Aristotle’s Evil “Goodness”

ARISTOTLE’S PROMOTION OF ELITE GOODNESS AND GREATNESS WERE FOUNDATIONS FOR MILLENNIA OF PLUTOCRATIC RULE. 

Aristotle demolished democracy for the next two millennia. And probably did much more than that, demolishing democracy in the minds of the Macedonian elite which took over Greece… and much of the world, in Aristotle’s lifetime. We are taught badness through bad men, when they are presented as greatness, and, or, goodness incarnated. Aristotle was a towering thinker. He instituted biology as an observational science (fossils had confused observers). He also contributed to logic. 

So greatly was Aristotle respected as a thinker in general that his blatantly idiotic physics was viewed as truth. Aristotle had pontificated about motion: Aristotle thought that a force had to be applied continuously for an object to keep on moving. Aristotle had neglected friction. That was denounced by Buridan in Paris in the mid fourteenth century. Buridan introduced momentum and the law of inertia, according to which only a force can modify motion… The fact that the tyrant Antipater was Aristotle’s best friend, was overlooked. Antipater may have assassinated Alexander, and certainly assassinated Demosthenes, while torturing to death many others and imposing war and then plutocracy on Greece and Athens in particular… All this was carefully overlooked by two millennia of corrupt thinking.  

Indeed, much of these other towers of thoughts Aristotle erected, remarkable and highly remarked, served as the foundations of more than two millennia of plutocratic rule. Evil power rule. 

Aristotle’s Politics I 2-5: “For that some should rule and others be ruled is a thing not only necessary, but expedient; from the hour of their birth,some are marked out for subjection, others for rule. […] the lower sort are by nature slaves, and it is better for them as for all inferiors that they should be under the rule of a master. “

Need I say more?

Aristotle’s sense of greatness, justice and goodness ruled for millennia. Even Nietzsche would repeat them faithfully, 23 centuries later… while presenting them as… new.

Aristotle taught to more than Alexander the Great and his “companions“. Aristotle encouraged tyrants for millennia to come. The symbol I added on Aristote’s chest is a personal imitation of what was found in Philippe II of Macedonia’s tomb. The original was much prettier and in gold. It’s the sunburst symbol of the Macedonian regime. The Macedonian Svastika. It’s also called the Vergina Sun. It has 16 rays. Philippe was Aristotle’s friend, employing him as private teacher and mentor of his son.

Aristotle was long the incarnation of rectitude and even logic. Aristotle was the right zero for a wrong world. Aristotle’s world vision about greatness is all about “He”. Aristotle is a sexist fundamentalist. Sexism was characteristic of Athens… in contrast to Sparta, which was in many ways radically the opposite. The victory of Sparta over Athens was greatly caused by Spartan women doing all what was necessary, including keeping Helots in line, while the relatively few Spartan warriors went to war…

Socrates, a bit earlier, had made a point that he learned rhetoric, among other things, from Aspasia and probably the theory of the Open Society, which she authored and is Socrates’ underlying moral system. Socrates also says he learned the theory of love from another woman, Diotima who “convinced him he was mistaken” (it is possible that Diotima was an avatar for Aspasia) Two women taught Socrates… Plato informs us. And in any case, Aspasia was a towering figure, as she was the brains behind Pericles. So Aristotle’s insistence that greatness implicitly means “He” is a direct attack against what made ancient Greece great. 

“Good” is not defined. What about the Theory Of Knowledge, mother of virtue according to Socrates? Aristotle’s society as superiors and inferiors, and, worse of all, slaves. Superior in mysterious, undefined “goodness”. The “lower classes” are outright not worth asserting oneself against. In other words, the high-minded man, if he wants to avoid being crude, will be careful to alienate himself from the “lower classes”.

Although Aristotle was against jogging, he promoted thinking and debating while walking, another excellent idea. But he is a peripatetic philosopher with a low speed limit… (Being on a horse at full galop would have revealed to him the existence of air friction…)

The historical context is that Aristotle hanged around the worst of the worse: the Macedonian plutocratic terror fascists. With them fascists, no adjustment needed. This is why “he looks down on others”. With his dear friends, from whom he hides neither hate nor love, and can be himself entirely, and truthful.  

Does everything Aristotle define goodness with wrong? No. Is contempt for the lower intellectual classes justified? Yes. Should they be interacted with, those armies of trolls? No. Should alienation from intellectual slaves be a way of life? Yes. And to have a long memory for wrongs is a trap because it leads to revisiting the past obsessively… instead of building a better future…

The fundamental problem with Aristotle is that classes in society are (implicitly) identified with intellectual classes… And greatness with plutocracy… In the sense of the evil-power (Pluto-Kratia).  

After the picture of the perpetrator, a relevant passage from his Ethics…

“The high-minded man will do good, but he is ashamed to accept a good turn, because the former marks a man as superior, the latter as inferior. Moreover, he will requite good with a greater good, for in this way he will not only repay the original benefactor but put him in his debt at the same time by making him the recipient of an added benefit…

It is, further, typical of a high-minded man not to ask for any favors, or only reluctantly, but to offer aid readily. He will show his stature in relations with men of eminence and fortune, but will be unassuming toward those of moderate means. For to be superior to the former is difficult and dignified, but superiority over the latter is easy. 

Furthermore, there is nothing ignoble in asserting one’s dignity among the great, but to do so among the lower classes is just as crude as to assert one’s strength against an invalid. His actions are few, but they are great and distinguished. 

He must be open in hate and in love, for to hide one’s feelings and to care more for the opinions of others than for truth is a sign of timidity. He speaks and acts openly: since he looks down upon others his speech is free and truthful, except when he deliberately depreciates himself in addressing the common run of people. 

He cannot adjust his life to another, except a friend, for to do so is slavish. That is (by the way) why all flatterers are servile and people from the lower classes are flatterers. He is not given to admiration, for nothing is great to him. He bears no grudges, for it is not typical of a high-minded man to have a long memory, especially for wrongs, but rather to overlook them. 

He is not a gossip, for he will talk neither about himself nor about others, since he is not interested in hearing himself praised or others run down… He is a person who will rather possess beautiful and profitless objects than objects which are profitable and useful, for they mark him more as self-sufficient. 

Further, we think of a slow gait as characteristic of a high-minded man, a deep voice, and a deliberate way of speaking. For a man who takes few things seriously is unlikely to be in a hurry, and a person who regards nothing as great is not one to be excitable. But a shrill voice and a swift gait are due to hurry and excitement.” (Nicomachean Ethics, 1122a34-1125a18)

Aristotle was long the incarnation of rectitude and even logic. Aristotle was the right zero for a wrong world. Aristotle’s world vision about greatness is all about “He”. Aristotle is a sexist fundamentalist. Sexism was characteristic of Athens… in contrast to Sparta, which was in many ways radically the opposite. The victory of Sparta over Athens was greatly caused by Spartan women doing all what was necessary, including keeping Helots in line, while the relatively few Spartan warriors went to war…

Socrates, a bit earlier, had made a point that he learned rhetoric, among other things, from Aspasia and probably the theory of the Open Society, which she authored and is Socrates’ underlying moral system. Socrates also says he learned the theory of love from another woman, Diotima who “convinced him he was mistaken” (it is possible that Diotima was an avatar for Aspasia) Two women taught Socrates… Plato informs us. And in any case, Aspasia was a towering figure, as she was the brains behind Pericles. So Aristotle’s insistence that greatness implicitly means “He” is a direct attack against what made ancient Greece great. 

“Good” is not defined. What about the Theory Of Knowledge, mother of virtue according to Socrates? Aristotle’s society as superiors and inferiors, and, worse of all, slaves. Superior in mysterious, undefined “goodness”. The “lower classes” are outright not worth asserting oneself against. In other words, the high-minded man, if he wants to avoid being crude, will be careful to alienate himself from the “lower classes”.

Although Aristotle is against jogging: he is a peripatetic philosopher with a low speed limit…

The historical context is that Aristotle hanged around the worst of the worst: the Macedonian plutocratic terror fascists. With them fascists, no adjustment needed. This is why “he looks down on others”. With his dear friends, from whom he hides neither hate nor love, and can be himself entirely, and truthful.  

Does everything Aristotle define goodness with wrong? No. Is contempt for the lower intellectual classes justified? Yes. Should they be interacted with, those armies of trolls? No. Should alienation from intellectual slaves be a way of life? Yes. And to have a long memory for wrongs is a trap because it leads to revisiting the past obsessively… instead of building a better future…

Classes in society are (implicitly) identified with intellectual classes… And greatness with plutocracy… In the sense of the evil-power (Pluto-Kratia). The fundamental problem with those who have taken guidance from Aristotle has been their lack of awareness that Aristotle was mostly writing politics to help himself and his closest friends to keep on going with their exploitative schemes of the “lower sort” and even of women (while Socrates and Plato made an effort, although located in ultra sexist Athens, to promote Aspasia and the enigmatic Diotima… there is nothing like that in Aristotle). 

It’s high time for “Non Aristotelian” thinking…

Patrice Ayme

Monothought, Monotheism, Monofascism: No Brains If With Just One Value

Ethics is both relative (to circumstances) and absolute (given these circumstances). 

Ethically, Fascism orders us to have just one value: the Chief. We saw it in the built up to the George Bush invasion of Iraq in 2003: as George W Bush put it, essentially, you are for me or you are against us… W used the majestic plural refering to himself… You are for us, or you are against us. No nuance. That’s the entire point.

Another interesting notion is what Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Party and the first leader of the Soviet Union used to call a “useful idiot”… Somebody not favorable to a cause but inadvertently advancing it through the force of sheer idiocy. Lenin wanted mostly to advance one value “dictatorship of the proletariat”. As he died with a ruined brain, Lenin suffered the excellent supplementary torture of seeing the ex-seminarist and confirmed gangster Stalin grabbed the dictatorship, and made it his personal monostate.

