How To Alleviate Fake Media Censorship Through Public Utility Legislation

The problem of “fake news” cannot be disjointed from censorship and propaganda… Censoring the truth, or replacing it by lies is not very different. The solution to this steering of the public mind into subjugation is to recognize quality thinking and information as “PUBLIC UTILITY”… From the Google-Facebook duopoly, to the most modest websites, as yours truly (legislatively enforced). That means, dear New York Times, and various university professor sites, no more censorship… 

In a few hours, I was censored three times, twice related to Nobel, not so noble, Paul Krugman, the self-described “Conscience of a Liberal”, and his network. More sad than infuriating. 

I had sent to Paul Krugman a pretty neutral piece for his  post “The Force of Decency Awakens”. Krugman claimed that the same emotion, decency, waking up, was the root cause for the renewed fight against sexism, and against guns. Decency comes from the present participle of decere “to be fitting or suitable“. Krugman apparently found my comment unsuitable and inappropriate. However that comment was purely about how and why plutocracy grew and how that related to indecency. My comment actually supported what Krugman said, it understood it, it stood under it. Krugman should have been happy to be understood, with not one word against him. But, no, he censored my comment nevertheless (someone at the NYT told me Krugman censors me personally). When Krugman does this, I am always baffled: does he really not understand, or does he censors me because he is afraid of the shareholders of his employers (some of the world’s wealthiest men), or is he simply jealous like the wicked queen was of Snow White?

In his post, Krugman pontificated that:”Political scientists have a term and a theory for what we’re seeing on #MeToo, guns and perhaps more: “regime change cascades.””

 The link was looking at only four revolutions, and asked for big money to go beyond the abstract. I smelled a rotten fish. I looked at that site.  It claims: “REMARQ is a collaboration network from RedLink, designed for researchers and qualified users.” “Qualified users?” I sent a comment. The “Remarq Team” looked at the title of my Aristotle Destroyed Democracy essay (I was electronically informed) and, within minutes, sent me something that got plastered on  my browser: “The Remarq team rejected your qualified user request and comment on article Regime Change Cascades: What We Have Learned from the 1848 Revolutions to the 2011 Arab Uprisings. 2018-02-27 14:37”. To be “rejected” by a “team” sounds more abusive than polite.

The theme of ADD is that the respect for Aristotle’s political work is the respect for monarchy, the rule of one. Aristotle’ s main political idea constitutes the bottom principles of today’s political “science”: a few individuals (generally male) should lead We The People, as if we were sheep. This is not idle talk, and a claim Aristotle was a bad influence: Aristotle was actually the leader and mentor of the small group of vicious men who launched the Hellenistic Regimes (which later encouraged the destruction of the Republican spirit in Rome).

The idea of the rule of one, monarchy, defended at the highest intellectual level, is, of course, also the main idea of Judeo-Christo-Islamism, with its big boss, God (which not coincidentally grew with the Hellenistic regimes). Attacking Aristotle, for those who believe in the Guide Principle (Deutsch: Führerprinzip) is like attacking Allah for the worst Jihadists.  Most intellectual professionals paid for their mental work are there to enforce the established order, they do now what the church used to do in the Middle Ages. To rule over minds, one will find more efficient to rule the souls, rather than to wield chains. Here the opinion of Paul Nizan about paid intellectuals, paid to have the correct thoughts and feelings, the watchdogs:

Those whom the establishment feeds wear a chain around their necks, a fable of Aesop already

One difference between someone like me or Nizan (who lived in the Middle East, Europe, Africa) and the political scientists at the “Remarq Team” (who presumably didn’t grew up nor lived in such places) is that I am not paid to tell lies, lies are not what Nizan or I, profess… As paid condottiere of things intellectuals presumably are (why else would they think it is important that others do NOT see my thoughts? If they are so bad, why don’t they rot by themselves?) This observation is not new: since ever, intellectuals have been paid as “watchdogs” (to use Paul Nizan’s expression; Nizan, a friend of Sartre, enlisted in the French army to fight Nazism. Nizan died in combat at Dunkirk, 23 May 1940, part of the enormous French army protecting the evacuation of 330,000 elite soldiers, including most of the professional British army (future instructors to the mass army they would teach), against the entire, vengeful Nazi army. 

