WORLD WARS LAST A LONG TIME, Because They Have Deep Roots

Arguably the “Sea Peoples” invasions was the first world war, 33 centuries ago. This somber plot accompanied, or caused the Bronze Age collapse, when nearly all advanced civilizations of Western Eurasia disappeared, followed by dark ages. Several Pharaohs commented on the Sea Peoples, including Ramses II. Later, in one of several texts in stone, Ramesses III wrote, in 1175 BCE, relating, among others, the annihilation of the end of the Hittite, Mycenaean and Mitanni kingdoms: “The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands, All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms…” [1]

Most of the military collapse of the Roman state happened swiftly (395 CE-406 CE)… however, the Germans had put Rome in military difficulties since Caesar (50 BCE)… And Rome was at war with itself since longer than that (and that war with itself caused the invasions, as Roman corruption and devolution was a crucial factor in the success of the Goths, say at Adrianopolis; see note [2]).  

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The Mongol world conquest of the Thirteenth Century, spanned from Europe’s Adriatic Sea to China, Indonesia and Japan. That war also lasted half a century or so. (As I relate in Note [2], in the case of the Romans, the Mongol conquest of Rus was made possible by the deliquescence of the invaded lands. Kyivian Rus had become a military nebulous state… When the Mongols encountered stiff resistance in Hungary, they found the losses unbearable, and return thence they came…)

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The war of the Spanish succession, the Seven Year War, the war against the French revolution (1792-1815), WWIi and WWII (1939-1945) were all long world wars. World wars are always long, because peace has to be preceded by economic and, or, demographic exhaustion of the participants, and, or of the defeated.

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Terrorized by Putin’s nuclear threats, the democracies have taken 8 years to come to the serious rescue of Ukraine since Crimea got invaded. Even to this day, the fact that, barring a coup in Moscow, this is a world war, is not generally acknowledged, although more than 50 countries are helping Ukraine militarily. This denial of blatant evidence only extends the conflict. 

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ECOLOGICAL CATASTROPHE OFTEN PRECEDES WORLD WARS:

Ecological problems often preceded invasions. Indeed, with Rome, the mines got exhausted after 100 CE, and that turned into a currency crisis, then a confidence crisis and an economic crisis, which brought invasions and “barrack emperors” (50 emperors or so during the Third Century).

Renewable energy, on which 5 trillon dollars was spent (roughly the annual GDP of Japan) has itself been slowed down by the fact it needs hydrogen (and derivatives) as an indispensable complement, to replace fossil fuels by green hydrogen. Instead of installing hydrogen, nuclear energy was de-installed, and new forms of nuclear energy, much safer, non weaponizable, and less polluting, were not funded (except in China and India). This mis-investment has created a world energy crisis. 

De-carbonification without nuclear and hydrogen is simply impossible, thus a fraud and a lie. The cost of that lie is the devastation of the biosphere, now clearer, one heat wave at a time. It was also a lie to believe one could have a civilization in common with Putin. All these lies are coming together nicely, and the result is going to be a crisis deeper than any seen before. Global trade is a necessity, in the present world organization, but it depends upon cheap energy… Just as food production depends upon water, the fundamental reason why Putin invaded the rest of Ukraine in 2022: Crimea was out of water, and the rest of Ukraine refused to provide it by the canal from the Kherson Oblast.

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World wars have started for ecological reasons, for example the one of the “Peoples of the Sea” we started this essay with: there is evidence of plenty of extraneous factors incurring at the time: a megadrought, plus quakes, and volcanic eruptions, and also the rise of disruptive iron technology (which may have helped some invasions, such as the one of the Dorians; think Sparta). Famine arose at the time, bringing forth calls to help from the Hittite empire to their old rival, Egypt. Egypt sent grain to its old enemy! The Hittites got the grain from Egypt, but were soon invaded by the “Peoples of the Sea”, and vanished as a civilization… part of the Late Bronze Age collapse, which brought four centuries of Dark Ages to Greece, among other disasters…

“Ecology” has to be understood in the broadest term: when the Huns pushed the Alans, Goths and other Germans in front of them like frightened cattle, the Huns had slightly better recurved bows.  

