TREASON AGAINST REASON: FOR WHOM MADNESS TOLLS

Specifically, DESTROYING THE PAST TO BUILD A FAKE, SUBJUGATING FUTURE

Madness is often a metalogic. Madness has its reasons that more restricted reason doesn’t.

Any logic needs, to exist, a metalogic. Restricting oneself to the former, makes the latter, literally, unreasonable.

When contemplating past acts of madness, putting them in a fully rational context requires to find out who, or what, profited from them. There lays the metalogic in which madness reveals itself to be rational.

Here we will study some more the following craziness, the will to destroy 83 year old state commissioned art, from Communist Arnautoff, and ponder who profits from it. In the preceding essay “WANT HUMAN? FREE TRUTH! Instead, San Francisco Promotes Lying, While Hating History, Reality“, I had emphasized that there is nothing more human than truth. Here I will focus on for whom madness tolls:

After half a century of debate, the San Francisco Board of Education voted unanimously in June to destroy thirteen murals depicting the life of George Washington that line the halls of a high school named after the first US president. The murals offend some uneducated critters by depicting two original sins of the United States, namely : slavery and the Native American genocide. They even evoke the alliance of the French regular troops with the Indians. 

One would guess that individuals offended by the evocation of Natives’ genocide belong to the “Make America Great Again” crowd. But quite the opposite, or so they claim! But then why are they acting even more racist and white nationalists than Trump’s supporters?

One of the murals the San Francisco Board of Education and the PC crowd want to destroy. It depicts (in the back) French troops (in blue) surrendering, while their Native American allies flee. At the time Washington was a colonel in the British army. And committed a war crime against French troop, assassinating 35 of them… In the center, Indians in black and white are turning into ghosts… main work of Washington… That the French were allies to the “Indians” may come as news to the ignorant, and reveal that some of the opposition between France and the USA, in how one should interact with Natives, and in economic models, has very deep roots…

I have always been anti-racist and anti-fascist (I was even attacked physically because of this, more than once). According to some who, nowadays, claim to be antiracist, and antifascist (“antifa”) … while exhibiting the exact opposite behaviors, engage in magical behavior.

According to modern “antifa”, forgetting infamy ever happened is how to fight it. So are we going to destroy what’s left of Auschwitz to make sure we can’t remember something ever happened there? That would be the ultimate holocaust denial. What could help Nazism more?

Wanting to destroy art representing horror means not wanting to learn the worst that happened, and thus the most important which did happen, and thus, may happen again. 

To destroy the evocation of infamy with fighting infamy itself is confusing message and fact, observing and thinking. 

Only a collapse of the educational system could have gotten us so low. We saw this when the Roman state collapsed under the blows of the Roman Catholic inquisition: heresy (making a choice) became subject to capital punishment. It made no sense: how was capital punishment going to help the almighty god? Punishing heresy by death was a sacrifice of reason itself, precisely because it made no sense whatsoever. The true aim of the Roman emperors (such as Theodosius !) instituting Roman Catholic terror was not help god, but to terrorize those who wanted to use reason.

We have a similar phenomenon here. Those who want to “repair” past injustices and crimes, so they claim for the holocaust of the American Natives and slavery, want to do as if those crimes never happened, erase all memory… something Romans did to those they condemned for high crimes against the state: the famous “damnatio memoriae”…. But in this case, it would erase all the crimes against humanity committed by the English Colony in America, and the US.

It makes no sense, it’s an outrage against reason. And if we disagree, we will be punished by being called terrible things, damaging our entire existence. 

As during the collapse of Rome, it doesn’t take very long to realize that violating and punishing reason, terrorizing those who want to use it, profits those who can only fester when reason is not applied to them, the plutocrats. We The People, once deprived of reason, won’t make a revolution…

It may sound strange that individuals who claim to be on the “left” and “progressive” would promote plutocracy. But this is exactly what happened in the later stages of the Roman state, both in occident and the orient [1]. Roman plutocracy had two dimensions, one that of the military (Constantine/Theodosius dynasties), the other that of wealth (much of it, senatorial). By putting Christian mentality in power, that triumph of unreason, it was made so that neither the tax-free status of wealthiest and the dictatorship of the emperors would be submitted to the scathing critique of reason.

Similarly, nowadays, the media controlling plutocracy drives the mental landscape by promoting obviously irrational and self-contradictory opponents, such as these “antifa” who want to destroy Communist ideology of 83 years ago, and confuse magical thinking with reality.

Want to find where reason lurks when confronted to unreason? Look no further than treason!

Any hope? A bit. Before the logical, there is the emotional. Trump has been accused, luridly, with treason. Now, supposing Trump gets his orders from Putin is silly. But what remains is that a president of the USA is accused, by a large part of public opinion, of treason. However silly in this particular case, it breaks an emotional paradigm. And that is that the leadership of the USA could be betraying those it overlords. Emotionally it means that the emotion that the reigning oligarchy is treacherous to We The People, is growing.

And it of course does: watch the mass extinction outside…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] It is often said that the Roman state collapsed in the West in 476 CE (forced golden retirement of Augustus Romulus). But that’s silly, as the Franks, fully endowed of Roman state power, were acquiring control… And the Ostrogoths viewed themselves similarly as the Roman state in Italy (Constantinople agreed for the Franks, not for the Ostrogoths). Another common view is that the Roman state didn’t collapse in the Orient…. But it did with the Arab Muslim conquest, which took control of most of the Oriental Roman state. So the collapse of the Roman state in the Orient followed that of Occident within two centuries… Moreover, as the Franks soon viewed themselves fully as the Roman state… One can say the Roman state collapsed in the Orient and Africa… But not in the Occident (!)… the exact opposite of conventional wisdom…

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Friedrich Nietzsche famously said: “Madness is rare in individuals – but in groups, parties, nations, and ages it is the rule.”  The preceding explains that such a madness of crowds can very well emerge as a mechanism of subjugation…

Busing: A Racist Fake Herring. Kamala Harris’ Disingenuous Berkeley Jeremiad

Preaching the Good Lord, to better practice being a Devil, what’s more human?

Kamala Harris, US Senator and the youngest of the top four presidential candidates, demolished ex-Vice President, and leading candidate, Joe Biden, in a pulverizing exchange, in her first democratic debate. A baffled Biden is now history, I reckon (or hope). 

Now I don’t like Biden, mostly because he is a “moderate” whose business model used to be right of Reagan, thus empowering plutocracy ever more… But I despise Kamala’s “busing” bandwagon.  Warren presents really new ideas, whereas Harris takes the same old bus to Political Correctness. It’s precisely because the unjust stupidity of busing was so passionately promoted by pseudo-progressives, at the detriment of real solutions, that lethal inequality was allowed to grow, unnoticed.  That was so insane, it promoted insanity some more.

Clearly Harris has a very high probability to be US president someday; she has presidential presence, and the killer instinct of the prosecutor she was. Had I been her, I would have made the same point on busing, just to demolish Biden (philosophers on the edge of human understanding have to be the most cynical creatures). But, eschewing Harris’ excellent (for herself) tactics, busing is not a good thing. Busing was, and is, mostly a red herring, it has very bad consequences today. Not just per se, but as an example of diabolical diversionary tactic impelling the exact opposite of what it claims to fight (more on this in another essay). Such diversions have replaced the desired ends: see the destruction of murals proclaiming precisely the horror, and error, of real history.

Let me explain busing, for those readers not from the USA who can’t conceive of that peculiar madness. “Busing” consists into driving children to schools far away, in the misguided hope it will drive down segregation and racism. All what busing achieved was a mad drive towards wealthy, tax reduced, distant, segregated suburbs, so-called “Gated Communities”… And thus “busing” made worse what it was pretending to cure, segregation in the USA… thus busing ended up building worse problems than what it was fighting (see below). 

And, importantly enough, Berkeley, where Harris grew up, is a perfect example that the problems got worse. [1] 

Busing in the USA. Instead of going to school, you shall go to bus, to make sure you stay stupid. The children are removed from their neighborhood, to be brought to a school in another distant neighborhood supposedly with a different “race”. Kamala Harris, who was not from US parents, spent more than an hour and a half in and around buses, each day, instead of going to a school next to her home. Guess what? In Berkeley, everybody left, in the end. Especially the “blacks” busing was supposed to help. The likes of me are now living there, and doing everything there, including having lots of anti-racial and anti-racist thoughts, and sentiment… And not liking polluting buses, and pseudo-progressives whose true calling is colossal hypocrisy.

Some progressive friends (who, overall, are against busing) advised me not to vocalize against busing because, as the time, they say, it helped to fight segregation. The funny thing is that there is colossal and increasing segregation in the San Francisco Bay Area, but it’s all about money, not skin color. Besides, Kamala Harris is not an African American, she just masquerades as one…

Busing helped with what? It was pretty obvious that the madness of putting kids up to two hours a day in buses would have the opposite effect, long term. Busing helped towards accepting to be ruled by a mood of irrationality. And deciding that make-belief was best. What busing provoked, the flight towards the suburbs, and supergiant gated communities, was entirely predictable. Actually, Palo Alto (30 miles south of Berkeley), outright split itself in two. The servants were made to live in the newly created “East Palo Alto”, on the other side of the giant 101 freeway. In the SF Bay Area, a plutocrat who just died, made his billions by building entire gated cities along the I 680 corridor… As a reaction to busing, wealthy folks fled there. [2].

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I know the geography of the area very well, and the school where Kamala was “bused”, at the foot of the hills. I also criss cross, on foot and car, West Berkeley all the time, where I live, shop, and my child goes to school. I lived there longer than Harris, I saw the evolution, and view many powers that be in Berkeley, as perfect hypocrites, preaching the Good Lord, while practicing the Devil. 

There are huge problems in Berkeley now, arguably even greater than during the few years when Harris lived here.  There are much fewer African-Americans, but the non-“white” minorities are a majority. 

