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.

A Closed Society (China) is More Open To PANDEMICS (Coronavirus)

LACK of INFORMATION & DEBATE in NON OPEN SOCIETY FOSTERED DISASTROUS PANDEMIC

The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now a pandemic that circles the globe. The prospect is daunting. A pandemic will have global consequences, despite the extraordinary travel restrictions and quarantines now imposed by many countries.

Science does not yet know how lethal the new coronavirus is. However, I can compute: we have less than 15,000 official cases and more than 300 dead so it seems the death rate is at least 3% (on the face of it that would be 5%). That means if one billion people get infected, 30 million will die. 

To these preliminary considerations, several caveats: first, out of the 15,000 infected, much more than 300 will die: the virus is known to kill patients who were improving for days in hospital beds. Second, and on a more positive note, information is exchanged between doctors, and methods to mitigate the effects of viral pneumonia are no doubt found. Even more important, the governments in the leadership of the world, the so-called “West”, governments are highly organized and have huge means: the USA has installed its first quarantine in 50 years, and uses large military bases to isolate potentially infected people.     

The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading more like influenza, which is highly transmissible, than like its slow-moving very lethal coronavirus cousins, SARS and MERS. [1]

How did we get there? It’s not just about markets mixing humans, live bats and live snakes, all infecting each other in a weird bat-snake-human ecology.

It’s also about China being huge, way too closed, and thus, too stupid for its own size. 

***

China is not an Open Society. The concept of Open Society was originated by Aspasia, a philosopher married to Athenian general and politician Pericles, who famously declared, quoting his famous funeral oration as reported by Thucydides:

“Our political system does not compete with with institutions which are elsewhere in force. We do not copy our neighbors, but try to be an example. Our administration favors the many instead of the few: this is why it is called a democracy. The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar.

… The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and we do not nag our neighbor if he chooses to go his own way. … But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right….

Our city is thrown open to the world… We are free to live exactly as we please, and yet, we are always ready to face any danger…. We consider a man who takes no interest in the state not as harmless, but as useless; and although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely.”

Debate is crucial to advancing understanding. Debating with oneself is indispensable, but debating with others enables debating with others enables one to go where none thought of, and thus to advance understanding. 

Beautiful words, yet, disastrously, Pericles didn’t act accordingly to them! Just the opposite. 

Chinese Dictatorship Politicians with advanced specialized N95 masks (which stop the virus particles which are 10^7 meter across, so 5 billionth of a meter bigger than the meshes in these N95)… Whereas the doctors welcoming them have pitiful masks which can’t do that. Best masks out there stop at 300 billionths of a meter, 3 times too big to stop the 2019 Coronavirus, Some chinese doctors had to make masks out of garbage bags, due to penury.

Instead in a dictatorship, few decide; the brain power is if not minute, drastically reduced. Actually it’s the multi-debating aspect of Western Europe which enabled most of the advancement of civilization in the last millennium. China, which used to be very advanced scientifically and technologically missed the debating aspect, motivated by mighty intellectual passions. Lack of fierce debate, independently of social hierarchy, is the main missing link of Confucius philosophy, which views the respect of one’s “station” in life, the most important feature of society. Hence Confucius is most compatible with Xi’s regime.

Let alone that Xi got his job in part from his parents’ station in life… 

Whereas intellectual debate and its descendants, in particular scientific, medical and technological advancement, are the exact opposite: they respect only truth, and, more generally, the search thereof. To equal the West, China will have to accept to see truths, and love thereof, be hurled around. 

Tribalists come to me and they whine; if you are not blue, you have got to be red. Their simplicity is hurt, their minds are reeling, they are looking for something to color their bland lives. Well, children, I am campaigning for the truth. Not for a particular potentate to satisfy his or her greed for power.

***

PANDEMICS FROM TYRANNICAL STUPIDITY:

On a great historical scale, one is struck by the fact the Roman State was wrecked by pandemics in the Second Century, The Third, and the Sixth. The first pandemic, during Marcus Aurelius’ reign, weakened the empire considerably. It’s not clear what happened. Clearly the army was struck as Marcus died. The lack of information is, by itself, an indictment: an Open Society would have debated and found ways to fight the epidemic. Instead, the tyrannical empire behaved as if the disastrous pandemics were no more than bad air not worth commenting upon. (By comparison, we know of the authorities in London abating pollution from coal burning already in the Fourteenth Century.)

