Was Putin Tricked Into Attacking Ukraine?

[The title above was “restricted for diffusion” or “shadow banned” on the Internet; a more accurate title should have been: Was Putin Deliberately Misled By His Own Intelligence Services Into Attacking Ukraine? Shadow banning is ultra modern censorship: learn everything about some brainless celebrities, famous for being famous, who are “trending”, and learn not to care about anything else]

Putin arrested several of his top intelligence officers, for misleading him about the situation in Ukraine. Putin and his top people had been told it would take five days at most to defeat Ukraine. One may wonder if those officers were genuinely in error, or told Putin stories which he did not just want to hear, but also would bring him to launch a war so big that he could not win it. Because that was the only path to regime change, the way those intelligence officers looked at it.

Putin is most vile, but the tyrant is too well defended for a direct coup or assasination: his close guard of millionaires and billionaires are personally tied to him, and some were his accomplices not just from the KGB, but all the way in Saint Petersburg since before Putin became a lawyer! So how to bring him down? By enticing the tyrant to make a terrible mistake by making him believe he was advancing his dream of Russian hyper power while engaging in a war crime he could not fail to profit from. 

 

Real Russian patriots will resist the Putin tyranny by sabotaging it. Sabotaging a tyranny is what real patriots do, it happened in Nazi Germany extensively and in various ways. Sabotage in its simplest form is lack of zeal… which can show up as “low morale” of troops engaged in combat. 

The most elite, thus fanatical troops engaged by Putin suffered heavy losses during their assault on Kyiv. The same phenomenon happened with Nazi Germany: 50,000 of the most dedicated Nazis died during the battle of France of May-June 1940, followed by another victory less than a year later in Crete, where most Nazi paratroopers died while winning. At Stalingrad, the elite Nazi Sixth Army was annihilated. Too many dead elite Nazis weakened considerably the might of Hitler’s forces, and it was even worse with pilots (who couldn’t train from lack of fuel after declaring war to their ally the USSR).

 

In the grand scheme of things, the nuclear armed tyrannies are an unsustainable danger for democracy. When France and Britain declared war to Hitler in 1939, the latter was not ready. Nor was Putin.

 

So one may wonder about the possibility of the ultimate sabotage: what if elements opposed to Putin within Russia had deliberately misrepresented the situation to Putin so that the tyrant would engage in a war too ambitious for him to win? Indeed, if Putin had concentrated all his elite forces on the Donbas from the start, he could have won. But now most of these forces are severely degraded. Are only nukes left to exhibit some Kremlin tyrannical superiority?

 

Oooppsss… Russian T 72 tank experiencing “tandem” anti-tank warheads. Putin came to believe Ukraine was full of Nazis… thus stupid brutish orcs… it turns out the orcs were his own troops. In the city of Bucha alone, ten Russian soldiers were already thoroughly identified as war criminals. One used to be a firefighter in Siberia…

This is what Deep Machiavellian really means. Now were some US Deep State actors involved into this? Something like that happened in 1914 (Colonel House; maybe president Wilson himself), and in the ramp up to World War Two (FDR, who wanted to own the French empire replaced his anti-Nazi ambassadors by pro-Nazi ambassador to the Reich and UK… He also sent his right hand man… a four star admiral to Vichy). Could it be that Biden was encouraged to show weakness in Afghanistan?… to encourage Putin into believing the US, thus NATO, was scared, weak and senile? Time may tell…

Patrice Ayme

WHERE HATE COMES FROM (Basic)

Put too many rats in a cage, and they will fight in the most vicious manner, to death. 

Humans are no different. The cage is the planet. The planet can probably sustain, long term, with present technology, only a fraction of the existing human population. A consequence is the CO2 crisis, and several other pollution crises. The end product of these crises will be a devastated biosphere where advanced animal life will be difficult, if at all possible.

Thus there is only one optimal outcome: better technology… the very factor which makes hate problematic at this point of evolution.

Ecological crises have dominated human evolution for hundreds of thousands of years, ever since our ancestors became the dominant predators. As humans imploded the ecology, evolution discovered that it was more conducive to survival of the fittest to eliminate surpluses of humanity before eliminating the ecology supporting said humanity. This is how hatred became a dominant human instinct. Hate entices humans to kill humans. Hate renders highly performing humanity possible. Hate is an adaptative behavior so ingrained it became an instinct.

Astute observers will remember that ethologists also discovered that chimpanzees conducted wars of extermination in the next valley over. There too the deep root is the ecology… and this shows that hate is not just a human instinct, but most ancient. 

Add to this propensity for hatred the fact human beings are not just made to be free, but perform best when they are free. Thus humans hate to see their freedom curtailled. Moreover groups of free humans think in parallel, not in series, and thus are more intelligent.

As oligarchy, propped by ever more powerful technology, grows, so does hatred against those who rule. Hatred grows, both in those who see their freedom curtailled, and in those who see the dowthrodden rise against the privileges of the upper crust. And hatred tends to be fungible: once it has arisen, it goes around. 

Nothing new in the basic psychology, but, as Vlad the Mad is keen to remind us from the Kremlin… we have nukes now, and weapons like you have never seen before. This makes the full enjoyment of hate impossible, as, like the thugs around Putin remind us, “humanity could be turned into radioactive ashes“. 

***

So what to do practically? 

One has to understand that hate has a life of its own, once it is born. Understand also that hate has deep roots, reasons of its own. And that it is even noble in some sense: who doesn’t want to save the ecology? Well, hate wants to save it. Thus if one wants to prevent hate, one has to destroy the roots, and the processes which could lead to even more roots.

For example, when it became clear that the KGB/FSB, the Soviet-Russian secret police, was behind the rise of Putin, and once it became clear that they would do anything to grab power (the bombings in Russia and the Chechen genocidal war), it should also have been clear that, to feed Putin and his thesis that the disappearance of the genocidal USSR was the greatest tragedy of the 20C, was to feed hate large enough for a world war. I wrote about this for decades, so I was not surprised when it happened, as I had predicted.

The way to prevent Putin was to put maximum pressure on his regime from the start. The same applies to Xi’s genocidal regime. But what have we been doing? The opposite!

Hate is the gift which keeps on giving, we are getting smothered by its generosity. But the way out is not to hate hate, but to love sustainable solutions before they become problems.

Patrice Ayme

P/S: The first part above was published as a comment in NYT on “Where Does All That Hate We Feel Come From?“April 27, 2022 By Thomas B. Edsall starting with: 

“The story of the 21st century is less a story about exponential population growth than it is a story about differential growth — marked by a stark divide between the world’s richest and poorest countries,” Jennifer Sciubba, a professor of international studies at Rhodes College, writes in her new book, “8 Billion and Counting: How Sex, Death and Migration Shape Our World.”

Much of that differential is driven by tech prowess (for example hydrocarbon extraction is highly automatized, and involves relatively few, very well paid workers, so it encourages concentrations of wealth and power)… But also by hate, since, as we sketched tech to increase hate (just as it increases goodness and other extremes… but the equivallent of a nuclear bomb doesn’t exist with love!).

If I ate all the grass, my species would die off. Fortunately, predators will eat enough of my kind to prevent this. And who will kill the predators, if there are too many? Humans… Who also eat grass! We need something, somebody, to kill humans!

Truth Is Not Always Palatable At First Sight

Truth may be disgusting, but it is the truth. Musk is buying Twitter, to save free speech, and prevent intellectual fascism (paraphrasing, he says, and it’s likely) [1].

