Evolution Is A Voyage Through The Cosmos

Advancing science is not just fostering understanding, and power, it is also a teacher for our logical acumen, the lessons of whom can be carried all over human common sense and sensibilities. 

The classic movie “2001 A Space Odyssey” pretends that extraterrestrials made apes into proto-humans. Once proto-humans have reached the Moon, extraterrestrials tinker again with evolution. It was beautiful when written, but now it sounds rather silly and contrived: if evolution had reached the ape level, it would surely get to the human level, given a few million years… As it did: no need to intervene at this late stage; getting to apes was hard and took hundreds of millions of animal evolution, but once there, the mix of cultural and physiological evolution would reach a singularity of progress. 

Another flaw of “2001” was the assumption of extraterrestrial civilization: not only it is to be helpful, it is also unlikely to exist. Habitable planets are clearly in the millions, if not billions, in the galaxy. But conditions stable enough to enable a star traveling civilization are probably exceedingly rare.

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By the preceding I do not mean that it is boring out there, and that life on Earth was not influenced by the cosmos. Quite the opposite: it’s not boring, and the cosmic influences are not just great, but primordial.

Not only that, but the cosmic environment has an influence on evolutionary smarts. Yes, there is such a thing.

Official evolution theory in recent generations held that evolution was the fruit of chance (haphazard mutations) and necessity (a better adapted organism will reproduce better). This standard “Darwinism”, also known as “Selection of the Fittest”. It is unlikely that Darwin believed just in that evolution mechanism, since, after all, he went to Scotland to study Lamarck, the discoverer of biological evolution in its full many-million years’ glory (evolution itself was known and exploited by the Ancient Greek breeders…). 

Lamarck, after spending decades behind his microscopes, believed that there was a mysterious force for complexification, and that usage created evolution. Although the details are not in, we can guess how that happens.

DNA has weak hydrogen bonds at its core. Submitted to a changed cellular environment, those bonds will loosen and reform, enabling mutation. The changed cellular environment can arise from a changed ecology (something the animal consciously controls)… But it can also arise from other changes, such as a change of radiation levels.

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Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977 and flew by Jupiter and Saturn, targeting Titan. Voyager 2 was launched previously, in August 1977, but on a slower trajectory, and flew by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Thanks to gravity slingshot effects using the giant planets, both spacecrafts are now headed out of the solar system into interstellar space on hyperbolic trajectories (they are not coming back).

Nuclear powered, the Voyagers’ instrument suites have proven hardy. Few failed, and now five scientific teams, 45 years later, serve the VIM, the Voyager Interstellar Mission, an extension of the Voyager primary mission that was completed in 1989 with the close flyby of Neptune by the Voyager 2 spacecraft.

Humanity is heading for the stars. For real.

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Here is Science Magazine pondering in a long article why it would be a good thing to launch an Interstellar Probe (IP) going at the speed of the Earth-Moon distance every three hours: THE LONG SHOT

The Voyager probes raised perplexing questions as they exited the Solar System. Now, scientists have conceived new missions to interstellar space. (28 JUL 2022; by Richard Stone.)

Voyager found that 75% of the cosmic rays heading our way from interstellar space get filtered out in the heliosphere’s outer reaches. If the encounter with the next cloud squeezes the heliosphere all the way down to Earth’s orbit, life forms would be exposed to an intense radiation environment that would riddle DNA with mutations, Brandt says. (Brandt is John Hopkins APL space physicist and chief scientist on the Interstellar Probe mission concept study.)

There’s evidence of such an event around the time early hominids were just beginning to pick up stone tools, and Brandt muses on a possible connection. “Let that creep up your spine for a moment,” he says. In recent years, scientists have discovered iron-60 isotopes in ocean crust samples dating from 2 million to 3 million years ago. Iron-60 is not found naturally on Earth: It’s forged in the cores of large stars. So, either a nearby supernova blasted the heliosphere with the iron dust, or the heliosphere drifted through a dense cloud laden with iron-60 from a previous supernova. Either way, Brandt says, “The heliosphere was way in, and we had a full blast of galactic cosmic rays and interstellar matter for a long, long time.” To look for relics of other such events, IP could use plasma wave antennas to essentially take the temperature of nearby electrons. Hot regions might mark the blast paths of material from past supernovae.

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Philosophically, that is on the grandest scale of the plausible, what does this all mean? First that cosmic radiation may have been the good fairy which accelerated human evolution. No need for extraterrestrials as in “2001”, cosmic machinery had its hand in the growth of human intelligence. A rational aura from this is that radiation shouldn’t not just be correlated to fear (as X rays, radiotherapy, and carbon free nuclear energy already show).

Second, life on Earth is much more cosmos dependent than it looks: not just sun weather (sun explosions, sun activity, up or down), but also cosmic weather are not just important for humanity, they may have played a primordial role. 

Third, the Voyager probes were intended to take the first detailed pictures of the outer planets. They became the first interstellar probes thanks to their usage of the heat of three Plutonium cartridges to keep warm and generate electricity. Plutonium is mighty, but those Plutonium batteries are still running out of power. Due to radioactive decay converted into heat, the Voyagers’ Radioactive Thermoelectric  Generators are losing about .8% of their power output each year. So the heat was dialed down on some of the instruments, which remarkably kept working (the ultraviolet detector still works at minus 80 C while it was designed for a minimum of minus 35C… Same with the Cosmic Ray System on Voyager 2). 22 systems were turned off in Voyager 1 to save power over the decades (as of 2022 CE)… However the ducts for the hydrazine propellant keeping the spacecrafts’ High Gain Antenna aiming towards Earth cannot be allowed to freeze…

In any case, after 50 years, the on-going operations of the Voyagers is not just a testimony to great nuclear and electronic technology, but keeps on bringing unexpected discoveries contradicting previous logic, that is keep on bringing great science. 

Those who argue for shrinking civilization should be reminded of the feats tech can accomplish, and the understanding it leads to. It turns out indeed that some of the unexpected results of the Voyagers were unexpected because the logic used for these predictions was not subtle enough. With more subtlety in the computations, we get some of what the Voyagers showed to be true.

In cases like that, when reality shows us that our logic is coming short, what is established is the necessity for more rigorous and clever logic, and the mistake(s) that were done… And the lessons carry everywhere, especially in complicated fields such as politics, economics, sociology, the human sciences. 

Hard science forces us to learn to think better, when time and time again, little innocuous reasonings we thought were sufficient turn out grossly mistaken because of little details we overlooked… which, after all, were not that small in the consequences they bear.

Launch more Interstellar probes (China, heavens bless, is planning two…)

Humanity is a voyage to the great beyond. Claiming it’s not, and actively blocking the voyage, especially in the interest of anti-intellectual, parsimonious or puritan ethics, is inhuman.

Patrice Ayme

 

 

It turns out the shape of the diverse features here are not as expected, or even their nature. The Termination Shock turns out to be rather spherical (it was expected to be comet-like). Also it is less of a shock than expected. The Heliosheath (confusely named heliosphere above) turns out to be flatter than expected (thus why Voyager 2 came out of it faster than expected, as V2 plunges below the (sort of) plane made by the Solar System). In retrospect, many of these characteristics should have been expected, the logic previously used was not subtle enough.

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

How To Remove CO2 From the Atmosphere: Water Volcanic, Calcium & Magnesium Desertic Tropical Ranges. Contemplate Indonesia!