Socrates, as represented by Plato, was prone to use useful idiots, so that he could preene his feathers.  

A contradictor told me in a comment to the essay linked above, that I must “Choose one (1) value in order to claim *all* of existence.” … Such a statement may reflect a common trait of insanity… The connection with the mentality of dangerous fanatics all over: they want to “claim *all* of existence” and they need to “choose one (1) value” to do that.  Call such a person a “useful maniac”, who led me to the following obvious observations:.  

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The very reason for the existence of the brain is as a comparator and adjudicator of values to optimize behavior conducive to species survival. This requires that there is more than one value among which to exert judgment… the most basic choice for any ebauch of a thinking system being: shall I stay (and save energy) or shall I go (to get energy).

This is precisely why “god” is imposed as the one and only value: “god” makes brains irrelevant by imposing just one value: god. This is precisely why “god” was created: to force people to learn NOT to use their brains, let them atrophy, and thus scrupulously obey the higher ups… since you have no brain left anyway. Thus monotheism is intrinsically mental fascism, and that’s its reason for being.

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Consequences: Monotheism, like other poor educational systems, does not just brainwash brains, it makes deficient brains. Brains exposed to just one value can’t learn to adjudicate…The circuitry probably does not appear on its own without exercising it when it’s still inchoate.

Paradoxically, as it all ends up in war, the monofascist idiots are then forced to become more intelligent. Thus ISIS (Islamist State) got the idea of using commercial drones to drop explosives on allied Western troops… inaugurating the utilization of drones on the battlefield. 

Theofascism can give the opportunity for the most beautiful art (Blue Mosque, Istambul).

As mental fascism, with its one value, stunts brains, it is basically impossible to neurologically grow out of it by the power of reason. One can basically imagine such neurologies connecting all to a particular value (all and any “value” being some subsystem in the brain). That means that recondioting will be hard. Journalist Tom Friedman went to a reconditioning Western camp in Syria with 43,000 civilians, mostly women and children with some Western ancestry, who got children from many ISIS fighters… each )one woman, a “battlefied bride”, six fathers…). The children pelted with stones Friedman’s convoy… He caustically noticed it would take some time to recondition them.

Emotions are sourced in the brain. E-motions is what gets the brain in motion. So, ultimately, if one needs to make people smarter, if one wants to get brains out of the fascism of monothought, monovalue, one has to act on emotions. Philosophy schools in China have correctly connected wisdom and climbing, the latter being potentially highly emotional, probably for reasons found in: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2020/09/17/why-climb-to-study-life-in-full/

Ruth Hermence Green once quipped: “There was a time when religion ruled the world. It is known as the Dark Ages.” Yes, and some denied that was the case, because they lacked nuance, not knowing when the ages started to darken… So they were wrong. Religion started to rule the world with deified Roman emperors. In the early Fourth century occured a smooth transition to “Orthodox Catholicism”, a terror religion. Most of the Darkening Ages were concentrated in these darkening centuries…. when the most cultivated minds learned to have just one value… The pantheon of Antiquity, with many gods insured many values… The god of the Bible could do with just one serpent… ready to bite, in a garden of doom…

Patrice Ayme

Want Genius? Get Out Of The Gilded Box Global Plutocrats Designed

A PhD in a field X means one has done studies in X, but it also means one has PLEASED A HANDFUL of senior members of the PhD GUILD… One has entered a hierarchy. When I mixed up with the best and brightest, I was struck how hierarchical it all was [1].

The fact that professional intellectuals have to aspire to belong to a guild, to please a hierarchy to get the crumbs that feed them as the pigeons they are has the following consequence: Most great mental advances of humanity are from AMATEURS, OR INDEPENDENT INVESTIGATORS, NOT GUILDERS; it’s a historical fact. The very fact that “amateurs”, people who love a subject are viewed in a pejorative way is itself pretty telling. It is basically saying that working for love is inferior to working for a stipend: the lover is inferior to the prostitute, on matter of (prostitution?) principle. The prostitution principle makes employers the ultimate adjudicators of intellectual worth. And now the ultimate adjudicators are the global plutocrats.

I agree with Nietzsche’s analysis, but I go much deeper: the universal principles the infernal trio of those lovers of each others of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle subscribed to were the universal principles of plutocracy against democracy. Plutocracy is intrinsically for mental fascism: deriving everything from a few principles which serve the owners. Socrates, heir of a small fortune, lived like a whore for wealthier than him. Plato, a gilded youth of Athens, aspired to be the Syracuse tyrant’s boyfriend, and Aristotle, a spawn of the innermost circle of the Macedonian tyrant, was the mastermind of the takeover of the world by his Macedonian students. Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, are the evil artisans of the ultimate plutocratic box. The consequences were dramatic: ARISTOTLE DESTROYED DEMOCRACY

Yes, ARISTOTLE DESTROYED DEMOCRACY, by building the box nobody was supposed to get out of [2]

It is true that individuals who, while members of the PhD GUILD do not follow the dogmas of the guild, are described as “fringe” and dangerous radicals, and lower order sorts. I was long around the highest top circles in math-physics and I noticed the very highest (Nobel, Field medal ranks) were less arrogant than the ones below them…  The very top guys (De Broglie, Feynman, Wheeler, etc.) were just the opposite, humble and frank. But very consumed by their narcissistic selves…

The intrinsic nature of genius means one is out of the box: the box is not a genius, it’s a prison: new ideas come always from the outside, not the stampeding herd. So the very definition of genius implies asocial behavior towards the GUILDS. 

This can be seen even in individuals such as ABELARD and BURIDAN, Middle Ages super thinkers who were the equivalent of celebrity rock stars in their times… So they were very famous. Abelard led the war against Saint Bernard, the de facto Pope and a crazed advocate of the 2nd Crusade; two centuries later, Buridan, rector of the world’s most famous university, Paris, advised four kings and was loved by a queen, etc… and also had a gigantic following, including the Oresemes, Oxford computing school… They were very famous but still they rocked the boat… Both fought the power of the church in a way which required extreme courage.

An example of resistance of dogma to significant fact is Dark Matter: the evidence for it is nearly a century old, but it was denied… It is a highly significant fact, as it means, POTENTIALLY, that existing physics is 96% IRRELEVANT. As an amateur of sorts, I found an obvious (?) POTENTIAL solution: a finite Quantum Interaction (there is no Quantum Interaction if CIQ, Copenhagen Interpretation Quantum… But I am sure Newton would agree with me, because he wrote on the subject, famously about gravity).

The problem with the identification of the PhD and UNIVERSITY EMPLOYED GUILD with the top intellectual class is that universities, and “university affiliation” are that universities are all in the employ of the top plutocratic class and its agent, the GLOBAL DEEP STATE… This enables the Global Deep State to establish its worldwide mind control.

An example is so-called “French Theory” an all-encompassing philosophical theory, which has been interpreted as saying that there is nothing as a superior cultural trait. Believing in the superiority of some system of thoughts over others is… racist.

Thus, in particular, claiming that “All Lives Matter” is racist.

Wait… what? Ah, because the founding members of “French Theory”, like the ignorant and, or, biased Claude Lévi–Strauss (a French anthropologist and ethnologist founder of “French Theory”) believed that the West rose on mayhem, and, implicitly, only mayhem… This has been parroted and amplified ever since, in an avalanche of Black Lies. And Black Lies Matter!

Whereas, in truth, the West rose on… Amateur geniuses… certainly the USA, a colony of Europe, rose on much more mayhem than necessary, but that’s another story.

The Occident arose from the creative destruction of yesteryear’s obsolete spiritual prisons… The history of ideas is the history of jailbreaks.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Since then Zarathustra, or Nietzsche, following Descartes, himself echoing Montaigne and his “ivory tower”, will guess that I have entered a higher phase, where mixing would be akin to dilution: there is a time for the cave up high in the mountains, and the dialogue with the centuries…

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[2] Abelard, then Buridan, did get out of the Aristotelian box, It was perceived to be so at the time. Peter the Venerable, abbot of all powerful Cluny (by far the largest Christian church at the time) protected Abelard from Saint Bernard. He called Abelard “our Aristotle”.

How To Alleviate Fake Media Censorship Through Public Utility Legislation

The problem of “fake news” cannot be disjointed from censorship and propaganda… Censoring the truth, or replacing it by lies is not very different. The solution to this steering of the public mind into subjugation is to recognize quality thinking and information as “PUBLIC UTILITY”… From the Google-Facebook duopoly, to the most modest websites, as yours truly (legislatively enforced). That means, dear New York Times, and various university professor sites, no more censorship… 

In a few hours, I was censored three times, twice related to Nobel, not so noble, Paul Krugman, the self-described “Conscience of a Liberal”, and his network. More sad than infuriating. 

I had sent to Paul Krugman a pretty neutral piece for his  post “The Force of Decency Awakens”. Krugman claimed that the same emotion, decency, waking up, was the root cause for the renewed fight against sexism, and against guns. Decency comes from the present participle of decere “to be fitting or suitable“. Krugman apparently found my comment unsuitable and inappropriate. However that comment was purely about how and why plutocracy grew and how that related to indecency. My comment actually supported what Krugman said, it understood it, it stood under it. Krugman should have been happy to be understood, with not one word against him. But, no, he censored my comment nevertheless (someone at the NYT told me Krugman censors me personally). When Krugman does this, I am always baffled: does he really not understand, or does he censors me because he is afraid of the shareholders of his employers (some of the world’s wealthiest men), or is he simply jealous like the wicked queen was of Snow White?

In his post, Krugman pontificated that:”Political scientists have a term and a theory for what we’re seeing on #MeToo, guns and perhaps more: “regime change cascades.””