The main problem of Berkeley, the Bay Area and California, is housing. Berkeley NIMBYs have systematically refused the construction of high density living, using absolutely any argument they could possibly imagine. That NIMBY (Not In My Back Yard) attitude is generalized in the San Francisco Bay Area. It has prevented high density living, electrification and improvement of metro and train lines (it would ameliorate commuting, reduce pollution, and that matters in people who, as I do, live in West Berkeley: a busy train track sees 100 carriages fracked oil trains going to the Richmond refinery, and giant merchandise trains going to the East Coast all the time).

The housing crisis has created squalor. The homeless live in incredible filth, greater than anything seen in the 1960s. The other day, in Oakland, one of the squalid tent cities caught fire below the 14 lane freeway. Enormous black smoke was pouring out both sides of the humongous freeway. Such fires of the filthy homeless camps happen all the time. Berkeley is very good at just one thing: keeping the homeless completely away from the wealthy parts of town.

The solution to bad schools is good schools with well paid teachers… not hitting the road in a bus, with the preconceived attitude that it’s better among the “whites”.

Harris should call for better schools and decent housing. Equality, not yesterday’s racism, and busing around clapping children.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Here is the NYT about the Harris-Biden story: 

Kamala Harris and Classmates Were Bused Across Berkeley. The Experience Changed Them

“BERKELEY, Calif. — In 1967, the superintendent of the Berkeley, Calif., school district had resolved to desegregate the city schools. “We will set an example for all the cities of America,” he wrote in a report called “Integration: A Plan for Berkeley,” which he presented to the Berkeley Board of Education. “The children of Berkeley will grow in a community where justice is part of their pattern of life,” the report stated.

Several years later, a young girl named Kamala Harris, the daughter of an Indian mother and a Jamaican father, boarded a school bus — part of that school integration program that would change her, the city and the country’s conversation about racial politics.

“There was a little girl in California who was part of the second class to integrate her public schools, and she was bused to school every day, and that little girl was me,” Ms. Harris, now a senator and candidate for president, said on Thursday evening onstage at the Democratic debate. She was directly addressing former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr., and what she described as his history of opposition to mandatory busing.

In that moment, Ms. Harris invoked a complex part of American history, and the way cities tried to address how segregated the country’s classrooms remained…”

Complex, and ineffectual, not to say decerebrating… Little girl Kamala spent forty (40) minutes, each way, twice a day, in that polluted, polluting bus. NOT getting instructed. Instead… My own daughter has gone to school in West berkeley, and only in West Berkeley, all her life. Does that make her racially inferior? Less bused?

Burning Housing Projects of high density living is a San Francisco Bay Area NIMBY occupation, a new form of racism… Santa Clara, SF Bay Area, June 28, 2019….

New York Times going lyrical on (not so) poor Kamala motoring around town: 

“She and her peers played hand-clapping games to pass the time, one classmate remembered, aware that their bus ride took them to a neighborhood different from theirs, but not that it was something a superintendent had to fight for.

Students who attended Berkeley public schools during the early years of the integration effort recall the experience as a defining one for them.

“Racism didn’t go away because we were bused,” said Doris Alkebulan, 58, who was part of the initial group of black students in Berkeley to be bused to a majority white school. “What about play dates? Were you going to be invited to the birthday party? Would you be chosen for the team?””

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[2] “Ms. Harris onstage at the debate reflected on a time in Berkeley history when moderate politics were falling apart. Though the city was a microcosm of seismic political changes in the country as a whole, including antiwar sentiment and free speech activism, one major catalyst for transformation was school busing. As white families who opposed busing left town for the suburbs in 1967, they gave way to an insurgent new left.

“Busing was really when Berkeley split and became leftist because a lot of people who couldn’t handle that change, they left,” said Jef Findley, a librarian at the Berkeley Public Library specializing in city history, who helped make an oral history of the city’s busing and desegregation. “The moderate, pro-business rightist town became a leftist town.”

Except, as I pointed out in my essay above, not really: Most powers that be in Berkeley talk as if they were leftists, but most act as what they are, property owners living in multimillion dollar homes. Plus actually, maximum Berkeley activism was in 1968, when busing had just started, and the wealthy had not moved out yet… And, it turns out, never really did… 

New York Times again: 

“Carole Porter, 55, who now works in information technology, lived around the corner from Ms. Harris. The two girls took the bus up the hill from the middle-class Berkeley flats where they lived to Thousand Oaks, a school in the white, more affluent Berkeley hills. Ms. Porter recalled that the ride took about 40 minutes.

Ms. Harris attended a Montessori school for kindergarten and joined Ms. Porter at Thousand Oaks in first grade.”

Patrice reality check: Montessori schools are private schools. Harris was going to a private school. Their cost is typically around $20,000 (2019 dollars). So Kamala Harris was far from destitute. “More affluent” relative to what? Private school children?

The New York Times produced specious statistics on “race” in Berkeley (let alone that Harris who is half-Indian, half-Jamaican, is viewed as “black”). According to those, when “Ms. Harris joined the class in 1970, her first grade year, which was the third year of integration. The school had been 2.5 percent black in 1963. In 1969, it was 40.2 percent black as a result of integration.”

However, my daughter has played on the playground of that exact same school many times… And the notion of “black” is, simply, not relevant. Basically all races are represented… Yet the “African-American” “race”, to speak like an American racist, is, ironically enough, the rarest, it has basically disappeared from Berkeley: the darkish colored are typically recent immigrants. It is as if “busing” bused the “blacks” out of town…

Actually the NYT recognizes that: 

“Now, Berkeley is a wealthier and whiter town than when Ms. Harris was growing up. In 1970, the city was 23 percent black; today it is only 10 percent black. The median sale price for a two-bedroom apartment is $1.2 million…” 10% is obviously an overestimate. Most “blacks” in Berkeley are recent immigrants who do not view themselves as “African-American” (rightly so). There is a large Asian and Hispanic contingent….

And the NYT also recognizes, towards the end of its own article, that busing was a dismal failure: “Given alternatives like low-income housing in middle-income areas or changed school boundaries, only 9 percent of blacks said they preferred busing, and just 5 percent of whites did.” At the time. Busing is still practiced in parts of the Bay Area and viewed by its potential victims as a terrible oppression to be avoided at literally all cost… But it keeps on going because the pseudo-progressives who vote for it in city governments, typically have no children, or send their own children to extremely expensive private schools…. So busing has become an instrument of racial class subjugation: if you are poor, your child shall be submitted to the horror of the bus which never ends, and clapping games is all the education the child will get.

Meanwhile, rabid NIMBYs keep on killing as many density housing projects as they can… When not outright burning them….

Consider this from 2017: Tuesday morning’s big fire in West Oakland marked the ninth time since 2012 that a fire broke out at a housing construction site in the East Bay, leaving housing developers on edge. Many of the blazes have been intentionally set in the middle of the night, and in two cases surveillance video captured suspects, according to investigators. This keeps on happening, all the way to June 2019, massive fire housing project in Santa Clara…

KILL SEXISM, And Why. The Next US President Should Be A Woman: A Question Of Smarts And Equity

Women as political leaders have played crucial roles in the past. One, in particular, ought to be the most famous political leader, ever. I mean: more important than Justinian, Julius Caesar, Pericles, Solon or Ramesses III (who defeated the “Sea Peoples”)… Or George Washington. Washington was just a British colonel, the French could have found others to agitate terminally (Philadelphia was crawling with French agents).

It is telling that nearly no one with “culture” knows of her, this woman who was the most important political leader, ever. No, she was not Chinese, or Egyptian.

Notice that China and Egypt were with the Creto-Greco-Romano-Celtico-Frankish civilization, and India the four most important civilizational zones. I don’t know much about India, but in the case of the first three, the place of women was at the very top, or next to it. Egypt had divinized and feminized Truth, Ma’at. In contrast, Islam had one, just one female leader, out of all these places, countries, histories and centuries… that was immediately after Louis IX of France’s invasion of Egypt: not perhaps a coincidence, his mom was in charge in France…  

Egypt had several female pharaohs, including the ferocious monotheist proponent Neferti, who went a few concepts too far, bringing her demise… and the famous Hatshepsut. Tang empress Wu Zetian is remembered today as one of the greatest rulers of China (Seventh Century).

Empress of the Franks, Saint Bathilde, an ex-slave… Towering above the  Senate of the French Republic. Republics with slavery were tried before, and didn’t work… Bathilde outlawed slavery… Take that, Julius Caesar!

Revealingly, women tend to acquire control in history, when the going gets real tough (it’s know that famed Roman emperor Justinian didn’t not resign during the Nika riots, because of his wife). Sometimes their role has been enormous and pretty successful at defending the established order (in France, Yolande of Aragon, queen of the four kingdoms, victor of the “100 years war”, a two Medicis queens and the mother of Louis XIV, who defeated the “Fronde”, are examples…)

So what of our mystery female leader, and what did she do that was so awesome? Any guess?

She has a statue facing the French Senate, in the Jardin du Luxembourg, Latin Quarter, Paris. This is Queen Bathilde, who ruled the Imperium Francorum in the Seventh Century. She outlawed the trading of slaves who were denizens of the empire (be they Christians, Pagans, Jewish, etc.) A millennium later, slavery was reintroduced in the English colony of America. So women can have the brains where it makes a difference for civilization. 

What is fascinating is that Bathilde outlawed slavery at a technological level no higher than the Greco-Roman empire. However, the outlawing of slavery forced Europe to become much more technologically advanced, by using machines instead of people for all sorts of tasks (when Europeans got to China they were surprised that men were used for many tasks where Europeans used mechanical advantage). An example is the heavy steel plough necessary to work the wet and fat soil of the European plain, productive heartland of the Franks, soon to produce lots of genetically modified, protein rich, beans. By the year 1,000 CE, Western Europe had started to become more advanced than Rome.