What is clear is that a lot of people are spending a lot of efforts censoring the Internet. The NYT censored my comment on the Krugman essay referred above.  

A physicist specialized in Dark Matter censored my comment on Dark Matter, on her site (not the first time!) although the idea I have been pushing is incredibly simple (thus potentially revolutionary). Whereas people like that physicist are pushing MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics, I am pushing MOQ (MOdified Quantum; which I also call Sub Quantum Patrice Reality, an allusion to the fact that the Copenhagen Interpretation, and its ilk are NOT real…).

A good reason for not having MOND is that, modifying gravitational mass, as MOND de facto does, opens the can of worms of having to modify inertial mass, and, if not, why not… Whereas MOQ/SQPR fills in a gap in the usual Copenhagen Interpretation and its ilk (the other way to solve the gap is the Many Worlds/Multiverse, in other words, angels on a pin, with no limits, whatsoever…) As an exchange on the comments of the Dwarf Galaxy disk problem (predicted by MOQ/SQPR, not by MOND, nor LambdaCDM…) shows, my comment was finally published. It made an analogy between the present situation and the epicycles (an old point of view of mine now adopted by many physicists)… But I am going in much more details. The epicycles’ theory was a consequence of the wrong, ridiculously wrong, Aristotelian physics, at the root, and it may well be what is going on now… Buridan resuscitated heliocentrism, because, first, he got the physics right (also heliocentrism was obvious…)

Delaying comments destroy the debate: the New York Times delayed my comments, by several days, systematically, for years: that allowed the NYT to claim it practiced no censorship (in correspondence with me)… although nobody would read them, then… and then the NYT decided to just censor ALL of my comments, for years. My point is that this sort of steering of public opinion should be illegal, in a public utility (see below)…

I am used to something paradoxical for whom has never been employed by academia (I have ONLY been employed by academia), the scholar as a thief. I was, bad luck, next to some of the greatest, most decorated thieves ever, one of them was one of my best friends (until I discoverer to my horror and depression that he was a thief… There were pages on his thievery at some point in the New York Times; not only he helped then to demolish my career, but he demolished the career of the famous G. Perelman… Perelman got the top prizes in mathematics, refused to accept them, as he said that, then, he would have to tell the truth, and the world of top math would be revealed as the BS it is. Then an angry and discouraged Perelman gave up math (contrarily to repute, math is a social activity; can’t do it when the people you talk to are, you know, thieves, among other problems…).

I had this problem with Black Holes: I suggested, long ago, that the standard reasoning was insufficient because it neglected Quantum effects (say Quark stars, etc.) Now this point of view is standard wisdom.

Thievery is a general problem in research, in a time of insufficient budgets. I have known the detailed case of junior researchers (not just yours truly) seeing their papers rejected, and then senior “peer reviewers” running away with the ideas… which they had just rejected for publication. Greed is not just a plutocratic problem, nor does plutocracy necessarily have to do with making billions. Verily, the power (kratos) of evil (Pluto) is great… especially when directed at honest to goodness thinkers.

Strange world. A tweet of mine, relating to the Bernie Sanders’ Twitter account, was also “made unavailable”. What did my tweet say? Here it is: “Problem: Democrats view as too left-wing the taxes advocated by Carnegie, the USA’s first billionaire (19th Century)! Carnegie explained in detail why it was necessary to tax enormous wealth enormously. The only deep reason for taxation is to prevent hyper wealth accumulation!” https://twitter.com/SenSanders/status/965670396715511809 …

Am I too left-wing for Bernie? Or, more to the point, is Carnegie now too left-wing for the Democrats and US “Socialists”? Anyway, my tweet was removed by the powers that be (such a dangerous tweet, I agree!) At least Senator Bernie Sanders just changed his position on some guns… Tweeted Bernie, 2/28/2018:

“We should not be selling assault weapons in this country. These weapons are not for hunting. They are military weapons for killing human beings.” I replied @BernieSanders:

Hillary Clinton used to complain that Bernie Sanders sided with the NRA. Glad to see the clear statement against military assault weapons..(See? Even Hillary can be right sometimes…)

The Internet is big money nowadays: 73% of the advertising revenue in media goes to the duopoly of Google and Facebook (up from 63% in 2015… and 85% of the growth in said revenue). So, we have, de facto, a monopoly of two! By itself, this should impel governments to act (well, OK, they are acting by doing nothing…)

And what do many Internet agents do? Steer, censor and contrive. Indeed, neither Google nor Facebook create content, they are content to steer We The Sheeple towards their idea of decency. They are electronic leeches. 

It is clear that none of this is innocent. what is happening on the Internet is exactly, on a much grander scale, what Putin is accused of doing: a few individuals and their obsequious servants, manipulating public opinion. So what to do?

***

Remedy: The Notion Of Public Utility Medium:

Public utilities provide an infrastructure necessary to society. They are subject to public control, beyond that of standard private industry. In the case of media on the Internet, the infrastructure would be the most important infrastructure of all, the infrastructure of truth!

As it is, there is a serious problem. As David Chavern has it in the WSJ in “Protect the News From Google and Facebook“: “A partial exemption from antitrust laws would help publishers and readers (Feb. 25, 2018):  The news business is suffering, but not because people don’t want news. They do—more than ever. The problem is that the money generated by news audiences flows mostly to Google and Facebook , not to the reporters and publishers who produce excellent journalism… newspaper advertising revenue fell from $22 billion in 2014 to $18 billion in 2016 even as web traffic for the top 50 U.S. newspapers increased 42%.

Local news is most at risk. As print circulation declines, community news publishers have the hardest time adapting to the ever-changing demands of Facebook and Google algorithms… Tech savvy, digital-only publishers are also struggling. BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti said in December that Google and Facebook are “paying content creators far too little for the value they deliver to users,” and that “this puts high-quality creators at a financial disadvantage, and favors publishers of cheap media.”“

And the Wall Street Journal to pursue:“Google and Facebook have become the primary and de facto regulators of the news business, and governments around the world are starting to recognize the danger. British Prime Minister Theresa May announced earlier this month that her government would review the economics of internet news consumption. Regulators in Germany, Israel and South Korea are investigating how Google’s business practices have disrupted the media market and harmed publishers and consumers. U.S. regulators, on the other hand, have rarely looked into Google or Facebook—and never at their influence in the news marketplace.

Some voices on the left and right are calling for Google and Facebook to be regulated as utilities. But there is an easier solution: exempt news publishers from certain aspects of antitrust regulation.

U.S. antitrust laws, designed to promote fair competition and prevent consolidation, actually make it harder for traditional news outlets to compete with Silicon Valley giants. Under current law, for instance, news publishers cannot get together and agree to withhold their product unless they receive a return on their investment.”

YouTube (owned by Google) warned some accounts which had reported that the latest school mass shooting in Florida was a “hoax” and the victims were “actors”. Nice, but those sort of “fake news” are not really worse than decades of lies from the Main Stream Media. Lies, or non-saids (French magazines reports that US president Jimmy Carter started the war in Afghanistan, which killed many millions, from his own administration, were censored, so US Americans really don’t know that! By the way, my point of view that Carter, Clinton and Obama were fake, not to say evil, is spreading. In the case of Obama, that depressed me….) For Carter, July 3, 1979 attack against Afghanistan, please consider:

1979 US ATTACK AGAINST AFGHANISTAN Secretly Ordered

***

What to do is that there should legal recourse against any medium declared a public utility, and yet, practicing censorship:    

To become a medium of public utility, there should be, and could be, two ways:

1. Being declared to be so, by legislative decision, and Google and Facebook, and all the major media, certainly should be.
2. Applying to become so (for example this site would).

