Saving The Animals, Thus Ourselves

Animals die in great numbers trying to cross human transportation systems. When one provides the animals with crossings, they rush to use them (so are used even before they are finished, by a Noah’s ark of species). Respecting nature is not just about the beauty and naturalness it provides us with, it is about respecting how we became who we are, at our best. We have to learn to share the planet with animals. Not just because we are smart, but also because they are smart and our smarts evolved from interacting with their smarts. So interacting with wild animals is smart all around… and it has made our species smarter! Wildlife interaction is how we evolved our smarts. Not book smarts, but the deepest smarts.

Hence by respecting animals, we respect how we became human… and it keeps on being human to do so.
Economy means managing the house, in particular, managing earth, which is our common house. As the greenhouse heating proceeds at an accelerating pace, we then have to reserve an increasing part of our economic activity to save the animals by helping them to cope with the changes we have brought.
Morality comes from the mores, the old ways, the ways which perdured, and thus, insure survival. Having a natural environment, full of animals, is the ultimate morality. If we can’t save them, how can we learn to save ourselves? So it is not just smart and economic to save the animals, but also moral. The money engaged so far is quite small. But the price of an unbalanced environment tottering towards ruin, is incomparably higher. For a nice article with nice videos of animals using their smarts crossing freeways and roads, consider:

As a badger digs, say for ground squirrels whose borrows have many exits, could not it be that the coyote would seize a fleeing squirrel, and share the meal? This is basic economics and strategy, and it turns out that coyotes and badgers have figured out that behavior, and cooperate together. The next question would be this: do the individuals concerned figure it out by themselves, as cephalopods do, or is the behavior culturally instigated, namely both badgers and coyotes learn elements of interspecific cooperation from teaching by their elders? I believe the latter.

After all, I trained the (wild) nesting birds on my balcony to benignantly ignore my weird and intrusive ways… which thus had to learn to be a bit more respectful than they usually are. But of course these ways tend to incite the red tail hawks to not land on this particular balcony on a determined culinary mission (as they have been seen doing…) And the birds know this [1].

Saving the animals is first of all about saving us… Not just our sense of beauty.

Patrice Ayme

[1] Hummingbirds set their nests below hawks’ nests, as this protects them from gays. Local hawks do attack nests of birds who are big enough (like gays, crows, etc).And I have seen them pass 10 feet from me, eyeing me suspiciously… Their feathers can be two feet long…

https://www.audubon.org/news/why-hawk-hummingbirds-best-friend

RELIGIOUS IRRATIONALITY RATIONALE

Ruling Classes Subjugate Opposition With Irrationality, Not Just Human Sacrifices (And Their Variants: Killings, Jihad, Signature Strikes).

Say you are a tyrant, You want Your rule as absolute as possible. You may have ecological problems, and you may need to decimate your subjects, or make them work harder. What is the best way to do this? Controlling your subjects’ minds, and not just with fear. Notice the sheep: they follow the pastor who milks them, and occasionally, cut their throats. What is the difference between flock and pastor? The pastor is much more clever, much more rational. The pastor is endowed with reason. Actually more than one. The pastor is full of reasons. The sheep is deprived of reason. Irrational. So, as a tyrant, irrationality you shall preach.

So how are you going to turn simple folks into a flock deprived of reason? Well, human sacrifices are a way to do this. Notice the king in the drawing below, sitting under an umbrella, just like a US president under his White House. A study published in Nature, in April 2016, explains that “Ritual human sacrifice promoted and sustained the evolution of stratified societies”.

Sacrifice Of The Annual Customs At Dahomey. Drawing By Foulquier, 1776. Engraving In “Le Tour Du Monde, 1865.”

The “Annual Customs” in Dahomey were also tax day for the free citizens of Dahomey (only war captives and criminals were sacrificed). The massive (several thousands) sacrifices stopped when the slave trade became too irresistibly profitable (the empire of Dahomey provided roughly 20% of the transatlantic slaves).

Honored European guests were allowed to attend the Annual Customs, as Dahomey had guns made locally, a professional army, and was perfectly capable of defending itself against the white man (as the British army found out, in Ashanti next door, suffering a terrible defeat where all soldiers were killed, but two, and the Anglo-Saxon commander was eaten, cooked like Cook).

But the outrages of superstitious religion go well beyond just roasting people alive, and are otherwise subtle in their deepest forms. The Bible evokes the Golden Calf, and rejects its cult. But that may have been a red herring. What upper classes need to rule best is for the lower classes to:

ADORE IRRATIONALITY!

Adore irrationality, reject reason. Rejecting reason, makes one the master’s slave, because one becomes so stupid, one gets feeble-minded. Thus all enslaving religions trample reason, as reason is the weapon which could destroy them most. Reason, not love.

This is why all religions which help enforce plutocracy train their followers to obey senseless orders, such as not eating pig, crustacean, and only eating animals who were agitated by spasms, while experiencing anxiety and suffering as their throats were slit, etc.