Last week, Facebook told me, twice, that I was banned for thirty days. I disagreed and then: Your post is back on Facebook.
We’re sorry we got this wrong. We reviewed your post again and it does follow our Community Standards.
We appreciate you taking the time to request a review. Your feedback helps us do better.
You disagreed with the decision. Thanks for your feedback. We use it.

***

Shadow banning is used massively on the Internet, and not just when reviewing tweets.

For example BING, Gates’ and Duck Duck Go’s search engine shadow ban me completely. Elon Musk, Apr 22: shadow ban council reviewing tweet …

A traditional leitmotiv of the pseudo-left: “If we don’t confront hateful speech, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and xenophobia become normalized.” This sentence equates “hateful speech”, fear of homosexuals, fear of transgender people and fear of strangers with fear of “Islam”.
It implicitly equates natural biological conditions and a particular type of ideology which advocates to kill (!) some categories of people (including homosexuals, “apostates”, pagans, polytheists, etc.). This is a category error. And why just Islam? I have Christianophobia, and my ancestors had it for generations: does that make us racist?

There are more than 100 types of “Islam”. Fearing the sort of Islam found in Arabia is only rational, and should not be equated to “hateful speech”. Arguably “hating” a regime such as the Islamist regime in Saudi Arabia, which executes bloggers for advocating democracy rather than Salafist islam is to be more commended than feared, by those who claim to be “antifascist”.

The author claims that “ being denied a platform is not a violation of one’s rights.” Well, the ancient Athenians made “equal speech” part of democratic rights. Equal right of speech was called “isegoria”. It is industrially violated nowadays. And this is used to manufacture not just consent, but minds.

Official media, such as the New York Times, have special rights (given by the government, such as being part of the White House press Pool). In exchange, they should have the fiduciary duty to give equal comment rights to all honorable citizens in good standing. This is not the case: although a full subscriber to the New York Times for decades, it had banned all my comments in the last four years (something it didn’t even do when I disagreed with the Iraq invasion by the US in 2003, and the NYT supported it!)

It is my observation that, by censoring commenters who disagreed, say, with the nature of Quantitative Easing (which was manufactured to serve the wealthiest people on earth), the media has been able to control who said what. In the USA, all the media is either owned or controlled by plutocrats (yes, even ostensibly public NPR and PBS).

The Electoral College has been thoroughly debated. It was instituted to prevent one state to dominate the Union. If Britain feels dictated by the EU, certainly the rest of the USA should feel dominated by California, which voted massively for Clinton. However, that was an interested and biased vote. California’s monopoly tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook, Oracle, Intel, Salesforce, etc.), which often double as spy agencies, have been massively favored by the Obama administration, at the cost not just of the USA, but of the entire planet. The Electoral College compensates for that manufactured electorate, bought by monopolists.

Calling automatically the enemies of media which are fake, lie, dissemble, shun alternative knowledge, and serve the wealthiest, “fascist” is itself fascist.
Revealing truth is the only activity which is genuinely antifascist.
Patrice Ayme

I have come across colossal eco hypocrites with fleets of electric cars, mansions in the Sierra, advising presidents (French and US). Had big fights… Gates of Hell used a foundation to make stocks he personally owned more valuable… Elon Musk made fun of Bill Gates (who bans me) because Gates shorted, by billions of dollars, ecological stocks, including Tesla. Here is Musk’s retort:

Elon Musk@elonmusk, Apr 22: in case u need to lose a boner fast:

[1] I used to be adverse to Musk, because of his collusion with the Obama administration. However, meanwhile, Musk proved to be, indeed, and excellent technologist… He made rockets land again and again and again… changing the cost of access to space… and Tesla makes the best batteries….

Schröder, Merkel, Plutocracy: New York Times Censorship Series

As long as the West gives a billion dollars a day to Putin, by purchasing Russian hydrocarbons, Putin knows the West is not serious about opposing him. The Russian economy has become a war economy, with weapons factories going 24/7. Paradoxically, the Western sanctions help that way. So everybody is happy: Putin runs a stronger and more lethal dictatorship, and failed to conquer Ukraine in a clean manner, enabling him to destroy it completely instead… which is what he truly wants to do [1].

Corruption in politicians is a big problem. Politicians should be legally obligated not to profit from the office they have been elected, or selected for… For the rest of their lives.

Putin genocides in Chechnya and Ukraine are part and parcel of the general plutocratic problem which ruins the West, democracy, the climate, and even the biosphere. Putin was long the darling of the WEF, World Economic Forum and Davos. The WEF conspiracy to feed and empower the Russian oligarchy, headed by the KGB/FSB, dates from the 1990s. Putin should have become known as a genocidal tyrant after he killed one Chechen out of six.

However, Germany made itself fully dependent upon the genocidal tyrant, years after the genocide, and while fully cognisant of said genocide. It was apparently assumed by German leaders that greed would fix hate, and the will to kill. Now Germany and other European genocidal collaborators are sending more than a billion dollars a day to feed the genocidal tyrant’s war crime factory.

In light of this, and her personal, murky history, one may wonder whether Angela Merkel was not a double agent (truly working for Putin’s KGB). She declared that, when the KGB approached her, she brushed them off by telling them that “she talked too much”. This sounds like disinformation to me: Merkel knew that the fact that the KGB tried to recruit her would come up, so she planted plausible denial. She had junior dictatorial positions and became spokesperson for the Stalinian East German state. Putin and his Western enablers have to be stopped, arrested.

***

The preceding comment to an article about the corruption of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder,was censored by the New York Times. Why, we don’t know. Was it because I insinuated that Putin was an adored child and instrument of the WEF?

Censoring without good legal basis should be illegal, be it on Internet social media, or conventional media. Censorship can be used to steer public opinion, which is a violation of democracy. Moreover media can get to know some ideas and then steal them (personally observed many times). For example I will not be surprised that in a distant future, if higher ups decided she is past her expiration date, the same ideas will surface about Merkel (I had excoriated Schröder and his greed for years, as I had that of Obama, etc.)

***

Here are extracts of

The Former Chancellor Who Became Putin’s Man in Germany
Gerhard Schröder, who is paid almost $1 million a year by Russian-controlled energy companies, has become a pariah. But he is also a symbol of Germany’s Russia policy. (April 23, 2022.)

HANOVER, Germany — On the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, 17 days after Gerhard Schröder left office as chancellor of Germany, he got a call on his cellphone. It was his friend President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Putin was pressing Mr. Schröder to accept an offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany.

“Are you afraid to work for us?” Mr. Putin had joked. Mr. Schröder might well have been, given the appearance of possible impropriety — the pipeline he was now being asked to head had been agreed to in the final weeks of his chancellorship, with his strong support.

He took the job anyway.

Seventeen years later, the former chancellor, who recounted the events himself in a pair of rare interviews, remains as defiant as ever…

… Germany is deeply reliant on Russian gas, giving Mr. Putin coercive leverage over Europe while filling the Kremlin’s war chest.

That dependency grew out of a German belief — embraced by a long succession of chancellors, industry leaders, journalists and the public — that a Russia bound in trade would have too much to risk in conflict with Europe, making Germany more secure while also profiting its economy.

“He took advantage of the reputation and influence of the chancellor’s office and offered himself up as an agent for Russian interests to get rich,” said Norbert Röttgen, a conservative lawmaker, former minister and longtime Russia hawk.

…Mr. Schröder, now 78, spoke with undiminished swagger, cracking jokes but arguing in essence that, well, if he got rich, then so did his country. When it came to Russian gas, everyone was on board: “They all went along with it for the last 30 years,” he said. “But suddenly everyone knows better.”….

