California Grizzly: Rewilding Is A Moral Duty.

The last grizzly assassinated in California was killed in 1922, a century ago. The place of execution was the Southern Sierra (Fresno-Tulare counties). The species had been hounded to extinction by US citizens.  Since then grizzlies have only resided on Californian flags.

Now there is talk of reintroducing grizzlies in California. It should be a moral duty, symbolic and practical.

Other animals are reintroducing themselves, namely, wolves, who have entered, as packs, north-east California.

A collared male wolf went all over half of California, including the central coast. Twice in the Sierra I met gigantic wild canines who looked suspiciously like wolves (and not coyotes, with whom wolves interbreed…)

Reintroducing the grizzly? Commoners whine that they, the humans, are all over California, 40 million of them, and there is no room for grizzlies. That’s disingenuous: much of California is totally wild, empty of people. I have spent entire days walking and running, covering dozens of miles, not seeing a single human. Minutes from well-known places, one can start seeing strictly nobody.

***

Yes, grizzlies are dangerous: that is an important characteristic of having them around, and it makes them more worthy. Several species of spiders, wasps and snakes living in California are also dangerous. I was once stung by more than 50 wasps in a sequoia forest on the north side of Mount Tamalpais in a surprise attack. I survived, but others may have died. Last month a mysterious black wasp stung me by a lake in the Alps and my arm swelled spectacularly in minutes before medical treatment could be applied at a pharmacy, which was only 500 meters away. However, I am often hours from roads. Does that mean all stinging insects should be exterminated? 

We can hardly preach to Brazilians, Asians and Africans to take care of their wildernesses, if we refuse to repair ours. 

***

Grizzlies roaming in California could be managed in diverse ways. Being extremely intelligent animals, they could be taught to avoid people. Also one could equip them with electronic means of localization, and one could imagine apps telling hikers where the grizzlies are, in real time.

Our civilization has a problem with the wilderness in general, and wild animals, in particular.

The Norwegian government euthanized Freya the walrus on Sunday, August 14, 2022, citing safety concerns for the crowds that gathered to watch her sunbathe on a beach next to Oslo. The walrus had visited many European countries in recent years, and seemed curious about people. “The walrus is not getting enough rest and the professionals we are in dialogue with believe she is stressed,” Nadia Jdaini, a senior communications adviser for the Norwegian Directorate of Fisheries, said, in a pinnacle of hypocrisy, before secretly and quickly assassinating the curious walrus, obviously on human grounds, or so she claimed. Better dead than stressed by having one’s picture taken, says the Norwegian government! Other professionals saw no stress whatsoever in the walrus’ behavior. 

But the authoritative point is this: the walrus did not wear a mask, the walrus did not respect the lockdown ordered on him by the authorities. The fact the walrus did not know the law is no excuse: authorities rule by the law, especially if wrong. The walrus was creating in human beings unauthorized thought patterns, in particular the walrus contributed to humanize wilderness, something that could have wild consequences, all authorities will tell you that.

***

North America’s megafauna was devastated during the Neolithic. The Late Pleistocene fauna in North America included herbivores such as mammoths, mastodons, camels, horses, giant beavers, several species of tapirs, peccaries (including the long-nosed and flat-headed peccaries), saiga, camelids such as two species of now-extinct llamas and Camelops, at least two species of bison, the stag-moose, the shrub-ox and Harlan’s muskox, 14 species of pronghorn (of which 13 are now extinct), the beautiful armadillo and the giant armadillo-like Glyptotherium, and giant tortoises, as well as birds like giant condors and teratorns. Predators included Arctodus Primus, the short-faced bear,  the American lion, Miracinonyx (“American cheetahs”, not true cheetahs), the saber-toothed cat Smilodon and the scimitar-toothed cat Homotherium, dire wolves.

The extinction of this megafauna created an imbalance which has consequences on the flora and vegetation. Trampling and eating of trees made forests harder to burn. In recent fires, forests that existed for millennia, with thousands of years old individual trees, burned down to ashes, destroying a large part of ancient species, to the point that they should imminently go extinct. The cause? Forest mismanagement due to lack of megafauna activity (Native Americans had consciously replaced the megafauna, mostly through prescribed burning; now they are also extinct, at least in the wild).

The grizzly is not an American original: it is the European Brown Bear, and it migrated into North America as a replacement species… as a sort of companion to humans. Differently from the huge Cave Bear, ferociously extinguished by Neanderthals 50,000 years ago, the grizzly is much more human compatible, and can be readily tamed. Brown Bears and Wolves were extirpated from Western Europe using government reward money and poison, in the 19C and 20C. Now they are coming back, wolves on their own, brown bears through reintroduction programs (although locals often assassinate them). In a country such as Slovenia, large brown bear populations thrive, in cooperation with humans (who feed them sometimes).

One should strive to reintroduce American megafauna, starting with the more innocuous species (and that includes the grizzly). By the way, I have run and hiked in grizzly country (Alaska), with a huge bear pepper spray cannister at the ready. I nearly used the cannister on a charging moose (with her calf which was as big as a horse). The calf slipped off, and I eluded the mom through a thicket of very closely spaced tough trees. But I had my finger on the trigger, safety off. Moose attack more humans than grizzlies and wolves combined (although a bear attack is more dangerous). In any case, in the US, stinging insects kill around 100, deer around 200 (mostly through car collisions), and lightning around three dozen people, per year.

As it is, I run and hike a lot in California wilderness, out of rescue range. I generally try to stay aware of where and when I could come across bears, lions and rattlers. My last close call with a large rattlesnake, up a mountain slope, was partly due to hubris and not realizing I was moving in dangerous terrain. Fortunately I heard the slithering just in time. Dangerous animals make us aware of nature in its full glory, and the real nature of the human condition. They keep us more honest with what is real, what humanity is all about.

And that should be the primordial sense.

Patrice Ayme

 

Dangerous loitering criminal, said the Norwegian authorities about Walrus Freya.

Trumped By Jurassic Climate Nonlinearly Erupting

Trump is climate skeptic, it is said, but the climate is not skeptic about Trump. Humanity is the crew, and Earth the spaceship. Trump is now in charge, if anybody is in charge, after eight years of … boyhood. It’s supposed to be a racial insult, I learned. But question: where is the insult, when a 47-year-old (age of Obama when he was sworn in) is supposed to lead the planet, knowing what few other know (as Joe Biden reminded us this week).

Obama went to Germany, and sang the praises of Angela Merkel, her wisdom, etc. Arguably, however, Merkel has been disastrous: her austerity policy, combined with her refusal to support France militarily in a significant way, by re-establishing peace in Syria, manu military, has brought more than one million refugees to Germany, and a near economic and political collapse of Europe (think Brexit, exodus from Portugal, etc.)

All what Obama knows is that his financial sponsors and paymasters tell him austerity is great, Quantitative Easing is great, inequality is great, but we can live with it, etc. 

Spectacular Heat Is On Where It Hurts Most: The High Arctic. November 2016.

