Forgetting History, Putin-Led Russia Compromises Siberia

FASCISM, NAZISM, RUSSIA, CHINA, The Past And The Future:

Fascism is justified by war. The more war, the more fascism. So the popularity of a fascist leader appears to augment as a war becomes catastrophic, especially when the leader has involved his entire population in infamy. It is infamy to let oneself be persuaded that Ukraine was going to attack, just from believing a thief-in-chief as if he were god).

This fascism from war effect is why Hitler’s popularity augmented during WW2… while increasingly much of the entire German population grimly perceived they had wronged the Jews, and perhaps done even more than that… and that they were going to pay a heavy price.

As the US army fought through its first German villages and cities, GIs were surprised to see Germans come out, after the combat had moved down the street, and calmly sweep in front of their houses. As Germans swept the combat debris, they seem to be sweeping Nazism off their minds. By 1945, the Germans had few illusions about Nazism, yet, still, many fought through the bitter end. Especially many in the ill informed and culturally stupid and thus, criminal, youth.

But of course the young were more vulnerable to Nazi propaganda. Hitler used to boast that he didn’t care what adults thought about Nazism, because “we own the youth“. In some cases, US officers were faced with young Germans holed up in some house with Panzerfausts. The US commanders drafted local German school teachers to order their pupils to lay down their weapons. So there you had German matrons ordering by loudspeakers their students to stop their ruckus and come out hands up.

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There have been many illusions regarding Putin’s tyranny: I fully predicted Putin’s attack, more than a decade ago… An autocracy is automatically evil. Yet most experts, completely drunk on neo-liberal, end of history, pipeline diplomacy, trade as master of the universe ideology,  believed it would not happen: well, their careers depended upon glorifying the fact everything, even peace, was for sale! Putin denial, like denial that, because they don’t experience limits to their powers, plutocrats are destroying democracy, or like denial about the CO2 crisis, have long been obvious, yet nothing is done about them, because that would doing something against the established order which plutocrats have captured (and this is why transferring arms to a democracy under attack by a fascist, racist genocidal regime is like pulling teeth…)  

Why did they think Putin modernized 80% of itsC nuclear forces, and developed, already 20 years ago, nuclear tipped hypersonic missiles? Putin was preparing his realm to exert nuclear blackmail, obviously. But the so-called “experts” had not noticed! They were paid, not to notice…

Another illusion is that the sanctions are hurting Russia real bad. Short term, no. Russia controls maybe 20% of the world’s arable land, and its gigantic land as all resources, except mangrove and coconut trees. Russia is an autocracy ready to live in autarky.. 

Could Russia end up like Venezuela, Cuba, North Korea or Iran. Isolated, forever inimical to most of the planet? No. Because Russia wants to be, and is, just from the land it controls, a superpower.

Notice this didn’t happen with China: After the Gang of 4 attempted takeover, China embarked in democratization… the opening of China to the world was recently interrupted by Xi, an ally of Putin… who discovered, like Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Hirohito and Franco before him, that global plutocrats were natural allies: see Bill Gates of the Gates (of hell?) foundation providing Xi with the most sophisticated security expertise. See Gates and Xi holding hands, see Xi visiting Gates’ mansion in Washington, and holding court there with other plutocrats from “Big Tech”, before Xi proceeded to Washington to tell Obama how it was going to be.

(Obama is a weakling, Xi, reared in part by the Red Guards, is tough, that’s why Xi gives orders to Obama: “Big Tech” plots with Xi, a man who can pretty much order the death of anybody, anywhere, then Xi goes to see someone who is afraid of his own shadow, except when sponsored by oligarchs).

The reason China did not isolate itself from the world has to do with Mao and Nixon… Nixon himself was pretty much doing what US oligarchs (say Kaiser) told him to do.

China is big, ambitious, and has been for 4,000 years. China got defeated by an expansionist Russia two centuries ago, losing immense territories at the Treaty of Aigun (1858 CE). The Russians threatened to open a second front while China was losing the Second Opium War, against Britain and France (which went on to destroy architecture in the Chinese capital to avenge various atrocities with petty war crimes of their own… 

China wants to be a superpower, that means: opening itself to the world. Russia will have the same problem, if it wants to keep on being a superpower. 

Now, of course, Xi is a personal ally of the Kremlin mongrel, but that’s precisely Xi’s problem: Xi carries the mark of infamy “Putin”…  that may make Xi less popular with his comrades of the Chinese leadership. 

In the fullness of time, China is a major threat for Russia, because Russia occupies or control immense territories on which China has exerted imperium, sometimes for centuries, and sometimes already two millennia ago (Rome and China basically touched at some point, and Romans notable made it all the way to East Asia; an allegation is that Roman prisoners settled in China). Two huge cities, Vladivostok and Khabarovsk, sit very close to the Chinese border. Khabarovsk is full of descendants of Ukrainians deported to Siberia by Stalin (who also killed around four million Ukrainians, just to make sure Ukraine obeyed and agreed to be dispossessed… The Holodomor, one of these periodic genocides the Kremlin visits on Ukraine in its effort to keep as much of Eurasia under tits subjugation as possible).

Make no mistake: Siberia should be developed from the Russian base it has now, with the help of the European Union and its allies. I am not advocating a “return to China”. Actually Russia and the USSR seem to have been more respectful of Siberian peoples than 

Russia can’t depend upon China. The problem of Muscovite Russia is that, to realize its ginormous expansion to the east, the Kremlin embraced the ways of the Mongols. That was the opposite of the quasi-democracy of Kyivan Rus… which really got Russian civilization started. That tension remains. What we see with the cruel Moof scow attacking Kyiv is a civil war, and even more, a civilizational war, a war for saving the world…

As tech progresses, a point may happen where the formidable Russian nuclear arsenal may become obsolete. Much Russian military prowess rests on western electronics: that’s going to be cut off (hopefully; it remains to see how strong the embargo is going to be). 

Ukraine, a democracy assailed by plutocrats, must regain lost territory through military means… Because there are no other means, and the nuclear tyrant needs to be thoroughly defeated: Putin cannot be rewarded with some Sudetenland, as Hitler was… We know what happens in such a case.

So the democracies should help Ukraine militarily as much as possible. After having committed the worst threat, destroying all of humanity, Putin and his accomplices should be given no quarters: there is strictly no hope to be coming from this criminal organization. Democracies must choose between civilization and the only thing which can stop civilization, a rogue nuclear regime. 

World War Three is on. It is more serious than any which preceded.

Patrice Ayme

One of the big chunks of Eurasia China (actually the Manchus) used to have, and wants back very much. Actually Stalin himself saw Mao maneuver to acquire it, and after that the relationship ended in near-war in 1969. All of central Asia, owned by the Han 2,000 years ago, is in play too…

On That Harvard Traitor To Democracy…

In a Boston Court, a Superstar of Science Falls to Earth
A jury found Harvard chemist Charles Lieber, chair of two departments, guilty of lying to the federal government about his participation in China’s Thousand Talents recruitment program. It took less than three hours to find him guilty of this and three other counts [1].

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Dr Lieber says: “This is embarrassing. Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.” Well, not true. Only true in a society where all people doing science would do it, not because of science, but because of greed. Being driven by greed is not happening in a scientifically healthy society. Many scientists do not work in science because they want glory, but because they want to advance knowledge, or the honor of the human spirit. Relatively few are driven by Nobel greed, which is neither noble nor the best steed one needs to ride to figure out the unknown. Nobel greed is a form of corruption, and one corruption leads to the next, with bills stuffed in brown paper bags. 

