Toxic Artificial Turf To Be Installed At French Bilingual School Berkeley

EB TOXIC TURF.

Toxic-Plastifying Planet, One Elementary School Playground At A Time.

The short of it: EB plans to install at least 15 tons of toxic plastics and Prop 65 Silica Sand in the playground, for a total cost of around $350,000. The risk to small children? Death, cancer, pneumonitis, lung fibrosis, through Prop 65 products, silicosis, or suberosis. That “Artificial Turf”, considering the chosen technology, pulverulent cork, will have to be torn down within five years. EB doesn’t plan to treat the toxic effluents (contrarily to usage); according to “turf team” the runoff of herbicides, biocides, fire retardants, disinfectants and other deleterious chemicals will go straight into the Bay… when not in the lungs of the little ones.

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Artificial Turf carcinogens flying away. Situation is worse with cork. Clouds are bigger. I saw it, still looking for the pictures I saw

Ecole Bilingue de Berkeley informed parents it was planning to install “Artificial Turf” on its playground. 7,500 square feet of it. We were explicitly told, repeatedly, that would be done so that some boys could play soccer.

This particular Artificial Turf consists of:

1) plastic grass blades coated with URETHANE, a Prop. 65 product (that is, “known to the state of California to cause cancer”). There would be several tons of it.

2) artificial soil made mostly of SILICA SAND, another cancer causing Prop. 65 product. Once breathed in, tiny silica sand can’t be expelled and causes inflammation, alveolitis, pneumonitis, fibrosis and silicosis; it is made of tiny balls of SiO2, and associated dust. It’s an irreversible disease. There would be TEN TONS of Silica Sand. To prevent the intrusion of algae, moss, plants, the silica sand is treated with BIOCIDES (life killers) such as glyphosate (“Roundup”), triclosan, “Bioban” (trade secret poison), etc…

3) mixed with the silica sand would be cork. Those cork pellets would start as half a millimeter across, and then would shatter, under impact, in much smaller pieces. CORK DUST causes a disease called “SUBEROSIS”. The mechanism for suberosis is quadruple: cork itself, lodged in the lungs, is hard to expel, like silica sand, causing inflammation. Cork gets moreover also covered by a mold specific to cork, which by itself, once in the contact with the lung tissue, causes allergies, inflammation, alveolitis, pneumonitis, fibrosis (just as the cork itself and the silica sand). Cork is also endowed with two specific bacteria, with the same effect.

4) A thick pad below the whole artificial grass and soil is made of recycled tire crumbs and polyethylene pellets. It acts as a shock pad. As, under impacts, the sand compactifies, huge accelerations of 200 times gravity, or more, have been recorded upon impacts (more than 200 gs; natural grass doesn’t go over 115 gs, and is typically around 60 gs). Putting a thick layer of styrofoam like material, 2 inches thick, or more, is supposed to reduce impact forces, hence the crumb rubber pad.

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The brown cloud behind the running player is toxic cork dust. It is always mixed with Silica Sand, as in the system proposed at EB. But the sand itself is laden with herbicides, fungicides, biocides, pesticides, etc. When dry and dusty those become airborne too, joining the toxic cork as a deadly aerosol.,

Why does EB plan to use cork? Because the previously used technology for Artificial Turf, coming directly in contact with players, “crumb rubber”, also known as ELT (End of Life Tires) is known to cause various diseases, including several types of cancer. Climbing gyms used crumb rubber, until, after a few years, employees and climbers noticed they suffered breathing difficulty and were coughing black mucus. Recent epidemiological statistics have shown increased cancer risk, especially among soccer goalies. Goalies get closer to the ground.  

Proximity to the ground is of relevance here, as small children, in an elementary school, are closer to the ground. Cork dust has been shown in pictures to fly into small brown clouds, a few feet high, upon impact of a player.

In the particular technology proposed at EB, biocide laden cork and silica sand dust, would readily fly into the lungs of the little ones. The crumb rubber element in the proposed EB technology would be hidden below, affecting effluents. 

Tom Bates Athletic Field at Gilman in Berkeley has two Artificial Turf fields, with cork. Entry is restricted to authorized personnel only. (The other four natural grass fields don’t have such a restriction.)

The two plastic fields at Tom Bates were replaced at great cost (several millions) in 2017-2018, in a five months effort... and look already worn out. The two plastic fields are separated from the San Francisco Bay by a decantation zone 300 feet wide, including a catch basin at least 500 feet long. The decantation zone is closed off by an impassable metallic fence. The idea of the decantation zone is to catch the toxic chemicals and substances necessary for maintenance of the Artificial Turf, before they can reach the Bay. Access is restricted, upon authorization only. The four other fields at Tom Bates are natural grass, and access is open.