Meanwhile, Earth’s climate is acting up. The temperature in the Arctic is way above normal. A full twenty degrees Celsius above normal (that’s 36 degrees F above normal). As a result, ice is having a problem forming. Should the situation perdure until the sun starts shining again above the Arctic, a complete disappearance of sea ice, comes next summer, is imaginable… Sea ice levels in at the North Pole are at a record low, by a long shot.

Planetary climate is self-regulating… Except if pushed too far. Planetary climate consists in several entangled machines. The overall climate pattern in place in the last three million years is a Carnot engine, with a heat source, the tropic, and a cold sink, the poles.

Right now, the poles are still very cold, but more energy has been pumped into the tropics, from the increasing greenhouse (what’s called “climate forcing”, 60% due to COE, 17% due to CH4, and the rest completely from man-made gases like NOx). Thus the climate engine is roaring more than ever (it gets more efficient, from an equation Carnot discovered nearly two centuries ago). An effect, as I predicted long ago, is that more energy will be stored dynamically (jet stream twisted all over) and potentially (high and low pressure systems both more so).

This is what we observe.

How will it evolve? Among the entangled machinery, some is (still) dormant: fabulous quantities of methane are locked in a sort of ice in medium depth sea floor, and more in the tundra. Should those be released, the temperature of the planet would go up five degrees Celsius nearly instantaneously, and, in turn, huge quantities of CO2 locked in the northern latitudes would be released.

Once the latter happens (it’s more a question of when, not if, barring vast technological advances), Earth would go back to Jurassic conditions nearly instantaneously.  

What can one do? First have everybody understand the danger. Differently from the dinosaurs, or the mammals who lived under them, we have the means to understand and act.

Obama had as National Security Adviser a politically, dynastically connected woman, with lots of stocks and connections, but not a warrior. Trump just selected as National Security adviser a four (no, three, thanks Richard Reinhofer!) star Lieutenant General, Michael Flynn. Flynn, ex head of the Delta Force, became Director Army Intelligence in 2012 (however, Obama never met with him, and fired him for being too tough about Radical Islamism). That’s a rational choice. Flynn is a “registered Democrat” (that is, not GOP).

The general considers “RATIONAL” to be afraid of Islam. And then recommended to propagate that message, because rationality is not afraid (OK, agreed, Flynn made the mistake of saying “afraid of Muslims” instead, as he should have, “afraid of Islam”.)

General Flynn ✔@GenFlynn

Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL: please forward this to others: the truth fears no questions... http://youtu.be/tJnW8HRHLLw

5:14 PM – 26 Feb 2016 Or this:@FieldofFight — Obama and Hillary’s Refusal to Name Radical Islamic Terrorism: Aiming to ‘Dumb Us Down’ – Breitbart

As the New York Times puts it: “General Flynn…sees the United States as facing a singular, overarching threat that can be described in only one way: “radical Islamic terrorism. All else is secondary for General Flynn, and any other description of the threat is “the worst kind of political correctness,” he said in an interview three weeks before the election.

Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem, he said, describing it as a political ideology, not a religion. He has even at times gone so far as to call it a cancer.

For General Flynn, the election of Mr. Trump represents an astounding career turnaround. Once counted among the most respected military officers of his generation, General Flynn was fired after serving only two years as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He then re-emerged as a vociferous critic of a Washington elite that he contended could not even properly identify the real enemy — radical Islam, that is — never mind figure out how to defeat it.”

I have argued that Literal Islam is totally incompatible with civilization. And the best proof is that what was long the world’s richest area, the Middle East (including the Fertile Crescent, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia) became one of the poorest.

Clearly the voters agreed (Trump destroyed the famed “Blue Wall” of states Democrats thought were secured, and thus got a large Electoral College victory).

Islam, a savage-from-the-desert Middle Age system of thoughts and moods is nothing much, a self-destructive obsession. However, as it has invaded the Western psyche, it has become a distracting cancer. To handle the serious problems, like the planet blowing up, we have to reduce this sort of maddening distractions. Nor can we talk falsely about Islam, while talking truly about the climate. The mood of telling the truth has to be global. Irreverential. The Obama administration and its poodle regimes (Merkel, France, etc.) have been talking falsely not just about Islam, but also about economics, society, globalocracy, plutocracy, taxes, taxes on the wealthiest, corporate fascism, dark money, etc.

They talked falsely about Islam, precisely because the Obama adminstration, and the Deep State

Obama, talking at Der Spiegel: “Many people who voted for me, voted for Trump… I think that’s indicative that there is some impulse towards some sort of change, politicans have to be more sensitive to the desire for change.” where have you been my lost son? Obama sounds increasingly like Sleeping Beauty waking up after eight years’ slumber…

In any case, Trump is telling the truth about Islam, or even Mexicans (“terrific people”). Let’s keep truth momentum. Trump seems willing to replace wishful thinking by rationality (just as the pivot to Russia, however worrisome and potentially dangerous it is, is better than Obama’s boiled noodle opposition).

Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the climate has started to act nonlinearly.  It will be rational to also act even more nonlinearly in return.

Patrice Ayme’

Extinctions

American Megafauna Gone Extinct In the Last 20,000 Years. Arctodus Primus, Megatherium, Smilodon. For the scale, the whitish American Lion is 30% larger than today’s African lions.

A characteristic of today’s biosphere is that most wild megafauna has gone extinct. The culprit is Homo Sapiens in general, and civilization made the situation worse. However, 40 years ago, if one suggested human beings had annihilated the megafauna, one was viewed as unbalanced, unscientific, a conspiracy theorist, grandiloquent, megalomaniac, etc.

Nowadays, though, detailed chronologies have shown that, indeed Homo Sapiens caused many extinctions. I hold that Homo Sapiens caused directly most extinctions of the last 100,000 years. And, indirectly, the rest.

Some have held out against this global extinction theory. They brandish the case of Africa, where the megafauna had survived until recently.

I will presently extinguish this effrontery. Africa is extremely hard to penetrate. The African tropical forest is much darker than the darkest cathedral. The sahelian and subsahelian zone are crisscrossed by “forest gallery”, along the countless streams. Forest gallery is extremely dark, thick, full of dangers, from nasty predators to tsetse flies. Thus, to go ten kilometers in Africa is extremely hard. The streams, when any, are dangerous to navigate, from mosquitoes, to crocodiles, to man-eating, blinding worms. Forest galleries provided shelter to predators, including lions.

(Once I walked next to a lion, 2 or 3 meters away in a very thick thicket, when approaching, precisely, a river, in a sandy, open area; because of the openness, we did not pay attention to the thicket. What was a lion, we guessed, because we did not really see it, jumped away to great sound and fury; the point is that nobody in my party suspect a lion was indulging in a siesta in such a place.)

Moreover, in Africa, animals were in contact with men, for millions of years. So they evolved their own cultures, transmitting it to their children. It’s not just a matter of fearing man and running away (because a fleeing animal could run into other animals, or other men). A culture to live alongside human beings required mutual respect.

Lions, hyenas and even leopards know very well who men and their children are. They act accordingly, in general, except in exceptional cases.