It is crucial to maintain technological superiority over China in scientific sectors with potential military applications. In the Nineteenth and early Twentieth centuries, democracies partially lost their scientific and technological lead over racist, fascist Prussianized Germany, and that brought among Prussian German leaders a military hubris which help them launch two world wars. The exact same psychological mechanism could happen with present day China, which, in its official constitution, is a “dictatorship“.   

Technological science is more than just science. Much of it is military activity in disguise. And dictatorships are enemies of democracy… On a planet which is shrinking by the day, as our technology expands. Top scientists carrying brown paper bags full of cash given by the dictators commit high treason against democracy.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The  not so famous Chinese university in Wuhan had money to spend — “that’s one of the things China uses to try to seduce people,” Dr. Lieber said in the interrogation… We want to know what the other seductions are…

But money wasn’t the reason, he said. By training young Chinese scientists in the use of technology he had pioneered, Lieber hoped to burnish his credentials with the committee that decides the ultimate scientific honor.

“This is embarrassing,” he said. “Every scientist wants to win a Nobel Prize.”

A federal jury found Dr. Lieber guilty of two counts of making false statements to the U.S. government about whether he participated in Thousand Talents Plan, a program designed by the Chinese government to attract foreign-educated scientists to China. They also found him guilty of failing to declare income earned in China and failing to report a Chinese bank account.

Dr. Lieber’s was specifically asked about his participation in the Chinese program, and denied it. His own lawyer presented Dr. Lieber  as a victim: “the world’s greatest nanoscientist is facing multiple felonies.”

Since 2008, Lieber’s laboratory at Harvard received research grants totaling $18 million from the Department of Defense and the National Institutes of Health.

A three-year contract emailed to Dr. Lieber in 2012, and displayed to the jury by prosecutors, identified Lieber as a “One Thousand Talent High Level Foreign Expert,” entitling him to $50,000 a month, plus about $150,000 in living expenses and more than $1.5 million for a laboratory, which they called the WUT-Harvard Joint Nano Key Laboratory.

A portion of Lieber’s salary was deposited in Lieber’s secret Chinese bank account and the remainder — an amount he estimated as between $50,000 and $100,000 (who is counting?) — was paid in $100 bills, which he carried home in his luggage.

“They would give me a package, a brown thing with some Chinese characters on it, I would throw it in my bag,” he said. After returning home, he said, “I didn’t declare it, and that’s illegal.”

In January of 2021, Gang Chen, a professor of mechanical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was arrested on suspicion of hiding affiliations with Chinese government institutions thus allowing him to secure $19 million in U.S. federal grants.

Conversing with the F.B.I. agents on the day of his arrest, Dr. Lieber reflected on international funding in research, saying that relationships with foreign partners were never as straightforward as they seemed at first. “Early on, if someone said, ‘We’ll give you this title and we’ll pay your travel to and from,’ you don’t think anything about it,” he explained, but partners “always want something from you.”

“A lot of countries, money is what they have in excess,” he said. He added, “that’s one of the things China uses to seduce people.”

Is Xi’s China A Danger? Or Is It, As Usual, US Plutocracy?

Many high level executives of the plutocratic Internet are entering the Biden administration, to the applause of the fake, deluded pseudo-left, a tribal masquerade. At an even higher level, plutocratic America has succeeded to repeat with China what it did with Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin: a fruitful cooperation. In the end the fascists went one invasion too far, France and Britain reacted by declaring war to Nazism, but, from bad luck and no timely US help, Europe self destroyed, and US plutocracy, having used European and Japanese fascisms as space vehicles use gravity wells to accelerate, was boosted into the “American Century“.

Now of course, if worse comes to worst, a good war with a Chinese dictatorship could help US plutocracy too, to go a bit further, and turn the planet to neo-feudalism, so first let’s feed the beast…

A half mentally retarded, or at least, culturally retarded, person on Quora pondered, outrageously: “Is China more evil than Nazi Germany? After all, the Nazis did lots of good things for the world while China is just a cancer to civilisation.“

I stooped to answer, because if we cannot answer retards mental or cultural, who can we answer? And there was a valid interrogation therein: mental, or cultural retards don’t know which question common people are not supposed to ask, so they end up, differently from elegant, and sophisticated academic prostitutes, by asking sometimes interesting questions, which academics would never ask, lest their reputations, and then careers, sink to the bottom of the sea. The presupposition of the retarded creature, that Nazism did many good things, is of course grotesque (on second thoughts, I remember one relatively little, but telling positive aspect of Nazism, in ecology, see [1]). What single big good thing did the Nazis do, aside from being an instructive example of how evil is generated from a mix of bad ideology, some of it Christian, elections by the stupid, while serving pernicious, stealthy conspiracies of (mostly US) global plutocracy? However the fact that Nazism was a powerful tool, maybe the most powerful tool, of US plutocracy has been successfully buried by US plutocratic propaganda… And evoking that notion is always viewed with horror and consternation by US leading circles and their obsequious servants in media and academia.

US plutocrat on the left, dictator on the right: a repetition of the old method inaugurated in the 1920s. I give you my computer tricks to help your dictatorship, you give me your love letters and a few hundred billions to me and my associates. Hey, well trained puppy Obama gave me and my spouse the “Medal of Freedom”. Is not that something to laugh aloud about?

Also, China, on the other side of the world’s biggest mountain range, has been the other great center of civilization for more than 5,000 years. Although China was, in the end, a junior partner to the Indo-European ensemble (which unfairly extends from Nubia to the Altai and Ireland to Burma… And is crisscrossed by all sort of rights of way, from steppes to seas and rivers), China contributed mightily to civilization, with the compass, black powder, paper, printing and deep drilling for gas (among other things). China also did much of that advance the way Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, Rome and Western Europe did it: through governmentalism.

To call China a cancer, just because Xi, deluded by hubris and personal insecurity out of context, confuses himself with the new Mao, is a stretch into a future we don’t want to have. Since the heydays of the Tang dynasty, China has spent most of its time under occupation (first by Uighurs, then Jurchen, then Mongols and finally Manchus, with the added spice of a Franco-British army invading Beijing, and finally a horrendous invasion by Hirohito’s Japan). This constant stream of torrential invasions goes a long way to explain why China contributed less to civilization in the last millennium. And it is also a vicious circle: the less innovative a great civilization is, the more invaded it gets, and then, because it is presumably ruled by brutes, the less innovative it gets, thus bringing in more invasions [2]. Europe’s success has much to do with no truly foreign massive invasion by lesser beings in more than 15 centuries (although there were extensive attempts, and durable encroachments).

The danger now is that China is a dictatorship, and one with modern weapons, including H bombs. Military actions can be decided in minutes now. The close relationship with Gates, Buffet, their countless fellow global corporations and their ilk is fraught, for the entire planet [3]. Just like the fascists of the thirties (including the USSR), dictator Xi is entangled with Western plutocrats…who not only provide him with tech to help impose his autocracy, but also feed his hubris and his dangerous delusions about democracy. So, basically, Xi has collaborators who rule Western media, quite a bit as Mussolini, Hitler and Stalin had, starting a century ago. If China thinks it will get ahead playing fire with the devil, and the plutocratic devils he knows all too well, it should be reminded that others tried that before, and came out in ashes.