The cost of the materials that the EB administration has “decided” to install is $150,000. That doesn’t include installation and maintenance. Once those are included, the cost of the toxic plastic Prop 65 playground goes up above $350,000. But its even more ridiculous than that… explaining why toxic plastic feld promise to be a gold mine for private investors (at least five companies would build various elements of the EB plastic toxic field; they are all private, not public, companies, operating in an unregulated climate).

As the cork (density 14% water) flies away, it has to be replenished (tons of the material are stored in the open air at Tom Bates, and were vandalized, spilling their contents). In the end, though, the cork becomes so pulverulent, it becomes extremely toxic. The cork will turn to dust, blowing away… into the rest of the school… and the lungs of the little ones!

Another fraction of the cork is compactified into the carcinogenic Prop 65 Silica Sand. The cork mixed with the Prop 65 Silica Sand, compactified at the roots of the plastic blades, partially shredded by then as microplastic pollution, cannot be recycled. It can’t be vacuumed. Thus the entire Artificial Turf has to be torn out, and removed, polluting sea or soil. Because of the nature of the products involved and their intimate mix, they cannot be recycled or repurposed. The entire Artificial Turf system will go straight to landfill.

The preceding revelations were made by industry representatives.

How soon will the “cork” field be replaced? Five years. Only five years, because of the increased pulverulence of the cork, which makes it lethal. (By comparison, Crumb Rubber fields can hold twenty-five years… in theory. In practice, they become hard as concrete within ten years…) This means that the Artificial Turf cost will be $70,000 a year.

All the natural landscaping and trees around the Artificial Turf will have to be removed, as per technical requirement and contract (Artificial Turf exposure to biological plant debris has to be limited).

The environmental cost is considerable. As the Tom Bates Artificial “Cork” Turf field shows, chemical effluents are important and noxious. Worldwide, more than 91% of plastics are not recycled. Several countries including China and now Malaysia, are rejecting plastic waste from the US and France…

Aware of the preceding, the European Union is cracking down. In January 2019, the European Chemicals Agency (ECHA) published the Annex XV Restriction Report that suggested restricting microplastic according to Annex XV of REACH (1907/2006/EC). The report calls for the regulation to prohibit the marketing of “intentionally added” microplastics as of 2021. [1]

Want to save the Earth? Start by saving earth!

PA

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P/S: The Trump administration has been preventing any disclosure of the stalled commission on Artificial Turf mandated by the Obama administration in 2016.

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[1] Microplastics include artificial grass blades, plastic envelopes of sand grains. cork grains, or crumb rubber, and crumb rubber itself, are microplastics, because they are it, or shed it. All these microplastic and carcinogenic silica sand should total 20 tons over a 7,500 square feet expanse. 

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https://echa.europa.eu/completed-activities-on-restriction

March 2019; ban on microplastics, including artificial turf, planned to be effective by 2021. Now why this ban is highly understandable: microplastics are polluting the world oceans, and most of the pollution is at great depths, that became clear in the last few months:

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-deep-ocean-harbors-a-mountain-of-microplastic-pollution/?redirect=1

Equality Is One Measure Of Civilization. And A Potential Savior.

Equality is natural to human beings: our species, and those ancestral to it, evolved in an egalitarian context, that of the very small human group. Thus, inequality is inhuman, in more deep ways than one. For human minds to blossom maximally, equality of opportunity of expression and creativity are required. But there is much more, and much darker. Fortunately, we can do something about it now.

Civilizations are more or less civilized: civilizations are on a gradient. One can compare them, between, and within, polities. Not everybody is beautiful, not everybody is gentle. Same for civilizations. Erdogan’s Turkey is unquestionably more civilized than the Ottoman empire which used to impale contradictors, on an industrial basis. During the siege of Constantinople, a Venetian captain, Antonio Rizzo, who refused an inspection, was impaled (his crewmen were beheaded, or sawn asunder). Later, the Ottoman empire would make printing punishable by death (so did Francois I of France… but that intellectual fascist outrage didn’t stick in France, whereas it lasted centuries under the Ottomans. So some of the best “Oriental” literary works were published in France first… making France more “Oriental” than the Orient, Mr. Edward Said… Said was a guy, revered to this day who said, basically that only “orientals” like himself could talk of “orientalism”… but how does one learn to think, when one can’t even print the books… all too long the, unequal, condition of the “Middle east”)

Civilizations closest to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, those eminently most human conditions, and principles, are the most civilized, as they enable human minds to flourish maximally.

Such a religion exists: it’s called the Democratic Republic (but not as defined by Marx’s unquestioning, unquestionably evil followers). Equality not just a question of liking, it’s a question of existing.

Some polities put forward different principles (from Latin Principium, origin, source, from primus, first). And some polities followed philosophers: had Aristotle taught the opposite of what he taught, his friends and, or pupils. Antipater, Alexander, Craterus, and all Macedonian generals awed by the preceding leaders, may well have been more democratic. But the self-serving Aristotle was “monarchist” (the power, the rule, of one).