Empress Wu Zetian a contemporary of Bathilde, ruled for decades, at the apex of the Tang. She was demonized by later Chinese historians. Yes, I believe her baby daughter was strangled by Lady Wang…. Because later male historians had powerful sexist reasons to make us believe that the official version was wrong… Sexists can’t believe that China at its apex was ruled by a woman… Except, of course, if she was a she-devil. This being said, Wu Zetian had this in common with Bathilde that she was totally a sort of female James Bond. Just like Bathilde, she took enormous risks (Bathilde escaped as a slave; Wu Zetian took as illegal lover the son of the emperor she had become concubine of, thanks to her extreme beauty and literary skills)

When people think of a scientist, they think of Einstein (who popularized Relativity which Lorentz and Poincaré had discovered, and made a few secondary discoveries besides). However, who knows Émilie du Châtelet?

She started her fame in physics by translating Newton, and discovering that Newton had confused energy and momentum. Émilie du Châtelet corrected that by elucidating the concept of energy, tied it to heat, discovered infrared radiation, was a top philosopher… and died after childbirth at 41. Arguably, Émilie du Châtelet was greater than Newton (who put things together rather than introduced any new concept)

Bathilde was the greatest politician, greater than the doomed, erroneous Pericles (who himself was his second wife’s puppet: Aspasia did all the thinking, pericles all the bullying). Émilie du Châtelet was the greatest physicist. As great as the any of truly greatest. And who knows her name? Nobody. Even the French ignore her (… especially the post-Napoleon French? Napoleon is the name of a sexist disease, long pandemic in France…)

Women are deliberately ignored. It’s a form of masochism for humanity. It’s also a sadistic behavior of men.

That means, half of humanity is thrown away by artifices in part deployed by the present ruling half… Which wastes a lot of… energy oppressing the other half.

It’s not just a waste of half of humanity. It also makes women less motivated, less performing, less sure of themselves… And they are on the front lines of early child education… so humanity’s mental performance is hit twice by sexism

Patrice Ayme

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So what in practice? I don’t like California Senator Kamala Harris: she reminds me too much of Obama, a puppet, with very conservative views paying lip service to progressivism. The natural choice is whom Trump calls derisively “Pocahontas”, Elizabeth Warren, who has long espoused correct principles in finance and economy. She is not an opportunistic, young and inexperienced chick like Harris, but a veteran law professor…

Islam A Clash of Civilization? Because Now Ordering To “Slay” Innocent Individuals Is “Civilized”?

Islamists say that reading and quoting Islam’s Quran is… Islamophobia… Except when they do it themselves! Curious ideology where just looking cause phobia in others… according to its own proponents!

All too many Western plutocratic media agree… with the Islamists! They decry reading Islam as a “clash of civilization”. So if one sends quotes of the Quran, one is described either as a hater of Muslims or an Islamist.

I know Islam, in part because I was raised, from the age of two weeks, in places where Islam was the local religion. Women showed their hair, their faces, and their unsupported naked breasts. They also fought back violently if they perceived the slightest abuse on the part of their fellow-men. Thus, Islam, in the places where I was raised, was really tolerant and non-sexist. These were also Islams of peace. I put it to the plural, because one of these Islam was from the desert (actually, more than one), the other from the Sahel. There is another Islam, the literal Islam found at the core of the dictatorship of the Middle East, which, propelled by petrodollars, is now viewed by Western Pluto media as the only Islam worth having.

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The New York Times described in detail a case where Islam lethality seems to arise out of nowhere, complete with wealthy mothers blowing up their own children… reminiscent of Ms. Goebbels killing all her children, though they resisted (nota bene: Hitler esteemed Islam a lot).

A case like the Easter Islam bombing in Sri Lanka demonstrates that Islam’s love of murder has nothing to do with colonial oppression, the return of the Jews, or whatever other blame-the victims rationales come up readily in the accusatory schemes which have passed for scholarly reflection for all too long.

The New York Times report described . It offered no explanation whatsoever. It is as if the New York Times were a chicken without a head.

The explanation for both the bombings and the headless chicken is plain and visible: There are what, at face value, in the Qur’an, the strict word of God according to the presently most commonly propagandized of Islam, clear injunctions to kill plenty of humans whom secular law views as innocent. To kill gays Quran just quotes the Bible. Brunei faithfully follows.

The picture above is extracted from an Islamist site. Islamists now have to pretend the Qur’an is “misquoted” when verses ordering to kill are extracted from it. What they allege is that there was a context, and the context was forsaken. I have read the Qur’an more than 100 times, and I can tell you it’s the exact opposite. What Islamists don’t tell you is that the most violent verses, like the Sword Verse, are the most recent… Thus they “abrogate” gentle verses written when Prophet Muhammad was trying to persuade the government in Mecca that His new religion was kosher (literally!)

I sent a comment, to the New York Times on their article of the two super wealthy families, where the Muslim one killed the other. It was censored. A faithful reader of mine asked me:”Did you quote the Qur’an?” I replied:”Of course, yes, that’s the crux of the matter!” My reader replied:”Well then, they will accuse you to “blog” the Qur’an, you know that very well!” It’s true that “The Guardian” in London accused me of “blogging the Qur’an” specifically to justify, the fact they banned me (for life, apparently; “The Guardian” is a pseudo-left paper, secretly financed by Bill Gates, the 200 billion dollars “lover of man”)  

We are living in times so dumb that, when explaining why one is against an ideology, one is systematically accused of advocating it, whenever quoting it, even doing so to trash it. In other words we are living in the world of three words logic.

OK, here is the New York Times:

Two Super-Rich Families Ended Up on Opposite Sides of Easter Attacks

April 27, 2019 COLOMBO, Sri Lanka

“— A little before 9 a.m. on Easter Sunday, Anders Holch Povlsen, the richest man in Denmark, was having breakfast with his family at the Table One restaurant in the Shangri-La Hotel in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo.

The restaurant was decorated with crates of oranges, apples and large, uncut pineapples, and the Povlsens looked out on the ocean rollers crashing into a sea wall not far away.

At the same time, Ilham Ibrahim, the son of one of Sri Lanka’s wealthiest spice traders, was heading down to Table One in an elevator. Wearing a baseball cap and a large backpack, he stepped into the elevator with a friend wearing the same thing. Right before the doors opened, CCTV shows, Mr. Ibrahim’s friend flashed him a long, white smile.

The two families, the Povlsens and the Ibrahims, were about to intersect.

One was a billionaire in dollars. The other, a billionaire in rupees. One built a fortune through jeans, turtlenecks and all kinds of hip clothing. The other, through white pepper, black pepper and all kinds of spices.

They both were well-known and admired, part of wildly successful, close-knit business families from opposite ends of the world and perhaps opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.

In an instant, five of their children — Ilham, Inshaf, Alma, Agnes and Alfred — were blown to pieces, one side slaughtered by the other.

Two of the Ibrahim sons — Ilham and his older brother, Inshaf — were among the suicide bombers behind the series of devastating attacks around the country. Sri Lanka’s Muslims have been painfully perplexed by the question of why two of their most privileged sons would do this.”

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“Painfully Perplexed” The “Muslims” were? Really? Those self-declared “Muslims” never read the Qur’an then? 

The beauty of Islam is that, to become a Muslim, none of these long instructions, and exams, so many other faiths favor. Becoming an Islamist is the simplest thing. One has to say: “La ilaha illa Allah, Muhammad rasoolu Allah.” (That’s Arabic for: super-baboon is super-baboon, and a Muha baboon is Messenger of super.) Then, to become that great Muslim “believer” in lame desert fables, one has also to:

 Believe that the Holy Quran is the literal word of God, revealed by Him.

– Believe that the Judgment Day (Resurrection Day) is true and will come. [Nota Bene: according to Hadith, that requires to kill ALL the Jews first!]

– Believe in the prophets that God sent and the books He revealed, and in His angels. [And the Djinns, and Satan… Not a question to ask Allah, the Qur’an points out!]

– Accept Islam as his/her religion.

– Not worship anything nor anyone except God. [Super is super!]

Thus one can easily see how one would become not just a Muslim, but a “perplexed Muslim”… because although one believes all what’s in the Qur’an, one doesn’t need to have ever read the Qur’an! (At least, Christians are supposed to learn their little fables!) But the problem, of course, is that some young people do read the Qur’an, under the leadership of mad men or exploiters… And then one calls them… Islamists! Islamists DID READ the Qur’an! The Qur’an basically says that the safest way to paradise is to go out, kill some miscreants! See below.

Islamists, caught their pants down with such violent verses, argue it ain’t what it looks like to the pseudo-intellectuals (paid by the fossil fuel plutocratic organization of the world, and its nice “universities”) infecting the Civilization. To suicide bombers, they tell them that God ordered them to slay whoever, whenever…

NYT again, pondering why nice Muslims suddenly decide to believe the Qur’an, and do as indicated therein, and kill all these people Allah has condemned to death… And many of these deaths are horrible: flaying people alive, burning them, making them drink molten lead…. Hey, it’s all in the Qur’an, have fun, read it. It’s not fifteen shades of grey, it’s fifteen shades of horror… NYT:

“Everybody keeps asking me that question,” [Sri Lanka’s Muslims have been painfully perplexed by the question of why two of their most privileged sons would do this] said Hilmy Ahmed, the vice president of the Muslim Council of Sri Lanka. “I don’t know if there ever will be an answer.”

… Perhaps the most striking is how the paths of the Ibrahims and Povlsens, two powerful families with so much to live for, crossed that day.”

Well, the answer in the Qur’an, Mr. Hilmy Ahmed. Free a few hours to read it, please! Understand what you claim to be your own religion, please!

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Here is the comment of mine which was censored by the NYT:

It’s not very difficult to understand the fanaticism. Either ones believes in Islam, or one doesn’t. What does believing in Islam mean? It varies considerably according to people, individuals, places and history.

As a president of Senegal observed, Wahhabism, as practiced in Arabia, “is a different religion from Islam as practiced in Senegal”.  

The version of Islam financed by petrodollars has come to dominate, as money made it incomparably powerful.  It’s called “Salafism” or Wahhabism”, according to Wahhab, a eighteenth century cleric who took what is in the Qur’an literally. The Qur’an is a short book. Many calls to murder are found therein:

“And slay them wherever ye find them, and drive them out of the places whence they drove you out, for persecution is worse than slaughter… and fight them until struggle is no more, and religion is for Allah.“

— Quran 2:191

Thus: keep on killing until all have converted to Islam.