An institutionalized culture which wiped out an entire continent of its original inhabitants, the European colony now known as North America, has more than one arrow in its quiver.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The Nazis were great ecologists and animal rights defenders (the latter no doubt in part to make virtue displaying, trying to make people believe they would not hurt a fly…) The nazis created a lot of national parks and passed animal right laws still in place…. And imitated elsewhere… The Nazi economic boom, somewhat similar to the New Deal, was promoted, greatly by the same global plutocrats… It was greatly fake, and broke the Third Reich financially, hence the frenzy of thievery the Reich engaged in… Including stealing entire countries or ethnicities…

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[2] This has to be nuanced. Differently from the Nazis, the Yuan, the Mongol occupation of China, actually did great things for China, before imploding in corruption which succumbed to the Ming rebellion, headed, as it should have been, by a monk. An example of a good thing was the program of Treasure Fleets, which opened China to the world (there were five of them, going all the way to Black Africa; some have rumored one Chinese fleet reached the Americas, although there is no good proof of this… although we now have genetic proof that the Polynesians reached South America… and we had the sweet potato proof before that, anyway…)

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[3] From the Chinese embassy’s own poor English in 2015: “Bill Gates said that China has offered a great deal of resources in joint effort with the international community to address the Ebola epidemics and also done a remarkable job in controlling AIDS disease. China has erected a model for the rest of the world by playing a leading role in poverty reduction, for which he highly appreciates. The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is ready to intensify cooperation with China in public health service.“

Bill and Melinda Gates of Hell, the Freedom Medal recipients, fresh from their exploits with cancer causing biocides they loved to be invested in, and investing their foundation into, making Xi dictatorship all that it could be… What could go wrong? Did they help with those Chinese virus labs too?

Alumni of Gates’ Microsoft, the software giant’s Beijing research lab are now executives at Alibaba, Tencent, SenseTime—and TikTok parent ByteDance… All famous Chinese powerhouse companies with dual technology: entertainment and dictatorship implementation.

In 2019, the Financial Times reported that Microsoft Research Asia worked with a university associated with the Chinese military on facial recognition tech that is being used to monitor the nation’s population of Uighur Muslims. Up to 500,000 members of the group, primarily in western China, were monitored over the course of a month, according to a New York Times report. Now what is apparently going on in Western China is genocide…

In 2013, the New York Times pondered with apparent anxiety: “AS this populist wave crashes in on both sides of the Atlantic, the plutocrats, for all their treasure and their intellect, are in a weak position to hold it back.“

Well, thanks to their vaunted “intellect”, the plutocrats found the solution: occupies all the information space, in China as in the West. So now, as one of my devoted readers put it, “the mobs will calm down, and in half a year, year they will shake their heads, how could be so stupid to follow such an evil stupidity as Donald Trump.” Trump, the one who succeeded to push away from the Chinese dictatorship, however briefly, and who invested more than ten billion dollars to make possible the first three certified COVID vaccines… and half the money went to European companies. Let me repeat slowly; the three certified successful vaccines companies got more than ten billion dollars from Trump… and nothing from Europe (during the R&D phase; now the Europeans are buying the Trump vaccines…) But everybody who pretends to think, sing songs they hate Trump, while lauding the invader of Iraq.

Good job, Pluto propagandists!

Dictatorship Endangers World: Proof By Coronavirus!

Xi and his dictatorship should resign: they are fatally dangerous to the world, not just their kingdom, and not just this virus. They are the virus. Clearly the police and secret state Xi built has contributed directly to the mayhem in Hubei, now extending worldwide.

Xi’s dictatorship stealthily rose, and now steers China, as if increasingly again under Mao’s dictatorship. But Mao had excuses (such as fascist Japan’s invasion of China), which Xi doesn’t have. We have seen that debate before: when the Roman Republic vacillated under corruption, sole Consul Pompeius Magnus made bribes unlawful, retroactively, over twenty years. At the time many advocated that the Republic should be ruled by just one man (as happened soon after). However, once again, Xi doesn’t have that excuse. His knowledge of the COVID19 epidemic without telling the public about it is revealing. What other doomsday machine does Xi have up his sleeve?

The first known case was December First 2019. Xi now claims he gave a (secret) talk about the virus January 7. Right. Tell me, Xi, how did that help, that secrecy? How are people supposed to take precautions against catching the disease, or transmitting it, when only Xi and his accomplices know about it?

As I explained, in the case of the very society which invented the concept of Open Society, a closed society fosters illness. In an open society, this cases in early December could have led to nipping the epidemic in the bud… Instead, lying about the existence of the epidemic became a state mission in the next 6 weeks. Those not cooperating were punished. Apparently individuals reporting dismal conditions in Hubei healthcare are Xi-disappeared.

Pluto-cracy, Pluto-kratia = Evil-Rule! Xi is very self-satisfied, as all dictators are: it comes with the job, be it only to persuade the slaves that all is best in the best possible world. He got the job from his father’s position. Such individuals, steeped in prerogative and crime, are the world’s ultimate danger.

Xi said: “Our progress will not be halted by any storms and tempests.” yes, but a pandemic could stop you, dictator. Pericles was judged in Athens, 2,450 years ago, for his mishandling of Athenian society, forcing people to live in a way which caused a devastating epidemic (during a war Pericles partly instigated).

Xi’s father, Xi Zhongxun (15 October 1913 – 24 May 2002) was a Chinese communist revolutionary and a subsequent political official in the People’s Republic of China. He belongs the first generation of Chinese leadership.

So here we just don’t have a dictatorship a la Hitler, or Mussolini, but an hereditary fiefdom. A most traditional, most obdurate form of plutocracy.

Xi’s model of government, where one brain decides of all, as if it were an emperor from 2,000 years ago, is thoroughly obsolete: it condemns China to be led by one tiny nervous system instead of a great collective mind. Dictatorship of one, advocated by Marx, is fundamentally the antithesis of collectivism, ironically enough. Come to think of it, Marx, irritated by the lost of value of his wealthy father’s vineyard, was formed, as Jew, under the Prussian dictatorship. Dictatorship, he was told when very young, was the way to get things done. If things to be done consist into oppressing most people, dictatorship is perfect. If things to be done imply progress of the mind, then Direct Democracy is the way to go, direct observation of Athens, or of the Roman Republic, or the English republic-in-disguise, and of the French and US republics, and basic logic, show. 

Although the 1982 constitution guarantees freedom of speech, the Chinese government often uses the “subversion of state power” and “protection of state secrets” clauses in their law system to imprison those who criticize the government.

This total dictator Xi is now hiding from the Coronavirus pandemic, and behind his Prime Minister, Li, which his own practice of the state caused. Xi views the state as a conduit to his power, instead of an intelligent, all-knowing substrate for an all empowered society. That state fascism has proven a danger to the entire world. Out!

And this is a world lesson: we need information, to feed our meditation, thus the Direct Democracy which requires it. Hence freedom of information is another motivation for Direct Democracy! The West showed the way of Marxist dictatorship which China revendicates. The West should raise the bar by going to Direct Democracy. THAT would be coming back full throttle to humanity as it evolved, that is, as it is meant to be.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S 1: This is a follow up, and pretty much iteration of the more detailed essay:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2020/02/02/a-closed-society-china-is-more-open-to-pandemics-coronavirus/

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P/S 2: See New York Times: “Her Grandmother Got the Coronavirus. Then So Did the Whole Family.
“What kind of government is this?’ asks a family of three generations sickened by the new virus and desperate for care in Wuhan, the Chinese city at the center of the outbreak.”

A Closed Society (China) is More Open To PANDEMICS (Coronavirus)

LACK of INFORMATION & DEBATE in NON OPEN SOCIETY FOSTERED DISASTROUS PANDEMIC

The Wuhan coronavirus spreading from China is now a pandemic that circles the globe. The prospect is daunting. A pandemic will have global consequences, despite the extraordinary travel restrictions and quarantines now imposed by many countries.