…Mr. Schröder is useful to the Russian leader as a cat’s paw to further his own interest in hooking Germany on cheap Russian gas.

Germany’s reliance on Russian gas surged to 55 percent before Russia’s attack on Ukraine began in February, from 39 percent in 2011, amounting to 200 million euros, or about $220 million, in energy payments every day to Russia.

It has helped make Mr. Putin perhaps one of the world’s richest men, has buoyed his otherwise feeble economy, and has enabled and emboldened him to pursue his aggression in Ukraine

Even as Mr. Putin was massing troops on the Ukraine border last fall, Mr. Schröder visited the Russian leader in Sochi, one of Mr. Putin’s favorite retreats, across from the Black Sea coast that Russian forces are now trying to rip from Ukraine.

Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine began, the entire staff of Mr. Schröder’s parliamentary office resigned in protest, including his chief of staff and speechwriter of 20 years, who had been with him since his days as chancellor.

He relinquished his honorary citizenship in Hanover before his home city could strip it from him — something it last did, posthumously, to Adolf Hitler.

But Mr. Schröder is undaunted. He remains chairman of the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning about $270,000 a year, and served as head of the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2…

Three weeks before Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, Gazprom — the Soviet energy ministry turned Russian state-controlled gas company, which owns 51 percent of Nord Stream and all of Nord Stream 2 — announced that Mr. Schröder would join its board, too… since 2017 he has also presided over the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft, earning another $600,000 a year, according to public records, on top of his monthly $9,000 government stipend as former chancellor.

But even his fiercest critics acknowledge that Mr. Schröder’s close and lucrative dealings with Russia are also emblematic of his country’s decades-old approach of engagement with Russia. Lobbied aggressively by Germany’s export industry and cheered on by labor unions, successive chancellors, including Ms. Merkel, collectively engineered Germany’s dependency on Russian energy.

“Schröder is the tip of the iceberg,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former ambassador to the United States and veteran diplomat. “But there is a whole iceberg below him.”

Matthias Warnig, the chief executive of Nord Stream 2, who took part in 19 of the meetings in the report, has acknowledged having been a former spy of the Stasi, the former secret police of Communist East Germany. Stasi records show that, in February 1988, both he and Mr. Putin, when he was stationed in Dresden as a K.G.B. officer, were awarded medals for their service. But Mr. Warnig has denied reports that he had recruited spies for Mr. Putin in their old days.

In February 2015, Mr. Schröder took Mr. Warnig to see Mr. Gabriel to discuss cooperation with Russia, according to the list of meetings provided in the report. He also accompanied Nord Stream 2 executives to see Mr. Steinmeier’s ambassadors to Moscow and Brussels at the time.

Steinmeier, who is Germany’s president told the NYT: added: “Should you put my visits and meetings in Russia in a different context, I want to inform you now that I will initiate legal steps.”

Is it why the NYT decided it shouldn’t publish my assertion of the obvious: Merkel a traitor?

Nord Stream 2 was approved in June 2015, the same year that Gazprom was also allowed under the Merkel government to buy Germany’s biggest strategic gas-storage facility, where it has kept levels of gas conspicuously low for the past year in what may have been preparation for providing leverage for Mr. Putin in his war.

But Mr. Schröder said he was unbothered by the growing dependency, or by American and Eastern European warnings about Mr. Putin weaponizing energy supplies.

German Chancellor Schröder explained the thesis that, while there may be masters and slaves, masters depend as much upon those they enslave, because they couldn’t be wealthy without them… So Putin may have enslaved Germany, but Putin needs his slave.

Just the boyfriend I needed! Chancellor Schröder, left, with Putin: make me rich, and you can kill whoever you want!

[1]  Khrushchev, an Ukrainian, was the mentor of Brezhnev, another Ukrainian. Putin is very aware of this, and apparently, ressents it (Putin has different ethnic roots).

No Faith, No Thought

Takeaways: Faith is the complete trust or confidence in someone or something. It is at the core of what is called thinking (present day AI is primitive in the sense that it does not have to use faith).

It is traditional to oppose reason based thinking, with “faith” (typically faith in the Abrahamist religion, which is supposed to be above any suspicion). However, that opposition is an illusion, and a strategic error in deploying the advancement of understanding: faith is used constantly, in minute but crucial ways, because we cannot verify everything, all the time. 

If using faith is ubiquitous in life, in minor and major ways, and everything in between, it, and the way it is created, should be examined thoroughly, just as the rest of life. There should be no exception, and even the gods should be examined. No exception for the faith of fanatics [1]. 

When we walk we walk, we take it on faith that we know how to walk. Opposing reason and faith is an example of obsolete thinking. As everything that is obsolete, it hinders the progress of Enlightenment. 

***

Too Much Faith In Some Elements Of Mathematics Can Hurt Mathematics:

Euclid’s elements are generally viewed as the model of what reason should be: everything is deduced from five set theoretical axioms and five geometric “postulates”.  At least, that’s what was believed for more than 20 centuries. Even Euclid’s elements were full of faith: it turned out that many crucial assumptions were missed among said axioms and postulates. When Hilbert reviewed Euclidean geometry, he posited twenty assumptions…then others intervened, such as the famous Polish mathematician Tarsky, who postulated other axioms for Euclidean geometry… which did other things Hilbert couldn’t do (going from second order to first order logic, etc.)…

So, in the end, the situation with the most basic geometry was revealed to be much more complicated than was assumed for 24 centuries… To phrase it differently, what was viewed as the archetype of reason, rested on faith to a surprising degree. 

That faith was far from innocuous, it had a fascist aspect: the obsession with Euclidean geometry. Indeed, why should one only do geometry on a plane? A century before Euclid, Greek mathematicians had thought about making geometry on a sphere, or a saddle: out of that came something very practical: the size of the Earth, and the sizes and distances of the Moon, and the Sun (basically proving the heliocentric theory, if one thought about it deeply)… All of which was done at the same time as Euclid, thanks to a Marseillais…

The faith in the perfection of Euclidean geometry had then, for similar reasons to the faith in whomever or whatever, the effect of depriving more worthy subjects.

Similar shortcomings were revealed in Set Theory, making Bertrand Russell famous… A modern pirouette is to use so-called “NAIVE Set Theory” and ignore subtleties like sets which are not elements of themselves…   

Basic arithmetic was deficient too: it turns out that traditional arithmetic assumed implicitly something called the Archimedean Axiom, the violation of which creates infinitesimal and infinite numbers (that’s called non-standard arithmetic). 

The reaction to all this, in the end, was more trust and less verification. Although mathematical logic kept on growing inside mysterious thickets, real mathematicians (if I dare to use the expression) decided to ride their faith in the rigor of mathematics until hell and high waters: instead of establishing the deepest foundations, mathematicians decided to explore the complexity of imaginable foundations. Category Theory became the powerful queen of math, developing a gigantic theoretical castle of theories floating up in the air. Never mind if CT is really true or not: all the proof we need is in the complication it handles with . In other words, LOGIC BECAME LOCAL.

Don’t expect all mathematicians to understand much of the preceding: their craft depends on believing their faith in mathematics is no faith, but megalomaniac certainty. 