DID INDONESIA CAUSE THE LAST THREE MILLION YEARS OF GLACIATION? SOLVING THE CO2 CATASTROPHE BY ACTIVE, FEASIBLE REMOVAL:

In the last 500 million years, three-quarters of the time or so, the planet enjoyed a hot, Jurassic style climate. It was not the case during the evolution of the genus Homo, one characteristic of which is the ability to endure cold and even subpolar climate. Enormous glaciations then rolled in, one after the other. What happened? Well, the mystery has now been unveiled.

This is not just a curiosity. Indeed, said discovery provides us with a solution to the CO2 catastrophe: just water dry tropical volcanic ranges and similar areas with plenty of calcium and magnesium, and the CO2 will be removed, stabilizing the atmosphere. Watering those particular mineral areas provides with a believable mechanism to decrease CO2 when enormous amounts of cheap clean energy is available… in a generation or two. (This is the first plausible mechanism ever suggested to do so!)

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Sacred mountain of Zoroastrianism, the major historical religion of civilization, Mount Damavand is the highest point in Iran higher than the Alps or even the Caucasus. It is an active volcano in full sight of gigantic Teheran. The gas and fumaroles on top was a problem when I circled the crater. This is the northern side, facing the Caspian sea, a lush area. Other sides are extremely dry, and I propose to water them. That of course would require gigantic, power-hungry engineering beyond the capability of present civilization.

Global climate change around 3–4 Million years ago influenced the evolution of hominids, via the aridification of Africa, and what happened next, the Pleistocene glaciation about 2.75 Myr ago… thereafter the Earth’s climate suffered rolling glaciations… while human species evolved ever faster.

Most explanations of these climatic events used to involve changes in circulation of the North Atlantic Ocean due to the closing of the Isthmus of Panama. The idea is that a strong current of warm water was going north from the Pacific, joining, and augmenting the Gulf Stream, thus preventing any ice to form in the Arctic. With no ice in the Arctic, the albedo of Earth was significantly lower, thus all these infrared, instead of being sent back to space by reflecting snows, were trapped in the Arctic. A warm Arctic brought temperatures up, overall.

However, the closure of the Indonesian seaway 3–4 Myr ago could also be responsible for these climate changes: it acts similarly to the contemporaneous Panama closing (but as we will see, Indonesia does more than Panama). Closing the Indonesian seaway brought the aridification of Eastern Africa. The simplest theory and results from ocean circulation modelling show that the displacement of mighty New Guinea, about 5 Myr ago, at 100 kilometers per million years, going north, and west, closed the seaway. (But not just that, as we will see.)

That would have switched the source of flow through Indonesia—from warm South Pacific to relatively cold North Pacific waters (all waters below 100 meters are now blocked by narrow, shallow straights inside the Indonesian archipelago). This blockage would have decreased sea surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, leading to reduced rainfall over Eastern Africa. Changes in the equatorial Western Pacific, by making heat stagnate there, probably reduced atmospheric heat transport from the tropics to higher latitudes, stimulating global cooling around the poles, and the eventual growth of ice sheets., which, in turn, cooled the planet further!

All of a sudden, shallow waters all over! The right side, the gigantic island of New Guinea, moved north, but also west, at 100 kilometers per million years, strangling the Indonesian seaway, starting 5 millions years ago (coincident with the same in Mesoamerica) This blocked the Earth’s warmest waters to enter the Indian ocean.

But there is another way in which Indonesia enters the climatic picture: CO2 removal by chemical reaction with basaltic rocks. This happened because the tectonic collisions caused the rise of high mountains, hence intense weathering.

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Basalt Make CO2 Into Rock:

Basalt generally has a composition of 45–55 % SiO2, 2–6 wt% total alkalis, 0.5–2.0% TiO2, 5–14 wt% FeO and 14% or more Al2O3. Contents of CaO are commonly near 10%, those of MgO commonly in the range 5 to 12%.

Limestone is a sedimentary rock which is often composed of the skeletal fragments of marine organisms such as coral, foraminifera and molluscs. Its major materials are the minerals calcite and aragonite, which are different crystal forms of calcium carbonate (CaCO3).

Immediate conclusion: if one adds CO2 to basalt, one should be able to make limestone. Indeed:

When CO2 is in presence of water, it reacts and makes carbonic acid. Putting lots of CO2 into water makes a Seltzer water which is acidic enough to destroy basalt. The low pH water (3.2) worked to dissolve the calcium and magnesium ions in the basalts, which then reacted with the carbon dioxide to make calcium and magnesium carbonates (which are whitish). Cores drilled into experimental sites in basalt showed rock with the tell-tale white carbonates occupying the pore spaces. Roughly it seems that 100 kilograms of basalt turned 50 kilograms of CO2 into rock. So far so good… One could locate power plants on top of basalt flows? Probably not: the process costs of the order of $17 a ton… That would augment the cost of burning oil by 20% (back of envelope computation in my head)… One has to understand the cheapest energy is already photovoltaic energy… In 2018…

Researchers tagged the CO2 they injected in basalt, 600 meters down, with carbon-14, a radioactive form of carbon. None of the injected CO2 was leaking back to the surface or finding its way out through a distant watercourse, as no radioactivity came out: the capture of CO2 by basalt is highly efficient.

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Indonesia is sucking CO2 out of the atmosphere:

Many mountains in Indonesia and New Guinea consist of ancient volcanic rocks from belching volcanoes caused by subduction of various tectonic plates. When ocean floors were caught in a colossal tectonic collision between a chain of island volcanoes and a continent, those volcanic  rocks were thrust high. Lashed by warm tropical, acidic, corrosive, penetrating rains, these basaltic rocks react with CO2 sequestering the product inside the basalt. That is why, with only 2% of the world’s land area, Indonesia accounts for 10% of its long-term CO2 absorption. Its mountains could explain why massive ice sheets have persisted, waxing and waning, for several million years: evidence shows that the normal state of the planet in the last half a billion years, is a hothouse, with crocodiles all the way to the north of Greenland…

Researchers claim to have found that such tropical mountain-building collisions in wet areas coincide with nearly all of the half-dozen or so significant glacial periods in the past 500 million years. “These types of environments, through time, are what sets the global climate,” said Francis Macdonald, a geologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union in Washington, D.C. (December 2018). If Earth’s CO2 has a machine producing it, the rise of mountains like Indonesia’s could be it.

Long-term changes in the planet’s temperature are governed by shifts in CO2 atmospheric density. Plate tectonics refurbishes continually the planet’s surface. For decades, scientists have debated what turned the CO2 on, to the dramatic extent it did. Volcanoes were long prime suspects. Volcanoes erupt where plates dive beneath one another. By spewing carbon from Earth’s interior, they could turn up the thermostat. That was the idea. But it’s a bit stupid: CO2 was in atmosphere, gets captured by rocks, sediments, gets buried, and then belched out: it sounds like a rather quick (on a geological scale) zero sum game: what comes in comes right out…

Rock weathering of massive mountain ranges, seems a smarter approach: it depends on mountain building driven by plate tectonics. Indeed, sometimes there are giant mountain ranges, as big, or bigger than the present Himalayas. Sometimes, most often, not: as observed, the planet is a hot-house ¾ of the time, just as there are no massive wet tropical ranges, most of the time.

The Hercynian range, which spans the Appalachians, Scotland, and countless ranges in Europe, is still here for all to see (started 480 millions ago, it became Himalayan like when Africa collided with North America as part of the construction of Pangea).