Jared Diamond gives more examples in his book “The World Until Yesterday: What Can We Learn From Traditional Societies?”:

“Virtually all religions hold some supernatural beliefs specific to that religion. That is, a religion’s adherents firmly hold beliefs that conflict with and cannot be confirmed by our experience of the natural world, and that appear implausible to people other than the adherents of that particular religion. For example, Hindus believe there is a monkey god who travels thousands of kilometers at a single somersault. Catholics believe a woman who had not yet been fertilized by a man became pregnant and gave birth to a baby boy, whose body eventually after his death was carried up to a place called heaven, often represented as being located in the sky. The Jewish faith believes that a supernatural being gave a chunk of desert in the Middle East to the being’s favorite people, as their home forever.”

One should not forget a Prophet (Muhammad) who flew to Jerusalem on a winged horse, before ascending to heavens, just like that other guy had done before. (Curious that Diamond forgot the founder of the second most major superstition.)

Superstitious religions sound very stupid, but the cult of unreason has its reasons that only the masters understand. Some of these orders are not just irrational, they are lethal: if they can claim you insult(ed) their little godly doggie god in the sky the excellent Judeo-Christiano-Muslim authorities could, or would outright order you killed.

Hence irrationality did not just rule, it killed, and demanded the utmost respect, doing so, lest it would have another irrational reason to kill you.

Let me insist: the very irrationality of religious commands enables the authorities to exert power whimsically. So it is the reign of Sharia, not Human Ethology (the later been approached by Roman law).

In the third century BCE, Chinese administrator Li Bing eliminated the sacrifice of young maidens to a river god during the conquest of Sichuan by the First Emperor. He called the bluff of a local racket in which families rid themselves of unwanted daughters while getting rich on the compensation they received. Thus “irrational” rituals bring all too rational, very prosaic gain.

Jared Diamond observes that embracing irrationality is the greatest divide between the fanatics and the rest (fanatics means: coming out of the FANUM, the temple):

“No other feature of religion creates a bigger divide between religious believers and modern secular people, to whom it staggers the imagination that anyone could entertain such beliefs. No other feature creates a bigger divide between believers in two different religions, each of whom firmly believes its own beliefs but considers it absurd that the other religion’s believers believe those other beliefs. Why, nevertheless, are supernatural beliefs such universal features of religions?”

As we just saw, “irrational” beliefs are something else reason to get ahead. Pure irrationality is rare. Searching the reasons behind apparent irrationality, what’s hiding in the Dark, oft reveals causality in full.

Jared Diamond rejects the explanation that believing in irrational things is just due to ignorance. Instead he views it as necessary for identifying in groups. There is no doubt that this is a factor. But one does not need sheer absurdities to identify in a group. Middle Age Muslims for example requested Jews and Christians to wear clothing which could identify them. So dressing in a special way can work.

In conclusion, Jared Diamond claims that “it’s irrational to be religious. Supernatural beliefs might not make sense, but they endure because they’re so emotionally satisfying.”

Well, sorry Jared, that’s mostly missing the point. There is a higher reason for imposing (the religion of) irrationality. The point is that irrationality makes people brainless, and thus easy to rule.

However, humans are naturally rational. So irrationality has to be taught, and preached. Some may sneer and ponder what’s in it for We The People. Why would We The People be so easily seduced by their own subjugation?

It is not as if the subjugation was a secret: Christianism brandishes “The Lord”, and compare people to “sheep” to be led (to slaughter?). Islam literally means: “submission”, from root of aslama “he resigned, he surrendered, he submitted.”

So what We The People get in exchange is… irrationality, a rest from the human condition. And just like the Lords themselves, brandishing irrationality to generate fear, cruelty, submission… We The People can do the same.

In almost all societies, killing “legally” within a tribe or clan is granted only to those with great authority. Thus ritual human sacrifice serves power structures—who sits at the top of the social hierarchy.

In a study published in Nature, Joseph Watts, a specialist in cultural evolution at the University of Auckland in New Zealand, and colleagues analysed 93 traditional cultures in Austronesia (the region that embraces dozens of thousands of islands in the Pacific and Indonesia). The key was to analyze them before they were influenced by colonization and major world religions (generally in the late 19th and early 20th centuries).

Ethnographic records, show that the prevalence of sacrifice increased with increased social stratification: it occurred in 25% of cultures with little or no stratification, 37% of those with moderately stratified societies, and 67% of those with a pronounced hierarchy.

Mapping the evolutionary relationships between cultures, the researchers found that human sacrifice and social hierarchy co-evolved. Social stratification can change over time. However,  societies that practised human sacrifice were less apt to revert to milder degrees of stratification.

In other words, human sacrifice seems to bolster stratification: it helped to stabilize hierarchy, and conceivably, therefore, had a common role in the development of highly stratified societies that generally persist even today.

I hold that extremely lethal Jihadism is a form of human sacrifice, so this analysis carries to Literal Shia or Salafist Wahhabist Islam directly, and explained why these Muslim societies were unable to progress.

Human sacrifice is the privilege of priests or those who claim religious authority. Watts and colleagues say that this discloses a “Dark Side” to the social role of religion. (They have previously shown that belief in supernatural punishing agencies in Austronesian cultures encouraged moral observance, and thereby promoted the emergence of stratified, complex social structures).

Watts’s team reveals that human sacrifice wasn’t conducted for ostensibly religious reasons alone. Taboo violations, demoralization the underclasses, imposing class boundaries and instil fear of social elites, all build and maintain social control. In India, Untouchable touching higher caste individuals could suffer what are nowadays unimaginable punishments such as amputation, sitting in a red hot metal seat, etc.

