LIFE IS HAPPINESS. Life Is Worth It, That’s Why Death Is An Enemy

The simplest truth has not been emphasized enough by thought leaders: for most people, most of the time, LIFE IS GOOD, LIFE IS HAPPINESS. Contrarily to what Socrates said, we don’t need to examine life to make it worth living. (And that makes the philosophical impulse harder to engage!)

Simplicia: Do unhappy people share your opinion?

Tyranosopher: Most of them aren’t so unhappy that they stop eating. So they view life as preferable to non-life. Hence a good thing to have. When old ancient Greeks thought their lives were not worth living, when they were really unhappy, they would lay in bed, and stop eating until they died. If people are still hungry, they are hungry for life in some sense. 

Simplicia: Life is not necessarily an intrinsic good. Having a child can cause suffering: what if the child dies of a horrible disease? That child would have been better off aborted to start with.

Tyranosopher: In the fullness of time, any child will grow enough to die. And that’s horrible. So you may as well argue that those who give birth cause murder. It’s shortsighted, it overlooks all of life.

Simplicia: I am unconvinced that life is an intrinsically good thing.

Tyranosopher: Consider the average person. Does that person want to die? No. Some are suicidal, true, but they are a very small minority. Most people love life, life makes them happy, and that’s demonstrated from the fact that they correctly assess that they don’t want to die. Thus, in first approximation, one can identify life and happiness. Call this sort of observation effective philosophy.

This turns out to have drastic political consequences, especially considering extremely practical policies impacting demography and immigration.

***

Simplicia: I am not sure that I want to listen to an exposition of the later point. It is bound to be extremely politically incorrect, knowing you. Let’s talk of other things. So human life is an absolute good?

Tyranosopher: Yes. We must hold that moral position, it’s not just that it makes life sacred. It is that “morality” comes from “mores” what tradition is. To have morality, then, one needs tradition, thus humanity, hence human life. 

Simplicia: Aristotle celebrated the pursuit of happiness.  Aristotle asked ‘what is the ultimate purpose of human existence’? He claimed it was ‘happiness’. Funny that you agree with him.

Tyranosopher: I sometimes agree with Aristotle, but not here. Without happiness, there would be no existence, we would be too depressed to search for food. So happiness is not so much “purpose to life” but rather a necessary mean to achieve human existence. Aristotle’s definition of happiness was stealthily perverse. Aristotle was a hopelessly compromised member, teacher, exploiter and propagandist of the Macedonian tyranny. That colored all his ethical system. So, naturally, Aristotle had a twisted definition of happiness. Aristotle termed this eudaimonia – “activity expressing virtue”. The virtue of serving the Macedonian tyranny. Aristotle didn’t celebrate the happiness of free humans, he wanted the slaves to accomplish their duty with minimum fuss, by following their “virtue”. Really, go ask Aristotle (as a virtual reality program) how slaves can achieve the purpose of their lives. Aristotle was pro-slavery (because, he analyzed, we don’t have machines; right, but slavery prevented the rise of machines and mechanical advantage, as the Franks demonstrated a millennium later…) 

Simplicia: OK, forget Aristotle. The US Declaration of Independence establishes as a human right the “pursuit of happiness”.

Tyranosopher: Democritus, a proponent of the atomic theory, born two generations before Aristotle (but contemporary to Aristotle, as Democritus lived to 90) held that:  “Happiness resides not in possessions, and not in gold, happiness dwells in the soul.”

While in partial agreement with Democritus (partial, because we need possessions such as food and shelter!), I observe something simpler: most humans are happy enough, most of the time, to not want to die. Thus life is happiness. Run across a desert landscape until thirsty, hungry and exhausted. A safe shelter with water, food and a bed will then define overwhelming happiness. Thus travails bring hope, contentment!

Simplicia: Alleviating suffering is happiness?

Tyranosopher: LIFE IS HAPPINESS. That’s why people fear death. And rightly so. It’s very simple, very animal.

Simplicia: Are you just a beast? What kind of philosophy is that? Animal philosophy?

Tyranosopher: Humans are animals. Go watch the movie Avatar The Way of Water, and consider the super intelligent whale there, more clever than humans. All and any philosophy should be advanced enough to be animal-proof. 

Simplicia: Animal-proof? What does that mean?

***

Tyranosopher: Any philosophical system should encompass, as a very minimum, humanity’s animal condition. Because animals are what we are. This is a point Buddhism makes: live in the present, as animals mostly do. Living in the past and the future, as all advanced animals do quite a bit, is the most human skill. Yet, it’s the present which builds the (subjective) past and the (hoped for) future.  

