Research As Moral Principle: The Case Of The Energy Crisis

Energy, Justice, Research

Humanity is search. Humanity is when evolution has become conscious, and searches for solutions to the point of inventing problems to resolve. This, like the evolution of the universe it animates, runs its course. Resistance is futile.

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Is Using Fossil Fuels Moral?

Biden just allowed a major oil project, on Federal land, in Alaska [1]. Is that moral?

Morality Is Not So Much What’s Good, But What PERDURES:

What’s morality? Is morality the avoidance of evil? Nobody understand fully what evil is, because one would need to understand the future thoroughly.

Morality is from Old French moral (14c.) and directly from Latin moralis “proper behavior of a person in society,” literally “pertaining to manners,” coined by Cicero (“De Fato,” II.i) to translate Greek ethikos (see ethics)… ēthikos “ethical, pertaining to character,” from ēthos “moral character,” related to ēthos “custom”…

Greek ēthos “habitual character and disposition; moral character; habit, custom…. An important concept in Aristotle (as in “Rhetoric” II xii-xiv).

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We are literally fumigating the planet, among other problems. Leaders blow hot wind on it all, by enjoying the fruits of pleasing the powers that be. 

The world needs energy. Historically, most energy usage, per capita, has been in the so-called “West”… which has now offshored industry to China, as it used to offshore energy to dictators. 

Justice demands that, on a worldwide basis, energy usage, per capita, be the same for all (or, at least, that there is enough energy to satisfy people’s basic needs, including maximum educational availability, which is not the case now). 

Thus, and as observed, energy usage will augment, worldwide. 

Now 84% of primary energy production, worldwide, is from fossil fuels… the same quotient as in 1980, when the alert was sounded about the necessity of cutting emissions of CO2. The lack of progress in decarbonation was mostly due to a systemic campaign against nuclear energy, which started under president Carter.   

Solar progressed enormously, but is land hungry. Wind is intermittent, and, as the greenhouse planetary heating makes the wind belt migrate towards the poles, it is likely that wind will peter out. 

So what we need is new energy sources: green hydrogen (killed by Obama on day one of his presidency, thanks to the fossil fuel lobby), new and safer small nuclear fission, thorium, and thermonuclear fusion. So a gigantic investment in research should be made (China already connected new nuclear tech to the grid). Meanwhile, one must gain time… And that means new fossil fuels, hopefully cleaner. 

Fossil fuel propaganda claims that its own decline is around the corner. The graphs show that’s a lie, but it’s OK, as long as more money goes towards research in new, decarbonated energy. 

The truth is that we just don’t have the technology right now to decarbonate most of primary energy production. We need more science, bringing in revolutionary tech like room temp superconductors, or photovoltaics which can work at night (using infrared).

We presently need fossil fuels, so that civilization will not collapse. So using fossil fuels is moral, when no alternative can be found. But we also need to stop traveling as if there is no tomorrow and stop heating stuff as if we were Neanderthals, and heat pumps didn’t exist. The San Francisco Bay Area government’s regulatory commission met and 20 votes for, none against, decided to outlaw the sale of fossil fuel heaters and furnaces, starting in 2030. The regulatory commission declared that somebody had to lead, and it may as well be the Bay Area. Notice that California prouces fossil fuels… Also notice that there is such a thing as a Bay Area government, an accord between 110 cities… A democratic thing. It gives more manoeuvrability than Switzerland, while democratic… 

We also need to find, and deploy decarbonated solutions from science to be discovered next.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] In How Big of a Climate Betrayal Is the Willow Oil Project? March 16, 2023. The New York Times says:

President Biden approved ConocoPhillips’s $8 billion plan to extract 600 million barrels of oil from federal lands in Alaska, the announcement landed simultaneously with the thud of betrayal and the air of inevitability. On the campaign trail, Biden had promised “no more drilling on federal lands, period. Period, period, period.”

No slowdown: Below is the global primary energy production graph. Right, it includes decarbonated sourse such as nuclear and intermittents (aka “renewables”)… BUT, notice, they are basically neglectable!

WHAT IS MORALITY? A Moral Government Is A Sustainable Government & Reciprocally

Here again, I address the question at the largest civilizational scale: where does morality come from? What justifies it?  (That brings an immediate problem, as regimes, let alone governments, are constantly shifting; consider in China alone the “Warring States”, followed by Qin, followed by Han, then Tang, Sung, Yuan, Ming, etc; these are called dynasties, but they were actually different regimes, constantly shifting; however, pretty much the same morality; so I introduce meta-governance, meta-civilization, etc.)

A criminal regime has criminal laws. They, of course, can be more or less criminal.

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Wayne Straight Indeed but it got me to thinking about whether there is or can be any such thing as a “moral” government. One of my long-time original (at least I think it’s original) quips is that any large organization is only as ethical or moral as it’s least moral member. That would seem to be particularly apt when applied to governments.

Serious Abomination was always legal, making it even more abominable… [Actually the Holocaust of Jews was not even legal according to the Nazis own laws passed in 1935. The Wannsee Conference attempted to persuade the Justice minister and others to allow the bending of Nazi laws… to exterminate Jews, and others…

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Answer to Wayne: One has to define first what “moral” is. For doing this, it helps to go back to the etymological root: moral is from Old French moral (14c.) and directly from Latin moralis “proper behavior of a person in society,” literally “pertaining to manners,” coined by Cicero (“De Fato,” II.i) to translate Greek ethikos (see ethics) from Latin mos (genitive moris) “one’s disposition,” in plural, “mores, customs, manners, morals,” a word of uncertain origin.

Conclusion? Morality is defined in a society as what enables sustainability, of said society.

For example neither Assyria, not Imperial fascist Rome, nor the Mayas, nor the Aztecs, nor the Nazi or Stalinian regime were moral, because they were not sustainable. But of course they were more or less sustainable, thus moral: Rome and the Maya lasted millennia, Assyria, centuries, whereas Stalin’s regime lasted 30 years, the Nazis, 12.

Another related notion is meta-governance. Morality arises from meta-governance, not simple governance, because morality is a civilizational notion (after the Nazis were killed by the Allies, Germans immediately recovered the moral sense coming from Western civilization; same thing happened in Russia after the demise of Sovietism).

The West has had metagovernance even as the Occidental Roman state crumbled and partly collapsed: Goths, Burgonds, Franks and remaining Romans agreed, in their various states/kingdoms, upon the basic civilizational structure, namely, mostly that of the Roman state.

Within a century, the Franko-Gallo-Romans had installed a Roman like metagovernance (everybody became a Frank while Frankish and Celtic languages faded, replaced by bastardized Latin).

In the details, the IMPERIUM FRANCORUM looked extremely gory: Frankish leaders, having done away with Goths and Burgonds, and the like, were busy killing each other, in most unpleasant manners. However, on the largest scale, the Imperium Francorum was an important moral advance. The Imperium Francorum became so highly moral, it superseded morally the Greco-Roman meta-civilization preceding it.

Indeed the government of the ruling monarch, the Frankish queen, Saint Bathilde, outlawed the slave trade (of Frankish citizens) around 655 CE (1,210 years before the good old USA outlawed in turn slavery…)

In contrast, metagovernance of Mexico, pre-conquista, was terrible, highly immoral: Aztecs insisted to eat their enemies, so Cortez found plenty of allies, multiplying his army by a factor of 40 or so. That gigantic army overwhelmed the Aztecs (who had boasted countless times that Cortez will never have enough men to kill them all). The immorality of the Aztec regime was the direct cause of its demise: it gave the Spaniards the excuse and capability to exterminate it.

A similar mechanism occurred with Nazism, and other fascisms, of course: their very immorality caused them a mass of enemies bigger than themselves, and provided those enemies with plenty enough motivation, namely the enemies will to survival, for the extermination of the fascists. Nazi laws were so immoral, so unsustainable, the Nazis themselves couldn’t obey them (they had to bend them, hence the infamous Wannsee conference).

So then what to extract from the preceding drastic moral fundamentalism, looking forward?

Well, any new ways and means increasing humanity’s potential survival will define a new and better morality, looking forward.