***

Not all faiths are good all the time. Faith can be misused by plutocracy. An example is Abrahamism, whose basic foundation is a criminal folly that binds: if the boSS orders you to kill a child, even your child, you should obey, no question asked. So Abraham ties up is fully conscious son to execute him, because a god in his head told him so. It is impossible to make more vile, and thus it is an excellent foundation for a religion which killed at least dozens of millions of people directly, and much more indirectly, by being the mythology of plutocracy… Yet, misuse of the faith instinct does not mean that we can do without it:

***

Beauty is to some extent in the eye of the beholder, and so is greatly a matter of faith.

The FAITH INSTINCT Is Necessary For Thinking:

René Descartes sought to doubt the truth of all beliefs in order to determine which he could be certain were true. Descartes’ statement, “Cogito ergo sum” (I think, therefore I am), in its fuller version reads: “dubito ergo cogito, cogito ergo sum” (“I doubt therefore I think, I think therefore I exist”). What Descartes is talking about is the fact that thinking consists in adjudicating reality, and this requires first doubting all evidence presented. 

My example, as usual, is trail running: on a roaring basis, a torrent of information is presented to the visual system, with the question of branch vs root vs shadow vs ground depression vs ground prominence vs snake vs where to put foot next analyzed and debated in real time by various part of the brain, which do not even have time to synchronize and cohere. So doubt figures prominently all too often when trail running, and doubt is processed too fast for global consciousness, only local consciousness can process it, and generally too slowly to override automatic systems [2].

After we have doubted all relevant elements, we think, that is we decide what is real and what is not real. 

Thus, we certainly must have faith, faith in what we decided is true, if we want to think: not everything can be doubted 24/7 (Cartesian doubt is to be used parsimoniously).

Belief in a mind-independent reality is itself an act of faith…. But one well supported by facts…

Thinking without faith is like flying without air. Can’t be done, without redefining flying, or thinking first.

Nathalie Delima Graza: “or just like put your faith in parachute and trust in it.”

Faith is when we decide reality: experienced parachutists know that parachutes generally work… but they also know they do not always work, and that’s why they often wear another chute… Trust, but not fully. Cartesian doubt was to distrust everything 24/7… But it can’t be done! Hence the use of faith… Fisth is when we decide reality.

Bertrand Russel was superficially full of faith… against faith. Said he:

“All faiths do harm.” Here is Bertrand Russell in full: “All faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.”

— Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), Ch. VII: Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?, p. 213

We may not speak of faith, but we practice it. Bertrand Russel was full of faith, and also, hot air: during World War One, he believed, he had faith, that Europe would be better off under the Kaiser’s fascist boot. British justice was unimpressed, and put him in prison for a very long time, for this ludicrous and war criminality promoting opinion… He later tried to redeem himself with anti-nuke, anti-Vietnam War positions…

Can anything be rescued from Russell’s statement above? Sure. Any faith where one “substitutes emotion for evidence” should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not that it is always bad: emotion has a logic of its own.

My point is that, contrarily to what Russell asserts, most faiths have evidence. No evidence that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse… But that Muhammad’s religion, in some, amd many, ways is a good thing (for example it brought down the murder of girls, and improved the treatment of slave girls)…

By admitting that faith is not just good, but indispensable, and that most faiths have evidence to support themselves, that faith is just an indispensable abbreviation and determination of thought, we are far from giving succor to the fanatics and those who disrespect critical thinking. Verily, just the opposite. We deprive those with lethal and unjustifiable faith (such as faith in tyrant Putin)… of the argument that everybody has a sacred right to all and any faith… Instead we point out that faith has to be examined, like everything else, and actually more than anything else.

An example of unhinged faith is that HAARP technology and its ability “to accelerate cataclysms“. High Altitude Aurora Research Project could do no such thing. At best, create a little artificial aurora.

Hugo Chavez, an uneducated tropical tyrant, believed Northern Lights (Aurora) launched earthquakes… Because he was told so by other fools, not knowing the subtleties of Alaskan politics, among other things he didn’t know… (The Alaskan senior Senator wanted the government to spend in his state. HAAARP cost 300 millions, and then provided employment…)

Faiths have their uses: believing HAARP could launch nine Richter quakes, provides believers with the illusion that their complete lack of scientific knowledge and scientific common sense is an excellent thing, as it made them superior to Physics PhD…. And freed them from scientific reason in myriad ways…

Those who believe Putin is not a genocidal tyrant, but a worthy president also tend to believe that a Kremlin centered empire will provide them with glory, empire, or a general way to criticize “the West” without thinking too hard. 

Faith is actually what enables thinking to decide, saving energy, but most importantly, having decided reality, enables the brain to switch to implementation of the chosen strategy.

Faith in others is called trust. Culture and complex society can’t work without it.  

Faiths, and trusts, have to be examined and verified, not thrown under the bus.

The Enlightenment has to throw a light on all and any reason, emotional or nonlinear… Just proscribing some forms of reason, while subscribing to them secretly, as the occasionally eminently irrational Bertrand Russell did, is only hypocrisy… a form of thinking that should be consumed only in extreme moderation.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Va de retro, Islamophobia phobia.

[2]: Once, on a turning and slightly descending trail, I came across a large rattlesnake. I was going around 15 feet per second (perhaps 5 m/s). The decision to accelerate and jump over it was taken consciously (there was no other choice), but only by the part of my conscience which supervises running (the rest of me became horrified later).

alk we walk, we take it on faith that we know how to walk. Opposing reason and faith is an example of obsolete thinking As everything obsolete, it hinders further Enlightenment. 

Euclid’s elements are generally viewed as the model of what reason should be: everything is deduced from five set theoretical axioms and five geometric “postulates”.  At least, that’s what was believed for more than 20 centuries. Even Euclid’s elements were full of faith: it turned out that many crucial assumptions were missed among said axioms and postulates. When Hilbert reviewed Euclidean geometry, he posited twenty assumptions…then others came, such as the famous Polish mathematician Tarsky, and postulated other axioms for Euclidean geometry… which did other things Hilbert couldn’t do… So, in the end, the situation with the most basic geometry was much more complicated, and much more resting on faith than was assumed for 24 centuries. Similar shortcomings were revealed in Set Theory, making Bertrand Russell famous… A modern pirouette is to use so-called “NAIVE Set Theory” and ignore subtleties like sets which are not elements of themselves…   

Basic arithmetic was deficient too: it turns out that traditional arithmetic assumed implicitly something called the Archimedean Axiom, the violation of which creates infinitesimal and infinite numbers (that’s called non-standard arithmetic). 

The reaction to all this, in the end, was more trust and less verification. Although mathematical logic kept on growing inside mysterious thickets, real mathematicians (if I dare to use the expression) decide to ride faith until hell and high waters: Category Theory became queen of math, developing gigantic theoretical castle of theories floating up in the air. In other words, LOGIC BECAME LOCAL.

Don’t expect all mathematicians to understand much of the preceding: their craft depends on believing their faith in mathematics is no faith, but megalomaniac certainty. 

We certainly must have faith, if we want to think: not everything can be doubted 24/7 (Cartesian doubt to be used parsimoniously).

***

Belief in a mind-independent reality is itself an act of faith…. But one well supported by facts…

Thinking without faith is like flying without air. Can’t be done, without redefining flying, or thinking first.

Nathalie Delima Graza: “or just like put your faith in parachute and trust in it.”

Faith is when we decide reality: experienced parachutists know that parachutes generally work… but they also know they do not always work, and that’s why they often wear another chute… Trust, but not fully. Cartesian doubt was to distrust everything 24/7… But it can’t be done! Hence the use of faith… Fisth is when we decide reality.