Simplicia: When Western philosophers try to sound philosophical, they say we shouldn’t fear death. Or all that matters in life is death. Or that philosophy is only a preparation for death.

Tyranosopher:  Personal experience, and common sense, show that fatal accidents develop in a few seconds [1]. So much for long drawn preparations for the death event. Now as far as not fearing death… It was useful to kingly plutocrats to have troops which didn’t fear death. Troops which fear death don’t go into battle. So plutocrats encouraged those paid philosophers to pretend that one should not fear death  

Early Islam was highly successful on the battlefield because Muslim soldiers welcomed death in battle. 

***

Simplicia: You seem to fear death.

Tyranosopher: Exactly! I have feared death many times! I was nearly killed more or less accidentally at least half a dozen times. I could give a long list of dramatic events. And I suffered from the deaths of significant others. Death made my life lonely, diminished it. My young uncle, killed by fascists at the tender age of 28, my grandparents, my parents… When my mom died, part of my life also did. 

Simplicia: It seems that your love of life brings you to like dangerous activities, though!

Tyranosopher: Exactly! Life is made to be dangerous, it’s a fatal condition! Can’t escape it, so we may as well embrace this happiness! Including the fear of death, which incarnates our love of life! We fear death because we love life, so the more we fear, the more we love!  Last time I feared death acutely was doing some solo climbing last summer with a raging torrent below the gigantic rock face. 

I like to fear death from a distance. Like I am climbing something in the wilderness and a mighty gloomy black storm is gathering a few peaks away. It is very motivating, one feels more alive! From all those neurohormones, and life having much more sense, namely the sense away from the storm!

Simplicia: What’s so cool about playing life and death?

Tyranosopher: It’s life in miniature. Moreover… When solo climbing, the infinite power of the human mind is fully concentrated, coolly concentrated, on the next move. The ancestral monkey is doing what it is made to do best. 

Anyway, my point was that we all fear death because we love life so much, and love is happiness. So we are like Monsieur Jourdain, who made prose his entire life, without even knowing it. We are all happy, we are not just pursuing happiness, and that happiness is called life.

Simplicia: Beggars are happy?

Tyranosopher: To a point. US homeless people, when full of drugs, are obviously happier when forgetting about their condition, and this is definitively a societal failure. But, generally all those who cling to life are happy enough to do so.

***

Simplicia: Hedonism is the pursuit of pleasure as the only intrinsic good Epicurus added that virtue (living according to higher values) and pleasure are interdependent. Christians and Muslims believe that human happiness is imperfect, only Heaven and Allah promise eternal happiness. Sade explained that the ultimate happiness of European leaders are cruel power plays. Utilitarians, such as Jeremy Bentham, observed that maximum surplus of pleasure over pain as the cardinal goal of human striving. Utilitarians believe that morals and legislation should be based on whatever will achieve the greatest good for the greatest number of people. Does your metaphysics of happiness bring some effective morality and practical directives?

Tyranosopher: Absolutely! The practical consequences of happiness as life, are enormous for achieving the optimal evolution of civilization. In particular, happiness simply defined as life shows how erroneous recent Western policies have been. Because enforcing fake happiness as financial profits for the few brought a loss of life… Thus an implosion of real happiness. 

Patrice Ayme

If life is happiness, living more will bring more happiness. Dostoyevsky, and many others, agreed:

[1] When the crew of the Titanic saw it was heading towards the iceberg, it had to either try to turn as much as possible, or head straight on, braking as much as possible. It did both, and that was the wrong decision, as it made the attempted turn ineffectual, while exposing the flank of the ship. Wrong decision, because there were  a few seconds to take it, not a deliberation of half a minute. Long studies and practice had not prepared the crew for that emergency. Believing one can hone a philosophical system to handle death well is silly  

Judiciary Must Not Legislate: Pass An Abortion Law In The USA. Roe v Wade Was A Masquerade

It is not for the judiciary to legislate. The judiciary is in charge of implementing and adjudicating the laws. Laws are passed by the legislature (supposedly representing “We The People”).

In the US, the Supreme Court stepped in, and nine senior men with a mostly Caucasian appearance, 50 years ago, passed a judicial opinion masquerading as a sort of law enabling some sorts of abortions. 

This is not how  representative democracy with separation of three powers is supposed to work. This violation of basic constitutionality set a dangerous precedent where the Supreme Court displaced Congress to write sort-of-laws. 

Since then, one can see the mood of replacing laws voted, or not voted, by legislators being created, or overruled by the judiciary in other domains, for example guns… With disastrous effect; it should not be SCOTUS which decides what sot of guns people can carry. 

