Debate Islam Intellectually: That Means Don’t Massacre Muslims

There was an abominable attack against people inside mosques in New Zealand. The perpetrators explained they created violence, to lead Jihadists in turn to be more violent, amplifying the initial violence, until apartheid ensues, and all Muslims go back home (never mind that some of the “Muslims” went to the “West” precisely because they couldn’t stand Islam anymore; moreover many of the worst Jihadists are “Western” converts to Islam, as the final battles of the Islamist State showed).

The idea of the assassins in New Zealand then is that the “Great Replacement” of “whites” by “Muslims” would stop, once the violence level is high enough.

That there is a “Great Replacement” is a fact, but the cause is not Islam per se. We have seen that story before, namely when the plutocrats took power in the Roman Republic: the population of Italy collapsed. It doesn’t have thus to do with Islam, but with the replacement of democracy by plutocracy, and the discouragement which then possess the subjugated masses…

Bringing violence in, amplifying it, could work, it has worked many times before, except if everybody knows the game, because then everybody goes meta on the game, and the game changes to a meta form, another game. All the more that, in this case, this is the ultimate form of game, where people become game and get killed… thus motivating all participants (that’s all of grown-up humanity) to become much more involved and smarter.

I have been there. Magnificent. I recommend visiting Isfahan, one of the world’s most spectacular cities. An occasion to ponder the history of iran, at the time of Shah Abbas…. And why, ultimately, didn’t work… Thus why a more democratic society is intellectually, thus physically, superior…

Earlier in the week, the relevant authority in Pakistan called me all sorts of names and asked for my site to be shut down (supposedly that was partly one; I would be interested to know how many islamofascist countries obeyed…) Clearly, civilization is having a problem with debating ideas.

Some Mosques are among the world’s most beautiful buildings, and should be religiously preserved, just for that. In the name of the religion of the most beautiful art. Although Islam administered countries didn’t contribute to civilization as much as Islamophiles claim, they played a positive rle, be it only, irony of ironies, by preserving a significant part of the Greco-Roman inheritance found in the regions the Jihadists had invade.

The basic Islam ideology was the fruit of Muhammad’s life. Said life was entangled with Christianism and Judaism. Muhammad actually met his first wife thanks to some Christian whom he had met in Christian land, next to (then Christian administered and occupied) Jerusalem. Later, a cousin of theat first wife, who was one of the most famous  and proselytizing Muslims in Arabia, suggested to muhammad that his visions in the desert were those of the Archangel Gabriel, talking in the name of the (Judeo-Christian) god. As there were difference between what Muhammad thought he heard and the practice of Christians and Jews, he endeavored to set them right in a set of revelations, the Recitation, the Qur’an.

Muhammad had other agendas too, and became a confirmed caravan raider, after being a caravan trader for his wealthy business woman of a wife. He was well aware of the fragile state of Rome and Sassanid Persia after a long exhausting war between these two. He declared that was the best time to attack in 1,000 years, after 12 centuries of Greek and Persian domination. So attack he did: he led a huge army into Roman territory… but the Romans refused combat and withdrew. Muhammad went back to Mecca, and mysteriously died, traditionally age 62 (but his real age may have been very different).

At Muhammad’s death, the first two “Successors”, the first two “Caliphs”, Abu Bakr and Omar, conspired to tweak or select much of the Qur’an. Aisha, Muhammad’s child-bride was involved in this too: confronted by Omar about the disappearance of some verses in the Qur’an, she claimed that she had hidden them under a bed, but, unfortunately, a goat had found the verses, and eaten them. Omar was a notorious mysogenine, and Aisha was notoriously free-wheeling (with Muhammad’s benediction).

Muslim warriors (Jihhadists) were promised to sit next to god if they died fighting for Islam. Under Abu Bakr and Omar, in a few years, the Muslim army destroyed Persia, and conquered Syria, Palestine and Egypt. The military expansion of Islam took all by surprise, and, within a generation, Islam had the largest empire on Earth ever. Ultimately, the Greek Fire of the Roman Navy prevented the fall of Constantinople. A circumnavigation around the Mediterranean subdued North Africa after a long and terrible war. The conquest of Spain, though, was rapid.

Then three Muslim invasion of France in quick succession failed, with huge Muslim defeats in Toulouse (721 CE), Poitiers (732 CE), Narbonne (748 CE). its army annihilated, the Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus fell (750 CE), and was replaced by the Abbasid Caliphate in Baghdad… which, ultimate irony, was Iranian controlled…

The next irony: Baghdad fell to the Mongols, and their Frankish, Georgian and Armenian allies.  

In the following 13 centuries, more than 100 variant of Islam evolved. Some have really nothing in common: Black African Sunni Islam could have women not just with naked heads, but naked torsos, and free exhibitionist mentalities commensurate to their minimal clothing… While in some Arab countries, women could be killed, just for having interacted with a non-Muslim male.

My family is half from Africa, and I spent my childhood among “Muslims”. Except those Muslims had nothing to do with the bigots now presented as “Muslim”, who are anxious to impose their “Sharia”. Those a bit familiar with Muhammad know well that the Sharia, much of it established well after Muhammad’s death, doesn’t reflect Muhammad’s mentality. Although Muhammad had something against civilization as organized by Romans and Persians, he was not sexist, considering the circumstances: he apparently gave Aisha the discretion upon her sexual freedom, although they were married (she was still a teenager). When the bishop of Alexandria offered him a Christian female slave of great beauty, he loved her immensely, all the more as she gave him his only son (who died of disease, a few months before his father). Clearly, if one espouses Muhammad anti-sexist spirit, women shouldn’t be legally worth half of what men are worth, etc. Sometimes following the letter condemns the spirit. 

Greco-Roman polytheism didn’t force the masses to practice it. Christianism and Islamism (differently from their origin, Judaism) forced those who practiced other beliefs to become Christian, or Muslim, or then subjugated and exploited them. Hence Christians and Muslims eradicated all religions… except Judaism, which, being their root, proved harder to extricate…

Enough with all this cretinism. How do we mitigate it?

It is alarming that countries, such as Pakistan, which practice the enforcement of a particular superstitious religion, are allowed to be considered in good standing at the United Nations. Instead, they should be condemned and having various privileges removed. Democracies and the organizations and corporations originating from them should be forced to make cooperation with various fascisms increasingly difficult.  

Secularism is the way. The alternative is war. In the case of Pakistan, it means thermonuclear war. Before we come to that, we should debate.

Meanwhile, let’s protest against dictatorship, as millions of Algerians are presently doing. There the demonstrators don’t hesitate to tell the truth: the present FNL dictatorship was put in power by… France. More exactly what one should call the French presidential dictatorship of De Gaulle, then in power. Referendums had been conducted in Algeria, during the dusk of Paris colonial rule. The will of the Algerian people, long neglected, was then clearly expressed:Algeria wanted democracy, a Republic… And that will was violated by the powers that be, in power then in Paris (acting on behalf of the influences behind the French throne, and some came from the world of finance, Washington, Moscow…).

Paradoxically, the racist De Gaulle thought he could separate France and Algeria. Forever. That was naive on his part (or then his racism was out of rational control). Instead, we ended with the Great Replacement, because the same logic which exploited Algeria all too long, exploited France in turn… Whereas Algerians reacted with a demographic explosion, France, and Europe reacted with the opposite. That, again, is nothing new: we have many historical examples, of both effects, that’s how populations get replaced. And there is a logic underneath, it should be debated… because, nowadays, the weapons are bigger, and the going down, not as placid…

Patrice Ayme

FAITH: BORN FROM BRAINS, NECESSARY FOR INTELLIGENCE, Disastrously Hijacked By Tyrants. AI Take Heed!

“If one decides it’s true, it’s true“… is a necessary trick the brain has to use. A key to intelligence, or how to answer the question ‘why’!

For example, a child touches fire, it hurts. Real bad. So child decides,  that, every time fire will be touched, fire will hurt: empirical (from experience), but not statistical: the evidence is not firm, or numerous, just significant (pain). This is the foundation of FAITH. Thus the faith instinct is crucial to advanced brain function. We all have, and use, faith.

Giordano Bruno Thought a lot, and very pertinently about Faith. Both to trash it, as Catholicism, and be guided by it, as Truth. The Vatican and Catholicism showed clearly its real nature and fundamental essence when torturing horribly Bruno for seven years. To suggest EXOPLANETS (now we have found 4,000 of them; I hope the first habitable one be called “BRUNO”). The way the Pope treated Bruno was worse than the worst Jihadism enjoyed today! Really.

Those who believe, and have faith in thoroughly grotesque superstitions (such as “Jesus existed, flew like a helicopter, Muhammad flew on a winged horse to Jerusalem, etc..”) as a foundation for the most important system of ideas, aren’t serious. They are debasing reason, truth, and they know it, and that’s why they push the most ridiculous and grotesque notions. Those clowns therefore are distracting us… from their true purpose, which is, typically to serve their true masters, and their bloody, sadistic passions (Catholicism killed horribly millions of Cathars (circa 1200 CE)… and that was just one of its many exploits in the realm of mass horror and atrocious murder). This is clear with Christianism, or Islamism: the founders (emperors Constantine, Theodosius I, Muhammad the Rophet, Ali the Fourth Caliph, and don’t ask me what a rophet is, etc…) were real life tyrants, capable of killing thousands, whenever it caught their fancy, and it often caught their fancy: by the time of Ali, it was the Fitna, civil war, and it never really stopped since… Thus the superstitions they promoted were just distractions… crucially based on the FAITH INSTINCT (necessary for thinking)!