Patrice Ayme

P/S: What happened to the ethological (somehow genetically, or congenitally imprinted) morality (which advanced animals can be experimentally determined to have)? Well, it’s subjacent and implied in the preceding discourse: the exact same force, the WILL & IMPLEMENTATION of SURVIVAL, which established morality at the civilizational level, established morality ethologically and etiologically at the scale of the evolution of species.

God As Evolution Abstracted

GOD, CREATION OF THE CROWN OF EVOLUTION

If God is all-powerful, God can’t be a prisoner of human logic, God is beyond human logic (Descartes, creator of analytic geometry, and Pascal, a creator of calculating machines understood this). Thus God can lift an unliftable stone. (Saint Thomas had a petty vision of God, considering God couldn’t lift an unliftable stone, as if God were subject to human logic… Something Saint Thomas actually decided, as if he could impose on God His own powers…)

The problem with evil is exactly the same as with God lifting the unliftable stone: God and evil co-exist, it’s nothing humans can understand: that exact argument is held by Allah Himself, God Itself, in the Qur’an. The very co-existence of a good God and Evil is a proof of the existence of God, as it shows something is beyond human logic, thus all-mighty.

Man, the genus Homo, torments other beings, because if Man can find pleasure in tormenting, Man will be enticed to exterminate other conscious beings, as needed, including oneself. Indeed the latter is fundamental not just to ecological balance, but to the survival of… the genus Homo. Thus the infliction of pain, just as the reception of pain, have reasons beyond the individual, the group, or even the species. It is the genius of the genus.

Representant of the Genus Homo Rules Over the World As the one and only God that Matters. The son of God is son of Man, indeed.

So what wisdom did super mathematician and physicist Pascal suddenly found in the God of Abraham (after a severe illness attacked his brain)? What did Pascal find in that apparently cruel, illogical, somewhat demented, sometimes smart and good, Creator? Well, the inner logic of our own ethology: we are all children of a creative process we are made to abandon ourselves to, because we have no choice: creation itself, biological evolution… our smart, all-powerful, evil and most generous Creator… a (probably) subquantum process we don’t understand, but which certainly exists, and has all the characteristics of the proverbial “God”.

In a way, then, inventing God was a preliminary to discovering evolution. We found God, Evolution, and it created us, by evolving us with all the smarts Evolution is capable of. So here we are, most thankful, and now consciously in charge…

Patrice Ayme
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Notes:

a) In the most prosaic way, it was simply how late Roman emperors justified their God-like tyranny, as I have explained in many essays. The Christian God invented under the Flavian emperors was anti-Judaic, beside being pro-Caesar and pro-Roman. The Catholic God perfected and invented by Emperor Constantine depicted a God made in Constantine’s image. How convenient!

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/emperor-constantine-christian-terrorist-325-ce-fall-of-rome-part-x/

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b) The short essay above was a comment to the New York Times (published!), on an essay “A God Problem
Perfect. All-powerful. All-knowing. The idea of the deity most Westerners accept is actually not coherent.” By philosophy professor Peter Atterton. With all due respect, the essay didn’t break any new ground on the subject (my comment did).

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c) If God knows everything, and is all-powerful, deciding upon everything, why should we bother to gather knowledge? Thus the imposition of God (enacted by Constantine, see the essay linked above) was an imposition of a mood conducive to deliberate ignorance. And then what? Still another mood bathing We The People conducive to dictatorship, emulating

Democracy is first about knowledge. Those who block the transmission of knowledge block the inception of democracy. This has plenty of consequences such as addressing Pluto ownership of media or We The People not voting laws.

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d) Nineteenth century German pessimist yet sleep-around philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer drew attention to what he called the “diabolical” in his work “On Human Nature”:

For man is the only animal which causes pain to others without any further purpose than just to cause it. Other animals never do it except to satisfy their hunger, or in the rage of combat …. No animal ever torments another for the mere purpose of tormenting, but man does it, and it is this that constitutes the diabolical feature in his character which is so much worse than the merely animal.

But then, if one claims man is bad, god is good, as God knows what it is like to want to inflict pain on others, the conclusion is, again, that God enjoys evil.

e) When Pascal died his servant found sewn into his jacket the sentence: “God of Abraham, God of Isaac, God of Jacob — not of the philosophers and scholars.” That was before the discovery of evolution in full. In those more obscure times, scholars and philosophers had no idea of what biological evolution was capable of, indeed those intellectuals couldn’t know that the mass murdering God of Abraham was exactly our Creator… with the help of the occasional asteroid or super volcano.

f) I tried to explain that the concept of God is extremely coherent if one understands that it is an abstraction of our true creator, biological evolution. In that light, all the apparent incoherence, the badness, and the goodness, the stupidity, brutality and the benevolent intelligence all make sense. Now, of course that return to tyrannical nature was very useful to emperor Constantine, who imposed Christianism…

Relativism Gone Relative to the Point of Madness:

The New York Times asks: “Would Human Extinction Be a Tragedy?

Our species possesses inherent value, but we are devastating the earth and causing unimaginable animal suffering.”

 [By Mr. Todd May, a professor of philosophy at Clemson University; Dec. 17, 2018] And so what? Well, publishes the New York Times, we should be indifferent to the extinction of all human babies…

Mr. May reveals himself to be incapable of distinguishing a human being from a shrimp. We have seen it all before. The Nazis highly valued such people, affected with similar inhuman lack of discernment: they had plenty of tasks for them.

Many common philosophers have sunk so low, they ask, to earn their pittance by ingratiating themselves to, and be published by the plutocratic media: would killing all humans be a tragedy? By that token of abysmal questioning, Auschwitz was not even an appetizer for a pleasant smoke-out. With, or without Heidegger, Nazism got many children. Or is it an infection, a pandemic?

One mistake those who want deep down inside to see humanity gone make, is that they claim humanity causes suffering of all conscious beings, and that’s tragic (Mr. May’s main argument).

However, the consciousness of a shrimp, or a sheep, doesn’t equate to human consciousness. Different consciousnesses are not like different frames moving relative to each other. One neuron does not equate ten billion neurons, just like a space with one dimension does not equate with one with ten billion dimensions. 

That a whale swallows millions of shrimps doesn’t make it a Hitler swallowing millions of Jews. Humans are no shrimps, even though some professional philosophers are hard to distinguish from shrimps:

Hitler and Helga Goebbels. After Hitler’s death, Helga , then 12 years old, was forced fed poison (a Soviet autopsy revealed). She resisted to the point of facial injury. The Goebbels’ parents hated non-Nazi humanity with all incandescent hatred.

Even non-human predators know this, how exceptional human beings are… something all too many professional philosophers deny (so that they can become famous and well-fed): a wolf will kill sheep, just because he can, but will respect a human being, just because he can look at the human in the eye, and recognize intelligence and fellow high level consciousness. I have personally made that experience in the wild with both wolf and lions. There is no doubt wolves and lions hesitate before inflicting pain to a creature with superior intelligence and consciousness.

Not all creatures are fellow: superior sentient animals know this perfectly well, because it’s an imminently practical notion: their lives depend upon it. Superior animals are clever enough and knowledgeable enough to know that injuring a highly social and competent human being will have bad consequences.

By the same token, the environment has no consciousness, it doesn’t suffer as a sentient creature.

The Nazis went down that same exact road, passing all sorts of laws for animal welfare, to better relativize human lives… by respecting rats… Respecting rats in a showy fashion makes it easier to kill humans. In the very lethally racist caste system in ancient India, courtesy was extended to cows and other beasts, to better deny the most basic humanity to lower caste human beings.

All too relative philosophers play the role of dynamic red herrings, capturing feeble minds with fascinating outrage, and nonsensical jargon. Yes, they say, people are no better than shrimps, be good to them, shrimps, and the masters of the world applaud… 

Patrice Ayme

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Here is an extensive quote from the theoretician of mass lethal imbecility in the New York Times, to show I am neither distorting nor exaggerating what was published there:

“To make that claim less puzzling, let me say a word about tragedy. In theater, the tragic character is often someone who commits a wrong, usually a significant one, but with whom we feel sympathy in their descent. Here Sophocles’s Oedipus, Shakespeare’s Lear, and Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman might stand as examples. In this case, the tragic character is humanity. It is humanity that is committing a wrong, a wrong whose elimination would likely require the elimination of the species, but with whom we might be sympathetic nonetheless for reasons I discuss in a moment.