Far from promoting democracy, legislating through diktats of the judiciary is not just unconstitutional, it’s demeaning, infuriating, it makes people turn away from the law and it creates a general fascist mood, as We The People gets in the habits to have a committee of nine decided what is legal, or not… Instead of having more than 500 representatives decide. 

Worldwide, more than 50 representative democracies have passed laws on abortions, using a standard vote in the Parliament. Those laws are remarkably similar. One could call them collectively, the abortion law: abortion at will, no question asked until 12 to 14 weeks, after that, medical opinions, and restrictions, steer abortions (including by considering the psychological state of the mother). The idea being that, once the fetus is viable, it’s not the private property of the carrier of said yet-to-be-born baby, 

The US must do the same on a national level… And there will be no problem. In these 50+ democracies which passed the abortion law, abortion is not controversial (anymore). 

One of the reasons that the Judiciary must not legislate is that it is very bad at it (having others things to do, and other inclinations).

In its abortion decision, of 1972, SCOTUS confused unanimously… life and privacy. Certainly the privacy of someone stops where the life of someone else starts.  Just as the motion of one’s fist must stop where someone else’s nose starts…

Romans used to have the right to kill their child, no question asked. Now, thoughtful laws prevent them to do so. That’s progress. All culturally advanced countries have an abortion law (details do not vary much among US peers). Why can’t the US pass one? Too busy being tribal?

Patrice Ayme

Supreme Court Of US (“SCOTUS”) in 1972. Those 9 mostly white oldish men decided that abortion was a right to privacy, and exceptionally stupid decision… Which led millions into error regrading human life: somebody’s life is not somebody’s else, “right to privacy”.

Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., writing for the six SCOTUS judges of the majority, said that a Mississipi law was OK, and that Roe and Planned Parenthood v. Casey, the 1992 decision that affirmed Roe’s core holding, should be overruled.

“Roe was egregiously wrong from the start,” Justice Alito wrote. “Its reasoning was exceptionally weak, and the decision has had damaging consequences. And far from bringing about a national settlement of the abortion issue, Roe and Casey have enflamed debate and deepened division. It is time to heed the Constitution and return the issue of abortion to the people’s elected representatives.”

Why Climb? To Study Life In Full!

I have climbed a lot, for decades, from the age of 6. Each climb is a life, with its potential death attached. It doesn’t matter how easy: the easier climbs kill more, because there are more of them, and one’s guard is down, because they are easy. Also easier climbs are harder to protect, because the hardest climbs would not go without some protection. 

Never let the guard down, expect danger from the expected and unexpected, try to keep a safety margin because sometimes it will erode or disappear, all of a sudden. Some deranged feminists working for The Man, have argued that climbing was “toxic masculinity” . As we will show, all that they are promoting is toxic weakness and lethargic non-examination.

Girls do it as well… The lady is climbing solo, no rope. One mistake, death. Any serious mountain climber ends up climbing solo, because sometimes having a rope is too much of a drag, or pointless (no anchors), or too time consuming (I have climbed down entire quasi-vertical mountains fast, solo, because doing it with a rope would have been ten times slower and thus increase the danger ten times…)

Climbing teaches to master one’s hubris. It forces the otherwise arrogant, uninformed human mind to listen to the universe, to take instructions from it, to become one with the universe. 

Why climb? Why live? Each climb, well done, should feel like a life… because it’s a life. But mostly it reveals unknown powers. Ours, and those of the universe…

Once I was torn off a mountain by an enormous rock avalanche, the largest I have ever seen: my double ropes had been hit by rocks… Also I was running a one hundred meters wide ice gully… in rock climbing shoes, not proper ice equipment, and the belay was horrendously bad. I  faced certain death: the ice gully below, the most notorious in the Chamonix area, is a mile high… I remember the event, it was as if it happened three seconds ago, although it was three decades… Miraculously, I was able to wedge myself between an ice wall and a rockwall along the side of the gully… and stopped! At the time I was an excellent Yosemite chimney climber… After this I stopped mountain climbing proper for years. But the fact remains that I discovered my brain could mobilize absolutely superhuman strength. When I remember exactly what happened, if someone else than myself described it, I would not believe it. 

The original superstar solo female super climber was the Algerian born French climber Catherine Destivelle (she is now in her sixties), who climbed all over the world, at the highest level. She nearly died falling off a peak she had just made the first ascent of… while taking a victory photograph, she went backwards too much, and fell off until the end of the rope to her partner… in icy, lonely Antarctica (self-rescue was more than problematic). Another time she got broken up falling in a rimaye, a Bergschrund, in Chamonix. Somehow she stopped on her way to oblivion.