Aristotle was clever, but, not clever enough, or honorable enough not to follow the genealogy of diffidence to democracy established by his masters, Socrates and Plato, he went to the Dark Side.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/aristotle-destroyed-democracy/

We are still in Aristotle’s mental world: individuals called leaders are haphazardly selected, or selected for unsavory reasons. For example, far from being a great thinker, Putin was a top officer of the KGB. Our “Western” leaders aren’t much better: no individual human is god, but our leaders have divine powers, and that, per se, guarantees disaster, and would, even if they were gods (follow the horrid adventures of all the gods in sight: even the haughty Christo-Islamist versions of “god” can’t control evil, and their travails, their entire version of the universe, are all about that).

Having ignorant twerps, obnibulated by power, capable of killing hundreds of millions, even billions, around is bad enough. Admiring those crazed critters, worse. So is admiring those who, like John McCain, tried to get the full power, couldn’t, and now hate (not to have been endowed with the power of annihilating, potentially, billions).

“Strong man politics are ascendent” said Obama in an excellent discourse at the Mandela 100th year celebration. Right. But Obama himself helped this ascent of strong man politics. Because his politics served it: …”the free press is under attacks”… says Obama, neglecting that the so-called “free press” is actually owned by the wealthiest men, and they all think and feel the same, as shareholders in global plutocracy.

Obama says we have to believe in facts, in reality. Right, so Obama should stop the blah blah about all the world religions been so great, and so right, dear Barry. There is only one right religion, the religion of man: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity…

https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10156068521341939/

The cult of politics as we have it, is all despicable. Thermonuclear power has made equality not a luxury, or an advantage, but the one and only key to survival. So follow your political leaders not. Time to relegate them to the dustbins of history, as the slave masters they aspire to be, but even more so, as the death masters they are.

The aspiration to be ruled by death masters is a mental derangement of the highest order, surpassing even the worst tribal regimes ever seen. Cannibalism, impalements? All childish stuff, when now, one guy who didn’t exist a few decades ago can put an end to the strings of civilizations which separate us from nothingness.

Equality is not just a cure, not just a moral principle, not just how to instill creativity, at this point, equality has become survival itself. Animals have a right to live as evolution has meant them to. And, in the case of the genus Homo, that means under a more or less egalitarian regime. However, on the face of it, we have the most unequal regime the animal kingdom ever knew. 

And that’s lethal. That most massive inequality ever, which we are afflicted by, is mass lethal. A civilization killer, a planet wrecker. Yesterday’s technology brought us the mass death potential. But more recent tech brought us the mass democratic possibility, by harnessing the power of the Internet for mass voting, directly, not through “representatives” and “leaders”….

Patrice Ayme

European Biofuel Criminals: Elected Democracy Doesn’t Work

Every day, the European propaganda machine tells us how good Europeans are, because they hate Trump so much. In the latest development, Trump kills Gaza baby by forcing his parents to expose their child to Israeli tear gas, so great was their indignation that Israel persists to have the same capital for 3,300 years, in spite of Muhammad having flown there on a winged horse, as all islamizing Muslims know.

However, by crucifying Trump all day long, the European legislators and their friends and employers, the lobbyists, are throwing gold dust in our eyes, it’s highly profitable, if not for orangutans, at least, to them:

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THE CRIMINALS IN OUR MIDST; THOSE IN “POWER”, POWERING THEMSELVES EVER MORE: THE CASE OF EUROPE AND PALM OIL FUEL

We are led by the corrupt. You could cut down the entire Amazon forest, ship all the trees to Europe and burn them, claiming you replace fossil fuel burning, and corrupt EU law and its corrupt judges and legislators would count that as a 100 percent greenhouse gas reduction

Many years ago, I campaigned on my sites against “biofuels”. The idea of turning food into fuel is a monstrosity: it’s putting locomotion above survival, it tells  us it’s OK to kill people, as long as we can move: a parody of the worst mass criminal imperialism. Yet, biofuels became Politically Correct. And now are a mass, biomass PC phenomenon.

Cuddle with the Orangutans not: Palm Oil Mass Criminal Eradication of the Biosphere: The 100% PC European Union Law is turning Indonesia (above!) Into Hell. Or, at least, fuel.

PALM oil is found in food and cosmetics, and the mass cultivation of palm is destroying the biosphere, rainforests, ecologies and orangutans. Besides, it’s bad for the cardiovascular system (epidemiology in places using palm oil has shown). In pathetic efforts some grocers and companies are halting the use of palm oil in some products.

Yet, the real problem with palm oil isn’t in your kitchen or bathroom. In Europe, it is in your car. Or, more precisely, its tank.