I have given sugar to enormous jumping wild African dogs; I would throw the sugar up in the air, and the dogs would catch it at an extravagant height, with an impressive metallic snapping of jaws. Any other animals, those dogs would take down. Wild hyenas have also accepted to be hand fed by human beings. Hyenas’ relations with other animals are extremely adverse. Their jaws are feared by lions and dogs alike. The same is true with cheetahs: they readily domesticate. I have sat, as a ten-year old, in the back of cars with cheetahs larger than me. Cheetahs can take down a huge impala in a second, but they don’t attack people.

So this is something I noticed in the wilds of Africa, again and again: the most ferocious representatives of the megafauna there , know very well who human beings are. They will not just think twice before attacking a human child: generally, they will not do it. One does not attack the gods, if one is a well-educated, normally behaved member of the African megafauna.

In the Americas, as human beings swept in, fast, lethally, and suddenly, mutual respect cultures could not evolve: archeology shows that it would take at most 300 years for human beings to kill the entire megafauna of a region. In Eurasia, there are giant killing grounds of horses, mammoths, etc: this means human beings killed animals there, for thousands of years. There are no such places in the Americas.

So human beings did it: they exterminated the megafauna. That’s not just a fact, it’s a warning. First the megafauna, now the rest of the biosphere?

Patrice Ayme’

 

Ode To The Moon

Oh Moon, not just for lovers,

You shine for us all lifers

That beauty you fill us blunt

Not just for the hunt

But for humane seasons

In the end we grasped with reason

The Moon holds our hand

Across space to no end

Our celestial mate

Our own hand of fate

No Moon, No Trees? 4 Billions Year Ago, Moon Was Red Hot Liquid Rock

***

Earth’s Moon is most peculiar. It is large relative to the planet it orbits around. Nearly as large as the three largest satellites in the Solar System: Ganymede, Titan, Callisto. Those orbit giant planets.

The Moon has made advanced life on Earth possible. Maybe if Mars had a large moon, it would enjoy obvious life now: a moon would have made super summers impossible.

No Moon, No Sentience?

If one considers Mercury, Venus and Mars, there is something very wrong with their diurnal rotation: it is either way too slow, or way too wobbly, in the fullness of time. Even if Venus did not have a killer CO2 atmosphere, it’s very slow (counterclockwise) rotation would have scorched, half freeze life there, on a perpetual basis.

Mars rotates on itself in roughly one Earth day, but the axis of rotation does not just precess (as it does on Earth). It also changes inclination on the plane of rotation of the planets (the “Ecliptic”). And does so wildly. This means that, periodically, Mars has super summers (and super winters). During super summers, a lot of water vapor appears in the atmosphere, and that’s a powerful greenhouse gas (actually more powerful than CO2).

The Moon-Earth system has one global angular momentum: as the Earth’s rotation slows down, due to the friction of the tides, Earth’s angular momentum goes down, so the angular momentum stored by the Moon has to go up. That’s mostly stored in the product of the distance of the Moon, times its mass, times its speed. The only of these three factors which can go up is the distance of the Moon: so the Moon, which used to be very close to Earth, is now roughly at one light second.

Water Streak In This Martian Crater Are Hundreds Of Meters Long, Five Meters Wide

NASA confirmed today what we already knew: there is briny water flowing on Mars. It’s liquid at minus twenty degrees Celsius (being full of anti-freeze). It’s exact origin is still unknown: deliquescence, melting permafrost, watery reservoirs?

It has long been known there is plenty of water on Mars. It’s just frozen in the ground, and at the poles. During super summer, the poles probably disappear, and there is much more water and warmth on the planet. It’s not excluded that life blossoms then.

Super seasons would have been be a killer for Earth’s advanced life, periodically over-heating or freezing the ocean.

Where from this orbiting celestial miracle?

The Moon is made of Earth. Science does not explain that yet. The main theory’s base state claims that the Moon is collision debris: Earth would have collided with a third body, Mars size, and the orbiting debris would have gathered into the Moon.

I even have my own theory, both outlandish and Politically Incorrect: a succession of nuclear-assisted explosions would have lifted material at the Roche limit, where it would have gathered, forming the Moon.

Angular momentum would have done the rest. Pro my theory: we have a massive, life-giving nuclear fission reactor below our feet. It rotates an iron ocean which in turn generates a life saving magnetic shield. It also generate plate tectonic and mantle subduction, which burrows all nefarious fossil fuels, and excess CO2. (That worked well until the oil devils took over!)

Could we have life on Earth without our large Moon?

This is not clear. Not at all. Having a stable rotation axis is primordial. One of our Solar System gas giant’s rotation axis is nearly within the plane of the ecliptic. Something happened to tilt it. Gas giants can be tilted. Yet, the Earth would be hard to tilt, because of the Moon.

Patrice Ayme’

Juicy Planets

This is the one thousandth essay on this site. Let’s celebrate with a whiff of optimism. We found, for sure, three habitable planets. Close-by. And maybe four. Or five. Europa, Callisto, Ganymede, and Enceladus. They are all in the Solar System. Why habitable? Because they all have liquid water.

And massive quantities of it. Europa’s ocean seems greater in volume than Earth’s… by a long shot. Ganymede’s ocean maybe 800 kilometers deep… This is astronomy, in full, with its proverbial astronomical numbers.

Juicy Planets In The Habitable Zone

The total land area of Earth’s continents is 148,647,000 square kilometers (57,393,000 sq mi), or 29.1% of Earth’s surface. This is just a tiny bit larger than Mars’ total area (145 million square kilometers). Mars has lots of water. However, except for (rock covered) glaciers and ice caps, most of it is ice mixed with the soil.

It is welcome news that planetary bodies close-by have plenty of water, and land. Europa’s land area is 30 million square kilometers. Ganymede is 87, and Callisto 73 million square kilometers. Thus the total land area of water loaded Jupiter satellites is 190 million square kilometers, much larger than the grand total of Earth’s continents. That’s plenty of room for human civilization to expand into.

As I related, civilizations come and go, and one of the main mechanisms, if not the main mechanism, has to do with the entangled exhaustion of increasingly impotent technology and waning resources. This is fully in evidence now in our case: although not all resources are exhausted, yet, others are exhausting: the CO2 pollution, and similar, entangled crises, have reached the stage of a mass extinction.

A race is engaged between the deployment of more renewable energy and multiple singularities from pollution and resource exhaustion.

Once, when still a child, I met a poet and philosopher from a family of poets and philosophers. He read some poems. I was impressed. The conversation, though, turned to space exploration. My youthful enthusiasm was quickly dashed. The poet told me that space would not help humanity’s problems. Actually throwing money at space prevented to feed children, he opined. Walking on the Moon was mostly a folly darkly connected to imperialism, colonialism, materialism, nihilism.