Here is the conclusion of Watts and colleagues:

“Religion has long been proposed to play a functional role in society and is commonly claimed to underpin morality. Recent evolutionary theories of religion have focused on the potential of pro-social and moral religious beliefs to increase cooperation. Our findings suggest that religious rituals also played a darker role in the evolution of modern complex societies. In traditional Austronesian cultures there was substantial religious and political overlap, and ritualised human sacrifice may have been co-opted by elites as a

divinely sanctioned means of social control. The approach adopted in this paper demonstrates the way causal hypotheses about major transitions in human social organization can be tested by combining computational models and language phylogenies with a wealth of cultural and historical data. Unpalatable as it might be, our results suggest that ritual killing helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors, to the large stratified societies we live in today.”

Say You are a tyrant, You want all to understand that Your rule is absolute, global as the plutocracy you lead with relish. So You order “Signature Strikes”, thus telling the world that any wedding You can kill, if such is Your good pleasure, as long as it happens in a far away land.

Were the killing by drones in “signature strikes” personally ordered by president Obama for all to see a form of ritual killing, of human sacrifices for all to see? Certainly. The scariest part is that ordering kills for all to see is something that even Chancellor-President Hitler, a solid reference for human sacrifices, was careful not to be associated to! This means that the Obama administration developed momentum to change the public’s mind about human sacrifice.

Human sacrifices violate human ethology, the evolution-given morality humans come equipped with. In the small groups in which humanity evolved for millions of years, human life was most precious, because the life of others was necessary to pursue one’s life.

So this means that the rise of civilization and its accompanying religions comprised a violation of human ethology.

The main theme of this essay is even more general: it considers not just the violation of evolution given morality, by “stratified societies”, but the violation of reason itself. Violating reason itself compounds the preceding moral problem: human ethology does not come just from “instincts” (whatever that means), but also from the usage of rationality (within a culture, or the individual).

The superstitious religions associated to the rise of demonic upper classes, plutocracy, have attacked reason itself. They are as inhuman as one can get, and survive. They enabled war maximally, annihilating their competition fully (although secular Rome and Literal Islam have unfinished business). Superstitious religions come short, for the future. Their carefully engineered irrationality and willingness to kill at the drop of a hat, will decapitate us, if we do not decapitate them first.

Make no mistake: irrationality has its uses, it allows to jump out of mental boxes. However, irrationality in a religion is different; it creates a common box, and create common, shared respect for irrational elements. Adoration for the Golden Calf is itself a particular case of irrationality. Making irrationality itself an object of adoration is a generalization of the cult of the Golden Calf, to the point of adoring the whims of the satanic masters themselves.

Collective adoration of senseless ways is collective adoration for the mania of the crowd, intellectual fascism at its worst. It’s a moral duty, moral from the ways of Homo, moral to go back to the free ways of our genus, which have made us what we are, the crown of the creation of reason, by enforcing reason, and not its exact opposite.

Patrice Ayme’

No Assimilation: Racism & Destruction

We have to be guided by history. The present ecological, plutocratic, immigration and Islamist crises (in order of importance) are informed by history. However neither our delusional “leaders” nor the herds they guide know enough history to inform decisively the present crises. Verily, history is the best teacher.

The Ancient Greeks and Romans were also guided by history, but we are in a much more advantageous position than they were: history in Greco-Roman times was at most 1,000 year old. Now the history we know of, much of it from increasingly detailed archeological work, is more than 10,000 years old.

An example: detailed archeology, recently done, revealed that the Late Roman empire was much richer than previously believed. There was no evidence of economic decay, far from it. So the catastrophes which struck it in the Sixth Century were of a different nature than Gibbon’s “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”.

Small Surviving Portion of Diocletian Baths (Circa 300 CE). Christian Hated Bathing, So They Destroyed Baths.

The Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Franks were stuck by the story of Troy, which was the limit of what they thought they knew for sure (modern archeology has not decisively determined the exact events of Troy’s adventures: it’s a work in progress). But they did not really know the truth: soon thereafter the “Greek Dark Ages” nearly obliterated history.

Something was learned though: the Franks (barely) avoided the total collapse which had struck the Greeks 15 centuries earlier. The Franks (like the Romans before them) claimed they descended from Troy. Whether that’s true or not, what they meant is that they knew how to avoid catastrophe.

And they did.

How did the Franks do it? By NOT doing what the Romans had done. Or, more exactly, by doing civilization in the spirit of Ancient Republican Rome, not the degenerated  self-obsessed imperial fascism of emperor Commodus and his successors.

I am a bit unfair to the successors here: Commodus perpetuated a mood actually launched by Augustus himself: Augustus, differently from his great uncle, Julius Caesar, had not understood the necessity to expand the empire. Augustus explicitly advised his successors to NOT conquer Germany. The advice was respected, and therein all the problems of Rome.

Had the Romans made a determined effort to conquer Germany, they would have had to reinstitute the Republic in full. If the Republic had been reconstituted, in full, Roman governance would have been much smarter, and capable of solving the problems thrown at Rome.