Any medium of public utility would have to satisfy some requirements, such as trying to tell the truth when claiming to do so (poetry and fiction would be allowed, but under those labels). Public utility media would also have to avoid censorship, and be ready to justify it (that mean be ready to justify when censorship is applied; for example, the NYT would be required to justify why it censored me systematically when I comment Krugman’s posts…)

More than a decade ago, a philosophy site banned me for life for “fantastic logic” and stealing (from myself) my own (!) intellectual property (which I had made the mistake to put on their site as comments; so they viewed my ideas as their own thereafter, and forbid me to publish said ideas of mine on my old, Tyranosopher, site…) Ridiculous, but at least they provided some reason (last year I learned that the main, very famous philosopher behind that site, an old enemy of mine, called Searle, has been accused of sexual harassment by many girls and women, and was suspended from his prestigious university position; that didn’t surprise me, as I considered him a thief already… Sexual harassment is a form of thievery, and assault.)

When a medium is unwilling to give any reason for the censorship it applies, it should not be given the privileges associated to journalism, the respect of implied scholarship, nor the prestigious aura of “public utility”.  

Your devoted servant, glad to be, hopefully, of some public use,

Patrice Aymé

Between Friends: Donald, Hillary, & Angry Plutocrats

Trump Hatred Originates With The Average Plutocrat, Not The Clintons:

The Clintons and Trumps have long been friends, their children are great friends, especially Chelsea and Ivanka, and it shows. So why all the hatred? Well, it’s manufactured, It is part of a distraction show, kabuki theater. And a genuine worry, among most plutocrats, that Trump is a traitor who plays apprentice sorcerer. The figure of the rogue plutocrat turning treacherously against plutocracy, his alma mater, his nourishing mother, is a familiar one in history. 

Roughly all Main Stream Media, worldwide, are owned, held, or otherwise controlled by plutocrats (yes, including the public NPR and PBS in the USA). Those plutocrats hate Trump, because Trump has dared to say, and has been saying as loudly as possible, since at least 1987 (when he attacked Reagan in writing) that globalization, as practiced, does not work for We The People. That has been proven aplenty, and now angry voters are discovering that Trump was right all along.

Amusingly, Sanders’ final success in 2016 was forged by Donald’s iconoclastic work, from way back when he fought Reagan with the exact same idea he rolls out today again (whereas the ever more popular Obama lauds Reagan; that, and not racism, is the source of the antipathy between Trump and Obama: Obama was born half white and educated by 100% whites). When crafty Bill Clinton called Obamacare the “craziest thing in the world“, he was craftily following Donald Trump too (and thus neutralizing the Donald: no need to vote for Trump to put Obamacare out of its misery, Bill will do it for you…)

***

The Ill Informed Sing The Praises Of The Clintons, but the Clintons are followers of Goldman Sachs, establishers of  the financial plutocracy. One, of course, has to be educated enough, and curious enough, to understand the following graph. As rabidly pro-Clinton minorities are in general not graced with as much discernment, they are rather obdurate: they suffer you know. Thus it is that the victim elect their torturers, a generalization of the Stockholm Syndrome (the feelings of trust or affection felt in certain cases of kidnapping or hostage-taking by a victim towards captors). It is a case of capture-bonding. 

The Clinton System Destroyed FDR’s Banking Act of 1933 and Re-established The Vicious Financial System Of 1929, On Steroids

 Since the Clinton economy affected income, median GDP per capita has lost 40% relative to the GDP of the USA. How come? The 40% went to the top, and mostly the .1%. 

***

We Are Friends, And Long Have Been:

Trump and Clinton roasted  each other in a funny way at the annual roast and Catholic fundraiser. Trump said he was delighted that Hillary was nominating him ambassador to Iraq or Afghanistan, and he got to choose which one. Hillary said Donald said she did not have stamina, but she had spent 4.5 hours with him, debating, and that was longer than any of his campaign managers ever did (an allusion to the fact Donald’s managers keep on resigning, or being resigned).

The host, Cardinal Timothy Dolan, said the candidates had “nice things” to say offstage.