To make that case, let me start with a claim that I think will be at once depressing and, upon reflection, uncontroversial. Human beings are destroying large parts of the inhabitable earth and causing unimaginable suffering to many of the animals that inhabit it. This is happening through at least three means. First, human contribution to climate change is devastating ecosystems, as the recent article on Yellowstone Park in The Times exemplifies. Second, increasing human population is encroaching on ecosystems that would otherwise be intact. Third, factory farming fosters the creation of millions upon millions of animals for whom it offers nothing but suffering and misery before slaughtering them in often barbaric ways. There is no reason to think that those practices are going to diminish any time soon. Quite the opposite.

Humanity, then, is the source of devastation of the lives of conscious animals on a scale that is difficult to comprehend.”

Well, what’s hard to comprehend is that, 73 years after the Nuremberg trial of the Nazis, this sort of deep criminal trash, where human lives are equated to flies, is still wildly publicized!

 

What If The USA Had Used No Nuclear Weapons In 1945?

Old wisdom: Hiroshima was a terrible thing. New wisdom: Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the shots needed to cure Japan swiftly, and with the least pain, releasing the world from the pain Japanese fascist military madness had wrought. Millions were saved. The atomic bombings were expiatory sacrifices to the gods of war, that civilization had to make. 

Master Kong (“Confucius”) believed that, if one acted with benevolence, everything would be best. Benevolence means “good will”. There is the little problem of determining what “good” is. That was the province of virtuous men. And so on. So-called  “Virtue Ethics” was invented in Greece at the same time, and is viewed to this day as a great invention by some Western philosophers, who paid to exhibit moral pretense, of the type fully compatible with unhinged plutocracy (that’s why they are paid). The founders of virtue ethics in the West are Plato and Aristotle, those adulated great destroyers of democracy (this is why Aristo-Platonism survived, as their evil teaching served the fascist regimes of the next 2,000 years).

It is of course going around in circle, defining “good” as what “virtuous” men do, and “virtue” as what does ”good”. In truth, most men and women believe they are doing good. Even Hitler, Stalin, and their ilk, thought they were doing good. Rare are those doing bad, with in mind terrible ends (that was Hitler, when he had been punished long enough to become half-mad).

Badness, evil, don’t have to be global, and apparently gratuitous, they can be local, and unfortunately necessary. When Churchill ordered the destruction of the French fleet at Mers El Kebir, he knew he was doing real bad, but in a context which made the treacherous atrocity part of a global picture which was better that way. The global picture was that Churchill wanted to show the world that even allies, friends and colleagues (in this case French naval personnel) would be destroyed, if in the way of victory in the slightest. The same subjacent moral calculus also stood below Hiroshima and Nagasaki (as behind the annihilation of Dresden and its ilk): anything standing in the way of righteousness will be annihilated. This is why we had no great power war for 62 years, for the first time in 3,000 years.  

Evil can happen by happenstance. Churchill didn’t know is that his suggestion that the French fleet could remove itself to the West Indies had not been transmitted to the French admirals. Oops.

Should Great Britain excuse itself for Mers El Kebir? Not really, but excuses should have been presented for not transmitting the proposition of letting the French fleet escape to the Antilles (where the fleet would have been nominally under Vichy control, thus respecting the ceasefire with the Nazis; such excuses probably were presented between officers, as the French and British sailors have long been in very close contact, before and after Mers El Kebir)

Apology is a path to understanding. Understanding, in full, and only in full, is more important than apologizing. Roughly all history textbooks, anywhere have to be re-written, so that they can give birth t understanding in full, to the best of our present knowledge.

Evil is in the details. If one wants to be moral, one has to plunge in the details. Hiroshima is an examination of one’s moral compass. The question is not whether one can claim to be a Hiroshima lover or not, but whether one has enough moral power to plunge in the details.

The way the Hiroshima bombing is mis-analyzed reflects the way the civilization’s bombing campaign against ISIS, or, for that matter, Nazism, have been misinterpreted.

The allegation by one commenter on this site has been made that the two nuclear bombs used over Japan were “the beginning of the end (or the end of the beginning?) of Western (US) moral supremacy.” Actually, West European mainstream morality, and even mentality rules the United Nations, and, to a great extent China. So it smacks more of an apotheosis than an end. Why? As Gandhi said about Western civilization: it would be an excellent idea. 

Considering my preceding essay on the way to peace through truth, Purasuchikku accuses me of “Schoolboy textbook interpretation of what marked the beginning of the end (or the end of the beginning?) of Western (US) moral supremacy. Color me disappointed.

Really, the US was well aware (Japanese diplomatic cables were systematically decrypted) that by June 1945, following the fall of Okinawa, the Japanese intended to seek peace, sending ambassadors to Stalin (Captain Hindsight would laugh at that one) and other neutral countries to broker negotiations. This diplomatic effort was too little, too late: half of the Supreme Council members were still hardcore f****wits bent on the “victory or death” strategy and hindered the pro-peace endeavors of Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo and the Emperor (yes).”

However, another commenter, Gmax, pointed out to Purasuchikku that “20,000 people were dying each day the war was going on. So the bombs killed 10 days worth of war. You forget Japan was busy killing half of China everyday.” (I said so myself in past essays; I will reconstitute a quick reasoning justifying this number below.)

Strategic bombing, or any sort of bombing, or war, is a grim occupation democracies  sometimes find themselves into. Precisely because they are democracies. Precisely because, if one does not violently oppose the Dark Side, the Dark Side will triumph. This is what “pacifists” of the simplest sort, and Confucius failed to grasp. Confucius was wrong about his hope that “benevolence” would solve all. Was the Munich conference of 1938, when Great Britain persuaded France and Czechoslovakia not to fight off Hitler, benevolent? Benevolent, for whom?

When confronted to a bear, or a hostile human group, prehistoric men couldn’t not have turned the other cheek, because otherwise, we won’t be here. Twice I killed extremely lethal snakes attacking me, and I had once a Homeric fight with a bear, who had charged me deliberately to steal my backpack (as was his habit). The fight ended when the beast got hit by a very large stone propelled at a significant speed. Three weeks later, the same bear gravely injured a grandmother, and was shot dead by rangers.  

Human beings have a predatory side, which defines mayhem as benevolence: that’s what Master Kong didn’t know, and Plato and Aristotle affected to ignore, as they were tops of the most exploitative elites (they were like various Stalins’ boyfriends)

All together, Japan probably killed 42 million people between 1937 and 1945 (latest numbers). That’s a rate of six million a year. Moreover, most of these people died of exposure, disease and malnutrition (same thing as the average Japanese soldier). One also has to keep in mind that the rate of death accelerated, as disorganization accelerated. In Europe, around ten million people got killed in the last six months of the war. In any case the rate of death was at least 2 millions in three months (20,000 killed a day).

So what happened with the bombs? All in all, including radiation sickness and malnutrition, less than 250,000 people got killed. More exactly, between 129,000 and 226,000 people died, half of them on the first day. In Hiroshima an important garrison was devastated, and 20,000 Japanese soldiers died (a legitimate military objective under any interpretation of the laws of war). The Nagasaki bomb was more powerful, but the ground was hilly, and quite a few people practiced “duck and cover”, after learning of Hiroshima (hide under and lay flat after the flash).

As I said, hours after Nagasaki, the pro-war party collapsed: emperor HiroHito used to be pro-war, he became thoroughly against it.

One has to know the history of Japan: the Mongols, at the time they owned China, landed in Japan twice. They were contained by the Samurai after landing. The Samurai took effective defensive position behind walls of stones they erected, etc. Ultimately, thanks in part of “divine wind”, kamikaze, the Mongols went down to the bottom of the ocean.