Science does not yet know how lethal the new coronavirus is. However, I can compute: we have less than 15,000 official cases and more than 300 dead so it seems the death rate is at least 3% (on the face of it that would be 5%). That means if one billion people get infected, 30 million will die. 

To these preliminary considerations, several caveats: first, out of the 15,000 infected, much more than 300 will die: the virus is known to kill patients who were improving for days in hospital beds. Second, and on a more positive note, information is exchanged between doctors, and methods to mitigate the effects of viral pneumonia are no doubt found. Even more important, the governments in the leadership of the world, the so-called “West”, governments are highly organized and have huge means: the USA has installed its first quarantine in 50 years, and uses large military bases to isolate potentially infected people.     

The Wuhan coronavirus is spreading more like influenza, which is highly transmissible, than like its slow-moving very lethal coronavirus cousins, SARS and MERS. [1]

How did we get there? It’s not just about markets mixing humans, live bats and live snakes, all infecting each other in a weird bat-snake-human ecology.

It’s also about China being huge, way too closed, and thus, too stupid for its own size. 

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China is not an Open Society. The concept of Open Society was originated by Aspasia, a philosopher married to Athenian general and politician Pericles, who famously declared, quoting his famous funeral oration as reported by Thucydides:

“Our political system does not compete with with institutions which are elsewhere in force. We do not copy our neighbors, but try to be an example. Our administration favors the many instead of the few: this is why it is called a democracy. The laws afford equal justice to all alike in their private disputes, but we do not ignore the claims of excellence. When a citizen distinguishes himself, then he will be called to serve the state, in preference to others, not as a matter of privilege, but as a reward of merit; and poverty is no bar.

… The freedom we enjoy extends also to ordinary life; we are not suspicious of one another, and we do not nag our neighbor if he chooses to go his own way. … But this freedom does not make us lawless. We are taught to respect the magistrates and the laws, and never to forget that we must protect the injured. And we are also taught to observe those unwritten laws whose sanction lies only in the universal feeling of what is right….

Our city is thrown open to the world… We are free to live exactly as we please, and yet, we are always ready to face any danger…. We consider a man who takes no interest in the state not as harmless, but as useless; and although only a few may originate a policy, we are all able to judge it. We do not look upon discussion as a stumbling block in the way of political action, but as an indispensable preliminary to acting wisely.”

Debate is crucial to advancing understanding. Debating with oneself is indispensable, but debating with others enables debating with others enables one to go where none thought of, and thus to advance understanding. 

Beautiful words, yet, disastrously, Pericles didn’t act accordingly to them! Just the opposite. 

Chinese Dictatorship Politicians with advanced specialized N95 masks (which stop the virus particles which are 10^7 meter across, so 5 billionth of a meter bigger than the meshes in these N95)… Whereas the doctors welcoming them have pitiful masks which can’t do that. Best masks out there stop at 300 billionths of a meter, 3 times too big to stop the 2019 Coronavirus, Some chinese doctors had to make masks out of garbage bags, due to penury.

Instead in a dictatorship, few decide; the brain power is if not minute, drastically reduced. Actually it’s the multi-debating aspect of Western Europe which enabled most of the advancement of civilization in the last millennium. China, which used to be very advanced scientifically and technologically missed the debating aspect, motivated by mighty intellectual passions. Lack of fierce debate, independently of social hierarchy, is the main missing link of Confucius philosophy, which views the respect of one’s “station” in life, the most important feature of society. Hence Confucius is most compatible with Xi’s regime.

Let alone that Xi got his job in part from his parents’ station in life… 

Whereas intellectual debate and its descendants, in particular scientific, medical and technological advancement, are the exact opposite: they respect only truth, and, more generally, the search thereof. To equal the West, China will have to accept to see truths, and love thereof, be hurled around. 

Tribalists come to me and they whine; if you are not blue, you have got to be red. Their simplicity is hurt, their minds are reeling, they are looking for something to color their bland lives. Well, children, I am campaigning for the truth. Not for a particular potentate to satisfy his or her greed for power.

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PANDEMICS FROM TYRANNICAL STUPIDITY:

On a great historical scale, one is struck by the fact the Roman State was wrecked by pandemics in the Second Century, The Third, and the Sixth. The first pandemic, during Marcus Aurelius’ reign, weakened the empire considerably. It’s not clear what happened. Clearly the army was struck as Marcus died. The lack of information is, by itself, an indictment: an Open Society would have debated and found ways to fight the epidemic. Instead, the tyrannical empire behaved as if the disastrous pandemics were no more than bad air not worth commenting upon. (By comparison, we know of the authorities in London abating pollution from coal burning already in the Fourteenth Century.)

We have more information from democracies than from the wretched Roman dictatorship. At the onset of the Thirty Years Peloponnesian war, a (highly) predictable pandemic (typhus?) hit Athens. All the population of the Attica peninsula was within the walls, thus very crowded, while armored Spartans roamed outside, destroying the land. Pericles ordered the Athenian fleet to sail to go attack the other side of the Peloponnese. Unsurprisingly, the pandemic exploded in the hyper crowded ships. The expedition became a disaster.

Pericles was recalled and tried for this, under the accusation that everybody knew crowding would make the epidemic terrible. Thus Athens was an open society, but not so open as to be able to avoid such an obvious blunder (much of the population died)… Pericles admitted he “had anticipated everything, but not not this”. Maybe if there had been more of a debate, when planning for war with Sparta, the pandemic could have been anticipated. 

Interestingly, when the dictator Napoleon attacked Russia, a similar situation developed. Apparently the Grande Armee suffered from typhus. In a democracy, the situation would have been revealed, and debated. The obvious solution was to take measures to stop the epidemic, and put off the assault against the Czar to another year. Instead, the dictator kept everything secret, and the idealistic young soldiers from Poland, Germany and other countries, in close quarters, infected each other. So efficient was the dictator that the scandal was kept secret for two centuries (archeology revealed the contaminated corpses recently). Napoleon thus undermined the spreading of revolution to Russia, and enabled the likes of old enslaving aristocrats such as Tolstoy to gloat.

If Rome had been a democratic state in the Second Century, perhaps it would have been able to mitigate considerably the pandemics which weakened it so much. 

During the terrible plague of 1348 CE, not one European aristocrat seems to have died: the nobles knew what was coming and took efficient counter-measures. However around half of the population, often ignorantly crowded praying in churches, died. So obscurantism doesn’t help.

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SPACESHIP EARTH NEEDS TO BE OPEN TO DEBATE:

In the case of the present Coronavirus, some authorities loudly proclaimed the virus could not be transmitted from human to human, when doctors already knew with certainty that was a lie. So no timely measures were taken in Wuhan, a city of eleven million. 

We are all sharing a small planet, our common spaceship. No country owns the spaceship. No country can endanger the spaceship. Obscurantism and closed societies, anywhere, endanger us all. It was telling that Russia, Mongolia, Vietnam and even North Korea closed their borders to China: when they got informed, they acted as Open Societies should have. More generally, increasing more cooperation, by making the world more of an Open Society will enable to decrease suspicion, hence military spending, and thus augment spending on science, and in particular biology, medicine.

They said “Climate Change”. We said: WORLD CATASTROPHE. They scoffed. Now they are going to sneeze. They will sneeze because the world’s ecology has been all open, and kicked around to new possibilities, while the old biosphere dies. The intellectual climate needs to change and warm up. The time for imagination and passion has come.