So I learned something from what should have been my end, I could never have learned in books, because I don’t believe in superstitious religions: sometimes the thoroughly impossible happens. For a hard core rationalist such as yours truly, this is an astounding lesson, nearly as astounding as the miracle of life itself.  

The entire pillar next to the gully, the Bonatti Pillar, on which I made a first ascent, later entirely collapsed.

Many more lessons can be learned from climbing, or activities similar to it: mountain running, which I still practice between smothering smoke clouds, requires similar neurology. In mountain running one of the dangers is to trip and head head first towards a rock, or off a cliff, it happened to me more than once… although emergency reflexes saved me with fractions of seconds to spare… In general, whereas danger in climbing can appear in seconds, in mountain running, it can appear in hundredths of a second, and one needs to think with one’s body much faster than in climbing. 

What are older folks going to do? Well one can climb into very old age, and of course the best climbers are the oldest, as climbing is a survival school. And to replace mountain running, there is always hiking. There is actually a rule among professional mountain runners: if you can’t see the top of a rise, you walk (high angle running is less efficient an walking).

I have argued earlier that climbing makes us into gods. The picture accompanying the essay is of Ueli Steck, a Swiss climber who died, soloing up a similar face, in a similar way: he fell off, maybe because of wind slab, on Nuptse, the mountain facing Everest. At least climbing sure makes us feel that way, like gods, when done maximally. We need divine powers, to muster all we need to resist gravity. Even time loses meaning, for example, in solo climbing: we become a force that goes, beyond smarts, a second can feel like a lifetime. Each climb is an occasion of contemplating life in its entirety.

We, and the universe. To be human beings in full, we need to be reminded all the time of the following: we are at our best, when we are one with the universe. Be it from a relationship with a pet, or from enjoying a landscape, or experiencing a wilderness, nothing replaces reality, and especially not virtual reality.

In the case of climbing, becoming one with the universe is a requirement, because death is the alternative poor execution leads to. Other dangerous sports such as sailing, diving, surfing, require this mind meld with the universe too. Being one with the universe forces our wisdom to work, and to learn, in the most exacting circumstances, that of the universe in full…

Socrates opinionated that the unexamined life was not worth living. Socrates promoted daily investigation of virtue or morality. However, examining his life in turn, we can see that the philosopher examined himself in battle, and was not found wanting. Socrates killed four enemies in combat. He also saved a friend during a dreadful retreat, and fought rear guard actions, to great risk for his own life after the Athenian army had been defeated.

These are extreme circumstances. Extreme circumstances enable us to see until the ends of what we really want, meant, and are. Combat is indeed helpful to find out about ourselves and the universe, it reveals lesser minds, and raise others above their own existences. Examining life is important, but the important examinations go to uncomfortable depths and have a hefty price.

So what is the most important? Gathering more wisdom, or denying a deeper grasp on reality? As usual, the devil is in the details of the consequences of whatever we do.

But, ultimately, even the most placid love depends upon enough wisdom to experience it, and project it. We are not called “Homo Sapiens” for no reason. The deepest reason is that even our roughest emotions should be wise, and they become wise because they are informed and have been examined…

Patrice Ayme

 

Loving Life Is The Way. Leif Ramos (1972-2017).

My brother-in-law Leif suffered a heart attack ten years ago, and was given a bypass. His father had died of a heart attack. He followed a scrupulously correct vegetarian and exercise diet thereafter. However, he also had to be “off the grid” for mitigating interest on non-reimbursed student loans. In the USA, nowadays, student loans are never forgiven: the chains which hold the slaves down, are not made of metal anymore.

Whereas the colossal, multi-billion dollars debts of plutocrats such as Donald Trump, or any of the millions of California homeowners millionaires are readily forgiven, it is not the case for modest students without rich parents. Then  interests pile up and states “garnish” whatever income the ex-student, now a victim, may incur. Nice, keeps the low lives in check! This efficient, apparently neutral mechanism drives millions of US citizens into the underclass (precisely those who had the effrontery to want to learn something). If one’s parents belong to the .1%, student loans are a rounding error. For others, it’s a crushing burden. Indeed, the rest of the US can live in slavery: it fits them just right. For not revolting, and just swallowing all the lies served to them, as if they were delicious junk foods.

Leif paddling in his state of Alaska. Nature is the way, tempered by humanity.

Leif had a second heart attack December 1, 2017. Five stents were installed. His surgeon had to leave for a scheduled trip, but asked the hospital to keep him in hospitalized. However, Leif had no health insurance, thus the hospital, searching, as they all are, for higher profits, kicked him out, after the surgeon left for very far places, overseas (this was all happening in Anchorage, Alaska, travelling from there generally means long flights on the other side of an ocean, or two).