Half of all the palm oil imported by the European Union is turned into “biodiesel” and blended into conventional fuel to power cars and trucks. Mixing palm oil to “green” fuels crazily triples carbon emissions… instead of doing what it was advertised to be doing, reducing said emissions. And the palm oil addiction is subsidised by the European Union: taxpayers are legally forced to destroy rainforests, & accelerate the climate catastrophe!

“People don’t know that they have palm oil in their fuel tanks,” says Laura Buffet of Transport & Environment in Brussels, Belgium, which campaigns for cleaner transport in Europe.

How did we get there?

It’s always the same: a few self-important monkeys get to power, or were born that way, and they are promised lots more bananas, a better cages, business class travel, a nice retirement… if only they take whom the mightiest and wealthiest view as the right decisions.

Just like the Nazis, these leaders of ours shooting palm oil will be OK, if the misdeeds they commit are hidden from the general population. Thus they keep the general population in a carefully organized darkness. They will be even more OK, if, like the German population supporting the Nazis in 1930s, said population learn not to dig too deep to find out what is really going on.

Global palm oil production hit 65 million tonnes in 2017, with 20 percent used for biofuel, says data firm Palm Oil Analytics.

Under European rules, 10 percent of transport energy should come from “renewable” sources by 2020 (is rainforest “renewable”? No! It takes centuries to grow, especially on poor soils, as in Borneo). Thus countries are blending biofuels like palm-oil biodiesel with conventional fuels.

Transport & Environment calculates that using palm-oil biodiesel triples emissions versus burning fossil fuels, based on figures compiled for the EU.

This tripling in CO2, is not just from burning the fuel, but also from burning rainforests to grow oil palm, which releases lots of carbon. What’s more, there are vast stores of peat under many rainforests, which when drained decompose (methane!) and can release carbon for decades… They can catch fire, burn for months…

In January, the European parliament voted to end subsidies for palm-oil biodiesel from 2020. The vote has no force, though, as the European Parliament has no force: the dirty little secret of the EU is that governments decide, especially the big ones (Germany, France). Moreover, if the EU ends subsidies for palm-oil biodiesel, while keeping its overall biofuel targets, cars will be fuelled with soybean or rapeseed oil instead… and that’s much more destructive for the environment (palm is several times more efficient by surface unit). However, then the price of other vegetable oils will shoot up, increasing palm oil relative advantage… as happened in the USA.

Under its perverse self-declared “Democratic” leadership, the USA came to mandate that conventional fuels must be blended with biofuel… But the US hasn’t approved the use of palm oil because its carbon emissions are the highest of any vegetable oil. Hence, as more corn, and soybean were turned into biodiesel, bringing up the price of other vegetable oils, the US started importing large quantities of palm oil for use in food… as it is the cheapest.

There is a much better way to green transport: electric locomotion. Electric cars are already cheaper to run than cars powered by fossil fuels, produce hardly any air pollution and can be powered by solar or wind energy…. Solar and wind are now the cheapest UNSUBSIDIZED energy sources…

Bioenergy is an inefficient form of solar energy. Plants capture only a fraction of one percent of solar energy compared with 16 per cent for current solar panels. Solar panels as used on satellites have nearly 50% efficiency (OK, they are expensive)… and a combination of (the new) Perovskites and Silicon let us hope to get soon such efficiency on the ground, in cheap solar cells.

The challenge now is to persuade our corrupt government officials that they have run out of excuses to prop up the fossil and biofuel industry, which pays them under the table.

Ending subsidies for all food-based fuels and other “biofuels” would be a win for forests, climate action, taxpayers – and orangutans. And also for the air. Recently I flew (for family reasons) over the French Alps, Piedmont, Switzerland, Germany. The air above the Alps was clear, be they French or Swiss, one could see hundreds of kilometers in full detail. Piedmont was polluted significantly (all Italian industry is there, and there are high mountains, north, west and south). The pollution over Germany was astounding. A brown cloud obscured all beyond ten miles. Thank Angela Merkel lignite burning policy for that.

Ah the Germans… Do they ever learn? Friedrich Nietzsche: …”we are too open-minded, too malicious, too spoiled, also too well-informed, too “traveled”: we far prefer to live on mountains, apart, “untimely,” in past or future centuries, merely in order to keep ourselves from experiencing the silent rage to which we know we should be condemned as eyewitnesses of politics that are desolating the German spirit by making it vain and that is, moreover, petty politics.”