Bertrand Russel was superficially full of faith… against faith. Said he:

“All faiths do harm.” Here is Bertrand Russell in full: “All faiths do harm. We may define “faith” as a firm belief in something for which there is no evidence. Where there is evidence, no one speaks of “faith.” We do not speak of faith that two and two are four or that the earth is round. We only speak of faith when we wish to substitute emotion for evidence. And the substitution of emotion for evidence is apt to lead to strife, since different groups substitute different emotions.”

— Bertrand Russell, Human Society in Ethics and Politics (1954), Ch. VII: Can Religion Cure Our Troubles?, p. 213

We may not speak of faith, but we practice it. Bertrand Russel was full of faith, and also, hot air: during World War One, he believed, he had faith, that Europe would be better off under the Kaiser’s fascist boot. British justice was unimpressed, and put him in prison for a very long time, for this ludicrous and war criminality promoting opinion… He later tried to redeem himself with anti-nuke, anti-Vietnam War positions…

Can anything be rescued from Russell’s statement above? Sure. Faith where one “substitutes emotion for evidence” should be viewed with extreme suspicion. Not that it is always bad: emotion has a logic of its own.

My point is that, contrarily to what Russell asserts, most faiths have evidence. No evidence that Muhammad flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse… But that Muhammad’s religion, in some, amd many, ways is a good thing (for example it brought down the murder of girls, and improved the treatment of slave girls)…

By admitting that faith is not just good, but indispensable, and that most faiths have evidence to support themselves, that faith is just an indispensable abbreviation and determination of thought, we are far from giving succor to the fanatics and those who disrespect critical thinking. Verily, just the opposite. We deprive those with lethal and unjustifiable faith (such as faith in tyrant Putin)… of the argument that everybody has a sacred right to all and any faith… Instead we point out that faith has to be examined, like everything else, and actually more than anything else.

An example of unhinged faith is that HAARP technology and its ability “to accelerate cataclysms“. High Altitude Aurora Research Project could do no such thing. At best, create a little artificial aurora.

Hugo Chavez, an uneducated tropical tyrant, believed Northern Lights (Aurora) launched earthquakes… Because he was told so by other fools, not knowing the subtleties of Alaskan politics, among other things he didn’t know… (The Alaskan senior Senator wanted the government to spend in his state. HAAARP cost 300 millions, and then provided employment…)

Faiths have their uses: believing HAARP could launch nine Richter quakes, provides believers with the illusion that their complete lack of scientific knowledge and scientific common sense is an excellent thing, as it made them superior to Physics PhD…. And freed them from scientific reason in myriad ways…

Those who believe Putin is not a genocidal tyrant, but a worthy president also tend to believe that a Kremlin centered empire will provide them with glory, empire, or a general way to criticize “the West” without thinking too hard. 

Faith is actually what enables thinking to decide, saving energy, but most importantly, having decided reality, enables the brain to switch to implementation of the chosen strategy.

Faith in others is called trust. Culture and complex society can’t work without it.  

Faiths, and trusts, have to be examined and verified, not thrown under the bus.

The Enlightenment has to throw a light on all and any reason, emotional or nonlinear… Just proscribing some forms of reason, while subscribing to them secretly, as the occasionally eminently irrational Bertrand Russell did, is only hypocrisy… a form of thinking that should be consumed only in extreme moderation.

The faith instinct is so fundamental to thinking that Artificial Intelligence will become mature when it has to use it… to decide which axioms it will use next.

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Va de retro, Islamophobia phobia.

***

[2]: Consciousness is also local. See “Split Brains and Multiconsciousness“. Once, on a turning and slightly descending trail, I came across a large rattlesnake. I was going around 15 feet per second (perhaps 5 m/s). The decision to accelerate and jump over it was taken consciously (there was no other choice), but only by the part of my conscience which supervises running (the rest of me became horrified later).

… P/S: And what of the Quantum is all this? Well, you guessed it, the paradoxes of Quantum Mechnaics have to do with the localization of decision… And we saw it appear above already in a seemingly classical context. That means classical thinking already contains the Quantum in hiding….

Le Pen Is Not Racist, But European Leaders Have Been Evil

Le Pen is “deeply racist” paid media writers say all over France and the Anglosphere [1]. Proof? Why do you want proof like a quote? Are you racist? Proof by innuendo! Le Pen is racist because she fears some aspects of Islam… In a country where significant portion of the population has feared the fascist Abrahamist religion in its variously delirious variants for 20 centuries, that’s only natural, deeply “French”…

US citizens are fully unaware of the way foreigners can abuse the French health care system (that could include US citizens, by the way). Show up in a French hospital and treatment will be free… whereas law abiding French citizens from overseas will have to pay an arm and a leg (happened to me).

This method of crossing the French border at the last hour before giving birth is used systematically in some border areas (say around Briancon). I have seen it twice from my very eyes. Once it was an Albanian woman (Albania is not in the EU; she paid nothing for the birth, nor could she; next door I paid more than  10,000 Euros…). Another time, an African woman who seemed ready to explode was helped in the bus, a kilometer from the French border in Claviere. The gendarmerie got her out the bus and called an ambulance in Briançon…

The trick of giving birth in France has even been used by terrorists to rear “French” children who are trained in their primitive lands to hate France… But have a French passport, and thus abilitated to help out with terrorism inside France.

“Islamophobic” is a strange notion in France, where a law was passed in 1905 exists which limits the role of Catholicism, Protestantism and Judaism… But the 1905 law did not apply, nor limit Islam. (Yes Christian monks and priests at the time were furious and rebelled violently!)

The root of the 1905 separation of church and state law was centuries of religious wars, from the holocaust of millions of Cathars around 1200 to the Revocation of the Nantes Edict around 1700, which made two million, 10% of the population, flee France. In some families the fear of Christianism (Christianophobia), or anti-clericalism has run for centuries (half of my family was like that; they used to be protestant nobles, more than 5 centuries ago, and most were kicked out of France by the fanatical Catholic Louis XIV!).

Because Christian fanaticism has caused tremendous suffering, anti-Christianism and Christianophobia run deep in France: the Cathars are remembered, although all their writings were destroyed, and Louis XIV’s religious cleansing of Protestantism motivated the hatred of many Germans whose ancestors were French, centuries ago, before they were forced to emigrate by the tyrant Sun King.

. Cartoon from 1905, when the binding betwen Pope and France was cut (by the mighty fasces, notice!) Inspired by Voltaire (who also identified Islam to fanaticism), the pact between Napoelon and the Pope, dating from 1801, was abrogated in 1905. Inspiré par Voltaire, up in the cloud, Émile Combes, an ex-seminarist, s’apprête à trancher le nœud gordien entre l’Église (le pape) et l’État (Marianne) tandis qu’un moine cuve son vin. Notice drunk monk on the ground.

So, after five centuries and millions dead over five centuries in Christian religious wars, fear (phobia) of organized religions run deep in France and, far from being a form of racism, is a form of deeply enlightened humanism.

Islam has been basically respected and ignored by French authorities for 13 centuries (Islamist invasions were repelled thrice in the Eight Century with major battles in 721 CE, 732 CE, and 748 CE… And also in the Tenth Century; later Frankish and Normands armies freed Rome, Souther Italy, Sicily… However no restriction were ever taken under individual Muslims on religious grounds… A proof of this is the presence of Arab and North African genes in France, from more than a millennium ago. And historically speaking Muslim peasants left over were left alone, this is known: no forced conversions.