Leif did worse on December 30th. He apparently tried to drive himself to another, more hospitable, hospital, Alaska General. At 5am. He nearly made it.

He leaves behind a loving family, including his ailing mother, herself with her own heart trouble, now doubled.

Leif’s life was not easy, and made him suffer, in a number of inordinate ways, but it was worth having, he took it with a smile.  

***

Leif with aurora. His award-winning pictures are there to stay. So are his musical compositions.

Leif loved life. That sounds simple, but it’s not. Life is not the grid all too many others are forced to live on (thus perpetuating it in its sorry state). People know this more easily in Alaska and Hawai’i, some of those increasingly rare places on Earth where it is possible to stay in touch with nature. Leif’s love of life forced him, greatly from circumstances he didn’t control, to live off the grid. Loving life requires to go further than just being told what to do.

Who knows what to do correctly in life, who doesn’t love life?

One can’t tell all & sundry, life is absurd, or unlovable, then switch around, been good, well-meaning, giving.

One may not get back all the love one gives to life, but one has to: others will, that’s how humanity is. How humanity became possible.

Leif’s love of life is a mood worth caring forth. What better choice is there? Loving other creatures and the world they share, with us, is not just the best we can do. It’s the only thing humanity can do, and the most significant thing humanity, overall, has done and does. As long as we keep on sharing this way of having a world, Leif lives with us. Let’s live!

Patrice Aymé

Why To Climb? Because It’s a Life Which Makes Us Gods

Climbing is hard, and it’s a life. That’s why it’s there. But it’s a there we climbers chose, not one we just submit to. Normal life, the life common people live through,  is something we have to submit to. Climbing life, and the potentiality of the death it is attached to, we chose.

God While You Last. South Face of Annapurna, Ueli Steck, Solo. He carries a rope, and a friend is taking the Picture… but he is not ON the rope. Why so? It is often safer to solo steep slopes where one cannot the slightest mistake in the mountains, with the objective of going faster over dangerous terrain. I soloed faces nearly that big, up, and down, in the name of… safety! After nearly dying in two pesky avalanches, I have encouraged myself to undertake less adventurous climbing…

Climbing is a chosen life-universe. This is why, deep down inside, more than for simple bragging, people pay $65,000 to drag themselves up Everest. They are helped by countless servants, and various technical devices, from gel insulated boots to carbon fiber axes, bottled oxygen, dehydrated foods, bottled methane, fixed ropes, and looming helicopter service and rescue. Still more than 400 climbers have died in the giant horseshoe formed by Chomolungma (Everest), Lhotse-Nuptse horseshoe. Many of them most famous, and the best. My best friend, also at the time the best mountaineer, died not too far from there, when part of a mountain he was doing the first ascent of, broke. Climate change can strike the heart.

The 2017 climbing season in that highest of all horseshoes, was inaugurated by the death of Ueli Steck, 40 years old. At the time he started to careen down that icy abyss, Mr. Steck, a Swiss, was viewed by many as the greatest living mountaineer. One of the many greatest living mountaineers to die within a few miles of there.

All true and genuine breakthrough philosophers are solo climbers, they risk death. And if not death from their contemporaries, they have to create the threat, because menace is the essence of human existence.

Nietzsche was climber, and a solo climber. He would regularly climb Corvatch, a peak which is still glaciated, from the Upper Engadin valley floor, a mile down. I have skied there in summer: a cable car brings the modern faineant up there. When Nietzsche was climbing alone, it was clearly dangerous: no helicopters at the time.

The extremely gifted Ueli Steck fell a full kilometer on Nuptse, a peak on the Western side of the horseshoe-shaped Everest-Lhotse-Nuptse CWM. Steck was apparently within 200 meters of the summit, and had climbed up there, starting at 4:30 am, with astounding speed. The face is very hard, very steep. During such solo climbs, if one slips on an ice lens, or one is hit by a fist size rock from up high, one will fall, and, most probably die (although some have survived falling all the way down the Matterhorn, this sort of feat is rather rare).

Dangerous physical activities such as climbing require full cerebral engagement. Paradoxically, although such tasks look like the less intellectual, they are exactly the opposite, the ones where the intellect is fully engaged in a massive way, which no sedate activity ever brings.

Climbing often requires full neurological mobilization, especially when soloing is involved. This is an important aspect of its charm. It makes one feel fully alive as nothing else does!
This full neurological mobilization is all too often the only way to avoid death.
Once I complained, while climbing, to two female mountain guides in the Alps that so many of my friends died climbing, and they scoffed that, once one reaches 40, many of one’s climbing friends are dead.