 The link was looking at only four revolutions, and asked for big money to go beyond the abstract. I smelled a rotten fish. I looked at that site.  It claims: “REMARQ is a collaboration network from RedLink, designed for researchers and qualified users.” “Qualified users?” I sent a comment. The “Remarq Team” looked at the title of my Aristotle Destroyed Democracy essay (I was electronically informed) and, within minutes, sent me something that got plastered on  my browser: “The Remarq team rejected your qualified user request and comment on article Regime Change Cascades: What We Have Learned from the 1848 Revolutions to the 2011 Arab Uprisings. 2018-02-27 14:37”. To be “rejected” by a “team” sounds more abusive than polite.

The theme of ADD is that the respect for Aristotle’s political work is the respect for monarchy, the rule of one. Aristotle’ s main political idea constitutes the bottom principles of today’s political “science”: a few individuals (generally male) should lead We The People, as if we were sheep. This is not idle talk, and a claim Aristotle was a bad influence: Aristotle was actually the leader and mentor of the small group of vicious men who launched the Hellenistic Regimes (which later encouraged the destruction of the Republican spirit in Rome).

The idea of the rule of one, monarchy, defended at the highest intellectual level, is, of course, also the main idea of Judeo-Christo-Islamism, with its big boss, God (which not coincidentally grew with the Hellenistic regimes). Attacking Aristotle, for those who believe in the Guide Principle (Deutsch: Führerprinzip) is like attacking Allah for the worst Jihadists.  Most intellectual professionals paid for their mental work are there to enforce the established order, they do now what the church used to do in the Middle Ages. To rule over minds, one will find more efficient to rule the souls, rather than to wield chains. Here the opinion of Paul Nizan about paid intellectuals, paid to have the correct thoughts and feelings, the watchdogs:

Those whom the establishment feeds wear a chain around their necks, a fable of Aesop already

One difference between someone like me or Nizan (who lived in the Middle East, Europe, Africa) and the political scientists at the “Remarq Team” (who presumably didn’t grew up nor lived in such places) is that I am not paid to tell lies, lies are not what Nizan or I, profess… As paid condottiere of things intellectuals presumably are (why else would they think it is important that others do NOT see my thoughts? If they are so bad, why don’t they rot by themselves?) This observation is not new: since ever, intellectuals have been paid as “watchdogs” (to use Paul Nizan’s expression; Nizan, a friend of Sartre, enlisted in the French army to fight Nazism. Nizan died in combat at Dunkirk, 23 May 1940, part of the enormous French army protecting the evacuation of 330,000 elite soldiers, including most of the professional British army (future instructors to the mass army they would teach), against the entire, vengeful Nazi army. 

What is clear is that a lot of people are spending a lot of efforts censoring the Internet. The NYT censored my comment on the Krugman essay referred above.  

A physicist specialized in Dark Matter censored my comment on Dark Matter, on her site (not the first time!) although the idea I have been pushing is incredibly simple (thus potentially revolutionary). Whereas people like that physicist are pushing MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, I am pushing MOQ (MOdified Quantum; which I also call Sub Quantum Patrice Reality, an allusion to the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation, and its ilk are NOT real…).

A good reason for not having MOND is that, modifying gravitational mass, as MOND de facto does, opens the can of worms of having to modify inertial mass, and, if not, why not… Whereas MOQ/SQPR fills in a gap in the usual Copenhagen Interpretation and its ilk (the other way to solve the gap is the Many Worlds/Multiverse, in other words, angels on a pin, with no limits, whatsoever…) As an exchange on the comments of the Dwarf Galaxy disk problem (predicted by MOQ/SQPR, not by MOND, nor LambdaCDM…) shows, my comment was finally published. It made an analogy between the present situation and the epicycles (an old point of view of mine now adopted by many physicists)… But I am going in much more details. The epicycles’ theory was a consequence of the wrong, ridiculously wrong, Aristotelian physics, at the root, and it may well be what is going on now… Buridan resuscitated heliocentrism, because, first, he got the physics right (also heliocentrism was obvious…)

Delaying comments destroy the debate: the New York Times delayed my comments, by several days, systematically, for years: that allowed the NYT to claim it practiced no censorship (in correspondence with me)… although nobody would read them, then… and then the NYT decided to just censor ALL of my comments, for years. My point is that this sort of steering of public opinion should be illegal, in a public utility (see below)…

I am used to something paradoxical for whom has never been employed by academia (I have ONLY been employed by academia), the scholar as a thief. I was, bad luck, next to some of the greatest, most decorated thieves ever, one of them was one of my best friends (until I discoverer to my horror and depression that he was a thief… There were pages on his thievery at some point in the New York Times; not only he helped then to demolish my career, but he demolished the career of the famous G. Perelman… Perelman got the top prizes in mathematics, refused to accept them, as he said that, then, he would have to tell the truth, and the world of top math would be revealed as the BS it is. Then an angry and discouraged Perelman gave up math (contrarily to repute, math is a social activity; can’t do it when the people you talk to are, you know, thieves, among other problems…).

I had this problem with Black Holes: I suggested, long ago, that the standard reasoning was insufficient because it neglected Quantum effects (say Quark stars, etc.) Now this point of view is standard wisdom.

Thievery is a general problem in research, in a time of insufficient budgets. I have known the detailed case of junior researchers (not just yours truly) seeing their papers rejected, and then senior “peer reviewers” running away with the ideas… which they had just rejected for publication. Greed is not just a plutocratic problem, nor does plutocracy necessarily have to do with making billions. Verily, the power (kratos) of evil (Pluto) is great… especially when directed at honest to goodness thinkers.

Strange world. A tweet of mine, relating to the Bernie Sanders’ Twitter account, was also “made unavailable”. What did my tweet say? Here it is: “Problem: Democrats view as too left-wing the taxes advocated by Carnegie, the USA’s first billionaire (19th Century)! Carnegie explained in detail why it was necessary to tax enormous wealth enormously. The only deep reason for taxation is to prevent hyper wealth accumulation!” https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/965670396715511809 …

Am I too left-wing for Bernie? Or, more to the point, is Carnegie now too left-wing for the Democrats and US “Socialists”? Anyway, my tweet was removed by the powers that be (such a dangerous tweet, I agree!) At least Senator Bernie Sanders just changed his position on some guns… Tweeted Bernie, 2/28/2018:

“We should not be selling assault weapons in this country. These weapons are not for hunting. They are military weapons for killing human beings.” I replied @BernieSanders:

Hillary Clinton used to complain that Bernie Sanders sided with the NRA. Glad to see the clear statement against military assault weapons..(See? Even Hillary can be right sometimes…)

The Internet is big money nowadays: 73% of the advertising revenue in media goes to the duopoly of Google and Facebook (up from 63% in 2015… and 85% of the growth in said revenue). So, we have, de facto, a monopoly of two! By itself, this should impel governments to act (well, OK, they are acting by doing nothing…)

And what do many Internet agents do? Steer, censor and contrive. Indeed, neither Google nor Facebook create content, they are content to steer We The Sheeple towards their idea of decency. They are electronic leeches. 

It is clear that none of this is innocent. what is happening on the Internet is exactly, on a much grander scale, what Putin is accused of doing: a few individuals and their obsequious servants, manipulating public opinion. So what to do?

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Remedy: The Notion Of Public Utility Medium:

Public utilities provide an infrastructure necessary to society. They are subject to public control, beyond that of standard private industry. In the case of media on the Internet, the infrastructure would be the most important infrastructure of all, the infrastructure of truth!

As it is, there is a serious problem. As David Chavern has it in the WSJ in “Protect the News From Google and Facebook“: “A partial exemption from antitrust laws would help publishers and readers (Feb. 25, 2018):  The news business is suffering, but not because people don’t want news. They do—more than ever. The problem is that the money generated by news audiences flows mostly to Google and Facebook , not to the reporters and publishers who produce excellent journalism… newspaper advertising revenue fell from $22 billion in 2014 to $18 billion in 2016 even as web traffic for the top 50 U.S. newspapers increased 42%.

Local news is most at risk. As print circulation declines, community news publishers have the hardest time adapting to the ever-changing demands of Facebook and Google algorithms… Tech savvy, digital-only publishers are also struggling. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in December that Google and Facebook are “paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users,” and that “this puts high-quality creators at a financial disadvantage, and favors publishers of cheap media.”“

And the Wall Street Journal to pursue:“Google and Facebook have become the primary and de facto regulators of the news business, and governments around the world are starting to recognize the danger. British Prime Minister Theresa May announced earlier this month that her government would review the economics of internet news consumption. Regulators in Germany, Israel and South Korea are investigating how Google’s business practices have disrupted the media market and harmed publishers and consumers. U.S. regulators, on the other hand, have rarely looked into Google or Facebook—and never at their influence in the news marketplace.

Some voices on the left and right are calling for Google and Facebook to be regulated as utilities. But there is an easier solution: exempt news publishers from certain aspects of antitrust regulation.

U.S. antitrust laws, designed to promote fair competition and prevent consolidation, actually make it harder for traditional news outlets to compete with Silicon Valley giants. Under current law, for instance, news publishers cannot get together and agree to withhold their product unless they receive a return on their investment.”

YouTube (owned by Google) warned some accounts which had reported that the latest school mass shooting in Florida was a “hoax” and the victims were “actors”. Nice, but those sort of “fake news” are not really worse than decades of lies from the Main Stream Media. Lies, or non-saids (French magazines reports that US president Jimmy Carter started the war in Afghanistan, which killed many millions, from his own administration, were censored, so US Americans really don’t know that! By the way, my point of view that Carter, Clinton and Obama were fake, not to say evil, is spreading. In the case of Obama, that depressed me….) For Carter, July 3, 1979 attack against Afghanistan, please consider:

1979 US ATTACK AGAINST AFGHANISTAN Secretly Ordered

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What to do is that there should legal recourse against any medium declared a public utility, and yet, practicing censorship:    

To become a medium of public utility, there should be, and could be, two ways:

1. Being declared to be so, by legislative decision, and Google and Facebook, and all the major media, certainly should be.
2. Applying to become so (for example this site would).