Truman: “A quarter of a million of our young manhood was worth a couple of Japanese cities… I asked General George Marshall how much the invasion of Japan would cost in lives… he told me at least a quarter of a million casualties on our side, and up to a million, and as much for the enemy” [not counting civilian losses, which were a majority at Okinawa]  

The Japanese High Command was hell-bent to revisiting the notion. The US landing in Okinawa had been very costly, including to the propagandized civilian population which often seemed more interested by death than surrender. The US domination in conventional weaponry was not so great that the US could afford a very costly landing. Kamikaze and other furious air attacks off Okinawa had been costly. A fleet carrier such as the Enterprise was very heavily damaged, and would have sunk with such damage earlier in the war. However, the US had become experts at saving their carriers. The Enterprise went to repairs. The US had many escort carriers, but few fleet carriers.

Just on one (of many) underground base west of Tokyo, the malevolent Japanese military had stored 5,000 planes, fully intent to use them during an attempted US landing (with suicide pilots in various states of unpreparedness). The chief of the Japanese army wrote a vibrant poem where he extolled the beauty of 100 million flowers being cut (namely most of the Japanese).

So now suppose there had been no nuclear bomb. The war would have gone on.  The US would not have landed in 1945. Meanwhile, Stalin would have conquered China. Indeed the invasion of Manchuria by the Soviets, a double pincer the Japanese had not anticipated, turned, in a few days, in a rout for the Japanese. Around 100,000 Japanese soldiers died, the Soviets conquered northern China, and half of Korea.

As Wikipedia puts it:

“Many Japanese settlers committed mass suicide as the Soviet army approached. Mothers were forced by Japanese military[21][22] to kill their own children before killing or being killed themselves. The Japanese army often took part in the killings of its civilians. The commander of the 5th Japanese Army, General Shimizu, commented that “each nation lives and dies by its own laws.” Wounded Japanese soldiers who were incapable of moving on their own were often left to die as the army retreated.[22] “

The sense of civilization Japan had at the time was in need of a serious evolution. Even the fascists at the helm knew this.  When the Japanese Navy conducted a suicide attack on Okinawa, led by super battleship Yamato, the Navy High Command ordered the sailors to try to save themselves, if their ship sank, because there was a Japan to defend and rebuild. Saving oneself when defeated in war was contrary to bushido, the Japanese military honor code.

I write a lot of very nasty things about a lot of US presidents. Because they did very nasty things. However, some didn’t. Similarly in France: I despise, and retroactively condemn with utmost severity a lot of the leaders there. However, some shine. And even some who did terrible things shine. Because they did terrible things because they had to.

Clovis, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Philippe le Bel and Clemenceau come to mind in France: they all did terrible things (even deliberate spiritual cleansing of the ethnic type, in the case of Charlemagne), but for very good reasons, and they changed history for the best. Some did fantastic things, such as Queen Bathilde (outlawing slavery; fostering education), without having to be nasty, right. They were lucky.

Truman did the right thing. The terrible, right thing (a student had dissuaded the war minister to atom bomb Kyoto, on the ground of saving architectural beauty…)

There is no truth without context, in pure logic as in history, and this is true for moral truth too.

The context of Hiroshima is that the fascist Japanese military government had been on a war rampage for 14 years.It had to be stopped, and stopped fast.  The Japanese people had been unable to stop it (although they tried in 1937, their violence was not up to snuff). Killing the Japanese military meant killing the Japanese war production, thus killing the cities, because that’s where the production was.  

Meanwhile the Chinese were dying by the millions every year. Stalin had a solution: turning China into North Korea (the Chinese Communists actually protested, in vain, about Soviet methods in China).

Another commenter on this site, Eugen R also pointed out to Purasuchikku that:”Japan still occupied most of East Asia including big parts of China. Japan under pretext of defending Asia from the European imperialism implemented its own imperialistic policy, using unprecedented atrocities against the local population. Do not forget also Japan’s alliance with the Nazi Germany a horrible crime by itself. If the US would have had atomic bombs to drop on Berlin at 1942, most of the victims of WWII would have been saved…”

Indeed.

Fortunately, the bombs were dropped in August 1945, preventing Japan to go the way of Nazi Germany, and killing another few dozens of millions of people.

And what of Master Kong’s philosophy of benevolence? Five centuries after the “sage’s” death, the extremely experienced emperor and very learned scholar Wan Mang implemented Confucianism fiercely. Results? First nothing. Then a flood. Abominable civil war broke all over China. Peasant armies rose, plutocrat led armies rose. The emperor ended besieged in his capital, after considering setting up an air force (the head would be flier-engineer  died in a crash, after an all too significant flight). The capital was seized, the emperor was dismembered. The Han dynasty was re-established.

Thereafter, Confucianism stayed an idea, not a method of governance.

All religions are about everything. But some religions are also more about killing people, or setting up the mood to kill people (war being a way to sustain some civilization; yet it can be done to excess: consider Assyria).

Examples are the Aztec religion, the Punic religion, the Celtic religion, Islam (original version) etc. And also what was de facto the Japanese religion in the 1930s, a nationalist cult, mixing Shinto with bushido and their ilk, creating a de facto racist cocktail. The Aztec, Punic and Celtic cultures’ rules were annihilated, greatly because of their lethal, hyper-violent Zeitgeist.

Japan escaped that fate. In no small part because the crazed military fascists at the head of Japan got short-circuited big time on August 10, 1945. Thanks to the sacrifice of up to 226,000 Japanese who got atom bombed. They should be thanked and grimly remembered as sacrifices we, as a civilization, had to make.

The famous religions, some of them stoking hatred and superstition, are ways to tie people together again. They are all obsolete. The planet is creaking. Surely,  it’s time to tie people together again, by studying how we got there. Study history, people, make that into the new religion! You will find it addictive, even better than the old stuff.

Studying history, for real and in full would have wondrous effects in the places dominated by Islam, or in the fight against global plutocracy leading us to extinction.

You don’t want war? Create the contexts for peace. That requires no more lies. Not lying is not sufficient, but it is necessary, to dismantle evil contexts. One can’t use things known to be false as a basis for justice, thus a sustainable society.

Patrice Ayme’

Syria’s Assad Struck Because Pacifist Fundamentalism Leads To Horror

Good people will want to, have always wanted to, strike down Syria’s Assad and North Korea’s Kim. Pacifist fundamentalism is worse than an hypocrisy. It brings not just death, but the apocalypse (consider Nazism).

In August 2013, French pilots were in their seats in their fully armed planes, ready to strike Assad, when Obama lost his nerve, or got a call from one of his masters, decided to be worse than a hypocrite. Obama decided it was OK, after all, to use neurotoxic weapons such as Sarin to kill thousands, including children. Neurotoxic weapons against cities can only kill innocent people, such as children.

A Few Of The Hundreds Of Children Assassinated By Nerve Gas In 2013 By War Criminal and Criminal Against Humanity Assad. In Just One Single Attack In Damas (and there hundreds of such attacks). Unsure About Playing Knight In Shining Armor, Or Maybe Paid to Do So, Obama Lost His Nerve At The Last Minute. He Claimed To Stay Cool, Watching This, When He Had the Means to Punish It, and Thus Became A Smirking Accomplice of It. In A Way, It’s Worse Than What Happened In The Nazi Extermination Camps, Because We Had No Picture Of Exterminated Children!

By way of comparison with Assad and Obama, Adolf Hitler, not a humanitarian of renown, decided, in 1945 NOT to use neurotoxic weapons against his ferocious enemies, who were determined, and had declared officially, that they would not stop until they had annihilated Nazi Germany. Nazi stocks of gases such as Sarin were enough to kill dozens of millions, and the Nazi had the means to bring those gases over the targets (Western armies, London, Paris, etc.). In spite of the fact using the neurotoxins could have been imagined by the most crazed Nazis as a way to bring the war to a standstill, the Nazis did not consider using them.

The top Nazis knew all too well that the British, if no one else, would reply in kind. This sort of tit for tat had happened in 1940. The Nazis devastated Coventry. The Brits replied in kind, on a much greater scale. Rightly so.

This is why Hitler did not go fully neurotoxic in 1945.

Trump fired 59 cruise missiles at the Shariat Assad air base in Syria which fired the neurotoxins.

Good.

Barack Obama and the plutocrats in London (who are friends of Bachar El Assad) let humanity down in 2013. Civilization needs to be defended.

