“1917”: HUMAN HEROES AGAINST TRIBAL KILLER ROBOTS… As It happened.

What was the fundamental truth of World War One? That civilization was assaulted by tribal barbarians who thought they were civilized.

Because plutocracy has make it so that it is fashionable to believe that the concept of civilization is not fundamental,  this lesson has been forgotten. Yet, the world was organized according to this lesson, if while the Second World War, a continuation of the First, was going on.

The movie “1917” relates a small piece of action in World War One [1]. It features telling contrast between the Democratic Allies and the fascist invaders. The Allies are human, humanistic, heroic, ethnically diverse. The Germans are pretty much depicted as the opposite. And so, indeed, it was. 

The story itself may be fiction, but actions similar to it, or even more dramatic, did happen continually during World War One. Some of these played a crucial role. French reconnaissance behind German lines before the Second Battle of the Marne come to mind: exquisite French intelligence helped to win that battle of July 1918, when Germany lost the war… according to its operational commander, Ludendorff. Ludendorff would go on to found the Nazi Party even before Adolf Hitler was assigned by the Bavarian police to spy on it. 

French intelligence based on aerial observation gave clear warning of the July 1918 onslaught,designed to occur before the US army’s might could be brought to bear.

The arrogant plume covered peacocks who launched World War First, so that they could preserve their position on top of the planet, exploiting everybody. So they deliberately launched a World War to make preserve their luxury and prerogative. The way they looked at it, if they did it serially, first France, then Russia, then Britain, it could work. (Dictator Kaiser Wilhelm II and his six sons…)

Heroes Can Turn Bad:

The main hero of French reconnaissances behind German lines was warrant officer Joseph Darnand. A reconnaissance patrol of the French Fourth Army, headed by  Darnand, deep behind German lines, in the evening of 14th July 1918, captured twenty-seven (27) German soldiers. Brought back and interrogated, the prisoners revealed the German attack plan for the next day, to the minute… so the French fired 40 minutes before the Germans attacked, disorganizing them, while evacuating the first lines, so the German artillery barrage, when it finally arrived, hit only empty positions. [2]

A dedicated fascist, but Germanophobe, Darnand would become head of the fascist, racist, anti-Jewish French Milice in World War Two. Being Germanophobe, whole fascist, in those times, was a mighty contradiction. Darnand tried three times to join the French resistance, but was rebuffed (because of his racist fascist leanings, trust didn’t flow). Then he turned to full collaboration (finishing with a rank in the SchutzStaffel, the SS!) Captured by the British in Italy, Darnand was brought back to France, sentenced to death on 3 October 1945 and executed by firing squad on 10 October 1945 at the Fort de Châtillon.

My grandfather found himself in a railroad engine, behind German lines at some point, and escaped capture or death by the Huns with a similar jaunt, for three days, through devastated landscape and the no-man’s land. He would be drafted again in WW2, and then joined the Resistance, early on, saving all sorts of fugitives and wanted (by the Nazis) “criminals” (although mostly Jews).

***

Britain and France Were Ethnically, Thus Mentally Diverse Democracies in 1917:

The “1917” movie represents that some of the British troops were actually… not British, but Commonwealth. That’s entirely correct. Huge contingents of non-ethnically French or British fought in the french and British armies. And they played a crucial role to change mentalities. At the Second battle of the Marne, the french command, may be deliberately, engaged a Senegalese division along the two US, white, divisions. The Senegalese, being all black, hated the very racist Germans, and reciprocally. Neither side was in the habit of making prisoners, when dealing with each other. Inspired by their fierce Black African allies the US troops did just the same: they didn’t focus on making prisoners, either… 

“The first trench raid appears to have been mounted on the night of 9/10 November 1914 near Ypres by the 39th Garhwal Rifles of the Indian Corps. Fierce irruptions into enemy positions under cover of darkness was a traditional feature of Indian frontier fighting and this first murderous little action may have represented an introduction of tribal military practice into the ‘civilised’ warfare of western armies.“

There were so many Indians in the trenches that the British army was asked to supply 10,000 live goats a month to meet the ritual dietary requirements of Indian troops in France.

***

WW1 Broken German robots resting in eternal peace with the flies among barbed wires, France, 1914… There was no excuse for Germans to take part in a war of aggression in 1914, especially because a few lunatic, despicable plutocrats gave them the order to make their utmost, to take over the world…

OK, as they say, spoilers ahead!

German WW1 Killer Robots obeying plutocrats were the main problem, but the USA made the situation worse, early on:

“1917” correctly represents German invaders as war robots, so proficient at killing, little humanity is left to them: they kill cows, cherry trees, all trees, terrify (French) civilians, and will keep on killing, even when facing certain death if they so persist. A rescued, burning German aviator, rescued at great peril, stabs (to death) his rescuer, and even when hit back by a bullet, is apparently keen for more. 

Politically Correct thinking, confronted to such scenes have long pretended that, to depict German invaders as the way they were was unfair, and a misrepresentation of reality. PC thinking insists that there were guns in August (as a famous history book title goes) and they fired, all by themselves, there just too many guns. Nobody’s fault. One should have killed the guns. But, in real life, it’s French guns, especially the 75mm field gun, which killed the war.

Indeed, it’s the PC view which is incorrect. It’s not the “Guns of August” which killed people, inasmuch as the savages who used guns in August to enact exactly the same feat tried again in 1939: win a succession of adversaries at such a fast pace, that they would be destroyed one after the other, and Kaiser Germany would rule the world. In 1914, the trick was to defeat the French Republic before Czarist Russia and Britain could intervene. It failed, because the French counterattack at the battle of the Marne, five weeks later, nearly destroyed the Kaiser’s war machine. 

Why the German leaders thought such a lunacy possible as making a world empire for them, had to do with stealth enticement, encouragement and support from the hyper racist US president Wilson. This, I allege, made the difference. The USA provided Germany, through the Netherlands, with enough goods, including military goods, to break the otherwise fatal Franco-British high seas blockade. 

Right, you will never read about this, USA as Deus Ex Machina, in official history textbooks as found in, say, Princeton University, where “Democrat” Wilson was president (before he became US president). Wilson was the most racist US president, even more so that the many US presidents who owned slaves. You will never read it, because it puts the entire history of the two “German” instigated world wars (1914-1945) under a completely different light, namely a tool of US plutocratic supremacy, a Deep State agenda…

WW1 German position of heavy artillery in France. Long range German guns hit Paris.

***

THE MORAL CODE OF BIG BROTHER KANT ENFORCING ROBOTS VERSUS HUMANITY:

Belgium was more than overrun by the Germanic horde, it was deliberately terrorized to encourage submission. The German robots, under orders, razed Belgian villages and executed villagers—men, women, and children, eventually numbering into the thousands—en masse. Priests, and Nuns, as authority figures and potential symbols of moral resistance, were chosen targets. Outrage was deliberate, as when general Ludendorff, basically founder of the Nazi party, ordered the burning and looting of the famous university town of Leuven/Louvain. Over the course of five days, beginning on 25 August 1914, the Germans pillaged the city. Using petrol and incendiary pastilles. 230,000 volumes were lost in the destruction, including Gothic and Renaissance manuscripts, a collection of 750 medieval manuscripts, and more than 1,000 incunabula (books printed before 1501).

“NECESSITY KNOWS NO LAW”

The Germans, in their insanity, their Terror Derangement Syndrome, believed they were fighting a war for civilization—for German Kultur against Latin decadence and Slavic barbarism. The highly educated German general staff, having read all the same books and drunk the same wines, had adopted social Darwinist ideas and applied them to the conduct of society (‘plutocracy”) and war (as rule of Evil)

An example: General Friedrich von Bernhardi’s book Germany and the Next War (published in 1911) called war “a biological necessity” in the struggle for existence. He added that war “is not merely a necessary element in the life of nations, but an indispensable factor of culture, in which a true civilized nation finds the highest expression of strength and vitality.”

Basically, the entire Kaiser army which invaded France, Belgium and Luxembourg on August 2 1914 (starting without even a war declaration), was an army of war criminals… and acted accordingly. Right, this is a philosophical point of view: yours truly against Immanuel Kant’s grotesque morality.

WW 1 German Troops advancing in Ham, France, 1914. They all read Kant, or took orders from officers who read Kant. What literacy can lead to.

***

HUMAN MORALITY WAS EVOLUTIONARILY CREATED:

I found my morality upon basic humanity, our creator, the crown of evolution. Kant found his morality “a priori”. Namely according to what is providing him with everything, the murderously racist Prussian State. Kant concludes that “Duty is the necessity to act out of reverence for the law”. When the law is made by the Kaiser, a crippled mass, war criminal, and certified criminal against humanity (per his racially motivated genocide in Namibia), duty, according to Kant, is then to violate all of humanity. This was exactly SS mass murderer and criminal against humanity Eichman’s line of defense in Jerusalem (the judges, rightly, condemned him to hang… and so should all the followers of that reasoning who practice murder).   

Only in August 1914, we have the very well documented proof of hundreds of crimes against humanity committed by the Kaiser’s invading hordes, down to mass murdering nuns, or killing two (2) year old girls. The invasion itself was a crime against humanity, and, just on that ground alone, the Kaiser and his main accomplices should have been judged and executed. 

That’s why, when supposedly educated individuals come around, and attribute Auschwitz only to Hitler and his gang of maniacal murderers, they are misinformed: what would come to be called “Nazism” was already fully grown by 1914. Yes, most of Germany became criminal by following the Kaiser. That’s why, just 15 years after goose stepping behind the Kaiser, the german nation was goose stepping behind Adolf Hitler. That’s why Germany, under the Nazis operated no less than an unbelievable 42,000 death camps (or ghettoes meant, and organized to kill people through disease, starvation, physical abuse). My own family barely escaped a round-up, before being outright being hunted by the Gestapo in the forests around Grenoble (for having saved 100+ Jews, among other “crimes against Germany”).

***

The Kaiser and his class were “PARASITES”, plutocrats making a country criminally insane Fundamentally, the movies “1917” and “Parasite” both depict what the Dark Side of Humanity leads to:

“1917” represents male Germans invading France as they were: killing robots. Is it why the movies didn’t get “Best Pictures” at the “Oscars”? Instead the prizes went to “Parasite”, a dismal Korean horror tale. Whereas “1917” is about what happened (reconstituted in a movie), “Parasite” is a complete fiction. Both movies, though, fundamentally address the same subject: beware because humans, even though they may look civilized, will partake in the greatest crimes, if given the opportunity. 

***

The roots of German Criminal Insanity in 1914-1945 were very deep, centuries deep. Much German culture and history came in play:

The mass criminality against humanity of Germany in 1853-1945 had very deep roots. Maybe as deep as Arminius, a German who had become an Roman officer, and then brought three Roman legions to their annihilation. Arminius was a traitor… still he came to be celebrated as a great German hero by Prussian nationalists. Celebrating treachery as heroism is a slippery slope. In the end, Arminius (“Hermann”!) was assassinated as other Germans suspected he wanted to become sole autocrat.

In any case case, the deadly cocktail of racism, extreme tribalism, intolerance, extermination and nationalism started with the crusade of the Teutonic Knights against the original, Pagan Prussians. It had dawned on the Knights that the Muslims were too hard to exterminate (especially after Saladin passed laws to punish Islam Fundamentalism with the death peanalty). So they went to invade Prussia instead. It was a long and hard war of extermination. It lasted decades. Next the Teutonic Knights turned against the Russians… and were crushed by Alexander Nevski during the Battle of the Ice on 5 April 1242… Hence a durable German ressentiment against “Slavs”. 