“I was very moved by the obvious attempt on behalf of both Secretary Clinton and Mr. Trump to kind of be courteous, to get along, to say nice things privately to one another,” Dolan said on NBC’s “Today.” “I was very moved by that. That was pleasant.”

Dolan, who sat between Trump and Clinton at the dinner, acknowledged the two were, like President Barack Obama and Mitt Romney in 2012, “kind of awkward together.”

“But the purpose of the evening is to break some of that ice, and thanks be to God, it works. The Al Smith Dinner by its nature literally tries to — I’m sitting there between the two — and literally,I’m supposed to be kind of a bridge to bring these two people together. And I try my best, and there were some very touching moments.”

The three of them prayed together. “And after the little prayer, Mr. Trump turned to Secretary Clinton and said, ‘You know, you are one tough and talented woman…This has been a good experience in this whole campaign, as tough as it’s been” She replied “And Donald, whatever happens, we need to work together afterwards.”  

Trump: Sometimes Vulgar Below The Belt. Clinton: All Too Often An Awfully Vulgar Laughter Which Looks Like Something A Donkey Would Do. Made For Each Other

So much love! Not like the “arrogant” Dylan who, members of the Nobel committee loudly whine, has refused to acknowledge their glorious, yet most generous existence. Well, what do they think? It is embarrassing, that Nobel is embarrassing and Dylan knows it. (At least he did not get it just because he received power and brown skin!) If I were me, i would accept the Nobel, if i were Dylan, I would refuse it. The Nobel should be used to reward what, and, or, whom, deserves to be discovered, not one of the planet super stars. (Salman Rushdie was supposed to be a runner-up for the literature Nobel, Rushdie is a martyr of the struggle against fanatical, lethal theology, yet how come I get bored to death reading a few pages of his books? At least Dylan, I appreciate, and not just the music.)

So who hates Trump, if not the Clintons? Well, in the last presidential debate, Hillary accused Donald to be a “puppet” and he angrily retorted:”No, you are the puppet“. She meant he was a caricature, he meant she was something whose strings were pulled by multi billionaires (Soros, Buffet, the Gates, etc…) They both knew that they were right, and in which different ways. (Clinton may have enough of a temper to break a few strings, though…)

***

Hatred Against Trump Is Self Interested Among the Mighty:

Typical is the hatred of the (light weight, yet courageous) billionaire-intellectual-charming corruptocrat,  Bernard-Henri Lévy who nebulously accuses Trump of “possible infidelity to America itself. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has been commandeered by a corrupt demagogue…”

To put Eisenhower and Reagan in the same category is embarrassingly ignorant: Eisenhower launched FDR New Deal style massive programs (for example the construction of a continental size FREE freeway system, all the way to Hawaii! Or several massive defense programs reminiscent of FDR again). To pay for them, Eisenhower brought up the tax on the wealthiest up to 93%. Free, highest quality public university system went up in the USA, for example the University of California. In shocking contrast, Reagan, an enemy of cognition, established a tuition at the PUBLIC University of California, starting the great movement of making it so that only the wealthiest are fully human (Thatcher would pursue it much later) 

By comparison, in 1981, Reagan significantly reduced the maximum tax rate, which affected the highest income earners, and lowered the top marginal tax rate from 70% to 50%; in 1986 he further reduced the rate to 28%.

The result was pandemonium (see the second graph in https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2016/08/02/trump-a-traitor/: that’s when the rich started to get ever richer, and the poor, poorer). Reagan was the anti-Eisenhower (but Reagan’s followers were even worse! All those who laud Reagan in any way are just ignorant, Neoconservatives, or worse, clueless clowns. And most probably, all the preceding. Logically enough, as Trump blasted Reagan during his presidency, Trump hatred and Reagan loving are two sides of the same coin (many of Trump partisans, or their parents actually believed in Reagan, before realizing later that they had been had… hence their indignation).