When tropical mountains contain seafloor rocks rich in calcium and magnesium, they react with CO2 dissolved in rainwater to form limestone, which is eventually buried on the ocean floor. Both processes matter in removing CO2 from the atmosphere, This also explains why there were gigantic amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere in the Carboniferous era, and they mysteriously vanished: they are in all these rocks, such as all these limestone ranges….

Having the right rocks to drive the CO2-chewing reaction is not sufficient. Climate matters, as I said. For example, the Siberian Traps, a region that saw devastating volcanic eruptions 252 million years ago, are rich in such rocks but absorb little CO2: it’s too damn cold, the chemistry doesn’t happen much because of the cold (details aren’t clear yet).

More clearly, in Arabia, one finds plenty of heat and volcanic rocks, but the solvent, water, is absent: CO2 rains down as carbonic acid after reacting with water… But only then. So… If could make it rain in Arabia, we could eliminate massive amounts of CO2. @,lacks another ingredient. “It’s hotter than Hades but it doesn’t rain.” Indonesia’s location in the rainy tropics is just right. “That is probably what’s keeping us centered in an ice age,” Kent adds.

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The Preceding Suggests THE Viable, Sustainable and Definitive Remedy to the CO2 catastrophe:

Lots of cockmaniacal plans have been proposed to mitigate the CO2 catastrophe (Harvard, the Pluto university, is going to try to throw a veil on the atmosphere… although that won’t solve the CO2 problem, but trust the nasty to come up with nastier…)

Some of mitigation of CO2 will happen naturally: as, and if, the Siberian Traps become tropical, and if it rains there much, CO2 will be removed from the atmosphere. More generally, as the entire planet warms, it moistens up, and all volcanic zones of the planet become CO2 absorbing: this is a natural way to prevent CO2 from raising so much the planet boils.

Practically, if one finally masters thermonuclear power, and, or, photovoltaic energy becomes super cheap, one could make it rain artificially (or massively water) dry tropical volcanic rock areas (such as Arabia, Iran). Thus one would remove enormous quantities of CO2 from the atmosphere. That will have to be done by 2100, just to stabilize the climate in the standard hothouse, the Jurassic mode ( what Trump calls a “super climate”), with sea level ten meters higher and crocodiles in Newfoundland…

Over the past few years, academic Macdonald and his collaborators have searched for other times when tectonics and climate could have conspired to open an Indonesia-size CO2 sink. They found that glacial conditions 90 million and 50 million years ago lined up neatly with the collisions of a chain of island volcanoes in the now-vanished equatorial Neo-Tethys Ocean with the African and Asian continents. A similar collision some 460 million years ago started to form the Appalachians, but it was thought to have taken place in the subtropics, where a drier climate (from trade winds) does not favor weathering. By reanalyzing ancient magnetic fields in rocks formed in the collision, Macdonald’s team found the mountains actually rose deep in the tropics. And their uplift matched a 2-million-year-long glaciation. “They’re developing a pretty compelling story that this was a climate driver in Earth’s past,” says Lee Kump, a paleoclimatologist at Pennsylvania State University in University Park.

Those cases are not exceptions. Indeed, the team compiled a database of every tectonic “suture”—the linear features left by tectonic collisions—known to contain ophiolites, characteristic pieces of sea floor, and pillow lavas and the like, volcanic sea floor, over the past half-billion years. Based on magnetism in each suture’s rocks and a model of continental drift, they mapped their ancient latitudes to see which formed in the warm and rainy tropics, and when. “We were surprised that this is not as complicated as we thought,” Macdonald said.

The team compared the results to records of past glaciations and found a strong correlation. They also looked for declines in volcanism, which might have cooled the climate (from lessening of CO2 emissions). But their influence was much weaker, Macdonald said.

A recent study challenges the mountain CO2 weathering-thermostat notion with evidence for the importance of volcanoes (as I said, it has to be rather a zero sum, when considering volcanoes from subduction, because what goes in comes pretty fast out!) The study used ages from thousands of zircons, durable crystals that can indicate volcanic activity, to show that upticks in volcanic emissions were the dominant force driving the planet’s warm periods. But there are two types of volcanisms: what I call “core volcanism” (“Traps”, Large Igneous Provinces, LIPs) brings in massive amounts of fresh CO2 from way down inside the mantle… It’s likely both streams of ideas have at least one hand on the truth.

The beauty of absorption by volcanic rocks of CO2 is that it explains not just why glaciations start, but also why they stop.

A hothouse Earth appears to be the planet’s default state, prevailing for three-fourths of the past 500 million years. We will have it again by 2100: the dice are thrown, it’s in the air.

An Indonesia-style collision may push the global climate into a glacial period, but only for a while. Mountains erode and continents drift. And the planet warms again.

Science doesn’t just bring understanding, it brings also the means to act on the universe. Now we have the trick to reduce CO2… (And I am, by the way, the first to propose it: massive watering of the desiccated zones!) To give us the means, we have to keep on deploying photovoltaic energy and thermonuclear reactors (I say “deploying”, because there is plenty of evidence that a massive thermonuclear reactor could work: the bigger, the more efficient, it’s a matter of mass against surface).

The alternative to the solution to the CO2 catastrophe by weathering and geological chemistry is a CO2 driven holocaust. Developing science and technology is not just profitable, pleasant, and human. It is also the moral thing to do. And the only moral solution to CO2 there is.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: By public request, a partial list of references supporting the research above:

References: Closing of the Indonesian seaway as a precursor to east African aridification around 3–4 million years ago
Mark A. Cane & Peter Molnar
Nature volume 411, pages 157–162 (10 May 2001)

Swanson-Hysell, N.L. and Macdonald, F.A., 2017. Tropical weathering of the Taconic orogeny as a driver for Ordovician cooling, Geology, G38985. 1.

(That was 440 million years ago, and the continents looked nothing like now; only Siberia is recognizable… It was a free floating continent…)

Tropical uplift may set Earth’s thermostat
Paul Voosen
Science 04 Jan 2019:

For scary, or when Antarctica partially melted under similar conditions to what we are going to get within a decade:

Antarctic ice melt 125,000 years ago offers warning
Paul Voosen
Science 21 Dec 2018:

 

IMMORAL & UNSCIENTIFIC, To Crisp CRISPR

Abstract: We can edit genetics now. Should we? Of course. It’s the moral thing to do. First, because it’s moral to try to know what we don’t know, even when, and especially when, it’s a great jump in the unknown (I will explain why in a follow-up essay). Second, because, by pushing the CRISPR technology, we can save billions of hours of quality of life for millions of human beings, very soon.

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In 2012, a collaboration between  Jennifer Doudna (from Hawai’i; then a professor at UC Berkeley) and  Emmanuelle Charpentier (a French professor from Paris working all over Europe) brought a huge invention. The two collaborating professors harnessed CRISPR into a method to edit DNA at will. Doudna learned first from CRISPR thanks to another female professor at Berkeley.

(Doudna wrote an excellent book on this “A Crack In Creation”, which I highly recommend; the title itself has a triple meaning.)

CRISPR is the abbreviation of: Clustered regularly interspaced short palindromic repeats. They are segments of prokaryotic DNA containing short, repetitive base sequences. These play a key role in a bacterial defence system: bacteria get attacked by viruses, bacteriophages. RNA harboring the spacer sequence helps Cas proteins recognize and cut the enemy (exogenous DNA) in two. Other RNA-guided Cas proteins cut enemy RNA.