PM Angela Merkler wanted to prove she was ecologically correct by wasting nuclear power: nevermind that coal has killed thousands of Germans, a year, for generations, although nuclear power has not killed even one German. That’s PC for you. Just as she wanted to prove she was no racist by accepting a million Muslim refugees, all of a sudden (voters have sobered her up)…. (Just ask the French, who accepted 30,000 Chechen Muslim refugees, supposedly pursued for their religion by Putin, and now some of the youth so accepted kill French citizens in the name of Allah, because Allah, a friend of theirs, said so, or so say the famous epileptic analphabet caravan raider, and serial rapist… )

The Germans wasted much of Europe in the 1914-1945 period. They just didn’t think too well about they were doing, the human and cosmic angles were lagging… What of the Japs? Same idea, in the same period: follow orders, don’t think too much. So of this mood, all to present in Germany and Japan, the old Axis mood, still lingers all too much… All this CO2 emitted kills, and will kill much more, especially indirectly…

So the Tokyo Power company locates a nuclear power plant along the shore, at sea level, in an area notorious for super giant tsunamis, with warning signs 12 centuries old… And the reactors survive a nine Richter quake, but then get hit with a 34 meters wave. Oops, forgot backup power, some of the reactors melt down, explode, people nearly die, region evacuated. What to do? Make a bad situation worse: Japan has decided to replace nuclear power (bad, if badly done), by coal power (worse). Actually Japanese accountants have already computed that the few coal plants added already will kill the equivalent of 60,000 full human lives, from their pollution…

As I said, above, except in very high latitudes, the energy problem is solved: just use PhotoVoltaics…

Morality means sustainability, and it’s all very practical… but we will have to change our political system to direct democracy, if we want to remove the corruption element found in our present politics. The case of biofuels, burning food for greed, is a case in point.

Patrice Ayme

Next Year In Jerusalem: לשנה הבאה בירושלים

Question: Is giving in to the enemies of Israel the concession that Jerusalem shall not be again the capital of Israel a concession made to whom are, effectively, Nazis? I discuss, without weasel words:

L’Shana Haba’ah B’Yerushalayim (Hebrew: לשנה הבאה בירושלים‎‎, lit. “Next year in Jerusalem“) is a phrase Jews living in the Diaspora utter each year at the end of Passover and Yom Kippur. After the destruction of the great Jewish temple in Jerusalem, by the Romans in 73 CE, the hope of seeing it rebuilt became a central component of Jewish religious and secular consciousness.

Many are upset by this attitude of the Jews, in the last 1950 years, or so. They called it “Zionism”. And many identify Zionism with racism. How, why, do the Jews want to go home, generation after generation? How dare they?

Isn’t good enough, say the Jewish skeptics, that Jews are tolerated back on the so-called Holy Land? Why do they want everything back, like the owned the place in the past? Why do they want their capital back? Don’t they have it already?

Before last year presidential election, opponents of Trump claimed he was a Jew hater. They were, they are that dumb, and, or disingenuous. Even Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate and New York Time pillar claimed that, two days before the election. The fact that of Trump’s several closest family members several were Jews didn’t mean anything to them. Such a level of idiocy means that arguing intelligently is as easily done with the Commons as with common cockroaches.

We had to build our mosques on top of your temple, to show you who is the boss, and so that you could never return. Beautiful Gold Al Aqsa Mosque Crushes Foundations Of Jewish Temple in Jerusalem. God is a terrorist, or is not.

Now Trump has recognized Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and the cockroaches are roaring to high heavens. Jerusalem was the capital of Israel for more than a millennium. Say from 1200 BCE (king David) until 136 CE.  Rome had two terrible wars with Israel, one in 66-73 CE, starting under Nero, and the other in 132-136 CE. In 73 CE, the victorious Romans demolished the great temple. In 136 CE the Romans ordered the dispersion of the Jews out of Israel,  and took to calling Israel “Palestina”. (from “Philistia, land of the Philistines”, something justified by old Assyrian inscription). In 360 CE, Roman emperor Julian ordered the Jewish temple rebuilt, but the work was interrupted by a quake and Julian’s death. During the Sassanian occupation of the area, in the Seventh Century, the Jews were again given autonomy. But then the Christians regained control, and the Jews lost the autonomy, and the Muslims followed suit, even forcing Jews to wear marks on their clothing. Jews regained autonomy, shortly after demolishing the British government’s headquarters in the King David hotel in Jerusalem.

The international consensus at the united nations was that Jerusalem was an international city. Right, a treaty was signed to this effect between Richard the Lion Hearted (representing Philippe Auguste of France, his suzerain) and Saladin. (Treaty of Jaffa, 1192 CE!)

The reason being that Jerusalem is sacred to Jews, Christians, and Muslims. In the case of the Muslims, it’s because Mohammed flew there on top of a winged horse after his death (don’t make fun of the Prophet, or Allah may make you drink melted lead, one of his prefered punishment, says the Qur’an). Another reason is that the tiny territories given by the UN at the creation of Israel, don’t have much of the city.