***

Plutocracy strikes aging societies. Just like metastatic cancer strikes older individuals, and for similar reasons: the corruption of entrenched nefarious mutations. When a society is struck by plutocracy, it needs a revolution. That is why France, the core of the European civilization, went through so many revolutions: precisely to rejuvenate itself, from revolution to revolution (and France implemented a revolution machine in England, which worked for many centuries; even Brexit is a form of revolution, however flawed and misguided…)

Trump, by lashing back against plutocratic globalization, is refreshing. He is also sincere: his mood against some aspect of globalization can be found in a campaign he made against Reagan. Trump’s campaign against the “Politically Correct”dates from the early 1970s. It is not clear what Hillary will do against corrupting globalization, as she did a 180 degrees on the Trans Pacific Partnership (she said the details changed, she didn’t). The Democratic platform adopted several of Sanders’ propositions.

In any case, the differences between Hillary and the Donald are less great than feared by the young and naive. The difference of either of them with Obama, will be more marked: the impulsive Donald and the Hilarious One have lots of experience with the system, and do not really need said system, to become somebody: they are already superstars, and they think highly of themselves. But progressives have to understand they have to exert continual pressure if they want progress, be it Donald, or Hillary. Just making a blind Hillary cult after 8 years of blind Obama worship will mean ever more plutocratization, same as what we have been going through.

And keep in mind that the grotesque racist campaign against Trump is an example of how much manipulation is going out there. After a visit with John Kerry, the US Secretary of State, the Ecuadorean president, Correa, cut Wikileaks’ Assange his Internet access. Assange had been revealing various Clinton manipulations all over. The strident accusations of the US administration against Russia in the US electoral process, mean, precisely, that it takes one to known one. 

Hillary is a monster: a good sign. Devils know best how to fight evil. Maybe she will gobble Bill and his financial puppet masters too.

Patrice Ayme’

Record Heat 2015, Obama Cool

2014 was the warmest year ever recorded. 2015 was even warmer, and by far, by .16 degrees centigrade. The UK (Great Britain) meteorological office announced that the temperature rise is now a full degree C above the pre-industrial average. At this annual rate of increase, we will get to two degrees within six years (as I have predicted was a strong possibility).

What’s going on? Exponentiation. Just as wealth grows faster, the greater the wealth, mechanisms causing more heat are released, the greater the heat. Yes, it could go all the way to tsunamis caused by methane hydrates explosions. This happened in the North Atlantic during the Neolithic, leaving debris of enormous tsunamis all over Scotland.

2015: Not Only Record Heat, But Record Acceleration Of Heat

The Neolithic settlements over what is now the bottom of the North Sea and the Franco-English Channel (then a kind of garden of Eden), probably perished the hard way, under giant waves.

Explosions of methane hydrates have started on the land, in Siberia. No tsunami, so far. But it can, and will happen, any time. The recent North Easter on the East Coast of the USA was an example of the sort of events we will see ever more of: a huge warm, moist Atlantic born air mass, lifted up by a cold front.

Notice that, at the COP 21 in Paris all parties, 195 nations, agreed to try their best to limit warming to 1.5 degree Centigrade. At the present instantaneous rate, that’s less than 4 years away. Even with maximum switching out of fossil fuels, we are, at the minimum, on a three degrees centigrade target, pretty soon.

By the way, if all nations agree, how come the “climate deniers” are still heard of so loudly? Well, plutocrats control Main Stream Media. It’s not just that they want to burn more fossil fuels (as it brings them profit, they are the most established wealth). It’s also that they want to create debates about nothing significant, thus avoiding debates about significant things, such as how much the world is controlled by Dark Pools of money.

Meanwhile, dear Paul Krugman insists in “Bernie, Hillary, Barack, and Change“, that it would be pure evil to see him as a “corrupt crook“, because he believes everything Obama says about change and all that. Says Krugman: “President Obama, in his interview with Glenn Thrush of Politico, essentially supports the Hillary Clinton theory of change over the Bernie Sanders theory:

[Says Obama]: ‘I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.'”