As a teen, but a teen experienced from having lived in Africa most of my life, who had endured through wars and coups d’état, I doubted the wisdom of the poet. (When I was 11 years old, I made a sing-song about a coup d’état enfolding in the African country in which I lived. Retrospectively strange…)

I knew very well that there are monsters out there. But then, again, I also knew monsters, properly handled, could learn to behave properly. A leopard entered an open hut I was sleeping in, and walked out (don’t ask me about what I view as my parents’ irresponsibility: there was just another child in that hut, smack dab in the center of a national park, full of panthers). I once walked around a bend on a dirt road, in the same national park, to find a lion spread all across said road, looking at me calmly. I did not panic, and respected away.  

Differently from the European poet, I knew the world was richer than just a zero sum (where what you put in is what you get out). I knew starvation was entirely due to war. If you don’t want children to starve, the first thing needed is a strong stater, with a constitution centered on human rights (instead of the Catholic or Islamist creeds).

As it turned out, in its rush to the Moon, and Mars, as ordered by its Guide (USA president JFK), NASA and its Nazi engineers, helped develop plenty of new technologies, from fuel cells to solar panels. Now Photo Voltaic Solar energy is, with wind turbines, the cheapest, safest form of energy (fossil fuels get more than 5 trillion dollars of subsidies, each year). In a way PV solar energy is feeding the world, and saving it too, being non polluting. Solar PV arose in space, to feed satellites with electricity.

To this day PV energy panels used in space are much more efficient than any used on the ground (but also much more expensive, as they use different very expensive materials). The research goes on: the requirements of space did not just bring Teflon.  The technological push impelled by space exploration keeps on going. The giant infrared telescope NASA wants to launch (with an Ariane V rocket!) has been delayed for years by setbacks while developing new technology to make it possible. Engineers have perfected the efficiency of space probes and solar PV, to do away with plutonium to energize them.

Far from being weird and unusual, expanding human civilization throughout the Solar System is the most conservative behavior to behold.

It’s revolutionary in the sense of evolving again, as we used to.

Indeed, how did our species arise? Our family, hominidae, arose from a separation from chimpanzee like ancestors. Basically, our distant ancestors were motivated enough to come down from the trees and imitate baboons (giant or not), and conquer the savanna. Giant baboons, who could weigh up to 200 kilograms, and stand two meter tall, besides being extremely dangerous, were probably an inspiration, as they dominated the savanna-park.

Conquering new land, and new environments, is what our species does. Our species shipped to Australia in prehistoric times, and conquered the Americas, and the Arctic, also in prehistoric times.

Now the juicy planets of Jupiter beckon. This summer, Europe attributed to Airbus the JUpiter ICy moons Explorer (JUICE), to launch in 2022, and NASA announced that its “Europa Clipper” mission was feasible. It will “clip” Europa’s atmosphere 45 times, to analyze it for organic materials.

Some may object that, before we conquer space, we could conquer the oceans. It seems an obvious extension from swimming. However, going to space means a difference of one atmosphere of pressure, just as going down ten meters in water. Going down in the ocean at its average depth, 6,000 meters, means 600 atmospheres of pressure, a much greater challenge than the one and only one of pressure difference space requires.

With present technology, extrapolated a bit, Earth’s life could be implanted in these icy moons of Jupiter, one way, or another. It’s imaginable that present day life, recently discovered 850 kilometers from the lighted ocean, under Antarctica’s ice shelves, could survive in Europa’s ocean.

And it will need to. It’s not just a question of our nature, and respecting it. Or of our tradition, Charles Quint’s “Plus Oultre”, and respecting them. It’s a precaution. We are using Earth far beyond sustainability. Yet, out there, in proximal space, lays in waiting another 230% worth of the entire land area of Earth, complete with abundant water.

After 1,000 essays on this site (and more on Tyranosopher.com), what’s the obvious verdict?

If you want to be popular, write about simple things, for simple people, in the most simple fashion. Cats, witchcraft, celebrities, flowers, home remedies, and logic for the mentally underperforming. People want to forget about their condition: those who are going to die do not salute me.

Another dismal conclusion is that censorship is strong, out there: the New York Times boast of having censored hundreds of my comments (they sent me an email about that). It’s more like thousands. The Guardian, a British daily supposedly on the left, just informed me I my comments were censored, because I am culprit of “blogging the Qur’an“. So the Guardian has decreed that Patrice Ayme, is a well-known… Jihadist? Complain about something will get you accused of it: one of the logics of the vicious.

The New York ran a long article on Islam Rape Kit, but systematically censored any direct quote from the Qur’an supporting that criminal habit. To blare as a subtitle that:

“ISIS Enshrines a Theology of Rape. Claiming the Quran’s support, the Islamic State codifies sex slavery in conquered regions of Iraq and Syria and uses the practice as a recruiting tool.” is alright. Claiming that ISIS claims the “Quran’s support” is fine. Demonstrating it is presumably “Islamophobia” (thus racism, thus censored).

Meanwhile, pretty much unfazed, I have been trying to think, as honestly as I can, precisely, and beyond (“plus oultre“) what has been said, on the most difficult problems, trying to find possible issues to them. Escapism, if you will, the hard way. As Montaigne caustically preempted, in the introduction to his “Essays”, paraphrasing:”Passant passes ton chemin, there is nothing for you here, Adieu.” (Amusingly, Montaigne, who was familiar with the most powerful, such as the future king Henri IV, was actually seriously manipulative in his essays, as demonstrated by the fact that he spent lots of pages crawling on his belly, singing the praises of most plutocrats… This is not the case here, as witness the evidence that I should have antagonized everybody by now.) 

Ultimately, I write just for my little girl, who has called me (with a slight twinge of irony perceptible) “the One Who Knows Everything”. That’s good enough, it’s the greatest honor, and all the meaning one needs in the world. Camus claimed one must find a meaning to rock and roll. Silly. Those who love a child do not need to impose meaning onto themselves. They have found it already.

One day, human children will bathe on Europa.

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’

ADDED VALUE IN THE XXI CENTURY

PRODUCING SUPERIOR THINKING TO IMPROVE NOT JUST WORLD SOCIO-ECONOMY, BUT SURVIVAL:

Capital Exponentiate, Decapitate Wealth To Feed Minds:

Piketty’s “Capital In the XXI Century” argues that the return on capital is greater that that on labor: r>g. All economists from the pseudo-left fell on their knees, astounded by the depth of that observation. They obviously never studied history, let alone archeology.

In truth, Piketty’s big deal inequality, that r>g has been known for 12,000 years, as I have emphasized in countless essays, for years. I have even explained the mathematical-psychological reasons why r>g. Piketty has smirked that he discovered r>g when he wrote the book. (A case of arrogant ignorance buttressed by colossal stupidity: that r>g ought to have been the first law of economics. That it took centuries for economists to discover this cannot possibly be a matter of stupidity, but of the will, on the part of economists of not understanding how the masters who fed them got their power from.)

So Piketty claims he just discovered that r>g: maybe economists are not idiots, but they play some on TV? (Some are bound to think that Piketty should be my ally, and thus I should be nicer to him; however, correct philosophy tends to be done by being only friendly to truth.)