WW1 German soldiers having fun with Polish girls, WW1. Saying no would not be polite

Prussia, became legally racist against Slavs, Poles and Jews in the Eighteenth Century, Financed by Britain, Prussian then became a war machine against the Austrian empress, and France. Ultimately, by 1815, that turned out immensely successful, and racist militaristic Prussia was able to extend its racist militaristic Zeitgeist all over its empire in Central Europe. That’s when the young Marx, a German Jew, learned to hate, while at the same time, imprisoned by the Prussian mentality that dictatorship was the way to efficient governance. 

To prevent Nazism, one would have had to invade Germany in 1918, take control of it, arrest the top 1,000 war criminals, and hang them. In other words, do to Germany in 1918 what was done in 1945: a thorough cleaning and cleansing. Hanging a thousand war criminals would have prevented the Nazi Party to sprout: many leading Nazis were actually young (or not!) commanders in World War One. Of the young ones, an example if Hermann Goering. Of the old ones, the initil sould of the Nazi Party, Ludendorff, definitively a criminal against humanity… With lots of guts. The German army opened fire on the Nazis who were attempting to stage a putsch in Munich in 1923 (financed by hyper racist, anti-Jewish  US plutocrat Henry Ford, a US car maker). Many Nazis fell dead, Hitler was wounded, and fled. Only one man was left standing, and kept on marching towards the firing troops: Ludendorff (recognizing their famed commander, they finally stopped).

***

1917 REAL, HUMAN HEROES VERSUS KILLER ROBOTS:

“1917” depicts British and Commonwealth heroes, with a French heroic background, fighting a monstrous fascist war fighting machine devouring humans and humanity alike, in the name of a perverse notion of morality as obedience. 

The English heroes depicted are thoroughly human: they are attached to life, to their own lives, dearly, but transcend them in the name of the highest values. The fascist German invaders, however devoted to killing they are, do not rise to the same level of heroism, precisely because they are Kant killer robots dying in the name of the Kaiser World Empire project (same as, a few years later, the Nazi World Empire project: it is easy to see where Adolf Hitler and his goons got the inspiration).

This is of course why democracies win wars. And why at Thermopylae an army of a few thousand Greeks (including 300 Spartans headed by the Lion-like Leonidas) blocked, for days, the Persian juggernaut of three millions (says Herodotus; some modern historians, to show they were smart, have contested Herodotus number by an order of magnitude; truth is probably in between…).

The defeat of the Achaemenids in Greece preserved democracy… which lived strongly to the West, in Greek cities of independent republics along the Greek model, say in Magna Grecia, Rome and Marseilles.

The fascist plutocratic temptation is always strong, because a fascist dictatorship mustering evil to the rescue is always better at sudden vicious attack shattering the peace: August 1, 1914 is the best proof of that, when Kaiser Germany attacked the world, but imperial Japan proved that when it attacked China, especially in 1937, etc. But such demonstrations are found throughout history, as on December 31, 406 CE, when several German tribes galloped across the frozen Rhine, surprising the Frankish(-Roman) army. 

***

WW1 A convoy of German prisoners escorted by French Algerian Spahis, of which there were 14 regiments in the French Army.

french army Spahi regiments had 1,000 men. The First Moroccan Spahi Regiment 75% Moroccan, 25% European, was the most decorated unit in the entire French army. This was not bad colonization, but good globalization, ladies and gentlemen… Multi-ethnicity won first on the battlefield.

***

When Evil Mentality Rules When The Herd Is More Valued Than The Rest:

Some will think I am going overboard, telling too many truths above, my usual sin, and the one philosophers are always charged with. And this is why “1917” didn’t win the Oscars: too many truths. 

But we have a problem. The “Axis”, Germany, Japan, Italy demonstrated that, using modern technology, then the radio, one could make the herd believe anything, as long as the herd believed the essence of morality was to be a herd. 

It is completely obvious that the German attack on the world in 1914, same as in 1939, was caused by the evil mentality which animated Germany at the time. Instead, a persistent myth has been successfully implanted that the first World War was purely mechanical, no one was to blame. This is hogwash: it was all caused by the Evil-Rule in Germany (Pluto-Kratia) [3]. 

The excursion of Germany into a mentality, fascism, completely opposed to the old German mentality, freedom, as in the Franks, is a precious (the price was high!) story, rich in wisdom. One has to learn from it. The Germans thought they were hyper civilized, when they were mostly just the opposite. So one would expect the youth to learn from that tragedy, right?

OK, Israel learned the lesson well: one should have listened to Hitler more carefully (this is an inner slight directed at Isaac Berlin, a British Jewish philosopher who had learned nothing from Nazism). But what about the rest of the world?

An obvious case of herd phenomenon is Islam, and the apartheid it calls its home. Fundamentally Islam distinguishes the “House of Peace” (where Islam is) and the “House of War”. A distinction which French president Macron just called “Islamist Separatism“… a good concept. Islamism, as Catholicism before it, rests upon the herd instinct: who is in, who is out. hence the importance of “excommunication” or “apostasy” (both initially Catholic obsessions, three centuries before Islam was invented.

***

Lack of Awareness:

In 2017 a Körber Foundation survey found that 40 percent of 14-year-olds in Germany did not know what Auschwitz was. What in the hell? A 2018 survey organized in the United States by the Claims Conference, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, and others found that 66% of the American millennials (and 41% of all U.S. adults) surveyed did not know what Auschwitz was. No wonder I have so few followers when many 20 year old credit card fraudsters can get 400,000 followers (there were several such cases; now in prison). OK, the fraudsters propose money, whereas I propose knowledge non conducive to money, just to save civilization. In 2019, a survey of 1,100 Canadians found that 49 percent could not name any of the Nazi camps in German-occupied Europe. There were 3,000 camps in Berlin alone. Twenty million innocent people, millions of them children, died in Nazi camps.

Nowadays fools such as all too many so-called “millenials” feel that, as long as it is Politically Correct to not know any history, to show one belongs to the herd, the head deep in the sand, they and their values are safe. Well, not so. The German orchestrated holocaust of 1914-1945 was plotted, and enabled by people who thought they knew, and had a good feeling, for all that was important.

And they were wrong. To start with, a herd can’t replace a heart.

World War One was a plutocratic phenomenon. Plutocrat Duke of Brunswick, Kaiser son in law, former Duke of Cumberland, behind German lines in occupied France. The Kaiser was the grandson of UK Queen Victoria, and cousin to the Czar. Kaiser, empowered by Wilson, also enabled Lenin and Stalin…

This 1914-1945 German lesson in abomination has extreme validity nowadays. In the USA, a presidential election is in the process of being bought as never before [4]. In China, a pandemic was allowed to proceed, thanks to the extreme secrecy, thus information impotence, of the population. In either case, mechanisms similar to Nazi Germany are at play. Europe is not doing much better, as plutocrats are all the more firmly in command there, because they have learned to operate stealthily.

Ignorance was the main engine of the world wars: it enabled very dark forces to operate from beneath without everybody knowing. And that goes on to this day: the troubling role of the USA in 1914-1917, and again, in 1933-1942 was not properly analyzed by historians… because it’s way too dangerous. (I do not have a career to lose, being an independent scholar…)

World War One “Crown Prince”, the eldest son of the Kaiser, and would be dictator of Germany, commander of the largest army groups with death cap on his hat. The analogy with Nazism is total: the famous SS-Totenkopfverbände (SS-TV; literally “Death’s Head Units”) was the SS organization responsible for administering the Nazi extermination camps for Nazi Germany, among similar duties. The SS TV used the same symbol, the exact same drawing, a few years later.

The essence of plutocracy is that it feels, and knows, and wishes, and enforces that hell can be construed as paradise. This goes to the core of the human condition. Hell as paradise goes to the core of the human condition. Carefully studying 1914-1945 shows this. It got so severe because of technology… which has considerably in power since.

The world doesn’t want to be ruled by Lords. Because human beings are not meant to be ruled by anything else than reason. Only war justifies otherwise. Thus Lords love war, another reason not to like them!

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] To remind readers unfamiliar with my version of the most significant facts of World War One, the Kaisers and six other plotters had decided upon preparing public opinion through media action for war as early as eleven December 1912. By July 1914, under the pretext of Russia stiffening Serbia about unacceptable Austrian demands consecutively to the Sarajevo assassination of the Archiduke, Germany executed its detailed plan for war. The other powers had only defensive, belated reactions. The French leaders, in particular, were in vacation (surprise). The German plan was named after the army chief of staff who drafted it, Alfred von Schlieffen. It solved the problem of Germany’s two-front war against France in the west and Russia in the east. The solution was to invade France from the north (through Brussels and Belgium, bringing it into the war as well), sweep around Paris, and turn east to crush the French army in the rear where it would be deployed on the German border. The idea was to go fast enough that Britain could not intervene in a significant manner to help its ally and relative, France. This would take the Germans, Schlieffen calculated, 42 days. This was less time than Russia needed to mobilize, and after finishing off France, Germany would then invade Russia. 

Unfortunately for the fascists, fortunately for civilization, desperate Belgian and French resistance slowed them down (the counterattacking French lost 27,000 soldiers Killed In Action, in one day, on August 22, 1914, alone; 10% of the French officer corps was killed in action in August 1914 alone;  after staggering losses, the French army would change its striking red white and blue colors to something as drab as the Germans). 

Slowed down, confident that the French had lost all their heavy weapons, the Germans shortened their swing from west to east of Paris. Meanwhile the Russians attacked faster than anticipated, necessitating transfer of eight German divisions to East Prussia (which arrived after a tremendous German victory at Tannenberg). Plus the British Expeditionary Force, equivalent of one French Army Corps, was in the war. Finally, using all motor vehicles they could find, the French Paris garrison was flung into the side of the German army juggernaut… At the First Battle of the Marne, from 5 September to 12 September, 1914, two million men fought; only fast action by some German army corps commanders preserve the German army from annihilation.

***

[2] Guderian, chief, soul and early organizer of Nazi armor, said he learned the usage of tanks in coordination with planes, when French general Mangin (10th French Army) and general Degoutte (6th French Army) counterattacked on July 1918 (using Allied troops besides 44 French divisions… US troops were massively used, for the first time, two US divisions were courageously victorious… and annihilated). Ironically enough, World War One was a learning experience for the Nazis.

***

[3] Conventional description of why the First World War was fought, instead of accusing the racist, fascist, militaristic, dictatorial, expansionist, plutocratic “Second Reich” insist on something mechanical, a clockwork shared by all, from various unstoppable mobilizations. For example, French mobilization, with three million men and 4,278 trains on the move, couldn’t be stopped. That forgets that said mobilization was ordered by the under Secretary for Agriculture, the only government official in vacationing Paris, when it became certain that the Germans were going to attack.

This forgets that German mobilization was fast, a few days, whereas Russian mobilization would take weeks. It also forgets that Britain had, basically “no army” (as its chief, Lord Kirtchner declared at the time, after he was nominated). It also forgets that Germany supposedly attacked to help Austro-Hungary which obstinately refused to declare war, days after the Germans had invaded Belgium and France, in spite of Berlin’s pressure…

***

[4] The establishment always feared Sanders much more than Trump… All the more as much Trump hatred was just an orchestrated circus act. So is now doing whatever needs to be done to stop Sanders.  Fortunately for plutocracy, Bloomberg is riding to the rescue with many billions, buying all that can be bought, including hearts and souls. Voters believe whatever the plutocratic media is telling them to believe… And not just in the USA. France, Britain and their ilk have the same problem. Direct Democracy would help, as voters would have to learn to become more discriminative… By themselves, the exact behavior Germans were incapable of, in depth, a century ago. 