Any medium of public utility would have to satisfy some requirements, such as trying to tell the truth when claiming to do so (poetry and fiction would be allowed, but under those labels). Public utility media would also have to avoid censorship, and be ready to justify it (that mean be ready to justify when censorship is applied; for example, the NYT would be required to justify why it censored me systematically when I comment Krugman’s posts…)

More than a decade ago, a philosophy site banned me for life for “fantastic logic” and stealing (from myself) my own (!) intellectual property (which I had made the mistake to put on their site as comments; so they viewed my ideas as their own thereafter, and forbid me to publish said ideas of mine on my old, Tyranosopher, site…) Ridiculous, but at least they provided some reason (last year I learned that the main, very famous philosopher behind that site, an old enemy of mine, called Searle, has been accused of sexual harassment by many girls and women, and was suspended from his prestigious university position; that didn’t surprise me, as I considered him a thief already… Sexual harassment is a form of thievery, and assault.)

When a medium is unwilling to give any reason for the censorship it applies, it should not be given the privileges associated to journalism, the respect of implied scholarship, nor the prestigious aura of “public utility”.  

Your devoted servant, glad to be, hopefully, of some public use,

Patrice Aymé

Socrates A Poisonous, Unexamined Fascist?

The Pathos Of Truth Seeked & Violated. Unexamined Fascist, Unexamined Prostitute? Both. Why Was That Covered Up, So Long? For The Same Exact Cause Which Made Socrates Famous!

The death of Socrates keeps haunting philosophy. And that, per se, is a sad, yet very revealing tale. The old common wisdom was that Socrates died, as a martyr to truth (as Hypatia, Boetius, Giordano Bruno, and many others certainly were). You want a hero for philosophy? Celebrate Jean Cavaillès. In the presence of Cavaillès, Sartre nearly wetted his pants. We will see that the mood behind Socrates’ actions is significantly different. Socrates was rather on the side of those who killed Cavaillès.

Indeed, a casual look at the basic setup of Socrates’ trial contradicts the theme that Socrates was mostly a martyr for truth. Socrates was simply accused to be the mastermind of the young dictators who ruled Athens after her tremendous defeat, and half annihilation at the hands of Sparta, the tool of Persia. Socrates was also mentor, friend and lover (!) of the young Alcibiades who, deprived of a generalship by Athens, then betrayed her for her lethal enemy, fascist, ultra-racist, Persian financed Sparta.

Agreed, philosophy needs heroes, and has plenty. Here is one:

Jean Cavaillès, Anti-Fascist Martyr. Here Is A Hero For Truth & Philosophy. Socrates Was Nearly The Exact Opposite.

[Jean Cavaillès was tortured and assassinated by the Gestapo in 1943-1944. He is buried in the crypt of the Sorbonne.]

Thus Socrates was a sort of Charlie Manson of serial traitors and killers, whose mental actions led, or accompanied, Athens’ near-death experience in losing a devastating war, and the resulting dictatorship by Socrates’ students. Temples of democracy such as Britain, France, and the USA have gaily executed traitors, or incompetents, for much less than that.

Socrates Used To Look At People As A bull Does. Ugly Inside Out? To Reveal the Truth, Some Will Say Torture Works Even Better

Stanford political science and classics professor, Josiah Ober opines in “The Civic Drama Of Socrates’ Trial” that:  “Conventional wisdom sees Socrates as a martyr for free speech, but he accepted his death sentence for a different cause… In his influential interpretation The Trial of Socrates (1988), the US journalist-turned-classicist I F Stone saw this trial as an embattled democracy defending itself. In Stone’s view, Socrates had helped to justify the junta’s savage programme of oligarchic misrule and was a traitor. More commonly, Socrates is seen as a victim of an opportunistic prosecutor and a wilfully ignorant citizenry. In truth, politics is indispensable to understanding the trial of Socrates, but in a slightly more sophisticated way.”

I love sophistication, philosophy is all about increased sophistication (so is science). Sophistication, translated, is wisdomization: sticking to reality ever better by ever more subtle, complex logic.

The point was not so much that Socrates justified the savage programme, but that he formed the minds who organized said programme, “corrupting the youth”. And he was at it again, even after being amnestied. Professor Ober describes the problem well (although he fails to fathom the enormity of what he describes).

Stanford’s Josiah: “For what people today call ‘the wisdom of crowds’, Socrates had nothing but scorn. Athenian democrats who argued that the many, the group, were collectively more likely to get important matters right than any individual expert earned his antipathy. Whether or not anyone actually was expert in the art of politics, Socrates certainly supposed that there could be such an expert, and that the Athenians were deluded in thinking themselves collectively wise.”

The “experts” would have been naturally his rich, best (“aristos”) boyfriends. Professor Ober is led to the obvious question, but fail to recognize that he does not answer it:

“How did Socrates both scorn the idea of collective wisdom and yet maintain obedience to Athens’ laws, even when he disagreed with how they were interpreted? The rudimentary answer lay in the foundation that Athens (as opposed to, for example, Sparta) provided in its laws and political culture. Athens mandated liberty of public speech and tolerance for a wide range of private behaviour.”

Yes, but public incompetence could lead to trial (as happened to Pericles and many strategoi, generals and admirals). Anyway, that is not an answer. I will give a better answer: Socrates himself had no answer to his drastic self-contradictions, so hise self-delusion fatally committed him to self-destruction. Yet political science professor Ober sees the problem:

“By 399 BCE, however, four years after the end of the tyranny, and with Socrates doing the same things in public that had seemingly inspired the junta’s leaders, the Athenians regarded his speech very differently. In the eyes of the majority of his fellow citizens, Socrates was no longer an eccentric with potential for contributing to public life. He was now either a malevolent public enemy, or deluded and dangerously unable to recognise that his speech predictably produced seriously bad outcomes. And so the way was left open for Meletus to launch his prosecution.”

Right. What professor Ober fails to mention is that only the intervention of mighty Sparta prevented Athens’ annihilation after she surrendered, having lost already half of her population (other cities wanted to do to Athens what Athens did to Melos). Try to imagine this: the city-state half annihilated, democracy destroyed by Socrates’ students, and then? The strongest mood that Socrates had been instilling was to oppose democracy. And he was again at it, after the amnesty he had profited from. What could motivate such a rage?

Unsurprisingly, Socrates was put on trial for “corrupting the youth and impiety”. (The City was to some extent divinized, with Athena as her protecting goddess.)

“With unsettling metaphors and logical demonstrations, he made it clear that he [Socrates] opposed democracy… Xenophon implies that Socrates chose that sort of speech as a method of jury-assisted suicide: he was… tired of life and allowed the Athenians to end it for him.”

This is what I believe. And I go further than Xenophon, by explaining the cause of Socrates’ depression. Socrates may have been tired of his own contradictions.And may have been ravaged by regret. (Regret, I reckon, is a powerful human instinct.)

The Socrates’ worship interpretation is due to Plato. It poses Socrates as martyr to civic duty. But, as it turns out, “civic duty”, for Socrates, seems to be mostly blind obedience to “the Laws”, while viciously criticizing the Direct Democracy which gave birth to them.

That Socrates respected the laws of Athens while despising the Direct Democracy which had passed them is illogical in the extreme. Yes, I know Socrates said he respected “the Laws”, as if they were disembodied gods with a life of their own. But We The People passed said laws, and they lived only because We The People had created them, and We thge People could extinguish them just the same.

The “Laws” were nothing. We The People was everything. Socrates behaved as if he could not understand that.

Insisting that the Laws were everything reveals that the concept of blind obedience was more important to Socrates than arguing about the nature of what one should be obeying to, and why. Blind obedience is also the traditional ultimate value of standard fascism: law and order as supreme.

Blind obedience had been what the junta’s rule was all about. What the rule of Socrates’ young students and lovers had been all about. That’s also what fascism is all about. However, arguing, debating, fighting is how to get to the thorough examination necessary for the “examined life”.   

The contradiction was, and is, blatant. Socrates’ mental system was shorting out. Socrates had been shorting out for half a decade or more: he ambitiously wanted to “examine life”, but he could not even examine the minds of his followers, let alone his own, or why he was hanging around them. Why was he hanging around them? They were rich, he was not, but he lived off their backs and crumbs. And the feeling of power they provided with (after Obama got to power I saw some in his entourage becoming drunk with power).  

Arguably, Socrates was a martyr to fascism, a Jihadist without god. There is nothing remarkable about that. The very instinct of fascism is to give one’s life, just because fanatical combat is the ultimate value, when one gets in the fascist mood. In this case, the fanatical combat was against We The People.

Posing Socrates as a martyr for intellectual freedom is farfetched: fascism, blind obedience, passion for oligarchs are all opposed to the broad mind searching for wisdom requires.

Some will sneer: you accuse Socrates to be a fascist, why not a racist? Well, I will do this too. The golden youth Socrates loved so much and drank with were hereditary so. Socrates believed knowledge was innate (so an ignorant shepherd boy knew all of math: this is the example he rolled out!) If knowledge was innate, one can guess that the “aristos”, the best, were also innately superior. That is the essence of racism.

Logically enough, Socrates disliked science: nothing was truly new under the sun (as all knowledge was innate). So much for examining life.

It is more probable that Socrates was indeed, just a stinging insect buzzing around, stinging the idea of Direct Democracy. In exchange, his rich, young, plutocratic boyfriends would fete and feed him. Such was Socrates’ life, a rather sad state of affair, something that needed to be examined, indeed, by the head doctor.

Socrates may have been clever enough to feel that he was an ethical wreck. His suicidal submission may have been an attempt to redeem himself, or whatever was left of his honor (which he also tried to regain with his insolence to the jury).

Plato would pursue the fight for fascism (“kingship”). Aristotle, by teaching, mentoring, educating, befriending, advising a number of extremely close, family-like friends, the abominable Alexander, Craterus and Antipater, finally fulfilled Socrates’ wet dream: Athenian Direct Democracy was destroyed and replaced by an official plutocracy overlorded by Antipater (supremo dictator, and executor of Aristotle’s will, in more ways than one).