Homo Thrived In This Cold Climate For 2 Million Years (Georgia, Tusheti NP.) Thanks To Science & Technology

It was so well known, that the return on capital was higher than that on income, r>g, that all reasonably sustained societies had colossal, decapitating taxes on wealth.

By law, hook, or crook. And when this was not the case, when wealth became hereditary in an exponential way, disasters happened. Generally invasion and destruction.

This happened to all the plutocratically corrupt Chinese empires when Genghis Khan’s Mongols came down.

The peaceful variant is revolutions such as 1789 (for twenty years the king had been meekly trying to make the aristocracy pay enough taxes).

When a great Native American, or great Viking chief died, much of their possessions (it could thousands of horses) would be redistributed.

Time to re-learn the wisdom of the ancients.

***

SUPERIORITY OF THE WEST?

Why did the West become so superior? Or China, for that matter?

Technology. Superior technology. Coming from superior thinking. Both the Greeks and the Chinese had colossal contempt for barbarians. (In both cases it went so far that the Greeks lost everything, and the Chinese came very close to annihilation).

Around the year 1000 CE, the Vietnamese (it seems) invented new cultivars of rice, which could produce an entire crop, twice a year. The population of East Asia exploded accordingly.

A bit earlier, the Franks had invented new cultivars of beans. The Frankish Tenth Century was full of beans. Beans are nutritious, with high protein.

Homo is scientific and technological. Thus, two million years ago, pelt covered (tech!) Homo Ergaster lived in Georgia’s Little Caucasus, a pretty cold place in winter. And the population was highly varied genetically (showing tech and travel already dominated).

***

A GREATER OBSESSION WITH FREEDOM MADE THE WEST SUPERIOR:

Here is the very latest. Flour was found in England, in archeological layers as old as 10,000 years before present. It was pure flour: there were no husks associated. The milling had been done, far away. How far? Well the cultivation of wheat spread to Western Europe millennia later. The flour had been traded, and brought over thousands of miles. Most certainly by boat. Celtic civilization, which would rise 5,000 years later, was expert at oceanic travel.

What’s the broad picture? Not just that prehistoric Englishmen loved their flat bread, no doubt a delicacy. Advanced technology has permeated Europe for much longer than is still understood now by most historians. Remember that the iceman who died in a glacier, 5,000 years ago, was not just tattooed, and had fetched in the lowlands a bow made of special wood. More telling: he carried antibiotics.

China and the West diverged, because the philosophies of the Franks and the East were different. The Franks had outlawed slavery four centuries before the great divergence started. This helped freedom, especially the freedom to think of new technology and science.  (Frank = Free.)

The more enslaved a population, the less inventive. It is not just a cultural-psychological phenomenon. It may be epigenetic. The Franks were more ethologically correct, and that enabled to unleash full human epigenetic.

(Being endowed with full human capability, is perhaps why G.W. Bush was incredibly brazen when he became president, going to invade Iraq, whereas Obama was subdued, and just worked, under Summers’ orders, to save the established plutocratic order, like a little boy, obsequious servant of the great white masters; OK, Obama did not descend from slaves, yet he was exposed to the black slave culture, throughout, and somewhat clueless about it.)

The Germans had been obsessed with freedom since ever, and, since in particular, their first contacts with the Romans. All that Germanic freedom led to population explosions, and invasions of Greco-Roman lands, which, for centuries, were systematically cut down by hyper-disciplined Roman armies.

All this was brought into one mold by Consul Clovis, who, as Roman Imperator, and himself son of Roman Imperator Childeric (also elected king of the Salian Franks), made the soldiers of his army understand that they would have to be extremely disciplined too, under the penalty of death (Roman style, a revolting notion for free Germans).

Militarily, the Franks by combining freedom and discipline, were an undefeatable force ever since (the Mongols knew this all too well, thus did not send their scouts west of Croatia; then allied themselves to the Franks to capture Baghdad and Damas).

Free peasants had no slaves, but they needed help: domesticated beasts and mechanical advantage were thus evolved by Frankish society. When Europeans made it to China, they were astounded that people did everything, without using machines or beasts.

So not too many children, but then communal living: Middle Ages villages in Europe were commune-ist regimes. Exploitation of property was divided according to how many could work.

The end result was strong philosophical pressure for ever more advanced technology. Although China was ahead in some tech, as soon as Europe heard of it, it captured it greedily. That philosophy permeated all of Western European society. Peter the Great, emperor of Russia knew this so well, he went to study incognito as a worker in Dutch naval shipyards.

***

AMERICAN ECONOMIC DISCOURSE: A TROJAN HORSE

Does the drive to advanced tech dominate now?

Not as much as it used to.

Why? American plutocracy. And the “Nobel Prizes” of a whole army of obsequious plutophile servants thereof.

Because the spirit of all-conquering technology has been displaced by Capital in the XXI Century. And more specifically its USA monopolistic operators (such as the insufferable Bill Gates, and cohorts of financial operators). Technology is, and will stay, of course, the main and ultimate capital of humanity. That’s how Homo colonized the Caucasus, two million years ago.

Piketty, in his book, brushes technology off. Absurdly, he believes that tech can provide only a 1% return. That’s thoroughly stupid: inventing full Quantum Computers, for example,  would have tremendous consequences, as any device could be made hyper intelligent.

Yet, this sort of attitude makes Piketty an object of admiration in USA Academia.

Why? Because USA Academia is plutocratic through and through. Piketty’s ideas do not threaten plutocracy. Quite the opposite: they will allow it to survive. Diminished, true, but alive. My ideas would destroy plutocracy. Let alone the fact that it would take a long time to implement Piketty’s scheme. My schemes, being multi-dimensional, could be implemented faster, and start to bite right away.

(I do agree with several of Piketty’s propositions, such as a world cadastrum, and progressive taxation on capital: I have advocated them for more than a decade!)

***

PLUS OULTRE:

However, a European solar plane just took off from Dubai. It will go around the world on solar power alone. The main force behind this project, the inventor and pilot, the engineer Picard (scion of ancestors just like him) asserts that the global adoption of such technologies would lower energy waste by half.

Europeans, following the Europeans who had migrated to North America, were the richest, most powerful, better nourished people in the world, for five centuries, because their economies produced more ADDED VALUE than any other economies (in particular, better guns).

To re-establish relative riches, Europeans need to focus on what produced that superiority in added value production. That means technological superiority, and this is fed by a more educated population. More educated scientifically, and thus philosophically.

Philosophy, done in a humanly ethologically correct way, is the metaphysics of science. It all fits together. Anything else is an amputation of the possible. Of the humanly possible.

China understands this very well. At least the science part. (Not too sure about the philosophical part; without it, China may well follow the path of fascist Germany. It’s going that way, with a military budget bigger than France, Britain and Japan combined: $145 billion.)

How to do this?

How to add so much value from mind that superiority is re-established?

Well establish the correct philosophy, put it in power, teach it, finance free maximum quality education, free at all ages.

Pay by taxes on wealth, and large incomes, fortunes, in such a way that there would be a practical cap on wealth, as the Roman Republic used to have, when it really worked.