Quran 9:5 is the famous “Verse of the Sword”: …”fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them, and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem“… This verse, amongst the youngest of the Quran, abrogates older verses.

“Prophet! Rouse the believers to wage war…”

— Quran, [Quran 8:65]

“Those who believe, fight in the cause of Allah, and those who disbelieve, fight in the cause of Satan. So fight you against the friends of Satan...”

— Quran, [Quran 4:76]

Another 100 verses in Quran order mayhem. Killers did as ordered. 

***

That was my comment, it was factual. But fact-based reality is not what Pluto media is all about.

Real fanatics kill in the name of their religion. Those who don’t kill, are amateurs:

The word “fanatic” comes from the Latin “Fanum”, which means temple, shrine, sacred place. Hence “fanaticus” meaning “mad, enthusiastic, inspired by a god”. By the 1520s, it came to also mean “insane person”. The eight religions wars of the end of the 16C quickly proved that the most enthusiastically inspired by God were truly insane. In this case Christians were killing each other, according to their interpretations of Allah, just as muslims do today. In the 17C, the (mostly) religious war in Germany killed a third of the population.

It’s obvious that, when people have decided they know enough to have figured out the universe, either we are mad, or they are. When those who have figured out the universe claim that killing others is essential to the interpretations of the universe they have, it’s clear their cognitions are out of order, and, for our safety, they should be prevented from imposing their fanatical ideologies.

So why is the Literal Islam madness allowed to go on? Because plutocracy gains from it.

Fanatical, literal interpretations of the Qur’an have enormous interests for the global plutocracy: it’s not just that they provide with oil, wealth, and control. They have also made its natural opponents short-circuit.

Tolerating literal interpretations of the  Qur’an brings one to tolerate calls to abusing (women) or even killing most people on Earth (gays, Jews, Christians, “Pagans”, “Polytheists”, “Unbelievers”, “Apostates”, etc…). Islamists kill Muslims in particular because they decide at some point that they have renounced Islam (“apostasy”). In recent years literally millions were killed that way. And then, when a US Representative preaches that sort of Islam, one is supposed to not criticize her, because if one did, one would be called “racist”.

***

OK, more New York Times, in another article on the Wahhabist take over in Sri Lanka:

“April 28, 2019 KATTANKUDY, Sri Lanka — When the Wahhabis came, with their austere ideology and abundant coffers, the town of Kattankudy yielded fertile ground.

In this part of Sri Lanka, faith was often the sole sustaining force during the civil war that raged for nearly three decades. Wahhabism — a hard-line strain of Islam blamed for breeding militancy — proposed a direct path to God, albeit one that aimed to return the religion to the time of the Prophet Muhammad.

It was here in Kattankudy’s warren of homes decorated with delicate swirls of Arabic calligraphy that Zaharan Hashim, the man accused of masterminding the Easter Sunday attacks in Sri Lanka, grew up. And it was here that he preached his ideology, calling for the killing of nonbelievers in Islam and even other Muslims.….

The Sri Lankan police say that at least two of the suicide bombers involved in the attacks, which killed at least 250 people, were from Kattankudy. The Islamic State claimed responsibility.

Beginning on Friday evening, just down the coast from the town, a raid on a house linked to the Easter bombings turned violent, leaving 15 dead and wounding the wife and child of Mr. Zaharan. Some of the dead, thought to include Mr. Zaharan’s brother and other immediate family, blew themselves up as security forces closed in. The Islamic State also claimed a connection to this shootout.

It was in the 1980s that Kattankudy, one of the few almost exclusively Muslim towns in Buddhist-majority Sri Lanka, began blossoming into a center of Islamic life. The town was enriched by Saudi money for mosques and madrasas, work-abroad contracts and university scholarships.

But the advent of Wahhabism, with its isolating dogma, has also shaken this multifaith island where minority Muslims have traditionally practiced a more inclusive faith. Birthed in Saudi Arabia, Wahhabism’s stern intolerance denigrates not only those who don’t believe in Islam but other Muslim sects as well.

While Saudi Arabia insists the faith does not call for violence, critics have long blamed the kingdom’s mass export of its austere creed for fueling extremism and terrorism abroad. Al Qaeda’s leader, Osama bin Laden, and most of the hijackers in the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks were from Saudi Arabia, and the Islamic State used Saudi religious textbooks inside its self-styled caliphate in Syria and Iraq.….

There are more than 60 mosques in Kattankudy for a population of 45,000, and most now subscribe to conservative strains of Islam, including Wahhabism. At the New Kattankudy Grand Jumma Mosque, designed as a replica of Al Aqsa Mosque in Jerusalem, one of Islam’s holiest sites, construction workers are laying intricate blue mosaics as part of the town’s mosque-building boom.

“After the age of 7, everyone must pray five times a day, so we always need more mosques,” said M.I.M. Irfan, the mosque’s secretary.

Saudi diplomats visited, too.

The Saudis and others from the gulf also supported a plan by M.L.A.M. Hizbullah, a Kattankudy native who is now governor of Eastern Province, to open an Islamic-inspired university campus in his hometown.

Mr. Hizbullah is against reversing regulations that allow Sri Lankan Muslim men to marry children and have multiple wives. …

Beginning in 2004, Wahhabi-influenced youth from Kattankudy began attacking Sufis, who practice a mystical form of Islam. Grenades were thrown and swords thrust. Hundreds of Sufis were forced from their homes.”

***

All the preceding was in the New York Times. Anybody sane would deduce that “Islam” is an insane religion… but it gets better than that: the Western Pluto media has a pro-Wahhabist bias.

“Sufism” is always described, by ignorant, and biased academics and their parrots such as those at the New York Times, as “mystical”. In truth Sufism is often clever, social, non-sexist, tolerant, low-key, rational, human, gentle and very far from the lethal madness in the Qur’an. Sufism is generally civilization compatible, Wahhabism is only plutocracy compatible, as it preaches ultimate violence..

New York Times goes on, in the same article, describing the evil of Wahhabists:

“Although Kattankudy’s Islamic organizations are horrified by Mr. Zaharan’s militancy and have eschewed violence, most have campaigned for years against Sufis.

“Those people, it is not Islam,” said M.L.M. Nassar, a member of the Federation of Kattankudy Mosques and Muslim Institutions. “It’s a deviation.”

… The talk of jihad emanating from some of Kattankudy’s hard-line clerics appalled him, he said.”

Indeed, those who deviate, according to Salafist tradition, or, more exactly, according to the Qur’an and the second most sacred book of Islam, have to be killed. Here we go with the little murder book:

“Quran (4:89) – “They wish that you reject Faith, as they have rejected (Faith), and thus that you all become equal (like one another). So take not Auliya’ (protectors or friends) from them, till they emigrate in the Way of Allah (to Muhammad). But if they turn back (from Islam), take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them, and take neither Auliya’ (protectors or friends) nor helpers from them.”

You will find others who desire that they should be safe from you and secure from their own people; as often as they are sent back to the mischief they get thrown into it headlong; therefore if they do not withdraw from you, and (do not) offer you peace and restrain their hands, then seize them and kill them wherever you find them; and against these We have given you a clear authority.

— Quran 4:91

Make ye no excuses: ye have rejected Faith after ye had accepted it. If We pardon some of you, We will punish others amongst you, for that they are in sin.

— Quran 9:66

He who disbelieves in Allah after his having believed, not he who is compelled while his heart is at rest on account of faith, but he who opens (his) breast to disbelief– on these is the wrath of Allah, and they shall have a grievous chastisement.

— Quran 16:106]

The Hadith goes further:

In Sahih al-Bukhari, the most important book in Sunni Islam after the Qur’an, and Sahih Muslim punishments for apostasy are described as follows:[45][46]

Allah’s Apostle said, “The blood of a Muslim who confesses that none has the right to be worshipped but Allah and that I am His Apostle, cannot be shed except in three cases: In Qisas for murder, a married person who commits illegal sexual intercourse and the one who reverts from Islam (apostate) and leaves the Muslims.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:83:17, see also Sahih Muslim, 16:4152, Sahih Muslim, 16:4154

Ali burnt some people and this news reached Ibn ‘Abbas, who said… No doubt, I would have killed them, for the Prophet said, ‘If somebody (a Muslim) discards his religion, kill him.'”

— Sahih al-Bukhari, 4:52:260

A man embraced Islam and then reverted back to Judaism. Mu’adh bin Jabal came and saw the man with Abu Musa. Mu’adh asked, “What is wrong with this (man)?” Abu Musa replied, “He embraced Islam and then reverted back to Judaism.” Mu’adh said, “I will not sit down unless you kill him (as it is) the verdict of Allah and His Apostle.”

— Sahih al-Bukhari, 9:89:271

***

In 90 years, Islam made the most gigantic empire. Systematic massacres, violating all the laws of war as understood by Greco-Romans and Persians, were used to do so. However, killing, for example, all combat age men in Syria, had long-term social and economic, not to say cultural and psychological consequences… The wealth of Syria under the Late Greco-Roman empire in the 6C, never came back…

Islam makes excellent fiction, full of gore. I am all for it, as a piece of thrilling literature, as I am all for various fairy tales about ogres, murderous queens, etc. By all means keep it, for entertainment, bed time reading But when Islam is seriously preached and taught as reality, in its literal version, with super baboon is heavens giving real orders, it simply constitute the world’s most elaborated hate crime ideology. Hence its fantastic military success, in its first few decades, when it succeeded to annihilate the 27 centuries old Mesopotamian religion and civilization, and occupy more than half of the Sumero-Egypto-Creto-Greco-Roman empire and civilization… before being stopped by Constantinople’s Navy and annihilated and counterattacked by the Franks.

So why all the tolerance for the Wahhabists, and calling racist to frown on their invading, hating ways?

Just think a moment: Senator Sanders  is described as a “socialist”. However, all he advocates was the norm 60 years ago, in Europe: free education, free healthcare. Then, California had instituted free education too, even at the university level.