Yet, feeling that full neurological power, is feeling divine.

The climber, especially in a desperate situation, especially when falling towards certain death (as happened to me once after being hit by a rock avalanche) has incomprehensible powers. Those powers come from a fully mobilized brain, all neurons firing out commands with superhuman power. It has to be experienced, to be believed.

As part of the Dru spire fell on me, and I therefore thereafter tumbled down an ice chute, I was able to stop myself. However, should anyone else tell me the same story, I would not believe it (being short of believing in God-ordered miracles). Without any question a philosophically stimulating experience.

Climbing is not a game. Or then, it is the game of life. Each Climb is miniature life, but with the climber free to select it, as she, or he, were God. Each climb is an entire life, an entire universe, in miniature. It starts with hope and power. It ends with fatigue, accomplishment. Yet, all along, death can strike said life

Aristotle claimed that man was a political animal. Whatever. In truth, Aristotle was the animal, an animal, a ravenous beast, whose friends, the worst of the worst, fed out of politics, like pigs out of a through. Aristotle didn’t know that Polis, the City, Civilization, was less than 10,000 years old, and humanity, millions of years old. All Aristotle wanted is to foster monarchy, especially when, as was the case, those monarchs (Alexander, Antipater, Craterus, etc.) are family.

Humans are creative, labouring, and this thanks to hard and very deep thinking, the essence of humanity.

The point of life is to survive it. Day to day. We, and who, and what, we love. Such is the engine of human motivation. But “life” itself has to be defined. The discovery of those who seriously climb is that they are the ones who define what life is. In climbing, it’s the climber herself, or himself, who decides what “life” is going to be: climbing this, or that peak, or this, or that route. Climbing with this, or that, companion(s). 

The mountains are there. More exactly, the potential lives they offer are there. They are there for us to pick. If we so decide, as if we were gods. Which we are, in a deep sense, as far as climbing is concerned. We may be the only free agents in the universe, and we are free, because we chose what the universe is. And this is what the climber does. Hence the fascination and importance of climbing, which is found in all civilizations, from South America, to Africa, to China.

We can’t yet reach for the stars, but we can reach for the peaks, and this is what humanity has been about, all along. Going where no stupid animal would ever go. Precisely because their brains are too stupid to make the universe what they want it to be. Climbers make universes as others make pizzas, just because they can, and no other agent in the universe is crazy enough to do so.

Patrice Ayme’

Truth Is Not Politically Correct

Truth is not Politically Correct. Denying this, pretending that truth is Politically Correct, is the mother of all problems with the present management of the entire planet. And that’s the first thing which is wrong with today’s political practice. And this is what leads to war and terrorism, let alone biosphere devastation, as observed today.

So why do we have this mood hostile to truth? Because it profits the powers that be. Hostility to truth makes people stupid. Stupid animals can be led by the nose more easily that those who are very clever. When a male shark wants to plant his flag deep in Ms. Shark, he grabs her in its powerful jaws, by a fin or another, flip her on her back, until she gets into a trance, and stops moving. This is similar to what the fiercest rulers do to We The People.

So our leaders are playing dumb. Are they as dumb as they look?  The four sacred months expired at 12pm, Mecca time, on Friday. Refer to Sura 5, verse 9: …”when the forbidden months are past, then fight and SLAY the Pagans wherever you find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every ambush.”

9pm in Paris, 12 pm in Mecca, on November 13, 2015, was now time for “every ambush” on the pagans.

Three teams of fanatics attacked in Paris, within 33 minutes. Three individuals tried to get in the Stade de France (with 80,000 inside, plus the French president and the French and German national teams). The first kamikaze was detected at 21:20. He had to explode himself before he could get in, making only one victim (there was only security outside of the stadium, minutes after the match started).

At 21:25 a terrorist team of three attacked the restaurant “Little Cambodia”. 21:32 they attacked the Cafe’ A La Bonne Biere. At 21:36 “La Belle Equipe”. Their weapons and car were found in Montreuil, but they ESCAPED. That team killed at least 39 people.

At 21:40 another fanatic sat at a cafe’ on boulevard Voltaire, then exploded himself. Meanwhile, still another team of three kamikazes attacked the Bataclan theater. The raid was organized in Belgium, in the same zone as usual. 12 accomplices have been arrested so far.