We have more information from democracies than from the wretched Roman dictatorship. At the onset of the Thirty Years Peloponnesian war, a (highly) predictable pandemic (typhus?) hit Athens. All the population of the Attica peninsula was within the walls, thus very crowded, while armored Spartans roamed outside, destroying the land. Pericles ordered the Athenian fleet to sail to go attack the other side of the Peloponnese. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic exploded in the hyper crowded ships. The expedition became a disaster.

Pericles was recalled and tried for this, under the accusation that everybody knew crowding would make the epidemic terrible. Thus Athens was an open society, but not so open as to be able to avoid such an obvious blunder (much of the population died)… Pericles admitted he “had anticipated everything, but not not this”. Maybe if there had been more of a debate, when planning for war with Sparta, the pandemic could have been anticipated. 

Interestingly, when the dictator Napoleon attacked Russia, a similar situation developed. Apparently the Grande Armee suffered from typhus. In a democracy, the situation would have been revealed, and debated. The obvious solution was to take measures to stop the epidemic, and put off the assault against the Czar to another year. Instead, the dictator kept everything secret, and the idealistic young soldiers from Poland, Germany and other countries, in close quarters, infected each other. So efficient was the dictator that the scandal was kept secret for two centuries (archeology revealed the contaminated corpses recently). Napoleon thus undermined the spreading of revolution to Russia, and enabled the likes of old enslaving aristocrats such as Tolstoy to gloat.

If Rome had been a democratic state in the Second Century, perhaps it would have been able to mitigate considerably the pandemics which weakened it so much. 

During the terrible plague of 1348 CE, not one European aristocrat seems to have died: the nobles knew what was coming and took efficient counter-measures. However around half of the population, often ignorantly crowded praying in churches, died. So obscurantism doesn’t help.

***

SPACESHIP EARTH NEEDS TO BE OPEN TO DEBATE:

In the case of the present Coronavirus, some authorities loudly proclaimed the virus could not be transmitted from human to human, when doctors already knew with certainty that was a lie. So no timely measures were taken in Wuhan, a city of eleven million. 

We are all sharing a small planet, our common spaceship. No country owns the spaceship. No country can endanger the spaceship. Obscurantism and closed societies, anywhere, endanger us all. It was telling that Russia, Mongolia, Vietnam and even North Korea closed their borders to China: when they got informed, they acted as Open Societies should have. More generally, increasing more cooperation, by making the world more of an Open Society will enable to decrease suspicion, hence military spending, and thus augment spending on science, and in particular biology, medicine.

They said “Climate Change”. We said: WORLD CATASTROPHE. They scoffed. Now they are going to sneeze. They will sneeze because the world’s ecology has been all open, and kicked around to new possibilities, while the old biosphere dies. The intellectual climate needs to change and warm up. The time for imagination and passion has come.

The Open Society is not just a choice anymore, it’s a duty. A world duty. Not just a world moral duty, a world survival duty. China can’t ship out, so it will have to change. And not just China. As in China, throughout the West politicians and potentates have confiscated decision power. Debate needs to grab it back.

Wars used to be made about territory. It’s time to have one about fostering the proper open attitude.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Together SARS and MERS caused less than 11,000 official cases. Their lethality rates were 10% (SARS) and 33% (MERS). The 1918 “Spanish flu” killed only about 2.5 percent of its victims — but because it infected so many people and medical care was much cruder then, and disorganized by World War One, 20 to 50 million died. The evidence is that it started in crowded US military camps.

The highly transmissible H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009 killed about 285,000, fewer than seasonal flu normally does, and had a relatively low fatality rate, estimated at .02 percent. It is hoped by authorities that 2019 Coronavirus has a death rate of less than 2% (when more mild cases surface). The argument was made by Chinese authorities that Wuhan is more disorganized than the rest of China. Thus a death rate of 4% in Wuhan, 2% in the rest of China.

***

P/S: February 6, 2020. The Chinese doctor who tried to warn other medics about the coronavirus has been reported dead after contracting the infection in Wuhan. According to local state media, Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist, died from the virus on Thursday.