However now the situation is different because of a poisonous mix of anti-France rhetoric, anti-Enlightenment, anti-European, post-modernist hatred for civilization or even reason, and weaponized Muslim immigration… I am not saying all Muslim immigrants are bad: some are very good, and historically a lot of variants of Islam in Africa have little to do with Suni or Shia superstitions… However, propped by hydrocarbon money, just like Putin, many nasty ideologies have tried to carve their own empires, and have smothered advanced African Islams…

I am myself half African, so I have viewed the problems religions can cause (my first memories in life are from a charming oasis where most Muslims had been prevented to come for centuries: the local branch of Islam, older than any other, came under terrible repression from the tyrannical Shia and Sunni, thus defended itself by excluding them; I a pprove that sort of Islam, and many other sorts, just as I generally disapprove forms of Islam which treat women as lesser beings).

The hatred against Le Pen, resting on fighting words (accusing her groundlessly to be “deeply racist“) calls for a refusal of debate, and thus destruction of democracy. Unbalanced critique of otherwise honorable politicians and their demonization is not helpful to democracy [1]. It creates anger and even hatred. I was actually going to vote for Macron, with profond distaste, because I find Le Pen’s position on Russia even more friendly towards Putin than Macron’s (who has been all too friendly towards Putin over the years).

The way the French constitution is, the governmental program emanates from Parliament, not the President. le Pen could have Macron as Prime Minister… or even a real leftist: Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the far-left party La France Insoumise, who came third in the first round of the presidential election, just behind Le Pen, on April 10 with 22% of the vote (she got 23% and Macron 27%), has called on people in France to “elect him as prime minister”.

So let’s relax.

And let’s reflect; a lot of the proposition of Le Pen, such as Proportional Representation and Direct Democracy through referendums, would be definitively progress. Even the question of the supremacy of European law over National law is a legitimate question: if it doesn’t apply to Swiss Canton, why should it apply to a country, Republic and Democracy, France, which is 200 times more populous than the average Swiss canton?

All the more as, as it is, the European army is NATO… giving a precedence to US weapons over, say, French ones (which can be be of higher quality than US ones)… 

In any case, it was hilarious to see an investment banker, and double dipper (Macron, who leveraged his previous state employment as finance inspector) accuse Le Pen of depending upon her Russian banker. Macron said Putin was Le Pen’s banker… Le Pen shot back that her party had been prevented of borrowing from European banks, so it had to borrow from a Russian bank, and she pointed out that Macron invited Putin over, all over, Versailles, Cote d’Azur, etc…

Let’s reflect how much of the anti-Le Pen hysteria has to do with the fact that Marine Le Pen is a woman (and not in the skirts of her husband or the establishment, as Hillary Clinton).

Not to say I agree with her position on Putin (I want full embargo, she doesn’t want it on energy). But then, again, the present, outrageously pro-Russian tyranny policies were put in place in the last 23 years, in spite of Putin’s vile tyranny… and not by Le Pen, but by dozens of very honorable Western politicians.

Democracy doesn’t demand one has to agree with everybody on all things, and should not require to demonize individuals who just want more direct democracy (the referendum of initiative populaire already has existed in Switzerland and California for more than a century, and neither fell into the sea…)  

So let’s relax… But let’s also view with suspicion those who are keen to demonize democratic opposition: we saw what happened when that was done to Tiberius Gracchus…

Patrice Ayme

[1] The NYT had a title “Marine Le Pen has not changed, she is as dangerous as ever“… the latest in many strident anti-le Pen essays (where my comments were censored), After my comment (on this latest insult torrent against Le Pen) was published (finally!), the NYT, finally aware of how vicious it looked, changed the title to something completely different, but anti-French in a worse way.

Memories:

My first memories are from this place, Ghardaia, Mzab, Sahara (a tiny portion of the city)

War Tech: SAMs and Stealth

Would American aircraft suffer the same losses of jets and helicopters as Russia is experiencing, if they were engaged in a similar conflict such as Russia’s attack on Ukraine?

It depends: the devil is in the details and those who operate them. Everything indicates that the Ukrainians are extremely well trained and very smart. They may be poor in GDP per capita, due to a number of actors out of their control, but they are first world in engineering. Ukrainians are not illiterates from the desert, just the opposite, and have been building their own planes for generations.

Well operated, S300 category missiles can be devastating. During the war against Serbia, a single Serb S300 SAM battery escaped destruction for many weeks, by moving around the country, observing the patterns of NATO planes, and turning on its radar at the last instant. It shot down at least two US planes, one “stealth” …and was never destroyed. Its commander later retired, became a baker and friend with the F117 pilot he had shot down.

Reciprocally, twenty years later, the French air force in Libya attacked ten hours before US SEAD (Suppression of Enemy Air Defenses), using French Rafales fighter bombers to suppress flak while killing Qaddafi’s armor entering Benghazi. The bombing itself was done by Mirage fighter bombers that the Rafales protected with their active stealth (basically counter frequency jamming).

The action in Ukraine seems to show that high maneuverability of fighter planes is extremely useful. Narratives from Ukrainian pilots show that old dogfighting techniques change everything. Just like the legendary Serb SAM commander, they turn on their missiles at the last moment. Time is at such a premium that some basic commands are just one word, such as the command to get in the plane and take off. 

Another important fact coming out of Ukraine is that the small but lethal Bayraktar TB2 Turkish drones, which seems to have a radar return larger than a Rafale, are hard to spot for Russian SAMs. This means several things: Rafale passive stealth is enough. F35 passive stealth is overkill, especially as it comes while inflicting losses of carrying capacity and lack of maneuverability (a slow going F35 with a giant fiery exhaust will be perfect for Stinger style MANPADs; reciprocally if it does not approach the ground, to avoid MANPADs, it will be ineffective for its measly bombing and fall prey to S300 style SAM).

Unsurprisingly, two months into the world war, Ukrainian ace pilots ask for F16s, F18s, and… Rafales. Conventional, highly maneuverable fighter bombers with plenty of radar absorbing material without reduction of capability.  They do not ask for F35s… (Nor do the Ukrainians ask for Typhoons or F15s… which have their own problems, being too much of high altitude interceptors…)  

Thus the West should augment the production of these highly capable jets. Unfortunately, to please Uncle Sam located in Washington DC, every country in the West is ordering F35s, which, all seem to indicate, would not be very useful in Ukraine fighting Putin’s forces.

Russian Cruiser Moskva burning after being hit by two Ukrainian Neptune anti-ship missiles, in combination with “other equipment” (probably spotting and distraction by BT2 Turkish made drones). The ship later capsized and sank. The Moskva was one of the three carrier-killers cruiser of the Russian Navy. It was also the flagship of the Russians in the Black Sea. Its anti-aircraft capabilities had been used earlier off Syria, and were probably used off the Ukrainian costs, where Ukraine said it shot down Russian superiority fighters in the past… This is the largest capital ship sunk since World War Two (the Argentinan cruiser sank by UK nuclear submarine 200 miles from the Falklands, 40 years ago, was much smaller…)

When the US engaged the North Vietnamese, it suffered heavy aircraft losses, due to confrontation with experienced pilots (some Russian instructors) in nimble planes. Another problem was that the US planes depended too much on missiles (F4 Phantom had no canon, so found themselves in dog fight with armed Migs, while having no weapons). Ukrainian pilots claim they can out maneuver Russian missiles, and in particular outrun them (this is in theory possible with many missiles, given a fast jet, and if the missile exchange start at large distances… F35 partisans mumble arguments about non detectability, but France, for example has long range infrared missiles… And then it becomes a question of how fast can the prey run away, radar stealth or no radar stealth…).