Decapitating wealth is important for the youth: it will show youth that material wealth to excess is such a bad thing, it had to be made unlawful. It will replace mind at the apex of what youth ought to aspire to, and be programmed by.

***

KEEPING A CIVILIZATION GRADIENT WILL SAVE BILLIONS:

Billions of lives, that is.

The usual partisans of insignificance, nihilism and masochism will no doubt whine that Euro-American economic ascendency is a bad thing. They prefer to be haughty slaves than responsible masters.

European scientific superiority led to a reasonably stabled world order. (Except for some populations of the Americas who got exterminated, thus clearing the lands for Europeans.)

In a world where everybody has the same weapons, and ecology is collapsing (still not raining in California, fourth year in a row, in the greatest drought in several millennia), it is to be feared that disorder will express itself as it has in the past: the sort of massacres that make entire populations disappear. That is what Netanyahu is thinking of…

So defining properly Capital in The XXI Century is not just economically and socially important. It is morally important, in the apocalyptic sense of “moral”.

Superior mind is the ultimate capital. Obviously hardly a notion that comes naturally to economists. As what is called “economics” is mostly a fake science, and famous economists are mostly people who have learned to lie about that fact.

When Piketty claims he just discovered r>g, 10,000 years after most of our ancestors, he demonstrates that. More generally, the same critique can be directed at entire fields such as most of theoretical physics and even mathematics, as funding from plutocrats has become ubiquitous. By buying the hierarchy, the plutocrats bought the thinking. That’s what they wanted. Thinking to be directed incorrectly.

We have see this before: this is how Aristotle, or more exactly his sponsors, nearly destroyed civilization. The difference? The stakes are much higher now.

Can I be more specific in my critique, give a hint of what is wrong with Academia? Most thinkers in Academia are too specialized. Right, much science requires hyper-specialization. Say when one is studying Pluto’s atmosphere (the Solar planet not the god of planet finance). One needs hyper-specialized science. However, there is also the science, and the thinking, about big questions. In those fields, hyper-specialization, unguided by the broad picture, can lead to error: look at much of theoretical physics, much of philosophy, much of economics.

It is precisely because Thomas Piketty is obviously pretty ignorant of history, that he believes he just discovered r>g. After 10,000 human societies made the  notion central to their cultures. It is also why economists do not even know that, during most of humanity’s history, money creation was not farmed out to private individuals (the bankers). So they cannot even feel that there is anything wrong with the present money creation system.

Ignorance allows the devil to hide in the details.

Patrice Ayme’

Stellar Flybys: New Way To Life’s Extinction

DO STAR NEAR-MISSES MAKE SUPER-JUPITERS FALL?

How fragile is life?

Very.

Many disasters can strike a biosphere.

A famous “equation” the Drake equation, is meant to estimate the probability of life in the galaxy. It overlooked many factors. One of them is interstellar near-misses. It is not a question of stars colliding, but of the disruption of solar systems.

A star zoomed through our Solar System just 70,000 years ago, astronomers have just discovered.

Scholz’s System: I Zoomed By, Therefore I Scare

http://iopscience.iop.org/2041-8205/800/1/L17/article

No other star is known to have approached this close to us.

The international team of astronomers found that the intruder came five times closer than our current nearest neighbour – Proxima Centauri (at .8 light year whereas Proxima Centauri is 4.2 light year away).

The star, a red dwarf known as Scholz’s star, cruised through the outer Oort Cloud, a region not as much stuffed with comets as the inner Oort Cloud. Scholz’s Star is 8% of the mass of the Sun, and it is accompanied by a brown dwarf which is nearly as massive (6% of Sun mass). It goes without saying that going through the comet cloud would have adverse consequences for advanced life on Earth. But worse could happen.

(Brown dwarves just miss the mass necessary mass to have enough heat and pressure to get fusion going in their cores).

Something struck me when extrasolar planets were discovered. How frequent were the super-Jupiters grazing their home stars? Of course, there was a detection bias (with the technology used by the French Corot, and the more recent USA Kepler, the probability to detect a super-Jupiter close by was overwhelming).

However, a question loomed: how do you get a gas giant that was obviously formed far from the home star, so close to the home star? One could imagine a cloud breaking the planet, but that makes little sense (as cloud and planet have similar angular momentum, and the planet would suck the cloud).

What’s left?

Collisions. Or more exactly, near-misses.

Previous work suggests that flybys within 0.25 pc occur infrequently (~0.1 Myr−1).

Sedna, a dwarf planet, whose orbit varies between 70 (seventy) and 1,000 (thousand) Astronomical Units (AU, the distance between Sun and Earth). Maybe a remnant from a near collision (torn from a Red Dwarf clutches).

In any case, Scholz’s star came within 52,000 AUs of the Sun. And it passed very fast (the slower the pass, the greater the disruption).

If it had passed within 100 AUs, the disruption would have been considerable (Neptune is at 30 AUs; at 90 AUs, the pull from a passing star, in the worst case would 1/10 of that of the Sun, and would make the orbit of Neptune ellipse, significantly eccentric)

So what happens if a gas giant gets a severely eccentric orbit? Well, it can cut through the others’ orbits, and the whole system becomes unstable. A few large collisions and near misses later, one could get some gas giants to graze their suns, as observed.

As usual, I just suggest the idea. Others can figure out the details, program their computers, and check… ;-).

Let’s make a little computation. Suppose that the probability of a star coming within 52,000 AUs was once every 100,000 years (a probability tellingly estimated BEFORE it came to be known Scholtz’s star zoomed by).

Let’s consider the disruption radius to be 100 AUs. The probable number of near-misses disrupting the inner system during the past extent of the Solar System would then be:

1/25,000)x(10^4)x5 = 2.5.

That’s quite a bit… And, now that we know about Scholz’s Star’s recent flyby, no doubt that the probability of near misses will skyrocket. All the more as the Sun is presently in the pretty empty zone, the Local Bubble, 300 light years across.

I have explained in the pat that life depended not just upon having a planet in the Habitable Zone (the Water Zone), but also in the Radioactive Belt.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/01/14/life-giving-nuclear-earth-reactor/

Many are the causes of disasters on the way to advanced life, as I have enumerated in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/06/40-billion-earths-yes-no/

Being lucky with stellar flybys is another factor to consider: a nudge to the outer gas giants, and it’s curtains for advanced life. Bacteria don’t count. I am suggesting that, in star systems long established, star near-misses is a much serious problem than rogue asteroids or comets.

Patrice Ayme’

Cap Wealth, Decapitate Critter Power

MONEY IS POWER: LIMIT BOTH IN INDIVIDUALS, WORLDWIDE…

OR THE EARTH WILL GET YOU.

A plutocrat, Ms. Helene Pastor, the richest real estate owning Moneguasque heiress, was shot like a vulgar rabbit in Nice by a commando. She is surviving in a French hospital. Not so clear for her bodyguard. Open season on plutocrats? Plutocrats are not easily to kill. With their armored vehicles, and what not.

The plutocrats’ game is just the other way: kill and rule, using their perverse sense of justice.