What is the difference now? Tolerance for the intolerable. The sheeple out there has learned to tolerate the intolerable. So why is Sanders now viewed as a “socialist”, although he would have been viewed mainstream way back? Why is that sort of extremism in appreciation not viewed as intolerable?One method? Corrupt women go out there and celebrate the subjugation of women by “Submission” (=”Islam”)… and all the self-declared “liberals” applaud how remarkable, admirable, and a stupendous advance it is, to cover women like tents, and subjugate them to men, just like 14 centuries ago, in the savage desert…

Indeed, what is the most intolerable? Calling tolerable an intolerable superstition. Once one has been trained to find intolerable those who do not to tolerate a religion which says all sorts of innocent individuals should be killed [1], one is trained to find tolerable all and any possible abuse. And trample on any reason.

So Sanders is a socialist, and US Rep Omar promotes peace and sexual equity, right. And the Earth is square like an orange, sure. Civilizational failure is generally preceded by cognitive failure.

Patrice Ayme

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To be killed according to Hadith and Qur’an: Countless “unbelievers”, “pagans”. “polytheists”, “apostates”, gays, people having sex out-of-wedlock… except if they are raping soldiers of Allah, of course… See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/16/thought-crime/

Hadith 41;6985: ”Allah’s Messenger: The last hour would NOT COME UNLESS the Muslims will FIGHT AGAINST THE JEWS and the MUSLIMS WOULD KILL THEM…”

Quran (4:89) – “… if they turn back (from Islam), take (hold) of them and kill them wherever you find them…”

The “apostasy” is in the eye of the beholder: there is no religious organization in Islam distinguished from the political organization: the religious chief, emir, is also the political, and war chief, a la Bin Laden. This is why Fundamentalist Muslims tend to kill Muslims they decide don’t believe anymore…

 

Want Human Development? Beware Religious Superstition

American God Is Also the One Roman Emperors Invented, For the Same Awful Reasons Which In US America Festered:

As US America is the mentally leading nation it matters to all what the USA thinks (yes, there are five times more Chinese, and soon, Indians, and Europe has thrice the population; however US institutions dominate world institutions… and it’s more than a habit; as I said, it’s instituted and people are “cool” with it, worldwide… Because they tend to distrust their neighbour more than the USA… Maybe Russia went back to disastrous, Putin friendly Orthodox Christianism, precisely because the USA’s propaganda was impelling the notion that Christ was “cool”, the indispensable and easiest way to gain respect…).

Observes The Economist in “Young Americans believe in a vengeful God”

“Their deity offers relatively little protection and plenty of punishment.

The more stupid one is metaphysically, the less developed in all other ways one tends to be.

FEW rich nations are as God-fearing as America. A global poll by Gallup in 2009 found that 69% of the country’s adults consider religion an important part of their daily life, more than twice the share in Britain, France or Japan. A new survey by the Pew Research Centre shows that young Americans, though less devout than their elders, are still much more so than their peers in Europe.

Five-sixths of those aged 18 to 29 believe in some kind of deity, but their generation is the least likely to worship God as described in the Bible (43%). This is not because they have switched en masse to another mainstream religion: only 8% of them follow non-Christian faiths, just slightly above the national average of 6%. Rather, a large share of young people profess to believe in another higher power (39%), whatever that may mean.

God, as young Americans see her, is a bit less likely to be all-knowing and all-powerful than the God their parents worship. However, compared with their elders, young people see God as less likely to protect them and more likely to punish them. Alas, there are no historical data to reveal whether youngsters have always felt so cursed—or if the current crop are experiencing an unusual amount of divine persecution.”

It is easier to believe in the Biblical or Islamist God, than to gather the motivation to learn history and geography… or just to acquire a sophisticated common sense. Instead, the common sense of the ambient rabble fits all, is ready to wear, and indispensable to arrivistes. This is why US common sense arrives so well, all over.

Also the US god, was, originally, not that of North America, but the plain old God of Europe, the God which presided over the destruction of Greco-Roman civilization. Believing in a God made in the image of the all-powerful, all-knowing masters of the Roman empire, who imposed and engineered Christianism, is highly compatible with The Empire, having been devised by those at the helm of The Empire.

Embracing Constantine’s terror god shows to all others that one respects authority, one is anxious to please it, and Constantine, and today’s replacement of Constantine, and one is endowed with proper naivety and anxiety to fit among one’s peers, and have a beautiful career. This is also why so many politicians in the West, including the revered Obama told us Islam was a religion of peace and Angelina Jolie, a movie star and UN ambassador tried to imprint on us, sotto voce, that “Islam is a beautiful religion“. (The rest of Jolie’s speech was commendable, of course, and indeed, that’s how manipulative politicians do it; at least since Adolf Hitler… Dilute lethal venom, in an appealing drink.) 

India is on the left…

These properties, the awe for plutocrats, wealth, fate, and the vengeful, jealous common deity, enable those immigrants or descendants of rather recent immigrants who constitute most of the US citizenry to fit with each other, a common way to empathy.

The problem is all this indeed, sets the same sort of mood which presided over the fall of the Roman empire, and one can expect the same results. Believing in the vengeful, all-everything Lord sets a belief in vengeance and justice in another world, not in the one at hand…. meanwhile, obey the boss! Faith in the Christo-Islamist god replaces the drive to progress with the patience of resentment. It makes the youth inclined to respect omnipotence (the NSA) and omniscience (Facebook) and the power of politicians, rather than to fight plutocracy, and for progress. After all, the biblical God is, at least symbolically, the ultimate plutocrat: owning everything, knowing everything and ready to use violence and ultimate cruelty to impose her glory and jealousy.

The biblical God is the perfect God for the rule of wealth and evil, and in America, this enormous (mostly) European colony stolen from the Natives, it justifies the very existence of the society: a precious gift.

SUPERSTITIOUS religion tends to make its practitioners believe that, whatever happens to be, was ordained by the organizer of the universe. So it is fundamentally friendly to the powers that be. That is tyrants, dictators, plutocrats… And force, and wealth. So this is what the USA preach.

And another point: China is imminently non-religious. In the last two millennia, China had disastrous experiences with state mandated Confucianism at one point, and state mandated Buddhism, at another. And entire dynasties or states were affected. In the end, the experienced of the state of Qin, first to unify China as the Qin dynasty, in the last three millennia, was that, it was better to depend upon secular law (like its contemporary, the Roman Republic).

Modern China is pretty much following the same model as Qin… or Rome: law and public works (the ascent of Qin culminated with the short-lived Qin dynasty, However the state of Qin itself had lasted centuries before that, and its model got launched by Lord Shang Yang, circa 361 BCE, advocating the philosophy of Legalism (also translatable as “rationalism”: Cartesianism, 20 centuries before Descartes…)

Secularism of China goes a long way to explain its spectacular development…  By the way, it goes without saying that, should one be a potentate, or a class of potentates anxious to prevent the human development of We The People, a most efficient way to do this is to foster religious superstition. So watch the construction of gigantic mosques and associated buildings in Morocco, Algeria, Saudi Arabia, Turkey… Algeria, flush with enormous oil and gas revenue, has one of the world’s worst educational level (127th in world rankings… although better than Morocco with 152th… Morocco has only 75% of the phosphate reserves of the world! Such countries do so poorly, because their elites do so well…)

Religion is not just the opium of the people, it is the politics of the soul.

And then, of course, superstitious religions foster a respect for mental ways friendly to losing a grip on reality. When one has no grip whatsoever, one offers oneself to be trampled by the powers that be. It’s hard to imagine carpets happy. Nor can they make their friends as happy as could be, either!

Patrice Ayme

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Note: Karl Marx: “religion in itself is without content, it owes its being not to heaven but to earth, and with the abolition of distorted reality of which it is the theory, it will collapse of itself” [The German-French Yearbooks, 1842.] In 1843, Marx in his Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: ”Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people. The abolition of religion as the illusory happiness of the people is the demand for their real happiness. To call on them to give up their illusions about their condition is to call on them to give up a condition that requires illusions”….

Thus, for example, US citizens withstand US plutocracy the easier, the more they embrace their belief in the vengeful deity… So it’s a self-feeding, vicious spiral… Fortunately, in Europe, the strong identification of fascism with superstitious religion damaged both (clearly in Spain, Italy, Germany with the SS’ “Gott Mit Uns!”… But even in Marxist fascist countries with living deities such as Stalin, Ceausescu, Tito, etc.)

Hormones Rule Reason

Is reason free as a bird? Well, first birds are not that free, and reason springs from brain organization, something that biochemistry built.

Old wisdom: there is reason, and then there is its opposite, its enemy, irrationality. New wisdom: reason is context dependent and context is hormonally determined.

In turn, hormones are dependent upon cognitive environment…

(Nietzsche already wrote people thought with their stomach:”a spirit is more similar to a stomach”. A general mood already found in Napoleon’s writings:”an army marches on its stomach”.)

Indeed, there are the hormones everybody has heard of, but less noticed are neurohormones, more recently discovered. Neurohormones double as neurotransmitters. Dependent upon hormonal, and neurohormonal activity, part of the brain gets active (at least that’s my hypothesis). So what? So, mental inertia. Reason does not remain a question of logic as found in logic text books, but also a question of chemical logic, and vast inertia, as sub-organs within the brain gets active, or asleep: a sub-organ will develop according to activity (say posterior pituitary gland, versus its anterior part: they secrete different neurohormones!)

There Are 50 Neurohormones Known. Moreover, There Are More Ephemeral “Neurohumors”… These Chemical Universe Means Bias & Inertia

Tied up with that concept of chemical machines as the factories of reason within the brain, is psycho-rigidity, also called by me “mental inertia”.

A practical example: many anti-Trumpists revel in hatred at this point. Differently from other activists such as Islamists, anti-abortionists, neoconservatives, etc., they are unfamiliar with hatred, they are accustomed to it, and they really love it. After a few months of this, they may find it addictive, and pursue it by sheer mental inertia.