WHAT IS MORALITY? A Moral Government Is A Sustainable Government & Reciprocally

Here again, I address the question at the largest civilizational scale: where does morality come from? What justifies it?  (That brings an immediate problem, as regimes, let alone governments, are constantly shifting; consider in China alone the “Warring States”, followed by Qin, followed by Han, then Tang, Sung, Yuan, Ming, etc; these are called dynasties, but they were actually different regimes, constantly shifting; however, pretty much the same morality; so I introduce meta-governance, meta-civilization, etc.)

A criminal regime has criminal laws. They, of course, can be more or less criminal.

***

Wayne Straight Indeed but it got me to thinking about whether there is or can be any such thing as a “moral” government. One of my long-time original (at least I think it’s original) quips is that any large organization is only as ethical or moral as it’s least moral member. That would seem to be particularly apt when applied to governments.

Serious Abomination was always legal, making it even more abominable… [Actually the Holocaust of Jews was not even legal according to the Nazis own laws passed in 1935. The Wannsee Conference attempted to persuade the Justice minister and others to allow the bending of Nazi laws… to exterminate Jews, and others…

***

Answer to Wayne: One has to define first what “moral” is. For doing this, it helps to go back to the etymological root: moral is from Old French moral (14c.) and directly from Latin moralis “proper behavior of a person in society,” literally “pertaining to manners,” coined by Cicero (“De Fato,” II.i) to translate Greek ethikos (see ethics) from Latin mos (genitive moris) “one’s disposition,” in plural, “mores, customs, manners, morals,” a word of uncertain origin.

Conclusion? Morality is defined in a society as what enables sustainability, of said society.

For example neither Assyria, not Imperial fascist Rome, nor the Mayas, nor the Aztecs, nor the Nazi or Stalinian regime were moral, because they were not sustainable. But of course they were more or less sustainable, thus moral: Rome and the Maya lasted millennia, Assyria, centuries, whereas Stalin’s regime lasted 30 years, the Nazis, 12.

Another related notion is meta-governance. Morality arises from meta-governance, not simple governance, because morality is a civilizational notion (after the Nazis were killed by the Allies, Germans immediately recovered the moral sense coming from Western civilization; same thing happened in Russia after the demise of Sovietism).

The West has had metagovernance even as the Occidental Roman state crumbled and partly collapsed: Goths, Burgonds, Franks and remaining Romans agreed, in their various states/kingdoms, upon the basic civilizational structure, namely, mostly that of the Roman state.

Within a century, the Franko-Gallo-Romans had installed a Roman like metagovernance (everybody became a Frank while Frankish and Celtic languages faded, replaced by bastardized Latin).

In the details, the IMPERIUM FRANCORUM looked extremely gory: Frankish leaders, having done away with Goths and Burgonds, and the like, were busy killing each other, in most unpleasant manners. However, on the largest scale, the Imperium Francorum was an important moral advance. The Imperium Francorum became so highly moral, it superseded morally the Greco-Roman meta-civilization preceding it.

Indeed the government of the ruling monarch, the Frankish queen, Saint Bathilde, outlawed the slave trade (of Frankish citizens) around 655 CE (1,210 years before the good old USA outlawed in turn slavery…)

In contrast, metagovernance of Mexico, pre-conquista, was terrible, highly immoral: Aztecs insisted to eat their enemies, so Cortez found plenty of allies, multiplying his army by a factor of 40 or so. That gigantic army overwhelmed the Aztecs (who had boasted countless times that Cortez will never have enough men to kill them all). The immorality of the Aztec regime was the direct cause of its demise: it gave the Spaniards the excuse and capability to exterminate it.

A similar mechanism occurred with Nazism, and other fascisms, of course: their very immorality caused them a mass of enemies bigger than themselves, and provided those enemies with plenty enough motivation, namely the enemies will to survival, for the extermination of the fascists. Nazi laws were so immoral, so unsustainable, the Nazis themselves couldn’t obey them (they had to bend them, hence the infamous Wannsee conference).

So then what to extract from the preceding drastic moral fundamentalism, looking forward?

Well, any new ways and means increasing humanity’s potential survival will define a new and better morality, looking forward.

Patrice Ayme

P/S: What happened to the ethological (somehow genetically, or congenitally imprinted) morality (which advanced animals can be experimentally determined to have)? Well, it’s subjacent and implied in the preceding discourse: the exact same force, the WILL & IMPLEMENTATION of SURVIVAL, which established morality at the civilizational level, established morality ethologically and etiologically at the scale of the evolution of species.

Physics Needs Strong Philosophy More Than Ever: Scandal of the 5%!

And it has to do with the rule of the 1%! 

Philosophy is often dominated by weaklings. Sometimes, centuries of weaklings. Let’s avert our eyes from the Nazi Heidegger: fools love Heidegger, because fools love Nazi style of thinking. So does those who favor the rule of the few, because Nazi style thinking has to do with fascist thinking, thinking according to a few ideas and a few men (“Jesus”, Constantine, Saint Augustine, Muhammad, etc.)

Perhaps the most prominent example mixing barbarity, philosophy and stupidity is the Christianized Middle Ages: Epicurus wrote 300 books. All were meticulously destroyed by Christians. Only three letters of Epicurus survived… What was Epicurus writing about, why did Christians hated him so much? Atomic theory. The Greeks considered it highly probable, they thought they had experimental proof. They also had mechanical computers and very advanced elements of mathematics and physics which the Christians also eradicated. It requires some effort to go back to barbarity!

The Christians hated atomic theory, which denied the whole transmutation of bread and wine into body and blood of Christ: Christians “thinkers” wrote millions of pages on the divine transmutation, using Plato and Aristotle’s fishy onanistic theories of the universe. (For Plato that there was a realm of pure “forms”, nothing real, and for Aristotle that there were ten categories, including “essence”; Middle Age philosophers used those heavily… ironically my own SQPR re-institute Dark Matter as essence: my DM interacts with matter some, by causing “spontaneous collapse”… but let’s not deviate from the subject at hand…)

The first thing a decadent civilization does, is to spite philosophy, spite the lovers of wisdom: decadence springs from brute force, not wisdom.

Real, deepest physicists were, and are all philosophers:

Inventing new ideas enables to discover the intricate logic of the world. Invention starts with being a friend of wisdom: why is it that I think, what is it that they think they know and take for granted, and why? Is there a more precise, better informed way?

Anti-philosophy of pop scientists is partly a consequence of the success thus domination of the “shut up & calculate” school. Top physicist Feynman, despised the philosophers he knew. But he, himself, was a philosopher, and it showed up even in what he considered a valid reasoning to be (Feynman had a peculiar way of reasoning; same with Einstein, De Broglie, etc.) Feynman’s son became a philosopher. Physics describes no more than 5% world, it needs strong philosophy!

The other reason why pop philosophers and pop scientists are also anti-philosophy? Because their masters, those who pay them and advance their careers, are themselves in the employ of plutocrats and their organizations, who hate wisdom… as it would be lethal to them, and their organizations…

And physics needs stronger, more subtle logic!

It has always been clear to me that, on a cosmic scale, Quantum Theory makes no sense: basically physics as we affect to know it, is local. However, Quantum Theory speaks as it the world was global. This leads to a contradiction, which has surfaced in the prestigious journal Nature for all to see: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-018-06749-8

“Nature News 18 SEPTEMBER 2018
Reimagining of Schrödinger’s cat breaks quantum mechanics — and stumps physicists
In a multi-‘cat’ experiment, the textbook interpretation of quantum theory seems to lead to contradictory pictures of reality, physicists claim.”

Logic is ever more subtle. Consider the following cartoon from “Philosophy Matters“, a consortium of US academic philosophers (which at some point told me my smarts made me insufferably obnoxious, or words to this effect):

Cute, first order correct, but subtly wrong!

Actually, if people are already dead, they can’t die anymore. People who don’t breathe could be already dead, thus can’t die. Because one doesn’t die again. Hence the second cartoon should read: people who stop breathing, die. Context: not everything, but most of the thing!

The same goes for partisanship: people love the frenzy of the herd they belong to, and the simplistic logic it leads to.

Actually Trump has ordered the FBI to make a full inquiry. But an investigation, except for the grossest things (crime against humanity), can’t be made correctly 36 years later… Defense is automatically at a disadvantage against false memories. (BTW, Republican Senator Flake, a blonde, after been cornered in an elevator by irate women, called for the FBI inquiry, saying he would vote against Kavanaugh otherwise.)

Cute cartoon. Indeed, Justice has got to be a blonde with pink skin: always was, always will. However cute, not the whole truth, which is much more tragic. Namely it’s far from being only the so-called “Republicans” who smother justice. “Partisanship” is not the solution. The entire legislative system needs a re-think. Towards direct democracy.

“Donald J. Trump‏
Verified account
@realDonaldTrump
NBC News incorrectly reported (as usual) that I was limiting the FBI investigation of Judge Kavanaugh, and witnesses, only to certain people. Actually, I want them to interview whoever they deem appropriate, at their discretion. Please correct your reporting!”

Right. Let’s seriously investigate the fashion, and age old tradition, in the USA, of getting drunk, especially among young people, damaging their brains, and using alcoholism to get away with the basest behaviors, and habits. This goes both for the accuser and the accused here! (By the way, frazzled by his elder brother dying of alcoholism, Donald Trump does not do drugs, including alcohol.)

One can’t have the better, and progressive civilization needed for planetary survival, when too many brains of the leadership are damaged by drugs. It’s not just a question that their performances are inferior to have they could be, or should be. The mood that drug addiction gives a sense to life brings forth the tendency, the overall mentality, that the mind should be overwhelmed by out-of-this-world modes of operations, which enable the brain to forget reality as it is. And what are the greatest out-of-this-world neurohormonal regimes? All these having to do with violence, fight or flight, and will to power.

OK, those can be correct to use, but only if one knows what one is playing around, and in the full knowledge of the associated causations. And what of those 5%? They relate to the proverbial 1% who own the world. Both are able to do so because common people are tolerant of theories which explain very little, and are impossible to understand: why is gigantic economic equality necessary, how can it be deemed to be compatible with democracy? Well, look at physics: there a theory is called Theory Of Everything, and it explains not even 5%. Similarly modern economics sustains mostly 1% and is just as impossible to understand. They are made to each other, sustain the same mood of mystification!

In the Middle Ages, persons with lots of character, knew all too well that many of the official (Christian) theories were wrong: Beranger de Tour, a church authority, held that reason was god, and thus that the church should obey to reason. The pope was not amused, councils were organized to castigate Berenger, excommunicate him and deprive him of authority. But Berenger held his ground, in spite of the fact heresy could bring the death penalty, until the natural end of his life, in no small part because he was discreetly supported by the ultra powerful Duke of Normandy, a superman in more ways than one.

William the Conqueror was known to hold that the Earth turned around the sun, and mention it during banquets. Heliocentrism, even with the empirical science of the time, was pretty obvious (the small thing, the Earth should turn around the big thing, the Sun, plus, obviously, the Sun didn’t turn around the Moon, thus the Earth-Moon system; the ancient Greeks knew how to measure those distances, using shadows…) William was not afraid to mention it: once, in combat, he vanquished 15 knights. Alone. Mental courage and physical courage are two faces of the same coin.