The Open Society is not just a choice anymore, it’s a duty. A world duty. Not just a world moral duty, a world survival duty. China can’t ship out, so it will have to change. And not just China. As in China, throughout the West politicians and potentates have confiscated decision power. Debate needs to grab it back.

Wars used to be made about territory. It’s time to have one about fostering the proper open attitude.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Together SARS and MERS caused less than 11,000 official cases. Their lethality rates were 10% (SARS) and 33% (MERS). The 1918 “Spanish flu” killed only about 2.5 percent of its victims — but because it infected so many people and medical care was much cruder then, and disorganized by World War One, 20 to 50 million died. The evidence is that it started in crowded US military camps.

The highly transmissible H1N1 “swine flu” pandemic of 2009 killed about 285,000, fewer than seasonal flu normally does, and had a relatively low fatality rate, estimated at .02 percent. It is hoped by authorities that 2019 Coronavirus has a death rate of less than 2% (when more mild cases surface). The argument was made by Chinese authorities that Wuhan is more disorganized than the rest of China. Thus a death rate of 4% in Wuhan, 2% in the rest of China.

***

P/S: February 6, 2020. The Chinese doctor who tried to warn other medics about the coronavirus has been reported dead after contracting the infection in Wuhan. According to local state media, Dr Li Wenliang, an ophthalmologist, died from the virus on Thursday.

#Breaking: Chinese doctor Li Wenliang, one of the eight whistleblowers who tried to warn other medics of the #coronavirus outbreak but were reprimanded by local police, dies of coronavirus on Thursday in Wuhan, the Global Times has learned. Li sent a message to fellow medics in a group chat on 30 December, and days later was summoned to the Public Security Bureau to sign a letter in which he was accused of making “false comments”.

Li was one of eight people being investigated by police for “rumour-mongering”.

Big History View Of China, How It Relates To Hong Kong

How did China get united, 22 centuries ago? Under the rule of law. The state of Qin grew, over the centuries, from relentless application of the law, just like the other greatest civilization, Rome. This mood, of the rule of law being paramount, is why the generals of the First Emperor were able to conquer China… Very similarly to what the Roman Republic did, at exactly the same time, and for the exact same reasons: Rome won, and Qin won, because people accept to be ruled by law, if it is fair and clairvoyant. The Mission Civilisatrice is no lure: it wins wars. Superior war fighting capability comes from superior philosophy. Inferior philosophy brings extinction. 

In the end, the First Emperor slipped, and led China astray, for millennia to come, when he ordered the books of 100 philosophy schools destroyed. Right, records, science, medicine were preserved… So the disaster was not as great in China as the Christian generated destruction of the Greco-Roman heritage in the West. (Yet, in the West, the Franks, a minority, took over, and, as a minority, they had to be smarter, and thus domesticated Christianism, rendering it innocuous… for the next five centuries… before it rose its ugly snout again…)

However, that Qin instigated wanton destruction of higher thinking, and the respect thereof,  set-up in China a mood of embracing a lack of wisdom and tolerance for exotic thinking, which, in the end, had ethical consequences (and from there, social, economic, and ultimately, military). That mood of irreverence for higher thinking out of the box, prevented China to learn to treat individuals as well as they were in the West.

In Francia, in 655 CE, the government of the Imperium Francorum led by queen Bathilde, a former English slave, outlawed slave trading; this was imposed all around Europe. For example in 1066 CE, when the Franks conquered England… and freed the slaves, 20% of the population. As Aristotle pointed out, if one had no slaves, one would need machines. The Franks developed those machines. European visitors to China. around or before Marco Polo, were struck by the fact that cutting trees in China involved hundreds of people carrying those trees around… when similar tasks were accomplished by a few in Europe, thanks to various tech tricks. 

What Xi wants to be, when he grows up? Hopefully, the Present Masters of China Will Learn That This Is All Over Now: Xi Can’t be Qin Shi Huang!

(Huang, emperor, maybe, Shi, first, certainly not…)

Treating individuals better in the West, as was imposed under the Merovingians and Carolingians, brought up a technological, and even bioengineering explosion: human muscle and multitude had to be replaced by mechanical advantage or specially bred animals (for example hydraulic hammer to forge huge iron beams, hence the cathedrals… and, a bit later, field artillery). [1]

An indirect result of this tech explosion was Western military superiority, which was so great, even the Mongols left Western Europe alone (after conferring among each other about why their ancestors the Huns had been defeated in France, eight centuries prior). Thus Western Europe was unconquered, for two millennia, insuring independent ferocity of thinking and self-worth, spurring inquiry of the indomitable human spirit, with more freedom than occupied China.   

Indeed, in contrast, in the last millennium, China spent most of its time ruled by foreigners (Jurchen, Mongols, Manchus). Mongol generals even proposed to annihilate China, demographically (holocaust) and even ecologically (turning northern China into a steppe) The rule of law, intellect and science suffered in China, from this foreign occupation.

In the Twentieth Century, China reacted, mostly by adopting Western ideologies: rule of law, then Marxism, then the sort of mercantilist, tech led development leading Western powers, used in the Nineteenth Century; powers such as the USA, Germany, UK, France… even Japan (a new honorary Western power!)

So far, so good. 

However to lead, one needs to create ideas, not just mass produce goods. Western European supremacy was born out of human rights (when the Franks put back monotheism in its place, by replacing Christianism by tolerance and pushing back Islamism, after outlawing slavery). If China doesn’t learn to drive the rule of law from human right, it will just become one more dangerous super power, like Prussia, and the Second, and Third Reich of Germany.

Democracy and Human Rights are not just fair. Humanity in full, is made for fairness, and blossom fully that way. Democracy and human rights are how one maximizes mental creativity… And thus military superiority. Hence, should the Chinese dictatorship decide to crush democracy, once again, it is Chinese security that it is also crushing, long term.

Hong Kong is an irreplaceable gift to China, an antidote to Chinese intellectual and governmental fascism: it forces China to learn to become more tolerant to thinking outside of the particular box which pleases at this moment the present emperor (right now, Mr. Xi). [2]

Destroying that gift would instill an even more ignorant mood.

But ignorant moods are exactly what plutocracy loves.

Lack of construction for homes and dearth of living wages, have been a chronic disaster, throughout the West. It’s particularly bad in Hong Kong, but also in all top producing metropolises, such as Paris, San Francisco Bay Area, Tokyo, etc. Not only are homes unaffordable for the jobs at hand, but the economy suffers from the unaffordability crisis.

Then We The People, observing the collusion between plutocrats and government, revolt… by asking for more (real, that is direct) democracy. And that goes through decreasing the power of tycoons, so precious to governments. Ironically enough, what is Xi, but a super-tycoon, a super-typhoon putting equality to waste?