It’s telling that Trump, so vomited upon by the pseudo-progressives, is the one defending civilization, whereas their puppet president, who was the object of a cult by the plutocrats that be, did nothing which could upset the enemies of civilization, his, de facto, friends.  Trump’s action is an excellent message for all those who believe they can scare civilization into submission. An excellent way to set up the right context with President Xi of the People Republic of China, visiting the US president at Mar a Lago this weekend, reminding him that civilization without a great wall cannot be defended. But now civilization is one, and the great wall has to be in the minds.

There are great walls which cannot be crossed, because they ought not to be crossed, and the usage of weapons of mass destruction against civilian populations is one of them.

Patrice Ayme’

What Is “Moral” To A Lion?

What Is Moral To A Chimpanzee?

What is the Origin of Human Morality?

Individual Morality May Vary, But Social Morality, Which Also Varies, Is Absolutely Dependent Upon Circumstances:

Natural scientists will say that one has to start with human ethology, the behavior of man au naturel. However, that’s a bit delicate, as there is nothing natural about man, since the genus Homo wages war and uses weapons and tools, to the point man cannot do without.

Nevertheless, morality has stabilized in the last 25 centuries in most ways (especially now that women are treated with natural equality).

The mos maiorum (“way of the elders”; plural of mos, behavior, is “mores”).  The unwritten code of the Republican Romans, comprising: Fides, Disciplina, Pietas, Gravitas, Religio, Cultus, Dignitas, Auctoritas, Virtus…  

This is where the concept of “Moral” comes from.

These behaviors, as a set, enabled the Roman Republic to survive for 5 centuries (or more, if one considers the empire and the subsequent “Christian Republic” as an extension of the Republic, as the Roman did; de facto, we are still under basic Roman secular law, 25 centuries later).

This gives a philosophical hint. Philosophy is the art of guessing what could be, may be, could well be, ought to be, etc. For morality, it is beyond a guess:    

“Mores”, “Morality” has to do with survival. Morality is the set of behaviors which insures survival. 

Temple of Baalshiman, Palmyra. Insulted by the Bible in Connection with Human Sacrifices. Its Destruction by Islamists in 2015 (right).

There is a continuum between natural and (epi-)genetic ethology, and cultural ethology: the study of chimpanzees shows this. The very Christian Jane Goodall found, to her dismay, that the chimpanzees she studied made, over many years, a systematic war of extermination against another group of chimps.

The origin of morality is survival. The set of all moral behaviors (“mores”) is the set which enables survival. Survival of the individual, the group, a society, even a civilization.

Carthage was, in its times, 25 centuries ago, one of the most advanced societies. Its sailors captured gorillas, and circumnavigated Africa. Trading with Black Africa for fish was intense. Carthaginian agriculture in semidesertic conditions was so advanced, Roman preserved the book (while destroying all others). However, Carthage practiced childhood sacrifices extensively and routinely (archeologists seem to have demonstrated, confirming the stories already found in the Bible, Leviticus).

Another example: Polynesian societies needed to corral strongly behaviors and human population on their delicate islands. Hence taboos (don’t fish there, don’t go into that valley, etc.) and cannibalism (often entangled with religion, as Captain Cook experienced).

The Aztecs, deprived of massive proteins aside from a giant salamander (differently from other civilizations around Mexico, which had access to large quantities of fish). The Aztecs made a religion centered on human butchery, up to thousands eaten in a few days… (This made the Aztecs unpopular in Mesoamerica, and enabled Cortez to rise an army of 80,000 natives to fight the Aztecs, enormously amplifying his very small army of few thousands Spaniards).

Astrophysics professor, and proud principal investigator Coel Hellier states:  “If “it is morally good” doesn’t mean “I approve of it” then what does it mean? When Stephen Law says that science cannot tell us “what one ought or ought not to do”, what does the phrase “ought to do”, as used there, actually mean? These are fun questions to ask a moral realist. We ought to do it because it is morally good … and it is morally good because we ought to do it, and … but so far I’ve never come across an actual answer.”

A society determines what it ought to do to survive, and derives a morality from it, that all individuals “ought” to obey (“mores”, social morality). However, to survive, or lessen pain, a given crazed, or, simply, distressed, individual may well decide that she/he needs to violate the social morality, and follow her/his own ways of doing things.

Hence morality is relative between societies, and between individuals and society. However, given a long-established society, morality is absolute.

Roman Republican morality cracked around 150 BCE, due to Roman globalocracy (which enabled Roman plutocrats to come into existence, and ever grow in power). The collapse of that morality proximally brought the non-enforcement of anti-plutocratic laws (although the assassinated Gracchi tried to reinforce them). Soon plutocrats were at each others’ throats, as they dominated the Roman world (contemplate the situation today!). Massive and continuous civil wars ensued, followed by Augustus’ Principate in 27 BCE, as that wily youngster was able to muster the declining strength of the moribund Republica to his command.

However, the basic Roman Republican morality was embodied by Republican Roman law, whose basic framework survived even the Christo-fascism of the Fourth Century. Roman secular law was refurbished under Roman emperor Justinian (529 CE to 565 CE), and separated from Christian Sharia. Roman secular law was transmitted by the Imperium Francorum: it fit well with the Salic Law of the Franks. Roman secular law survives to this day as the basic legal framework of the present civilization. (This partly explains why the present civilization is not Christian: it does not fllow Christian law, but Ethological Law, also known as Roman Law.)

That morality is time-tested. It’s also the morality closest to natural ethology. So it’s not relative. It’s pretty much absolute. Hence a very good foundation on which to wage war in its defense.

Patrice Ayme’

No Force, No Moral

Abstract: Why didn’t Obama outright jail the Crook of Apple Inc., on the ground of aiding and abetting terrorism? For the same reason as he became lupine Putin’s obsequious butler. Morality, the Roman mores, depends upon force always. However, masters’ servants are not reputed for the creative application of force.

***

The universe is created by force. Giant supernovae explode, generating the heavy elements which can then combine and create chemistry. Some want to say the universe is not about force, just harmony, love, etc. Yes, the universe, the human universe, is also about love and harmony. But fundamentally, it’s a balance of forces.

Unbalancing those forces lead to holocausts. Or, as we can now clearly see, even worse.

Did Obama Understand What His Primary Mission Was?

… Or is it that the job of the leaders in Washington is to let the world down, so that they can come on top? (And New York’s Daily News is not cynical enough.)

The universe, and our knowledge of it, is not just about force, violence, but also about chance, serendipity.

The new LIGO observatory of space deformations detected gravitational waves when it had just been turned on for its first engineering run, after being closed for improvements, during five long years. It was supposed to officially open four days later. The observed Black Holes have masses too large for usual astrophysics. Collapsing stars are supposed to give BH no more than 11 solar masses (long story), a third of what was observed here. This is an important new riddle emerging.

There is a brand new ceasefire in Syria. Putin rules, Obama cleans his shoes (some will say that’s what, for psychological reasons, this is to be expected: after all, Putin is a wilful white man, a killer, a conqueror, an invader, not a self-important, obsequious butler).

In 2013, The French Republic was ready to strike Assad. Assad had crossed the ‘red line’ of massive, blatant usage of nerve gas (in a suburb of Damas). Who had set the ‘red line’? The USA. The President of the USA had declared, solemnly, that if Assad used chemical weapons on its own people, the USA would take him out. Indeed, the war in Syria had started with peaceful protests. Assad reacted with gunfire, and then unleashing, and feeding (by buying its oil), the Islamist State. So Assad, son of his dictator father, was as culprit as possible.

The legitimacy of it all? 1) Human Rights. 2) Syria is within the European defense zone, so to speak (as demonstrated by the refugee problem). 3)Syria as a French Protectorate (given by the SDN, after the Turkish empire got ejected). 4) Further back, Syria was part of the “Oriental Part” of the Roman empire for seven centuries, until it was invaded by the Muslim Arab army which killed all males of weapon bearing age.

One can view the latter invasion as an UNJUST war, and such wars can be reversed.