Several elements intervene in CRISPR: tracing with RNA attached to a pair of scissors, adding (or not!) what DNA piece one wants, & then automatic repair DNA…

Gene editing proceeds by attaching a DNA-breaking natural bacterial defense against virus to a particular region of the DNA, thanks to a recognizing RNA. Then whatever one wants to splice is brought in by another RNA. DNA. 

The potential is to create species at will. Or to remove diseases at will. Let’s hasten to say, that the process can, and has, happened spontaneously in the wild (so to speak). Some patients have had grave genetic diseases they were affected by, disappear, from the cutting effect appearing on its own in one stem cell’s DNA. (If that stem cell had enough descendants to compensate for the deleterious effects of others, wrong-DNA cells, a cure can be achieved!)

Some “bioethicists” are all alarmed by gene editing, and use big words, about the potential damage to life for frivolous pursuits.

Technically, CRISPR alarmists are panicking too early: first, and most importantly, the phenotype does not reduce to the genotype. Human beings’ inheritance is mostly phenotype, not genotype: this is why we can share 99% of our genotype with mice, and still be quite different  (except for those addicted to plutocracy, who may as well be mice).

Granted, one should not do whatever. Fluorescent mini-pigs should be amusing, but not if their fluorescence prevents them to sleep. Worse: a very promising, but hyper dangerous technique exists, the GENE DRIVE. In a gene drive, the CRISPR itself is made part of the genetic information which is added.

Promising? Experimentally, some mosquitoes species were then infected with 99.5% success with immunity to the malaria parasite. That would make malaria disappear faster than Bill Gates takes to visit five-star hotels on his way to do whatever in the name of malaria. So it’s an excellent thing. On the danger side, species could be eradicated. That technique could also obviously be weaponized.

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We are the astonishing the species. Stupendous astonishment is what we do.

What is predictable is not astonishing, and what is truly astonishing, is not predictable.

Such philosophical musings are actually intensely practical. I am going to show how.

***

With CRISPR all genetic diseases become potentially curable: Considering Huntington’s and Duchenne muscular dystrophy leads Doudna to write in her book: “The stakes are simply too high to exclude the possibility of eventually using germline editing.”Strange formulation: the stakes are simply too high to exclude the possibility of eventually using life saving technology?

I shall be even clearer. Those not all out for using CRISPR to cure human diseases are on the same moral side as those who didn’t go all out to prevent Auschwitz, although they knew about it. Yeah, no, I’m not exaggerating, but it’s going to be a bit difficult to explain why. 

By editing DNA at will, we become the architect of creation.

When one can alleviate human pain and suffering, absent adverse consequences, one has to do so. It’s a moral imperative. Otherwise one joins the ranks of those who could have done something about Auschwitz, and didn’t. Actually, it’s worse: opposing those who operated Auschwitz clearly had adverse consequences!

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Same basic story as above, rolled out again to explain better…

Jennifer Doudna: “The truth is, I don’t have answers.” Doudna would like to have the public participate in the debate. However, says Doudna: “There’s a disconnect between the scientific community and mainstream culture, a real degradation in trust by the public. Many scientists — I’m guilty of this too — find it much more fun to do the next experiment in the lab than to take the time to explain to non-specialists what we do or how the scientific process actually works.”

Doudna is still searching for red lines that CRISPR technology shouldn’t cross. “I struggle with the question of crossing boundaries of speciation that are naturally in place” — For example 28,000 people are grafted every year in the USA. The demand is five times that, at least. Raising pigs with human-compatible organs becomes possible with CRISPR.  “You might decide that it would be unethical not to do that,” says Doudna, unhelpfully.

I love Doudna. She and Charpentier should get the Nobel. However, she somewhat disingenuously pretends to believe that, given our limited knowledge about the human genome, there shouldn’t be clinical use of CRISPR in the human germ line at present. (She does not really believes this, because she is not an idiot, but she affects to play a fair, Politically Correct game…) But she also admits that the balance is delicate. The same technology that might cure genetic-related conditions such as Alzheimer’s, Duchenne, diabetes and cancer might someday be used frivolously. Strangely Doudna pretends that “I don’t think that’s going to happen any time very soon, just because we don’t have the knowledge,” Doudna says. “But is it coming in 50 or 100 years?” She pauses to reflect, then says: “Yeah.”

However this is all a fake debate: it has been done with mice. Thus, it can be done with people. Thanks to the People’s Republic of China, it’s going to happen all over human disease. Mr. Xi just inverted the one-child policy established 40 years ago, he can earn more brownie points by curing human diseases.

CRISPR is a wonderful tool, to gather knowledge, and THEN to pontificate upon the morality this knowledge will entail. THEN.

To try to pontificate about the consequences of CRISPR now, when we don’t know so much, is unscientific. It will feed the enemy of the scientific method, by having scientists pretending to think when they can’t. As Doudna herself said, she doesn’t know.  

Indeed, the chicken-egg can’t come before the evolution which led to them. So the science has to plough ahead, and inform We The People. Then we can moralize.

Experiment, then moralize.

A reader told me, about the preceding aphorism that “Historically, you have it wrong; even though you may be right”. Right. I was expressing a moral imperative, not a historical observation of how people behaved. Experiment then moralize: the way of the thinker. Moralize, then be careful not to experiment: the way of those on the wrong side of history. 

CRISPR is on the right side of history. Follow it, to learn not just how to get more power, but how to become more moral…

Patrice Ayme’

Dragonflies Play Dead, So Do Our Masters

Animal behavior can be extremely intelligent, even in insects. Being an animal means being intelligent. (I was once nearly pushed off a mountainside by a giant sheep which looked innocent, cuddly, thoroughly unawares and stupid enough, until it deliberately, smartly, shoved me downslope.)

A study from the University of Zurich, published in the journal Ecology, reveals that the moorland hawker dragonfly plunges at high speed, a risky maneuver, and then pretends to drop dead, upside down, to escape aggressive males (sometimes, the hovering male inspecting the belle from above, is not fooled, though…) There are instances of other animals faking their own deaths to avoid being killed, for example opossums, who look thoroughly disgusting, foaming at the mouth, as if they had a terrible disease (the disgusted predator, not wanting to catch something, generally walks away).  

I see, therefore I think. And I think playing dead works.

Playing dead is a well documented strategy (even in dragonflies). Yet, this is the only study of female animals faking deaths to avoid mating. 

Researcher Rassin Khelifa was collecting insect eggs in the Swiss Alps, something he had done for ten years, when he noticed that a female dragonfly would fake her own death by falling from the sky and then lie motionless on the ground until the male dragonfly leaves the area.

“While I was waiting at a pond near Arosa, at about 2,000 meter elevation,” he wrote, “I witnessed a dragonfly dive to the ground while being pursued by another dragonfly… the individual that crashed was a female, and that she was lying motionless and upside down on the ground. Upside down is an atypical posture for a dragonfly. The male hovered above the female for a couple seconds and then left. I expected that the female could be unconscious or even dead after her crash landing, but she surprised me by flying away quickly as I approached. The question arose: Did she just trick that male? Did she fake death to avoid male harassment? If so, this would be the first record of sexual death feigning in odonates.”