Indeed, one has to understand the tyrants who hijacked civilization, and keep on hijacking civilization, do this by using a very old instinct necessary for the proper functioning of intelligence… One can even see the faith instinct at work in all the hatred, grouping on the Internet (for example with anti Trump Derangement Syndrome, “Anti-Fa”, etc., as we saw it with Nazism, Stalinism, Maoism, Pol Potism, etc…)

This is a short essay, but it has a key idea: to master Artificial Intelligence, FAITH will have to be programmed, as it is, with biological intelligence! At some point, intelligence has to decide what is true, and what is not true. It can’t decide truth on probabilities alone (Bayesian mumbo-jumbo).

Saint Peters, Rome, greatly built with Roman monuments’ stones. A faith building another. Also US Congress to be built in that image: the principle of faith building the Republic (even if, in Washington, the idea, long brandished in the Middle Ages of Christian Republic was resurrected… with “Christian” dropped). Out of the faith for the “Christian Republic”, as early as 400 CE, was born, in the long run, faith for the return of real large Republics (France and USA, late 18 C). Faith morphs…

Indeed, it does not stop here. The fundamental problem at this point with steering civilization is the… lack of faith, in the the right things, thus intelligence! By this the philosopher does not meant of course to a myth like Jesus or a nightmare like the analphabetic, genocidal caravan raider. And Political Correctness is a faith too, into something only founded on a small, partial set of feel-good-about-oneself emotions, and thus just as false: as it is, Truth is not Politically Correct, Yet Political Correctness should be true.

Proper intelligence has faith in only what seems genuinely to be true, to the best of one’s sincere knowledge. (Often intellectual fascists advocate publicly to NOT read what could disturb their mono-thinking. For example Muslims will kill you for “insulting the prophet”, meaning evoking, or reading something incompatible with all what the “prophet” is supposed to have “recited”; the point is that refusing data is one diagnostic of lack of sincerity).

When Giordano Bruno said: “I beg you, reject antiquity, tradition, faith, and authority! Let us begin anew by doubting everything we assume has been proven!”… He was talking about those erroneous faith. Verily to believe in error is more popular than believing in the truth, because the tyrants want you to believe in these errors, precisely, and you will ingratiate yourself with them by embracing the faith(s) they want you to have: thus Augustus wanted to be called “Son of God”, and Late Roman emperors a similar doctrine (“Catholicism”)

The same Giordano Bruno fought courageously the viciously mass criminal organization known as the greatly homosexual, pedophilic Vatican (represented above)… because he had faith in the truth: “I fought, and therefore, believed in my victory. There is more to the fact that I didn’t fear death and preferred a brave death instead of a life of an idiot.”

Giordano Bruno, condemned to a particularly horrible death by the viciously criminal mass murdering Pope and his goons said:”It may be that you are more afraid passing judgment upon me, than I am receiving it. The time will come when all believe as I do.” And what did Bruno believe? What had been suspected by the brightest minds for millennia, namely that the Sun was a star and that other stars had (inhabited) planets, like around the Sun…

Thus, let’s not be people of little faith! Great intelligence means great faith in the truth, little faith in idiocy. The will to truth needs enough will to power for embracing it.

Faith is at the core of least effort logic (variational calculus applied to logics!) Faith based logic, which present AI doesn’t have enough of, doesn’t contradict probability based logic. It reinforces it. Both are needed, one to establish, the other to implement.

Faith we have, because think we do.

Patrice Ayme

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Note: For more of what I think about superstition based tyrannical faith, in particular Catholicism, from its inventor, Constantine, to what happened to Bruno:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2018/03/25/emperor-constantine-christian-terrorist-325-ce-fall-of-rome-part-x/

So the preceding essay is not about celebrating that sort of faith!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As Wikipedia puts it:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Indeed.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme’

Humanism Versus Buddhism

The very fact that there is a distinction to be made between, “Humanism” and “Buddhism” tells volumes. No ideology with pretensions to goodness should stand distinct from humanism. Because that means, contradicting human ethology. And Buddhism contradicts human ethology, big time. Arguably, it’s way worse than Abrahamism: even the disguised cannibalism of Abrahamism is more naturally anchored in human nature.

What’s the problem in not been occurred in human nature? Well, the more so, arguably, the more of a superstition: standing (“stare”) above (“super”) reality.

Another problem with Buddhism is that it was instigated by a Prince, Gautama Buddha. I am not a Prince, nor do I know any, but I suspect that any Prince would be partial to making the Commons into sheep. So that they can be directed where the shepherds of men when men to be led (to slaughter, or, at the very least, to be shorn and milked, as needed). The fact is, Buddhism instills passivity: passivity is perfect for Princes. Passivity is not a good propellant for evolution. Individuals are created as children, it’s very hard for them to quit their mental geometry later.

The next problem with Buddhism, as with Islamism and Christianism, is that there are many variants of this superstition. In particular, they are more or less superstitious. Tibetan Buddhism, which is extremely superstitious, is pretty far from Zen Buddhism, which is pretty secular. 

Tibetan Buddhists believe that if they rotate around unclimbed Mount Kailash, good things will happen. The PRC gave famed alpinist Reinhold Messner the authorization to climb it, but he declined… Good boy.

Variants of Buddhism are just as far from each other as Wahhabism/Salafism is far from Sufism (the latter having itself drastically different variants). The Mahāyāna (“Great Vehicle) Buddhism is the largest major tradition of Buddhism existing today, with 53.2% of practitioners, compared to 35.8% for Theravada and 5.7% for Vajrayana. The Great Vehicle is more altruistic: it may have been Christianized (personal opinion), as Christian missions reached Sri Lanka as early as the Third Century, and India by the 100s, Common era (just when Mahāyāna surfaced). (I have lots of idiosyncratic opinions…)

Just to give an example, Tibetan Buddhism comprises four lineages. Temperaments can run high: top associates of the Dalai Lama killed each other for reasons of great theological import, in the obscure spiritual caves they roam.  (Interestingly, I made a Google Search of this fact I know to be true; however, Google informed me that, under European Privacy Law, this search was omitted:I’m now in Europe…It took me a huge amount of time to find the link above, and I had to be crafty. This shows European law to be friendly to the Elite, AKA plutocracy…)  

The fundamental problem with Buddhism is its very secular foundation. The deepest intuition of Buddhism, that pain has to be avoided, at the cost of perception. It is as inhuman as it gets.

Some may object to this description. And the objection may be valid, depending upon the variant of Buddhism considered. Some Buddhists will say:”Pain has to be avoided, at the cost of most human emotion”. That’s still inhuman.

Why? The brain thinks, not just with strict implications, but also with emotions. This is even true at the level of pure logic. Emotions can’t be avoided, even if one restricts oneself to logic itself.

Even the parodic character in Star Trek, Mr. Spock, depends very heavily on emotions: after all, one has to have FAITH in the axioms of logic. Besides logics can be anything, by changing the axioms. One choses axioms of logic from emotion, not logic. Logic does not select logic. Logic is; volition, volition from emotion, does the rest.

Emotional computers are coming, make no mistake. Serious Quantum Computers will be emotional… (Yes, I know, that could be a problem…)

By then, when it becomes obvious that, for achieving true Artificial Intelligence, one needs emotions, Buddhism will suffer an irretrievable blow.

Many Buddhists say:”Wait, meditation is good, it changes the brain”. Right. No need to be a Buddhist to meditate, though. I meditate several hours a day, I am a meditation machine, but I usually never mention it, it’s a s natural to me as breathing, and I know the of the impudence of telling other people to “meditate”, as if they were such fools that they never meditate. Basically, if one never meditates, one is just a mechanical parrot. Because one has no indigenous thinking.

Moreover, to deflate further the Buddhist bandwagon, Buddhist meditation is only one type of meditation. However admirable. There are other types of meditation, fully incompatible with Buddhist meditation, and which give excellent results Buddhism can’t get at. An example is Taoist meditation.

Make no mistake: I welcome individuals with dubious behavior to engage in so-called secular Buddhism, if they didn’t gather such a level of wisdom yet, that they still insist to engage in road rage, drug abuse, drinking alcohol, smoking tobacco or THC, insulting their friends thoughtlessly, betraying their loving ones, clutching guns, potentially lethal behaviors, abusing the innocent, in being self-destructive, or in total incapacity to meditate in any way, etc.

I will just say that philosophy, full force, is vastly superior to Buddhism and other isms. Philosophy itself has its own isms, many of them. To quote a few: Stoicism, Cynicism, Existentialism, Marxism, Nominalism, Epicureanism, Positivism, Platonism, Neo-Platonism, Hedonism, Realism, Pragmatism, Materialism, etc.

Allright, the Politically Correct pseudo-left which rules, or, more exactly, ruins the West loves the Dalai Lama certainly the most famous incarnation of Buddhism known worldwide. I am cool with some of what Dalai says, but I have been known to agree even with Lamas in the high Andes. However, my harsh criticism of Buddhism, and other eastern religions (I barely got started here) was pleased to see that, last time my friend Obama received the DL at the White House, His Holiness had to skirt the garbage of the backside…

However interesting the debate, “Secular Buddhism” is pretty much an oxymoron. The mood of passivity Buddhism and its derivatives generated made East Asia fall behind West Asia (Europe). Now, of course, Buddhism and its derivatives or antecedents (Confucianism) has been wiped out as a leading mood, in places such as Japan, Korea, China and Vietnam. It has been replaced by the mood which enabled Western Europe to forcefully industrialize in the Nineteenth Century (If Czar Peter The Great read this, he would be outraged and point out that, three centuries ago, he did exactly what Mao, Chou En Lai and Deng Tsiao Ping did, in the last few decades… Right, I present my excuses…) The point is that PROGRESSIVISM is not compatible with Buddhism. All leaders in the East have concluded it’s not, and they have chosen the philosophical path forged by Europe (and now idiotically second-guessed there!)