This is all hogwash. We are not just in a civilization crisis. We are in a biosphere crisis, unequalled in 65 million years. “Real-life differences“, under Obama, have been going down in roughly all ways. His much vaunted “Obamacare” is a big nothing. All people in the know appraise that next year, it will turn to a much worse disaster than it already is (in spite of a few improvements, “co-pays” and other enormous “deductibles” make the ironically named, Affordable Care Act, ACA, unaffordable).

The climate crisis show that there is no more day-to-day routine. At Paris, the only administration which caused problem, at the last-minute, was Obama’s. How is that, for “change”? The USA is not just “leading from behind”, but pulling in the wrong direction. Really, sit down, and think about it: under France’s admirable guidance (!), 194 countries had agreed on a legally enforceable document. Saudi Arabia agreed. The Emirates agreed. Venezuela agreed. Nigeria agreed. Russia agreed. Byelorussia agreed. China, having just made a treaty with France about climate change, actually helped France pass the treaty. Brazil agreed. Zimbabwe agreed. Mongolia agreed. And so on. But, lo and behold, on the last day, Obama did not.

I know Obama’s excuses well; they are just that, excuses. Bill Clinton used exactly the exact same excuses, 20 years ago. Obama is all for Clinton, because, thanks to Clinton, he can just repeat like a parrot what Clinton said, twenty years ago. Who need thinkers, when we have parrots, and they screech?

I sent this (and, admirably, Krugman published it!):

“No doubt Obama wants to follow the Clintons in making a great fortune, 12 months from now. What is there, not to like?

Obama’s rather insignificant activities will just be viewed, in the future, as G. W. Bush third and fourth terms. A janitor cleaning the master’s mess. Complete with colored (“bronze”) apartheid health plan.

What Sanders’ supporters are asking is to break that spiral into ever greater plutocracy (as plutocrat Bloomberg just recognized).”

Several readers approved my sobering message, yet some troll made a comment, accusing me of “racist “slander”. Racist? Yes the “bronze” plan phraseology is racist. I did not make it up. And it is also racist to make a healthcare system which is explicitly dependent upon how much one can afford. Krugman is all for it, but he is not on a “bronze” plan. Introducing apartheid in healthcare? Obama’s signature achievement. So why should we consider Obama as the greatest authority on “progressive change”? Because we are gullible? Because we cannot learn, and we cannot see? Is not that similar to accepting that Hitler was a socialist, simply because he claimed to be one, it had got to be true, and that was proven because a few million deluded characters voted for him?

We are in extreme circumstances, unheard of in 65 million years, they require extreme solutions. They do not require, nor could they stand, Bill Clinton’s Third Term (or would that be G. W. Bush’s fifth term? The mind reels through the possibilities).

“Change we can believe in”: the new boss, same as the old boss, the same exponentiation towards inequality, global warming and catastrophe, the same warm rhetoric of feel-good lies.

As it is, there is a vicious circle of disinformation between the Main Stream Media, and no change in the trajectory towards Armageddon. Yes, Obama was no change. Yes, Obama was the mountain of rhetoric, who gave birth to a mouse. Yes, we need real change, and it requires to start somewhere. And that means, not by revisiting the past.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Do Violence, Bias & Abuse Help Research?

Sexism is not humanly, ethologically, culturally, economically, civilizationally, emotionally, poetically, romantically and scientifically correct. Moreover it flows and then encourages, a general mood of violence, abuse, exploitation against all and any human being. It also rests on many a stupidity, thus foster stupidity. But, as we will see, there is worse.

Thanks to Sean Carrol for an  excellent essay condemning abusive harassment of women in science: “We Suck (but we can be better)”. A reminder: sexist research found, decades ago, that the brains of women and men were different. Many powers jumped on that result to claim the poor results of women in science, or the intellect in general, were thus justified.

However, upon closer examination, that was simply not true. Unsurprisingly, it was found female and male brains are not quite the same, except that one could not tell, and some of the differences are the opposite of what’s expected: most brains are a haphazard mosaic of female and male features.

Researchers have identified several structural differences between the brains of men and women, but they form changing mosaics from individual to individual, making it impossible to tell the sex of an individual based solely on MRI images of the brain like the one above.