We need stronger philosophy, the medicine of civilization. Failure of enough of a meta-critical mentality allowed the rule of ideologies which brought us the 1%, thanks to modern economics, and the 5%, thanks to the “shut up and calculate” ideology in physics. “Shut up and calculate” is exactly the ideology defended by Barack Obama in his pseudo-autobiographies, in the service of what he called “navigation” (or how to get to the top). 

Just as genes can go across species, moods can go across fields of mental activity. The overall mood of Ionian and Greater Greece and Athens before they got broken by the Peloponnesian War, was one of inquiry, that means, maximum criticism. After that, and while, and because the great fascist regimes of Rome, Carthage and Macedonia grew in power, the spirit of inquiry shrank: Greek mathematics forgot about NON-Euclidean geometry, and concentrated upon Euclidean geometry, which is much more fascist (it has stronger axioms… restricting mental freedom). Amazingly, although Pytheas of Marseilles had computed (accurately!) the size of the Earth, 23 centuries ago, after the great fascism of Macedonia and then Christianized Rome, arose, the very possibility of spherical geometry became a scientific impossibility, so intellectually fascist the minds became, for 2,000 years…

The Aztecs were defeated because, instead of being legalistic like Qin China. they were into mass cannibalism, and Cortes’ 450 men found hundreds of thousands of local allies who were strongly motivated by their desire to escape barbecues. When the Qin empire collapsed, the Han took over, and repeated Qin mentality in detail, this time to last centuries as a giant empire. And much of Qin mentality survives to this day. (All too much, come to think of it… And yes, amazingly, this essay will be read in China’s People Republic… Qin famously practiced censorship of bad philosophy, ordering the destruction of the “100 schools” (it failed), but spared what was viewed as scientifically, legally and historically significant…)

Each civilization has one mood, it pervades all. It evolves in time, not always for the best.

Patrice Ayme

Equality Is One Measure Of Civilization. And A Potential Savior.

Equality is natural to human beings: our species, and those ancestral to it, evolved in an egalitarian context, that of the very small human group. Thus, inequality is inhuman, in more deep ways than one. For human minds to blossom maximally, equality of opportunity of expression and creativity are required. But there is much more, and much darker. Fortunately, we can do something about it now.

Civilizations are more or less civilized: civilizations are on a gradient. One can compare them, between, and within, polities. Not everybody is beautiful, not everybody is gentle. Same for civilizations. Erdogan’s Turkey is unquestionably more civilized than the Ottoman empire which used to impale contradictors, on an industrial basis. During the siege of Constantinople, a Venetian captain, Antonio Rizzo, who refused an inspection, was impaled (his crewmen were beheaded, or sawn asunder). Later, the Ottoman empire would make printing punishable by death (so did Francois I of France… but that intellectual fascist outrage didn’t stick in France, whereas it lasted centuries under the Ottomans. So some of the best “Oriental” literary works were published in France first… making France more “Oriental” than the Orient, Mr. Edward Said… Said was a guy, revered to this day who said, basically that only “orientals” like himself could talk of “orientalism”… but how does one learn to think, when one can’t even print the books… all too long the, unequal, condition of the “Middle east”)

Civilizations closest to Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, those eminently most human conditions, and principles, are the most civilized, as they enable human minds to flourish maximally.

Such a religion exists: it’s called the Democratic Republic (but not as defined by Marx’s unquestioning, unquestionably evil followers). Equality not just a question of liking, it’s a question of existing.

Some polities put forward different principles (from Latin Principium, origin, source, from primus, first). And some polities followed philosophers: had Aristotle taught the opposite of what he taught, his friends and, or pupils. Antipater, Alexander, Craterus, and all Macedonian generals awed by the preceding leaders, may well have been more democratic. But the self-serving Aristotle was “monarchist” (the power, the rule, of one).

Aristotle was clever, but, not clever enough, or honorable enough not to follow the genealogy of diffidence to democracy established by his masters, Socrates and Plato, he went to the Dark Side.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/09/28/aristotle-destroyed-democracy/

We are still in Aristotle’s mental world: individuals called leaders are haphazardly selected, or selected for unsavory reasons. For example, far from being a great thinker, Putin was a top officer of the KGB. Our “Western” leaders aren’t much better: no individual human is god, but our leaders have divine powers, and that, per se, guarantees disaster, and would, even if they were gods (follow the horrid adventures of all the gods in sight: even the haughty Christo-Islamist versions of “god” can’t control evil, and their travails, their entire version of the universe, are all about that).

Having ignorant twerps, obnibulated by power, capable of killing hundreds of millions, even billions, around is bad enough. Admiring those crazed critters, worse. So is admiring those who, like John McCain, tried to get the full power, couldn’t, and now hate (not to have been endowed with the power of annihilating, potentially, billions).

“Strong man politics are ascendent” said Obama in an excellent discourse at the Mandela 100th year celebration. Right. But Obama himself helped this ascent of strong man politics. Because his politics served it: …”the free press is under attacks”… says Obama, neglecting that the so-called “free press” is actually owned by the wealthiest men, and they all think and feel the same, as shareholders in global plutocracy.

Obama says we have to believe in facts, in reality. Right, so Obama should stop the blah blah about all the world religions been so great, and so right, dear Barry. There is only one right religion, the religion of man: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity…

https://www.facebook.com/Channel4News/videos/10156068521341939/

The cult of politics as we have it, is all despicable. Thermonuclear power has made equality not a luxury, or an advantage, but the one and only key to survival. So follow your political leaders not. Time to relegate them to the dustbins of history, as the slave masters they aspire to be, but even more so, as the death masters they are.

The aspiration to be ruled by death masters is a mental derangement of the highest order, surpassing even the worst tribal regimes ever seen. Cannibalism, impalements? All childish stuff, when now, one guy who didn’t exist a few decades ago can put an end to the strings of civilizations which separate us from nothingness.

Equality is not just a cure, not just a moral principle, not just how to instill creativity, at this point, equality has become survival itself. Animals have a right to live as evolution has meant them to. And, in the case of the genus Homo, that means under a more or less egalitarian regime. However, on the face of it, we have the most unequal regime the animal kingdom ever knew. 

And that’s lethal. That most massive inequality ever, which we are afflicted by, is mass lethal. A civilization killer, a planet wrecker. Yesterday’s technology brought us the mass death potential. But more recent tech brought us the mass democratic possibility, by harnessing the power of the Internet for mass voting, directly, not through “representatives” and “leaders”….

Patrice Ayme

Why The Crusades Were Lost: Saint Louis’ Racism Against The Mongols!

Islam came to near annihilation in the Thirteenth Century as Franks and Mongols unified and took the Islamist capitals, Baghdad and Damascus. A little known episode. At the time, the overall Mongol Khan was a woman (another little known episode!) But she didn’t cause the problem. Instead Saint Louis’ jealous racism, and unbounded hatred of “infidels” made the difference.

Richard the Lionheart lived in France, where he was supposedly vassal to the king of France, Philip II Augustus his companion in arms (who left the so-called “Holy land” after a while, leaving his soul mate Richard, in charge). Richard may not have lost major battles. But, a century later, Saint Louis, Louis IX of France, did, and ruined France in the process.

It became clear nothing good was achieved by all this crusading. On top of that, the climate started to wobble. Instead, the French switched to the trading model with Islam (rendered possible by treaties consecutive to the Crusades). Immense fortunes were made (Jacques Coeur, born a commoner, became the richest man in France by trading with the Levant in the fifteenth century, and soon, master of the mint, and a most important European diplomat).

Arab chroniclers used the correct term, “Franki” (Franks) to qualify the Europeans trying to (re)conquer the Middle East from the religion of Islam, which had smothered it.

By the time the Crusades were launched, direct Muslim aggression against Europe has been continuous since 715 CE, a full four centuries (the word “Europe” was used first by the Franks in the context of the Muslim invasions). This continual Muslim attack was viewed, correctly, by all concerned, as the continuation of the war of Islam against Rome. (Naturally so, as the Franks so themselves as “Rome”. By 800 CE, the Franks had officially “renovated”, as they put it, the Roman empire…)

Painted in 1337 CE. Notice that the Franks are covered in armor, and the Muslims are not. Obvious technological superiority. The Romans already bought light steel helmets in Gaul! Muslim tech superiority is a lie. In plain view.

There is plenty of evidence that the Franks were more advanced than the Muslims in crucial military technology, as early as 715 CE. How could they not be? The Muslims were just coming out of savage Arabia, all the technology they had, was stolen, or, let’s say, adopted from others.

Four terracotta hand grenades, with “Greek Fire” inside, used by the defenders of Constantinople against the Turks. Greek Fire had many variants, some secret to this day. The Chinese developed dry versions, with salpeter, which turned into black powder later.

The Franks, who had been the crack troops of the Roman empire, as early as 311 CE, had better steel, better armor, better steel weapons, and giant war horses capable of wearing armor themselves. That’s why the Franks were able to defeat the Muslims, overall, in the first phase of the war with Islam, which was in Europe (711 CE, attack on Spain, until the counterattack on Jerusalem, 1099 CE).

This European technological superiority was obvious during the Spanish reconquista. An armored Spanish horse was like an intelligent, indomitable battle tank, which would charge again and again, rarely seriously wounded. By contrast, Muslim cavaliers wore little armor, their relatively small Arab horses were excellent but all too little (I used to ride my own very combative Arab stallion in Africa, which nobody else would, or could, ride… Its name, appropriately chosen, was Napoleon…).

Horse archers were not effective against heavily armored cavalry. They could bother it, but not defeat it. This is why the Mongols decided wisely not to attack the Franks again, after invading, suffering huge losses, Hungary, and Croatia. The Mongols debated what had happened to their ancestors the Huns, eight centuries earlier, in France (annihilation spared only political decision). The Mongols used rocket artillery.

Noah Smith wrote “Why Did Europe Lose the Crusades?“. Said he: “A little while ago, I started to wonder about a historical question: Why did Europe lose the Crusades? The conventional wisdom, at least as I’ve always understood it, is that Europe was simply weaker and less advanced than the Islamic Middle Eastern powers defending the Holy Land. Movies about the Crusades tend to feature the Islamic armies deploying fearsome weapons – titanic trebuchets, or even gunpowder. This is consistent with the broad historical narrative of a civilizational “reversal of fortunes” – the notion that Islamic civilization was much more highly advanced than Europe in the Middle Ages. Also, there’s the obvious fact that the Middle East is pretty far from France, Germany, and England, leading to the obvious suspicion that the Middle East was just too far away for medieval power projection.

Anyway, I decided to answer this question by…reading stuff about the Crusades. I read all the Wikipedia pages for the various crusades, and then read a book – Thomas Asbridge’s “The Crusades: The Authoritative History of the War for the Holy Land“. Given that even these basic histories contain tons of uncertainty, we’ll never really know why the Crusades turned out the way they did. But after reading up a bit, here are my takes on the main candidate explanations for why Europe ultimately lost.”

He pursue by fingering “lack of motivation” as the main cause of the loss of the Crusades. That is true, in part: Europe opened to the ocean. However, the Crusades won in important ways (opening up trade). But the Europeans also really lost, when it would have been easy to win.

Noah Smith’s analysis focuses only on the English (so to speak) aspect of the Crusades. He does not quite say that a rogue frankish army seized Constantinople in 1204 CE. And then he omits completely what happened in the Thirteenth Century (because Richard Lionhearted was then dead, and history is all about the Anglois?).