Too many superstitious religions around, for this small planet. Respecting them, amounts to procreating them. We need hard-core secularism, and the religion of the planetary Republic.

Patrice Ayme’

Islam: Religion Of Fighting, Says Caliph!

[Those who are tired of my all too learned discourses, should go directly to the smart, yet simple, video linked below; and suffer through the first minute of half deserved “conservative” rant, before the interesting part.]

Strange Disease Of Islamophilia Condemned By Youth, At Last!

The admiration for, and lies about, Literal Islam, is the miracle which keeps on giving. To world plutocrats.

Islam took over what had been, for millennia, the richest, most innovative and most civilized part of the world, and turned it into the poorest, dumbest, and most war-torn wastes, until oil was found. Any question?

Well, some had questions. As the president of Senegal, Abu Diouf, said, Saudi style, Salafist Wahhabi Islam is “not my religion”. This is why 100 severely different versions of Islam were created. In opposition to Salafist Islam. However, Salafist Islam is now propelled by Arabian oil (and Wall Street, and Washington power standing behind since the 1930s: the swamp Trump talks about is full of oil…) 

The Caliph has spoken. In Some Ways, The “Islamist State” Is More Honest Than Main Stream Intellectuals In The West

A young and slick Utuber looked into ‘Avallone Hunter’,  looked into Islam, and made a good job at it. He particularly got it right on “moderate Muslims”, who, according to the Qur’an are hypocrites, thus to be killed. Anyway, the video is good, once you pass the gratuitous attack and passing conflation of “progressives” with their opposites, at the beginning of the work (I am a progressive, so I didn’t appreciate that!)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4d8GDo49QKY

Do not despair of youth: they learn. Showing in great numbers, contrarily to habit, and expectations, the less than 24 years old just helped Theresa May, the plutocratic fanatic UK PM, lose her majority in the UK Parliament. The youth in the UK is pro-Europe and anti-xenophobic. They know more, and have a more appropriate mood than their elders. Alleluia! Terrorism will go away, once the youth is aware of why it appeared in the first place.

The “West” by the way, is the descendant, in more ways than one, some cultural, some genetics, of that richest, most innovative, and most civilized part of the world, which I call not the Middle East, but the Middle Earth, because it is what it is.

Italians are partly, genetically, Iraqis: Mesopotamians migrated over to the north shore of the Mediterranean, with their bio-engineered grain and know-how, bringing themselves and agriculture. 5,000 years before Greek civilization. This migration was recently genetically traced through the islands of the Aegean. Much “Greek” math was Egyptian, Sumer cities, 5,000 years ago, started the alphabet, and “Europa” was a Phoenician Princess (who travelled over to present day Europe; actually she would have been kidnapped…)

Considering the logic of Islam, it’s easy to see why all the gold it touches turns to poisonous mercury. Islam is an essentially hypocritical faith, saying science has to be pursued, but then “disbelievers” have to be killed. That’s, at best, absurd: how can one develop science without disbelief? How can want to develop science without feeling that creation, as it happened, is not perfect, but, instead, requires thorough explanation?Doesn’t Islam say we should stick to revelation, as transmitted by Mr. Messenger, an epileptic analphabet hallucinating in the desert?

Islam seems to have aimed at making into a capital offense all and any behavior that would not make Muslims reproduce like rabbits, to feed those vast armies of conquerors and jihadists. So women are supposed to be baby machines, and any man not inclined to engross them, within strict guidelines, is a traitor.

This all happened in the lifetime of one person. The Ferocity Of Islam Insured Fast, Gigantic Conquests, Before Resistance Could Be Mustered. After the tremendous defeats of Islam at the hands of the Franks, Islam was broken, never to grow again until very recently… (Except for the conquest of Turkey, and the slow drip into Africa…)

Islam is the war religion par excellence, and Adolf Hitler admired it for that.

The irony, of course, is that the Islam superstition, by separating men and women, is intrinsically homosexual: after, men are supposed to be with men, and women, with women. Actually, it’s even better than that:  women are supposed to be out of sight. So Muslim men intrinsically only love to have around other men, they have androphilia (men loving men).

The ferocity with which homosexuals are killed in Islam is precisely because Islam is so homosexual. It’s both a lie and a lifeline. An attempt to disguise what is going while avoiding the accusation of sodomy by the West which helped to destroy the Aztecs.

Violence in Islam is no accident, coincidence or consequence. It’s intrinsic. Violence, the violence of armies, is what made Islam possible. In a few years, Islam conquered the largest empire the world had ever known. Precisely because those who (claim to) die for Allah are promised paradise.

The question then becomes: why did such a monster superstition become an object of adoration on the part of so many intellectuals in the West?

Because many intellectuals in the West developed a hatred for civilization, shortly before or coincident and causally related to Stalinism, Nazism, Fascism and Maoism… Much of the anti-colonialist struggle, however justified, resorted to hating civilization all together… Although it’s civilization which had made it possible in the first place!

Many intellectuals became rich, powerful and influential this way. Hating civilization became their business model. And in Islam they found an ideology which had been created to hate the “West”, the Greco-Roman empire, and also the other civilization, the Persian Sassanid empire. Muhammad led the first attack against Rome. Within ten years, Persia was destroyed and the richest parts of the Roman empire had been conquered by the Islamists.

Muhammad didn’t see it: he died by surprise, in great pain, screaming on his deathbed in Mecca, for days, that he had been poisoned. By fellow Muslims.

That’s the drawback of a lethal, dictator friendly religion: it kills a lot.

So many Western intellectuals loved Islam, because Islam hated the “West”, and they, themselves, made a (dishonest) profession of hating the “West” (which fed them so well). The hater of my enemy is my friend, some say, forgetting about crocodiles, which show that the eater of their enemy is not really friendly. So did Hitler love Islam, and hate the “West”. In general, plutocrats hate civilization, so they are natural enemies of Islam.

The Qur’an orders to follow dictators as if they were god, as long as they are Muslims… Consider:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/10/02/god-hates-democracy/

US oilmen and sneaky British imperialists saw, as early as the 1930s, that they would gain by instrumentalizing Islam. So here we are. All Islam propaganda goes through Western fibers and satellites.

The problem of Islam is thus way larger than just Islam. Yes, Islam is the religion of desert raiding, it was established that way by a caravan raider. Yes, Islam is ideal for brutal military conquerors, and dictators, thus many of these, from the Turks to the Mongols, adopted it. But Islam is more than that. Islam is an ideology, one of many, of the sort which serve a much bigger species of monsters, always devouring civilizations. Islam is the tool of something maximally monstrous: unchained, free ranging plutocracy.  

Let’s finish on a lighter, enlightening note on how public opinion gets durably molded. I just saw a Suisse Romande report on what happened in 1971, when six high level reporters and producers were fired from TSR (called RTS now), the state (and only) French-speaking TV in Switzerland.

The present Swiss TV, RTS was able to access the documentation of the time, and interviewed both the leftists and the police officers, or their superiors, involved at the time. Basically what happened is that there was a “political police” in Switzerland (it was secret that there was a political police). So important TV personalities and producers were followed by the secret police and information was gathered anonymously (as Google, Facebook and company are doing now). Patterns were established: some were living with someone else while not married, some were heard saying things which were deemed to be revolutionary. In the end the secret police sent a list of six persons, asking them to be fired. The TV TSR did so. TSR accused the six of “subversion and sabotage“. It was alleged that they had relations with foreign powers (Cuba).

The six fired alleged defamation (in truth they were simple middle class, with nearly no rebellious spirit about them, and no connection with organizations or foreign powers). There was a trial for defamation; the chief of the federal police (equivalent to the FBI) came and said the TSR was justified, so the judges sided with the TV channel. All of this happened because those six wrote TV shows disturbing to the political class. (They more or less won in appeal, because the Federal police chief was unwilling to reveal a secret police was spying on the citizenry). However those six and others connected to them were excluded from TV, and thus wide influence, for the next thirty years… These sorts of manipulations is happening all over the world, making sure that We The People think and feels just what the ascending plutocracy cares about (like sport teams scores).

To this day, one of two principals in this affair, Rene’ Schenker, says that he cannot tell what happened, because if he did, justice would have to re-open an inquiry. The other principal obeying orders from above says that: “Yes, we fired with canon at flies“.  This is still happening. Look at the New York Times: it bans all my comments, one of many media to do so. The idea is that my ideas and observations should not be known. Probably thousands of others are in the same situation (interesting commenters have disappeared at the NYT). However, the New York Times enjoys privileges (say sits in attendance at the White House). Thus a propaganda system is established: Islamophobia is racism, Obama is a great progressive, etc… If Islamophobia is racist, any analysis of why Islam, that enemy of the Middle Earth, re-appeared, coincident with the supremacy of oil and Wall Street, and the discussion of the deal with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud in 1945, is excluded. And so on.

Last week, I read some extracts of the Qur’an to good, left, progressive, socialist, rabidly pro-Clinton voters, sensitive souls who cried when Trump got elected instead. It was a little experiment, but I was surprised by their overwhelming incredulity. They were astounded, they were aghast, they couldn’t believe it, their gaping mouths went into huge Os. They were so astounded, they thought I was making it up, and they came over to read the Qur’an by themselves. They had never did it before, but they though they knew Islam… Strange times, indeed… All too many people do not even know what it is to know. They feel they know, what they couldn’t possibly know… except if they believed fully whatever the authorities want them to believe.