Reason is not just about building neuronal connections, it’s about building chemical factories within the brain. Factories are infrastructure: they don’t go up, or down, easily.

So, if one wants to become a superior mind, not cannot just cultivate one’s logic and facts carefully, and hope for the best. To reach the highest and best reason, one also has to manage which experiences, emotions, or types of emotions one engages in, and one has engaged in, carefully: emotions and experiences build up the brain, one just cognitively, logically, but in its very chemical infrastructure, and what one has the propensity to engage in, like, love, or detest. Mental imprinting, even apparently distant imprinting, even apparently distant imprinting of one’s feelings, impacts one’s subsequent capability to generate superior reason.

So one cannot just think about a subject, roll-out the Socratic method, and get it right. One has first to be in the appropriate mood. Socrates did not know this, and that’s why he ended up drinking hemlock, after 501 members of the jury found “he had corrupted the youth” (Socrates’ students and lovers imposed dictatorship and various lethal mishaps upon Athens, and it was widely considered that Socrates taught his students, many more than 40 years younger than him, in a way which was not appropriate; Athens lost her empire, and half her population in the war…)

Speaking of Socrates, indeed, the philosopher was widely viewed, at the time, as “anti-demos”. Still, Socrates is always, apparently always very logical. So how could Socrates be both very logical, and very wrong? Simple. Socrates was chemically disposed against the total democracy instituted by Pericles (and his top philosopher friends and lovers) which made Athens a lasting jewel for civilization. Thus he rolled out plenty of very logical logic against democracy.

The brouhaha against the Trump order against immigrants from seven countries gave several examples of a similar type. Obama’s spokesman said: “With regard to comparisons to President Obama’s foreign policy decisions, as we’ve heard before, the President fundamentally disagrees with the notion of discriminating against individuals because of their faith or religion,”

Motivated by a mood of cheap vengeance, (but I can understand the motivation of jumping in at the first occasion,) and with the advantage of getting in the interventionist mindset (which I advocated). Also wrong in several ways: first Trump said it was not “anti-Muslim” (there too, the occasion was too good to show everybody who the boss was… while rushing US Army tanks to the Baltics, to help sober up Putin in advance of NATO deployment in Spring).

Second, and more importantly, we DO discriminate against faiths or religions: more than 99.9% of historical faiths and religions are outlawed in Republics such as the USA or France (and their many parrots around). Did you try a human sacrifice, Gallic, Punic, or Aztec style recently? Or eat someone, Polynesian style, as happened when the esteemed Captain Cook got cooked in Hawai’i? No. Not really: it’s not our taste anymore. A question of stomach, in more way than one.

This means that we do discriminate against individuals who would insist on bringing back those faiths or religions. And why? Because such faith and individuals promoting them are incompatible with Republican law.

That is exactly the case of those faiths and individuals promoting “Sharia”, the so-called “Muslim law”, which is incompatible with Republican law. If we get in a mood of compromise, there, we will hurt, fatally in the long run, the Republic. With Sharia, the proper mood for the Republic is not tolerance, but abrogation and retribution against its unlawful promoters.

I will give another example soon of chemistry ruling reason: Sartre, De Beauvoir and other “existentialists” being all too existential, namely ruled by a mood all too sympathetic too pleasing to those who have the biggest stick around, and above. Those had a mood of submission (as Obama did), a brain chemically made for submission, not rebellion (whereas Camus did, and so did most real resistance fighters).

Any logic, logical textbooks will reveal, is bounded by the universe in which it is applied. Alternative facts will call on a different universe, thus a different logic. And those universes are chemically dependent.

I don’t believe in the multiverse as a foundation for physics. However, the multiverse is a fact, for reason itself. And those various universes are made from alternative facts and chemistry.

How we feel, how we felt, implies how we think, and will think. I think, therefore, I am in some universe, somewhere. Reason is not the end-all, be-all. And one of the reasons for the lack of reason, beyond emotion, is that logic itself is not one: consider the Incompleteness Theorems in metamathematics. Beyond those, modern logic has been demonstrated to be pretty much anything we want. And we want what feels good.

Reason has its reason that only the heart knows.

Patrice Ayme’

A Black Problem, Indeed

Defining people by the color of their skin, and, even worse, by the color that their skin does not have, is racism. Period. Take that one, and swallow it, it’s good medicine. “Niger” is Latin for “black”. For racist reasons, the word has been controversial. Yet, the situation is complex.

Consider Greek tragedy, during the greatest age of Athens, from space. What is tragedy about? Primarily, reason. Secondarily, the fate reason, or lack thereof, irresistibly brings forth. In turn, fate imprisons human beings in its icy grip. The solution is to educate the Furies, those “Ancient Children”.

Reason can, and should, be applied, not just to instruct children, but to words and the concepts attached to them.

I was brought, raised and educated, as a child, mostly in Africa, among Africans. Let me tell you something I knew, so extremely well, when I was six years old, that I never deviated from, be it only once, for decades thereafter. This ancient piece of wisdom was taught to me by my mom. She uttered it just once, as a warning, she did not have to do it twice:

Calling someone “black” in Africa, is perceived, rightly, as a RACIST insult: never do it. Call Africans, “Africans”. 

A Touareg Couple. The Blue People of the Desert. Don’t Call Them Black: They Would Think You Are A Lunatic, Ignorant, Offensive, Vicious Aggressor. And they are not Arabs, either… Touareg alphabet is more than twice older than Arabic alphabet…

[The French called Touaregs “Les Hommes Bleus”, the blue men, as they protected themselves from the harsh desert heat, light, wind and sand with layers of blue cloth. They live in the middle of the world’s largest desert, the Sahara. They have been denied a country, so far. The desert was crisscrossed by traders, war parties and raiders, for millennia. And many came for slaves in Black Africa. However empires, such as the Almoravids, were also born there, ruling over 3,000 kilometers, all the way from Mali to Europe’s Al Andalus.]

Most Africans, indeed, are NOT “black”, but of various shades. Thus, if I were, say, beige, why would you call me “black”? I am so little to you that you don’t even look at me? Is calling me according to a color I don’t even have part of the general distortion of me you enjoy inflicting on me, and having me answer to?

Am I so insignificant to you, that you do not bother to find a proper qualifier for me, deeper than skin-deep? Or, worse of all, as many “blacks” are from the deepest forest, or are well-known to be viewed as such, are you trying to insinuate that, I too, are not from a culture worth mentioning?  

In a reply, Facebook DuJuan Ross observed that: “Malcolm X himself popularized the descriptive as a deliberate militating against White Supremacists resorting to it as a pejorative.”

Malcolm X had an interesting trajectory (including among various variants of Islam, one of which got him assassinated). His reddish hair inherited from his Scottish maternal grandfather brought him the nickname “Red”. Malcolm said: “I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong. Than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”

Malcolm X made his little reasoning that calling people of part African ancestry “black” and “negroes” . He was himself following Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, world-famous writers and activists who made the same reasoning a generation prior. (My father was a friend of Senghor, a great writer, French MP and co-author of the French constitution and first president of Senegal.) The martiniquais poet and politician Aimé Césaire forged the word « négritude » Cesaire and Senghor used outright “negre”. “negritude” (negre being the French deformation of “niger”, namely black in Latin). Fine, I am all for it.

There is something correct about this, when addressing the culture and art of populations which are as black as black can be (say in parts of West Africa not long penetrated by Peuls). Indeed the art, there is delightfully obsessed by ultimate blackness. A painting where the dominant “color” is black can be eerily beautiful, and street artists in… Black Africa are experts at it. I am very attached to this art, tied to my childhood, and which have seen nowhere else. So one can use “black” where it is appropriate. What I am decrying is systematic, deliberate distortions of reality.

Aimé Césaire was from the Caribbean, not Africa. So it is only natural that he did not know that, in Africa, qualifying people by the color of their skin is frowned upon, and viewed, rightly, as racism. North Africans, Peuls, many East Africans, Ethiopians, Christian or not, and most enemies of the Zulus and other Bantus in South Africa, turn livid when one calls them black.

I find much of the work of Malcolm X deep and judicious. However, calling someone such as Obama, who is not any more “black” than 50 members of my own American family (I have seen them together) is not just ridiculous, it’s dishonest. Obama himself knows this very well, so why the double language? What are we selling, which require lies to be bought?

Let me repeat slowly: calling people by the color of their skin, and even more so when said color is imagined (as when someone beige is called “black”) is giving maximum importance to maximum superficiality. It’s not just racism, but an attack against reason.

But of course, it’s no accident. There is a meta-reason for it. When one celebrates attacks against reason in one area, one is then in the mood to make more attacks against in other areas. Thus one ends, deprived of reasons, nude and without defense when exploiters come to issue their orders. Hence the sorry state of affairs.

Ironically, the Obama presidency was a victim of the black problem. Having called Obama “the black president”, and viewing this superficial absurdity as a great success, most of Obama “supporters” did not support him at all, when and where he needed support and encouragement.

The failure of the Obama presidency is greatly entangled with the black problem of brandishing the black label as the end-all, be-all. Let’s stay away from all this obsession with skin color.

Reason is about finding out why people do what they do. There are always reasons. The Universe does not play with dice. Yes, I know Quantum Physics, in its present most accepted formulation, says the opposite. But that was in the last few decades, and evolution has been all about reason, in the last 600 million years, ever since there are brains, and they think.

So please learn to call black what’s black, and leave it at that. Obama was first an Hawaiian (who spent 4 years in Indonesia), brought and educated by white people, at Hawai’i most exclusive private school. Nothing black about any of that, and as any real African would tell you. 
Patrice Ayme’

Can A Religion Be Abject?

Are there abject religions? Yes, of course. Their annihilation, or transformation into higher forms, describe the progress of civilization. Nineteen-nine percent, 99% at least, of the known superstitious religions or sects were rejected, or outlawed, and buried in the night of aeons passed, because, precisely, they were abject. (Some non-superstitious religions, such as militarism, or Marxism, or even Stoicism, in excess, can be abject too. But this essay will focus on superstitious religions… which are generally what people have been trained to recognize as “religious”.)