#Breaking: Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, one of the eight whistleblowers who tried to warn other medics of the #coronavirus outbreak but were reprimanded by local police, dies of coronavirus on Thursday in Wuhan, the Global Times has learned. Li sent a message to fellow medics in a group chat on 30 December, and days later was summoned to the Public Security Bureau to sign a letter in which he was accused of making “false comments”.

Li was one of eight people being investigated by police for “rumour-mongering”.

Don’t Underestimate Earth’s Violence: Permian Mass Extinction Boosted By Ozone Destroying Gases

This is a violent universe. We are a violent species making peace in a violent universe, and it’s not easy. Even those who loudly advocate non-violence often end up feeding even more violence than if they had stayed silent. An example is the US peaceniks in the 1930s, who, anxious to appease the fascists and the gods of war, they claimed, refused entry to millions of refugees… including Anne Frank… Who all died (excuses anybody?) 

As violence is omnipresent and can’t be avoided, the next best thing is to understand it, so one can mitigate it. With floods of mind to spill like lava all over the universe… The first thing to understand is that violence is complicated, finely tuned (as demonstrated by the fact Earth itself goes at 30 kilometers per second along her orbit…)

I have argued that one of the secrets of the success of Earth’s biosphere is its powerful nuclear reactor, churning a giant iron ocean below our feet. It brings up a magnetic shield, and a CO2 burying mechanism, let alone nutrient providing volcanism. biological niches instigator…

LIFE Giving NUCLEAR EARTH Reactor

Heat transfer from the interior of the intelligence giving planet is not smooth: it happens as catastrophic LIPs, Large Igneous Provinces, enormous eruptions which can last several million years, and create continent sized lava flows, miles thick.

It has long been obvious Siberian hyper volcanism caused the worst mass extinction:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/…/21/trapped-by-super-tr…/

The new research finding: a massive release of halogens by the eruption plume, made things worse from disappearance of ozone, thus an extreme UV mutagenicity & sterilization. Same for dinosaurs (I say)!

Even nowadays, 250 million years later the Siberian Traps are immensely impressive: everything in the picture above erupted in a cataclysm.

See: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41561-018-0215-4

“End-Permian extinction amplified by plume-induced release of recycled lithospheric volatiles

Magmatic volatile release to the atmosphere can lead to climatic changes and substantial environmental degradation including the production of acid rain, ocean acidification and ozone depletion, potentially resulting in the collapse of the biosphere. The largest recorded mass extinction in Earth’s history occurred at the end of the Permian, coinciding with the emplacement of the Siberian large igneous province, suggesting that large-scale magmatism is a key driver of global environmental change. However, the source and nature of volatiles in the Siberian large igneous province remain contentious. Here we present halo-gen compositions of sub-continental lithospheric mantle xenoliths emplaced before and after the eruption of the Siberian flood basalts. We show that the Siberian lithosphere is massively enriched in halogens from the infiltration of subducted seawater-derived volatiles and that a considerable amount (up to 70%) of lithospheric halogens are assimilated into the plume and released to the atmosphere during emplacement. Plume–lithosphere interaction is therefore a key process control-ling the volatile content of large igneous provinces and thus the extent of environmental crises, leading to mass extinctions during their emplacement.”

Siberian Traps today. Putorana-Taymir peninsula. Imagine all this as it was 250 million years ago: red-hot lava… Kilometers thick

The demise of the dinosaurs gets more attention. However an even more disastrous event called “the Great Dying” or the “End-Permian Extinction” happened on Earth prior to that. Now scientists discovered how this cataclysm, which took place about 250 million years ago, managed to kill off more than 90 percent of all species of life on the planet. (Yes, it seems those extinction tend to happen every 200 million years, because blobs come up cyclically, as in a well-named “lava lamp”.)