“Sacred raid (razzia)  against the crusaders in Paris.” is the way Islamist State (ISIS) called its mayhem in Paris. Two sisters of the Saadi family, both young mothers, got killed leaving orphans behind. Both were of a French “Muslim” family. Many Muslims were killed in the attacks, but, as ISIS would point out, they were assuredly “depraved”.

Friendly Californian Children Left This, Lighting Up the Night, In Front Of My House

“Sacred raid (razzia)  against the crusaders in New York and Washington.” is the way Al Qaeda called its mayhem in the USA. The same words, the same sentence exactly were used in 2001, with “New York” and “Washington” in place of Paris. So, in that sense, the latest mayhem is exactly a “9/11” in France. Not the first, nor the last. (That there were only 130 killed and 100 extremely gravely injured, with “life prognostic engaged” is not really a miracle: the explosive vests were detected at the Stade de France; thus, instead of killing hundreds, the kamikazes at the stadium killed just one besides themselves; inside the Bataclan, the kamikazes detonated themselves while fighting the police in the dark; strikingly, no police of the SWAT teams in the BRI and RAID was injured).

As Osama Bin Laden said: “You will lose this war, because we love death as much as you love life.” This rather deleterious idea of Osama was quoted approvingly by the Islamist State.

ISIS, the Islamist State, said it struck in Paris “The DEPRAVED”, those who listen to California music, or watch soccer (because those “Depraved” went to a concert by rock group from California, or to a soccer match France-Germany). It did not matter if they were Pagans, Muslims.

25% to 30% of the French population descends from relatively recent immigration (and nearly 100% of the French population descends for foreign stock, if one goes back 3,000 years, as the Celto-Germans invaded; only the Basques are very ancient stock). Probably a majority of French have partial Jewish and Muslim ancestry (Jews have been in France for more than 2,000 years, Muslims for more than 13 centuries; contrarily to legend, under the Franks, there was total religious tolerance. That means for a duration of seven centuries. Then unfortunately Catholic fascism got increasing respect, and thus powers, resulting in the rise of religious terror and intolerance, which became full bore after a crusade conducted WITHIN France killed around one million (a huge number at the time). After that the religious terror, on and off, lasted until the French Revolution, when the Jews and Protestants were given the rights which they used to have, long ago, were given back to them.

An important difference between what is going on in France with 11 September in the USA was that the USA was attacked by 15 Saudi kamikazes, and five other foreigners. (Only one was “French” and was arrested.) So “9/11″was completely an aggression by foreigners. (The USA, though, had, since, pure Qur’an motivated hate crime attacks, the foremost one by a military surgeon who went Qur’an nuts and killed a dozen other soldiers. So the Quranic cancer in France can, and has metastized in other parts of the West.)

In the attacks in France most of the attackers are French who learned the most striking parts of the Qur’an. The most striking parts being those which ORDER the top followers of Islam, those who want to get directly in paradise to go out and attack, or even kill, non Muslims. No, I am not making it up: “Violence in the Holy Qur’an” can be consulted. And more quotes are coming by tomorrow, making these order explicit.

The Qur’an is viewed by Muslims as a set of explicit orders from God. In particular God gives explicit order to kill, attack, and submit entire categories of people. Not bad, in the way of war, for a book which is only 80,000 words long. Most of humanity falls into those categories to kill, attack, submit, oppress, diminish, tax, subjugate. What are the faithful supposed to say? What are the faithful supposed to do? Go along with the program? The Qur’an is a program. Not just a “religion” (whatever that means).

The first religion of a Republic, is the Republic. Superstitions can be accommodated, as long as they do not disturb the primary religion. 

Well, they should do exactly what the Catholics did, in a country such as France: stop believing in all the garbage. And that’s the truth. Yes, it’s not politically correct. However, the philosophically correct should bulldoze over the politically correct. Always has, in the long run, always will.

Last, but not least: human beings, like baboons, know how to make war. It’s in their genes, so to speak. When attacked, baboons make a military formation, and predators flee. more than 70 million of French baboons have been attacked, and they clearly need to adopt a military formation, and get smarter. The Paris are has been under Franco-Celtic control since at least the early Third Century , when Paris got is name (changing back to the “Parisii“, the old Gallic name, from the Roman Lutetia). Every since Paris was named, there was not one decade when France was not at war. 17 centuries of war, and counting. This is a stunning fact.

As the concept of “Jihad” has it, war and maximum effort is a generalized attitude necessary for the fulfillment of hope, let alone life. It’s the exact attitude, for bad or good, which made, in the end, our species master of the Earth. War should give peace a chance. But war never should keep on giving peace a chance as if there were no tomorrow.