Is there an objective criterion to find out if a religion is abject? Of course. The Romans, who launched our civilization, or, at least, our legal system, taught us that a religion is abject, and should be made unlawful, when it practices human sacrifices. Let’s outlaw religions clamoring for human sacrifices! Our ancestors did it, let’s heed their example!

Rome, invaded and occupied by a Gallic tribe, or others, sacrificed a couple or two… of human beings. The Romans, though, were ashamed by what they had done. Human sacrifice was formally outlawed by senatorial decree in 97 BCE under the consulship of P. Licinius Crassus.

The Romans accused Carthage of killing children. Thus Romans acquired moral superiority on Carthage which created a mood conducive to the annihilation of that Punic civilization. (Whether Carthage sacrificed children is still researched; archeological evidence points increasingly to the correctness of the Roman descriptions.)

Aztecs’ Description Of Paris, November 13, 2015: Jihadist Sacrificing Gourmet

[Codex Laud, folio 8.]

The Romans prohibited human sacrifices by the peoples they conquered (and used human sacrifices as a justification to conquer them). Romans advertised human sacrifices  as barbaric.

Outlawing human sacrifices distinguished civilization from barbarity, said Rome. Rome was also critical of Greek mythology for celebrating human sacrifices in disguise, and that refined intellectual critique helped promote the switch to Christianism…

The same mood, of revulsion to human sacrifices, presided over the annihilation of the Aztecs. Criticized for their deliberate annihilation of Mesoamerican states (not just the Aztecs), some violently invasive conquistadores claimed they had to do it to clean thoroughly the evil mood of human sacrifices…

The mood of being horrified by human sacrifices originated in Rome. However, human sacrifices were practiced in disguise for centuries (by gladiators’ deaths and the occasional sacrificed Vestal as happened once under emperor Domitian, because the chief Vestal engaged in sexual activity).

Our civilization is Rome Renovated (as the Franks proclaimed in 800 CE). And the next question naturally is: is there any religion today which practices human sacrifices?

Some have tried to deny that any religion practiced human sacrifices. Maybe because of the natural question: Does Islam Practices Human Sacrifices In Disguise?

When a religion organizes human sacrifices, it orders to kill some particular individuals, under some circumstances. As Wikipedia says: “Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more human beings, usually as an offering to a deity, as part of a religious ritual. Human sacrifice has been practiced in various cultures throughout history.”

Is there, today, a religion which orders to kill other people and claims that those who kill other people go to paradise? Of course there is.

A religion which orders to kill “apostates”, “unbelievers”, “pagans”, “idolaters” of food, music and the good life in general, consists in practicing human sacrifices in disguise. Or, actually, come to think of it, not in disguise at all, but full view. The emperor wear no clothes, He is just drenched in blood. Islam also punishes homosexuals by stoning, to death (on the ground that this is the punishment in the Bible), “Adulterous” women get the same treatment: stoning by a crowd practicing human sacrifice.

LOL, Muslims of the Fundamental sort, why don’t you call all your stoning, stoning, crucifixion, and whipping to death, human sacrifices? Because it does not sound good? Because it sounds all too true? [1]

So why is Fundamentalist Islam lawful? Maybe I should ask the question in reverse: is (Literal, Salafist, Wahhabist) Islam lawful because it was not pointed out that all its most troubling practices amount to human sacrifices? Let’s point out, that’s what thinking is all about. And a last question: are those who promote Islam, thus the Qur’an, as Obama had done, promoting what is inside the Qur’an, namely the orders from God detailing when and when the believers are to engage in human sacrifices? And if not, why not?

Tip for anti-terrorism: stop calling them monsters “suicide bombers” or “Jihadists”. Call them what they are: human sacrificers.

But then, of course, one will have to overcome first the mood that simply describing the Qur’an in its own words is racism, as the Common (Plutocratic, Democracy-Destroying) Mood has it. Can reality be racist? This whiff of realism could well end up with the wealthiest paying 93% tax, as they did under Republican president Eisenhower, lest the realistic mood takes over, and various superstitions squirm back to the unspeakable shadows they should have never left.

Patrice Ayme’

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[1] The Shia and Sunni sects of Islam are favorable to the violent, hence human sacrificing aspects of Islam. Others, like the older sect known as the Ibadis, were not, and insisted that the Qur’an was indicative and allegoric, not to be interpreted literally. The point became more saillant after the Fourth Caliph, Uthman, selected what he wanted to see in the Qur’an, and boiled alternative Qur’ans (this started the Muslim religious wars which go on to this day).

Transgender, Transreal, & How Pluto Profits

I am very transgender in mentality. In both directions, of course. Whatever that exactly means. I also know that gender is a matter of an hormonal landscape, in which chromosome identity (XX, XY, XXY, etc.) is only one factor. However, that does not mean I throw reality out of the window.

Humanity is steering the planet, towards oblivion. The obvious cause is that we are led by greedy, clownish “leaders” who masquerade as “elected”. In truth, they are not leading, they are just middle-men who hope to make a good “career” by pleasing the masters, like the butlers they are.

Yet the situation is worse than it looks. Consider the middle Middle Ages. The European Middle Ages, but I could adjust the same discourse to the Indian, Chinese, or Japanese Middle Ages. Europe is a clearer, better known case. It was a time of princesses, princes, and devotion to the Christian god. As Sade, Nietzsche, and various mafiosi observed, it was just the opposite: the European aristocracy was barely more than the largest organized crime operation in the world, and the wars it organized, a way to physically and mentally divided the people they subjugated into minced meat (when truly necessary).

Agnes Sorel Forced Charles VII To Make War, Or She Would Bed The English King Instead, As Eleanor Did.

Wedding the English king after divorcing the French king is what Eleanor, Duchesse d’Aquitaine had done earlier, and had many children. All subsequent English and French monarchs were her descendants for generations.

What was wrong with the Middle Ages?

The mood. This veneration of people such as Eleanor.

The “Christian” mood of the populace, the fake-Christian, hysterical mood of the leaders. The mood, superstitious and full of tribal anger (consider the pogroms against Jews, Cathars, Waldenses/Protestants, “witches”; and the crisscrossing of Europe by war parties and related “grandes companies” and other armies of brigands).

The superstitious mood is entangled by the celebrity mood, and both are adverse to the triumph of wisdom. The celebrity mood made people look up to princes and princesses (the word, originally used when the Roman Republic was dying, comes from “princeps”, first, and Augustus loved it).

Germaine Greer once at the edge of feminism, is now condemned as somebody so bad by a tribe so well-organized, a university she was supposed to talk at, implied that she should not be allowed to speak in public (as they will not insure her safety). The loudly “transgender” pseudo-tribe has condemned Greer. And, as usual, there is the public discourse, and the real one I suspect (below).

In Reality Greer Attacked The Celebrities Paid To Attack Reality, The Kadarshians

[In the USA, everything is bigger, compare with the “Dame de Beaute'”, the Fifteenth Century Agnes Sorel, above. And Kim Kadarshian is the specialist of reality, or so you will find, Rollingstone asserts, once you enter her real world…]

Tribalism is the way out of metaphysical loneliness. One advantage of “careers” is that they manufacture tribalism. An advantage of hostility strongly shared, let alone mass hatred, is that it creates a fake world solved by tribalism, and the tribal cement to go with.

Witness what is going on in Israel/Palestine. The best solution there is a global secular republic (or union) containing two states therein (a bit like the European Union model).

Chris Snuggs: ““philosophy” means “love of knowledge”, which has actually little to do with what philosophers do. What today is “science” was once “philosophy”. What today’s philosophy is is basically “speculation about the nonscientific” or ” speculative musing about the meaning of life and the processes of thought and its expression through language.””

Patrice: “Linguistic” philosophy has grown malignant indeed. Yet, philosophy, the philosophical method, is more needed than ever, and that is exactly why it is more dead than ever in the plutocratic system, and its universities. There, what passes for philosophy is all too often just garbage.

Watch what I said about the importance of moods. I am applying the philosophical method: telling the truth, sticking to reality. Mood calculus includes, crucially, the unsaid, and unexpressed.

The deepest questions at the edge of science, from Lamarckism to what it means when galaxies recess faster than light, or whether high energy physicists know what they are talking about, involve state of the art philosophy.

However, indeed, Chris, what’s often taught in philosophy departments is abysmal, indeed. This has to do with the fact that it takes (say) a decade to study all of science at high enough a level beyond high school, to have a fair idea of the scientific landscape.

Society, let alone universities, do not view this sort of global knowledge as valuable. Plato required the equivalent of a graduate level knowledge of mathematics. Nearly all “philosophers” now don’t know anymore calculus than Trudeau, Cameron, Hollande, Putin, Xi, Roussef, or Obama.

But of the degeneracy of philosophy has to do with the rise of “analytic philosophy” in Anglo-Saxon countries. Russell, its founder found it had become thoroughly unworthy. On the continent, the derangement was due to the rise of fascism (Soviet or Mussolini style).

What did the veteran feminist, Ms Greer say, which supposedly infuriated some transgender fanatics?

“I just don’t think that surgery turns a man into a woman. A perfectly permissable view. I mean, an un-man is not necessarily a woman. We don’t really know what women are and I think that a lot of women are female impersonators, because our notion of who we are is not authentic, and so I am not surprised men are better at impersonating women than women are. Not a surprise, but it’s not something I welcome.”

Surgery, as practiced today, is little different from what the best prehistoric doctors did successfully: amputation. OK, in the future, we will grow organs. It is studied. It is the future. But not yet a fact.

Kim Kadarshian seems to believe that reality, or rather, learning how to rape reality, is her business model. Said she, talking about her transgender, surgery challenged step-father, now a pseudo-woman:

“He lives his life the way he wants, a really authentic life, and he was like, ‘If you can’t be authentic and you can’t live your life, what do you have?’”

You want authenticity? Ask the Kadarshians, they know all about it. They accept plastic, any day.

Germaine Greer has accused TV star Caitlyn Jenner of emulating the limelight of other (female) members of the Kadarshians family.