Thus, when speaking of war, and whining about it, the herd forgets that democracies make war best (as the Athenians demonstrated at Marathon, when they charged irresistibly the immense multitude of fascist imperial Persian storm troopers).

Thus, to push things a bit, to make war better, one has to make democracy better. Thus the army was an important factor of de-segregation in the USA.

Speaking of segregation, that was the problem which killed Rome the most. The Romans had basically renounced ASSIMILATING the Germans. Germans were viewed as hopeless, yet too strong, barbarians.

The analogy with what is going on today is total. The Germans came in with their own legal systems, their own Sharias. The Romans respected that. So states within the state grew (a bit as has been observed in France and especially Belgium, where at least one city should be de-Islamized).

And why were the Germans so strong? Because the state had grown weak, from not taxing the hyper-rich enough. Just like now. Lack of taxation of the hyper-rich has made Europe weak. Military weak. Germany is going to send 650 soldiers in Mali, to relieve the French Army there (which then will be able to attack the Islamist State). One is talking about pathetically small numbers here, for a country as large as today’s Germany. Meanwhile the French don’t have enough air refueling capacity to bomb as much as they could (Germany there is speaking to provide air refueling for the French Air Force).

When the Roman state decomposed in the “Occident”, very small numbers of warriors were involved, roughly equivalent to those the Islamist State and its various faction have.

Verdict: one has to forcefully assimilate, and make the Republic stronger, as needed to do so. Both phenomena are entangled.

And don’t try to assimilate Islam instead: that was tried before. Not just with Islam, but Christianism itself: to convert Germans to the empire, the Roman leaders (Constantine and his successors) used Christianism. Christianism is a sort of superstitious republicanism claiming all men are equal, under fascist god, etc…  Well, it did not work: Christianism devoured civilization, and did so, in particular, in the Orient. The Orient was suddenly destroyed, within a generation by the wars, and the weakness, physical, intellectual and moral, which fanatical Christianism brought. In particular it brought Islam (just read the Qur’an, Muhammad himself explains it very well!)

I am perfectly aware that the ignorant view assimilation as racism. This mentality was launched by a herd of European pseudo-philosophers who loved fascism (either Kaiser, see the deluded Bertrand Russell, Mussolini, Hitler or Stalin style). Loving fascism provided them with perks, including from American pluto-imperialism (which was delighted to see proper critique replaced by non-sense).

That assimilation was racism has been the main driving force to create racism and segregation in French society (against the very people those who denounced assimilation pretended to protect!) Same, and worse in Belgium, a state representing well the sort of degeneracy which affected Rome. Actually Belgium’s only justification, as I have explained many times, was to weaken France, by cutting off from it the fiercest part of Gaul (“Gallia”; reference on that: Julius Caesar). It’s working splendidly: France nearly lost the two world wars against fascist Germany thanks to the existence of Belgium as a mentally, and militarily tiny independent kingdom.

(For those who do not understand the preceding paragraph: all the recent terrorism in France was planned in Belgium, by pseudo, unassimilated “Belgians”, who were simply barbarians educated by the Sharia.)

Hollande seems to be taking his war against the Islamist State seriously; that’s a political U-turn: just as Rome needed to conquer Germany, the empire needs to reconquer the Orient . Because, indeed, before it got subjugated by Islam, with the results presently observed, the Orient was to Rome, and before that to the Macedonio-Greeks, and, even before, to the Zoroastrians (I don’t expect the admirers of the late Edward Said to understand any of this).

Philosophy has to guide. Philosophy which knows history, and thought about it, that is. But force is to observe that most so-called philosophers of the Twentieth Century knew no history, or then so little, that they could use it to justify their madness (this is an attack against Michel Foucault, Althusser, etc.). Simone de Beauvoir, who knew enough history to teach it to all of France under the fascist Vichy regime, was rightly infuriated by Foucault’s distortions of history. Now all these obnoxious, and cruel, self-obsessed dwarves are viewed as pinnacles of wisdom. No wonder our politicians went mad. Now they have to quit the Fourth Century Roman political line they have been repeating.

And be happy! Or the strength will not be found. One has to learn to be happy through the worst. Especially when it’s only bad news affecting others.

Patrice Ayme’   

Human Kind, Yet Evil Rule

Humanity Good, Institutions Bad? Not so simple. Evil Rule (Pluto-Cracy) is a fundamental consequence of human nature, amplified by civilization.

In “Human Kind“, 14th October 2015 George Monbiot, published in the Guardian 14th October 2015, suggests that:“Fascinating new lines of research suggest that we are good people, tolerating bad things.”

Sounds good. It’s very self-congratulatory: defining oneself as “on the left”, “liberal”, etc. has much to do with self-satisfaction about what a great human one is. I sent the following comment:

“Saying that “people are good, while tolerating bad things” is an ineffective morality. The crux, indeed, is the moral nature of institutions, controlled by a few, rather than whether humans are kind or not.”

That observation of mine was censored, as  all my comments to Monbiot in the Guardian are. Human kind? Thus Monbiot readers’ minds are kept safe from my dreadful influence (lest readers flee the Guardian, and starts reading my site?).