However, Jerusalem is not just the religious capital of the superstition known as Judaism. As I said, it was the capital of the STATE of Israel for 1,300 years. Not as long as the 1,600+ years of Paris as capital, but close. And about as long as Memphis was capital of Egypt. Memphis was capital of Egypt three times between 2950 BCE and 664 CE.

The question is this: what is the justification for the existence of Israel? Conventional wisdom says it’s just a place for the Jews to be, otherwise they end up in ovens, and related situations. This is a silly reason: Jews shouldn’t end in ovens, because if they do, everybody will (as the top Nazis recognized, sotto voce, among themselves: the treatment they gave to the Jews, extermination, was going to be extended to others).

No, the real reason for Israel is Israel: bringing back the state by that name, made greatly, but not exclusively, of Jews. That state had Jerusalem as capital.

But what of the reasoning that this compromises peace?  Jacques Attali‏, one of France’s deepest thinkers, and close to president Macron, wrote on his twitter account (we follow each other): @jattali: “The United States’ unilateral recognition of a reunified Jerusalem as the capital of Israel, and of no other state, is against the long-term interests of Israel and the Middle East peace process.”

I recognize that the “of no other state” part is uselessly aggravating. However Trump said:  “We are not taking a position of any final status issues, including the specific boundaries of the Israeli sovereignty in Jerusalem, or the resolution of contested borders. Those questions are up to the parties involved,” That does not seem to exclude that East Jerusalem couldn’t be the capital of a Palestinian state (having a double capital was close to a situation found in Berlin for decades).

So my grain of wisdom? The Hamas charter wants all Jews killed. Hamas rules Gaza. I have quoted this saying of Prophet Muhammad in Hadith (41; 6985)  many times.

According to the Hamas charter, Jewish people “have only negative traits and are presented as planning to take over the world.”[39] The charter claims that the Jews deserve God’s/Allah’s enmity and wrath because they received the Scriptures but violated its sacred texts, disbelieved the signs of Allah, and slew their own prophets.”[40] (This mentality is straight from the Qur’an, which insults the jews, page after page, even asserting all pigs, monkeys and dogs we see are, truly, Jews…) ).

Here is a piece of the Hamas Charter, halfway through Article Seven:

The Islamic Resistance Movement is one of the links in the chain of the struggle against the Zionist invaders. It goes back to 1939, to the emergence of the martyr Izz al-Din al Kissam and his brethren the fighters, members of Moslem Brotherhood. It goes on to reach out and become one with another chain that includes the struggle of the Palestinians and Moslem Brotherhood in the 1948 war and the Jihad operations of the Moslem Brotherhood in 1968 and after.

Moreover, if the links have been distant from each other and if obstacles, placed by those who are the lackeys of Zionism in the way of the fighters obstructed the continuation of the struggle, the Islamic Resistance Movement aspires to the realisation of Allah’s promise, no matter how long that should take. The Prophet, Allah bless him and grant him salvation, has said:

“The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (related by al-Bukhari and Moslem).

The Slogan of the Islamic Resistance Movement:

Article Eight:

Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes.]

An essay in the Huffington post disingenuously claims the preceding Hadith does not really say what it says. Yet it’s repeated in at least 2 other places; moreover the Qur’an is extremely insulting to the Jews (although it quotes the Bible favorably to justify a “rain of stones” on homosexuals). The constantly repeated idea in the Qur’an is that Jews disobeyed “god”. Their “god”: the prophet of Islam knew better than the Jews what the Jewish “god” wanted, and he wanted them punished for it. 

In other words, the Palestinians are in denial. The Qur’ an and its murderous threats is their main problem, not the jews. The Jews have the right to come back where they were from. Recognizing this is recognizing the reason for Israel. Anything short of that tries to refute history… and justice.

here are many times more Muslims in Egypt than there are Jews in the world. The Middle Earth has space for the Jews to return.  It will enrich the place force tolerance, hence intelligence.

Meanwhile, negotiating with the most determined enemies of Israel is like negotiating with the Nazis, and literally so. One couldn’t negotiate with the Nazis, for a number of reasons. One does not negotiate with rattlesnakes. This is what the French Republic thought. France declared war to the Nazis, as soon as Great Britain changed its mind and agreed to help France militarily, if France got into a war with the Nazis.  The result is that the Nazis were forced into war 6 years early, and lost said war.

The case of Hamas is typical: read the text above. It’s straight out of Nazi central casting, the sort of declarations even the top Nazis (say Hitler, Heydrich, Himmler) didn’t dare to utter. Respecting this, and giving Hamas the concession that Jerusalem shouldn’t be again the capital of Israel is making to Nazis the concession that Jerusalem shouldn’t be again the capital of Israel. How wise is that/ How moral is that? How prudent is that? How cowardly is that?