The Australian-born feminist courted controversy by asserting that “misogyny played a big part” in the rumors that Glamour magazine would give Jenner its woman of the year award.

Jenner, who was born Bruce, and got many Olympic medals as a male, was married to Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian’s mother, until they filed for divorce early last year, and cannot get enough of his celebrity status, apparently.

Greer says that so-called transgender women, who, admittedly, began life as males, before undergoing surgery and hormone treatments to “become women”, are “not women”. Greer says that they do not “look like, sound like or behave like women”. Instead they behave as males who want to steal everything from women, including femininity. So they trample not just on reality, but on justice too.

Clearly those transgender creatures, not to say creations, are not females (that requires XX chromosomes). But to pretend that they are females, because some people just said so, is the effect the owners of the Main Stream Media, all very rich men, are after: namely destroy any common sense, and make a religion out of that destruction.

Not to say that attack against reality are only the work of transgender crazies. Giving the Nobel Prize to drone crazy Obama was not just funny, but unreal. And not that this was started yesterday. Among the pious, ever since Viceroy Lord Mountbatten said so, Gandhi has been viewed as a paragon of pacifism. Never mind that pacifist Gandhi, praying like an Hindu, helped to bring colossal, multi-generational, religious strife, 15 million refugees, & millions dead. (No wonder he got depressed.)

Christianism to is a religion of peace and love, especially regarding Cathars (exterminated), Jews (pogromized), Muslims (roasting their children a must when hungry, see the First Crusade), or any sort of intellectuals or printers (burned alive). And Joan of Arc, the one of the same king as Agnes Sorel, of course saved France, or so pseudo-French fanatics, by re-igniting a war with London which lasted another four centuries with real guns, and which France is still busy losing, to this day…

Reality is a hard mistress, and the one which always wins. Yet, we control it, to a great extent now, because we are the nonlinear species, ready, even mandated, for immortality. Not that we have a choice.  Humanity is the “why” species. Also the “no” species. Yes, no and why, for the God(s), incarnated, for real. And the problem the gods have is whether they want to aspire to grab Kim’s fake reality, or stick to exercising our reality muscles.

Patrice Ayme’

Why Insist On The DARK Side?

The First Thing That Studying The Dark Side Reveals, Is That:

Individuals, Operate According To Different Neurological “LAWS”, So, Instead Of being One, As One Naively Expects, The INDIVIDUAL IS MANY. Ex Uno Plures.

We have met the Multiverse, and it’s us…

So why to study the Dark Side, besides generating confusion? Well, precisely because it is dark. And when we throw a light on it, we see all what our simplified lives have hidden. Instead, if one wants to understand what we are capable of, we have to bring the Dark Side to the light. How does one do that? One tries to understand one’s own reasons and motivations.

Some will sneer that this insight is not knew. Some will point out at Socrates’ “Know Thyself”. However, Socrates picked up what was the Delphi Oracle’s motto. Delphi was an interesting consortium managed by women. Nor was Delphi first. The Greeks apparently traded silk with China as early as the Sixth Century BCE. And they certainly traded philosophical and mathematical ideas with India. They may have heard of Lao Tzu. As traditionally related, custom officials prevented Lao Tzu to leave China, heading West, before he wrote down some of his ideas. Many of those were strikingly modern:

Lao Tze 600 BCE, Deep. But We Don’t Want To Eliminate Ourselves. Sympathy For The Devil

Dark and negative? Sometimes circumstances call for dark negativism. When Sparta marched an army into Athens to eject tyrants who had succeeded to the enlightened democracy shepherded by Solon, it was dark, and negative, but necessary. From that promptly rose Athens’ Direct Democracy, a beacon to this day. World War Two was another famous example of diabolical negativism unleashed for the best reasons.

Is man rational? Some say yes, some say no. Pascal uttered that there were two sorts of reasons: one of them from “the heart, which has its reasons which reason does not have”.

So what’s reason? Generally that question is interpreted as: is man logical? The Logos, one of three deities or avatar of the deity, of Christianism (!) is about simple “logical” rules. Say:

(A-> B & B->C) -> (A->C). More generally, the old fashion logos can be generalized as diagram chasing as in Category Theory.

Logic, as traditionally envisioned, and Category Theory are all describable point to point and digitally. As both Quantum Mechanics and Non-DNA genetics point out, this is not how the world works, in full.

(Digitally is how the Abacus, and our Twentieth Century computers work; but that’s not saying much: that’s precisely their shortcoming; the Quantum Computers use Quantum mechanics, hence the continuously differentiable nature of the world.)

So it’s not surprising our brains act continuous differential. Just the opposite of neurons’ most spectacular antics. That consist in firing long range electric potential impulses down axons.

Continuously differential brainy means the EMOTIONAL, NEUROHORMONAL system.

How do we control that?

Well, that’s straining a bit out of the traditional approach to wisdom. Kama Sutra (truly a good life and family manual) and Tantric Texts come to mind (digging in the Tantra reveals a lot of analogy with what I preach, or what De Sade observed, namely that embracing nature is often the best teaching).

But one is better off observing how famous leaders of humanity, those who imparted momentum to civilization, lived. Well, they lived, mostly dangerously, and more strikingly, in various behavioral modes. Most monarchs were hard lovers and warriors, while appreciating the arts, and even science (contemplate the Duke of Normandy and Conqueror of England, asking pointed question about the state of motion of the Earth, of Ptolemy, the Marshall of Alexander (“the Great”) establishing Alexandria as a capital of knowledge, or Francois I, Louis XIV, and Napoleon pushing the sciences; contemplate Muhammad, warrior and philosopher).

And don’t forget Socrates’ military exploits, including, among other things killing four hoplites in hand to hand combat, and helping a wounded comrade survive in an harrowing retreat after a heavy defeat of the Athenian army.

What is going on here? What has hunting all day long, and skirt chasing to do with governance? Just as Catherine The Great, after she got her husband killed, and took as lovers many of the alpha males she detected. As Vlad The Putin would point out, that manly, adventurous attitude got her army a few miles from Berlin, and all over Ukraine.

What is going on is that varied behaviors lead to varied neurohormonal regimes, various moods, thus varied sets of mental laws. In the same “individual”.

This, in turn, leads to operating the brain under different “LAWS”. I borrowed the expression from Airbus, an airline company based in Toulouse, France. Airbus and its ancestors invented Fly By Wire (FBW), inaugurated with Concorde, (adopted for the Space Shutle,) and exclusively used in the Airbus 320 (now all serious aircraft makers have followed). When a plane flies normally it is in “normal law”. When things get abnormal, the computerized brain of the plane change “laws”, with the idea to put the pilots in charge. (The system has worked very well, for decades, up to two weeks ago when a brand new A400 M transport plane crashed because of a computer bug.)

The situation with human brains is that neurohormonal regimes put brains in different laws, that is, in different logics. This cannot be denied. It was intuitively understood, for a long time: hence the avice to not get angry, and that anger, or fear, are bad advisers, etc.

Well, maybe that’s the wrong approach. Maybe anger, fear, love, instead of being eschewed, have to be embraced, to explore the world under a different law.

Let’s go back to the aeronautical analogy. That A400M which crash was flown in a TEST, as a TEST aircraft (it was its first flight), by TEST pilots and engineers. As it turned out that was also the TEST of a new software to enable some specific military operations (acting on fuel and what is called “trimming”, a displacement of center of mass related to fuel, inaugurated on Concorde, nearly fifty years ago).

Well, the tests ended catastrophically: three engines cut-off, and the plane, badly trimmed, banked abnormally, and crashed.

It would have been better to run the whole thing as a thought, rather than test experiment. But for aircraft, there is no choice. Just as, for the Earth, there is no choice: we cannot run the Earth as a TEST SPACESHIP, doing whatever, and see what happens.

Because, whereas one crashed plane can be replaced, the Earth cannot.

So we have to make the most thorough thought experiments, much more thorough than we ever did before.

Why?

Because we want to understand our minds, or, more exactly, the minds of the oligarchy of a few thousands, dominated by Xi, Putin, Obama, Merkel, Hollande, and a few hundreds associated top plutocrats of, fully equipped with herds of minions, all the way down to academic critters producing the requested logic (plutocratic law).

Look back down at history. Consider FDR, a president of the USA at a time when, to avoid a holocaust, he had to make a united front with the French Republic. Instead, FDR did the opposite, pronouncing, ten years later, when they holocaust had been already unleashed, and millions were already dead, that the USA was the “Arsenal of Democracy”.

What motivated FDR in weakening and opposing France, while arguing with Hitler, when at the same time replacing his ambassador (Dodd) precisely because he was antagonistic to the Nazis, and tolerating a massive policy of investment with the Nazis that violated neutrality, and so on? One has to go to psychoanalysis.

My explanation? FDR was actually a plutocrat. His family had a (self-created) coat of arms (mine too, but it’s the fault of the king of Aragon, 12 centuries ago).

However, a half paralyzed Roosevelt had to impose an anti-plutocratic policy as candidate and president. And then FDR got the French government in his face, telling him he was all wrong. Indeed, then wrong FDR did, by being all too friendly to Hitler, and refusing Jewish refugees. In the end, FDR lived in denial.

The ultimate was when, although from an institutionally racist USA, FDR had to fight to death the racist-in-chief, Adolf Hitler, and make in a sense its bed for the Liberty-Equality-Fraternity Republic (never mind that France was not really that; FDR was furious he was pulled in the wrong direction; indeed, soon, under the pressure of the war, the U.S. army pushed for desegregation.

Notice that then one has to interpret emotions, such as FDR’s rage against the French, or his de facto friendliness to enemies of France such as Stalin. Texts, the digital thing, are insufficient.

To get to know ourselves, we have to know, not just our logic (roll over Socrates), or what we know (as a library of facts and demonstrations). We also have to know our emotions, and where they came from. More than that, we have to know what they are, or could be, capable of.

Thus we have not just to cultivate our garden (Voltaire), but also cultivate our emotional system, and especially its potential character. Don’t just imagine the Light. Imagine also the Dark.

Patrice Ayme’