This is when the philosophical method has kicked in: the mind has one example, a single example, and builds a (putative scientific) theory from it. We know that’s how the visual system itself works (the visual system is mostly stimulated by itself: information from the eyes is less than 10%!)

The human mind is a philosopher.

After making this initial revelation, Khelifa spent the next few months documenting instances where a female dragonfly would crash-land and play dead while being pursued by a male dragonfly. He observed that when female dragonflies arrived at the pond where male dragonflies were “constantly patrolling looking for a mate”, the females would be intercepted mid-air. After copulating nearby, the male dragonfly would fly away, leaving the female unprotected while she laid her eggs.

In 86 percent of cases that Khelifa observed, the females would crash to the ground and fake their deaths. “Those that kept flying were all intercepted by a male but if they were motionless, 77.7 percent of the dragonflies were successful in deceiving the coercive male,” he wrote.

This behavior could have resulted from exaptation, a term in evolutionary biology to describe a trait that has been co-opted for a use other than the one for which natural selection has built it. “Since death feigning already exists in the behavioral repertoire of dragonflies, females of the moorland hawker expanded the use of this anti-predatory function to avoid male coercion,” Khelifa wrote. “On the other hand, the origin of this exaptation is probably sexual conflict where each sex adopts reproductive strategies that best serve its own survival and reproductive success.”

Plummeting to their fake deaths appears to help female dragonflies survive longer and produce more offspring by avoiding coercion. “Sexual death feigning is one of the rarest behaviors in nature, and due to its scarcity, it has received little attention in behavioral ecology. Currently, it is restricted only to arthropods. It would be interesting to know whether this scarcity is true or just an artifact related to the lack of behavioral investigations or difficulty in detecting this behavior.”

***

Playing Dead, and Playing Dumb: How Plutos Rule:

Thus, when I argue that human history is much subtle and infused with human will and machination than official history has it, remember the dragonflies! If they can be so smart, so can we!

My Machivellian philosophy and vision of history extends in many dimensions. Not just Islam, plutocracy, democracy, civilization, and the evil nature of the best humanism. Fortunately, it is gaining credence.

For example, the Egyptian ambassador to France, Ehab Badawi, a self-declared “moderate Muslim educated by Jesuits“, and was once punished by a Father for not having studied the Qur’an well! Ehab Badawi argues that the West is the main sponsor and enabler of terrorist Islam (he puts it a bit more diplomatically than me). Badawi says this: Western satellites carry TV channels which incite to evil interpretations of Islam, and make propaganda for the worst Islam madness. Thus, instead of accusing the Wahhabis from Saudi Arabia, the ambassador accuses the Western plutocrats (who launch and operate the Islam propaganda satellites).

I have explained that the rise of fundamentalist Islam was a deliberate ploy by US  and British plutocrats (more exactly, initially, oilmen). The de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia, the 31 year old Deputy Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman, picked up a nearly three-quarter of a billion dollar yacht in south France last year (previously owned by Russian plutocrat). At the same time, he was imposing fierce austerity in Saudi Arabia. The Serene yacht was made in Italy.

Saudi Arabia is a dollar recycling machine which sends billions to Wall Street in a somewhat similar fashion to the European Central Bank sending 2.7 billion Euros a day to the world’s wealthiest entities. Smart. And when you ask the right questions, they play dead (that’s why I am censored by the New York Times).

Our masters and attending plutos would have to play dead, if one asked them the proper questions (fortunately for the plutocracy, in the USA, the democratic establishment is thoroughly pluto, and craftily replaced intelligent debate by racial and racist invectives, and other posing ways…)

The propaganda has been so intense, all values have been inverted. For example Paul Krugman is viewed as “left”, “liberal”, conscientious, an intellectual, look at him, like Obama, another deep thinker out of that shallow pond, he got a Noble.

Actually, as I have said for years, Krugman is nothing of the sort: he preaches disorienting venom. And this is now slowly starting to be understood by really deep thinkers. In light of what I said above about Muslim Fundamentalism (a plutocratic device), Krugman style thinking is just another plutocratic device. (And even the lukewarm critiques of the ilk of Sanders and Warren can be viewed as suspiciously mild posing…)

Similarly, in France, to block all changes, one accuses the National Front to be fascist. But surely the national Front is not causing the sinking of France? It was never in power. More generally, “populism” is accused of fascism (basically, following the model established in France, in the last thirty years, of calling the National Front, fascist and populist).

Meanwhile the European Union did its best to block in Turkey those who wanted to block Islamism (see Wall Street, above). Conclusion? The Sultan Erdogan has censored Wikipedia, blocked it, just as the New York Times blocks me. (It’s true that lies about Turkey, if outrageous enough, should be blocked; however, that should be done publicly, punctually, and debated. In a case like that, the state should be able to go to the Justice system, something that already exists for books. Worldwide.)

If the masters play brain-dead long enough, imposing their example, the brains of the rabble will atrophy, just as intended. Of course, to start with, a democracy with masters is a contradiction in adjecto. When one starts bad, and deny it, it can only get worse!

Patrice Ayme’

TRANSCENDENTAL INTELLIGENCE: SAPIENS’ ETHOLOGICAL LAW

IDIOCY VIOLATES HUMANITY ITSELF

A question pertaining to the survival of civilization: is transcendental animal not to be boxed in, finally?

A biology professor asked: how far do you intend to carry that project of founding morality on genetics? Well, far enough to show how human ethology transcends genetics and epigenetics:

If one uses enough intelligence, the means become the end. The paradox of the human species!  

Maybe Homo Sapiens should be called the transcendental animal. Indeed what is wisdom, but for the ability to transcend problems… mostly by using physics?

***

Being right in matter transcendental, always starts as a first, not by following the herd:

Normal people indulging in mundane tasks feel that being right means to follow the ways of the herd, all over. The result is plain to see. The world is changing ever faster, yet the herd cannot follow itself out of the problems this generates. Going around news, media and Internet, I am amazed by the gullibility, stupidity, and the relish for the masses to indulge that way. Including masses of professionals paid to teach, or to act as medium (the so-called “media”). But what else to expect from the rabble? Supreme thinking was always from an elite, to an elite.

So much stupidity, and full of hatred too: all over. One can understand why so many gave full powers to Turkey’s Sultan Erdogan: out of rage, and the will to do something even more stupid, and more nefarious, yet, bearing the signature of their freedom.

Meanwhile Geneva and the Australia’s Great Barrier go topless. Desultory progress in the Alps, while uncomprehended tragedy is unfolding in the oceans. True human ethology should contest the legality of all what afflicts it: so-called “representative” democracy, which is truly plutocracy unbound, and its obnoxious little whip and distraction, Salafist Islam.

***

Wasteful GDP Corruption Flaunted:

Economists of the “Liberal” type crow that California’s GDP is larger than that of all but the Gross Domestic Products which the rest of the USA, China, Japan, and Germany are endowed with. Yes, of course: the more a country wastes, the higher the GDP. The USA averages 16 tons of CO2 emissions, per year, per capita. The European Union, only seven. Now that massive consumption of quasi-free fossil fuels in the USA has put it, and Canada and Australia, way ahead economically, as I showed.

GDP is not just an indicator of economic growth, but of massive corruption.

Also GDP is augmented when the world’s largest corporations sit in California and pay no taxes. Thanks to Obama, and, soon enough, Trump.

GDP should look as a defect, instead, it’s viewed as glorious. An ethical and intellectual failure. GDP is an indication not just of pollution, but of mental deliquescence, in those who laud it.