Patrice Ayme’

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

Orders To Kill Non Muslims Are Found Early In Qur’an

One can’t understand Islamist fanaticism, without understanding Christianism, its prologue and paradigm. On the face of it, Islamophilia is the sort of mood we didn’t have since Roman Emperor Constantine, under the skeptical eye of his Frankish shock troops, imposed his Christianophilia on the gigantic empire. How? Christianism has it that non-believers should be killed. That was made into law by Roman emperor Theodosius in 390 CE.

See: Luke 19:27: Don’t Ask What God Can Do For You, Ask Who You Can Kill In His Name?

From this, this lethal stupidification, the empire would collapse within a generation (by 400 CE). Later, the Franks would acquire full power, re-impose tolerance. Christianofascism would return to the core of the (Franco-Germano-Roman) empire only in 1026 CE, when, for the first time in five centuries or so, half a dozen people got executed for heresy. Soon the Christians would kill millions, probably dozens of millions, from Ireland to Jerusalem. Now the Islamists execute non-believers (a sort even the Christians would not kill; heretics and non-believers were two different notions!) Islamists execute Islamists all over Western Europe. Whereas it started with six or so in 1026 CE, the Islamists have killed and wounded thousands in two years, in Europe:

Extermination of civilians for all to see…

Why do (some) Muslims kill non-Muslims with so much gusto? Because they read the Qur’an, and this is what is ordered there. And it’s not restricted to the Verse of the Sword (Surah 9, verse 5). A Palestinian friend, Lalo Dagach, who believes that Islam is a huge problem, for so-called “Muslims”, and progress in general, took three pictures from just the first, and most pacific, chapter of the Qur’an. I reproduce those pictures below. For a full complement, consider “Violence In Holy Qur’an“. (You will see that homosexuals should be stoned; And remember the Hadith is much more violent, even observing that all Jews have to be called before Last Judgement!)

There are orders to kill non-Muslims as early as the first chapter of the Qur’an, the Surah 2, called “The Cow”:

Need I say More?

“Those who disbelieve will have great torment“. It’s also possible to disbelieve while believing one believes, by deceiving God, the believers, and oneself. God has put disease in their hearts. “Agonizing torment awaits for them“… This is in page 5 of the Holy Qur’an… It’s not like it’s hidden somewhere obscure…

More of the same

“Fire is prepared for disbelievers, whose fuel is men…” This is in page 6 of the super Holy Qur’an…

This on page 7 of the Holy Qur’an…

By the way, The Cow, which we are quoting here, is considered to be a very pacific, innocuous and docile part of the Qur’an, and it is…

What of this calling to cull all Jews? Hadith 41;685: …”Allah’s Messenger… : The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will FIGHT against the Jews and the Muslims would KILL them…”

Teaching, preaching, presenting all this as the ultimate reality should be viewed as thought crime. When directed at children, it should be viewed as the worst corruption, bar none. Amen. That does not mean that it should be proscribed as fiction. No, not at all, quite the opposite. As fiction it should prescribed, not proscribed.

Make no mistake: I love the Qur’an. I also love the original movie “Alien”, where a space monster eats astronauts. I love the Qur’an more, because it’s substance is much richer. More things happen: Allah gets advice from Djinns, debate with Shatan (Satan = Pluto = Hades). We humans, Allah tells us, “should not ponder these sort of things because Allah knows, and you do not.” Allah also makes those who talk too much drink molten lead, and enjoys deluding humanity. Apparently, once enough humanity has been deluded, there will be plenty to “skin alive, and then regrow their skins, to be able to skin them again”…

There have been problem gods before: contemplate the Aztecs Huichilobos. Huichilobos encouraged Montezuma and his successor to resist Cortez forcefully. At some point 66 Spaniards captured in battle were sacrificed on top of the tallest cue of Mexico, in full view of the Spanish army. There, on top of that double headed giant extremly tall pyramids, the Spaniards were forced to dance, before their living, beating hearts were torn out. The destruction of Mexico (that was the name of the city) was caused by the belief in Huichilobos (and the priest who were the Messengers of his orders). Cortes and his captains insisted that Mexico was being destroyed, stone house by stone house, canal by canal, just because the Aztecs kept on listening to that devil of Huichilobos.

The Spaniards filled the canals with the house debris, so that they had fields of fire and flat ground for the armored cavalry. Civilization can’t be denied, especially when enraged.

The annihilation of Mexico itself created a precedent of annihilation which enabled (some of) the Spaniards, later to annihilate other nations of Mesoamerica which had not been aggressive towards the Spaniards (that was viewed as a war crime at the time in Spain). Violence breeds violence.

Five Arabic speaking nations are starting tomorrow a sort of economic blockade of Qatar, accusing it to foster terrorism through financing of terrorist networks, including Al Qaeda and the Islamist State. The nations taking sanctions are Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen…

The blockade is total: Saudi Arabia revoked the licence of Qatar Airways, Qatar citizens have two weeks to leave Saudi Arabia. People in Qatar are rushing supermarkets to store food. Most Qatar food comes through Saudi Arabia. (Amusingly, and tellingly, Qatar has huge investments in France, something long harshly criticized therein…)

Very good, and a good consequence from Trump’s visit. However, as I have pointed out forever and a day, for many years,  the present Islamist resurrection was a tool deployed initially by British imperialists and especially US oilmen and their Wall Street accomplices. To this day, most of this propaganda passes through media (fibers and satellites) exclusively controlled by western plutocracy. There is the choice, and thus the Achilles Heel…

But first the Western thinkers need to understand that Islamophilia is an attempt to make us all brutish and stupid… (Not to say that British, or Western plutocracy is not insufferable and brutish; but please notice that plutocrats are not those being assassinated…)

Patrice Ayme’

Cosmic Inflation Hysteria, Bio Evolutionary Hysteria

What If Cosmic Inflation Is Wrong? Where It Is Shown That Scientists Are Prisoners Of What Looks Good:

How plausible is a piece of knowledge? How does one establish the plausibility of a piece of knowledge? This is the sort of meta theory of knowledge (meta-”epistemology”) which the progress of science unceasingly reveals.

Thus, establishing new science is not just a revelation of the world out there, but a revelation of how we think, and, even better, how we could think, if we wanted to be even more clever than we already are.

In particular mass sociological effects control the “data” all too easily, the more subtle the “data” is.

Here we consider evolution and especially the attitude relative to Lamarck, and then the so-called Big Bang, or as it is now fashionable to say among the cognoscenti, in a bout of poetic mystifying jargon, the ΛCDM model. (Much more sophisticated than Big Boom theory!)

In both cases, silly, and thus all the more enthusiastic, herd effects are involved.

***

Nothing Real New In Darwinism, But Lots Of Insufferably Shattering New Ideas In Lamarck:

The debate about biological evolution was exemplary: Greece was making lot of money from having mastered selection of species, both natural and artificial, 25 centuries ago. Anaximander, earlier, informed us we all evolved from fishes. Then came the Christian Jihadists, burning books, libraries and infidels, cutting intellectuals alive with oysters shells until they succumbed. Fast forward 23 centuries, and research professor Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, having ruined his eyes by spending thousands of hours studying mollusk, and other invertebrate fossils behind his microscope, came up with several new insights.

Lamarck thought that evolution was urged along by two other forces. Teaching evolution was outlawed in England, Lyell and Darwin went to learn it in Edinburgh, Scotland. Next Darwin rolled the basic Greek theory out, claiming to have observed it in Galapagos finches as Lamarck had observed it mollusks. Darwin’s basic theory, purged from its Lamarckian elements, became widely accepted.    

There was no proof that the further additions suggested by Lamarck were wrong, though. However, believing that there was anything in evolutionary theory beyond what the Greeks already knew 25 centuries ago, became “unscientific”. Since when is believing that something could be true which we have no proven is not true “unscientific”?

Since science is a church with great bishops?

Nothing was really completely new in Darwinism, but lots was really new, and religiously shocking, in Lamarck. After lots of ridicule, Lamarck took 2 centuries to be proven right.

We know now that Lamarck was right on one of his two suggested mechanism. And I am pretty sure he is true on the other. Underlying both is full bore Quantum Physics.

Thus spoke Zarathrustra.

***

Here comes the Bible, latest version! Perfectly correct, if one supposes their suppositions about their suppositions just as correct…

Inflationistas’ Hysteria:

I am for more mild inflation in matters economical, and also in matters cosmological, but not beyond that.

For decades, cosmologists have screamed from every rooftop that cosmic inflation was right. I was dubious, because they made an hypothesis which was astounding, to explain something rather mundane. (And extremely natural, if one entertains the fancy that the universe is hundreds of billion years old, not just 13.8 billion!)

The short of it is that the universe is huge, at least 45 billion light years across, but looks everywhere the same, as if it originated from just one place (or as if it were immensely old). To explain the discrepancy, some cosmologists, starting in the USSR, assumed the universe expanded at enormously faster than light speed. The speed of light along loops in space is locally limited. The speed of space, though is not limited (a curved manifold of dimension n embeds in one of dimension (2n +1) so that the curvature of the former is a trace of the flat one of the latter).

This was a huge hypothesis to explain a smaller problem. Basically, it looked as if cosmologists had got the temporal dimension of the universe wrong. Or maybe the Big Bang was wrong. Or maybe both, a bit.

Instead, cosmologists assumed a completely new force, Cosmic Inflation, and thus a completely new source of energy. They went for a phantasmagoric “explanation”, instead of modestly admitting that they did not really witness the proverbial “First Three Minutes”, from their position, on the right of God.