This trio of philosophical malefactors became the heroes 22 centuries of dictatorship (“monarchy”) needed as a justification. A justification where “civic duty” was defined as blind obedience to the “Laws” (whatever they were, even unjust “Laws”). This amplified Socrates’ hatred of Direct Democracy. So the works of the trio were preciously preserved, and elevated to the rank of the admirable.

It is rather a basket of deplorables. We owe them the destruction of Direct Democracy for 23 centuries, and counting.

And what Of Socrates’ regret for being so deplorable? (Which I alleged he had to experience.) A dying Socrates lying on a couch, uncovered his face and uttered— “Crito, I owe the sacrifice of a rooster to Asklepios; will you pay that debt and not neglect to do so?”  Asklepios cured disease, and provided with rebirth, symbolized by the singing of the rooster calling the new day. This has been traditionally interpreted (by Nietzsche) as meaning that (Socrates’?) death was a cure for (his?) life. Nietzsche accused Socrates to be culprit of the subsequent degeneracy of civilization (and I do agree with that thesis). Certainly, Socrates, a self-described “gadfly” was deprived of gravitas.

Wisdom needs to dance, but cannot be altogether deprived of gravitas, as it is, after all, the gravest thing.. Maybe Socrates felt this confusedly, besides having regrets for his status of thinking insect. Socrates could have easily escaped, and Crito had an evasion ready. By killing himself Socrates behaved like a serious Japanese Lord opening his belly to show his insides were clean, and its intent good. Well, many a scoundrel has committed seppuku, and hemlock is nothing like cutting the belly.

Human beings are endowed with the instinct of regret, because we are the thinking species. It is crucial that we find the truth, and when we have lived a lie, indulged in error, the best of use are haunted by the past, and revisit it to find what the truth really was. Regrets has many stages, like cancer. The most correct philosophical form of regret is to re-established the truth. The cheap way out is to flee from reality, as Socrates did.

How to explain Socrates’ insolence to the jury? There again, it was a desperate attempt at reaching the sensation of self-righteousness and trying to impart it to the jury (this is often seen  on the Internet, with the glib one-liners and vacuous logic which pass for depth nowadays).

The inexperienced democracy in Athens did not always behave well. Athens behaved terribly with Melos (see link above). But the case of Socrates is different. Ultimately, the train of thoughts and moods promoted by Socrates weakened those who wanted to defend the free republics of Greece against the fascist, exterminationist Macedonian plutocracy. Demosthenes and Athenian Direct Democracy was mortally poisoned by Socrates.

Thus, Socrates execution was not just tit for tat. It was not enough of tit for tat. It was a preventive measure, in defense of Direct Democracy, which failed, because it was too meek.

Democracy does not mean to turn the other cheek, to have the golden beast eat that one too. In ultimate circumstances, democracy has an ultimate weapon too, and that is fascism. This is why the Roman, French and American republics prominently brandish the fasces. Fascism is the ultimate war weapon. But fascism is not the ultimate society. Far from it: political fascism, just a few individuals leading entails intellectual fascism, namely just a few moods and ideas leading. Before one knows it, one is in plutocracy, where not only wealth rules, but so does the cortege of the worst ideas and moods which characterize it.

Socrates often talk the talk, contradicting completely the way he lived (for example he said one should never return an injury, but, as a hoplite, he killed at least four men in combat!)

Socrates spoke so well sometimes, that he can stay a symbol of truth persecuted. But, because it is a lie, replacing him by Hypatia, Boetius, Bruno and, or Cavaillès, and, or, others, is urgent. Indeed, the reality is that Socrates was not just inimical to democracy. The current of thought he floated by was inimical to science, mental progress, and the truth he claimed to be pining for.  And even him may have been so overwhelmed by these astounding contradictions, that, in the end, assisted suicide for his pathetic mental writhing was, indeed, the optimal outcome.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Hawaiian Savagery & Planet Nine

New Giant Planet Around Sun? Hawaiian Savages Learned Nothing Important Yet?

After all these hard discourses, my friends, as Ludwig Van would say,  time for a little levity. Could spaceships some day fuel far out? It has long been suspected. And now indirect, computational proofs are piling up.

Science is just common sense. The edge of science is the edge of common sense, thus on the edge of the totally unfamiliar. Thus, it’s not obvious. But still, common sense should stay front and center.

For example, the dwarf planets around the orbit of Neptune and beyond, have extremely weird orbits. Pluto actually cuts the orbit of Neptune. And others do. These highly elliptical orbits always baffled me.

Or Maybe Planet Ninth Is All Frozen, Its Atmosphere All On The Ground?

[Hypothetical lightning has been represented on Planet Nine, in this art from Caltech; this was observed with other giant planets; distant Sun is visible, but won’t warm things much; at this sort of distances, only  energy of  nuclear origin could enable colonization, except if one make work completely new sources such as my suggested vacuum energy method. See: Zero Point Energy Machine.]

Caltech’s Batygin (theorist) and Brown (experimentalist) published their work in the current issue of the Astronomical Journal: “Evidence For A Distant Giant Planet In the Solar System”. “Planet Nine” explains a number of mysterious features of the orbits of icy dwarf planets, objects and debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.

“Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there,” says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. “For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system’s planetary census is incomplete.”

The discovery was long anticipated: I mentioned myself many times that the weird orbits made sense only if there was a huge weird planet out there. Although a star dashing through the solar system could have brought the same effect, and there was indeed such a star!

Stellar Flybys: New Way To Life’s Extinction

(A red dwarf star zoomed through the Solar System 70,000 years ago, at 20% of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the (red dwarf) star closest to the Sun.)

In 2014, an ex-postdoc of Brown’s, Chad Trujillo, and a colleague, Scott Shepherd, noted just that: 13 of the most distant objects in the Kuiper Belt are similar in some orbital features. To explain that similarity, they suggested the possible presence of a small planet.

The six most distant objects from Trujillo and Shepherd’s original collection all follow elliptical orbits that point in the same direction in physical space (with a thirty degree angle off the plane of the ecliptic, the plane of planets). That is particularly surprising because the outermost points of their orbits (“perihelions”) move around the solar system, and they travel at different speeds.

“It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” says Brown. The odds of having that happen are something like 1 in 100, he says. But on top of that, the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way — pointing about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of that happening is about 0.007 percent. “Basically it shouldn’t happen randomly,” Brown says. “So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits.”

The researchers tried different possibilities, quite a bit as Kepler did with Mars. Whereas Kepler, using Tycho’s work, took decades, modern computers compute fast. It soon became obvious that only a massive planet explained what was observed. In particular it explains the orbits of  Sedna and 2012 VP113 which never get very close to Neptune, yet behave as if they were “kicked” by something (as Pluto and others which, coming close to Neptune, are kicked by Neptune).

The Ninth Planet would also explain the weird orbits perpendicular to the ecliptic of some objects, which were recently discovered…

Science is not over. Actually, it’s barely starting. Ironically only telescopes based in Hawai’i have enough light gathering capability to detect the hypothetical Ninth Planet, if it is close to its furthest point from the Sun. It’s ironical: these telescopes are on one of two giant volcanoes in Hawai’i (the other, just as tall, explodes periodically). Those telescopes, the largest functioning telescopes in the world, ten meters across, profits from the fact they are, atmospherically speaking, half way to space.

The savages in Hawai’i, apparently gravely offended by all this science, persuaded the Hawaiian Supreme Court to order to stop the construction of a giant Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawai’i. The TMT offends the Hawaiian gods. So Planet Nine now has a good chance to not be discovered in Hawai’i, and the savages there can keep on roasting people according to their old religion.

For those who forgot: the famous Captain Cook was captured, roasted and devoured in Hawai’i. (Hence the allusion to roasting, as this was not just culinary, but religious.) And the global mood, promoted by the powers that be is to respect all religions, especially if they are gravely offended by common sense and basic humanism. Or offended by free, unaccompanied German women in front of Cologne’s cathedral.

Hawaiians, I am afraid, learned nothing. In spite of their tragic history.

In the early Nineteenth Century, American missionaries came to Hawai’i and persuaded the authorities of that independent nation, to persecute Catholics.  That was promptly done, maybe in the hope of Hawaiian authorities to ingratiate themselves with American plutocracy. The French military intervened twice to force Hawaiian authorities to stop abusing Catholics (the first treaty was signed, but then violated, bringing the second French intervention, a decade later).

Ultimately American plutocrats and their Protestant missionaries acting as a fifth column, staged a coup against the legitimate Queen of Hawai’i. The Hawaiian Constitutional monarchy and its national assembly was then destroyed and annexed by the USA, to plant pineapple, sugar cane, and now tourists and pot. Fortunes were made. By American plutocrats. Hawai’i, for 15 centuries independent, and a civilization, not to say a culinary hot spot, became an other possession of the American empire.

One would think that Hawaiians would have learned that blind anger, irrationality and scorn for common sense only bring their doom. But apparently, not so. Instead of contributing to the Enlightenment, Hawai’i has decided to contribute to Obscurantism, in a frantic rage against astronomy, and the discovery of worlds untold.

You would think that Barack Obama, who was born in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i, would have said something loud, along the preceding lines. Not so.

Abysmal. Astronomically abysmal.

Patrice Aymé

 

Christian Civilization Never Existed

Many fanatics, Christian or Muslim, insist that there was a “Christian Civilization”. Well, no. It’s not because people with vested interest repeat always the same thing, that it is decisively supported by the facts. It is not because some aspects of a civilization are of such and such a nature, that one particular aspect defines the whole thing. The philosophical, legal and behavioral foundations of the West were not “Christian”. Christianism was the fig leaf thrown, by the Roman plutocracy, over the apocalypse it preferred to the taxing continuance of civilization.