So it may be that the F35 doctrine is another silly idea which has overcome the US Air Force. One notices that recent orders for F35s were cancelled and replaced by orders for F15 (a large, but fast third generation jet).

Not to say the F35 is useless: it could be very useful in some situations, in a role somewhat reminscent of the Growler… But as the end-all, be-all? Big mistake, for sure.

Patrice Ayme

I sink therefore I special… The jets of water in the back are from fire fighting equipment of a tug behind…

Merkel A Double Agent And Other Stories:

Putin should have become known as a  genocidal tyrant after he killed one Chechen out of six. However, Germany made itself fully dependent upon the genocidal tyrant, years after the genocide. Now Germany and other European genocidal collaborators are sending more than a billion dollars a day to feed the genocidal tyrant’s war crime factory.

In light of this, and her personal, murky history, one may wonder whether Angela Merkel was not a double agent (truly working for Putin’s KGB). She declared that, when the KGB approached her, she brushed them off by telling them that “she talked too much”. This sounds like disinformation to me: Merkel knew that the fact that the KGB tried to recruit her would come up, so she planted plausible denial. She made do with junior dictatorial positions and becoming spokesperson for the Stalinian East German state.

Putin calls Ukrainian nationalists, “Nazis. The pseudo-left in the US or Europe smear its nationalist opponents by calling them tribal (“ethnonationalists”). This flies in the face of common sense: “Ethnonationalism” is hard to come by in very multi-ethnic societies such as the US, UK, or France; ethnonationalists just can’t get elected. Another trick of the pseudo-left is to demonize its “populist” opposition by calling it “terrifying” (a label the NYT smears Le Pen with).

The French political system is similar to the US one: it’s Congress which passes laws. One could imagine (it won’t happen because Macron will be re-elected) a situation where Le Pen is president and her PM is Macron, and he does what he wants (this happened before: Mitterand-Balladur). Le Pen was a European MP for 13 years, she will not dismantle Europe (I will probably vote Macron; but calling her “terrifying” makes me feel like voting for her…). 

All of French politics, including its most extreme right, is on the left of Sanders and AOC. That may be terrifying to Americans, indeed.

One has to make a distinction between “oligarchy” (rule of the few) and “plutocracy” (evil-power). A junta is oligarchic, but not necessarily evil. Lenin, Stalin, Hitler and those who financed them (many of them from the US) were plutocrats. Autocracy is the power of one, it necessarily entails plutocracy, as the innate sense of justice of the species makes such a rule unbearable, so it can only be maintained by force. Autocracy was enshrined by Nicholas I in the Russian constitution, and followed by Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, and now Putin.

[A shorter version of this teaching comment was published by NYT after 20 hours delay.]

Patrice Ayme

P/S: Here is the context of the preceding. NYT and its Nobel Krugman find French presidential candidate Le Pen “terrifying”. I think what is terrifying is that the truth of Merkel and other collaborators of Putin (Schröder; ecologists, other politicians), cannot be looked in the face. Krugman wrote:

“Now, it’s important to understand the context. France provides social benefits on a scale beyond the wildest dreams of U.S. progressives: universal health care, huge family benefits and more. Macron isn’t challenging the fundamentals of that system. He is, however, trying to trim some benefits… Le Pen, by contrast, actually wants to reduce the retirement age for some workers.

… If she wins, the consequences for France, Europe and the world will be terrifying. But there is some genuine populism — advocacy of policies that might actually help workers — in her platform.”

Krugman does not describe why Le Pen is “terrifying“. Not even one element of “Le Pen terror” is rolled out. Actually he does not even bother with one element of disagreement he may have with Le Pen. The 53 year French blonde lawyer turned European and French elected representative, just “terrifies” the world, while Krugman and the New York Times still sing the praises of Obama, who “reset with Russia“, after Putin invaded Georgia, to empower Putin for eight years, inviting him in Syria and Ukraine, while Obama himself was killing thousand of civilians in emerging countries… Krugman insinuated that Le Pen was an “ethnonationalist“, a tribal nationalist:

“Ron DeSantis would be Florida’s Orban if he could, state governors don’t have as much repressive power as rulers of sovereign nations.

Still, the comparison of European and U.S. ethnonationalists raises some interesting questions. In particular, as the G.O.P. has become a full-on antidemocratic party, why has it also remained the party of plutocrats and the enemy of any policy that might help its many working-class supporters?

To understand the puzzle, consider the policy positions of Marine Le Pen, who has a serious chance of becoming France’s next president. Her party, National Rally — previously called the National Front — is often described as right-wing. And on social issues it is; in particular, the party is largely defined by its hostility to immigrants and the alleged threat they pose to France’s national identity. On economic policy, however, Le Pen is if anything to the left of President Emmanuel Macron.“

Orban, elected four times Hungarian Prime Minister, is the bête noire of the US pseudo-left, which is heavily financed by the plutocrat Soros, one of the world’s wealthiest person, a currency manipulator and frontrunner, with philosophical pretense, of Jewish and Hungarian origin (I own books of Soros murky Popper pseudo-philosophy, his fig leaf). Anybody from the US pseudo-left is supposed to hate Orban… So Krugman hates Orban, and Fox News’ Tucker Carlson loves Orban (I am more nuanced than either, but hate Orban’s Putinophilia). DeSantis is of Italian descent on both sides. Does that make him an “ethnoitalian”? The terror of eating pasta?

So I sent the comment, in a simpler version, and, naturally, it was delayed 20 hours. (My lawyer told me that my assertion about Merkel was legally problematic!) In the end, it was published,

Internet Tragedy Of The Commons

I am a professional research mathematician, and I have studied infinity quite a bit (arriving at an emotionally drastic conclusion). Still completely uneducated clowns come out on the Internet… and get published there, pontificating out of sheer crass ignorance… on infinity. So idiotic they are that Ancient Greeks, 25 centuries ago, who had already established a few things about the concept of infinity, would have rolled their eyes in dismay. 

The same “philosophy” site, with more than 100,000 participants,  bans all my essays, even in completely unrelated fields, since the invasion of Ukraine… They even warned it would be so: somehow, wisdom should not be interested by the potential end of the woirld…. Probably Putin collaborators, in action, many intellectuals are pro-Putin, for the same reason as their cultural ancestors were pro-Lenin, pro-Stalin, pro-Duce, or pro-Hitler… Having no power, they torture others by imposing their own blatant madness…

The delight of the Internet, with completely ignorant people knowing better, reminds me of the delight of my dog, who often tells me he knows best, so I tell him to do something, such as going across wet grass, and he looks at me like: “no way!” 

Tragedy of the commons is not just tragedy of common property, as… common wisdom has it. Tragedy of the commons also means, in today’s world, that the least educated are the most popular and most powerful. In mental matters, tragedy of the commons shows up as nobody making the hard work to learn until the edge of what is known, and thus contributing to the advancement of civilization. Some may ask, Putin and Hitler admirers, why would civilization need to advance? Because if it does not advance, it falls, from ecological disaster if nothing else.

***

Think of these wealthy, buxom Instagram stars in Muscovite Rus. One of these sexy wixens has nine million followers. They use shears to destroy ultra expensive Chanel bags. Such bags are worth around half of the median yearly Russian salary [1].

Chanel confirmed to the BBC that it is complying with EU sanctions, which ban the sale of luxury goods worth more than 300 euros (about 1,550 Brazilian reais) to Russia, as well as the sale of products to individuals who intend to use them. them on Russian soil. The brand “requires customers whose primary residence we do not know to confirm that the items they purchase will not be used in Russia.”