Patrice Ayme’

 

We Are All Martians

The Life Giving Nuclear Reactor within Earth protects us with the magnetic field it energizes. The idea is that, otherwise, the atmosphere would be torn away, as it was in Mars. Or, if not the atmosphere, at least the hydrogen (and thus the water), as happened for Venus.

At least, such was my philosophy of the rocky planets’ atmosphere (exposed in prior essays). “Philosophy” can be educated guesses based on lots of physics and mathematics, intuitively understood. Philosophy can stand just at the edge of science. But then it’s good to have a scientific confirmation. Here it is. NASA’s MAVEN (= Mars Atmosphere and Volatile EvolutioN) in orbit for years, has measured that Mars loses around 100 grams of atmosphere per second, due to impact from the Solar Wind (protons going at 400 kilometers per second).

That’s not good. Still, back of the envelope computations show Mars should still have a thick atmosphere. Instead, its density is only 1% of Earth, and few of Earth’s most primitive lifeforms are hardy enough to survive in Mars CO2 atmosphere (even neglecting UV and low temperatures).

Once the atmosphere was going, the water followed, and so did the considerable greenhouse water vapor brought. Water vapor (H2O) is more greenhousy than CO2, meaning the relationship CO2-H2O is nonlinear: higher CO2 on Earth means higher H2O, hence even higher greenhouse than the simple rise of CO2 would naively bring).

Earth Has A Powerful Nuclear Powered Magnetic Shield. Mars’ Shield Was Too Weak. The Solar Wind Tore the Martian Atmosphere Away MCE By MCE.

So, if 100 grams per second was not enough to strip the atmosphere why did it escape Mars as much as it did?

The Sun is an hectic thermonuclear engine shaken by internal explosions. Occasionally a Mass Coronal Ejection (MCE) occurs. Then an alarming eruption of inordinate magnitude, violently flings material off the sun, in a particular eruption. The last one to hit the Earth was in the Nineteenth Century, and it caused severe disruption to the then nascent electrodynamic industry. More severe ones went here and there in the meantime (sparing Earth for now).

However, one hit Mars, and MAVEN was there to measure what happened. What happened? The MCE driven Solar Wind smacked into Mars with great force, and robbed the planet of five kilograms of atmosphere per second.

So what philosophy to extract from this?

1. Thank our nuclear reactor at the core, which maintains an iron ocean, hundreds of kilometers deep, below our feet.
2. Life is fragile: it can get started easily, but  can get killed easily.
3. With at least two planets where life started, in the Solar System, life, basic life, probably started all over the galaxy.
4. Earth’s life has a very high probability to be of Martian origin.

Why the last point? Because Mars cooled down at least four time faster than Earth. The very latest news show that life started on Earth within 500 million years of our planet’s formation. At that point, Earth became cool enough to sustain life (in spite of the formation of the Moon, which, whether from an impact or from my own nuclear eruption theory, was characterized by great heat, and worldwide fusion of the crust). By then Mars had been cool enough for four hundred million years, at least, to allow life (I get that working backwards from the geological date of life start on Earth, and the factor 4, from the surface ratios).

How did life bearing material go from Mars to Earth? Martian meteorites are found on Earth: an object crashes on Mars and debris flung into space (Mars has lower gravity than Earth). Some documented trips took no more than 15 million years, and temperatures within would have preserved life. More than four billion years ago, the bombardment was extremely intense, and Martian meteorites may have penetrated the terrestrial atmosphere continually. And it would just take one meteorite.

A baby was dying in London, from leukemia. All usual treatments were tried, and failed. The doctors proposed to try an approach so far only experimented only on mice. Collaborating quickly with the French company, CELLECTIS Paris, designer cells made to attack specifically Layla’s cancer were engineered. The treatment was an astounding success, so far. To make war against all diseases is not just fair, it is the war which has to be waged, paying our respects to Mars. In particular, I am certain that, when the choice is between death and trying a treatment which seems to have worked on mice, one should chose the latter. If nothing else, it brings hope, and the certainty one is contributing to:

1. Fighting back (the most human thing to do, facing evil).
2. Science
3. Treatment to all of humanity (other babies, etc.), another most human behavior to engage in: giving one’s life for others.

So kudos to the doctors in London (and the British government for allowing experimentation, plus the two parents for having encouraged it).

Our species celebrates Mars as a god, because war is one of our oldest instincts. Anglo-Saxon media generally scrupulously avoided to mention that this was FRENCH technology (from a French start-up, of all things!). Not mentioning France is part of the war of Anglo-Saxon plutocracy against France. We are all Martians, in more ways than one. And yes, we need to cultivate the better angels of that Martian side of us.

Patrice Ayme’