For politically correct reasons, some of them ten centuries old, some more voguish, allegations have been made of the superiority of Islam (or China, for that matter). These (often self-serving from racist self-declared anti-racists) assertions are not grounded in fact.

By 1000 CE, the Franks had the highest GDP per capita in the world, and its history. European technology was, overall, the most advanced. Europeans were stunned by how little the Chinese used machines and animals.  

The Arabic numbers were Greek numbers perfected in India, where the full zero was invented, and were reintroduced through central Asia. Out of the 160 major work of Antiquity we have, 150 survived in European monasteries, the universities of the time (and the ten remaining were saved by the Persians, initially).

The Middle East, long the cradle of most invention, has been clearly a shadow of its former self, ever since Islam established its dictator, intolerance and war friendly terrorizing culture of god obsession.

Crusades in the Middle east until 1204; The image Noah Smith uses, which misinforms the reality of what happened…

Europe didn’t “lose the Crusades”. Saint Louis did. Europe didn’t just decide the Middle East was hopeless, in all sorts of ways. Europe had got reopening of the Silk Roads from Saladin. Meanwhile in 1244, the Khwarezmians, recently pushed out by the advance of the Mongols, took Jerusalem on their way to ally with the Egyptian Mamluks. Europe shrugged (by then “Roman” emperors such as Frederick I Barbarossa had used a Muslim company of bodyguards… So there was strictly no anti-Muslim hatred and racism… contrarily to what happened with the Mongols, see below…) 

It is also true that Saint Louis, a weird mix of a dangerous religious fanatic of the worst type, and a modern, enlightened king, lost its entire army (to a woman, the only female leader Islam ever had!) in Egypt. Saint Louis was taken captive at the Battle of Fariskur where his army was annihilated. He nearly died, was saved from dysentery by an Arab physician (impressed Arabs offered for him to rule them). A huge ransom had to be paid, comparable to the French budget. Then Saint Louis died in front of Tunis, in another ridiculous crusade (1270 CE).  Louis fell ill with dysentery, and was cured by an Arab physician

The Seventh and Eight Crusades were disastrous military defeats

Saint Louis, a racist, was the direct cause of the survival of Islam. The Mongols, allied to local Franks had destroyed Baghdad (siege of the Abbasid Caliphate) and Damascus (siege of the Umayyad). The Mongols asked respectfully to make an official alliance with Christianity, and eradicate Islam.

Instead the Pope called Nestorian Christian Mongols heathens, and him and Saint Louis promised excommunication to all and any Frank joining the Mongols in war. Thus the Mongols attacked Egypt without Frankish help, and were defeated by the Mamluks Turks.

Dejected, the Mongols decided that they were Muslims (Islam has no pope, and the Caliphate had been destroyed by the Franco-Mongol alliance ) Under Timor Lame, they would carve a giant Mongol-Muslim empire all the way into India.

This is just a fraction of the common operations of the Franks and Mongols, when they were allied against the Muslims, destroying Baghdad, seizing Damascus. Saint Louis and his pet the Pope saved Islam by calling a halt to the cooperation. Mongols and Franks actually took Damascus together, and the commanders entered the conquered city, side by side…

The Spanish were more serious. They, Isabella, Ferdinand and their advisers, planned to pursue the reconquista by extirpating Islam from North Africa and the Middle East.

The extremely well-trained, battle hardened army was prepared, but then the Americas had just been discovered, and war with France for the control of the world in general and Italy in particular, became everything. Spain engaged in a war with France it took nearly two centuries to lose. The conquest of the Americas changed the world, though. The reconquest of the Christian empire from the Muslims was given up…

It could have been done: the Spanish occupied many cities of North Africa, including Algiers and Oran. Power was divided between Ottoman pirates (“Barbarossas”) and the kingdom of Tlemcen. In any case, in 1525 CE, while Cortez was conquering Central America, defeating among others, the Aztecs, pirates retook Algiers in the name of the Turk Selim 1. At the same time, Selim defeated the Egyptian Mamluks, taking control of the Levant, Mecca, and Egypt.

Islam, a pretty deleterious religion in its literal, Salafist form, survived. North Africa and the Middle East, previously long the world’s wealthiest place, is now the poorest and most war-ridden…

And the war goes on, the ideology of Salafist, literal Islam, being fundamentally antagonistic to civilization.

For the USA, the Iraq war has been an enormous victory: it boosted the price of oil for a decade, enabling the massive deployment of US fracking. Now the USA is again the world’s number one fossil fuel producer. Also French and US military forces are fighting from Mali to Afghanistan, maintaining economic and military control over an area still crucial for energy production (although it will soon become economically irrelevant, from renewable energy).  

All the regimes from Mali to Afghanistan, are, officially, friendly to civilization. So why does the war goes on? Because the ideology is islam is centered on Jihad, no holds barred. Thus Islam gives a ready ideology to those who want to make no holds barred. This is why the Turks converted to islam. Within a generation, they had invaded a huge swathe of Central Asia, and overran very old civilization: Georgia, Armenia, and the Oriental Romans (“Constantinople”).

Then Christian pilgrims going to Jerusalem were massacred (up to 10,000 at one time) by various Muslim potentates. Constantinople, having lost half of its territory, to the recently converted, ferociously invading Turks, asked the “Occidental” Roman empire to come to the rescue.   

In 1095 Pope Urban II called for the First Crusade in a sermon at the Council of Clermont. He encouraged military intervention for the so-called Byzantine Empire and its Emperor, Alexios I, who needed desperately to stop the westward invasion of the migrating Turks colonising Anatolia.

Morality of all this? What people think they know about history has little to do with what really happened. The forces presently in conflict have been in conflict ever since Islam exists, as Muhammad wanted it. The Quraish, in Mecca, the dominant tribe Muhammad belonged to, didn’t trust Muhammad: he was an analphabet and an epileptic. To boot, Muhammad succeeded in life by marrying a wealthy business woman, and then switching from caravan trading, to caravan raiding.

Just before he died, Muhammad led the first attack against the Romans (who had not attacked him, and refused combat). War is the great arbiter of human destiny. The enormous Roman field army, horrendously led erroneously, was annihilated on its third day of battle at Yarmouk against the Arab Muslim army. Emperor Heraclius, a great general had not been present, he was in Alexandria.

War is a great arbiter, but it is also extremely fickle. Crucial battles are won, and lost, which should never have been won, or lost. Sometimes by sheer happenstance, sometimes from hubris, sometimes by having top generals with top armies not considering the worst imaginable case (as happened to the Romans when fighting the Arabs at Yarmouk, or with Yamamoto at Midway, or the French mid May 1940…).

To learn from history, it has to be learned in full. Civilization missed a chance to eliminate the Islamist war ideology when it aborted the natural alliance with the Mongols. But it’s not very surprising: the overall leader of Europe, then, was Saint Louis. Saint Louis invented the modern justice system, and put his mother, Blanche de castille, in charge of France for many years. So he could be viewed as non-sexist and all for justice. He is represented to this day, rendering justice below an oak. However, Saint Louis was also a savage. He really believed that unbelievers should be killed painfully. Interestingly, Saint Louis came to believe that the Muslims were believers: his fanatical rage was oriented towards Jews and those who, in Christendom, did not believe. So it’s entirely natural that, by considering the Mongols heathens, and forbidding a further alliance with them, he would, in the end, save Islam!

It’s not just that Saint Louis burned 12,000 Jewish manuscripts in Paris, in 1243 CE (5 years before he led the disastrous Seventh Crusade). Saint Louis wrote abominable descriptions of the atrocious ways in which he would kill infidels (I read it in the original texts long ago; however, I was unable to find a source today…)

We have Jihadists around, ready to kill the innocent nowadays, because Saint Louis was actually one of them!

Patrice Ayme’

Real Civilization Does Not Confuse Civilization and Superstition.

Another day, another Jihadist attack aimed at children. The Islamist State has long given instructions to kill children. Twenty-two killed, 60 maimed in Manchester at a concert for children. A 22 year old cultural Libyan exploded himself. The “multicultural” assassin was technically, but not culturally, a Brit. Time to face reality.

An eight year old little girl died, among others. Who is responsible? The  savage who exploded himself, according to Islam, or those who, misleadingly, call Islam a “civilization”? Excited, nihilistic maniacs, or those who, in the philosophical establishment, call their religion civilized?

Here is a Sword Verse, one of a great many in the Qur’an, Surah 9, verse 59:

“But when the forbidden months are past,

then fight and slay the Pagans wherever ye find them,

and seize them, beleaguer them, and lie in wait for them in every stratagem (of war)…”

[Partisan Muslims whine that this is out of context; actually the context is much more terrible than that: all sorts of people are supposed to be killed, according to Literal Islam, for example homosexuals, just because they are homosexual, following explicitly the Bible, are supposed to “rain stones on homosexuals”. By the way, that’s ironical, as Muslim societies are INTRINSICALLY homosexual!]

Islam is not a civilization, it’s a superstition, and it has been highly successful precisely because this superstition gives a lot of pretexts to kill all sorts of people, while claiming warriors will be pals with god. Islam is not a civilization. How can we take seriously those who confuse “civilization” and superstition? Instead, indeed, Islam is just a superstition. And a pretty nihilistic one at that. “Nihil” means nothing in Latin, it’s related to annihilation. Muhammad explained from the beginning that Islam aimed at annihilating the Greco-Roman and Sassanid (Persian) empires.

Islam orders that society and superstition should not be separated. Said otherwise, Islam orders society to become a “theocracy” (power of god).

Tenochtitlan, Sixteenth Century. This is a civilization. It separated governance and superstition, because a civilization has to separate reality from fancy.

This is primitive. Serious civilizations separated, and separate, superstition and political governance. In Japan the Shogun heading the government was no priest. Nor was the Chinese empire a theocracy. An even more enlightening civilization was the Mexican one. The (more or less central) Aztec government separated the religion and the government: the emperor had diverse titles (including “speaker”), but he had no religious title. The Aztec emperor was not a priest. The two top priests of Tenochtitlan were at the head of the Aztec Church, a completely distinct hierarchy from political governance (which comprised war, justice, commerce, finance).  

Make no mistake: I don’t mind the devil, if, and whenever, it serves civilization: for example, I do not condemn the massive bombing campaigns against the populations who had supported the mass murdering fascist regimes of Germany and Japan. It was the cheapest way, by a very long shot, cheapest not just economically and militarily, but also, overall, in human lives, to win the war.

The Aztecs distinguished completely their superstitious religion from governance, That reflects, and encourages, the ability to distinguish reality from a fiction “above” it. Governance has to be grounded in reality, thus divorced from fiction.

The “West” did this, and did it all along, under the Roman Republic. The separation of church and state was re-asserted formally when (all too Catholic!) emperor Justinian ordered a (“Pagan“!) law professor to head a commission to refurbish Roman Law (by then nearly 13 centuries old, and full of obsolete considerations). Justinian gave just one instruction: to separate secular from religious law. Justinian’s refurbished law was immediately made law in the empire of the Franks (Imperium Francorum), which held (most of) Western Europe.

Thus, both Aztecs and Western Europe separated superstitious church and reality-based state.

A real civilization does not confuse civilization and superstition.

A civilization is the ultimate achievement of humanity. A superstition is a butterfly’s dream. And when a superstition is just a dressing for nihilism, it’s nothing to be proud of. Nothing. Not that nihilism is nothing, far from it.