OK, Xi was an abused child, an abused princeling, abused by the Cultural Revolution. Xi suffered a past of violence. But that’s a diagnostic, not an excuse.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] The cognitively challenged friend of monopolist plutocrat Bill Gates, Jared Diamond (author of Guns, Germs, and Steel; Collapse) didn’t understand any of this, that the husbandry of Europe over nature was not the product of chance, but human will, deployed over millennia (although in his latest book, Diamond shows flickers of progressing wisdom, as he ponders successful cases of government intervention… more or less mangled by his data management…) All the riches of Western Europe were greatly the fruit of will, indeed. The same holds for China (or Kerala)… But, as I point out above, and why, to a smaller extent. And the Beijing hysteria about Hong Kong is a case in point, that Chinese governmentalism, however glorious, fundamental and effective, can’t be the whole story:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/08/13/synthesis-found-governmentalism/

***

[2] France is another example where centralism, and the accompanying governmental, social and intellectual fascism has run havoc. Louis XIV, a bloody stupid monster, threw 10% of the French population out, so that it could better terrorize the rest, and please his fascist god. That was aggravated by his grandson, Louis XV, and Napoleon…

Zhōngguó, Central State, is the most common Mandarin name for China in modern times. The first appearance of 中國 on an artifact was in the Western Zhou on a ritual vessel. It is formed by combining the characters zhōng (中) meaning “central” or “middle”, and guó (國/国), representing “state” or “states”; in contemporary usage, “nation”. Prior to the Qin unification of China “Zhongguo” referred to the “Central States“; the connotation was the primacy of a culturally distinct core area, centered on the Yellow River valley, as distinguished from the tribal periphery. Hence the common mistranslation as “Middle Kingdom”.

The Chinese Riddle, & How To Keep It Nice

China is the other great civilizational center. The primary one being the Indo-European ensemble (which crucially incorporated Egypt, where a lot of what came to be known as Greek mathematics, was discovered).

To understand Europe, the last 500,000 years have proved necessary (Neanderthals started to burn coal, 80,000 years ago, foe example, and explored immensely deep caves, 165,000 years). In the case of China, the evolution of the last 5,000 years are crucial to understand how China became China.

 

China: A World Within The World, But Not Quite The Center Of Everything

China is the other great civilizational center. Much of what China uses as civilizational instruments was developed in situ, from writing, to the number system, to much philosophy. However, that philosophy was unbalanced, too much under the influence of Confucius (whose works have been under care from the same family inside the same city for 60 generations or more).

China developed an examination system which, in theory, enabled the most cognitively qualified to rule. Thus Mandarins and not aristocrats were in command. At least in theory.

This system, admirable in principle, was flawed in practice, as China got terminally invaded at least twice. The Mongol invasion came close to annihilation, when some of Genghis Khan’s generals proposed to exterminate the Chinese and change the ecology! (The generals knew they could turn much of China into a steppe similar to much of Mongolia, by cutting the forests and bringing massive herds of cattle, goats, sheep…)

The primary civilization center is the Indo-European ensemble (which crucially incorporated Egypt, where a lot of what came to be known as Greek mathematics, was discovered).

Now we have basically just one civilization, worldwide, so the misadventures of China are highly  instructive.

To understand Europe, the last 500,000 years have proved necessary (Neanderthals started to burn coal, 80,000 years ago). In the case of China, the last 5,000 years are crucial.

Now, granted all and any explanation can only be incomplete. What is important is to introduce new ideas, and that includes new hierarchy in what is more important, and what is not.

Right now, China seems severely influenced by the Germany of the Second Reich, and its incredible fast scientific, technological, mercantilist, and economic expansion… At the cost of a more general, more pacific mood. That uncanny comparison is quite a bit spooky. An evidence is the madness about the south of the South China Sea.

As in Germany, starting 165 years ago, increasing aggressiveness towards foreign powers seems to be the glue which increasingly keeps the dictatorship together. In the case of Germany, the increasing aggressiveness, which had started by attacking Denmark in 1853, went on with the catastrophic apotheosis, encouraged by the US presidency. of the savage surprise attack on the world of August 1914. Naturally enough, it was followed by the encore of Nazism. Yes, it’s not a reassuring comparison. But the same psychohistorical forces are in play. Psychohistory rules national moods and the actions they lead to (Isaac Asimov wrote a book on this; the real, live, historical case was the second foundation of the Roman Empire, the “Renovation of the Roman Empire made official by Roman emperor Charlemagne…). 

On the reassuring side, China adopted, and accepted to be guided, by a huge chunk of Western philosophy, a Franco-German contraption sensitive to the nastiness of great capital. That was a huge philosophical revolution, but it was made possible only by a great openness of mind (in part learned in Paris by the top leader of Communist China, such as Chou En Lai and Deng Tsiao Ping)

China used to rile against capital. Yet, who has the most capital under command in the world, after the USA? China.

Nevertheless, to accept a distant philosophy, extremely alien to China, China had to open its collective mind and eyes gigantically. And intelligence itself is something one can learn to acquire.

The kindest attitude with China right now may well be to show to it that its aggressiveness in the south of the South China sea can only lead to war, even a world war. And that China cannot win it. Australia has started to do just that by acquiring, with US help, a fleet of the best submarines in the world, made in France. (In World War Two, after the Americans learned to make torpedoes which actually exploded, their submarines were one of the main factors in closing the Pacific to the fascist Japanese military.)

The Han are dominating the Middle Kingdom as never before. One hundred nations are now submitted to them. Their languages are even disappearing. (My own daughter is learning Mandarin, BTW.) That’s all very good for the Han. They are now very much richer than before, not just from their considerable industry and genius, and change of philosophy, adopting instead European philosophy. Those increased riches also come from occupying Tibet and Xinjiang.

The Han should not push their luck with aggressive military and imperialistic distractions. Adopting just a piece of European philosophy and history, while ignoring the rest, plenty of Dark Side in full evidence and how to control it, can only lead to an unbalanced mind. And, from there, dangerous, irreversible courses of action… Of the sort Europe is all too familiar with.    

Patrice Ayme’

 

How Civilizations Go Down. Why There Is Hope

Gloom and doom go only that far. A number of commenters, or authors such as Machiavelli, entertained pretty abysmal considerations on humanity and its future.

In the case of Machiavelli, pessimism was understandable: he rode two horses condemned to decline and fall, namely the Republic of Florence (which was turning into a plutocracy), and Caesare Borgia, Cardinal at 18 years of age, who later resigned his church position in an attempt to seize power in Italy, a place where Spain had invaded the south (freed centuries prior, by the Franks, from the Muslims), France was trying to hold onto Naples (but lost because the Spanish general in command was too good). Most of the peninsula was covered by forts and domains which had feuded for centuries.

Nowadays, we have grounds to be optimistic. I will explain why below. However with a caveat: history is now flowing extremely fast, as we are approaching a technological and computational, thus theoretical singularity.

We Already Have A Better Understanding Of What Brought Rome Down The First Time, We Can No Doubt Avoid It, The Second Time, With Even More Understanding

There are three reasons why civilizations collapse: invasion, ecological collapse, plutocracy.

I use all the time analogies with Rome’s Decline and Fall, yet on a much grander scale than Edward Gibbon. I root firmly the Decline and Fall as starting in 200 BCE, with the rise of plutocracy. There are a lot of deep analogies between what happened then, and what is happening now.

Yet we also enjoy major differences with Rome. To avoid Rome’s fate, we have to cultivate these differences. (And our gaze turns towards the European Union.)

Rome was a quarter of humanity, and Roma was ALL the civilized, and Republican influence zone. Yes, China, India, Persia, and well before Egypt, were civilized. But only the only drowned and expired Sumerian cities could pretend to have a high Republican index: Sumer invented the bicameral system still in use today. Persia did not, China did not, and, as far as I know, neither did India.

But Rome, like the top Greek cities, was a Republic. However, most Greek cities crashed and burned within a century or so. Rome built a huge empire, and lasted so long, it’s not clear it ever stopped. Although it declined, and fell, it got up again, as the Franks engineered and observed. Thus Rome founded the present political system

Persia was advanced enough to seriously bother Greeks and Romans, it was only or equal civilizational level for a fleeting moment under Darius, and in the late Sixth Century (thus, 1,000 year later). (This is my own observation/theory, sure to rile up some out there!)