The cause of the extinction was a massive volcanic eruption in what is contemporary Siberia in Russia, known as the “Siberian flood basalts.” What’s remarkable, the eruptions lasted for about one million years. (The eruption which caused the demise of dinosaurs lasted much longer, but peaked around the demise of these type of beasts, and many other types, such as ammonites… See my link above)

The recent study’s lead author Michael Broadley, a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre for Petrographic and Geochemical Research in Vandœuvre-lès-Nancy, France, observed: “The scale of this extinction was so incredible that scientists have often wondered what made the Siberian Flood Basalts so much more deadly than other similar eruptions”. I had the same objection brought up to me by a top paleontologist. This friend of mine favored the (energetically nonsensical) asteroid collision explanation of the demise of the dinosaurs. It is usually claimed that the LIP of the Cretaceous was not the largest… When, actually, the two places on Earth with giant LIP in full evidence are the Siberian Traps and the Deccan Traps…

Siberian Traps mapped. In violet: lava, In red: tuff (ashes, more or less crystallized together). 2 million square kilometers, roughly Western Europe, in area, and up to 4 million cubic kilometers… That is 4,000 times more voluminous than the largest asteroid imaginable crossing Earth’s orbit. 4,000 times the volume is the problem with asteroid theories of extinctions… Moreover, those 4,000,000 cubic kilometers of lava of the Traps were accompanied of much larger volumes of hot gases…. Same reasoning holds for the “dinosaur” extinction, the KT boundary… 

The Permian extinction affected not only larger animals, decimating about 70 percent of their species, but also killed off 96 percent of the world’s marine life, as well as countless insects. It inflicted such a loss of biodiversity that it took another 10 million years for the ecosystem to bounce back. Interestingly, large species which could burrow survived… and soon their descendants became “mammalian reptiles”… appearing dozens of millions of years before dinosaurs…

The explanation in plain language? The geologists aver that the instigated volcanic eruption was not just massive, but the plume carried massive quantities of halogen gases which destroyed the Earth’s ozone layer at the time. They found this by analyzing the composition of the lithosphere — the hard outer part of the planet, which includes the crust and the upper mantle. Before the Siberian Flood Basalts happened, the Siberian lithosphere featured much chlorine, bromine, and iodine, all chemical elements from the halogen group. Notably, breathing gas containing these elements is highly toxic and will usually result in death. But after the volcanic eruption, these elements seemingly vanished.

“We concluded that the large reservoir of halogens that was stored in the Siberian lithosphere was sent into the earth’s atmosphere during the volcanic explosion, effectively destroying the ozone layer at the time and contributing to the mass extinction,” Broadley elaborated.

Something similar happened with the Cretaceous extinction. As the time before last, animals which could burrow tended to survive… So did those with high metabolism, and the capacity to keep warm, as mammals and birds, or to lay supine and hibernate (crocs, turtles, snakes, etc.) Indeed at the end of the Cretaceous, temperatures collapsed (how the polar dinosaurs, who could survive cold winters, disappeared is probably a tale of its own… not yet told…)

***

It’s fashionable to whine we humans are violent beasts. Sure. Yes, indeed. So what? We can leave our dent on this hyper violent universe, precisely because we, too, can be violent. Yes, covering the planet with agriculture is violent (many hate the new Brazilian president, just because he dares to want to do what North Americans and Europeans long did to their own continents; devastate the biosphere to cultivate their gardens).

Yes we kill and eat animals (and may not need to do this much longer). This is how we rose. So here we are, our growing minds having been well fed by enormous quantities of animal vitamins, fat and proteins. And we are starting to understand what more and more all means. To do better than Traps and their LIPs, we need to be more deliberate. That’s called wisdom. We can only brandish our own plumes if we are smart… And the aim of all this human activity, this human violence onto the universe? Not to flood continents with lava, but the universe, with mind.

Patrice Ayme

 

Extinction Of Dinosaurs & Demoncrats: A Unified Theory

Obsolete Dinosaurs Extinguished In Anguish by Blossoming Mammals, Newer, Better, More Energized.  Same Fate For Smaller Brained Demoncrats?

[The science in this essay is real (although the thesis proposed is new, as far as I know). However, the science is used to generate a sarcastic analogy in the last few sentences.]

My opinion about the main cause for the disappearance of dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, mosasaurs, etc. is that what I call “core volcanism”, also known as super Traps. Massive hyper volcanism, with ejecta of the order of 10,000 times that of the proverbial asteroid, changed the climate durably when the Dekkan Traps started to erupt (millions of years before an asteroid hit Yucatan, future base of the Maya). Weirdly, the Dekkan Traps eruption reached its paroxysm around the time of the asteroid strike (the detailed timing of what exactly happened when is ever more refined, every year). However dinosaurs and their cousins were made for a warm Jurassic climate (the sort we, the fossil carbon burners are trying to implement in the next 100 years). Dinosaurs and their ilk had insufficient temperature generation capability, something birds and mammals, being of a much higher metabolism, due to their much greater internal heat generation, had plenty of.