Where does nihilism comes from? Nihilism is a characteristic of human ethology. The greatest enemy of man is not just man, but the enormous destruction which man can bring to terrestrial ecology. Thus, the enemy of man is man, squared. Including oneself. To destroy that ecological destruction man brings, it’s best to destroy men. That’s where the nihilist instinct comes from. When there are more people than the ecology can stand, people have to die. Thus more so in the desert. Thus the nihilist essence of Islam! Thus the attachment of Islam to the regions with a difficult, unforgiving, ecology.

The civil war in Syria followed a spectacular drought which starved Syrians massively. War in Syria has displaced at least 25% of the population, solving the ecological problem in a way few will find amusing, soon all over reproducing, if the greenhouse keeps on getting worse, as it will.

Nihilism of Islamism: religions for a devastated and devastating future?

Patrice Ayme’

How Civilization Innovates When It Encourages Wild Thinking

When, How and Why Does a Civilization Innovate?

The crucial innovation is technological innovation. The rest, even science, follows. What brings technological innovation? New findings in science (oops). New findings in science, in turn, depend upon advances in philosophy. Advances in philosophy, in turn depends upon a friendly and encouraging mood of inquiry set-up by the State… And advances in philosophy depends upon new science, and new technology. Quite  a bit of a vicious, or virtuous, spiral is at work, because nonlinear effects are at work: the product reinforces the cause. This high nonlinearity explains why civilizational progress was always highly concentrated: Sumerian cities, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Crete, Greece, Rome, Western Europe… China…

All of this, history shows. And logic supports. (Some day, as university professor Asimov foresaw in “Foundation“, all of this will be part of mathematical, fully computable psychohistory!)

The converse also works: a state keen to destroy advances in philosophy, or thinking in general, becomes dysfunctional: this is what happened with the Roman empire, and it happened quickly. After Theodosius I established Christianism as the state religion (complete with the state having the choice of executing heretics, that is, those who made a choice), the Roman state lost control of its north-west borders within less than two decades (the Franks were given [“Roman”] military control of three provinces in 400 CE: the two Germania and Gaul; as the Franks were, then, non-Christian, this changed history, for the better; meanwhile, civilization collapsed.) 

Same Picture All Over The West. But China Goes The Other Way. Notice the JFK-LBJ Effect, Coming Off Strong Support For Basic Research In the 1950s-1940s

An earlier, and famous example with China: The first emperor who unified China, Qin Shi Huang, following his Prime Minister’s advice, ordered most previous books and records burned to avoid comparisons of his dictatorship with an innovative past. After the emperor’s death, from ingesting immortality conferring mercury pills (210 BCE),  the wise PM had the emperor’s eldest son and top general connived into killing themselves, and the Qin dynasty and its unification work crumbled.

Some will sneer: that was long ago, this is now. Not, not at all: mental patterns recur.  On being compared to Qin, the First Emperor, Mao, the “communist” dictator, responded:

“He [Qin] buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive… You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold. When you berate us for imitating his despotism, we are happy to agree! Your mistake was that you did not say so enough.”

Modern China is still profiting from the breakthroughs the West did. That made the Chinese very satisfied, they are the most satisfied people in the world, as living standards quickly improved.

But what when it runs out of breakthroughs? However, can the West go on with breakthroughs? I suggested to call the University of California the “Breakthrough Univerity”, because it was long the world’s best financed state university (however Ronald Reagan endeavored to destroy this, by introducing tuition, that is, a decrease of state financial support).

Mental breakthroughs depend upon massive support for thinking beyond the edge of official thinking. That means, state support.

Just to look at a small portion of (world) history and its greatest innovators: Rabelais, Montaigne, Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Bullialdus, Isaac Newton, all enjoyed state support (that does not mean that the state, their own state, or other states, did not try to terrify and, or kill them; for example, Rabelais, was a top doctor, and Sorbonne professor, and some of his friends and collaborators were burned alive, after the Sorbonne decided so). Even Blaise Pascal profited from the state, and tax collection is why he invented the first general purpose computing machine (the Greeks had some for astronomy).

Bill Gates went to see Trump today, and they talked about “innovation”. It is not clear to me what Gates understand of the subject. For the primitives, Gates is science itself. For the thinker, Gates is someone without a college degree. That does not mean he cannot think. But can he think in a way which understands how breakthroughs are produced? That’s unlikely, because his success was from exploiting others’ ideas (Microsoft arose from an IBM program which used MS-DOS, a university programming language; Gates mother was an IBM director, and he got a dream contract from IBM).

Tomorrow the great geniuses of “Silicon Valley” are going to see Trump. They are geniuses in gathering money for themselves. Not in finding ideas for us all to enjoy. And their connection with the state has nothing to do with fundamental breakthrough in thinking (but more like breakthroughs in spying and corruption). Sheryl Sandberg, a sort of girlfriend from Lawrence Summers, was parachuted at Treasury under Clinton, then Google, then Facebook. Now she is a billionaire. Armed with her relationships, she is now viewed as a brain. Does greed have a brain? Yes! But not of the most superior sort.

Billionaires, at Facebook alone, have a wealth worth more than ten times what the budget for research on various disease signed by Obama, December 13, 2016, has.

Civilization innovates when the state has decided to support deep innovation. This is why Sparta failed, and Athens succeeded.

Athens succeeded because we are following, however imperfectly Athenian ideas, not Spartan ones. And Athens was a choice, but also the natural choice. The human choice. Humnity innovates, that is what it does best. The corporate fascist state, be it encouraged by Louis XIV of France, Mussolini, or Obama, is an innovation killer, if carried just a bit too far. (Louis XIV financed Huyghens, and even Molière, and many a writer; thus it is not as if Louis was unwares of the danger of fascism; still he fully indulged in it.i

If one wants productivity and progress to perk up, the state has to become as smart as it was, when John F Kennedy was president: fully supporting deep research as much as possible.

Where else are people going to get jobs, anyway?

Patrice Ayme’

Allied

What are the duties of love? How does love arise? What are the duties of a human being? These are some of the themes touched in the excellent fictional story “Allied”. “Allied” is happening between Morocco, London, and a bit of France in the period 1942-1944. The movies stars Brad Pitt (excellent) and Marion Cotillard (stupendous, Oscar deserving for her great facial expressions).

The movie is a mix of historical realism and a serious distortion, I should even say, violation thereof. the distortion is essential to the story, but fatal to the understanding of why it is that Britain won the war, and the Nazis lost it. Basically, the British were extremely tough, and even tougher than the Nazis, that’s why they won. The British could be tougher, precisely because they had humanity on their side (the part not just sorely, and erroneously missing from the movies, but even deeply obliterated in the movies).  

This has consequences for the now famous subject of “fake news”. In a sense, the entire “Allied”, although an excellent movies, and precisely because it is an excellent movies,  is fake news writ large. Deep disinformation. Maybe I should give stars to fake news and disinformation. When Hillary and Barack says companies reimbursed TARP, that’s five star disinformation. When US propagandists, so-called “historians”, say from Harvard, claim that the US acted only as liberator and savior in World War One and Two, that’s ten star disinformation. “Allied” is a good eight star disinformation about how smart British Intelligence was, and how deeply democracy connects with civilization.

Two Stars & The Sahara, What Could Go Wrong? Well, Depicting Civilization As It Was Not. And As It Ought Not To Be.

So what is the story told in “Allied“?

All right, all spoilers out, we are landing on the world of real here. Pitt lands in the desert, and goes to Casablanca, where he meets Cotillard. He is a Canadian special agent, she is a top French resistance fighter who has infiltrated Nazis and collaborators in Morocco. He poses as a phosphate industrialist from Paris. He tries not to talk too much, because his Canadian accent is detectable. Together they kill during a reception the Nazi ambassador. It was a quasi-suicide mission, and they get neurohormonally transformed from it (they fall in love) and marry in England.

Next they have a baby, a little girl. Now here comes the maximum spoiler. Even knowing it, the situation is still heart wrenching, though. Cotillard is suspected to be a Nazi spy. Pitt is charged to execute her, should her guilt be confirmed. This is when my heart-strings started to pull hard. He flies to france, and determines, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she is indeed a Nazi double agent.

He confronts her, she admits her guilt. She said she did not believe the Nazis would find her in England. They threatened to kill her baby Anna, so she revealed to the Great Reich what her husband, a high intelligence officer, knew. (Through a little Nazi network of fanatics, one a degenerate smallish woman, the other an apparent Jew resembling Sigmund Freud.)

So far, so good, in the plausibility department. Every single detail of the movie could be correct. Indeed, there were indeed plenty of double, even triple agents (agents known to be double who betrayed those in the know), during World War Two. Many got executed. Many got tortured to death over days, even months.

***

Yet “Allied”Establishes Not Just A Fake World, But a Fake Civilization, Vastly Inferior to the Real One:

There were indeed Nazi spies in England. Some even got executed. For example the three idiots who knew nothing, and crossed from the Netherlands by paddling to commit sabotage, in 1940. Why were they executed? Precisely because they were saboteurs rather than informants. And to set-up a nice terror mood among Nazi spies.

Most Nazi spies in Britain who were detected were proposed a deal: work with us, British counter-intelligence, MI5, to disinform your superiors, or die. None of the Nazi spies chose to die whom I know of. And this is what the movies gets completely wrong. Had really Cotillard existed and been found to be spying, her husband would have been ordered to divulge to her only false and carefully manipulated data.  

***

This way of having a world had a name: The DOUBLE CROSS SYSTEM XX:

Nazi spies in Great Britain were systematically made into double agents. Not all these spies were detected by MI5. Many, seeing that the war was turning against Nazi Germany, and, thus, or, seeing that Nazism was not their cup of tea (as the very head of army intelligence, the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris decided; Canaris was ultimately discovered, arrested and executed). ALL Nazi agents sent to Great Britain were detected and made to work for the Allied cause (some were from standard military intelligence, Abwehr and some from Nazi intelligence, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)).

All the more in a case as delicate as that exposed in “Allied” were a high officer is married to a spy. As delicate, and as potentially fruitful.

(There were double agents at an even higher level, but they were not detected during World War Two)

Such subtleties are not just about reevaluating history. Nor are they about understanding which way civilizational progress goes, and how to evaluate it. They present immediate interest in appreciating the brouhaha about, say,  Russia having “hacked” (whatever that means) the US elections. If one analyzes deeply and subtly, beyond the headlines, in the claims of “interference”, one realizes that there is nothing there.

“Double Cross XX” was humanly superior:

1. It was human and had more altruism and empathy than the equivalent strategies in the fascist system.
2. It was smarter. Smarts is the essence of humanity. Denying smarts deny humanity. Fascism is intrinsically single-minded: thereupon its strength in combat, and stupidity, long, or even short-term (when combat is not at hand).

Movies such as “Allied” are not innocuous, when they drag the edge of civilization in the mud. By representing allied counterintelligence as cruel, vindictive and stupid, it is extolling these characteristics.

After all, the Allies, who quickly self-described as the “United Nations” won because of superior values. Three years before their formal declaration as an organization in San Francisco. An interesting aside is that the “Declaration of the United Nations” was explicitly founded in its first clause on the Atlantic Charter. This is something Russians ought to want to think about when they view NATO as a fundamental adversary.