If CI existed, why should CI appear just once? Why not here, there, and everywhere, now, yesterday and tomorrow? Could one make universes out of nothing? Yes, yes and yes, screamed hysterical cosmologists from all rooftops.

A rule in thinking is that when one has a problem with a ready class of explanations one should not explain it with supernatural explanations from the get-go, before the more obvious explanations have been proven wrong.

Here conventional theories of the Hot Big Bang may not be not quite correct, so hysterical physicists decided that everything-we-know makes no sense, to start with. It turns out that their arguments amounted to hand waving (OK, a gas cools down when expanding; however a quantum fluctuation is not a gas!) fabulous mathematician cum physicist Roger Penrose claims that obtaining a flat universe classically without any recourse to inflation out of a quantum fluctuation is 10^100 more likely.

A casual look shows that conventional Big bang theory makes a lot of assumptions we have no proof of (for example in astrophysics). Absence of logical contradiction is no proof of experimental existence. Especially when, in the end, the theory one gets (the conventional Hot Big Bang) seems incorrect (because nothing can solve the flatness problem, short of immense age!)  

The philosophical problem became even more acute when an experimental cosmological inflation was discovered, Dark Energy. The conjunction of CI and DE made the universe expand tremendously, brake down, and then re-accelerate. Weird. Both inflations differ by a factor of 10^27 in their energy density.

So why not go with Dark Energy alone? Then the universe maybe hundreds of billions of years old.

Why not? Just to say that can’t possibly be true, because one has seen the universe expands very fast, in a tremendous cosmic inflation, amounts to starting with one’s conclusion.

***

The Common Denial Mechanism About Evolutions Either Biological Or Cosmological; We Know, You Don’t, & What We Know Pleases Authority:

The Big Bang cosmology is in the exact mood of the Bible: nothing really new in that mood. They can say they have numbers, I can see there is a lot of completely circuitous logics, where the end proves the beginning. In any case, if it’s in the Bible, it’s right, and God cares about creating a little universe for us.

What hurt with Lamarck’s insights was the God of the Bible again (and the entire empires resting on it). Lamarck basically said intelligence, animal intelligence and an increasing mysterious complexity organizing force intrinsic to life, organized the universe. In any case, smarts, but not those of the God of the Bible. That was therefore censored from the Anglo-Saxon world, where God is a question of national security, or, at least, manifest destiny, grabbing entire continents… When the forces of obscurantism had to surrender, they embraced an obscure amateur gentleman researcher of good English stock. (Not to demean Darwin, but Lamarck, and even his enemy, competitor, contradictor and colleague Cuvier, did the heavy lift, 60 years prior…)

Insights about what truth could be never comes from herds, especially herds of mandarins, when they are genuinely new.  

Patrice Ayme’

Hirsi Ali: Fight Violent, Post-622 CE Islam.

Voltaire: Crush Infamy!

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Islam’s Most Eloquent Apostate, Warns That West Is Wrong About The Nature Of Islam’s Threat. The West’s obsession with ‘terror’ has been a mistake, she argues. Dawah, the ideology behind Islam Terror, is the broader, and truly fundamental threat. (This is the position I held for more than a decade.)

***

Ever More Muslim Crazies Are Embracing Ever More Hardcore Islam:

Anybody who reads the basic “Recitation” (Qur’an) of Islam in full, unabridged, unmanipulated edition, knows that it apparently very explicitly said there that those who fight, or kill (otherwise undefined) “unbelievers” and “pagans” will go to “paradise”. More and more angry Muslims are discovering this truth about Islam, long occulted by those who sciolistically pretended that Islam was just “a religion of peace”. Hence the continual attacks, which, themselves are just a symptom of a deeper problem (consider Turkey’s drift towards crazed tyranny, one political manipulation at a time, to see what I mean…)

Just in the first two weeks of Spring 2017, there were deadly or potentially lethal Muslim plots and attacks in England, Belgium, France, Sweden, Norway, Egypt (excluding the war theaters of Iraq and Syria). Attacks killed or gravely wounded dozens (more than 45 Christians in, or in front, of churches, were killed in Egypt alone on April 9, 2017; one attack aimed at killing the Coptic Pope, was thwarted by police, massacring eleven dead, and much more gravely wounded). It does not have to do with an ideology called “terror”: there is no such a thing, whatever the Kenyan thought. On the other hand, there is something called “Islam”, and it has everything to do with those attacks. Ms. Ali now explains this with a detail similar to the one I have used for more than a decade (I am a partisan of the original Islam found in Senegal). 

The Fifth Person Killed In The London Fanatic Muslim Attack Of March 2017. Romanian Architect Andreea Cristea Fell In the Thames (behind her) Thrown There By the SUV Driven By English Born On Muslim Jihad Against Unbelievers. She Died After More Than A Week’s Agony In A London Hospital. A Similar Attack Followed In Stockholm Within Days

***

Ayaan Hirsi Ali, born a Muslim in Somalia in 1969, is Islam’s most eloquent apostate: As a Somali Muslim woman she was submitted to extreme abuse, including genital mutilation. She escaped to civilization, and was accepted as a refugee there, later to be elected as a MP. However, European authorities did not take her security as well as necessary. Famous Dutch citizens and intellectuals (Leo Van Gogh, an example) were cruelly assassinated by Muslims, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali had to flee to the USA (there are at least ten times more Muslims in Western Europe than in North America).

Ms. Hirsi Ali is a research fellow in Stanford and was interviewed there for the Wall Street Journal by another researcher, Mr. Varadarajan, a research fellow in journalism at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution. I liberally quoted Hirsi Ali’s answers in what follows.

***

Watch Your Tongue: Islam May Fatwa You To Death:

Ayaan can’t go anywhere, at any time of day, without a bodyguard. Indeed, Ali is soft-spoken, perfectly logical, cogent, she is the most dangerous foe of Islamism in the Occident.

Hirsi Ali has multiple fatwas on her head.

Fatwa is one of the greatest beauty of Islam. A fatwa is a decree by a Muslim, any Muslim. A fatwa can even be proffered by a Muslim, in the name of Islam, proclaiming that someone has to be killed: no need to be a Muslim priest or something like that, because Islam proclaims it has no priests (avert your eyes from Mullahs, Ayatollahs, Muftis, Marabouts, Imams, etc.). Fatwa literally means “he gave a formal legal opinion on“. Thus anyone who believes he has Islamist legal training can proclaim a fatwa.

Thanks to the Fatwa Principle, any Muslim low life can hope to get anybody killed. Islam is the great equalizer: any sharp critique standing above can be destroyed (this effective capability to exterminate all and any serious intellectual is why, although the greatest empire ever for a millennium, in possession of all the Greco-Roman inheritance it had stolen, and most of india, Islam  generated nearly no discovery on its own). 

Theo van Gogh (1957–2004), a relative of the world-famous painter Vincent van Gogh, was a famous Dutch film director who collaborated with Ayaan Hirsi Ali to produce the short film Submission (2004). Theo was assassinated the same year by Mohammed Bouyeri, a Moroccan-Dutch Muslim, in a particularly gory murder. The assassin planted a knife in the dying Theo’s chest, pinning this way a letter explaining that Ayaan Hirsi Ali was next.

***

Reform Islam Thoroughly; Senegal Did It:

Ali used to declare Islam to be incapable of reform,while also calling on Muslims to convert or abandon religion altogether. That was incorrect: some need the crutches of superstition. Moreover, and more importantly, Islam, as practiced in West Africa, especially Senegal, was fully compatible with the Twentieth-First Century, even more so than the most advanced Christianism (I was raised in the middle of that completely open-minded Islam)

Now Ali believes that Islam can indeed be reformed.

Ali has been trying to introduce notions such as “Mecca Muslims.” These are the faithful who prefer the gentler version of Islam “originally promoted by Muhammad” before 622 CE. That was the year Muhammad fled to Medina and his religion took a militant and unlovely turn towards violence.

At the same time, Ms. Hirsi Ali urges the World to look at Islam with new eyes. She says Islam is “not just a religion, but also as a political ideology”. To regard Islam merely as a faith, “as we would Christianity or Buddhism, is to run the risk of ignoring dawa, the activities carried out by Islamists to keep Muslims energized by a campaign to impose Shariah law on all societies—including countries of the West.” 

Islam Terror Not Subjugating Ayaan Hirsi Ali Yet. Genitally Mutilated As A Child, But Mentally Unbowed, Blossoming Above The Abusive Brutes

***

Dawah, the Propaganda Of Hard Core Islam,

Ms. Hirsi Ali explains, Dawah is “conducted right under our noses in Europe, and in America. It aims to convert non-Muslims to political Islam and also to push existing Muslims in a more extreme direction.” The ultimate goal of Dawah is “to destroy the political institutions of a free society and replace them with Shariah,  a never-ending process. It ends when an Islamic utopia is achieved. Shariah everywhere!”

Up to 622 CE, Muhammad had to be nice: he was living in Mecca, and the dominant tribe of the Quraish (to which he belonged!) was not amused by his antics of epileptic analphabetic under the influence of a Christian monk, his cousin, threatening Mecca’s religious tourism with his home-made religion. So in 622 CE the self-described “Messenger of God” fled to Yattrib (now Medina), and spent the next decade living off war and raids on Meccan caravans, or the Roman empire.

As a result all the Qur’an written after 622 CE is mostly about the virtues of the morality of a hard-core desert raider: lie, kill, terrorize, go to heavens. And also proclaim these virtues to be the highest, thus introducing the notion of “abrogation” of the earlier Meccan verses by the post-622 CE verses. So, for example the famous Verse of the Sword (Surah 5, verse 59), which orders to kill apostates (like Ms. Hirsi Ali), unbelievers, pagans, abrogates (renders moot, overrides) the pacific verses about tolerance, not imposing religion, etc.