Mammalian reptiles appeared 250 million years ago or so. Full mammals are more than 3% of the age of the Earth old. Large ( meter long or more) carnivorous mammals existed already 150 million years ago, around the time birds diverged from dinosaurs.

Mesozoic Repenomamus, about one meter long were found with dinosaurs in their stomach:

An Early Case of Advanced Types Devouring Demoncrats? Furry Repenomamus Mammals Hunting for Dinosaur Prey during the Early Cretaceous Period of Europe. Mesozoic Era, 122 Million Years Ago.

So picture this: climate cools, dinosaurs, which were spread from the poles to the equator, have increasing difficulties, the number of their species go down. How come dinosaurs could not adapt? Probably because mammals and birds ate them, or their young.

Mammals and birds may well have been a complicating factor in the change of fauna at the end of the Cretaceous. Mammals and birds, capable of sustaining higher metabolism in cooler climes turned a near-extinction into a full extinction. They were a catalyst accelerating the reaction. This is supported by direct scientific evidence, not just philosophy. Some Cretaceous mammals fed on juvenile dinosaurs. It does not require much imagination to figure out that massive carnivorous mammals, whose fossils have been found, had been into that habit for already 100 million years when dinosaurs croaked terminally.

Some may sneer: they don’t know enough. Mammaliaformes are actually 225 million years old. They had evolved from large brained ancestors descending from mammalian reptiles which, themselves, evolved from Synapsids. Synapsids were the largest terrestrial vertebrates in the Permian period, 299 to 251 million years ago. (Large Synapsids were annihilated by the Siberian Traps eruption… however those among synapsids which had become bigger brained, and more prone to make burrows did survive… Thus big braininess in mammalian ancestors was established 251 million years ago…)

In the Jurassic, mammals tended to occupy the niche of smallness. Not that they were terrified by the dinosaurs and tried to make themselves as small as possible, like Trump voters terrified of rampaging demonocrats. More simply, I guess, dinosaurs could not make themselves very small, as they would lose too much heat. So anything smaller than a chicken was a mammal, or the soon to evolve birds.

What sort of philosophy to extract from all of this? Brains and higher metabolism, higher energy lifestyle, can overwhelm the more primitive forms. Extinction itself is multicausal: maybe if neither birds nor mammals (nor sharks or sea-going crocs) had been around, dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, pterosaurs and mosasaurs would have survived the considerable climate cooling at the end of the Cretaceous.

Demoncrats and plutocrats are whining all over as they (correctly) fear going extinct. Asteroid Trump has landed, the climate was changing already anyway, disaster looms for these primitive forms. Flushed with new notions, more clever monsters are roaming the land, devouring the very environment which sustained demoncratic, even plutocratic life, not to say lies. This is how dinosaurs disappeared: global change, and the death-blow given by better equipped, given the new circumstances, opportunistic predators.

Please stay tuned.

Patrice Ayme’

Could Veganism Cause Extinctions?

For millions of years, hominids evolved as ever more efficient killer apes. This allowed entire human races or subspecies to live off meat. Such as the Homo Sapiens Sapiens variant Cro-Magnon, or Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis. Meat was a hyper concentrated energy source. just ask seals, dolphins, killer whales, humpback whales, polar bears and walruses.

East Africans, tall and lean, evolved to run down exhausted preys in the mid-day sun, they became ancestral to many people today (most of all of them, according to the “Out of Africa” theory). Cro-Magnon looked like ancestral Scandinavians, tall and strong, ready to fight the fiercest lions, wolves and bears. They are ancestral to many people today. They long lived in present day France, when France was landlocked by enormous glaciers on towering mountains, all around, or the giant ice sheets form the north, and the icy seas, west and south. Then non-glaciated Europe was a land of tundra, and enormous herds of often gigantic beasts.