Take one example out of millions. A German general of the Wehrmacht (a standard general, not a SS), Anton Dostler, ordered the execution of 15 US soldiers who had been made prisoner when, while wearing the American uniform, they tried to blow-up a tunnel in Italy. The general ordered them executed. Subordinates knew well that this violated the Geneva Convention. They stalled, and asked for confirmation of the order, and again and again. The general insisted, and the US troops were assassinated.

The general was subsequently tried. He argued that he was acting under an order from Hitler. However any member of the Wehrmacht had the right to refuse to obey orders in violation of the Geneva Convention, and the order was not direct and reiterated in the specific situation. The Nazi general was condemned to death, and executed.

Where does the superiority of civilization intervenes here? Simple: the subordinates of the general executed an order they knew was anti-civilizational. At that point they had to decide whether they wanted to risk disobeying a direct order from a maniac, or not. Earlier in the war, they could have said no, and the case would have been considered for prosecution (no such prosecution was ever engaged, because the Nazis were afraid of a judicial precedent going against them!).

However, late in the war, when, clearly the 1,000 year Reich was on its ignominious way out, summary execution for disobeying orders became wanton and frequent. Thus the subordinates could not feel that they were fighting for the right cause, under smart and wise leadership, but under idiotic gangsters. That, in turn, would focus their minds not on winning the war (how could vicious imbeciles win the war?) but on saving their skins.

Whereas, it was exactly the opposite on the Allied side: there the mentality was that the cause was just. Greater than a soldier’s fate, worth dying for.

As Britain was more human, more emphatic, vibrant with a higher civilization, German agents willingly went to the British side. And conversely. After the war, it was discovered that Nikolaus Ritter, the Air intelligence chief under Canaris, had known that the cover for the agents in Britain had been compromised, but due to the fear of repercussions, in the cruel, demented, unpredictable, unlawful, wanton, self-destructive nature of the Nazi regime, Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) Ritter was too scared t0 inform Canaris (who was long a devotee of Hitler). Thus we can see directly that the less civilized a regime is, the harder it is to win a war.

***

Why To Insult (Britain Or Civilization In General? 

And once again, I will ask the same rhetorical question: why do those with money (like Hollywood movie producers, and investors, Trump just made one his Secretary of the Treasury!) have interest to misrepresent civilization, drag civilization deep in the mud? Because they have had so much money, in recent years, they feel like gods, and their pleasure has become to overlord people with all their taxpayer paid five star travelling around the world, their power talk with other rulers, their philanthropy, prizes, etc.

And their enemy? Civilization. Hence the interest to make us believe that British intelligence during World War Two was so brutish, vicious, stupid, short-sighted and inhuman to exterminate Nazi spies it could have manipulated, and did manipulate, in real history, as it happened.

To believe that British intelligence was so brutish, vicious, stupid, short-sighted and inhuman that it would have insisted to assassinate the beloved wife of one of their most esteemed operatives, a commander of the fully sovereign state of Canada, is well beyond ridiculous. Had such a case occurred, British counter-intelligence would have viewed it as a godsent, a fantastic occasion to make the Nazis believe more fake news, disinformation, misinformation and stupendous lies. (There may have been similar cases, with extremely high level spies, who got doubled-crossed… but they are kept secret to this day.)

***

The Double Cross System Double Crossed Adolf Hitler:

In the end, Adolf Hitler and his minions were persuaded, from fake intelligence, mostly from Double Cross XX, that the main D Day was not the one which happened in Normandy, on June 6, 1944, but one which was going to happen in the Pas De Calais (facing Dover, where the Franco-English Channel is narrowest). Double Cross XX had persuaded Hitler that an enormous army led by US General Patton (the most famous tank general of the Allies, professor of all top US generals, well-known for his ferocity), was going to rush across.

Actually that was a complete lie: all the Allied forces were concentrated to land in Normandy. Nazi forces basically held the Allies roughly two months, bottled in Normandy. Had Hitler understood on June 6, 1944, that the real D Day had just happened, in Normandy, the Allies may well have been defeated.

Then Hitler could have sent most of the troops in North West France to fight off the Franco-American Provence landing (where my North African dad fought, after the Italy campaign). Gott knows how this would have turned…

Had the Provence assault failed (that’s a big if) the Allies would not have had a second chance, for years. Moreover, the US strategists had warned that, thanks to new jet fighters and jet bombers, Nazi Germany would recover air supremacy by June 1945.

So Double Cross XX (crucially helped) won the war. The Allies won, because they were more civilized.

Allied is a magnificent movie. However, it is also a magnificent lie. And a vicious, deep lie, construed to make us believe superior civilization, and humanity is not what it is. And make no mistake: human beings are sensitive. I knew all the preceding, while I watched the movie. I knew perfectly well that the threat of executing Cotillard was grotesque, unreal, contrary to all what happened and should happen. I knew it was an attempt to confuse the Allies and the Nazis. Still when I saw the horrible fate of the innocent fictional toddler in that outrageous story, deprived of her fictional mother, I felt horrible.

Now Obama is in danger of insinuating that Russia stole the US election: he asked for a special report. That introduces a pretty horrible emotion. Even if we know that it is a fiction that a Russian is standing behind all US election official, the potential for emotional damage is enormous.

Trash civilization, by making us believe it was not the way it was. Now trash the US election system, by putting it in doubt. It’s the industry of doubt, destroying the foundations of value: a potentially lethal industry.

Patrice Ayme’

Trumped By Jurassic Climate Nonlinearly Erupting

Trump is climate skeptic, it is said, but the climate is not skeptic about Trump. Humanity is the crew, and Earth the spaceship. Trump is now in charge, if anybody is in charge, after eight years of … boyhood. It’s supposed to be a racial insult, I learned. But question: where is the insult, when a 47-year-old (age of Obama when he was sworn in) is supposed to lead the planet, knowing what few other know (as Joe Biden reminded us this week).

Obama went to Germany, and sang the praises of Angela Merkel, her wisdom, etc. Arguably, however, Merkel has been disastrous: her austerity policy, combined with her refusal to support France militarily in a significant way, by re-establishing peace in Syria, manu military, has brought more than one million refugees to Germany, and a near economic and political collapse of Europe (think Brexit, exodus from Portugal, etc.)

All what Obama knows is that his financial sponsors and paymasters tell him austerity is great, Quantitative Easing is great, inequality is great, but we can live with it, etc. 

Spectacular Heat Is On Where It Hurts Most: The High Arctic. November 2016.

Meanwhile, Earth’s climate is acting up. The temperature in the Arctic is way above normal. A full twenty degrees Celsius above normal (that’s 36 degrees F above normal). As a result, ice is having a problem forming. Should the situation perdure until the sun starts shining again above the Arctic, a complete disappearance of sea ice, comes next summer, is imaginable… Sea ice levels in at the North Pole are at a record low, by a long shot.

Planetary climate is self-regulating… Except if pushed too far. Planetary climate consists in several entangled machines. The overall climate pattern in place in the last three million years is a Carnot engine, with a heat source, the tropic, and a cold sink, the poles.

Right now, the poles are still very cold, but more energy has been pumped into the tropics, from the increasing greenhouse (what’s called “climate forcing”, 60% due to COE, 17% due to CH4, and the rest completely from man-made gases like NOx). Thus the climate engine is roaring more than ever (it gets more efficient, from an equation Carnot discovered nearly two centuries ago). An effect, as I predicted long ago, is that more energy will be stored dynamically (jet stream twisted all over) and potentially (high and low pressure systems both more so).

This is what we observe.

How will it evolve? Among the entangled machinery, some is (still) dormant: fabulous quantities of methane are locked in a sort of ice in medium depth sea floor, and more in the tundra. Should those be released, the temperature of the planet would go up five degrees Celsius nearly instantaneously, and, in turn, huge quantities of CO2 locked in the northern latitudes would be released.

Once the latter happens (it’s more a question of when, not if, barring vast technological advances), Earth would go back to Jurassic conditions nearly instantaneously.  

What can one do? First have everybody understand the danger. Differently from the dinosaurs, or the mammals who lived under them, we have the means to understand and act.

Obama had as National Security Adviser a politically, dynastically connected woman, with lots of stocks and connections, but not a warrior. Trump just selected as National Security adviser a four (no, three, thanks Richard Reinhofer!) star Lieutenant General, Michael Flynn. Flynn, ex head of the Delta Force, became Director Army Intelligence in 2012 (however, Obama never met with him, and fired him for being too tough about Radical Islamism). That’s a rational choice. Flynn is a “registered Democrat” (that is, not GOP).

The general considers “RATIONAL” to be afraid of Islam. And then recommended to propagate that message, because rationality is not afraid (OK, agreed, Flynn made the mistake of saying “afraid of Muslims” instead, as he should have, “afraid of Islam”.)

General Flynn ✔@GenFlynn

Fear of Muslims is RATIONAL: please forward this to others: the truth fears no questions... http://youtu.be/tJnW8HRHLLw

5:14 PM – 26 Feb 2016 Or this:@FieldofFight — Obama and Hillary’s Refusal to Name Radical Islamic Terrorism: Aiming to ‘Dumb Us Down’ – Breitbart

As the New York Times puts it: “General Flynn…sees the United States as facing a singular, overarching threat that can be described in only one way: “radical Islamic terrorism. All else is secondary for General Flynn, and any other description of the threat is “the worst kind of political correctness,” he said in an interview three weeks before the election.

Islamist militancy poses an existential threat on a global scale, and the Muslim faith itself is the source of the problem, he said, describing it as a political ideology, not a religion. He has even at times gone so far as to call it a cancer.

For General Flynn, the election of Mr. Trump represents an astounding career turnaround. Once counted among the most respected military officers of his generation, General Flynn was fired after serving only two years as chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency. He then re-emerged as a vociferous critic of a Washington elite that he contended could not even properly identify the real enemy — radical Islam, that is — never mind figure out how to defeat it.”

I have argued that Literal Islam is totally incompatible with civilization. And the best proof is that what was long the world’s richest area, the Middle East (including the Fertile Crescent, Syria, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia) became one of the poorest.

Clearly the voters agreed (Trump destroyed the famed “Blue Wall” of states Democrats thought were secured, and thus got a large Electoral College victory).

Islam, a savage-from-the-desert Middle Age system of thoughts and moods is nothing much, a self-destructive obsession. However, as it has invaded the Western psyche, it has become a distracting cancer. To handle the serious problems, like the planet blowing up, we have to reduce this sort of maddening distractions. Nor can we talk falsely about Islam, while talking truly about the climate. The mood of telling the truth has to be global. Irreverential. The Obama administration and its poodle regimes (Merkel, France, etc.) have been talking falsely not just about Islam, but also about economics, society, globalocracy, plutocracy, taxes, taxes on the wealthiest, corporate fascism, dark money, etc.

They talked falsely about Islam, precisely because the Obama adminstration, and the Deep State

Obama, talking at Der Spiegel: “Many people who voted for me, voted for Trump… I think that’s indicative that there is some impulse towards some sort of change, politicans have to be more sensitive to the desire for change.” where have you been my lost son? Obama sounds increasingly like Sleeping Beauty waking up after eight years’ slumber…

In any case, Trump is telling the truth about Islam, or even Mexicans (“terrific people”). Let’s keep truth momentum. Trump seems willing to replace wishful thinking by rationality (just as the pivot to Russia, however worrisome and potentially dangerous it is, is better than Obama’s boiled noodle opposition).

Meanwhile, there is little doubt that the climate has started to act nonlinearly.  It will be rational to also act even more nonlinearly in return.

