror. When reflected, they sustain a phase shift of π, and R sustains such a phase shift at BS1. At BS2, the waves going to D1 both have had two reflections, so…

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Only Knowledge Is Truly Noble

The long beaks of Black Plague doctors, circa 1348 CE, ensured social distancing, so did their sticks. Goggles glasses integrated to Plague Personal Protection Equipment covering the entire body, prevented the Plague to enter through the eyes… Similarly, COVID can enter the body through the eyes, but Twenty-First Century medical authorities forgot to consult with their Fourteenth Century peers…

Black Plague doctors had indeed had biocide agents in their respirators… Doctors got little infection, and nobles… not at all.

Nobles were socially distant in their castles and well protected from rats and their fleas by armies of domesticated dogs, cats, civettes, hawks, falcons and owls, etc…

No nobles were injured in that Black Plague experiment…

Middle Age authorities imposed blockades on the penalty of instant death from skilled archery… To go from Marseilles to Aix was impossible, as archers had orders to shoot on sight. But the isolation from town to town mostly failed… In the end. But it delayed the pandemic, which took a couple of years to spread from Marseilles, where it arrived by boat, and the rest of Western Europe. Quarantine initially failed, because contaminated goods were allowed on the land, and transmitted disease, even if no human directly did. 

As far as transmission of infection was concerned, much was known: Pericles, 25 centuries ago, was tried for ignoring basic rules against infection, while a “plague” had started in Athens, bringing a relatively enormous loss of lives… In Pericles’ defense that when Athens was besieged… But ha should have anticipated this, as top general, and he recognized he anticipated everything in the war with Sparta, “but not a pandemic”.

Red hot irons were used against infection, and people were injected with smallpox even around 1700… (Very deadly…) Washing hands was more problematic, water was not necessarily clean, they would have had to use wine…

***

Friend Ian Miller observed: “So social distancing works!”

Yes! Absolutely! Social distancing is a noble pursuit, it saves lives, civilization, now or in the future, I have ruled aristocratically all my life! But the notion of nobility is deeper and more subtle than usually considered…

Noble, nobilitas actually comes from: *gnobilis, literally “knowable,” from gnoscere “to come to know,”

We owe everything to the most noble instincts, even the flag of the USA. The basic artistic idea comes from the Franks, Seventh Century, let me present to you the Coat of Arms of Charles Martel (who famously crushed two giant Islamist invasions of Francia : 

America is a European colony in more ways than one… And it is the Franks who introduced the concept of “Europe”, in the modern sense…

Plato believed that societies should be ruled by philosopher-kings… But of course that was a self-contradictory notion: A king is a power center of one, an autocrat, fundamentally, even for the best, an assassin. A philosopher is the one who rules over wisdom, that is knowledge, and is, in turn, ruled by them. Fundamentally completely ineffectual at ruling over men.

The most advanced societies should be ruled, not by one self-declared super-smart monkey, as Russia and China are, but should be ruled, not by monkey, but by the best and highest ways, namely the most intelligent ones. “Ways” are those of the multitude, the mores, morality. In other words, the light of the most knowledgeable, the most noble take a long time to reach the multitude.. But that’s how civilization advances. Having one person impose more advanced and clever ways is tempting and can superficially work, as in the cases of Caesar, Clovis, Bathilde, Charlemagne, Ivan the Terrible, Peter the Great, etc. But for one enlightened, progressive ruler, one hundred vicious autocrats blossom (even short term apparent progress, for example Augustus, and many other Roman emperors, is followed by long term disaster). 

The point that Plato forgot, in his hatred of democracy, is that the notion of king, that of physical power on subjects is not… noble, not knowledgeable, as it ignores the blatant ethological fact that humans are not made to be ruled…  

Only knowledge is truly noble.

Knowledge starts with as little as one, it’s true… but new knowledge needs peer review, and is only validated by the multitude.

Forget philosopher-kings. Embrace knowledge,, knowledge of facts, knowledge of logic, knowledge of emotions, knowledge of the crowds… Next we will fustigate Elon Musk’s blatant ageism… and hubris, which reminds us of why, and how plutocracy makes even the best, into evil beasts…. 

Patrice Ayme