Cephalopods Are Highly Intelligent, But They Have No Cultural Intelligence., Thus Stay Mental Miniatures

Meanwhile in the terror war occupation in Israel, in a few days, more than 40 young Palestinians got killed. One by one. Human kind? If something looking like a Palestinian moves, it gets shot. Some Jewish Israelis got actually shot because other Israelis thought they looked like the enemy (hey, they are all supposed to all be Semites! One very blonde beauty with very long hair who happened to be an Israeli soldier shot dead a Palestinian youth who may have pricked her: she is OK, don’t worry).

Cephalopods are surprisingly intelligent. They even use tools (the definition of Bergson of man as Homo Faber, Homo Artisan-Of-Hard-Materials is to be questioned). However, cephalopods experience short, brutish, asocial lives, and that boxes in their intelligence. This demonstrates that fully-dimensioned intelligence is social, and, in particular, cultural.

Superior intelligence is not just about the individual, it’s about the collective. Our biosphere, our part of the biosphere, is collectively intelligent (somewhat as in the movie Avatar).

Before I quote the interesting part of Monbiot’s article (which mainly quotes others), let me re-iterate my main thesis on altruism and love:

All advanced brain animals have to love, love enough to raise the young. To say love dominates, is saying we have brains grown with culture. It’s an important thing to say. And it explains the experiences Monbiot mentions.

Compare to the poignant fate of cephalopods, whose bright intelligence starts from scratch, with no culture, whatsoever. Cephalopod intelligence shines brightly, and quickly peters out, in a flurry of new born eggs.

So, the difference between us and squids is that we are adorned with philosophers, and other thinkers. The scorn Monbiot heaps on them is neither kind, nor wise, not to say arrogant, coming from someone with a simple journalist background (and it shows!).

“A review article in the journal Frontiers in Psychology points out that our behaviour towards unrelated members of our species is “spectacularly unusual when compared to other animals”. While chimpanzees might share food with members of their own group, though usually only after being plagued by aggressive begging, they tend to react violently towards strangers. Chimpanzees, the authors note, behave more like the Homo economicus of neoliberal mythology than people do.”

That is not just a funny joke, but a deep observation, that traders are just enraged chimps. However, to view chimpanzee behavior as typical of other animals is erroneous. Chimpanzees are half-savannah animals. I saw one once in an area with small, very small, and sparse trees, and the first serious forest was weeks of travel away. Not surprisingly, he was acting fiercely and dangerously, in an area roamed by lion prides. Lions having a look at him, won’t try to come close: he shook an entire small tree he was hanging from, and swung away, with incredible power and speed, after flashing his four inches canines.

Thus Monbiot go off the deep end with chimpanzees. Here is a more balanced view: humans keep much in common with chimpanzees. They both descend from common ancestors (who may have been more Homo like than Chimp like: we don’t really know, however fossils, and logic, point in that direction).

“Emotionally and socially, the psychology of chimps is very similar to humans,” says famous primatologist Frans de Waal at Emory University in Atlanta (a Dutch who started his famous observations in the Netherlands; universities in the USA have more money).

For instance, de Waal noted, chimps have shown they can help unrelated chimps and human strangers at personal cost without apparent expectation of personal gain, the sort of selfless behavior often naively claimed as unique to humans. They also display culture, with groups of chimpanzees socially passing on dozens of behaviors such as tool kits, and methods from generation to generation that are often very different from those seen in other groups. There are basically as many Chimpanzee cultures as chimpanzee tribes (and that’s thousands).

“The big difference I see going for us is language,” de Waal said. “They can learn a few symbols in labs, but it’s not impressive in my opinion compared to what even a young child can do. They don’t really symbolize like we do, and language is a big difference that influences everything else that you do — how you communicate, basic social interactions, all these become far more complex.”

Mathematics is, first of all, a language, remember.

The hyper aggressivity of Chimpanzees is related to their evolution: “They don’t like cooperating with strangers, that’s for sure,” de Waal said. Harvard biological anthropologist Richard Wrangham suggested this pattern of genetic (so to speak) violence may have been part of humanity’s legacy for millions of years. Yet, de Waal observed that based on what the canines of Ardipithecus suggest, “chimpanzees may be specialized in that regard [hyperviolence]. It’s only with the special recent human conditions of settlement and agriculture that gave us the incentive to worry about wealth, leading us to become warriors that way.”

This is close to my thesis: EVIL RULE (“Plutocracy”) was made possible by civilization. Before that it was just Demonic Males. Demonicity plus civilization = Evil Rule.

Compare de Waal’ subtlety with Monbiot’s imbalanced enthusiasm characteristic of the journalist he is:

“Humans, by contrast, are ultra-social: possessed of an enhanced capacity for empathy, an unparalleled sensitivity to the needs of others, a unique level of concern about their welfare and an ability to create moral norms that generalise and enforce these tendencies.

Such traits emerge so early in our lives that they appear to be innate. In other words, it seems that we have evolved to be this way. By the age of 14 months, children begin to help each other, for example by handing over objects another child can’t reach. By the time they are two, they start sharing things they value. By the age of three, they start to protest against other people’s violation of moral norms.”