***

I was wondering why so many people hate to think. Is it because the Internet has made them increasingly disconnected with reality? Or is in part, because the Internet has made them suspect as they try to think, and fail, that they may feel they are coming short ethically. Hence all the hatred out there. And they are right (to hate themselves):

***

The Concept of Ethological Law: IDIOCY VIOLATES ALL OTHER HUMAN RIGHTS

Ethology can be scientifically defined through experiments. Some will scoff that the human species is too clever to be defined by gene-given, epigenetic-given law, that the ultimate law of Sapiens is intelligence. And whatever flows therefrom. Fair enough.

This point of view has the consequence that any law which is antagonistic to intelligence is inhuman. Examples of this inhumanity abound. One can only conclude that the general tension obvious around the world, and especially in so-called democracies, originate from all too much of society been organized in systematic violation of the Human Intelligence Principle (HIP).

This was the situation a year ago, in 2016. This year the situation has got much worse. The quest for the Golden Calf of Australian GDP Supreme is the proximal cause of this devastation. More generally GreenHouse Gas warming, induced by a GHG density now probably around 550 ppm, the highest since the Jurassic, 100 million years ago. Time to think and sacrifice, guys, and yes, it means you!

***

Puppets owe everything to those who pull the strings:

I was struck by the picture of the National Security Council, with a mysterious lonely pretty woman sandwiched there.

Dina Powell, a celebrity for our times, the sort of people who owes everything to those who created her (as Obama was). Thus, very pliable. All the more with arguably with all too little formal education, here she is at the top of the defense establishment, including extremely educated generals.

The more a civilization falls victim to plutocracy, the more celebritism is pushed onto people. Plutocracy is a form of generalized fascism, and celebritism, intellectual fascism: they reinforce each other. Celebritism is not just a moral flaw, it is a crime civilization is led to engage in.

***

All progressives should be resolute anti-sexists:

Women In Geneva were already allowed  to sunbathe topless. However, a law from 1929 forbade them to bathe in lakes and rivers, in the same attire. This law has now been changed; in the Canton de Genève (total population metropolitan area, one million). As it should have; enabling only men to go topless, was, and is, obviously sexist, wherever practiced.

In Black African “Islam”, women used to go topless, for obvious reasons: heat, hygiene. Something to emulate, as, worldwide, the planetary warming is accelerating:

***

The Great Barrier Reef, greatest structure on Earth built by animals, is dying:

345,000 square kilometers (as big as Germany). It is 2300 kilometers long. Now 1,600 kilometers (1,000 miles) are white, distressed, much of it dying.

The Great Barrier Reef is overheating, going white. During overheating, algae within the corral get expelled. In 1998, a colossal El Nino made the Great Barrier white. There was another whitening in 2008, and in 2016. The 2016 El Nino was as bad as the one of 1998. Coral gets overheated, and weakened by toxins (from coal, phosphates from chemical agriculture). Algae dies off in the coral with which they live in symbiosis, the coral goes white (“bleaches”). If bleaching happens again and again, the coral dies.

The Coral Great Barrier reef is dying from human action. Or more exactly mostly Australian action, as Australia does in its pursuit of GDP with corral, the same as it did with aborigines: kill all what’s needed, to get richer. It’s smart of the criminals involved, but there are millions. It’s not smart for humanity at large. This sort of things is solved by another great die-off, this time of human beings.

Human species had evolved in such a way that their actions could not put an end to the biosphere. A virus which cannot kill its host, lest it disappear. Sapiens was a virus, and Earth the host. But now, in a few decades, Sapiens has mutated in an industrial form lethal to Earth.

***

Fracking is good for the ecology, say Plutos:

This is the latest from the fossil fuel Plutos: Ban Fracking? Bad economics, Bad Ecology? Following the more genera cynical argument the USA, Russia and Canada have long been making, secretly, that warming is actually a good thing. Except now it’s not secret anymore: Vladimir Putin has said warming up the north will be a good thing (for Russia). And indeed, it will be for Russia. Canada will be less amused when the USA will insist that Canadian coastal water are actually international waterways… with more than the present day smiles. 

Actually we are approaching 550 ppm of GreenHouse Gas (GHG) equivalent. As I already said, but it’s never repeated enough; it’s a number much more astonishing than anything, even the percentage of the human population deliberately assassinated in World War Two. An astounding number, increasing fast. Levels not seen for 100 million years. Spaceship Earth has been highjacked with raving maniacs.

When all hell will break loose, pretty soon, the Plutos will be at home.

They create their own, most sustainable environment.

This is why when real democracy failed in Athens, more than 23 centuries ago, not only it stayed failed to this day, but Greece knew 22 centuries of foreign occupation.

Nowadays, the stakes are much higher: the biosphere itself is facing its sixth massive extinction. The survival of wisdom is in play. It’s a game that was probably lost by wisdom itself in many a galaxy. Now our turn to show if transcendental intelligence can overcome amor fati…

Patrice Ayme’  

MORALITY IS ABSOLUTE, Since Evolution Is God

Science has demonstrated the existence of our creator. It’s not a black monolith, a la 2001, Space Odyssey, nor is it a somewhat crazed transgender humanoid with issues, as the so-called “New Testament” has it.

There is a God, and it created us in a little more than four billion years. Its name is biological evolution.  Evolution, this all too real god transcends the ones of all too obsolete religions.

Biological evolution, our Creator, made it so that we come endowed, by naturally developing, a natural morality, ethology. Ethology is more developed, more plastic, more variable and intelligent in human beings than in any other species. Why? Because naturally developing morality depends upon naturally developed logic. And human beings are more logically capable than any other animals (although recent political evolutions may lead one to think otherwise…)

Ethology is experimentally established: Capuchin Monkeys have a sense of fairness, for example. That sense of fairness can override more primal urges necessary for survival (like hunger, or safety).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t6OsVUlp7Y0

Tiny Moralists Think Hard: Experimental studies show that Monkeys Stay Away from Mean People.

Capuchin monkeys show biases against humans who deny help to others. This finding suggests that being able to identify undesirable social partners (even in other species) has very ancient evolutionary roots (since our common ancestors with Capuchin monkeys date at least from the separation of South America from Africa. Now that dates to the early Cretaceous: open marine conditions between America and Africa happened by 110 million years ago. This, in particular means that our proto-monkey ancestors, as suggested in some Disney animation movies, enjoyed the presence of dinosaurs for 40 million years; as a reminder, let me point out in passing that those smart primates around, omnivorous as they are, may have found dinosaurs eggs a very handy snack when the world got devastated by eruptions, asteroids, etc… Thus pushing the mesotherms (dinosaurs, etc.)  into extinction…) 

Recently, ethological studies were extended to rats. Rats can override their primal urges to help a fellow rat.

So we don’t need a god invented in the last 32 centuries to explain why we have a sense of right and wrong. There is an absolute morality, but its application can be extremely variable according to circumstances. That is clear when studying the ethology of lions, say, which is all over the place: lions can be fair, tender, devoted, demented, cruel, vicious, selfish, generous, and even protecting of other species… The same pretty much can be observed with chimpanzees (who, after all, have to scare away lions…)

Absolute morality is a mix of what our bodies find pleasurable (that’s the automatic, “genetic” and “epigenetic” part), and what logics compels us to do. Logic itself we learn from the environment, as a sort of proto-physics.