If we want truth and reconciliation, we need truth first. The truth is that Jerusalem is the capital of the state of Israel. It was the case for more than 1300 years, roughly as long as the superstitious ideology known as Islam. I am not a Jew, I am more than that, I am a historian. Or, at least someone cognizant with the basics of common history. It’s where the facts are.

Patrice Ayme’

The rights and wrongs of hunting!

The Great Spirit Was A Hunter, And Will Always Be A Hunter. Hunting For Ideas, Is Not Just A Metaphor, Not Just Our Fate, But The Only Way To Have A Superior Mind.

Once, well above timber-line, with the sun low on the horizon, an antelope came my way, running passed me. I was running the other way, and the quadruped rushed, close enough to touch. As I turned the corner, a couple of seconds later, full of wonder, I found myself face to face with an enormous wolf charging my way. We looked at each other, not even three meters away… I will always remember that moment. The intelligence obvious in the yellow eyes of the wolf brought to my mind the look of a primate, not just a canid. It was a late evening in late spring, when days are very long. I could read the majestic creature’s quasi-human surprise:’What is a human doing here at this time of the day?’

Hunting had made his kind smart over the eons. He could have dispatched me to another world in seconds, but he knew what humans were. We recognized each others’ supreme intelligence, an identity of spirits. Two hunters on top of the world. He went his way, I went mine, both owners of the universe, and having recognized the other as such.

The essay reproduced below was penned by a baby philosopher, and tends to philosophy by enumeration, an honorable method, reminiscent of FOX News’ approach to debate. With a silly (anti-hunting) bias not so well hidden. However I agree with it in some ways, with what the author wrote, about the so-called “confirmation bias”. Let me explain by considering the conclusion of the author:
“If your interlocutor objects to hunting, try to discover the basis for their objection. And I believe you should keep nature out of it.

Finally, try to argue with someone who takes a fundamentally different view. Confirmation bias – the unintentional act of confirming the beliefs we already have – is hard to overcome. The only antidote I know of is rational discourse with people whose confirmation bias runs contrary to my own.”

I agree with the method proposed to deal with “confirmation bias” (= “intellectual fascism”, “group think”). However, the sentence “I believe you should keep nature out of it”, is downright silly. The author is part of nature, should he keep himself “out of it”? Whatever “out” is?

I am both for and against hunting. It all depends upon who is hunting what, when, how, why? Hunting with stones, or arrows is one thing, wolves hunting their prey, another. To want wolves living somewhere free, but wolves who are not hunting, but devouring protein pills, would be akin to wanting the biosphere, albeit, without biology.

Let’s not forget civilization was founded by the genus Homo, fundamentally a hunting species, the greatest hunting genus of all times. Hunting is especially the genius of Homo Erectus and Homo Habilis. When Homo Erectus got to Georgia, two million years ago, it survived the cold winters, because it was dressed in animal furs.

Fundamentally, hunting is about domination, and especially total domination of the better ideas. Predators tend to be smarter than prey (they tend to have bigger brains, overall: there has been a brain arm race between predator and prey, at least on land… with few exceptions, like crocodiles). Hence the mood fundamental to hunting (I am smarter than you, so I completely dominate and own you) is also the mood most conducive to civilization.

Hunting has been so central to the evolution of our genus that to be rabidly against it, is to be rabidly against humanity, and even worse against the idea that there are better ideas which can own and dominate.

The central idea is that nature needs hunting and nature is about hunting. Even human nature is about hunting and contemplating hunting means contemplating nature.

Overall, one has to dominate the debate. The crux we presently face, is the preservation of the biosphere. Genuine hunters want this, so that they can hunt. Actually many species were saved by hunters who had established preserves for them. So genuine preservationists want to preserve the biosphere. So they should cooperate.

Hunting teaches a meta-morality about the animal conditions which pre-Neolithic people understood very well: hunting was part of the digestion of the Great Spirit, so to speak. Hunting was a process consubstantial with the universe itself. This viewpoint, no doubt held for millions of years, is entirely correct.

By contrast, denying that hunting is central to the universe is in not just unreal, it violates the very idea of having a spirit. Wanting to protect the universe from hunting is to try to build a god that would be like a dog, something mastered, with no supremacy of its own, but for blind love.

Maybe we should grow up instead, and join the Great Spirit, in its full spirit? If we want the better spirit, we cannot just be prisoners of love. What we need, instead, to save the biosphere, is the greatest spirit. We won’t save the spirit if our only guide is to spare the pain. Quite the opposite.

Learning from Dogs

The philosophy of hunting in terms of it being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Anyone who comes here for more than a couple of visits will know that both Jean and I are opposed to hunting completely. Period!

That’s not surprising as there have been a number of posts over the years describing how we feed the wild deer. Here’s three more photographs that haven’t previously been shared with you.

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But, of course, the opinions of Jean and me are not, and should not be, the rule for the wider population of this part of Oregon.