Here it is, just as a reminder:

“And when the sacred months have passed, then kill the polytheists wherever you find them and capture them and besiege them and sit in wait for them at every place of ambush. But if they should repent, establish prayer, and give zakah, let them [go] on their way. Indeed, Allah is Forgiving and Merciful.”

That verse is accompanied by an entire flotilla of similar verses, supporting it. The Verse of the Sword, had it be written when Muhammad was in Mecca, would have brought Muhammad’s immediate execution (as dangerous terrorist). As it were, Muhammad was condemned to home arrest, under the penalty of death. He escaped by having his son-in-law and cousin Ali put on Muhammad’s characteristic mantle, and go to Muhammad’s bed disguised that way.

In the end, Muhammad’s tyranny did not escape punishment. At least so thought Muhammad. The self-described “Messenger of God” fell ill by surprise, at the age of 62. In bed for days, he died, screaming he had been poisoned.

***

Focus On Islam, not Terror, Says Ali; Comparing Algeria and Senegal:

Ms. Hirsi Ali observes that the West made a colossal mistake by obsessing with “terror” since 9/11.

“In focusing only on acts of violence, we’ve ignored the Islamist ideology underlying those acts. By not fighting a war of ideas against political Islam—or ‘Islamism’—and against those who spread that ideology in our midst, we’ve committed a blunder.”

Actually the mistake was made much earlier than that, and, like all deep mistakes, it was made by the French. Full stop, let’s back up? That would take us back, deep in history. During the Franco Algerian civil war, everybody focused on the violence (of both sides). Nobody focused on the problem of Islam itself. Indeed, how come the Jews of North Africa had become perfect French and the Muslims not?

The fundamental mistake was made by the French who honored an agreement made with Abdel Kader, early in the context of the conquest of Algeria: Abdel Kader surrendered, but only if the French state agree to never touch Islam.

No such an accord was signed in Senegal (where the French state interfered massively with Islam).

***.  

“What the Islamists call jihad is what we call terrorism,”

Adds Ayaan Hirsi Ali, “and our preoccupation with it is, I think, a form of overconfidence. ‘Terrorism is the way of the weak,’ we tell ourselves, ‘and if we can just take out the leaders and bring down al Qaeda or ISIS, then surely the followers will stop their jihad.’ But we’re wrong. Every time Western leaders take down a particular organization, you see a different one emerge, or the same one take on a different shape. And that’s because we’ve been ignoring dawa.”

As Mr. Varadarajan it in the WSJ:

Ms. Hirsi Ali wants the world to get away from this game of jihadi Whac-A-Mole and confront “the enemy that is in plain sight—the activists, the Islamists, who have access to all the Western institutions of socialization.” She chuckles here: “That’s a horrible phrase . . . ‘institutions of socialization’ . . . but they’re there, in families, in schools, in universities, prisons, in the military as chaplains. And we can’t allow them to pursue their aims unchecked.”

America needs to be on full alert against political Islam because “its program is fundamentally incompatible with the U.S. Constitution”—with religious pluralism, the equality of men and women, and other fundamental rights, including the toleration of different sexual orientations. “When we say the Islamists are homophobic,” she observes, “we don’t mean that they don’t like gay marriage. We mean that they want gays put to death.”

Islam the religion, in Ms. Hirsi Ali’s view, is a Trojan horse that conceals Islamism the political movement. Since dawa is, ostensibly, a religious missionary activity, its proponents “enjoy a much greater protection by the law in free societies than Marxists or fascists did in the past.” Ms. Hirsi Ali is not afraid to call these groups out. Her book names five including the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which asserts—and in turn receives in the mainstream media—the status of a moderate Muslim organization. But groups like CAIR, Ms. Hirsi Ali says, “take advantage of the focus on ‘inclusiveness’ by progressive political bodies in democratic societies, and then force these societies to bow to Islamist demands in the name of peaceful coexistence.”

***

Multiculturalism Is The Useful Idiocy Islamism Uses:

Ali’s strategy to fight dawah evokes parallels with the fight against Stalinism. Islamism has the help of “useful idiots”—Lenin’s concept—such as the Southern Poverty Law Center, which has denounced Ms. Hirsi Ali as an “extremist.” She sees that smear as a success for dawah: “They go to people like the SPLC and say, ‘Can we partner with you, because we also want to talk about what you guys talk about, which is civil rights. And Muslims are a minority, just like you.’ So, they play this victim card, and the SPLC swallows it. And it’s not just them, it’s also the ACLU. The Islamists are infiltrating all these institutions that were historic and fought for rights. It’s a liberal blind spot.”

Western liberals, she says, are also complicit in Islamist cultural segregation. She recalls a multiculturalist catchphrase from her years as a Somali refugee in Amsterdam in the early 1990s: “ ‘Integrate with your own identity,’ they used to tell us—Integratie met eigen identiteit. Of course, that resulted in no integration at all.”

***

Use The Same Methods Against Islamism As Against Stalinism:

Ms. Hirsi Ali wants the Trump administration—and the West more broadly—to counter the dawa brigade “just as we countered both the Red Army and the ideology of communism in the Cold War.” She is alarmed by the ease with which, as she sees it, “the agents of dawa hide behind constitutional protections they themselves would dismantle were they in power.” She invokes Karl Popper, the great Austrian-British philosopher who wrote of “the paradox of tolerance.” Her book quotes Popper writing in 1945: “If we extend unlimited tolerance even to those who are intolerant, if we are not prepared to defend a tolerant society against the onslaught of the intolerant, then the tolerant will be destroyed, and tolerance with them.”

I ask Ms. Hirsi Ali what her solution might be, and she leans once more on Popper, who proposed a right not to tolerate the intolerant. “Congress must give the president—this year, because there’s no time to lose—the tools he needs to dismantle the infrastructure of dawa in the U.S.” Dawah has become an existential menace to the West, she adds, because its practitioners are “working overtime to prevent the assimilation of Muslims into Western societies. It is assimilation versus dawa. There is a notion of ‘cocooning,’ by which Islamists tell Muslim families to cocoon their children from Western society. This can’t be allowed to happen.”

***

Force Islam To Respect The Right Of Children Not To Suffer Brainwashing:

Mr. Varadarajan asked whether Ms. Hirsi Ali is proposing to give Washington enhanced powers to supervise parenting? “Yes,” she says. “We want these children to be exposed to critical thinking, freedom, the Constitution, the Bill of Rights, the rights of women.” She also suggests subjecting immigrants and refugees to ideological scrutiny, so as to deny entry, residence and naturalization to those “involved with, or supportive of, Islamism.”

Ironically, Ms. Hirsi Ali would modernize the “communism test” that still applies to those seeking naturalization. “I had to answer questions when I applied for US citizenship in 2013: ‘Are you, or have you ever been, a communist?’ And I remember thinking, ‘God, that was the war back then. We’re supposed to update this stuff!’ Potential immigrants from Pakistan or Bangladesh, for instance, should have to answer questions—‘Are you a member of the Jamat?’ and so on. If they’re from the Middle East you ask them about the Muslim Brotherhood, ‘or any other similar group,’ so there’s no loophole.”

***

Comparing Defanging Violent Fascist Islam To  21st-Century McCarthyism,

“Is just a display of intellectual laziness,” Ms. Hirsi Ali replies. “We’re dealing here with a lethal ideological movement and all we are using is surveillance and military means? We have to grasp the gravity of dawa. Jihad is an extension of dawa. For some, in fact, it is dawa by other means.”

The U.S., Hirsi Ali believes, is in a “much weaker position to combat the various forms of nonviolent extremism known as dawa because of the way that the courts have interpreted the First Amendment”—a situation where American exceptionalism turns into what she calls an “exceptional handicap.” Convincing Americans of this may be the hardest part of Ms. Hirsi Ali’s campaign, and she knows it. Yet she asks whether the judicial attitudes of the 1960s and 1970s—themselves a reaction to the excesses of Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s—might have left the U.S. ill-equipped to suppress threats from groups that act in the name of religion.

Mr. Varadarajan asked Ms. Hirsi Ali if there’s any one thing she would wish for. “I would like to be present at a conversation between Popper and Muhammad,” she says. “Popper wrote about open society and its enemies, and subjected everyone from Plato to Marx to his critical scrutiny. I’d have liked him to subject Muhammad’s legacy to the same analysis.

“But he skipped Muhammad, alas. He skipped Muhammad.”

***

Sharia is mental fascism so grotesque it enforces sciolism most efficiently, just as the plutocracy needs it:

Popper “skipped” Muhammad, because he was not a first-rate philosopher in these matters. He was greatly paid and honored by the powers that be to agitate against Communism, Socialism, and all these horrors which could ambush plutocracy.

Actually the notion of “open society” was discovered not by Popper (as I long thought, having read just Popper) but by Pericles’ second wife, the philosopher Aspasia.  Voltaire was not second-rate. He wrote a play called “Muhammad or Intolerance”. The play was an attack against Christianism disguised as one against islamism. Guess what? The play cannot be played anymore, lest it offends so-called “Muslims”.

Behind Muslims are hidden the Feudal arrangements of Arabia.

Behind the Feudal arrangements of Arabia are those of Wall Street, US plutocracy, and its Deep State entanglement .