Although something called “Christianity” contributed to civilization considerably, the Christianism of bishop (Saint) Jerome, a “Founding Father of the Church“, in 400 CE Milan, was very different from the idiosyncratic Pagano-Christianism of Consul (and king of the Franks) Clovis in 500 CE (who re-invented Christianism thoroughly).

As so-called “Christmas” approaches, it’s good to remember that the Winter Solstice feast was Greco-Roman, and preceded the displacement of “Jesus” birth to the Winter Solstice, by more than a millennium.

“Christian” Hatred Of The Body Was Rejected By The Popes Themselves

[“What spirit is so empty and blind, that it cannot recognize the fact that the foot is more noble than the shoe, and skin more beautiful than the garment with which it is clothed?” Michelangelo.]

Christianism initially hated the body, in opposition to Greco-Roman civilization: love the body, and soon you will love the mind, and will want one of your own.

So Christianism closed and destroyed the baths (thus promoting devastating, civilization destroying, epidemics among the 99%) and longed for the Apocalypse (generously provided by the telling collaboration of Roman plutocrats and invading barbarians: the analogy with Islamism now is uncomfortable! Our plutocrats have been busy plotting with Islamists ever since before the Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy!)

Although some lunatics tried to force an authentic Christian civilization, it became, literally, a Non Sequitur: it’s now called the “Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire”. When one wishes for the Apocalypse as Christians and later Muslims, wished, it should be considered synonymous to the decline and fall of civilization, society, population, reading skills, security, economics, and all and any standards of sophistication.

See Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, Somalia, Pakistan, Sudan, Yemen… (And yes, Somalia, Sudan, and more specifically Yemen, can be compared to say, Ethiopia, which is doing incomparably better.)

What do I mean by the non-existence of “Christian Civilization”? Consider the tyrannical, self-obsessed, much adulated cretin, Louis XIV of France, the self-described, self-adoring “Sun-King” (a bloody dictator much celebrated in France this year, as he croaked 300 years ago, justly covered by gangrene, from his toes, to the top of his head. Louis’ painful and disgusting three weeks of gangrene is the only indication from his reign, which I can discern, that there may be, after all, a God).

Louis XIV tried to make France into a Catholic society, by revoking the Edict of Nantes of his excellent grandfather, Henri IV. That was more than weird: a century earlier, under Catherine of Medici, queen of France, a similar episode had been launched, the Massacre de la Saint-Barthélemy. Not only did that surprise assault in the middle of the night, killed immediately 30,000, and most of France’s intellectual elite (which could only condemn and despise Catholicism), but it launched no less than seven religious wars in 36 years, bleeding France, killing up to more than 20% of the population (so Syria has a way to go! By the way, those who wonder where the French hostility to Abraham’s god comes from, should study this).

I repeat: in less than 40 years, wars among Christians in France, killed more than 4 million people (and terrorized everybody).  Nor was it the first time: more tan a million Cathars, and all their works were annihilated by Christians around 1200 CE. And, in the Fifteenth Century, Protestants were hunted like wild beasts by Catholics (to the point Louis XI had to intervene, reminding all that killing people for religious reasons was against the law, and sending the army!)

How civilized is all that Christianism? When Rome was far removed from Christianism, no such massacre ever happened.

So here was that bloody imbecile, Louis the Blood King, trying the same trick all over again, all by himself (and his fanatical wife). It is still a great disease that such a creep is revered abjectly, by the French elite.

Thus Louis The Pervert threw out and abominably abused millions of Protestants. Many Protestants fled (that’s why there is winemaking in South Africa, and why so many Germans have French names). As protestants tended to be smarter, their flight made France much more idiotic, and thus more hospitable to Louis the Pervert and his vicious entourage of ill disguised monsters. Thus obnoxious critters make an environment hospitable to themselves

There is something in common between that so-called “Sun King” and the unfortunate fiction of Camus, Mr. Meursault, who kills an Arab, just because he can, and got too much sun, and could not care less. Louis XIV was the real life Meursault, and Camus channeling unconsciously that abomination of French history. Louis XIV killed the Protestants, just because he could, could not care less, and had too much sun.

Too bad Meursault and the Sun-King are still revered: it’s a sickness of the mood.

Christian propagandists always insisted that there was such a thing as “Christian Civilization”. But there was not.

The West was NOT A CHRISTIAN CIVILIZATION. It looked like one twice: around 400 CE, and around 1400 CE. But, in either case, although an attempt was made, the basic law was NOT Christian, but Roman (or the Salic law of the Franks, which was Roman written).

The attempt around 400 CE, a government of bishops, petered out right away. True Milan’s Saint Jerome, the most prominent “Founding Father of the Church”, had emperor Theodosius begging forgiveness (for some massacre). But then the Roman State, short in cash, put the Franks in charge of defending the North West “Limes” (frontier).

A century later, having established a huge “Imperium” (= Roman military command), the Franks sort of converted to Catholicism, modifying it extensively in the process, and submitting the Popes, for centuries to come.

The Franks re-established Roman (Late) Republican tolerance for ALL religions.

In other words, the empire of the Franks, the “Imperium Francorum” of 600 CE, was much more civilized than today’s Saudi Arabia. Arguably Arabia of 600 CE was more civilized than today’s Arabia, in the sense that Christianism, Judaism and the Cult of the Moon in Mecca, were all practiced without known religious massacre (the first religious holocaust was Muhammad’s personal annihilation of a Jewish tribe, a bit later; Muhammad is on the record as of the opinion that whoever insulted him should die, a tradition Muslims are keen, to this day, to carry forward, in the name of their Rophet; don’t ask me what a Rophet is).

The tolerance was extended to much more than Jews, Pagans (the Franks were de facto Christianized Pagans for centuries), Muslims, etc. By 800 CE, the “Renovated Roman Empire” led by Charlemagne, was at peace and the world’s richest

The “Final Solution” was Nazi (although I have accused many times Christianism to have inspired it). The “Manifest Destiny” was not particularly Christian (Founding Fathers and their preceding generation were very anti-Christian, and for “Nature’s God”). The Crusades were, mostly, a counter-attack (although I am very anti-crusades, that’s what they were in first order).

The annihilation of the Natives did not have to be a consequence from the Christian nature of the invaders. A very good example is the French, who never eradicated a population of Natives (and that’s why they lost America!)

“Secular ideologies” may have been by far the biggest mass killers…. Because they suppress everything else. In primitive societies the kill ratio is more like 50% (or at least 25%), whereas the two World Wars killed rather around 2% to 4% (at most, directly and indirectly, through famines and diseases they contributed to)

The preceding has to be kept in mind when inanities about Islam, and an “Islamist Civilization” are proffered, just because people are conditioned to mouth them, and believe it’s the truth, because everybody says it. It’s not because all the sheep bleat the same, that bleating is the truth.

This being said, because of the insistence of raw Islam to apply Islamist Law, instead of secular law, made “Islamist Civilization” much more of a reality. Islam wants to be everything, leaving no space for anything else. Islam wants to be all of society, and even to occupy visual space. Islam wants to be more than a civilization, it wants to be an obsession.

However, an inspection of history shows that all period of really shining civilization under “Islam” seemed to have involved see through dresses more than niqab, chador, and other attempts to make women into something that should be hidden.he vast body). Contributions by non-Muslims (Jews and Christian) tend to dominate (they were the majority for centuries).

Regimes which interpreted the Qur’an literally were highly successful, especially initially, thanks to ruthless surprise: initial conquest, from Spain to Central Asia, assaults of India, Indonesia, conquest of Anatolia by the just Islamized Turks, and a reconquest of Spanish Caliphate by savage, Fundamentalist Muslims from the desert. It ultimately backfired (except in the case of the Turks, arguably). For example the re-reconquest of Spain, made the “Reconquista” by the Catholics much more savage and thorough…

Many supposed “characteristics” of “Christianism” were established centuries before Christianism was imposed on the Greco-Roman world by emperors from Constantine to Theodosius, in the fateful Fourth Century. For example welfare and scholarship for worthy students was established by 100 CE (under emperor Trajan).

The Roman world kept on going, even, and especially after the Decline and Fall of the Roman imperial state. When Saint Louis, a Christian Fundamentalist and Jihadist (“Crusader”) of the Twelfth Century expressed, in writing his burning desire to “plant a knife in the belly of a Jew or Unbeliever” (“nothing would please me more”) he recognized he could not do it, because, well the (Salic and Roman) Law forbid him to do so.

Sharia Christian, or not never ruled the West very long (although, sometimes, it made sparks: see Bruno being burned alive). We are not going to start now.

Patrice Ayme’

Vegans Eat GMOs, Not Banksters

We live in the age of increasing intellectual fascism: the herds think all the same, and vigorously charge the same way all the time.

Some of the latest fashions in the USA consuming the progressive consumer, are: off with diet sodas, off with aspartame, off with gluten, off with meat, off with fish, off with eggs, off with cheese, in with vegans, in with LBTGs (Lesbian Bisexual Transexual Gays), in with wine, off with antibiotics, off with the French and their perverse stuffing of geese with food, in and now out with electric cars.

Hunt, Kill, & Eat, Or Plutocrats Will Do It to You

[Man evolved into, and as, a carnivorous ape. Deny thoroughly this most human of all natural traits, paradoxically, puts civilization at risk of falling into the most demonic hands.]

This tendency to ever greater mental fascism, is perversely augmented by the Internet social networks, which practice “curation”. “Curation” means you will see ever more what you “like”, a new form of mental masturbation. It’s very seriously studied by researchers employed by Facebook, and published in the best journals. Facebook says it’s not its fault.

As the USA leads the world’s intellectual fashion into nothingness, one must pay attention. If one pays enough attention to all the preceding, one will pay no attention whatsoever to what the illuminati in charge like Obama, do, for real. That’s actually the main interest of the preceding (as far as the oligarchy is concerned).