Then, in turn, this learned logics interacts with the ethical circumstances at hand. (Sometimes the logic gets entangled in circumstances to lead to sheer insanity; see the famous Melian dialogue where a maniacal Athens disingenuously explains to Melos why Athens has to be cruel and demented in the Athenian will to annihilate Melos, if Melos won’t submit…)

Logics (again, a proto-physics discovered by the baby, and then the child interacting with the world) is an integral part of what enables us to make our natural ethology operational. Those who “believe” in superstitions which stretch plausibility beyond the breaking point (son of god being crucified, as if that was going to save us, or Muhammad going to Jerusalem, carried by a winged horse, now that the Archangel Gabriel finished instructing him in Arabic, in the name of god…) are violating the law of logic.

Natural ethology is established in part from logic, and the logic each individual holds to be true, depends, to some extent, upon circumstances. Thus natural human ethology is relative, precisely because it’s absolute. In the end, like Brownian motion, it all averages out (absolutely). Moral outliers, like Nazism, get eradicated by evolutionary processes.

Babies discover at some point, that fellow humans don’t always tell the truth, and “belief” should not be absolute, except for excellent reasons (this is one of the point of the fables taught to children: don’t blindly believe others…)

Faith based on unbelievable beliefs deny this learned, mandatory suspicion.

In general, as science has progressed enormously in the meantime, unbelievable beliefs used to be more much believable than they are now. Thus unbelievable beliefs violate logics, the basic of our natural ethics, much more than they used to. Thank god!

That violation of ethics, coming from a violation of basic logic is neither accidental, nor incidental. Instead, it was a Machiavellian plot. Still is, when Obama tells us “Islam is a religion of peace” (which are the religions of war, tell us, please, Oh, Great Bama?)

Violating basic logics is precisely why Roman emperors imposed Christianity (under the penalty of death found in the edicts of emperor Theodosius, 390 CE). That enabled to make god in the image of the emperor, and thus, the emperor’s rule, divine. At the same time it habituated people to violate basic natural ethics, and even basic logic, thus making We The People much easier to dominate, exploit and abuse.

The same basic reasoning established Islam (the ferocious part of the Qur’an was written as Muhammad finally became dictator of Mecca, hence in the same position as Theodosius, 242 years prior).

By violating logic (not believing in anything whatever), the Abrahamic faiths are in violation of absolute, evolution given, ethology.    

Our physical powers are becoming increasingly divine. Our capacity for destruction, annihilation, horror, abomination and infamy, are ever greater, to the point we are in the process of destroying most of the most advanced life on Earth. The only way to stop, or mitigate, this, is by ever more rigorous ethics. Thus it has become a moral imperative more urgent than ever to break whatever threatens logics.

Patrice Ayme’

Alcohol, Sexism, Rape, Hypocrisy

Lots of females, and US Vice President Joe Biden (president of vice?), suddenly are all excited about the “rape culture”. Let’s have a toast to their health. Surely they realize they are joking? Did they realize they partake in that “rape culture”? This is a territory, where I prowl and predate: what to do to change the culture. Not just because I was there before (pre-date) but as a predator in the world of ideas.

I am 100% against “rape culture”, but even more against saying no, no, no, while actively collaborating with the exact opposite (as most hypocrites do). Much social activity in the West (and not just in the West) is engineered for rape (or sort-of rape, I-was-not-really-there cop-out) . Let’s say more: without the so-called “rape culture” most of the ostriches out there would not have any fun. And this is exactly why there was little progress on the “rape culture” ever since the concept and terminology appeared in the 1970s.

I will spare you, at least today, the gory psychobiology below all this, where it is explained why the happily enraged male pursues the delightedly scared female, prehistoric style. We are prehistoric creatures, because evolution created us over the aeons, and those time honed ways have a wisdom which millions of years of  survival certify.

Silence Is No Consent, But Drinking Factually Is

Instead, I will focus on two facts. First, there is a lot of sexism imposed on children as young as five years old (for example more in the USA than in France). Sexism consists in gender behavior not forced by psychobiology. Sexism leads to alienation, thus the “rape culture”. Sexism makes females weak, whiny, provocatively passive, too emotional while the males are made tough, resilient, brutal, domineering, coldly rational, ambitious etc. Sexism makes inter-gender interaction naturally violent, exploited and exploitative.

Sexism can be hidden (OK, not so hidden) in activities as simple as dancing (again, with stereotyped roles).

The second fact nurturing the “rape culture” is alcohol injection (“consumption”). To put it bluntly, young people get into the alcohol culture, to partake in the rape culture.

From Scientific American, 2001: Enzyme Lack Lowers Women’s Alcohol Tolerance

…”one of the reasons why alcohol harms women more than men: women, it appears, are deficient in an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol. The findings appear in the 2001 April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. “It has been known for a long time that, in general, both women and female animals are more susceptible to the negative or toxic effects of alcohol,” team member Steven Schenker of the University of Texas at San Antonio says. “This is true for the liver, heart muscle and skeletal muscle, and it may be true for the pancreas and the brain. In other words, there is something about the female gender that makes them more susceptible to toxic amounts of alcohol.”

In the past scientists attributed this susceptibility to women’s smaller body size and their relatively higher percentage of fatty tissue. For this study, however, the researchers focused on what is known as first-pass metabolism. Before alcohol reaches the blood stream, it goes through the stomach, where so-called gastric alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) isozymes break some of it down. “In an earlier study we found that women have less of this ADH activity than men do,” notes lead author Charles Lieber of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “Accordingly, women have a lesser first-pass metabolism and, therefore, for a given dose of alcohol, their blood level is higher than it is for men.”

Following up on that research, the team recently turned their attention to the makeup of ADH. They found that one of the enzyme’s three components, glutathione-dependent fomaldehyde dehydrogenase (x-ADH), is deficient in women, thus explaining their lower ADH activity levels. To Schenker, the take-home message is clear: “Women simply need to be more cautious than males in terms of the amount of drinking they do.”

There are other factors: women have more fat (in which alcohol does not dilute) and men have 20% more water (in which alcohol dilutes). In practice, a woman drinking alcohol in the same way as a male will always get more intoxicated, and often much more so. The Blood Alcohol Count (BAC) can be twice in a female relative to the male in the same equal social circumstances.

(By the way, the greater sensitivity to alcohol in women explains why so many women in the USA become alcohol addicts.)

Once the prey is incapacitated, all inhibitions down, the prey is there for the taking. Most “rapes” in the USA, involve alcohol.

“43% of the sexual victimization incidents involve alcohol consumption by victims and 69% involve alcohol consumption by the perpetrators.”

So let the prey know this. OK, sorry to be a party pooper. How are you going to have fun, looking forward? Screams against the “rape culture” especially in the USA, have become a cover-up for the alcohol culture. The more they scream against rape, the more they are getting drunk on their own fables, and their sorry sort.

I will taunt public opinion with the following proposition: young people get into alcohol, because they want to get laid. The rest is only habituation. Time to get sober, or let the hypocrisy, the show, and the fun, go on. They want no rape? Let them stop drinking, then, and we, or, rather, they can talk, and learn to talk, instead of just getting an uninhibited, inebriated ride on the most basic instincts .