The Gold Man government, Government Sachs…

***

Plutocracy Was Discombobulated by The Betrayal Of Trump, But It’s Regaining Control Fast. Promoting More Puppets:

And now look at the Trump administration: Goldman Sachs is crawling all over it. Not just this, but the Assistant National Security adviser is an agent of Goldman Sachs, for all to see. She didn’t make formal studies beyond college, giving her a suitable inferiority complex, but she used to earn millions a year at Goldman Sachs, having served well politicians in Washington:  Dina Powell after her first political internship concluded, took a job with Dick Armey, the Republican Majority Leader in the U.S. House of Representatives. Armey later said, “We immediately recognized her brains and her ability, and then her charm, and finally, I think somebody noticed she was gorgeous, too.” Armey’s was one among a number of remarks that various governmental officials have made regarding not just her professional abilities (out of nowhere) but also her physical attractiveness (undisputable). OK, Dina speaks Arabic. Somebody speaking Arabic earning millions a year at Goldman Sachs: it looks good, in this system, this wonderfully vicious loop, this spiral down the abyss, where Arabia is a province of New York financiers…

It’s not just Obama who got selected for his looks and sciolistic brains…

Respecting literal Islam is a way to sciolism, superficial knowledge, superficial wisdom, superficial everything. All the virtues we need to enjoy plutocracy. That’s why we have so much of it. Once again, for all to see.

Instead, here is the optimal way: let’s do as the Senegalese used to do: forget the bad teaching of Muhammad which are many, and keep only the good ones, the ones oriented towards progress.

Patrice Ayme’

Saint Patrick, the Trinity, and the Primacy of Secular Law, the Logos

Saint Patrick, A (Mental) Power Story

Mental power is the ultimate power, and the power of life, in the end, is all about intelligence. The argument has been made by many a top biologist (and not just Lamarck, but recent contemporary biologists, some Nobel laureates) that life is intelligent. That eukaryotic cells are intelligent.

Intelligence is much more Machiavellian than Machiavel. An example is Christianism, a triple headed system of thoughts and moods, which appears very different, depending the way one looks at it. Key to its success is that its secret God is the essence of humanity, the Logos. Saint Patrick’s day is a good day to remember this. Irish Catholicism, in its first phase, as taught by Patrice, and as mitigated by the people of Ireland, four centuries before the centuries of savage wars with the Vikings, was extremely open-minded.

Ireland was conquered by the Logos, not by the Sword. That is the difference with many other lands conquered by other religions (in particular the lands conquered by Islam which, in the first century at least, were all conquered by the sword, and a sword drenched in the blood of millions!)

***

Judges Can Be Of Some Use For The Progress of Civilization:

Today in New York the Alien Tort Act was activated by a Federal Judge. She ordered Germany to pay reparations for the attempted eradication of the Herero and Nama people, between 1904 and 1908. Half of the Nama were assassinated. This holocaust was warm-up for the German attack on the world in August 1914, another war crime, even greater. Neither the Namibian massacre nor the war crime of the German engineered world war of 1914 were excoriated, condemned, nor, a fortiori understood. Hence the repetition by the Nazis.

(A few years ago, Germany presented formal excuses to the state of Namibia, and “helps” Namibia; however that does not directly addresses the legitimate grievances of the Herero and Nama…) 

Teaching The Heathen, Or What Philosophers Have Always Done, And Will Always Do. Thanks to the Conversion of Ireland, Romanitas, the Greco-Roman Civilization Spread Where The Legions Didn’t Reach

***

The Difference Between Sotus and Scottus:

Saint Patrick started as an English boy. During one of many raids of the savage Scotti on Roman Britannia, he was captured when he was 16. He was enslaved for 6 years.

The Romans called the Irish, “Scottus”, and so did the Europeans for centuries to come. Charles the Bald, king of Francia Occidentalis and Roman emperor as Charles II, was a promoter of fundamental research. He became an excellent friend of the philosopher Scotus Erigena (“Erigenus” means Iris-born). Charles had named Erigena head of the Palatine Academy of Laon, thus becoming a successor to Alcuin of York. (Alcuin was Prime Minster of Charles I, Charlemagne). Erigena spoke many languages, including Irish, Frankish, Latin and Greek.

Once the emperor and the philosopher were pleasantly drinking across a table. The emperor asked Erigena: “Quid distat inter sottum et Scottum? (What separates a sot  from an Irishman?”[“sot” means idiot, the word sot is still heavily used in French]).

Quick as lightning, Erigena retorted: “Tabula tantum” (Only a table). So Erigena called the emperor an idiot.

Of these little piques great civilizations are made.

Notice in passing the difference of smarts with Islam: even if nowadays one calls Muhammad a “sot” (a particularly uninteresting idiot), the righteous Muslim will want to kill you. Or, at the very least will have to kill you. If said Muslim considers that what is written black and white in the Qur’an is an order from “Allah”, as it is supposed to be.

And the same extends to all the Caliphs, and other Muslims in authority (Surah 4, verse 59). So no wonder Islam never acquired a sense of humor, let alone supreme intelligence. Remember the context above: Charles the Bald headed an empire mightier than the Islamist empire (as it had heavily defeated it in the Eight Century, and would push Islam out of Europe for centuries… before ending all the way to Jerusalem a bit more than 2 centuries later). But Charles II, like Charles I, had a sense of intellect, humor. Although “sacred” by the Popes, they didn’t take their own holiness too seriously (European emperors would quarrel with popes, on and off, for the next 11 centuries…)

***

Saint Patrick Was a Franco-Gallic Product, to a great extent:

But let’s come back to Saint Patrick, four centuries earlier. He escaped slavery and Ireland, by hiding on a ship, and fled to what was becoming Francia (as the Franks, in military control conferred to them by the Roman Empire were slipping into governmental control).

The cleric Patrice was educated in Auxerre, Tours, and Cannes, Provence, more exactly at the monastery of the Lérins Abbey. He then returned to Ireland. (When Patrice came to Ireland, his name was mispronounced as “Patrick”.)

Hence Saint Patrick was pretty much a product of the Gallic-Catholic church (in contradistinction with “Roman-Catholic”). That Gallic-Catholic church would soon get in a conflict with the Pope in Rome, about secular teaching. The gallic-Catholic church thought that secular teaching was necessary. The Pope, as a good Jihadist keen to bring forth further apocalypse (the apocalypse in Christian and later Muslim texts, was a precondition for the Final Judgment, a desired act where the worthy are welcomed to paradise; hence its desirability). The conflict between Gallic bishops and Rome got so vicious, that Pope Gregory the Great threatened to have the bishop of Dignes burned alive, if he persisted with secular teaching (late Sixth Century). But the Gallic bishops had the army of the Franks, that is, the Roman army, to protect them (this fight between Gallo-Romans and the Popes was thus a continuation of the conflict of the Frank Arbogast, Magister Militum of the Occidental Empire with the Catholic fanatics of the Orient, in 394 CE).

Saint Patrick no doubt succeeded in Ireland, because he was taught tolerance in Gallic Francia.

***

Christianism As The Triumph Of The Logos:

After making Christianism the official Roman religion, Rome used what Constantine called “Universalism” (= “Catholicism”) to spread Romanitas at a distance and through the limes (armed physical border of the Roman empire, the “Wall”). That worked extremely well. And, to be honest, so great was the appeal of Christianism to the uncouth that under Nestorian form (for example), it spread ahead… All the way to Mongolia (Genghis Khan was adopted as a refugee child by a Christian tribe).

Thus, when the Barbarians invaded, they were already Christian, so they looked up to Rome spiritually. But for two significant details:

1) the Franks spurned Christianity, as their association with Rome was older… and founded upon a sturdier, deeper basis, secular law.  

2) Eastern Europe, outside of the Roman Limes, had been converted to Christianism by Arianus and his disciple. Arianus, an Egyptian bishop, did not believe in the Trinity (this is also why the Muslims don’t believe in it, either). This would bring their disappearance: the dozens of millions of Roman citizens were Catholics. Craftily, when they “converted”, the Franks decided to become Catholics. That can be viewed as a testimony of their political acumen. 

But there is much more: converting to Catholicism was converting to the Logos, to debate, the intellect, thus, tolerance. Let me explain.

The Franks helped Constantine, who started by fighting them, conquer the entire Roman empire. They refused to convert for nearly two centuries, as they knew how the Christian sausage had been made and why. Then, under Consul-King Clovis (“Louis”), they got the better idea to do as Constantine had done, and rewrite Christianism, their way.

The subtlety of the Trinity escaped the Arians totally. The Trinity meant that the Logos, that is, LOGIC, was God. And even as a primacy to the rest. That helped convert to Christianism the millions of Neoplatonists who led the empire. It also meant that all those who thought that the (secular) law of man, the Logos, came before any superstition, could also be Catholic without contradiction.

***

θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος: LOGIC IS GOD:  

This genuflection to logic is the master idea of Christianity, hidden in plain sight: the Evangel of John starts this way: ”In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.”

In the original Greek, the last four words of John 1:1 are: “θεὸς ἦν ὁ λόγος”. Literally “God was the Logos”.

If Europe is the modern Rome, as it is, or used to be, what is the modern equivalent of Roman Christianity spreading ahead of Romanitas? The United Nations machinery, spreading around the planet the religion of democratic secularism, the only religion worth having. Because that’s the only religion corresponding to the deep nature of the humanoids.

Patrice Ayme’

Contemplating Philosophically Trappist Habitable Planets

From TRAPPIST Monachal Studies in the Middle Ages, To Seven Planets found around one star, the arc of intelligence pursues its ascent, using the same word (trappist)! Colonizing the giant Milky Way’s four armed barred spiral galaxy, just, for now, with our greedy electronic eyes to start with! Studies foster understanding, the better monks would have said, thus helping to repel enemies of Progress!