In the early Twentieth Century, President Roosevelt succeeded McKinley, shot by an anarchist. At the time, anarchists were very active, shooting many of those with, or in, power. Little remembered now, Teddy Roosevelt cracked down on plutocracy, with anti-monopoly laws. Anarchists are not very popular. However, in the fullness of history, their ethical may come to be appreciated differently.

If Justice Is Not Reinstituted Soon, Is This The Future Of Plutocracy?

The Gilded Age came to a crashing halt in two installments, the First, and Second World wars. In the first, much of the old Prussian plutocracy went down in flames. Having lost to a reborn Poland what used to be Polish for a millennium, thanks to the Versailles Treaty, Prussian plutocrats went for an encore, the Second World War. This time, they lost Prussia itself.

Meanwhile, as, in 1945, the West had much more than 16 million young men armed, dangerous, trained to kill, and imbued with the ideology of equality and anti-plutocracy, concessions were made all over to this demanding youth, from the GI Bill to the British Health Service, to public housing by the dozens of millions, to public universities (such as the University of California).

Not satisfying this armed youth was dangerous, as the French colonialists found in Algeria, right away.

All this has been forgotten. Was it ever learned?

The Roman Republic had an absolute limit on wealth. When that went, so did the Republic.

This has been forgotten too, ever since those who noticed that, were assassinated, 21 centuries ago. Instead Gibbon the plutocratic gibbon, taught a simian version of history, to great applause among demanding Plutos.

The problem with dictator Putin is his personal power, and the power of the cronies around him. The power of the latter are embodied by their immense wealth (even the top Russian generals are endowed with billions).

As technology progresses, so do our god like powers. There is no choice: we have exhausted so many resources that used to be readily available, the human population is so huge, that all we hold dear can only sort-of survives, with new and better technology (that was the metaprinciple which intellectually fascist autocratic Rome deliberately rejected, after generations of increasing plutocracy).

It goes without saying that both the power and wealth individuals master and muster ought to be limited, worldwide.

That means a crack-down on both personal wealth, and even representative politics, that parody of democracy.

Representative politics advocate giant powers for an elected oligarchy. Manipulate the qualifier, “elected”, and you get an oligarchy. In the case of Putin, some of his own advisers admitted that the last presidential elections were manipulated. One of Putin’s closest advisers noticed that, in at least one district, Putin got more votes than there were registered voters!

The Swiss president, head of the 57 nations OSCE, went to see Vladimir Putin, May 7, 2014. I don’t know whether he told the master of the Kremlin that he could kiss goodbye to his 40 billion dollars in Swiss bank vaults, but suddenly, the Russian dictator, grimacing as a chastened schoolboy, gambled that concessions to the united world were a better bet that going it alone, supported only by a chorus of the deranged, from the extreme right in Western Europe, to pseudo leftists in the USA, and greedy German corruptocrats.

So da, the master of the Kremlin said, he would withdraw his armies, da, the “Separatists”, his henchmen, should not proceed with a pseudo-referendum. The fact that the Ukrainian army killed dozens of “Separatists” no doubt helped (many of these “separatists”, by their own admission, were (“ex”) members of Russian Special Forces, recently arrived from all over Russia).

Putin understands force only. The Kiev government pointed out “Putin just sold wind“… That’s not fair: Putin also sells oil, gas, and weapons.

A recent study from Princeton showed that only the reigning oligarchy influenced the decisions in the USA. That means that the greatest asset of democracy, its distributed intelligence, is absent.

So it is, all over the world.

The result, as the government of the USA just admitted, is that “U.S. Climate Has Already Changed, Study Finds, Citing Heat and Floods”.

Indeed the oligarchy was allowed to taint the opinion making process with lies, disinformation, dissembling, silly jokes, and outright imbecility. All these ought to be against the law, in the USA, as in Russia, Saudi Arabia, Argentina, or Nigeria.

And you have seen nothing yet. The biosphere will start convulsing pretty soon.  Change will accelerate, and could become catastrophic overnight, if methane hydrates start to be released catastrophically from the oceans’ bottom (whose temperature has been going up steadily). Methane has more than thirty times the greenhouse effect than CO2, for the same mass.

Ultimately, phytoplankton could be killed by acid, and oxygen production would then fail. Earth is being sabotaged by the fanatics of fossil fuels.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/04/15/terminal-greenhouse-crisis/

What’s the plan of the plutocrats?  The worst, the better, as far as they are concerned. That’s the theory of comparative advantage, they love so much, more than dear life. Especially the lives of others, that they enjoy to suck on, like vampires do with cattle.

The strategy of the plutocrats, consciously, or not, is the same as in 400 CE, or 1348 CE: be the last ones to die, behind their high walls and private armies, to inherit the Earth. They just don’t know that, truly, history does not repeat itself. And now less than ever.  It always comes back, with a vengeance.

Patrice Aymé

MOON From NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS, Glancing Blows?

Imagination ought to be stronger than cognition: such is human genius: invent what you don’t know (yet).

Luna, or Moon, played a crucial role in the rise of life on Earth. It is rather unlikely that advanced life could have evolved without it. Luna provided tremendous chemical mixing on Earth’s surface and otherwise unlikely stability of rotation of the planet (so nice seasons, instead of super winters and super summers, etc). Simultaneously.

Luna allows all sorts of rotations of the Earth to be close to the perfection needed for advanced life.

Other planets have unstable rotation (with up to a 40 degrees wobbling axis: Mars), or insufficient spins (Mercury, Venus), or lay completely flat on the ecliptic plane like beached whales (Uranus). The angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system is one, yet it’s spread on a huge area (about 1/6 of the Sun’s cross-section). Luna used to graze the Earth, at the Roche Limit, causing kilometer tides flushing continental margins continually (thus mixing organic materials with earth, sea and sky, as in an infernal organic materials churning reactor).

Earth-Moon From NASA’s Galileo, Heading To Jupiter

How did Luna form?

John Kennedy’s Apollo Project sent a geologist to the Moon, and brought back precious rocks that were generously divided among laboratories (and various animals) worldwide.

Exploring the Moon was a better use of money than feeding the starving in Africa. Actually there were not much starvation in Africa yet. Indeed there were no wars among the savages, yet, hence no starving in Africa, yet. Moon exploration also demonstrated that the USA does not have to be a nasty den of pirates 100% of the time.

First verdict of Moon science? Isotopic studies (2001) confirmed that Luna is made of Earth’s mantle rocks.

The surprise was considerable. Before that (isotopic) discovery, it was widely expected that Luna was a captured minor planet. Instead, the Earth and Moon came from the same body. How could that be? The obvious scenario that comes to mind is that a Mars sized object hit the Earth. Melted debris would have gathered around Earth, and coalesce, forming the Moon. George Darwin, fifth child of the most famous Darwin, himself a distinguished astronomer, suggested this in 1898.

However, closer, more modern inspection reveals that if Luna was made of Terra, it was not made from an impact… because what happened to the impactor’s material? Luna’s titanium isotope ratio (⁵⁰Ti/⁴⁷Ti) is so close to the Earth’s (within 4 parts per million), that none of the impactor’s  mass could have been part of the Moon.