Altruism is shown by nearly all advanced animals, because that’s how intelligence is grown. Thus, it’s not about material rewards. On board (so to speak) systems reward altruism intrinsically. Monbiot again:

“A fascinating paper in the journal Infancy reveals that reward has nothing to do with it. Three to five-year-olds are less likely to help someone a second time if they have been rewarded for doing it the first time. In other words, extrinsic rewards appear to undermine the intrinsic desire to help. (Parents, economists and government ministers, please note). The study also discovered that children of this age are more inclined to help people if they perceive them to be suffering, and that they want to see someone helped whether or not they do it themselves. This suggests that they are motivated by a genuine concern for other people’s welfare, rather than by a desire to look good. And it seems to be baked in.

Why? How would the hard logic of evolution produce such outcomes? This is the subject of heated debate.”

The heated debate is happening because the sort of view I defend (the view in Avatar, that of global intelligence, one could say) is progressing against the very reduced Survival-Of-The-Fittest approach.

The difference between us and squids is that we are adorned with philosophers, and the scorn journalist such as Monbiot heaps on them is neither kind, nor wise, not to say arrogant.

Humans are intrinsic scientists and philosophers, not just lovers and warriors. To try to say they are all one, and not the others misses the big picture.

The left, by insisting that humans are kind, underestimates the evil institutions are capable of. Institutions, although moral persons, in the legal sense, are not held back by human ethology in the behaviors they are capable of. (Nazism provided with plenty of example of that: even the very worst Nazis, including Himmler or Eichmann, found really hard to go all the way, and could do it, only by using institutional tricks, making institutions, Nazi institutions to force them to do what even them found too hard to do.)

Let’s not underestimate institutionalized evil. It has no bounds, whatsoever. Nazism, or Stalinism, were not about just a few very bad guys, they were about evil institutions, including a Prussianized army (in contrast to a human one). Let’s build human kind institutions that cannot not be commandeered by just a few (as our entire democracy-through-representatives regime gangrening the West, not to say the world, is).

Thus, to progress morally will mean to progress in the intelligence of the institutions we will set-up to rule over us. Hence moral progress will be a consequence, and only a consequence, of scientific and technological approfondissement (deepening).

Patrice Ayme’

Puerto Rico’s Default: Back To The 1930s?

We were told, for years, the outrageous lie that Greece’s debt crisis was “caused” by the Euro… Even by supposedly left wing economists of the USA (Paul Krugman, etc.), and their European parrots. I exposed this as a cover-up of the outrageous state of banking under a thick layer of Europhobia, even more than four years ago. Now Puerto Rico exhibits an increasing unwillingness to pay interest on its debt. Now what?

Puerto Rico’s Default Has Got To Be Europe’s Fault:

It’s only a matter of time before the plutocratic press, or, if you want, the Main Stream Media, make the Euro and Greece the reason for Puerto Rico’s failure. (For such a devious reasoning, see below.)

After 2008, the economy turned bad, and governments borrowed heavily to keep the society going. As the prospects got dimmer, https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/06/21/new-york-vulture-justice/, bought Puerto Rican debt. Vultures hate education, as education makes for rebels, and they are in position to reduce educational spending, in Greece or Puerto Rico. When Vulture Funds had their fill, of Puerto Rican debt, they sprang the trap: mistaking Porto Rico for Greece, they required the Porto Rican government to reduce spending in education… So that Porto Rico could pay them the extravagant interest payments.

Is Puerto Rico The Object Of A (Financial Engineered) Genocide?

Debating Puerto Rican debt appears to be about finance, state debt, schools, hedge funds. Yet, ultimately, it’s about who owns Puerto Rico.

The Guardian, and magazine such as Slate, bought the hedge fund propaganda, bait, hook, line, sinker, if not the boat itself. Jordan Weissmann in Slate, a famous electronic magazine, blared: “Hedge Funds Think Puerto Rico Should Shut Down Schools to Pay Its Debts. Is That So Wrong?”

No, of course, it’s right. Hedge Funds should have all rights you can possibly imagine. They already buy and sell entire countries.

***

The Truth About Porto-Rico: Tax Haven, Millionaires’ Haven:

The total tax receipt in Puerto Rico is 10%, a small fraction of what it is in advanced countries (at least 23%). Taxes on the rich are small, full of loopholes. Moreover, the USA treats Puerto Rico like an exploited colony, so full reimbursements and compensations available to full citizens of the USA are not available in Puerto Rico.

Another truth is that educational spending is exploding in the USA, because health spending (Obamacare”) does not control costs (contrarily to what propaganda says). So plutocrats from hedge funds profit from an inflation which fellow plutocrats in health care engineered, thanks to an arguably too Machiavellian by half White House.

Porto Rico is a weird island, a territory of the USA which is neither destined to independence, nor a state. In the 1950s, four Puerto Ricans went to the Congress of the USA, and shot 30 rounds onto the Representatives, to ask for independence.

Krugman says Puerto Rico is not Greece: indeed, Puerto Ricans flee massively to the USA. Greeks no doubt ought to do the same and contribute free, or menial labor, to the splendor of the economy as celebrate by Krugman. People who are in the know stridently contradicted Paul Krugman’s positions and exposed them for what they are: the term “neo-colonialism” is too good. Pursued to the end, Puerto Rico would just vanish, except as a tax haven (just as the Virgin Islands next door).