Surviving is what we do. Contemplating exoplanets, as our distant ancestors, launching the Homo understanding drive, as a gigantic experiment, did with the Savannah (before stepping onto it):

New potentially habitable planets have been found, a mere 39 light years away. They may harbor life. This has everything to do with philosophy. The fascist Catholic church tortured Giordano Bruno, a travelling astronomy professor, for seven years in the Vatican, then pierced his palate, and burned him alive, just for having entertained the possibility of other solar systems, complete with little green men and exobiology. Exobiology meant that the Vatican would not control the universe, as it was supposed to.

The despicable anti-intellectual madness of the Catholic theofascism is not quite dead: this is the present of Islam. And this is what the pseudo-left wants to impose on us (because that pseudo-left in truth works for plutocracy, the enemy of reason).

Another theme of the pseudo-left is that colonialism is bad (whereas most of the world, including Japan and South Africa, full of Bantus who did not use to be there a little while back, is the product of colonialism). The presence of habitable exoplanets reminds us that now colonialism, colonialism of other worlds, is a necessity. Yesterday toi fight cannibalism and slavery, amen, today to ensure the survival of intelligence.

Indeed, colonialism is a necessity for the same reason as it was for our distant ancestors and those of baboons, all of whom left the safety of the trees: colonizing the savannah was better than the alternative, which was death among the trees, in the Dark Forest (I just provided perniciously a link to an excellent Chinese Sci-Fi book; I advise NOT to read the Wikipedia article, which tells the whole tale, all too well, but go buy the book and read it first instead!).

Solar Systems Around Red Dwarves Were Found In Science Fiction So Far, Now They Are Science Fact. Impression of the view from a water-bearing Trappist 1 Planet. Spending a bit more money on telescopes would give us real pictures within a decade.

All of morality, and more generally, philosophy, flow from the opportunity of survival, granted by the understanding that a bit more imagination provides with.

The Politically Correct movement (which is anything but) has completely forgotten the deep nature of humanity, or, more generally, intelligence. There is no correctness in the city (polis) if there is no correctness in the physical sense. “PC” is a lie, a manipulation. What they call Political Correctness is the Perfect Con. The Perfect Conspiracy of vicious greed against intelligence.

Interestingly, the astronomers who invented the acronym “TRAPPIST” to designate this Solar System clearly had a feeling for the grander perspective of history I just alluded to.

***  

Why The Name Trappist For Planets?

The Franks brought monasteries under their mighty secular wings in the Fifth century. The Franks had set up their confederation two centuries earlier, under a law written in Latin (the Franks themselves talked a form of Dutch, but they eagerly learned from and then interfere with, Rome)).

During those two centuries the Franks helped Constantine acquire control of the empire, yet, while their comrade in arms Constantine was busy taking himself for the self-described “13th Apostle”, the Franks stayed anti-Christian, while their employer invented, and imposed what he christened “Orthodox Catholicism”.

Said Catholics collapsed the empire with their Political Correctness gone completely mad. Soon enough the Founders of the Church (bishop Ambrose of Milan and Al.) had to submit to their own contradictions. To their sorrow, they put the Franks, whom they had just fought to death, in charge of defense of the empire by 400 CE.

Verily, that was shortly after the Frank Arbogast took control of the Occidental empire in 392-394 CE. By the late fifth Century the Franks understood finally that the optimal course consisted in taking control of Catholicism (“Universalism”), by inventing their own version, just as Constantine had. But while avoiding the pitfall of superstition. (Consul Clovis famously quipped that Christ would never have been crucified if his Franks had been around: a deliberate mangling of Christian superstition!) 

Under the Franks, and opposed to the Pope’s fanaticism, in particular that of  Gregory the Great, monasteries became centers of knowledge. Saint Benedict of Nursia (in England) became the sort of Catholics the Franks tolerated and encouraged: those new style catholics only preached the kind side of Christianism, not its dark side, and were not just knowledge and progress friendly, but all about it.

Benedict’s mentality led later to the order of the Trappist monks, severely dedicated to study.

The Franks would save 94% of the Greco-Roman books which survived.

In any case, this is remembered by the European astronomers who discovered TRAPPIST 1. As Newton said, repeating 12th century’s  Bernard of Chartres, four centuries later: “We stand on the shoulders of giants”. More exactly, “nanos gigantum humeris insidentes”, we are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. We discover truth by building on previous discoveries. The moods within Frankish monasteries, for more than a millennium, was all about studying and preserving past wisdom. Without them, all, but ten of Greco-Roman intellectual works would have been lost.

***

The  TRAPPIST exoplanet survey is led from the University of Liege, Belgium. Using the 63 centimeters Transiting Planets and Planetesimals Small Telescope (TRAPPIST) in Chile. A member on the team was the initial discoverer of the first exoplanet. (Chile is a honorably performing member of Greater Europe, and is full of expensive European, and US, telescopes enjoying the clarity of the high altitude Atacama desert.)

In 1995, Michel Mayor and Didier Queloz of the University of Geneva,  used the radial velocity method with the ELODIE spectrograph on the Observatoire de Haute-Provence telescope in France to discover the first exoplanet around a main sequence star. Both received the Wolf Prize in physics (among other prizes). (My uncle Daniel Challonge founded that observatory. Continuity of civilization here too!)

Now we have discovered 3,500 exoplanets.

Interestingly, Winston Churchill wrote a fascinating, and very correct paper on exoplanets in 1939. Although the paper was unpublished, its content had got to have been known, as its author had close friends who were first class physicists. Basically Churchill wrote that there should be plenty of exoplanets. The theory of solar system formation at the time was that such a system would form only when another star passed close by, and tore material away. Churchill was not fooled and correctly guessed that the correct theory was the nebular theory (which predict plenty of planets). That was that the system gathered from a gas. The idea was discovered by Kant (in his astronomical phase) and Laplace.

***

The TRAPPIST 1 system was so fascinating that NASA spent hundreds of hours of the Spitzer, Hubble and Kepler orbiting space telescopes to decipher its mysteries. (Follow-up studies will use NASA’s upcoming James Webb Space Telescope, launching in 2018 on an Ariane rocket.)

There are seven Earth size TRAPPIST 1 planets, all rotating fast around a red dwarf. Such stars are the most frequent in the universe. They last a very long time, but they flicker, sometimes emitting enormous amounts of radiation. That means that they may sterilize water-bearing planets around them. There are three such planets around TRAPPIST 1. They may need very powerful magnetic fields to keep their atmospheres (solar storms is how Mars lost its atmosphere, recent studies showed). However that means the planets have to be endowed with even more powerful nuclear reactors than Earth (and that may well be a miracle!)

The entire TRAPPIST 1 system is tiny, in the sense that it fits within the orbit of Mercury. Thus the planets are very close to each other. Standing on one of the planet’s surface, one should see geological features or clouds of neighboring worlds, which would sometimes appear twice larger than the moon in Earth’s sky!

Even if suitably hydrated, the planets may have no indigenous life, because of the radiation storms, among other problems.

***

But those planets will certainly provide humanity with habitat, thus with hope to found a Galactic Empire.

That will sound ridiculous to the PC crowd. However, anybody else realizes that planet Earth has become too small for our increasingly divine technology.

So Trappist 1 should be viewed as a suitable target for colonization (that very non PC word again!) By the time we get there, may have so much technology that we could inhabit any system, and the space in between.

If the fuelless propulsion engine turns out to be real, we would have a means to go to distant stars at very high speeds.

Right now the fastest speeds we can achieve are of the order of 40 kilometers per second, 1/10^4 the speed of light. TRAPPIST 1 is 39 light years away. That means it would take 350,000 years to get there. From the chemical impulse propulsion we have now. However other modes of propulsion exist, or are now imaginable…

“Fuelless” propulsion has apparently been observed. If the effect is real (as it seems), its origin is deep in the foundations of Quantum Physics. (I proposed my own mechanism, Dark Matter Propulsion; researchers at NASA have proposed that the ever mysterious “vacuum energy” is tapped).

Fuelless propulsion achieves at least 100 times the energy efficiency of solar sails and laser push propulsion. The latter has been proposed to send a smartphone sized probe through the Trisolaris Centaurus system, which, it was suggested, it could reach in 20 years (a 100 meter telescope would be way cheaper and is certainly feasible).

So, weirdly enough, there is hope to conquer the entire galaxy pretty soon. The North Korean dictator’s vicious ways may help: Kim just poisoned to death his half-brother in the Kuala Lumpur airport, using VX nerve agent. Taking out Kim, a necessary task, while not allowing him to nuke Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing or LA, should bolster research in more advanced tech.

Spending more on powerful telescopes with existing technology should make us capable of seeing directly the surfaces of such planets (because the Red Dwarves don’t shine brightly, one can look at their planets directly; for stars like the sun, Sol, Alpha and Beta Centauri, one needs to put a screen in front, to mask the star’s blinding light, something which can be done in space, floating hundreds of kilometers away; the technology exists, it’s just a matter of spending half a billion dollars to launch the contraption…) The funding for a system of mighty telescopes is less than one would get by taxing just one of the world’s mightiest plutocrats. Yes, just one, fairly.

The ways of the Lord, namely within ourselves, the possibilities our deepest minds conceive, and bring forth, can only be mysterious. Imagination of the better parts of our best minds, is beyond the comprehension of the public discourse constituting the minds of most of us.

Yet we all have to progress in intelligence, emotional or rational, if we want to improve the probability of survival of terrestrial intelligence. Pretty pictures of imagined surfaces of exoplanets should help.

Patrice Ayme’