Moreover there is another drastic problem with the impact hypothesis. The dynamics don’t work. A grazing impact would have resulted with debris in a highly eccentric, grazing ellipse. Such a very elongated ellipse is not observed, and impossible to imagine (the debris would have crashed back to Earth, either from air resistance, or the Roche Limit). We are left with a deeper oblique impact, where the impactor is fully absorbed. But then it’s unclear that we can get massive ejecta with a required speed of ten kilometers per second or so, plus high enough an altitude to escape the Roche Limit.

All the more as astronomical considerations lead one to believe the collision happened at low-speed (at most 4 kms/s).

Still another problem of the impact theory is that it implies that the entire planet would have melted. However, there is plenty of evidence that the planet did not entirely melt. Rocks (zircons) have been found to be 4.375 billion years old, plus or minus 6 million years! These are granite like, water rich rocks. That means the supposedly melted Earth would have become solid within 100 million years of impact (by contrast those who believe Earth Core has just residual heat, no active fission heat, claim the core cools at the rate of 100 degrees Celsius every billion years. They generally also believe in the Impact, and thus contradict themselves, thanks to the zircons!)

Thus the impact theory does not seem to work.

The basic problem is that the Moon was created from Earth. Imagine the Earth as a soup: you need to put part of the soup in orbit. You need to rocket it up.

Any brighter idea? I propose there was no magma soup (because so was the fact).

I propose the NUCLEAR EXPLOSIONS THEORY (NET). Wow. It’s half tongue in cheek, it has a more serious variant. I replace the overall melting of the impact theory, by powerful local explosions that could hurtle water rich rocks in orbit (mini impacts also do this, that’s the serious variant). As I pointed out in “Life Giving Earth Nuclear Reactor”, we (probably) have below our feet the largest fission reactor in the known universe.

The Inner Core of Earth is about 70% of the size of the Moon, 2440 kilometers across. It is also around 5,800 Degrees Kelvin, the temperature of the surface of the Sun. Should the rest of the planet become transparent, it would appear to us about 35 wider than the Sun, and just as bright. That would transfer to us about 1,000 times more energy than the Sun does. We would quickly fry.

In my vision of Earth’s genesis, a lot of radioactive fission products were gathered, when Earth formed. Being denser, those fissionable nucleotides tended to sink in molten Earth, and so doing, concentrated. As they did so, their neutrons hit each other. Nuclear fission pockets formed, and violently erupted in tremendous nuclear explosions, deep inside the Earth’s mantle.

(In most so-called thermonuclear bombs’ explosions, contrarily to Communal Wisdom, most of the power actually comes from fission, by using the cheap trick that Uranium 238, the “stable” isotope of Uranium, fissions when exposed to fast neutrons; in the young Earth, there would have been plenty of Uranium 238; this subtlety no doubt escaped geophysicists, since they are unused to nuclear bomb making… In other words, tapping my nuclear know-how, I notice that there is way more fissionable nuclear fuel down below if one thinks, not as Voltaire’s proverbial watch maker, but as a nuclear bomb maker! Is not thinking fun? The reserves of U238 inside the Earth are enormous, and those reserves were more than double that, 4.5 billion years ago).

These enormous nuclear explosions, within the mantle, created plenty of ejecta, thank you Lord. Most fell back with a splash, but plenty had enough correctly directed momentum to achieve high enough orbit.

This is smarter than it looks. The Earth rotated at least once every five hours (8,000 kilometers/hour at the equator). That means ejecta thrown up at the equator would have had one-third of the energy needed for satellization. Hence only equatorial ejecta would have formed the Moon, explaining both why the Moon’s orbit is coplanar, and Luna spins the way it does.

The hot debris gathered, and formed the Moon, just beyond Édouard Roche’s (liquid) Limit. At least, so I propose. Never underestimate all things nuclear. One can combine my nuclear ejection theory with coplanar mini collisions (so not on Mars size body). The whole thing would have looked like one of these spirals generated by some stars… If a star can do it, so could the nuclear boiling Earth…

Some will object that the theory above does not explain the high angular momentum of the Earth-Moon system, that an impact provides with. They will object that I have to introduce this as an independent assumption.

It is true that, the more the independent assumptions in a theory, the weaker it is, or the more empirical.

My own Nuclear Core Theory (NCT) explains a lot of characteristics of the Earth. Could it also explain the high angular momentum? Yes. How? NCT considers that Earth formed not just in the Habitability Zone, but in a Nuclear Zone (NZ). The NZ cloud dust was full of heavy elements. Heavy nuclei can’t be held together by the nuclear force, so they fission, So the densest elements are radioactive.

As the NZ condensed, the heavy elements carried more angular momentum (angular momentum is the product of speed by mass by radius). So any planet in an NZ (which I believe necessary for long-term life evolution), once it has condensed from an NZ cloud, will have more angular momentum. The NCT implies high angular momentum.

Reality is stronger medicine than fiction, because what’s within is a pale imitation of interpreted fragments out there that it has been our good fortune to come across.

Conscience without science is only dwarfing of the soul.

Patrice Aymé

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Note 1: Angular momentum was locally augmented by explosions, be they partly of nuclear origin, or caused by mini-impacts, or a combination of both. Mini-impacts would have been automatically in the orbital plane… Something the usual macro impact theory does NOT have! (Let me repeat slowly: the usual Mars sized body impact theory is very unlikely just on the ground that the impact has little probability to be within the plane of the ecliptic. The theory above makes this automatic: non-ecliptic impacts and explosions get de-selected, as the Earth’s OWN rotation, which is basically co-planar with the ecliptic is used crucially… OK, cynics may retort that it’s not quite so, and thus evidence for an off-ecliptic massive impact, agreed… Computer modelling will decide…)

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Note 2: As I pointed out in passing, the more the independent assumptions in a theory, the weaker it is, or the more empirical? This may sound all too vague. However, it’s very practical. For example racism is logically weaker than non-racism, as it hypothesizes supplementary logics. (Which is, moreover, unobserved!) Some will say that this is just a version of the law of parsimony (lex parsimoniae, Occam razor; the idea is explicit in Aristotle: “We may assume the superiority ceteris paribus [other things being equal] of the demonstration which derives from fewer postulates or hypotheses.“.)

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Note 3: Searching for my own essay on the Internet, July 8, 2018, to my somewhat dispirited surprise I stumbled on the following paper, which I never heard of, let alone read, before:

Click to access 1001.4243.pdf

Which argues the Moon formed in one big nuclear explosion, using some of the logic above (nuclear fission being the only source of power capable of lifting the material, etc…) The difference with my theory is that I don’t do it with just one big explosion, but a whole sequence of them. One big one looks completely implausible to me (the math of coalescing so much nuclear material in just one spot at one time don’t work). Many, yes… So my own idea holds its own, all the more as the mini nuke and mini impact theory go together well, in whichever proportions… Alleluia…