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Mussolini Fustigated What He Called “Demoplutocracies”:

Hitler joined the Italian dictator in complaining about the “plutocrats”… whom he knew all too well (top Nazis commiserated with him for having to dine with “plutocrats”, and make small talk to “plutocrats“, etc.)  

Does that mean that those who complain about “plutocracy” a lot, such as yours truly, are also fascist?

No. Of course not. First it shows that Mussolini and Hitler called their dinner guests “plutocrats” because that’s what they, all often, were. It also reveals that, in the 1930s, it was a common political truth, worldwide, that plutocrats had caused the financial and economic crisis… As they had, since they were in command (the bubble of the 1920s was deliberately engineered by Lord Montague and his American alter ego, to mitigate British debt from World War One by inflation and over-activity).

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President Roosevelt, Knight Of The Dark Side:

People often ask me what the Dark Side is. Neither “Evil“, nor “Star Wars” do justice to the notion. That force is strong, but its strength varies. The politician who acted the best, for his own country, when faced with that plutocratic crisis, was President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Roosevelt devalued the dollar, shackled Wall Street and the banks, created a Command and Control economy (headed by a young Canadian!). Roosevelt, himself a plutocrat, behaved in an extremely progressive, socialist way. Because he had to. Sometimes, the Dark Side is all about doing what is necessary (I see Obama chuckling in the distance with his drones). Embracing many of the solutions of the hard left, was the price Roosevelt paid to save plutocracy.

Maybe to compensate, for his own exuberant socialism, Roosevelt was abusive with the French (who still adore him), and exploitative with the British. He also helped making sure that Stalin, Hitler and Mussolini could devastate Europe… To the great profit of the USA. In 1939, or early 1940, Roosevelt could have declared war to Hitler. That would have probably made him win re-election in November 1940 in a landslide.

Roosevelt ran for an unprecedented Third Term. President Washington had refused to do so; Roosevelt was not obligated to run for an unprecedented third term. But he was morally, civilizationally, and strategically obligated to declare war to Nazism. FDR never did: Hitler declared war TO him. So why did not he?

Because Roosevelt was a master of the Dark Side: he let Nazism being used as a blunt instruments to destroy the competition in Europe, the other representative democracies (France, UK, Netherlands, Belgium, Norway… and their allies: Czechoslovakia, Poland, etc.) In the USA, this makes him a great man, an immense patriot, the founder of the “American Century”. The judgment of history, is another matter, entirely, let’s hope I contribute to it with my own point of view (“theory“).

In any case, President Roosevelt was a master plutocrat, whereas Hitler and Mussolini depended upon plutocrats. The case of Stalin is different: the Dark Side was so strong with him, he was able to surf over lots of plutocrats, as if they were waves, one after the other. Early on plutocrats of the USA (such as the Harriman Brothers) financed him (say to develop Baku oil fields). Engel in his theoretical book had said to do away with marriage, and embrace, free, secxual love. So Stalin’s satanic approach was pragmatic. Allied to German fascists, from 1916, until savagely attacked by his colleague Hitler, Stalin dictated his conditions to a weakened Roosevelt who was all too happy to give him half of Europe to chew on.

The Pragmatic Approach Can Be Opposed to the Principled One:

The USA stays highly pragmatic, never having ratified the Kyoto Protocol. Obama presented a plan to lead from behind technological progress (it affects energy production, about 30% of the CO2 production, but not transportation, another third, or industry). The solution, of course is to take out all subsidies for fossil fuels, starting with the richest countries, and doing so progressively. If Europe and the USA decided this, they could impose it, worldwide, through a carbon tax.

A conference in Paris is supposed to make desperate efforts to stop the rush through the two degrees Celsius, but the largest sub-arctic zone, Russia, has already barreled right through.

As long as hedge funds feel they can order the world around why should it be any different? What else?

Plutocrats say: all the problems arise from French-like socialism, and the European Unification related to it. Thus, they have got to say that so it is, with Puerto Rico’s debt crisis.

Puerto Rico’s debt crisis has to be related to the hydra of European unifying socialism, sneakily propelled by the French.  How could that not be? Contagion, what plutocrats fear the most, this what Greece and France brought: contagion of rebellion. Destroying direct democracy is why Persia financed the war of Sparta against Athens. Plutocrats have profited of this Persian investment, ever since.

The Greeks did not want to pay for their banks’ errors, and the state debt resulting from it. So the Greeks started a mood, a mood where those who owe resist their lords, the lenders. Hence the Puerto Rican legislature sudden decision to resist its masters, the hedge fund managers. So, you see, European leftists are not innocuous, they are already attacking on U.S. soil.

And the climate crisis? Purely a French invention. Proof? The climate conference is to be held in Paris in four months.

Nowadays, thanks in part to the Multiverse fanatics, no proofs are really necessary, screaming insanities is sufficient, to qualify for respect (as long as you have a big gun, or pocketbook, or aura given by those with guns, or pocketbooks). Everybody knows this, by now: the tedium of the medium is the message, and the massage.

Patrice Ayme’

Wisdom, Most Devouring Beast of Them All

New Philosophy Mostly Blossoms Multi, and Meta, Culturally:

Any culture is wise, and loved. Thus, it is a philosophy. To use philosophy for diplomacy among cultures mandates, and thus needs, a greater wisdom to adjudicate among smaller wisdoms.