All the neighborhood of Rome was vastly inferior. Although the Celts were superior in ocean going ships and metallurgy, and even captured Rome in the Fourth Century BCE, their abominable religion was quite a drag.  Actually, it was such a drag, the Celts embraced Greco-Roman civilization even before Julius Caesar showed up with his ten legions.

The Persian religion, Zoroastrianism was very advanced, arguably more so than Christianism (which copied many of its elements, in particular the obsession with truth and the logos, thanks god). The Middle East got tied down by the instauration of “hydraulic dictatorships” all over. The Persian/Iranian/Mesopotamian ensemble was a vast military mess which never recovered imperially, thus politically, from the People of the Seas invasions.

Now the situation is quite different.

First, the USA is a EUROPEAN COLONY.Rome was not a colony; it was initially occupied by Etruscans, themselves one of the People of the Sea. But, at the same time, the Etruscans civilized Rome. Rome also got civilized by the “Magna Grecia”, the Great Greece of Southern Italy, stating in Nea Polis (Naples).

Second, the mother ship, Europe, gave birth to a gigantic empire. It’s not just that European colonies control the Americas and Australia. France, the USA and Britain Exclusive Economic Zones, EEZs, covers much of the world’s exploitable oceanic depths.

Although weakened by its own crazies (Prussia/Germany/Nazis, Mussolini, Franco, Lenin/Stalin and their subordinates), plus major American plutocratic maneuvering, and in a bad state presently, Europe not quite done yet. After all the good guys (French Republic and British pseudo-monarchy) won. Now the French Republican systems, and monarchies to the same effect, cover Europe. Germany is sister republic to France, in particular.

Third, the Roman Republican system spread way beyond Europe and her colonies. China and India, and most of the rest of the UN have actually adopted (and adapted) many of WESTERN civilization’s better sides. However, China is still a dictatorship, and (partly) India a mess.

Another difference with Rome starts with a similarity: Rome got in a huge ecological crisis, starting around 100 CE. The Romans could not understand what was happening. They said:”The world is getting old”. Well, what was happening is that Romans had exhausted the soils, and the mines. However we know what they did not: tremendous technological progress can enable to change exploitation regimes.

Thus, the fourth difference with Rome; a huge CO2, GHG, Climate Crisis is incoming, but everybody knows about it, and fixes are in sight. A crisis is an opportunity as the Chinese would say.

Hope? People have to learn from history, and that means, the real history. Hyper maneuvering by USA plutocracy happened in much of the Twentieth Century, and is still ongoing right now. People can’t understand that, as long as they don’t realize that, without American plutocracy, Hitler just won’t have happened. At least, not happened as catastrophically as he did.

But there is hope that people, thanks to the Internet, realize that they have been manipulated in both what they know, and what they can hope to achieve. In particular, Direct Democracy is in the best position to succeed ever. The Athenian Republic found difficult to achieve Direct Democracy, because it did not have the Internet. The average Athenian voter was one day’s travel away from the voting booth. Nowadays, the average voter has her, or his hand on the voting device, namely the smartphone. No more excuses.

Objections can be raised. The preceding was a partial answer to several commenters on this site, John, Aaron, GlouconX, Eugen… The latter jumped on Machiavelli to object to Direct Democracy; however, Machiavelli was not just an author and philosopher. Like Plato, and especially Aristotle, he was a vested ACTOR of the disasters he described, and thus deeply biased, all the way to the greatest depths of the human soul. People who have interest to be stupid, will be stupid. Be it only to forget the fools leading us by the nose. Direct democracy is the answer to stupidity.

However, there is snow outside and further comments will be delayed until enough snow will have been mastered by the imperialistic author of these lines. Hey, it may be the last snow ever, let’s enjoy a cold El Nino, while it lasts! Non-Linearity is ready to ambush us. Let’s build memories while we can, be it just to be melancholic later… being of many minds is what intelligence is about.

Patrice Ayme’  

Israel & the China Man

What do Israel and the Chinaman have in common? Fundamental biases dislocating a correct vision of reality which all lemmings ardently share, thus finding themselves very smart.

Once there was an English student in Scotland, enraptured, with his friend Lyell, listening to the discoveries of Jean-Baptiste Lamarck a research professor in Paris’ Museum d’Histoire Naturelle, pertaining to the immense age of the Earth, demonstrated by the evolution of microscopic features in fossilized mollusks (the family of mollusks was defined by Lamarck’s senior competitor, research professor Georges Léopole Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert, Baron Cuvier).

Lyell’s, and other geologists’ field studies, mostly in France and Germany, showed indeed that stratigraphy and fossils confirmed Lamarck’s view. Darwin grew up, and later honorably tried to parrot in the Galapagos the work of Lamarck, with turtles and birds. However, the Galapagos are recent (maybe as little as nine million years), so speciation is weak: the birds are so little different, that there is a debate whether some of them are different species. Darwin did not have the good luck of Lamarck, studying really different, and extremely numerous mollusks.

In any case, the British Empire, in its wisdom, realized that Jesus Christ was becoming less of a bedrock of  the splendor of said empire, so it switched to Darwin, proclaiming him the creator of evolution, and thus multiplying further the aura of the British ways. It worked: the head of state of Canada is still the Queen of England.

Trudeau: My Son Will Learn From Me How To Manipulate The Stupid Out There

In related news, China gave the “Confucius Prize” to the dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe. Mugabe has reigned over the country for 35 years. This makes sense: Confucius was all for oligarchy, not to say plutocracy, as these regimes brought (apparent) peace. Confucianism as the default mode of China has been its main problem for twenty-six hundred years: the same family is in charge of Confucius for 26 centuries. Mao understood this, and that is why he used as an excuse to launch his “Cultural Revolution”.

But back to that other pillar of empire, Darwin. Darwin had decided that man came out of Africa, so that truth having been established, as Charles had replaced Jesus, it has been repeated ever since. The fact that there was no proof, it was even better, as it was an occasion to cultivate the celebrity/superstitious muscle. Celebrity and superstition go well together, as both assume that concept or creatures who cannot be observed, are up there, and to be “believed” in. Cultivating one or the other pertains to the same mood, so they reinforce each other.

It’s harder to find fossils in China. The climate tends to be much wetter than in Africa, and cycles of great heat and deep freezing, in the north, are not friendly to delicate corpses, either. However:

Teeth from China Reveal an Early Human Trek out of Africa

“Stunning” find shows that Homo sapiens reached Asia around 100,000 years ago. [Nature, October 14, 2015.]

These 47 human teeth, dated to 80,000-120,000 years ago, were found in a limestone cave system in Daoxian, China. Those teeth from a cave in south China show that Homo sapiens reached China around 100,000 years ago—a time at which most researchers had assumed that our species had not trekked far beyond Africa.

“This is stunning, it’s major league,” says Michael Petraglia, an archaeologist at the University of Oxford, UK who was not involved in the research. “It’s one of the most important finds coming out of Asia in the last decade.”

The teeth are unquestionably those of H. sapiens, says María Martinón-Torres, a palaeoanthropologist at University College London who co-led the study with colleagues Wu Liu and Xie-jie Wu at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology in Beijing. Their small size, thin roots and flat crowns are typical for anatomically modern humans—H. sapiens—and the overall shape of the teeth is barely distinguishable from those of both ancient and present-day humans..

The team used calcite deposits, stratigraphy, and Uranium and Thorium datation methods.