Victoria Bonya (on the right above) destroyed her black Chanel bag  for her 9.3 million followers saying, “If Chanel does not respect its customers, why should we respect Chanel?… not a single thing is worthy of my love for my country, and not worthy of my respect for myself. I am against russophobia, I am against a brand that supports russophobia.”

This is how Nazism worked: crass ignorance, cynically manipulated by vicious extortionists and criminals for whom greed for power was the highest drug.

These days, when I send to the New York Times a comment related to Ukraine with some true technical points of great relevance (for example the fact the Ukraine Trident, symbol of the country, is more than 11 centuries old, we have it etched in old stone; or that there are French military (hence NATO) on the ground in Ukraine, and similar technical comments)… I get censored. This is striking, especially on purely technical comments pointing out pieces of history, such as the prompt expulsion of Russia from the Society of Nations, after it attacked Finland in 1939.

There are 2 possible explanations for this censorship on steroids: NYT writers are stealing the information (after reading it, they republish it, as if they produced it themselves; I observed this), or then they are truly traumatized by information they never heard about and are not conditioned to accept: the NYT has a censorship bureau, actually… Something they admitted last year, after denying it for more than a decade to me personally.

Right some NYT writers are more thuggish than others, for example Bret Stephens (who used to be at the Wall Street Journal for many years) loves to censor me and then use my ideas: hey, his salary depends upon it, the way he looks at it, it’s moral.

So there on the Internet, on a philosophy site which has censored me completely since Putin attacked, a completely ignorant person is pontificating at the highest level of stupidity on infinity, proffering thoroughly deranged statements, and hundreds of thousands are reading him…

I maintain that civilization needs an independent state organization, much more independent  than the Justice Branch of government, to evaluate the various dimensions of propositions: truth, potential truth, significance, potential significance, novelty, potential novelty, authenticity, integrity, etc… No censorship, just a star system, for purely informative purposes, and no small committee of experts, but total openness….

Elon Musk@elonmusk

I made an offer https://sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/0001418091/000110465922045641/tm2212748d1_sc13da.htm

[for Twitter…]

Offer to unlock potential for more truth? Truth is complex, potential, multidimensional. Censorship must be banned, but truth shouldn’t suffer the tragedy of the commons, as it does now, where the cheapest and most dilapidating propositions are most popular. Evaluations are needed!

When we change mental worlds, we start by changing emotional worlds. This is true even in mathematics. Non-Euclidean geometry preceded (!) Euclidean geometry. But the latter was simpler, so it became more popular, it looked more rigorous (it was not), so beautiful. It was a case of tragedy of the commons: Non-Euclidean geometry got lost to the point that the fact it is all over and everywhere also got lost! I allege something similar about the sort of infinity mathematics we have been walloping in: understanding that there is something, at least locally, as a largest number, will require an emotional switch… not denying infinity, but realizing the limitations of the concept (similarly, Euclidean geometry actually does not exist, it’s a simplification… And the reason why General Relativity is needed for GPS…)

As we need to change mental worlds, thus emotional worlds, the shocking value of the Internet, well done, is a great progress. But people need to know about probable reality too…

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] The price for a Chanel Medium Classic Flap bag increased from $1,150 in 1990 to $7,800 in July 2021. After the third price jump of the year (as of November 2021), the Chanel Medium Classic Flap is now $8,800. 

Split Brains And Multi Consciousness

Wisdom forges ahead of the self, however full of books the latter may be. New wisdom arises from beyond, and putting the mind out of the culturally expected zone.

Trail running means a potentially fully different world every couples of seconds. It takes one second to go from routine to head first at several meters per second (with potentially a terminal outcome [1]). Exactly what will happen if one quits concentrating. Foot landing is an adventure at any step, or bound, or leap (downhill mountain running is truly a succession of leaps, and a good runner can achieve dangerously high sustained speeds). Not surprisingly, command and control tends to be extremely localized and automatized. Here is an example, today:  

***

Suddenly wiggly is detected. There are no words, no thought, just wiggly is generating motion. The quickest part of the brain, and I literally felt to be in the back of the head going straight from visual area to cerebellum and legs, orders a general danger emergency jump, with particular lift of the left leg, where wiggly has been perceived. The wiggly input also launches an adrenaline burst. And a visual, directed inspection of wiggly.

Meanwhile the frontal cortex, and one literally feels it’s in the front, retorts with a slower analysis. Wiggly has got to be a root because of its general location, on a piece of asphalt, and it was not actually dynamic, and strong winds have brought innocuous wigglies down. 

Then an arbitration area kicks in, and I feel it’s in between. Arbitration decretes that the quick reaction area probably got it wrong, but it does not hurt to jump, but arbitration sends a moderation order to the jump, because emergency jumps are dangerous.

Such is the human brain.

Or more exactly, the human brains. The human brain is made of many. 

Even with half his brain dead, from strokes, bullets and what not, the bloody tyrant Lenin could provide astute opinions about his successors…  

Human brains are made of different pieces, not all equal, doing different things, and then conferring at a higher level called “consciousness” or “thinking”. 

The situation above happened April 12, 2022, but I had encountered an ultra rare snake on cement, a few miles away wiggling away very fast, a few days prior. It was of a sub-species of Garter snake, mostly jet black and scarlet red, related to the colorful one represented. A few weeks prior, on dirt, the scene above repeated, but that time there was a real snake below my left shoe! It nearly got pancaked. (Those snakes are not dangerous)

Conclusions:

1. To speak of human consciousness is a simplification: a given brain has many coexistent consciousnesses, and they work at different speeds, in different ways, and are focused on non-intersecting inputs and outputs [2]. The wiggly = jump away is obviously a primitive form of hard wired consciousness (prehistoric men evolved in regions full of extremely dangerous snakes). 
2. What we call “thinking” is often high level arbitrage. That doesn’t mean that lower level areas and entanglement are not conscious and thinking.
3. The brain is a sort of democracy, with its own institutions: brain organs entangled through neural networks, and different areas get to vote.
4. Social organizations should mimic the brain and for the same reason: neural democracy is hardwired. The brain works the world in parallel, not top down. That means democratically, not fascistically. Why? Because this way the brain can do more, and some of it at extreme speed.

Some currents of Buddhism suggest to rest the mind by doing nothing, that’s supposed to be meditative. However, rock climbers learn to rest dynamically. I believe in dynamic meditation, and putting the entire brain to work, resting dynamically, not just breathing… The Dyonisos approach, embraced by Socrates, getting drunk to reach joy and perspective, is part and parcel of this dynamical meditation (I don’t drink alcohol… no need… Crazy enough already…) 

Ah, wiggly was just a sinuous branch thrown by the strong, cold wind. And the frontal cortex was right to suspect that, in spite of the sun, it was no snake weather. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Once on Mount Tamalpais in California, my right shoe caught a thin piece of steel (!) which was sticking out after a (botched) trail repair job by rangers. I crashed over the next ten meters; the trail was straight, so the crash happened on the trail rather than the precipice on the right… Last summer I crashed twice in quick succession on icy rocks at 3,500 meters (!). Bad soles on those shoes I discovered. There again I was lucky not to have fallen off trail… Just got decorated with blood… Those crashes were actually more dangerous than the ones where I broke bones…

What I nearly stepped on a few years ago. (Actually a related subspecies, even rarer, as it is found just around one hill.)

[2] I think many things in many ways, all at the same times. Does that mean that I am many, Mr. Descartes?