Many of the fashions are laudable (out with aspartame, diet sodas), or ridiculous (out with gluten). Fake sugars, it turns out, are pretty bad, and can lead to diabetes (just like the real thing). Gluten is bad for those suffering from celiac disease (although how that starts is probably related to an incidence worldwide going from 1/300 to 1/40). I myself caught a related disease in Africa, and I watched my diet as a hawk. However, in all these cases, the fashion is to replace the offending substance by something worse, namely large quantities of plain old sugar.

Today I will focus on vegans. Vegans abstain from animal products. The reasons they evoke have to do with one’s health and one’s ethics.

The problem with the later is that, when one think highly of oneself in ethical matters, one may be led to two flaws:

1) we live in a highly unethical civilization. The person with high ethics may be prone to suffer so much distress, just looking at that, that it could not possibly be contemplated, and, thus, understood.

2) it’s highly unethical because too many wolves have been left alone, as they came to rule the sheep (banksters, oilmen, etc.). There again, the one distressed by the contemplation of evil may even be unable to visualize the possibility of demonic creatures of human origin.

3) For goodness to triumph, war is necessary. One should envision wisdom as Mars and Apollo, condemned to apply war, in the Sisyphean task of ever more clever progress, thanks to Prometheus’ gifts.

And now, having dealt with ethical health, let’s address physical health.

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We Are Not Cows:

It’s well known vegans run out of basic vitamins and minerals. B12, calcium, zinc, are examples. Vegans counter that they can apply crafty vegetable assemblies. They often roll-out soy, as the do-all, be-all vegetable protein.

Unfortunately, soy act like an estrogen: at three quarts a day, soy milk will feminize a full special forces superman, complete with breasts. It has been done in Texas (unwittingly). Scaled down to a child’s weight, the danger is obvious: relatively small quantities of soy will feminize a pre-puberty child intensely.

How do cows digest grass? They eat lots of little beasties; snails, insects, etc., to start with. So they are not really vegetarian (that’s why Thatcher gave them insufficiently cooked cow meat, in “free market” anxiety). Moreover cows have special supplementary stomachs, and their gut is equipped with special bacteria prone to digest tough vegetable fiber.

How, and, by the way, most foods vegans eat are actually Genetically Modified Organisms. Beans were invented by the Franks in the Tenth Century, exploding quality and quantity of the population. Similarly for rice in South-East Asia a century later: that exploded the population there.

So had corn, much earlier, in Mesoamerica, and North America: Native Americans became very numerous, because corn provides lots with lots of calories. However, corn eaters suffered from the vegan disease: Native Americans degenerated physically. They became short and weak, at least those heavily dependent upon corn.

We know how the smart Aztecs resolved their (very bad) protein crisis…

Agriculture is nearly 100% Genetically Modified Organisms. Wild almond ancestors will kill you before they feed you. OK, there are GMOs and GMOs, depending upon which modifications are done. But I am making a philosophical point here: GMOs are not necessarily bad… and the VEGAN DIET is thoroughly ARTIFICIAL. (That makes it thoroughly human, as man is scientific and technological, by evolutionary definition.)

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We Are Hunters:

We are the product of ten million years, at least, of carnivorous evolution from fruit eating apes. That is why we do need to eat Vitamin C (our ape ancestors got it from fruits), but also L Carnitin (our ancestors have been getting it from meat for at least five million years; without it, muscles break down).

I have known, for a very long time, climbers who got on a vegan diet. Although younger than me, their bodies literally fell apart. Specialists have been asking them to eat cartilage and bone soup (beyond being put on Glucosamine-Chondroitin treatment). Why? Our ancestors, for millions of years did not just eat meat, but bones, cartilage, tendons, ligaments, etc.

And now we need to hunt banksters and their supports, their lovers and admirers. To make this civilization as human as it needs, just to survive. Human ethology is what it is. Learning to live, is learning to live with it, instead of fastening for ourselves new chains from an imagination running on empty.Obsessing about tiny details such as getting enough B12 vitamin, is an unwelcome distraction. To be fully human, is, first, extending that courtesy, to ourselves.

(It did not escape me that banksters hunting is as dangerous as mammoth hunting; thus much of these obsessions with the most ridiculous fads is a rather successful attempt to distract oneself with innocuous subjects, and to display one’s innocuousness, for all to see. Thus, deep down inside, shallow fads are all about cowardice and laziness.)

Patrice Ayme’

Too Much Aversion To Aversion Is A Perversion.

Too Much Aversion To Aversion Kills Prevention.

Anger Sometimes Not Just Best, But The Only Way:

Many people are conflicted about conflicts. They are told conflicts are intrinsically bad, and they should wrought the conflicts out of themselves. Avert aversion, and conspiracy theories, and the world will be yours. This sweetly insipid medicine is central to the stability of plutocracy of the USA, and is repeated at all levels, from family therapists, to (nearly) all the media, to the presidency. “Black” and variously colored youth seem to increasingly disagree with this treatment. It is getting ever harder to swallow, as more and more youth are starting to understand Obama is more Wall Street than ex-disgruntled youth (whom, actually, he never was. Silver spoon is more like it.)

Anger is actually best, when it is the most appropriate attitude. Obama saved the private banks and the careers of the banksters who managed them, but what did he do for Black youth? If not now, then when, and what? Is breaking the necks and piercing with bullets those who disagree the solution, looking forward?

Look To The Right Of The Burning Police Car: All Obama Cares About Is Trade Deals For His Plutocratic Pets

Obama said it was all the fault of “thugs” who live in Baltimore, not banksters who steal on Wall Street. Don’t bite the hand that feeds…

The problem of the Jews confronting Hitler, is that they did not get angry enough. If they had, maybe the American Jews would have protested the pro-Hitlerian policy of plutocrats and the infeodated government of the USA.

Now we have Nepalis left to themselves, dying without rescue, while helicopters are used to ferry in style 1,000 gold plated “climbers” on Everest (who otherwise would have to well, climb down!). Hey, Nepalis are made to die in the service of the gold-plated ones, whereas the gold plated ones ought not to be expected to walk! In case like that, contempt is minimum service. Anger is more appropriate. And, appropriately enough, Nepalis are getting angry.

Europe, in the past was crumbling under plutocrats and religious fanatics (including Great Britain). So was, say, China. Flowers and smiles did not work. Violence is how one got rid of these predators.

But let’s give a the party of apathy a chance to open its mouth for a minute, or so:

***

Anthony Biglan, “senior scientist” at the Oregon Research Institute, a “leading figure in the development of prevention science” has helped over the past thirty years “to identify effective family, school, and community interventions to prevent the most common and costly problems of childhood and adolescence”. He uses “prevention science to build more nurturing families, schools, and communities throughout the world.”

Says Mr. Biglan: “The world has struggled with how to deal with others’ aversive behavior for millennia. The fundamental problem is to get people to not respond to others’ aversive behavior with their own aversive behavior because, more likely than not, doing so will simply perpetuate coercion and conflict.”

The way the author has it, aversion causes aversion, which causes aversion… So what caused aversion in the first place? Aversion? It sounds like the chicken and egg problem: the egg gave the chicken, who made the egg… It’s the chicken and egg problem, without the chicken.

The author blames responding to aversion by aversion. He advocates turning the other cheek, quoting Jesus, Gandhi.

But he does not roll out the violent quotes of Jesus, of which there are several:

Matthew 10:34. “Do not suppose that I have come to bring peace to the earth. I did not come to bring peace, but a sword.” Or Luke 19: 27 But those enemies of mine who did not want me to be king over them–bring them here and kill them in front of me.'”

Or Jesus’ last message to his disciples: He said to them, “But now if you have a purse, take it, and also a bag; and if you don’t have a sword, sell your cloak and buy one.” [Luke 22:36.]

And don’t tell me I deform Jesus’ message! Jesus threw the merchants out of the Temple. Proof that not only he was physically violent, but that he was some sort of Kung-Fu master, or the like. Yes the best known version of Kung-Fu was invented by the Shaolin Monastery for defense against from bandits around 610 CE (and at the crucial battle to establish the Tang Dynasty in 621 CE).

Jesus knew that turning the other cheek was not the only valuable strategy to bring the reign of goodness. All too often, aversion to aversion brings forth only toleration of abomination.

The Nazis eliminated hundreds of thousands of Germans viewed as mentally or physically defective. (The Nazis had justified this by claiming that Germany’s population had augmented by 50% in 70 years, whereas the mental retards and degenerated specimens’ population had augmented by 450% in those same 70 years; so soon, the Nazis ominously concluded, one German out of four would be degenerate; thus the need to act now; simultaneously the children of Franco-German unions who were not pure white, were sterilized; there were several thousands.)

The Nazis’ plan was to see how little aversion to extermination the population could be trained to develop. After this, they exterminated Poles, and then Jews (many Germans had Jewish, or somewhat Jewish, friends or relatives, so the case of the Jews was most delicate).

But let’s go back to the aversion of aversion.

The author of the quote above, Mr. Biglan, the self-defined specialist of aversion, also quotes Gandhi.

To see his full essay, consult Scientia Salon: Nurture Effect On Caring Relationships.)

However Gandhi, by posing in Hindu clothes, forever, and with Hindu symbols, such as the Wheel, helped to antagonize the Muslims. This boiled over in 1939. As the Indian Congress voted to declare war against the Nazis, Gandhi, who called Hitler “my friend”, and had corresponded with the mass-murdering, war criminal dictator, did all he could, in vain, for India not to go to war against the racist in chief.

In the end, Gandhi had to turn against the Hindus, and for the Muslims. Gandhi recognized Muslims should get their part of the national treasury. He was rewarded for this perceived “aversion” towards Hindus by being assassinated by Hindu nationalists.

Mr. Biglan also evokes Martin Luther King. However, the entourage of MLK was armed to the teeth, with loaded guns: they were not born yesterday.

So the real fundamental problem of “aversion” is how does “aversion” arises in the first place. In general it does because human beings find themselves in adverse circumstances, or because evil tendencies by a few were not opposed early enough.