The Roman Republic rightly made a big deal of JUST wars, which were basically defense wars: Rome was attacked, and then the aggressor was taken out. This is what happened, until the Third Punic war (in which Carthage was in the right, and the right-wing, plutocratic fanatics in the Senate, in the wrong). The next problem was Caesar’s Bellum Gallicum, where there again, Caesar’s adversaries pointed out that he, Caesar, had been the aggressor in Gaul (although the situation was complex, since the (misled) Helvetii had attacked, and Caesar initially intervened to help allies against the (future) Swiss. But then Caesar and his ten legions exceeded the mandate…

In any case, re-establishing democracy and republic in places which knew these under Rome is, arguably a just war.

Instead, Obama showed the defense of human rights by the USA was a lot of hot air. Putin invaded Ukraine 6 months later. Now he is making Syria into a client state. If he follows his model in Chechnya, he will kill up to 15% of the population, to install firmly his own Pluto.

(Said Pluto in Chechnya would have killed Boris Nemtsov, exactly a year ago to the day, with four bullets in the back, below the Kremlin; that’s convenient, as the Chechen Pluto is head of state, so hard to prosecute.)

Now that it is established the USA is hot air, nobody fears it. China is promptly installing radars on islands just off the Philippines, that it just created. Obama will punish the Chinese dictatorship by looking haughty until Mr. Xi and his goons surrender.

Where does Obama’s mentality comes from? Well, European pacifists are pretty much to be accused. The only European country defending Europe’s Lebensraum (vital space in German; a term Hitler used; that does not mean it never has any validity), is the French Republic, with troops on the ground in combat in Syria, Libya, Mali, Niger, Chad, Cameroon, CAR, etc. This sort of pacifism caused two extended world wars which ravaged Europe.

In World War One, the Netherlands, with its accomplice the USA, extended the war by three years by breaking the Franco-British embargo. In World War Two, Sweden, the Netherlands and Belgium helped considerably in the defeat of France in 1940, and the subsequent French-Nazi ceasefire (which lasted, in practice, less than two years; yet, the evil was done, and dozens of millions died).

Obama’s lack of spine is not just about refusing to confront the Russian Caesar. Now the dark Pluto heading Apple refuses to release the communications of a mass murdering Islamist State terrorist. Why was that crook not charged with aiding and abetting mass murdering terrorism? Because such people are supposed to lead the world, and not be led by the world.

Were I president, I would arrest the crook, and apply the Patriot Act to him. He would then disappear from view. Then I would ask the same question to the second in command at Apple, five minutes later. Upon refusal, he would also be on his way to Guantanamo or somewhere. And so on down the line in the next hour, until one could crack the codes in the damn phone.

Instead we have the sorry spectacle that Apple makes the laws. Just like Apple gets its profits, hundreds of billions of them through the British Virgin Islands, to pay no tax whatsoever, Apple is supposed to keep on deciding what the law is.

It’s a matter of knowing what dominates: the law of We The People, with its equality of taxation, or the law of Them The Plutocrats, with the principle that Plutocrats decide what the law is.

Instead, civilization made laws in accordance with ethology, where all human beings are equal. Civilization arose from force, and so did the imposition of morality, which is not viable, without.

Don’t ask Obama, he is a lost little boy, in a land of big Plutos roaming, who are everything, whereas he is not much, and he needs to love them, should he want a job, next year.

The more sinister, and deeper level of analysis, of course, is that the USA’s plutocracy profited immensely from the weakening of European democracies in the Twentieth Century. Thus, cynics will argue, the morally lazy Obama is actually in the tradition of the most efficient American patriots: paying lip service to the morally correct, while implementing the dirtiest. But then, of course, most European leaders are accomplices to that… A curiosity explained by the nature of global plutocracy, and its Anglo-Saxon headquarters (including Bermuda, the British Virgin Islands, etc.) Several European leaders were partners at Goldman Sachs, and, one would gather, are still partners with Goldman Sachs. That may explain why the leaders of Goldman Sachs were not arrested for cooking the books in Greece.

What is most interesting in all this, is that common people are starting to notice that something is askew: most Americans think the country is “heading in the wrong direction”…

Patrice Ayme’

HAPPINESS A DUTY, Good & Smart

Forget Sisyphus’ Dreary Myth, Embrace The Happiness Strategy:

Far from being a sin, could happiness be not just fun, but a duty? I will propose that happiness is, indeed, a duty. Happiness is both a cerebral and social necessity. Let’s start with its social link.

When an animal suffers, or at least, when an animal is not happy, it is likely that it is either under aggression, and, or, needs to get into some significant action (taking some risk to go somewhere unusual, even if that animal is only an herbivore).

In either case, action, and, a fortiori, suffering put the animal, human or not, into an aggressive neurohormonal state, or cocktail of aggressive states (notice in passing that it is not always a bad thing: action, or even suffering, are often needed for everybody’s good!). Thus, someone’s unhappiness often ends up as somebody’s else suffering. Unhappiness is not just immoral, and asocial, unhappiness starts a chain reaction of unhappiness.

No Laugh, No Love, Nor Mind In Full

In human life, suffering is ubiquitous, unavoidable: born in pain, die in pain, with quite a bit of pain, Sturm und Angst, aging and degeneracy in between. So suffering always stands at the ready. Ready to help us not to settle too hopelessly into routine. Suffering, or the threat thereof, is always ready to enrich our minds, be it only with appendicitis, or a broken ankle, we don’t need to encourage it too much.

Happiness, though, precisely because of the ubiquitousness of suffering, is more tricky: it requires more of our enthusiastic cooperation, and encouragement. Happiness calls onto creativity to exist, and overwhelm the pain out there. Not by eschewing the world, as monks and Buddhists propose, but by engaging it enough, to bring up the neurohormones of happiness (Endo cannabinoids, Dopamine, Oxytocin, Endorphin, GABA, Serotonin, Adrenaline, Nitrogen Oxide, “laughing gas“, etc.).

Happiness cannot tolerate too much moderation (consider the Adrenaline above, a chemical known to make a dead heart jump into action, or Dopamine, which cocaine, methamphetamines, boost, to create effect).

Moderation is debilitating, especially in large quantities. Happiness instead embraces immoderately the best aspects that life has to offer, and run away with them. (Creation, in particular necessitates to run away; as our society tries to run away from the encroachment of robots and plutocrats, creation will be needed ever more. Socially good creation is entangled with happiness, while unhappiness is entangled with war hormones and neural patterns and organs.)

But what of the other cerebral consequences of happiness? Happiness is a facilitator of survival. Epidemiological statistics show this.

Wisdom is, first of all, about being as smart in one’s behavior, as one can be, given the circumstances. An example is the six passengers in the Thalys train who just fought the heavily armed terrorist. They acted wisely, and, in this case, it meant that they acted decisively, fiercely, and with maximum violence: first two Frenchmen engaged the fanatic in combat, as it came out of the toilet. A Franco-American professor in his fifties, grabbed the AK 47 automatic machine gun, and ran away with it, and got shot through his entire left side for his trouble. Then the two U.S. servicemen, helped by another American, and a Brit followed, while the terrorist’s two guns jammed. The latter four heroes already got the Legion of Honor. As the 62 year old Brit pointed out, jumping on the terrorist, and hitting his head and choking him until he got unconscious, was the wise thing to do. Sometimes, extreme physical violence is the right activity to bring survival. This is a truism. Yet, in that case, happy meant punchy.

But what does the will to survival in the individual or the society have to do with? Happiness. Who wants to defend a sad life?

Salvador Dali noticed that the Nazis’ will to start a world war had to do with the desire to lose it. I agree. It was not just hatred, cupidity, and the stampeding of the herd, which characterized Nazism. Germans had long been unhappy, and had long built a cultural anthropology of unhappiness (thanks to the fascist and racist political system which ruled them, much of it straight from Eighteenth Century hyper-militaristic dictatorial Prussia and its ingrained hatred against Jews and Poles). German unhappiness brought forth the cultivation of a war-like society (a poisonous, but delicious fruit of which is higher efficiency).

Something striking about the four Anglo-Saxon heroes of the train above, is that they all seem happy in life. This is reflected by the inner strength they exhibited after the harrowing circumstances they had been through.

Without that inner happiness, the four heroes would have valued their lives less, thus valued life in general less, hence would have been less keen to defend theirs, and other people’s, lives (remember the connection of happiness with Adrenaline).

Happiness is not just a luxury, a reward, it’s a safety, even a security. not just for the individual, but for the community at large.

Socrates said the unexamined life was not worth living. Indeed, it never was, and never will. For a human being, to live is to examine. But with what is life examined? Intelligence. And the better examination is rendered possible only by greater intelligence. And what brings maximum intelligence? Experiencing the world in full.

The Romans knew this well. Even in their baths, they had a frigidarium, an ice-cold bath. And a caldarium, a very hot bath. Life, even at the baths, was not just all about the tepidarium, the tepid bath.

Sadness, unhappiness, or the tepidarium, a tepid life, only brings the input of just part of the world. Thus they make minds which are only partial (for example, only war-like). Such half minds are legions. Hitler was typical: more or less a quasi orphan, failed artist, bum, and then a shell-shocked, gazed soldier, his experience from the world, lots of unhappiness, and war, was all what his mind was made from (Stalin, or Lenin had somewhat similar war-like, dejected, unhappy backgrounds).

Sadness brings up the war-like instincts, hence the fascist reflex (to make one out of the many). Here is the answer Estienne de La Boétie was looking for, when he wondered why people accepted to live in servitude to an oligarchy. In Discours de la servitude volontaire ou le Contr’un (Discourse on Voluntary Servitude, or the Anti-Dictator), La Boétie asserted that tyrants had power because people granted it to them. I have proposed a mechanism to explain why it is so. And lack of happiness is central to it.

Happiness brings other aspects to the interaction with the world, which sadness can never reveal. Happy aspects, unhappiness alone never brings. Happiness allows to learn more form the world, it makes the mind in full.

The happy mind is a mind in full.

In a nuclear chain reaction, each nuclear fission, which is caused by a neutron’s impact, in turn creates, in the average, more than one neutron, which strike other nuclei, etc. Nobel Laureate Irene Curie discovered the chain reaction in the particular case of Uranium 235 in 1937 (although many sexist males preferred to attribute the discovery to Otto Hahn, who got the Nobel for it, it’s clearly Irene who taught Otto, through years of heated epistolary exchanges).

Unhappiness has a much more devastating amplification potential than its equivalent with radionuclides. Indeed an unhappy human being can make many other human beings suffer. Not just a couple. This is all the more true in a representative democracy, that is, an oligarchy. After he was elected Chancellor in January 1933, the pathologically unhappy Adolf Hitler was in good position to make hundreds of millions suffer, and not just his niece (who escaped through suicide, with her uncle’s gun).

If happiness is so important socially and for the blossoming of the individual mind, should not it be viewed as more than a right, but even as a moral duty?

The preceding was inspired by the neurohormonal theory of the mind, according to which neurohormonal states do not just characterize the mind, but are determined, with immense inertia, by exterior and inner circumstances. Given the neurohormonal theory of mind, it’s rather self-obvious that happiness is a duty. Without it, it is not that obvious. It’s probably why the notion, that happiness is a moral duty, not just for kicks, seems to have been ignored by the main philosophical ideologies.

Happiness is right in all ways. It even enables to learn. How? The road to truth is paved with errors, painfully learned. Only happiness makes us willing to embrace errors with an open mind. And wish for more, more errors, as we wish to learn more, learning to happily bounce from pains and disappointments to some new, unexpected, more exciting, freshly instructive errors.

No pain, no gain, yet, no happy, no bouncy. If one wants further gains, one has to accept further pain, and that’s possible only with a sunny, happy disposition. To learn ever more, means to be able to suffer pains gladly, ready to bring some more. Happiness is not just about preferring fun to dread, or about blocking reprisals of hatred against doom and gloom. Happiness is an epistemological need.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Why KILLING BEAUTY Makes SENSE

The Dark Side of humanity makes sense. As long as this terrible truth is covered up, it will fester, promoting the deepest infections, as it does. The Dark is not just obscure, vicious, cruel: ignoring it prevents the Enlightenment to proceed further.

Thanks to taxpayer money, a giant Ariane V rocket launched the Rosetta Mission to a comet, more than ten years ago. In France plutocrats pay taxes at several times the rate of the (lightly taxed plutocrats of the) USA. Taxes make a mission such as Rosetta and its lander Philae, possible (French experiments are also at the core of the present and future NASA Mars landers).

Science feeds the Enlightenment, with hard facts, so does history. History, inasmuch as the part of it consisting of hard facts, is part of science, and also feeds the Enlightenment.

Hunting, torturing & killing Give Many Of Us Meaning

[Assyrian Lion Experiencing Severe Technical Difficulties, 27 Centuries Ago.]

Now the lander Philae, busy in a hole somewhere on the complicated ground of the comet, where it gets sun occasionally, feeding its batteries, has found complex organic materials on the surface. Such complex compounds eventually turned into living organisms here on Earth. Philae found that they must have existed in much of the early solar system. This raises new hopes of finding life beyond our planet. Indeed, several planetary bodies (Europa, Ganymede, Enceladus, etc.) harbor liquid water. It seems that Europa’s ocean is more massive than Earth’s. Ganymede’s ocean seems to be most of the Solar System’s water (with a depth of 800 kms). The recent discovery of fishes (!) 850 kilometers from the open sea (and the sun!) under an Antarctica iceshelf, below the freezing point of sweet water, indicates that Earth’s life could be adapted to Jupiter’s satellites.

After philosophers on some obscure site, censored me for allegedly veering off a comment presenting a story hinging on a story about stories, and a Malaysian Airlines jet debris was found at the (French) Reunion Island, having also severely veered off course, being at Reunion, 180 degrees from its original destination China, comic relief is in order.

Is amusement provided by plutocrats who shower themselves in public, to advertise that they give what’s for them pennies for research on Charcot’s disease (Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis)? Is it funny that plutocrats believe we are so dumb that clowning around will enable them to disguise themselves into the innocuous clowns whom they are the exact opposite of? Who wants to heavily tax innocuous clowns? Bill Gates and Mr. Z from Facebook correctly believe no one will. So they monkey around, hoping we will do the same. It deeply evil to depict the Gates of Hell as fun and games.

What we need to do with plutocrats is to eliminate them all together, with harrowing taxation. Until they succumb, and disappear as a species. Then research in ALS, biology and medicine, could be funded appropriately. Only then. Moreover, we will also have enough money to send missions searching for life to Europa and Enceladus (the technology exists: a probe flying through an Enceladus geyser, or the attending ring, would find proof of life readily). With a tiny part of the money we will have left, we can go watch real circuses.

Giant money makes for one gigantically nasty world. Big money is simply insufferable.

Money is power, power on other people, giant money is giant power on other people. Giant power on other people is intrinsically inhuman (it’s not anticipated by ten million years of evolving human ethology).

Giant power by people on other people is intrinsically diabolical. Diabolical, in the divine sense. Giant power on other people, such as Bill Gates imposing on us his pseudo-clownish behavior, provides the Dark Side with an aspect which evolution itself did not anticipate, so that there is a super-stitious character to it: something which stands above reality, as anticipated by evolution, since before there was T-Rex, and it tore its prey in half.

The Dark Side reaches all over. Including “care”.

Big money brought us Obamacare. Obamacare was going to be the way the “free” market buys and sells us to perfect health care, through “consumers’ choices”. Obamacare was enthusiastically promoted by the likes of Paul Krugman. In the latest news, health care in the USA became 5.5% more expensive in 2014 (whereas incomes did not perk up). Obamacare was not what it seemed. Lies everywhere, not just to manipulate power, but as the fluttering flags, representing the rule of that power, for all to see.

***

I KILL, THEREFORE I AM:

So this rich American dentist went to Africa, offered the natives $50,000, and killed the most famous lion in the local national park. Excuse me, we are Americans, and we believe in drone philosophy: we kill whoever, whatever we want, because we can. Anything can be bought, remember? Just as Bill Gates and Facebook’s Mr. Z keep their taxes low, by taking showers in public.  All over, things are not what they look.

So why did this dentist kill this beautiful lion? Some claim it’s senseless. Senseless makes for a good insult, because it’s polite enough. However, “senseless” is a non sequitur. If one really wants to penetrate the mind of one’s opponent, and his error, one has to find in which sense, he makes sense (to his, or her, self).

It makes no sense to claim there is no sense to what so many people (hunters, warriors, plutocrats) feel makes sense. Figuring out how it makes sense, to them, far from being senseless, aggravates their case. Because it allows us to condemn, not just their acts, but also the systems of thought, moods, and minds, which brought these errors.

The lion was killed because it was beautiful and powerful. And not just that. Cecil the Lion was tortured, so that his power would be debased, over many hours. Shot first with a powerful modern bow, the lion was tracked down for 40 hours, and one can imagine Walter the dentist drinking martinis, chuckling on the lion’s suffering. Because Walter the dentist kills animals, has killed many animals, with bow and arrows. Not just to give animals a chance to survive, but, obviously, to give them a chance, and to give him the chance, to experience torture. Whereas a rifle shot tends to be very incapacitating, be it only from blood loss, old Assyrian, or Persian iconography represents lions full of arrows, and still fierce (see above). In the Wild West white men found themselves so full of arrows they looked like porcupines, and still, they were not dead. That brought more respect to Native Americans. (Although a modern bow can launch an arrow with some much force that it can go through a Polar Bear harassed by dogs, killing it in three seconds… This situation does not apply to a lion, which is much faster and limber, hence a poor target.)

A major motivation for human beings is to kill, maim, torture, oppress and subjugate. Forgetting that major fact, is forgetting human nature. Gates and Facebook’s Mr. Z have that major motivation, nearly all plutocrats have it, and, when he feeds us with lies about Obamacare, Paul Krugman has it, in his own meek, but highly influential way.

A few days ago, I surprised a lynx in the Alps (I know when and where to look for predators). I was very surprised by its color (reddish), and its enormous size. It fled for his life (we were only 3 meters apart). He was really fast, in the forest full of trees, with trunks of all sizes close to each other… And in total silence (differently from any other animal that size). Here I was, putting to flight an animal capable of slashing open the throat of a red deer, three times my weight, and with giant antlers.

Lynxes are known not to attack humans, even when their cubs are approached.

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TERRORISM FOSTERED HUMANITY:

Human beings evolved because not only they could hunt, and eat meat, but because they could terrorize their main opponents, the wild, ferocious predators. Torturing them helped. Bushmen, in South Africa could hunt a large animal, such as a giraffe, with poisoned arrows, chasing it down, once wounded, over an entire week.

Thus, torturing and killing are deep components of the human mind. They were key to survival. I have walked towards a lion pride resting below a tree, in Africa, as a child. Slowly. Just as slowly, the lionesses rose, and walked away. The king and queens of the jungle know well, most of the time, that human beings are like gods: they are better left alone, their parents taught them that, early on.

Now that we know this, that large predators can be instilled respect for human beings, we can take it into account, and reintroduce megafauna. Exerting surveillance for the most dangerous cases.

That lion killing dentist is a coward. Not a real player. Assassinating wildlife with over-powerful weapons  is not getting reacquainted with the human condition. Were it the latter, he would accept not just to hunt, but to be hunted. Let him approach lions with bare hands (I did this more than once, as a child, in the wild). Instead of armed with a hyper-powerful bow with a laser range finder. Hunting the cowardly dentist ought to help him get in touch with full human ethology. So those condemning him all over the Internet are helping him become a real man.

Paying $50,000 to kill a well-known, half-tamed lion equipped with GPS, is not a way to exhibit respect for the biosphere. Yet, one should not forget that wild mega fauna will not survive if it is NOT worth the cost it inflicts, in physical damage and terror.

Lions (and other ferocious beasts: panthers, elephants, hippos, buffaloes, warthogs, etc.) are dangerous, and, themselves exert terror deliberately (when they do not outright kill people). When I lived in Africa, the natives feared and wanted to get rid of leopards (once in India, a particular leopard killed more than 200 people). Equipping leopards with GPS hooked to computers and security is the future. Clearly such systems (already used in Alberta, Canada, with grizzlies) are expensive in equipment and trained rangers.

As such an activity provides with the basics of hunting, just as fishing and releasing fish, it can satisfy the Dark Side, and make it serve the goodness of a preserved biosphere. But not just this. Exploiting animals is all right, if it allows them to survive as species, and ecosystems.

For dangerous predators, and other ferocious beasts to survive, they have to provide people with some other things dearer to them than life itself. That is why it was a mistake to destroy (as was just done in New York), tons of elephant ivory. Elephants ought to be harvested for ivory: then they will survive, because they will have economic utility (hence pay for their upkeep… in the wild). Same for rhinos: cut their horns, and sell them, under a government mandated program.

Otherwise, keep on contemplating the most massive genocide in 65 million years.

Morality’s essence? Morality is what worked before, in a sustainable fashion. But, as the world quickly mutates, what worked before cannot work any longer. Let’s adapt our morality. Don’t deny that the Dark Side existed. Don’t pretend that the Dark Side can be made to disappear by wishful thinking alone. Instead, ask what the Dark Side can do for us… that nothing else can replace. (To help focus here, contemplate the young dictator of North Korea, who, not only let his family members be eaten by dogs, but has threatened the USA with nuclear strikes, while working feverishly to make that possible, in spite of UN sanctions.)

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HARVEST & HARNESS THE DARK SIDE IF ENLIGHTENMENT YOU SEARCH:

Some will whine that this harnessing of the Dark Side is precisely what the “Free Market Theory“, all too often simply a disguise for blossoming plutocracy, claimed one ought to do, while bankers and plutophiles called it the “Invisible Hand“. However, not so. Plutocracy is a mix of the Dark Side, and the generalized fascism which civilization enables, with the potential of concentrating enormous power in a few hands. It is an enemy of intelligence, as it reduces many minds to just one, or a few.

Thus plutocracy is my enemy, and I put some effort in fighting it, because my Dark Side wants to devour it. Revolutions occur when enough denizens of We The People, want to destroy the plutocrats who rule over them.

Contrarily to what the ill-fated John Lennon hypocritically recommended, Revolutions are good, precisely because they destroy those super-predators known as plutocrats, aristocrats, theocrats, pirates, nobles, mandarins, generals, ayatollahs, bishops and the organizations which foster them, when their rule has become an insufferable imposition of their power, or those they serve.

Mao in 1959, in a secret report, revealed much later: it’s better to let half the population die, so that they other half gets plenty. The Dark Side, fully abominable. However this “Great Leap Forward” worked, as Mao had predicted it. Mao had said that great efforts then would bring “a thousand years of happiness“. And the most troubling part is that Mao’s plan worked: China leaped over India, and spectacularly far out over many other countries. The cleaned slate Mao’s unleashing of the Dark Side created obviously helped.

Just like more usage of the Dark Side helps keep the USA on the straighter and narrower, relative to more placid Europe.

Yet, it’s not just justice, and goodness which judge what is insufferable, but, also, the Dark Side itself. And there is more. Voltaire said that we ought to crush infamy. Yet it’s ultimately anger, which gets us into action, which makes us move, which provides with. Thus, the Dark Side judges, and also motivates.

We are mental landscapes of contrast, we need the Dark, be it just to define the Light. Fighting for the latter, means recognizing the former. Our beautiful species can thrive, as long as it respects the laws, be they only the laws of physics (that is not the case now, with multiple attacks we are visiting on the biosphere). To remind us of that, anything goes. And that cruelty, is a good thing, relative to the alternative.

So hunt lions. But only bad lions. Only with the worst predators can destroyed using all and any means the Dark Side puts at our command. The Dark Side, the useful and friendly Dark Side, feels that better case can be made for the survival of the smallpox virus, than for the blossoming of plutocracy. And stands ready to provide us with the strength we need.

And what about the deliberate killing of beauty, in all this? To overcome beauty is an exciting, and rather amusing challenge, for the Dark Side. If one can learn to enjoy killing beauty, one’s Dark Side is ready to take out much more than that. Its power grows. The more beautiful the lion, the more tempting to kill it, the more instructive, for those who cultivate the parts of the brain most keen, and apt, to handle adversity.

The Dark Side is strong and all-devouring. Beauty, just an appetizer. As Rabelais put it in 1534, in Gargantua (chap.5, line 108): “L’appétit vient en mangeant.”

Patrice Ayme’