All I would ask is that there is a proper, mature discussion as to the pros and cons of hunting wild animals in this, the twenty-first century.

All of which leads me to a recent essay posted on The Conversation site and republished here within the terms of that site.

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Is hunting moral?…

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Essence Of MORALITY: SUSTAINABILITY, Not Just Avoiding Suffering.

What is morality? The answer is not in “religions” established in the last few centuries, by self-obsessed elites, such as Islam. Verily, there is just one religion, the religion of man: Ecce Homo.

Past religions could not be sure that man was a religion, so they invented god(s). The idea is that, to distinguish right from wrong, one needs absolute truth, and that absolute truth was called god(s).

However, we now know for sure that there is an absolute, an absolute creator, and an absolute morality, from that long (quantum) computation called evolution.

Right And Wrong Draws Another Line, Across Knowledge Bases. That the All Too Christian Solzhenitsyn Naturally Forgets

Heart Without Knowledge Is Only Ruin Of Morality

The fact that we, ourselves, are an absolute, is why hysterical “animal rights” advocates have not much standing: animals are not equivalent to us. They are no absolute. That is why Gary Francione, a professor of law at Rutgers and East Anglia Universities is fundamentally wrong.  

https://aeon.co/essays/why-keeping-a-pet-is-fundamentally-unethical

Says he: “A morally just world would have no pets, no aquaria, no zoos. No fields of sheep, no barns of cows. That’s true animal rights.” No poetry, no heart for other species, no alter sentiencism, either. That’s the perfect recipe for the total disappearance of the entire animal kingdom. Animals can survive only if us, masters of the Earth, and soon the Sol-Centaurus system, are interested by them.

True stupidity gives me counterexamples from which reason can bounce. Francione knows nothing. More than once in the mountains I met a solitary sheep, grazing. What did the sheep do? It had a good look at me, and then came to me, so I could rescue it from its predicament. Was the sheep suffering? No. Was the sheep feeling friendly? Yes. Is that a crime? No.

Law professor Francione confuses “what hurts a sentient being” with “immoral“. Pushing his logic further would mean all life of ALL sentient beings should be stopped, as life means hurt, for a sentient being, at one point, or another. (This is my old objection to Fundamentalist Buddhism; at least Buddhism, following Hinduism, is logical, and calls for Nirvana, the extinction of all cycles of life. The extinct Celtic religion was just the same.)

Thus, pushed a bit further, we should not have children: surely they cry as they are born, and that’s just the beginning. Hence we should let humanity disappear.

Leaving animals free to hurt each other.

This is a problem: if we are around, we may hurt animals, if we are not around, animals will eat each others.

Thus the author writes of ethics, while not knowing that the fundamental sense of “moral” is not “avoiding hurt”, but avoiding the behaviors which are unsustainable for our species.

Morality is species dependent. In some species, the newborns eat each other.  Newborn eating is moral in those species.

Thus, there is even worse. The real nature of the group of species known as hominids is that these were carnivorous bipedal apes who rose to dominance, precisely because animal protein and fat is so nourishing. It is moral for hominids to eat flesh, and especially so for the highly carnivorous Homo Erectus and Sapiens.

Many are the species which eat animals, few are those who do not. All primates, even cute, innocent looking Lemurians and Golden Tamarins, grab animals and eat them, whenever they can. Even grazing animals eat meat. The meat of snails, insects, and whatever crawls in the grass end in the stomachs of innocent looking grazers. This is why PM Thatcher made the cows cannibalistic, and, to save money, did not “render” the meat very long, thus causing “mad cow disease”.

In a just punishment, Thatcher herself became a mad cow, and croaked from it.

Meat made humanity, by enabling big brains and their extravagant energy consumption. Indeed, the meat habit came first. By millions of years. Those, like professor Francione, who cry each time we eat an animal raw (it happens when I run), want to deprive us of the very essence of our humanity. Being bipedal made our ancestors in the most efficient savannah dwellers: man is the animal with the fastest, furthest ground transportation capability, especially when it’s noon, and very hot. This (apparently weird and useless) characteristic is explained by an asset: the ability to catch up with any potential prey, especially when it’s very hot in the tropics, and Homo can see very well by mid-day.

Not just this.  Our hominid ancestors accelerated their evolution, by carrying weapons in their arms. Forgetting this and pushing a morality which even sheep would find better for what they eat (grass) will leave those who adopt it, and those that they pretend to defend, defenseless. One may as well advocate pacifism when facing deliberate evil. This sort of nonsense is what enabled the Twentieth Century’s greatest horrors, such as Nazism. And, indeed, the Nazis were fanatically for animal rights. Why? Because pushed to the extreme, animal rights contradict human rights. Thus, promoting the former exaggeratedly, enables  to violate the latter.

Patrice Ayme