Patrice Ayme’

CONQUEST Of England, 950 Years Ago: End of Slavery, Birth of Modern Democracy

The BATTLE OF HASTINGS, WON By The FRANKS 950 YEARS AGO: Outlawing Slavery, Jump Starting Democracy

How did British democracy arise? With the exact opposite maneuver from Brexit. What is the opposite of Brit-exit? Frank-in. And when William the Conqueror, came in, conquered-in, he did not just bring, but enforced a more advanced civilization, and much more, a process to self-feed democracy.

The ascent of Britain, blossoming into the edge of world civilization is a long story which started well before Caesar’s two landings in England. The mighty, yet disorganized Celtic civilization had been divided into a diversity of a bewildering obfuscation (fostered by the Druids) of countless small units: Gaul had 60 nations, with 60 central banks, senates and three languages. Roman organization put an end to that non-sense, and Gaul came out much stronger, wealthier and more intelligent (the Druids cultivated stupidity, by outlawing written expression, except among themselves).

The collapse of the Roman state brought an even greater mess to Britain, while the continent got reorganized under the Franks’ Lex Salica (see chapter inside the essay on Outlawing Muslim Brotherhood). The reconquest of England by the Franks under the command of a Roman duke of Normandy added a whole new layer of complexity in the subtilty of government. It is William’s Conquest, a conquest by a plurality, and the most advanced principles, which instigated the rise of the world’s most advanced democracy, protected, as it was thereafter, by the insular nature of Britain (whereas the rest of the Roman empire, on the other side of the Channel, fell in ever worse divisions sheared from ever mightier armies).

After its conquest under Claudius, a Roman emperor born in Lyon (Lugdunum), Britannia was unified and pacified for more than four centuries. However budget cuts by the theologically minded plutocrats who ruled Rome around 400 CE, led to the withdrawal of the legions (which constituted the core of the crack field armies of the empire). Local Roman militia was unable to repel waves of invasion of determined Angles and Saxons in the next two centuries. Finally British forces retreated towards Wales or took refuge in what came to be known as Brittany (formerly Armorica, the large western peninsula of France advancing in the Atlantic). Then the Viking came, overrunning much of England, and all of Ireland.

By the Eleventh Century, the king ruling England, Edward the Confessor, had no direct descendant. (His earlier life had been astoundingly full of battles and unlikely events; suffices to say he was the seventh son of his father, from his second wife, Emma of Normandy who ended up marrying a Viking invader, Cnut, who conveniently executed some of Edward’s half brothers. Edward spent many years in exile in Normandy (and acted accordingly: Edward could see that Frankish civilization was superior). 

William The Conqueror Territories In Red, That Of Some Of His Other Frankish Allies, in Blue (Poitou, Anjou, Flanders) or Green (Bretagne)

The Reconquista Of Britannia By A Dux Of The Roman Empire:

The reconquest of Britannia by a Roman Dux was no accident: five centuries after being overrun by the Angles and Saxons, the British Isles were more of a wasteland than ever, as waves of Viking sloshed all over. It was high time for re-establishing civilization. Only force can re-establish civilization (a theme of mine). William would apply overwhelming force, in the service of the most advanced civilization anywhere. And it worked splendidly: the progress he launched became self-feeding, and promoted peace. Indeed, after William’s conquest, except for a victorious Dutch invasion in 1688 CE (with the objective of defeating France’s dictator, Louis XIV), England would never be conquered again. 

The closest relative of king Edward the Confessor was the Norman Dux (“Dux”, Duc, Duke, was a Roman military title of the Late Empire: a Dux was the superior military officer of a large province, only subject to command from the Emperor himself). More exactly, Edward was the grandson of the maternal uncle of William the Conqueror. The accession of William to the ducal throne had been difficult because his father had died in Nicea (Anatolia), when William was seven years old. William’s mother was his father’s mistress, an independent business woman who then married somebody else. However, Dukes of Normandy were often “illegitimate”, and there is no doubt that his father intended William to be Duke (he made his vassals take an oath of obedience to his son, before leaving for the crusade, over his family’s objections).

By the age of 23, the battle tested William was the uncontested Duke of Normandy, and Edward was back, overlording an English realm streaked by Viking raids. Thus, in 1051 CE, Edward selected William as heir (no doubt feeling that Britain needed to be reintegrated in the Roman ensemble, for its own good as it indeed turned out). In 1064 CE, a top officer of Edward, Harold, showed up in Normandy, helped William wage war in Brittany, and told him that he, Harold, would support his claim to the throne (at least that is what Normand discrediting propaganda claimed at the time).

On January 5, 1066, Edward died and Harold, treacherously, took power as king of England. Many other claimants and grandees were not happy, and a complicated war started, with four parties involved.

However William was an official Duke of the Roman empire, had been named future king 15 years prior, and thus William was the only one with real legitimacy, and enormous clout (but making William king meant that Britain was reintegrating the Roman empire! And thus who thrived from the mess were going to suffer). Indeed, consent of Pope Alexander II for the invasion was obtained, and a Papal banner was flown by William. The Roman emperor also gave consent. On top of this, William was an extremely experienced military leader, used to command in the Roman imperator tradition (namely ready to execute miscreants as needed). William had been at war since age 8. And he was now 38 years old.

An enormous fleet was built, 3,000 ships it has been said. It sailed from the Somme river, once intelligence informed William that Harold’s army had been removed from the Channel and was battling in the north.

William led an army greatly composed of contingents under the direct command of many French barons who were not his vassals. In particular William’s forces comprised Breton, Anjou, Poitou armies (which made the left wing at the Hastings battle, commanded by Alan the Red, a relative of the Comte de Bretagne) and a French, Picardy, Flanders army (which made the right wing at Hastings, and was commanded by the Count of Boulogne, who was severely wounded in the pursuit of the Anglo-Saxon forces).

***

That two-third of William’s army was made of Frankish allies not his vassals was of great consequence: his non-vassal allies would shortly enforce upon the king the MAGNA CARTA LIBERTATUM, the Great Charter of Liberty.

During the battle, William’s left wing, the Breton army at some point cracked and fled, and was pursued by Harold’s forces, led by two of his brothers. That stretching of the enemy in the open enabled William’s cavalry to surprise and destroy them. The Normans feigned retreat twice more, to expose Harold’s army to cavalry (Harold had no cavalry, and no archers, William had both). William engineered attacks after attacks, changing strategy repeatedly, and had several horses killed under him. In the end, Harold was killed, some say by William himself (that Harold was killed by an arrow is apparently a later legend which arose when the Bayeux tapestry was misinterpreted).

The war was not finished.  English clergy and aristocrat nominated Edgar the Ætheling as king to replace Howard (whose body William had ordered thrown in the sea). To win the war, William instigated reforms right away.

William changed England in many ways. For example he was partly financed by Jewish financiers and brought rich Jews from Rouen to foster lending in England (an activity forbidden to Christians with Christians, but allowed from Jews to Christians). Thus William introduced Judaism to England (so Jews were not always victimized by it did not exist prior to that there).

William had made church reforms in Normandy. He extended them to England, and replaced English clergy by Normand clergy. William also enforced all the laws passed by Edward the Confessor (the preceding English king, who had spent most of his formative years in Normandy, thanks to William’s family, and much of his life, and had made his relative William his heir). Some laws protected especially the “Frenchmen who had come with William to England”, as one would expect after a conquest. But William went much further.

***

William The Conqueror’s Laws Created A New Polity And New Civilization:

William introduced ten major new laws. The first made Christianism the official religion (exit the pagan gods).

William’s second law made all Englishmen take a direct, personal oath of loyalty to the king, as if they were soldiers in the Roman army. Those who did not take the oath would not be considered to be freemen. The oath had to be witnessed by many. That was a very significant advance: prior to this, citizens did not have to take an oath of loyalty (only the Roman soldiers had to, except for a few years under Roman emperors Diocletian and Galerius around 308 CE).

All problems have to be solved in court, ordered William. Non-attendees were heavily fined, up to the amount of the charge against them.

The final two laws passed by William were stunning:

“No man is allowed to sell another man. Anyone breaking this law will pay a fine to the king.” This law outlawed slavery in England. 20% of the population had been enslaved under Harold. William, as a Roman Dux, had to implement the Lex Salica’s most prominent feature, the one that distinguished it more saillantly from Justinian’s refurbishing of Roman Law, was the interdiction of slavery. It is also on that law that the prosperity of the “Renovated Roman Empire” rested. Britain had been reunited with the empire (although, it was implicitly intimated that it never left).

“No one shall be executed for crimes they have committed; but if they are guilty of a crime, they will be blinded and castrated. This law is not to be challenged.” Outlawing the death penalty was very much a world first. (Although the EU has outlawed the death penalty, the USA still uses it, 950 years later.)

***

Outlawing Slavery Was Not Just Frankish Law, But An Essential Part of William’s Power Grab

As a Dux of the Roman empire, William had to implement (Franco-)Roman law. Slavery had been made unlawful by the (English-born) Queen Bathilde of the Franks in 650 CE. Later the Franks conquered most of Western Europe, including the British isles and the part of Iberian and Italian peninsulas still held by the Muslims. The outlawing of slavery by the Franks was extended to these liberated territories where Roman rule was re-imposed.

In turn, the outlawing of slavery no doubt facilitated this Roman reconquest. For example, the 20% of Englishmen who found themselves to be “freemen” as long as they took a loyalty oath to William were no doubt enthusiastic supporters of William.

***

Frenchmen, and French

In the following centuries, many powerful French characters and adventurers in England, would try to preserve their power, or try to seize power, and would push for various democratic reforms limiting the power of the king. Out of that came the Magna Carta Libertatum (the descendants of the allies of William wanted to keep the powers William had conferred to them, that of allies, not vassals), the power of Parliament (Lancastre hoped to be elected king through Parliament, so he boosted its power; Lancastre was killed on the battlefield, but his reforms stayed). And so on.

Ever since William’s conquest, France and England have been entangled (although intellectual life on both sides of the Channel had been entangled for two millennia already: Druids would study in Wales, Saint Patrick was educated in Cannes, Anti-slavery queen of the Franks Bathide was from Kent, Alcuin, Charlemagne’s main PM and philosopher was English).

The reason for thinking otherwise, that England and France have serious differences (instead of being family), was the dictatorial drift under the fanatical Jihadist tyrant Louis XIV, while England went the other way, towards more democracy. Democracy brings power, dictatorship, weakness. The result was that France became weaker and England blossomed into a superpower. In the (world) wars of the Spanish Succession, the Seven Year War, and the Revolutionary-Napoleonic wars, a haggard France was defeated and more subtly plutocratic England became a world empire.  

It is the mess of more distributed power which rendered England ever more democratic. Whereas in France, the emperor-in-his-own-kingdom (that was the official expression!) Philippe-Auguste (literally: the lover of horses who augments!) colluded with the Pope to destroy the (quasi-republican) giant County of Toulouse (which was ruled under a Count, but mostly by Parliament).

However, moods perdure. Lancastre, one of those who exploited Toulouse got there the idea of using Parliament as a weapon against the king, and implemented the idea in England.

Intelligence is greater, the greater the ability to detect, distinguish, identify & imagine (knowledge, distinctions, equations & allusions).

Contemplating history shows that reason is not linear, but a web. And guess what? Quantum Theory says the same, and it has a name, entanglement. This is an entangled world, and to reveal it, one has to reveal its implicit order. It arises from occurrences. By building one’s neurology while missing the most important occurrences in the world pertaining to it, one risks becoming stupid. 

Patrice Ayme’.