To any logic is associated not just one, but many, metalogics. Any of the latter is bigger than the former.

This is a direct application of the proofs of the Incompleteness Theorems in metamathematics.

Thus wisdoms, or cultures, by themselves, are the germs for bigger, greater wisdoms, or meta-cultures (thus, germs for their own enlargements). They contain their own spontaneous generation for greater transmutations.

Pine Island Glacier Crack Philosophically Transmutating

The easiest way to enlarge a culture is to entangle it with another. The resulting union is automatically meta. Thus the greater wisdom of travelers.

However, what comes out after a while, is not harmony, but battle. Indeed a simple union of logos, and intricately entangled emotional systems is not possible, as some elements will generally come to contradict each other.

This is what those who confuse multiculturalism with tolerance, overlook. In their colossal naivety.

Paradoxically, true multiculturalism is not tolerant, at least not tolerant of lies and ossified thinking. Instead, it learns to pick, chose, abandon, adopt, and decide. It does not tolerate everything: it selects the best, rejects the bad.

Any wisdom is a system of logos, entangled with systems of moods associated to it. Local wisdom is often weird: associate a picture of Buddha to a party in Burma, and you will be condemned to years in prison.

The entanglement of cultures results into, not just synergies, but, before that, competition, conflict, even extermination, between different ideas and emotions.

The situation is similar to, but even more frazzled than in the biological survival of the fittest.

Any new wisdom comes from forcefully introducing at least one new idea, fact, or emotion to an old wisdom. The resulting entanglement brings a dynamic conflict between the old wisdom, and the union of it with the new element.

So one can say that any new, better, and improved wisdom is intrinsically multicultural.

This happens in the clearest way when new science arises: Relativity as defined by Poincaré (1904) arose from the earlier realization (Lorentz, Poincaré) that time and space (contribution of Fiztgerald) were local.

Einstein’s name got associated to Relativity (although he had invented none of it), just because had written down a neat abstract of the new wisdom in just one paper (“hiding sources”, as he admitted, helped!)

Why did Einstein become so famous, if he invented nothing (aside from the obvious nationalist and tribal aspects of the discrimination)? Because he presented a neat synthesis of the ideas and concepts of the new culture, Relativity. By the time Einstein wrote his paper, the new culture exposed by Poincaré the year before in the USA, had to be recognized as a coherent whole in the German language, the language of very serious and obviously superior people.

By 1905, Relativity had thoroughly digested the idea of Poincaré that the constancy of the speed of light, as measured in all frames, was a new law of nature. And also the proof of Poincaré, from 1900, that the emission of energy by a body decreased its mass, according to E = mcc. One just had to wrap it in one text.

How is a philosophical wisdom found to be superior to another? Because it is closer to the truth in matters pertaining to survival.

Picture this; in Western Antarctica, the Pine Glacier rests on the bottom of the ocean, two thousands meters down. It is bathed in increasingly warmer waters. Its catchment basin, under sea level, is larger than Texas. If Pine, and some of its colleagues, melted, and they could, very fast, billions of refugees would be on the march.

Clearly, something impacting survival, but not envisioned by philosophical systems in the past. This is the sort of possible truth that philosophy has to envision. Add increasing ocean acidity (from conversion of CO2 into carbonic acid), and one has new facts that require clearly drastically new philosophies.

So the most drastic transculturalism comes from mixing philosophical obsolescence, let alone bigotry, with exotic cultures, brand new science.

If we want to survive, we need to be right, and that involves firing lethal torpedoes to sink the biggest lies, and turn attention towards the real problems, whatever is left, an approximation to truth.

Philosophy, some suggested, is a way of life. Yes, the one that maximizes survival, and that means, now more than ever, the pursuit of veracity, is the most superior philosophy.

Maximal culture shock can only help constructing that superiority. Even the worst culture has some mental elements that can be integrated somewhere into superior wisdom.

Some may object that the preceding was all too theoretical: it may be true that new systems  of entangled thoughts and emotions arise according the (metalogical) mechanic that is explicitly described in the proofs of the Incompleteness Theorems in logic. However, they will complain, what does that bring?

As I said, transculturalism, well done does not mean falling asleep, it means conflict, or replacement. Therefore when, as in Europe, conflict is avoided cost, and replacement is not instigated (as in the USA), transculturalism does not arise, only apartheid (to use the notion of Manuel Valls, the French PM used, to depict the situation in France).

Conflict and replacement can be effected by rising the cult of the republic above others.

In the USA, Americanization is both fine art and massive enterprise. It involves sports and high rewards. (This is one reason why some financial compensation, in sports or ‘equal opportunity’ “leadership” jobs are so high in the USA: to make the attraction of absorption in American culture irresistible, for the befuddled masses out there).

The best and highest philosophy swallows, integrates and transmutate accordingly to whatever it can swallow. That mood is already in Rabelais. What is new now, what is better now, is that never before have so many new fats come to light, so many cultures, so much history, and so much new shattering devastation.

This disastrously destructive, and all too global situation out there, is excellent, for the birth of vastly superior wisdom. Bring it on.

Patrice Ayme’