So it is the lack of aversion to various adversities, as they are gathering momentum, which leads to large scale aversion appearing in the first place.

An example is the Greenhouse Gas Crisis (“AGW”). If not opposed in a timely manner (and that will require some “aversion”), it will lead to large scale misery and war. Also North Korea, soon to have 40 nuclear weapons according to Chinese specialists, ought to looked at with appropriate aversion.

Prevention of the causes of aversion is how to prevent aversion. And the best way to do this is to have terminal aversion to abomination.

Time to value anger, people!

Appropriate anger, that is.

Appropriate emotions are appropriate. There is no emotion which is not appropriate to all and any situation. Full aversion to aversion is perversion.

Patrice Ayme’

Who IS, What IS, EVIL?

EVIL IS, WHAT EVIL HIDES:

There is no more important question than the nature of Evil. What it consists in. Let alone where it hides. Upon the definition of Evil given by civilization, depends the survival of advanced intelligence on this planet.

We have ever more power. We need ever more intelligence to manage it. We need an ever stricter morality, to motivate said intelligence.

As we will see by the end of this essay, enormous evil (starving all of humanity to increase the evil gains of those who lead us) is already in place. It’s not just my (long held) opinion. Science magazine even agrees.

To motivate ever stricter mentality, we learn to become ferocious. This is a long held truth, not just of Islam and Christianity, but also Buddhism:

Exterminator Of Evil, Tenkeisei. Obviously Such Hard Work, It Requires A Demon

I scoff when I see German TV making fuzzy the face of the mass criminal who just killed 149 people. What? To protect his privacy? The privacy of evil? Oh, some will say, to protect those who were close to him. Well, are they not co-culprit? From the village where the co-pilot was, he was well known to nuts. People knowing that ought to have contacted Lufthansa, or the authorities.

Evil is all too private.

Let’s make it public.

Some have said, the mass murder by a (implicitly well educated, disciplined) German was unlikely. But Nazi was, mostly, an enormous mass murder-suicide. It differed only in scale.

Fifty years ago, intellectuals worried about nuclear war. On the face of it, it was a strange worry: the USSR and the USA were fighting for world supremacy. Their elites wanted to control the planet, they were overstretched in all ways.

The USSR crashed and burned, Putin is trying to revive the ambers.

Now people have forgotten about nuclear weapons. But they are here, more than ever. Why did they forget? Because the world has become morally asleep. And why that? Because much greater danger are not just looming, but exerting their grip. Reality has become an inconvenient distraction on the way to lucidity.

***

NUCLEAR WAR IS EVER MORE LIKELY:

The situation is worse now: it is easier than ever to make nuclear weapons. It is not just a question of ever more efficient ultracentrifuges in underground fortresses. There are now even more advanced methods, using lasers, to separate Uranium isotopes. The USA itself is starting to use lasers to separate the highly explosive U235.

France and the USA are the two countries in the West which make thermonuclear weapons (Britain just buys them from the USA, and Israel got the technology from France). France and the USA have not made a technological breakthrough that would allow to neutralize nukes.

Say death rays of some sort; although France and the USA dominate in high power, military grade laser technology, said laser tech has not got to the point it could shoot down 99.99% of incoming missiles; actually it could not shoot down one.)

So, at this point, from lack of technological progress, nuclear weapons are still the ultimate weapon. And they are getting ever easier to make.

What does that mean for the talks with Iran? Well, that it is the occasion to refine an intrusive regime of nuclear inspections, to be used as a paradigm with other nations.

And what of Obama’s naive will, initially, to do away with nuclear weapons (thus affording a pretext to give him a Nobel)?

Well, as the world is, the safest way to prevent nuclear war is to augment the military research budgets of the West (only Israel has been doing well that way, devising plenty of anti-ballistic missile systems, with USA help…) Yes, I know, it’s cynical. But flowers won’t work.

***

EVIL HERE, THERE, AND EVERYWHERE:

Usually I roll out the usual suspect, Abrahamic entities. Here now, we have a 27 pilot. He wants to become captain. But he knows his sick mind will not allow it. So he let go with the very depth of the human Dark Side: he brings another 149 innocent people, including babies with himself. The Will To Extermination.

Hitler was just the same.

When the war was clearly lost, the Nazis kept on fighting. At this point many average Germans who previously supported Nazism turned against it: why could not the Nazis give up, as even the Kaiser had, in World War One? Because of the Will to Extermination. The extermination of whom they wanted to exterminate was the Nazis’ main industry in their last few months. If they did not know it before, now the Germans could clearly see that the Will to Extermination was the Nazis’ main motivation. That maybe why the day it surrendered, Germans never supported Nazism again (in most ways; and differently from Japan, where the population never saw their imperial forces in full extermination mode: that happened on the national territory, only in Okinawa, a smallish, distant island).

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WHEN IS EVIL HIDING? EVIL HIDES ALL THE TIME

The Greeks knew that Pluto could make itself invisible. The evil co-pilot hid his madness from his employer, just as he hid from his employer that he was under doctor’s order to stop working.

Pilots ought to be required to make their health physical and mental PUBLIC property. That ought to be true even for those piloting a car for Uber. If they don’t like it, they can do something else.

To be able to kill people en masse ought to be viewed as a privilege given by the masses to a few, in counterpart of what, they keep an eye on these few, at all and any moment.

Hitler claimed he was out to help oppressed minorities, oppressed workers, and make Germany proud, great. He claimed to be against “plutocrats” (his word!) In truth his real aims were not this, and he knew all too well that he brandished the red of revolution (Soviet style), when actually he was sponsored by plutocrats. And, while he claimed to be a nationalist, he was blatantly and gigantically supported by American plutocrats such as Henry Ford.

Nowadays, Pluto is hiding better than ever.

The world’s richest man, and arguably greatest monopolist, instead of being in jail, has self-defined as the greatest philanthropist, and now directs health research worldwide in the coffers of what he, his family and associates have invested in. All of this tax free, of course.

You want another example of spectacular evil? What about starving people to make corporations and their plutocrats even richer?

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DO BIOFUEL POLICIES SEEK TO CUT EMISSIONS BY CUTTING FOOD? YES!

A study published yesterday, March 27, 2015, in the journal Science found that government biofuel policies rely on reductions in food consumption to generate greenhouse gas savings.

How much more evil can one get?

Shrinking the amount of food that people and livestock eat decreases the amount of carbon dioxide that they breathe out or excrete as waste. The reduction in food available for consumption, rather than any inherent fuel efficiency, drives the decline in carbon dioxide emissions in government models, the researchers found.

(Indeed, it’s know that “biofuels” are very inefficient. Making ethanol from corn or wheat requires energy that is mostly derived from traditional greenhouse gas-emitting sources, such as coal, natural gas. But then it benefits companies such as Monsanto, which make the Genetically Engineered corn in which Bill Gates is invested!)

“Without reduced food consumption, each of the models would estimate that biofuels generate more emissions than gasoline,” said Timothy Searchinger, first author on the paper and a research scholar at Princeton University’s Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs and the Program in Science, Technology, and Environmental Policy.

Searchinger’s co-authors were Robert Edwards and Declan Mulligan of the Joint Research Center at the European Commission; Ralph Heimlich of the consulting practice Agricultural Conservation Economics; and Richard Plevin of the University of California-Davis.

The study looked at three models used by U.S. and European agencies, and found that all three estimate that some of the crops diverted from food to biofuels are not replaced by planting crops elsewhere. About 20 percent to 50 percent of the net calories diverted to make ethanol are not replaced through the planting of additional crops, the study found.

The result is that less food is available, and, according to the study, these missing calories are not simply extras enjoyed in resource-rich countries. Instead, when less food is available, prices go up.

“The impacts on food consumption result not from a tailored tax on excess consumption but from broad global price increases that will disproportionately affect some of the world’s poor,” Searchinger said.

The models used by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the California Air Resources Board indicate that ethanol made from corn and wheat generates modestly fewer emissions than gasoline. The fact that these lowered emissions come from reductions in food production is buried in the methodology and not explicitly stated, the study found.

The European Commission’s model found an even greater reduction in emissions. It includes reductions in both quantity and overall food quality due to the replacement of oils and vegetables by corn and wheat, which are of lesser nutritional value.

“Without these reductions in food quantity and quality, the [European] model would estimate that wheat ethanol generates 46% higher emissions than gasoline and corn ethanol 68% higher emissions,” Searching said.

The Science paper recommends that modelers show their work more transparently so that policymakers can decide if they wish to seek greenhouse gas reductions from food reductions.

Actually “policymakers” is the concept that hide the truth. It is to We the People to decide whether we should starve so that plutocrats can jet around the world in their private jets, while plotting our fate, and future ill-gotten gains, and powers they attribute themselves ever more generously, while we are invited to partake in ever more austerity.

Plutocracy is not just an inconvenience. As its name indicates, it is the ultimate evil. And it hides. We have to make sure it does not become a fate. And that means, first, to roll it out of its hiding places, from the minds of co-pilots to haughty policies which are anything but.

We are not led by great leaders, intelligence and goodness. We have been led, astray, by viciousness and the basest instincts, all too much. Time to withdraw the respect, and change course. As Dominique Deux half-joked in a comment on this site, time to make an app where passengers will vote: “… automatic implementation of the majority vote.
They’ll never ever vote for doom.
Democracy wins again, and smartphones become useful.”

We are all passengers on this Earth. And any baby has more right to be, than Bill Gates. Or any of our other great leaders. And those who have already abused power massively (see the food for fuel policy above), ought to have less right to be in power than anybody else.

Patrice Ayme’

Searchinger, R. Edwards, D. Mulligan, R. Heimlich, and R. Plevin. Do biofuel policies seek to cut emissions by cutting food? Science 27 March 2015: 1420-1422. DOI: 10.1126/science.1261221.