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2015/11/brains-men-and-women-aren-t-really-different-study-finds

In the end, therefore, human beings are not just bisexual, but multisexual. To boot, the varying influence of some hormones rule, haphazardly, while having nothing to do with pure intellectual performance.

The reason for the intellectual equality between human sexes is obvious: prehistoric life required women to be pluripotent, because they had to replace men. When men were far away hunting big game, patrolling territory, or at war, women had to be able to replace them completely, even for defense and hunting. More recently, Roman legionnaires were very surprised when they discovered that German women wielding swords turned out be what prevented German men to retreat.

The reason for having a non-sexist society is that we double the number of brains, thus increase considerably the number of ideas. It was obvious all along that females could perform at the very highest mental level: Emilie du Chatelet, after all, discovered the concept of energy, ½ mv^2 (Newton confused energy and momentum, apparently). She also discovered a few other things, such as infrared radiation, although she died in childbirth.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/12/28/non-locality/

So sexism is a form of abuse, and, ultimately, not just a form of abuse of particular individuals, but of society itself, as it deprives society of half of its best elements.

And that is the connection with the violence made to graduate students. The American fundamental research system depends upon 120 institutions. However, many of the most prestigious universities, in their most prestigious departments depend upon a system of exploitation, or even abuse, of their students.

It works this way, even in public universities: the graduate students make all the necessary work (be it basic research or basic undergraduate teaching, or both). However some of these university departments have ridiculously low rates of attribution of the PhD. Say 10%. This means they use to teach, or do research students who, statistically, have no probability to get what they are after.

I personally witness ultimate violence in some of the world’s most famous universities. All the way to murder (I may give more details in a further version of this essay).

In 1998, Jason Altom, a graduate student in chemistry at Harvard, took his own life. Renowned among his contemporaries as both an extraordinarily talented scientist and a meticulous personality, he left behind a pointed note:

“This event could have been avoided,” the note began. “Professors here have too much power over the lives of their grad students.” The letter recommended adoption of a three-member faculty committee to monitor each graduate student’s progress and “provide protection for graduate students from abusive research advisers. If I had such a committee now I know things would be different.” It was the first time, a columnist for The Crimson observed later, that a suicide note took the form of a policy memo.

It seems clear in the behavior of Harvard’s (Nobel Prize) Corey. By telling his star student who committed suicide that, after five years, he had made “no intellectual contribution”, Corey was actually committing a crime. OK, the law does not strike this sort of abuse yet for what they are: potentially lethal abuse. Why? Because this is so typical of what happen in so many graduate department in the USA. It’s a bit as when there were slaves everywhere in the USA: it was legal, and it felt normal.

It is important to remedy this. How? Notice science was not as cut-throat in the 1960s: young professors could afford to buy a house next to a prestigious university (it’s not the case anymore). Young professors were typically on tenure track, graduate student were treated decently, etc.

Then things changed: American man had landed on the moon, science was not needed anymore. Investment in science went down, culminating with Congress yanking out the super collider. Society decided to do science and intellect on the cheap. Cut-throat academia came into being.

Treating women students well enough to have as many of them as men will improve quality, it will also force society to realize that research cannot depend upon abuse and exploitation of people, but its exact opposite: the fragile blossoming of ideas rejects relations brimming with the grossest powers.

Rejecting violence, exploitation and abuse will force society to put more (relative) resources into (fundamental) research, the way it used to be, not so long ago. Instead of treating graduate students as modern slaves, universities will have to recognize their humanity, dignity, hence foster their responsibility and independent judgment, producing higher quality thinking. Ultimately thinking blossoms from the debate of many minds, and not just the celebrity cult. Cutting throats does not help.

However, a cut-throat establishment may want research to be in its image, abusive and exploitative, to justify its own mood. Hence the present plutocratic university system is not here by accident, engaging into satanic behavior, just because bad things happen. Far from it. To teach celebritism, oligarchism, and even abuse, exploitation, sadism, and inhuman behavior is entirely what the present educational system sees, secretly, as its mission.

Patrice Ayme’