“This demonstrates it was not a failed dispersal,” says Petraglia, who has long argued for an early expansion of modern humans through Asia on a southerly route. “This is a rock-solid case for having early humans—definitely Homo sapiens—at an early date in eastern Asia.”

Why were they Homo Sapiens Sapiens in China for 50,000 years, at least, before they appeared in Europe? Simple: stronger, smarter Homo Sapiens Neanderthalis were in the way.

That Homo would thrive in Asia is not surprising: it represents a huge amount of inhabitable warmish land. More such land than in Africa arguably. Neanderthals also occupied North Africa, so the Sapiens Sapiens would have had to sneak through. Maybe they did not sneak through, because Sapiens Sapiens is just the tropical variant of Homo, so was represented on both sides of the tropics equally. As I argued, once Neanderthals wore pants, .they may as well go tropical too, and revert to the more delicate, smaller, thus more prolific version of Sapiens.

In any case, this shows that turning scientists into gods is an insult to science: Einstein had no reason to believe in local reality, except that he had been conditioned (= fabricated) that way. The Einstein-robot just repeated mechanically what he knew by rote about reality. Fine. What’s not fine, was to make that into a religion. Same for some of Darwin’s pronouncements.

Some will say that’s just science, and surely politics don’t make the same mistake. Yet a beautiful example is the case of Israel. Netanyahu dared to go outside of official script, by pointing out that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, a sort of Muslim Pope, took part in the extermination of the Jews. This is factually true.

Yet as all the deepest truths of World War Two, it’s no good to proffer it, if all you want is peace, in your little world, or, more exactly, torpor.

So what of Israel? Exasperated by Jewish rebellions which turned into full blown wars which killed many legionnaires, Rome outlawed Israel, threw the Jews out, and called the place Palestina.

225 years later, the philosopher-emperor, Julian, having studied in Athens and been elected in Paris, decided that the punishment had lasted long enough, and ordered the reconstruction of the Jewish Temple in Jerusalem, and the return of the Jews. However Julian got killed, and replaced by Christian fanatics even worse than the ones before.

So here we are.

The “Two-States” solution will never work (long story). The facts, on the ground, is that Israel is not just occupying, colonizing, but invading the “West Bank” (60% of it).Denying this, and that the forces at work are so colossal, they can’t be stopped, is being a partisan of the present situation, the slow eating of Palestine by the Israeli boa.

What’s the only solution which can work? The One-State solution: one state, secular, rights of all critters, respected. That is the Israeli government has to respect the human rights of minorities.

Meanwhile Ivory Coast voted for president, for the economist turned president who had been barred, after being PM, from the Ivorian citizenship (for having not all his ancestors Ivorian). Ouattara got to power, thanks to some judiciously placed French rockets which landed his all too dictatorial predecessor in jail.

Some grumbled it all reminds them of “France-Afrique”, the connection between business interests, and the military help France provides with. Yes, sure, but as with Darwin or Israel, one has to look at reality: “France-Afrique” is bad, but the alternatives,  USA Africa or Africa, Idi Amin Dada, or Mugabe style, are worse roads to plutocracy.

France cannot keep on making war on the behalf of all Europe, plus civilization, without finding a way to pay for it. And the same holds even for the much richer USA.

Canada elected heir, and hair apparent, Trudeau son of Trudeau (see above) has promised many things, including the Keystone Pipeline, something that not even Obama supports (Keystone is an attempt to make Canada even more filthy rich from filthy oil tar, while melting the permafrost up north). Weirdly, everybody is applauding, although, not satisfied with smothering the biosphere, Justin Trudeau has made many pro-Islamist utterances (the way he sees it, it just brings him votes).

Training to recognize reality can be done best in science, but what is learned has to be brought to politics. If you want progress, for real, stick to truth, for real.

Patrice Ayme’

From Nasty Moods, Nasty Wars

Who Is In Charge? A Calculus Of Nasty Moods?

Under the tables, tensions keep on rising. Long encouraged by the tolerance of the USA, China is engaged in a dangerous game on the South China Sea. China ought to pay more attention to the weather: foul weather and a tornado on the Yang Tze sank a luxury boat in minutes, killing more than 620. Accidents happen. Meanwhile, the Korean dictator piles up nukes, and so to the Islamists, in Pakistan. And Putin chuckles a lot.

Under The Mongols, China Went All The Way To Indonesia. Back Into That Mood?

***

What The USA Calls Corruption Overseas, It Calls Business, in the USA:

In the USA, a few billion dollars for the selection

Of the “Commander-In-Chief”

Is business as usual, and no mischief

One calls it a presidential election

In the USA, when from the wealthiest, universities receive

Billions, plutocrats in your face do not deceive

In the USA the public buys plutocrats stadiums

This is no corruption, but the proper medium

Yet when under some tables, circulate a few millions

Learn! Only the USA decides who needs the billions

For its own banksters and greedy minions

To incite some countries to build soccer stadiums

A crime it is, for the USA, FBI, IRS, no tedium

Anything else against Washington Empire a crime

It is, and back deep into the grime

You of the whole world belong

Serving our USA plutocracy you should, all along

If you want a fortune in millions

American politics serve, Bushes and all Clintons

***

A Mood Of Nasty Outrageous Force Growing:

Of course the Russians see these methods being used. They see it works, they see it worked: Switzerland used to be number one in money management for wealth. USA law enforcement indicted Swiss High Finance, and now the USA High Finance is again number one, as it should.

So Putin decides 88 persons cannot enter Russia, including the French philosopher BHL, and European MPs. He just does not like the way they think. Never mind that BHL had an invitation for a debate on Russian TV.

Of course the Chinese plutocrats see these methods, and think: why not us? Why don’t we do something similar? Use our force, and the outrage we can muster. So they build outrageous islands in the South China Sea (“Reclamation”), and claim they own it.

The Philippine president, visiting Japan, compare China’s expansionism to Nazi Germany’s.

Fundamentally, Nazi Germany was doing what it thought the USA wanted it, or enabled, or allowed it to do (the Nazis were financed, fueled, and diplomatically supported by American plutocrats).

At this point, the People Republic of China has pretty much got a green light from the USA too. And the FIFA, or Swiss sort of prosecution have only showed China that the proper way is the outrageous usage of force and mass hypocrisy.

On the face of it, politics, in the USA is as corrupt as possible: it is actually legal to spend billions to elect officials, all the way up to the president… So called “representatives”, “Senators”, etc.

Tens of times, very officially the president went to sleep at plutocrats home, and people paid hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a day, to be in the presence.

But that’s not corruption, just American style politics.

***

If You Want War, Prepare A Mood, Say A Mood Which Rewards Aggression:

The Romans said: if you want peace, prepare for war. History says: if you want war, prepare a vast mood, conducive to it. Thucydides concluded his history of (part of) the tragic Peloponnesian War by said it originated from a mood. Similarly, the First World War, and the Second World War were driven by a mood reigning in Germany at the time. And guess what? Both in the First and Second World War, it was egged on by the USA.

By not bringing the spirit of the laws to bear on its banksters, but on the game the rest of the world plays, the USA is playing a dangerous ball game. And that may just be what many officials of the USA, maybe egged on by the plutocrats they talk to, are financed by, dine, play, and sleep with, are exactly doing at this point. Between two rounds of golf, they go FIFA hunting, while civilization is smoldering. Not that they can smell anything funny. Evil is best operated by the clueless.

From nasty moods, nasty wars and naughty profits, chuckle the plutocrats. Yes, sometimes. And sometimes not.

Patrice Ayme’