Hunting is our past, how we evolve, and so was war. Vegans want to change all this. They claim that the future is not to touch adversely the smallest hair or feather. Thus they suggest to not use any animal product whatsoever. Instead, one should go fully agricultural. Agri-cultural means to cultivate the ager, the field. Hence the question: Vegans say they are friendly to beasts, they want to live off fields they cultivate, but are fields friendly to beasts?   

Pure Veganism Would Lead To The Extermination Of This Species

This is the paradox: is one friendly with others, when one exclude others? (The question is not just for Brexiters) When vegans exclude all animal species, are they friendly to animals?

Nature is good and evil. Gods stand above nature (supernatural), they don’t exclude it. Could it be that, when vegan want to exclude evil, they want to exclude nature?

How so? Very simple. Contemplate the world we have. Look at the Auroch. The last auroch died in a royal preserve in Poland in the Seventeenth Century. Europeans domesticated aurochs perhaps 25,000 years ago. Through a careful mix of natural and artificial selection, over 10,000 generations, Europeans created the European domestic cattle (meanwhile Indians and Africans were doing the same with their own breeds; the African zebu was probably evolved in India first; it resists well to African diseases such as sleeping sickness, malaria…)

Or consider sheep and goats: millions live today. They are descendants of their wild ancestors.

What do vegans want to do with all those animals? Through these millions of these domesticated animals survive the ancient species which graced the Earth for tens of millions of years.

This is not an idle question. Take chicken. The rooster was made by the Romans into the symbol of Celtic lands (which they called “Gallia”, the land of chicks…) In the wild, chickens, initially from South East Asia, are basically extinct. By refusing the presence of chicken inside plates, and in the fields, vegans condemn the species to terminal extinction.

Does hard core veganism allows to ride on horses and run dogs?

Conclusion: hard core veganism would lead to the terminal extinction of the most megafauna. They claim to be friendly to the individuals, but they will kill the species.

Solution: keep on using animal species, but do it in what is, ironically enough, called a “humane” way. If a rooster has a beautiful, easy, comfortable life, and then loses by surprise its head in a laser explosion, is it so bad? Would this sudden death be worse than enjoying life prior to this impromptu, sudden, unforeseen and painless demise?

Is veganism, pushed to extreme, the psychological equivalent of a brat who declares to his mom that he will refuse to breathe, rather than to eat its vegetables? Mummy here, being nature herself?

There is an extremely powerful metapsychological objection to veganism: we have seen that story, the story of renouncing life, many times before. Periodically, a slave religion arises, and recommends to us to lay prone, refuse life, reject even self-defense, accept to live small, barely eating, afraid to bother others in all and any way. This apparently bizarre cult is only natural, and is an evolutionary selected mode of operation: that of the prey which surrenders to those red in fang and claw.

When an animal of one of these species which get preyed upon, is surrounded, and death is unavoidable, it is often seen surrendering to its fate: this is part of the co-evolution of ecological systems (something not well-known, but still a fact). Not the evolution of the fittest individual as the naive evolutionists of the 19 C had it, but the evolution of entire ecological systems, as individuals made of multitudes. Is the vegan is a beast which wants to die and disguises this as a lofty language, while dragging hundreds of large species in its hateful discourse? Hateful of what? Hateful of life itself. Life is about living, thus suffering and dying. Not that the latter activities are necessarily something to look for, just the opposite. But mitigating and escaping them, is the spice of life.

Thus it is not excluded that the rise of veganism corresponds to surrender to mighty plutocrats: instead of tearing and shredding plutocratic substance, vegans decide that broccoli is all the protein they need. ‘They are starving? Let them eat grass!’ Say these new Marie-Antoinettes of the abysmal age.

Thus we have seen that story before. Whenever great plutocrats rise, We The People tends to roll on its back, presents its belly, and waits for horror, persuading themselves that horror is all what they ever wanted. Buddhism preaches that it is better to give up on life in full, rather than indulge into giving and receiving suffering. After its creation by a Princeling (not a coincidence), Buddhism took over most of India. But the predators laid in wait. They re-took all of India.

Vegans can preach. The only way what they preach can not lead to mass extinction, is by reserving around half of the land mass to total wilderness, in all and any ecological zone. That could, even should, be done. However, refusing the essence of life, preferring non-existence to death, is another matter entirely.

Patrice Ayme’