Patrice Ayme’

Europe & Obama: Guilty Of The Syrian Massacre

Ultimately, & practically, the Syrian Civil War’s primary cause is not even Islam, or the plutocratic effect, but European impotence (except for the French Republic, which is engaged in half a dozen wars… but financially and diplomatically hobbled by most other European powers… and, of course, its occasionally ingrate progeny, the US). Europeans, Merkel, and especially European youth, talk big about peace, human rights, freedom. Yet, what good is talk when it is not followed by enforcement? Replacing action by the dream?

Refugees, you say? Millions of them? Well, six hundred million Africans and Middle Orientalists want to enter Europe. For starters. Any questions?

I guess not. Shall we reinstate European colonialism, so that Africans want to stay in Africa, as they used to?

Here are further observations of mine: Europeans (semi-) intellectuals talked big about imperialism, decolonization, peace, flowers, bad-mouthed the strong-arm of the USA. So who did they enable? Assad. Assad is smoother talking than Saddam Hussein. But as far as killing his own people, he is much better. Connection with the plutocrats in London made the British Parliament friendly to him. And his kind.

Obama refused, at the last moment, to strike Assad, in collaboration with France. French pilots were in their seats, ready to go unleash Scalp missiles on Assad’s palace, but The One in the White House changed his mind. Annihilating weddings, or Americans on the beach with drones in Yemen, OK. Hitting big bad dictator, whose family holds billions in assets in the West, not OK.

Alep, August 2016. Those “Leaders” Who Do Not Defend Humanity Justice & Civilization Are Culprit Of Leading The Wrong Way: European Peaceniks and Obama

What happened next? Putin saw the green light from Obama. Putin is an opportunist (see below). A much encouraged Putin invaded Ukraine, grabbing Crimea… which had been Ukrainian for eleven centuries. Now Putin is in Syria, training his army, extending his empire, and helping his fellow dictator Assad re-establish his rule (of terror). (Putin had seized parts of Georgia earlier. However Sarkozy intervened in various spastic ways, and Bush put a few hundreds US troops in the way of Russian tanks, persuading Putin to back off…)

Cynics will observe that the USA is the world’s number one producer of fossil fuels… Followed by Russia. Do those two have interest to see fossil fuel prices go too low for their own comfort? As long as there is a total war mess in the Middle East, most of the oil production out of Turkey, Syria, and especially Iraq, is shut down (by some measure, Iraq has the world’s second largest reserve of conventional oil). That lack of production keeps the prices up much better than the conspiracies from (a much weakened) OPEC.

In this light, Canada, which is trying to build a new giant pipeline, to exfiltrate the planet’s dirtiest hydrocarbons has also interest to extend the mess in the Middle East as long as possible. And sure enough PM Trudeau, that dashing ecologist in words alone, pulled the Canadian Air Force out of the Middle East.

Some will say Canada acted in a spirit of peace, alleluia, let’s save lives from horrid bombardment. By the same token, the Jihadists are all for eternal peace too. One does make peace with those who organize Auschwitz. Aleppo, right now is pretty much Auschwitz for all to see. Aerial bombardment is no panacea, but it remains the ultimate weapon. Who controls the sky and bombs from it has won more than half the war.

History will not be kind to Obama and those Europeans who pay only lip service to humanity, Socrates’ style (See Socrates on the lake of selfishness). To defend the position that one should not defend humanity and humanism is beyond vile, it is also illogical… if one is not a plutocrat of the most ferocious type.  

Trump accused Obama to have founded the Islamist State, ISIS, or words to this effect. Then he explained this happened through Clinton and Obama’s lack of action. Of military action. I agree, and said so at the time. Now I am making the same charge about the Syrian war. I have been making it for several years, if anything Trump is parroting me, and not the other way around.

These are symptoms of the White Flag Syndrome.

Obama maybe vile, from a humanitarian point of view, by refusing to strike a mass-murdering dictator, but, he is in the best American tradition: the US has helped many a dictator during the Twentieth Century, starting with Kaiser Wilhelm II (from 1914 to 1917). Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, countless bananas dictators, and many others more recently (Nasser, the Shah Reza Pahlavi, the Saudis, etc.)

America first, make America ever greater is a policy which has been most profitable. President Franklin Roosevelt in World War Two, following President Wilson in  World War One, refused to come to the help of the French Republic in a timely manner, after being begged to do so. That did not work very well for humanity, but it worked very well for America.

Roosevelt’s refusal to help France in 1939 and 1940 against Hitler, although Auschwitz had just been opened for business by the Nazis, for all to see, was despicable, anti-humanitarian. However, it brought the death of 50 million Europeans, the loss of the European empires, and, not the least, the coming of the so-called “American Century”.

Europeans, though, do not seem to have learned history as well as US think tanks did. Weakness in front of fascism and its associated plutocrats (Yesterday Mussolini, Salazar, Hitler, Franco, now, Assad, Putin, etc.) brought calamity to Europe. Syria, like Libya, should be part of the European empire of justice and peace, because it is the neighborhood of Europe. Actually, Syria was, until it was devastated by the brutal Muslim assault, the richest part of the Roman empire.

The king of Jordan believes World War Three has started. What is sure is that, for World War Three to start, the surest strategy is weakness in the face of infamy. It is known that many in the Russian chain of command believe that a surgical nuclear strike would intimidate the Western Europeans into abject surrender. Whomever the next US president is, Trump, Clinton, Kaynes or Pence, I would not bet on it. Indeed any of these four is clearly more aggressive than Obama. And the US chain of command is very deep.

Here is an example:
Low key and calmly cerebral, four star Admiral Haney, whom some would probably insist to call an “Afro-American” is Commander, United States Strategic Command (four star is the greatest number of stars, aside from times of world war). As such he would be the one talking directly to the president in case of nuclear war, real or potential. Haney commands  not only this country’s nuclear forces but its cyber weapons and space satellites as well.

David Martin, “60 Minutes”: Is it riskier today?

Cecil Haney: Well I think today we’re at a time and place that I don’t think we’ve been to before.

It is Haney’s job to convince Vladimir Putin that resorting to nuclear weapons would be the worst mistake he could possibly make.

David Martin: When you look at what would work to deter Russia, do you have to get inside Putin’s head?

Cecil Haney: You have to have a deep, deep, deep understanding of any adversary you want to deter, including Mr. Putin.

David Martin: So how would you describe him psychologically?

Cecil Haney: Well, one I would say I’m not a psychologist. But I would just say he is clearly an individual that is an opportunist.

[Sell, most politicians are opportunists. The job selects for opportunists. This is the major problem of representative democracy. Any politician is going to be a variant on Trump or Clinton, just those two make it more blatant. However, in the case of Putin and the nationalist mood in Russia, the sky seems to be the same limit as it was for the Nazis.]

David Martin, loaded question: Does it concern you that an opportunist has a nuclear arsenal?

Cecil Haney: It concerns me that Russia has a lot of nuclear weapons. It concerns me that Russia has behaved badly on the international stage. And it concerns me that we have leadership in Russia, at various levels that would flagrantly talk about the use of a nuclear weapon in this 21st century.

Well the psychological scenario for the use of nuclear weapons is in place. It came from weakness. No force, no moral. Only a perspective of great ferocity and fury, in defense of democracy, the republic and optimal human ethology will convince those seduced by the most devilish and oligarchic instincts to refrain from acting up.

Patrice Ayme’.

Essence Of MORALITY: SUSTAINABILITY, Not Just Avoiding Suffering.

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

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

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

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

Heart Without Knowledge Is Only Ruin Of Morality

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

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

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

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

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

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

Leaving animals free to hurt each other.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme