We Are Lions

I have walked to lions resting below trees in the shade, in the wild, in Africa, as a child. When healthy, lions consider such a situation, and out of caution and careful respect for humans, rise up to the occasion… and walk away. The exhibition of respect has to be mutual for this to work well. One never forgets half a dozen lionesses slowly rising and ambling away as disarmed human child approaches.

Lions used to be ubiquitous, during millions of years of human evolution in the savannah park, because lions live off big game but also smaller game, all the way down to rabbits. So lions influenced a lot of what became human psychobiology.

However, during the neolithic, the last 15,000 years or so, lions were replaced by massive quantities of human cattle and sheep, changing the composition of the atmosphere, with an abundance of methane which may have prevented serious planetary cooling.

Yet, lions stayed a symbol of … human power…. Because humans dominated lions, and lions had to be dominated, for life to get to space. Now we have to care for lions directly, and be grateful.

Because, deep down inside, we humans, to subdue lions as we had to, we became ourselves, to some extent, lions...

Coat of arms of Edward III, king of England, grandson of the iron king of France Philipp IV Le Bel… and thus Edward III was king of France, all the sons of Philipp The Fair, and his other grandson, having died in quick succession, in the real game of thrones... Some of them may have been helped by poison thanks to the famous Countess of Artois who had stolen that County from her even more formidable nephew who in turn incited Edward III to go get his due, the kingdom of France (so that he himself could recover his own County; his habit of leading battle in a scarlet outfit may have led to his death on the battlefield)… In any case this Franco-French quarrel,, the “100 year war” started around 1330 CE and lasted until 1815…

The three lions represent England, Normandy and Aquitania. The flowers of Lys represent the kingdom of France (actually technically an empire from the Tenth Century partition) . All over Europe, lions represented power. European lions went extinct less than 24 centuries ago…

Patrice Ayme

Outlaw Lobbyists

Abstract: Access to those with power in so-called “democracies” should be made completely transparent, thus completely recorded, and should be severely limited, both quantitatively and qualitatively. In particular professional lobbying should be assimilated to corruption and outlawed. 

***

Tyranosopher: Dozens of thousands of professional corrupters fester in Washington and Brussels. More of these professional corrupters are found in various capitals, including those of US states. They are called lobbyists. Considering the power of modern civilization, they have arguably more potential for nefariousness than the worst tyrants of preceding centuries. 

***

Simplicia: “But lobbyists are needed! This is how representative government works!”

Tyranosopher: You mean representative government is corrupt?

Simplicia: Let me educate you. Representative government consists in having a few individuals who are elected decide everything. To do that, they need to know what is going on. They can’t be omniscient like you. This education is provided by lobbyists.

Tyranosopher: You seem to say that advocacy is necessary for representative democracy to work.

Simplicia: Yes, advocacy, call it that way if you like, we need advocacy. Can’t have representativity without advocacy.

Tyranosopher: So a lobbyist comes and offers a 500 dollar lunch to a representative, and then advocates for a special cause, company or country… With the perspective of a juicy consultantship for the nephew of said representative, and you call that democracy?

Simplicia: Well that’s what happens when one delegates power to elected representatives. People decided to delegate the thinking to the selected few.

Tyranosopher: This practice, of getting steered by professional lobbyists violates pillars of democracy such as isegoria and parrhesia.

Simplicia: Please keep on using big Greek words nobody knows.

Tyranosopher: It’s worse than that: nobody knows the concepts these words represent. Isegoria says that everybody has an equal right to address the assembly in an equal way. Lobbyism violates that, because lobbying provides privileged access.

Simplicia: And what’s parrhesia?

Tyranosopher: Being able to speak frankly… not only freedom of speech, but the obligation to speak the truth for the common good, even at personal risk. One can’t do it in the censorship atmosphere that the present representative government and their social networks lackeys have fostered.   

Simplicia: So what do you suggest, oh great know-it-all?

Tyranosopher: To pass legislation outlawing lobbying as it exists today, to wit:

1. All and any interaction between the public and a representative or significant other of a representative must be recorded. Representatives could be equipped with body cams, like the police and for similar but even more important reasons.
2.  All these interactions, once recorded, should be publicly available through Internet searches. 
3. Representatives and their significant others should not get any compensation from any cause, nation, region or industry that was addressed in legislation the representative worked on… for a period of twenty years. 
4. Advocates’ gifts to representatives should be recorded in the greatest detail and limited to market rates; no 500 dollar lunch, but a 15 dollar hamburger, max.
5. Advocates’ causes should be topologically located and a given cause should be limited in access, and, within a cause the individuals or legal persons advocating said cause ought also to be limited in number and lengths of contacts.

[Cartoon from 1905…]

***

***

Simplicia: Great. And what got you so excited?

Tyranosopher: There is an ongoing spectacular scandal in the European Parliament. A Vice President of the European Parliament found herself arrested and imprisoned. 600,000 Euros in banknotes were found in her apartment, she couldn’t explain where they came from. Some insisted that the cash had to do with her advocacy of Qatar’s Human Rights progress. 

Simplicia: On 31 January 2019, the EU Parliament adopted binding rules on lobby transparency. The Parliament stipulated that ‘rapporteurs, shadow rapporteurs or committee chairs shall, for each report, publish online all scheduled meetings with interest representatives falling under the scope of the Transparency Register’-database of the EU.

Tyranosopher: Notice the “scheduled meeting” stipulation: parties, lunch and golf are not included. I propose to include them.

Simplicia: In the USA, the corruption is even greater, but lawful.

Tyranosopher: Indeed, Clinton and Obama cashed in big time on their presidencies. Many US politicians made fortunes of the order of dozens of millions of dollars, or more, during their political tenure. But this is not the worst.

Simplicia: What’s worse?

Tyranospher: Whatever the shortcomings of US politicians, the US became more powerful. However in Europe lobbying has made Europe weaker. And ravaged ecology and the climate.

Simplicia: Examples?

Tyranospher: Brexit was influenced by the enemies of Europe. Putin in particular. Russian oligarchs established in Europe are a powerful lobby. Another powerful lobby was the fossil fuels/Kremlin lobby which empowered the pseudo ecologists in Europe. They campaigned against nuclear power, and against Western European gas… Thus making Putin stronger, as planned. 

In France in 1999, a secret alliance between the ecologists (as I said, influenced by Moscow) and the French socialists, agreed to destroy French nuclear power and even French research in new, safer, better nuclear power (this is not nothing: nuclear research started in France in 1938; France inaugurated new forms of nuclear power in the following 84 years). Ultimately, the long lobbying arm of the Kremlin made the West addicted to him and stalled research in new technology which the planet needs (but Russia is OK with global heating).

Simplicia: Speaking of lobbyists, what about Tik Tok?

Tyranosopher: Tik Tok is an operation of cretinization of youth operated in the West by the Chinese dictatorship, In China Tik Tok is limited to 40 minutes a day, and below the age of 14, it shows only educative and scientific videos. Polls have shown young Chinese want to become astronauts and young western poultry wants to become Tik Tok influencers… Not knowing they would be controlled by algorythms from a foreign, anti-democratic power.

Simplicia: So Tik Tok is a form of lobbying?

Tyranosopher: Tik Tok is efficient lobbying for the Chinese dictatorship. It should be unlawful.Tik Tok promotes Beijing supremacy by stupidifying the rest. The algorithms are controlled by the dictatorship. Those algorithms promote cats and other small brained creatures, and, in general, extreme stupidification.

Democracy under foreign dictatorial influence is not democracy, but addiction and submission.

Patrice Ayme

***

Note: Europeans have long assumed that excessive lobbying is only an American problem. But over the past 15 years Brussels has become apparently the world’s first capital of the corrupt arts even ahead of Washington, DC! In Brussels 25,000 lobbyists have come forward voluntarily and registered themselves. Some say there are 40,000 lobbyists in Brussels. The official 25,000 have a combined annual budget conservatively estimated at more than €3bn ($3.6bn) seek to influence EU policy. Approximately 7,500 of them are accredited with the European Parliament, which means they are regularly able to meet with parliamentarians. Berlin is now reckoned to host up to 7,000 lobbyists with over €1bn to throw around every year.

Both cities have become infested with new arrivals who are pushier and use more sophisticated techniques than old-fashioned guilds such as the Federation of German Industry or BusinessEurope. Weak rules in both places are not designed to cope with the explosion of activity….

Washington has only around 12,000 official lobbyists, but that’s a wild underestimate… In the US, much of higher social life is all about lobbying…

Quantum Inspired Meta Strategy On Decision Making

Si vis optimum exitum, circumspice ante confligendum:

When in doubt, at first contact with an unknown, and some decision have to be taken, metastrategies offer advice. “If ain’t broke, don’t fix it!” is an example of a metastrategy in the art of deciding.

I will present a new metastrategy, which I have long used. It is inspired by Quantum Physics, how an electron comes out of the chlorophyll molecule. It does not always work: once the metastrategy failed spectacularly in the Alps, as I went up the wrong valley, the other side of which was blocked by impassable cliffs… but generally it works). For the background, see Note [1].

When one is confronted to a cliff, going up or down, and one has to find a way… one must observe the situation, first of all. And observe it carefully, because, after all, the end of everything is close at hand, should one decide poorly. The result of careful observation, from one point of view, is, typically, that a way seems to present itself. Call it W1. One then pushes things a bit further to confirm W1 seems to work, and one can evaluate the risk associated with W1, call it R1.

At that point, the most natural strategy seems to be to engage on W1: one has seen a way, so one engages in it. This is exactly what I would do if time was of the essence because some deterioration of conditions is expected within a short time (storm, nightfall, charging or lurking wild beast(s), etc…)

But, if I have time, going down W1, taking evaluated risk R1, the first apparent path which presents itself, is not what I do.

Instead, I look further, by moving and changing points of view and try to find another way some distance away, W2. If W2 looks promising, I then engage in W2. Doing so, I am forced to evaluate the risk associated to W2, R2. If I find that R2 is much greater than R1, I go back to W1 and its R1. But, if R2 turns out to be comparable to R1, I proceed along W2.

This non-intuitive strategy has several advantages:

First, as I go down (or up!) W2, I have W1 as a back-up. If I had gone down W1 to start with, I would not have a back-up, so no choice in case the going gets too tough. 

Second, a broader picture of the cliff has been discovered than if I had gone down (or up!) W1 alone… The second choice method boosts knowledge, relative to seizing the first path which offers itself, from the first point of view.. 

This method, by the way, is reminiscent of the integration along all possible paths of Quantum Physics. And it is probably how I derived the method! As the omniscient aspect of Quantum Physics is never far from my mind (this is one of the main riddles that the subquantal physics known as SQPR explains)

This method is worth an adage, Horace style: If you want the best outcome, look around before engaging

Si vous voulez le meilleur résultat, regardez autour de vous avant de vous engager

As Horace could have put it, had he thought of it: Si vis optimum exitum, circumspice ante confligendum

A weaker variant: Si vis optima solutio, circumspice ante confligendum

The consequences for biggest picture policies are considerable.

Patrice Ayme

When passing through such terrain from above (which I did, August 2022), one needs innovative decision making. Besides gravity, slippery ground, rockfall, storms, lions, bears, rattlers and various stinging insects, many of them lethal, have to be considered… Pinecrest cliffs, north of Yosemite Nat. Park, California.

Note [1], background: I am a mountain climber, and mountain climbing can require multi-day approaches. So doing, I ended, long ago, as a mountain runner, long before the sport was officially born. Thus I partly evolved into a sort of “ranger” (to revive the original meaning of the term)…. This sort of vacation is total, brutal, and excellent for those who live too much in the clouds (as Aristophanes, Socrates’ critic, had it in “The Birds” when he made fun of the “thinkery“). I cross mountain ranges off the beaten path, and cross country mountain exploration vacate the mind from anything else but the raw reality of nature. That and swimming through turbulent seas torn by swift currents.

Solo adventures in an unknown space: I have immersed in nature that way on the major continents: Africa, Eurasia and the Americas. Self-observing, I noticed that I use a peculiar strategy when in doubt about where to go, especially when crossing cliff bands. That strategy can, and should be, generalized for other decision making. It is basically a strategy to mitigate decision making itlself and make it more knowledgeable. The method can be extended all over. I do not know if someone thought of it before (Descartes himself had his “method”… I present one that he may not have thought of…)

Better decision making is central to humanity’s survival… And should be practiced in politics. After all, the greatest advantage of democracy is better thinking, the fruit of debate. But debate itself is full of mental decisions. Decision making showing up in judgments are the atoms of debate. Better decision making leads to better thinking.

To Avert Nuclear War, Convene A Conference To Outlaw Military Use Of Civilian Nuclear Power

OUTLAWING ATTACKS ON NUCLEAR WILL MAKE NUCLEAR ATTACKS LESS LIKELY… From A Mass Psychology Effect…

Nuclear power is crucial as base power for a carbon free future. I explained that keeping fossil fuels as base energy is a trick to keep fossil fuels at 84% of total energy.

Nuclearizing electric power production would have required having four thousand (4,000) nuclear reactors, worldwide… instead of 400. 

Disappointingly, the percentage of electricity that comes from low-carbon sources today is almost unchanged from the mid-1980s. Throughout the early-2000s this low carbon share actually regressed, greatly because of the shutdown of nuclear reactors.. 

Yes, electric consumption is only 20% of total energy consumption… So going nuclear on electric would not have solved all. (We need more such as hydrogen for transportation!)

***

Nuclear can be made very safe, and non-polluting. The only deadly civil nuclear power accident was in Ukraine at Chernobyl, a type of reactor (graphite-gas), power (way too much) and construction without containment, which are all de facto illegal in the West. Yes, Chernobyl should never have been built. (Ukraine has the world’s highest production of electricity from nuclear reactors, a distant second behind France.) 

By comparison, fossil fuels kill around ten million people a year, and probably much more.

The Orcs of Putin have attacked nuclear installations in Ukraine, and transformed them into battlefield. That should be unlawful. It is also a way to inure us to Putin’s military use of nuclear energy… Something he already did by threatening to destroy humanity with nukes if we don’t let him destroy Ukraine.

*** 

Dams were attacked in World War Two, causing great damage and loss of life. Now a worldwide convention outlaws attacks on dams, and it has been, so far, respected in Ukraine, which has several giant dams. Mr. Putin has not suggested that he would destroy dams to get his way.

Trying to outlaw attacks on nuclear installations right away would indirectly heighten a worldwide healthy alarm against Mr. Putin’s nuclear ways. Mr. Putin has weaponized the largest nuclear power plant in Europe, by stationing heavy weapons there. Mr. Putin also implicitly threatened to use nuclear weapons to make his invasion of Ukraine work.

Thus calling for a worldwide conference to outlaw attacks on nuclear installations would make it less likely, from general indignation, and the possible loss of allies that it would entail, that Mr. Putin would dare to use nuclear weapons (as using nukes is generally worse than attacking nuclear installations).

Hence there is an excellent reason to rush an outlawing of nuclear attacks, as Mr. Putin’s effective defeat in Ukraine makes it ever more likely that he will use nukes on the battlefield.

Whereas the three nuclear armed democracies (US, UK, France) have refused to declare they would never ever use nuclear weapons first, they would certainly agree to not attack nuclear installations directly, so they would support such an approach. Nuclear power is an important way to mitigate the CO2 crisis…

Under Putin, the Russian military decided to adopt a doctrine of “escalate to de-escalate”, which includes using battlefield nuclear weapons… First usage of nuclear weapons, or attacks against nuclear installations is not explicitly unlawful. However attacks against dams are. 

The Russian military may detonate a few nukes against concentrations of Ukrainian troops (a good reason to avoid those)… Hoping that the democracies, terrified by nuclear war, would then just submit. Thus NATO should create an appropriate answer, not just hope that Putin will not go crazy (as it is clear Putin is not analyzing the situation clearly, this hope is inappropriate).

Patrice Ayme

Russian Tank camouflaged in front of Zapo nuclear reactors 1, 2, 3 and 4… August 4, 2022. Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), which Russian invaders are now threatening to blow up, contains 1,200 tonnes of nuclear fuel. If Russia decides to commit a terrorist attack, the nuclear disaster will affect the territories of both Russia and Ukraine.
…Says Zaporizhzhia Regional Military Administration Head Oleksandr Staruk…

Nazis Often Exhibited The Characteristics They Condemned: Not A Coincidence, But Sadomasochism. See Putin.

Intriguingly, many Nazis ressemble more the parodies of “Jews” that they depicted, condemned, rejected and despised… whereas often the “Jews” look like ordinary people. One reason for this is that many Western European Jews had ancestors who converted to Judaism, so their distant ethnic origins were not necessarily exclusively from the Middle East. 

This is true even for superman super Nazi Reinhard Heydrich… and certainly for Nazi photographer Herman Heukels. Dr. Goebbels, Hitler’s fanatical Nazi chief propagandists and successor, who killed  his 6 children, aged 4 to 12 years old… started to hate Jews after he was rejected by a Jewish girl. Goebbels also advocated the assassination of handicapped people… although he himself was so handicapped that the German army refused him for military service… And so on. Nazis seem to have been so full of hatred that they hated even themselves, and thus pretended to not be who they were, or looked like. Hitler asked himself whether the “Jews” were German… And deduced that they were not… Although Hitler was certainly not a German, as he was born and educated as an Austrian… And besides Hitler could not prove that he was not a “Jew” according to the Nazi definition of “Jew”, as one of his paternal grandmother was employed by a wealthy Jew, and got a child of unkown male parentage.

The most famous example of an “Aryan” baby was actually the picture of a… Jewish baby… which throned as the cover of a Nazi propaganda magazine (I have written an essay on this, years ago).

Nazism was then also an adventure in sadomasochism, rejection of reality and self-rejection, not just racial hatred… As seen in today’s war, that invasion of Ukraine officially motivated by claiming Ukrainian nationalists are Nazis…

Obviouly those massively engaging in “Nazi” behavior in Ukraine are those obsessed by Nazism in Ukraine, namely Putin and his orcs.

Sadomasochism is one concept. The sadist extolls pain, giving pain, but then receiving it belongs to the same universe… One doesn’t go without the other…

Patrice Ayme

Reference: Photos That Helped to Document the Holocaust Were Taken by a Nazi

Historians have relied on Herman Heukels’s pictures of Jewish persecution in World War II, but it’s not widely known that the Dutch photographer shot them as Nazi propaganda.

Herman Heukels looked more like the Jewish archetype which he condemned to extinction… than the pictures of Jews he himself took… The latter looked quite often like fully ordinary Europeans… This may be why the Nazis, ultimately did not use the pictures he made…

Perverse History, Perverse Civilization.

Civilizations, like people, have moods, and act accordingly. Kremlin Russia’s successfully vile and hyper violent history has brought us minds like Putin’s, vile, hyper violent, claiming there are only “sovereigns” and “colonies”.

In 2016, Putin asked students if they knew where Russia ended. A boy rose and stood:”Russia ends at the Behring Straight, Mr. President!” “Wrong,” replied Putin. Putin corrected the miscreant:”Russia never ends!” 

President Vladimir V. Putin views himself as carrying on the task of the Russian czars. Sprawling back in an armchair, spread like an octopus, basking in chuckling self-satisfaction, Mr. Putin started a televised meeting with young entrepreneurs in Moscow on Thursday June 9, 2022, by reflecting on Peter the Great’s 18th-century conquest of the Baltic coast, describing that land as rightfully Russian.

“He wasn’t taking anything away — he was returning it,” Mr. Putin said of that territory, before hinting that he was doing the same thing in his war in Ukraine. “He was returning it and strengthening it. Well, apparently, it has also fallen to us to return and to strengthen.” And he laughted. A scared old 5 feet 5 inch, anti-western, backward looking, regressive poisoning weasel, compares himself to the young and unafraid Peter the Great, a 6 feet 8 inch, forward looking, fanatically pro-western, forward-thinking progressive fighting to death the religious establishment and all old ways, who succeeded to change Russia from the past into the future.

The Baltic nations, then, are next to be “returned”. Thus, like Ukraine in Putin’s estimation, those Baltic nations are not nations at all, but confiscated Russian territories… Just like Ukraine, which Putin has insisted, is not a country, but a piece of Russia ruled by Nazis. According to Putin it seems as if Eurasia should have just one country, to which everything has to be “returned”.

That reasoning was rejected, even by Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin. That, arguably infernal, trio knew well that the Moscow led empire could survive only if the nations that the Czars had conquered were given a lot of autonomy. So Ukraine joined the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics as a “republic”… And, as a “republic” was one of the 40 founding members of the UN. 

Contrast this with Putin’s position, expressed June 9: “It’s impossible — do you understand? — impossible to build a fence around a country like Russia. And we do not intend to build that fence,” Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, were talking about an union of republics, thus recognizing a measure of democracy, individuality and autonomy. Putin is just talking about “Russia”. And “Russia” has “no fences”, it’s coming to a neighborhood near you. Putin: “Because there is no in-between, no intermediate state: either a country is sovereign, or it is a colony, no matter what the colonies are called.“

***

And what does “Russian” mean? In a nutshell, around 12 centuries ago, Novgorod hired Swedish warriors to rule itself, and those warlords promptly went down and conquered what became Ukraine, an exceptionally wealthy land, for agriculture and minerals. Rus was thus created, and then expanded eastward. However, by the 1200s, the centrifugal forces which had affected Novgorod 4 centuries earlier made themselves manifest again: Rus was too extended, too wealthy, too diverse… Unfortunately at that point of disunion, the invading Mongols show up, asking for submission, in the footsteps of their ancestors the Huns. 

***

Putin in presidential transcript, June 9, 2022: We visited the exhibition dedicated to the 350th birth anniversary of Peter the Great. Almost nothing has changed. It is a remarkable thing. You come to this realisation, this understanding.

Peter the Great waged the Great Northern War for 21 years. On the face of it, he was at war with Sweden taking something away from it… He was not taking away anything, he was returning. This is how it was. The areas around Lake Ladoga, where St Petersburg was founded. When he founded the new capital, none of the European countries recognised this territory as part of Russia; everyone recognised it as part of Sweden. However, from time immemorial, the Slavs lived there along with the Finno-Ugric peoples, and this territory was under Russia’s control. The same is true of the western direction, Narva and his first campaigns. Why would he go there? He was returning and reinforcing, that is what he was doing.

Clearly, it fell to our lot to return and reinforce as well. And if we operate on the premise that these basic values constitute the basis of our existence, we will certainly succeed in achieving our goals.

… Narva is in Estonia… I sent the following to the New York Times which had claimed the door was shutting with Russia, and it was sad. It was censored, showing, once again the complicity between new York oligarchy and Russian oligarchy:

Moscow’s autocratic run, launched with Ivan I “Moneybags” started with a cynical collaboration with the Golden (Mongol) Horde, as tax collector for all Russias. It was highly successful, creating the world’s largest empire, colonizing many nations and religions.

However, overall and in the fullness of time, democracy has proven more adept to create the civilization we need to exist. Now, though, tyrants can muster greater powers than ever before. And the planet has become very small: rockets can go around in an hour or so. A final confrontation looms, as Biden correctly pointed out, many times.

Just today Putin declared that Peter The Great was “returning” the Baltic nations to Russia in the 1700s, not conquering them… and that he, Putin, was doing the same. 

As many a tyrant through history, and Kremlin rulers for seven centuries, Putin is distracting his oppressed population with a foreign war which enables him to declare all his opponents, “traitors”, “Nazis”, “criminals”, etc. Nothing new here… Except for one thing Putin has been leveraging: nuclear weapons. This is the first time in history a tyrant can, and threatens to destroy the world, if he does not succeed to conquer. 

A sad moment, for sure. But also a moment that cannot be denied.

We are confronted to the choice of submitting to the will of one man, his vision of humanity, or utter destruction. It is crucial that this one man doesn’t get his way: other tyrants, starting with Xi, would follow his path. It is not a question of imposing democracy, but surviving this.

***

Putin wants to do the same as Peter: getting back what was Russian all along… Notice that, right now, Russia occupies Prussia, something even Peter the Great didn’t do.

How did Russians become the way they are? Because tyranny has ruled Russia, and Kremlin led tyranny has been so highly successful… as a tyranny and land gobbler The enormous physical size of Russia has created imperviousness to other influences, which have been kept at a distance. The mood created by the tyrant in Moscow ruled without a rival, or even an awareness. Russia’s enormous geography made it isolated, and propicious to intellectual and mental fascism. It was all so suffocating that Peter the Great, who wanted to modernize Russia, created a new capital far from Moscow and its Kremlin, a kind of fortress full of churches.

In the rest of Europe, the situation has been different: diversity ruled, very different ways of thinking and even emoting have been entangled. As Blaise Pascal put it in the 1600s: Vérité en deçà des Pyrénées, erreur au delà. Truth before the  Pyrénées, error beyond them.  When Pascal wrote this, France and Spain, separated by the  Pyrénées, were in the middle of a war which lasted more than 2 centuries, creating the Netherlands and finishing with the Duke of Anjou, Louis XIV’s second-eldest grandson, becoming Philip V of Spain in 1700. Louis XIV had ejected 10% of the population of France, the Protestants who kept on protesting at a distance, creating elites in other countries who hated French autocracy. That in turn caused the next monster war, the war of The Succession of Spain, which brought enormous losses of French territory, and immense misery, especially in France (although the grandson stayed in place, and the present king of Spain is a descendant…)

In non-Russian Europe, it has become impossible to be unaware of opposite points of view and how maddening the differences could get… About nothing much. The Franco-English war, the so-called “100 years war” which lasted nearly 5 centuries (1300s until 1815), originated as a civil war, French plutocrats against French plutocrats… They called themselves aristocrats, power of the best, but they were not good for the majority of the population.

Now Europeans, outside of Russia, understand that differences enrich, and otherwise do not matter that much, and one shouldn’t go to war about them. Indeed the price for not understanding Vive La Difference is atrocious wars. And their consequences (100 millions killed by the so-called Spanish flu of 1918)… At least differences do not matter between Europeans… and their cultural descendants… and, in some ways, ascendants, the Americans. I said ascendants, because Europe learned quite a few things from the Americas, not just tomatoes, potatoes, and rubber… But also the Nature God and various ecological, or martial ways. 

Russians also learned a lot, and maybe too much, fighting the Mongols, Tartars, Tatars, and other bellicose nomad nations. Nomads have to be bellicose, but, ultimately, once the nomads have been pushed away, aggressivity from a civilization becomes perverse.

It is traditional among the woke and other pseudo-progressives to criticize European imperialism… But careful studies show that the reality was more about empires of the weak proposing deals that the Natives could not refuse, either because they were dead from Euro-African pandemics, or because said deals were irresistible. This is what I have long believed and it is now found in an academic book  “Empires of the Weak: The Real Story of European Expansion and the Creation of the New World Order”.

Actually, one should consider that the greater degree of democracy of Europe facilitated directly (nicer power) and indirectly (ideological, scientific, technological) European domination.

Although some of these aspects also applied to Russia (for example Behring was a German officer employed by the Czar), the bottom line in Kremlin Russia stayed the mood set up by Prince Alexander Nevsky and his grandson Ivan Danilovich Kalita. The mood was not to stand for progressive principle and democracy, but instead for power at any cost. Alexander was installed as the Grand Prince of Vladimir (i.e., the supreme Russian ruler) in 1252… by the Mongols. Alexander, made previously Prince of Kyiv by the Mongols, faithfully supported Mongol rule within his domains. In 1259 Alexander led an army to the northern city of Novgorod, an independent republic (at the origin of Rus), and forced Novgorod to pay tribute it had previously refused to pay to the Golden Horde.

Some will say that Alexander had no choice, that the ends justified the means. Maybe or probably. But the fact remains that, with Russian civilization in balance, Nevsky and his grandson Ivan I collaborated with evil. A traditional mentality was founded, of reverence to an evil leader, often wholeheartedly supported by many Russian intellectuals. And that mood was made sacrosanct: Alexander Nevsky was canonized in 1557 CE. These observations have not escaped Ukrainians, and they are starting to remove statues of Alexander Nevsky and various famous “Ruscist” (Russian + fascist) writers.

The situation with imperial Russia is completely different, and deeply perverse from the rest of Europe, because aggression was used as a method of extermination, relentlessly, for centuries, against fellow MASTER CIVILIZATIONS (Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania, etc.).

As Putin put it on June 9 2022: ” I promise that I will try to respond to all your proposals and ideas. It is easier for me to do this than for you. I just give instructions; you need to come up with ideas, while I just need to listen to you and give instructions. (Laughter.)”

Return it all! It’s all mine! We Russians own all of this, Peter said so! I have no ideas, just instructions!

This is why the Kremlin dictatorship has to be crushed: the model of one smart idiot giving instructions to everybody, according to a perverse vision of history he erroneously claims to share with Peter the Great (who tortured and killed his one surviving son… one of many people Peter was very familiar with and had to kill in very torturous ways… Some of them he argued with as they were dying, broken by him)… has to be crushed. 

Maybe Peter had to do all this killing and fighting: surely he couldn’t let the Swedes won at Poltava… But Putin did not have to cause mayhem. Comparing himself with Peter the Great, a two meter tall giant, Putin, in his shortness of vision, forgets that Peter had many excuses, excuses which Putin does not have, and three centuries have extinguished the context in which Peter thrived… with a real Swedish invasion and before that, extremely obdurate Christian fanatics, the “Old Believers“, organizing conspiracies, plots, and coup after coup… who had to be broken at the wheel just so the country could live. Instead, Putin is allied to the present day version of the Old Believers…

With its gigantic territory and interesting civilization, Russia has a lot to offer… especially while the planet warms up. But, as it strays into nuclear plated fascism, democracy can’t make any quarters… Should we falter in our defense of democracy it would surely be our ride to hell!

It goes without saying that similar charges can be made against the English American colony’s descendant regime, for somewhat similar reasons. Many of our essays have adressed this.

Perversity brought domination of the beholders. But now this is not a sure thing anymore. Times have changed: they are more subtle. It is time to understand this, what role perversity played, and why, and thus how to transmogrify it.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The core of the present essay, found in italics above, was censored by the New York Times propaganda machine as a comment to an article on June 9, 2022, written by a Russian, who claimed it was so sad that the door was closing between the US and Russia. Never mind that it is Russia which is slamming the door to democracy, while Putin is playing Charlie Chaplin in the Great Dictator, with the twist of threatening to blow up the planet… It stays troubling that the newspaper of record in the USA keeps on rejecting isegoria and parrheisia…

One Way To Spot Selfish People… Essence Of Femininity Fosters Thought

One Way To Spot Selfish People… Essence Of Femininity Fosters ThoughtSome people are fascinated by the world, what’s beautiful, exciting, natural, intriguing… All centers of interest outside of their own condition: such individuals are intrinsically NOT self-centered. Selfishness implies self-centeredness. 

Reciprocally, people who bring back all of cognition, issues, interests, feelings to themselves are, by definition self-centered, attributing an exaggerated importance to themselves. Self-centeredness is a strong warning for selfishness. A navel is not all that exists, however rotund (Buddhism with its obsession with avoiding pain and navels, is fundamentally selfish, even more so than Christo-Islamism, with its eternal life…) 

Obvious mitigating exemptions are inexperienced youth, nostalgic, experienced seniors anxious to pass their cultural inheritance, etc… all of them more self-centered per necessity.

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XX = XY, the fabulous equation which denies l’éternel féminin, brings back the feminine condition, something found in every single cell of a female XX, down to nothingness. Talk about selfishness on the part of males who suppressed some testosterone for 12 months!

There is something worse: the denial of Vive La Difference! If femininity, and even femaleness can be synthetically produced, if it is just an ersatz, the very notion of different thinking is attacked…

Mephistopheles wants to steal Faust’s soul. Faust is saved from damnation by the prayers of Margaret. Faust concludes: the eternal feminine pulls us up: « l’éternel féminin nous élève » (« das Ewig-Weibliche zieht uns hinan »).

The idea that eternal femaleness pulled up human thinking was forged by aristocratic female thinkers in the courts d’amour [1].

Patrice Ayme 

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[1] Courtly love theory was developed in the castle life of four regions: Aquitaine, Provence, Champagne and ducal Burgundy, from around the time of the First Crusade (1099). The extremely liberated Eleanor of Aquitaine (1124–1204) brought ideals of courtly love from Aquitaine first to the court of France, then to England (she became queen-consort in each of these two realms in succession). Her daughter Marie, Countess of Champagne (1145–1198) brought courtly behavior to the Count of Champagne’s court. Courtly love found expression in the lyric poems written by troubadours, such as William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (1071–1126), one of the first troubadour poets. The “courts d’amour” managed and organized by women, studied in detail the theory of how to subjugate the violence (and harems!) of the old Frankish ways… This was the oldest feminism as an object of study, and a change of ways (although many an important Greek, such as Aspasia, or Roman, such as Augustus’ wife, or Agripina the Younger, and several Augusta, plus seven reigning queens of the Franks in the 6C and 7C, played an arguably even bigger role… 

 

Poets adopted the conceptology and terminology of feudalism, declaring themselves the vassal of the lady, etc…

Giant Blue Gum Tasmanian Eucalyptus climbng to the sun. A different sight: vive la difference! Appreciating XX brains… and XY brains, independently, gives us a better grip on the world, and thus a better appreciation, and further, deeper happiness…

EMOTIONAL IMPRINTING: Lies Fade Away, Emotions Stay

THAT’S HOW MODERN PROPAGANDA WORKS…

Why do so many believe the nuclear blackmailer, the tyrant Putin?

For the same reason as so many believe so many stupidities, all over.  

For the It is logic by innuendo, facts by fiction.

Truth has become a battlefield and civilization is not winning… because, ultimately, and basically, people reason emotionally. Ideas and facts, ultimately, are best remembered from the emotions they primarily suggest, and emotions are laid down by the so-called logic and alleged facts which get to the brain… chronologically first (this is well known, it’s called imprinting and was first studied rigorously by Konrad Lorenz who got the Nobel in medicine for it).

If the logic and facts turn out, in the fullness of time, have nothing to do with reality, it does not matter: the fake reality moves on, the false feelings, moods and emotions they induced stay behind.

This is not just brainwashing, it’s brain imprinting. Emotional imprinting. The key is not to present logic and facts emotionally contradicting fake logic and false facts. That’s why, in modern propaganda, the torrent of lies keeps on moving fast to ever more fantastic assertions, giving no time for careful considerations.

For example the assertion that all and any biolab can be weaponized is correct, and was made about biolabs in Ukraine… with the emotional inuendo that this was a huge emotional problem because of the implied laie that the US developed bio weapons in Ukraine… However, that a biolab, any biolab, can be weaponized does not mean it is a weapon (the same program from the US Department of defense which helped decommision Soviet biolabs in Ukraine operated in Russia…)

Any chemical plant, or dam can also be weaponized. But it’s not because it can be weaponized that it is a weapon. A truck can be weaponized, but it’s not a weapon.

Propagandists will leave half of the logic out, look really indignant, imprint the emotions of fear and outrage, and move on, before those lies can be dissected, leaving those negative emotions behind, as intended.

In the end, in the case of Putin, this pure product of the plutocratic system, just like Hitler, can present himself as its dedicated enemy, just as Hitler did before him… we have actually Hitler’s conversation with some of his subordinates where he reveals his disgust at having to play nice with foreign “plutocrats“, Hitler uses that exact word… because they made his Hitlerian adventure possible… In the case of Putin, it’s just as obvious, if not more, and yet, most of Putin admirers feel that this pure product of the World Economic Forum and Davos is its… dedicated enemy… because Putin was highly successful in imprinting that emotion.

So logic imprints emotions, and emotions are what’s left when one has forgotten the logic….

At fortiori if said logic is fake… Because what’s fake is harder to remember. Thus the very fact logic is fake facilitates imprinting by perversity… 

Patrice Ayme

Kyiv Under Bombing, March 2022. All the clouds one sees are actually smoke from Putin bombing. Thanks to enough Russians believing the lies of their tyrant whom they love dearly!

Mania Form Mafia

As Nietzsche said, folly is rare in the individual, but the rule in the collective. Why it is so is very instructive. I have  explained this: mania cement tribes together, and collective crime unifies best. That doesn’t mean the collective is always wrong. All learning is cultural, thus from a mass of people, thus massive. When an element of culture is erroneous enough, it will bring nefarious consequences… which unite those who believe and participate in that mania. Indeed nothing unites better than common criminality.

It is a fundamental chimp instinct. Then an entire group of chimps get together to go on the warpath, hunt, hurt or, and, kill other chimps, as a matter of territory, hence ecology.

Examples of commonly practiced mania are scapegoatism, another the religion of Abraham, religions with human sacrifices, all sorts of racisms and tribalisms, etc. The crime is not accidental, but unifying. Crimes against truth and common sense are most… common as they present the further advantage of reducing brain work..

Follies are not necessarily useless, far from it. Paradoxically, folly helps reason, by exploring all possibilities, and instills strife, thus it is adaptive to the species which rules the world. Folly suggests and cleanses, by creating the very excesses which identify all the possibilities and diminish the human ecological load. In particular insanity expands the logics to the max. (Yes, this is Erasmus stood on his head…)

The advantage of mass delusions is partly why insanity is rare in the individual but the rule in cultural sets (epochs, nations, religions, etc. Another reason, besides the extremely sophisticated one evoked above is the fact that criminal follies bind tribes best… And plutocracies can exploit these and unite the people that way. See:  “Delusions That Bind”

Belinda Smith

Patrice Ayme

 -I like it, except if you could maybe rephrase the part about the religion of Abraham (singling out Judaism would be anti-Semitic.) For example: most atheists single out no belief. There are also three separate religious groups that come from the Family of Abraham.

Answer to Belinda Smith:

Judeo-Xto-Islamism is just the “religion of Abraham”. Calling them “monotheism” is abusive to other religions which also believed in a supreme being… The religionS of Abraham all emanate from Judaism. It is not anti-Semitic to observe this, because it’s a fact. which can be verified by reading the Bible or the Qur’an (something I do all the time, for fun). As happens with sects, they tend to hate each other. Sunni religious texts (Hadith) enjoin that all jews have to be killed before the Final Judgment can happen. This is not being anti-Jewish or being anti-Sunni to notice this. It is just describing faithfully some related ideologies.

Wisdom cannot listen to the complaints of idiots.

Many view Jesus as a “Rabi”… and Jesus was certainly a Jew… That he was a Jew prevented Christians to exterminate Jews (although they came close many times)… Christians, or more exactly Catholics, exterminated everybody else (99.99% of Samaritans, 100% Cathars, etc.).

Muhammad took refuge in Yattrib, a Jewish city, but later eradicated a Jewish tribe there. And elements of Islam are very clear that Jews are a serious problem with a lethal solution (once again, not an interpretation singling out a religion groundlessly, it’s literally there, in writing).

The Republican Romans outlawed all religions which practiced human sacrifices (so the Celtic religion was 100% eradicated, and the Carthaginian religion went underground). I will review the essay for possible anti-Semitic misrepresentation, though. I am agnostic (I do not pretend to be god by claiming there is no god).

Graduating from the human sacrifice mood as a unifier advanced civilization. One point I make is that the religions celebrating Abraham as founder (Islam, Xtianism, Judaism) celebrate the willingness to commit infanticide to please the boss as a community building criminal mood… In a way that was just not so blatant as to fall under Roman interdiction. So, basically, Abrahamism fosters the mood to do anything to please the boss.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

Listening to Christian preachers of US Protestantism (“Reform”) one basically listen, under the para ble of the Jewish people seizing land “given by God”, to the praising, as a religion, of the seizure of land, making war to, and killing the original inhabitants (who were, I think, Semites, nota bene…)

Collective madness is a complicated subject, with pros and cons. One may want to keep that in mind as Internet censorship is ever more practiced all over (not just Xi’s dictatorship).

Patrice Ayme

Wars, Peace, Love And Hate: Not So Easy. Ignorance is the Real Enemy.

Masters of war, you can buy all, but a soul!… So say the Masters of Peace, and Love.

They admonish, puff their chests.

Their goodness is obvious to see,

Their glory immense: they, and their sponsors, make sure of that.
Nobels are given to them, universal applause,
And they crisscross the globe,
In their private jets, five star hotels, they are celebrities

Lauded by the powers that be,

Who also from the peace of established order not just profit…

But Thrive…

Too much peace, has allowed those Masters of Hypocrisy to prosper.

Should they even exist?
We hear them all, and we sneer at their self-flagellating admirers.
We sneer at the hypocrisy,
Of the Masters of Peace, Love…

But that’s how they live, why they live, how they earn their prerogatives.

Their main job is to lie about how they arose.
Or should we sneer more at the ignorance of their followers?
Where was Peace, when the Nazis prepared to kill millions? In plain sight, for all to see? The US plutocratic media, the famed New York Times, didn’t peep a word all could see. They deliberately hid what their “peace” profited from.
What was pacifism doing, When infamy was sharpening the laws it uses as claws?
Where would the Masters of Peace and Love be,
Without the wars,
Which made their present wanton exploitation of resources possible?
Where would the Masters of Ignorance rule?
Certainly not in the Americas, Wealthiest in the world.
Certainly not in Australia, or the Pacific.
And, if they are Jews, Jewish,
Descendants thereof, however secular,
They would not even exist,
If ten million Germans had not been killed.
Because France took measures to forcefully oppose Hitler,
As early as 1933,
And opposed Hitler’s ally Stalin, and fascist Mussolini, Hirohito,
So one hundred million died:
It was too little, too late, because the USA perfidiously,
Stayed out, until after the longest time,

Knowing all too well, that only thus the American Century would come.
Thanks to the Masters of Peace.
France went to war, alone, with a little help from Britain,
To spare billions of lives, and civilization.

Britain didn’t surrender, the fascists mistrusted each other,

And finally the US consented to lend, lease, then kidnap victory.
Yet, war for civilization doesn’t always win.
Theodosius Thessalonica decree, 380-381 CE: from then on, Apostates could be killed at will,

The mass murderous Catholic Inquisition was born, the State would die from it.
We still live with Theodosius, it’s called Sharia,
A direct descendant,
And civilization nearly collapsed,
When the Roman State deflated, so did demography.
Arbogast, the Franks, the Western Army,
Secularism, were destroyed at the Frigidus Battle,
which threw the spell, the hurricane, divine wind of the evil sort,
Of killing in the name of “God”,
To this day, more than 16 centuries later.

The valor of blonde Franks was not enough to destroy Theodosius’ Goths, Huns, and Alans, when the divine wind blew in their face. When the world turned wrong, the wind rose as a hurricane, the forces of secularism lost to the barbarian army of the mass murdering Catholic tyrant [1].

War is good. Sometimes.

Sometimes it is even crucial. And no cruciality was ever won without war. There are many types of war, but the attitude and neurohormones don’t change.

This is what the Masters of Peace don’t want you to remember: 

No war-like effort, no real progress.

Even Islam knows this: Jihad, a war-like effort, is a moral command.

No Revolution, No Evolution.

And no evolution doesn’t just mean no progress, it means global death.

Love is good. Most of the time. Yet, not always. Come on, you Masters of Peace. What is this peace you rest on, but for the product of war?The product of countless wars? Wars of most determined good against the most absolute evil. Don’t deny the heroes who built the ground you stand on, and the furious angels who cleared the air.

Newer and better values always replaced or threatened old oligarchies which were not compatible with them, and rested on their opposite. Newer and better peace was always born out of war. Yes, now we have to fight a virus which looks like a crown. Another war. 

Come on you, Masters of Stasis. You want to stay still, while the universe moves below your feet, you claim.

The world will always move below our feet. It always did, and always will. The world moved when Rome was at her apex, and move away, until Rome collapsed, from mot having moved with it.

The world will move under your own weight, if for no other reason that you are so incredibly heavy, and the heavier, the more you gorge yourself with the planet. You look at the planet, you arrogant monkeys, go play some music on exotic islands where the natives serve you, and they don’t even wear chains, so anxious they are to debase themselves for you: they are perfectly tame from Peace and Love. Here is the president, he is brown, and he serves the pharmaceuticals, the health industry mafia, as Kenyan boys of old did with the white masters. Shameful, wan’t it? And you loved him, because he made you feel so right, overlooking reality, while gorging yourself more than ever, amazed by your “liberalism” (something supposed to mean you are good).

Come on, Masters of Love. You speak of peace, because that addiction to nothingness prevents you from making war on ignorance. Come on, Masters of Woke! What are you waking up to exactly? More drugs for your addicted minds? The war worth most fighting for, is also the love most worth having, the war against ignorance. As from it alone can genuine love spring forth. 

War and love you shan’t condone or condemn, just on the color of their skin. One needs to dig deeper. Instead, of their origin and future descendants, portends and moods, true lovers shall enquire. And hope what you may, more than ever. Wisdom from contemplation always, is the only peace worth having, on which tomorrow’s wars, peace and loves will be refined. 

Masters of creation out of volition, warring and loving, over the Earth, and soon across the Galaxy, forces that shall go, and always justify, multiverses of better hopes, we shall forge more of what we were born for, and with: limitless appreciation for expanding cognition, especially when they combine to satisfy the most basic wants, which the wise have long learned to corral, and ignore the rest. 

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The bishop of Milan excommunicated Roman emperor Theodosius for mass murder… Rather ironical… Considering nobody did as much for Catholic terror than Theodosius I…