We now have on our hands, potentially and enfolding, the greatest disaster in 66 million years: the anthropocene is causing several ecological crises, including the worst of them all, the GreenHouse Gas crisis. And the dominant species has the most powerful weapons, ever, by a very long shot… weapons so powerful that a medium nuclear exchange would be more devastating than a V8 volcanic eruption (as happens every 15,000 years in the average) 

An all-out world war, using nukes, will be pathological, and completely out of the ordinary, as defined in the history of life on Earth…

So how do we avoid a devastating world war, as the ecology becomes ever more difficult? By learning how to get smart and see far ahead in the landscape of solutions… The best way to avoid war is by having those vested most in the statu quo ante to be militarily superior in such an obvious manner than those who have interest to disrupt the established order, and thus make war, cannot do as the Sea Peoples did, plan war, and attack… because they thought hey had a realistic chance of victory. This is why and how the famous Roman adage:”Si vis pacem, para bellum” works… or more exactly, worked.

When the Roman empire was defeated, at the end of the fourth and beginning of the fifth centuries, what faltered was the will to go to war with all the means the Roman empire potentially had: no more than 100,000 warriors defeated 60 millions… Because those 60 million Romans mostly had lost, over centuries, the status of stakeholders they had when Rome was dominant as a Republic. So the world war which precipitated the fall of the Roman state (in which the Huns were crucially involved, and they came from Mongolia!) was even longer in preparation, than it was in execution, by a factor of ten, or more [2].  World wars, and their preconditions, are often enfolding in the longest time imaginable.  

After their costly victory in Hungary, the Mongol generals themselves said they thought they would lose against the Franks, as they remembered what had happened to their ancestors the Huns fighting in Gallia (first against the Franks… then the Franco-Romano-Gothic coalition). Oral tradition had passed, over eight centuries, from Huns to Mongols (with the Avars and Magyars somewhat in between): in the confrontation between steppe, mostly Mongolia originated, warriors and the civilized cities, one can speak of a world war which extended from Toulouse (which the Huns sieged with their Roman allies!) to Indonesia (which the Mongols tried to invade), over a millennium…

Civilization must be defended, sometimes with weapons in action, always through introspection first. 

Patrice Ayme

Hittite empire collpased around 1200 BCE, 32 centuries ago, one of many major collapses. Greece plunged in Darkness

[1] This is one of the many Egyptian texts in greater extent, from Ramesses III: “The foreign countries made a conspiracy in their islands, All at once the lands were removed and scattered in the fray. No land could stand before their arms: from Hatti, Qode, Carchemish, Arzawa and Alashiya on, being cut off [i.e. destroyed] at one time. A camp was set up in Amurru. They desolated its people, and its land was like that which has never come into being. They were coming forward toward Egypt, while the flame was prepared before them. Their confederation was the Peleset, Tjeker, Shekelesh, Denyen and Weshesh, lands united. They laid their hands upon the land as far as the circuit of the earth, their hearts confident and trusting: ‘Our plans will succeed!‘”^[83

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[2] Rome’s collapse, as a Republic, started around 150 BCE, and was complete by Theodosius I’s murderous religious edicts of 381 CE. Thus it took more than 5 centuries. The military collapse, though occured swiftly between 394 CE (annihilation of the Occidental Roman army by Theodosius !), and then 395 CE (invasion of Italy) and 406 CE (crossing of the frozen Rhine by German nations piercing the Frankish limes) or 410 CE (capture of Rome by the Goth Alaric, ally of Theodosius I). So we see that the deliquescence of the Republic by corruption took 50 times longer than its direct consequence, defeat by military invasion. We also see that just one bad leader, Theodosius, was mostly at fault… Just as one bad leader, Gamelin, caused the Fall of France in May-June 1940… Both Theodosius and Gamelin were not just stupid, but full of ressentiment (Theodosius against non-Catholic, perhaps because of his father’s execution) and Gamelin against the French Popular front of PM Blum (perhaps because Blum was a Jew, so Hitler was viewed as a lesser danger, as Gamelin himself wrote in his memoirs…)

Understand, Predict, Innovate Judiciously or Die: Why The Maya Collapsed

Civilizations are dynamically technological, or they are not, and they fall, like a cyclist trying to stand on just two wheels without moving. It is actually worse than that: the man-made ecology, the bicycle any civilization is riding, is always changing, as the civilization depletes whatever it is exploiting.

And the more successful it is, the more the ecology a civilization depends upon gets depleted. It is not just a question of having limits to growth in general, but of a progressive collapse of the particular type of growth which brought success… to a given civilization, so far. When old growth is sick and exhausted, one has to get a divorce, and adopt a new growth model which is smarter. Staying faithful to an ecology one has killed, brings only more killing. We will focus here on the Mayan collapse which overall, lasted three centuries, and was characterized by a megadrought. Changes of Mayan behavior occurred during the collapse, but they proved insufficient to stop it. One can compare with other (partial) collapses, the most famous being that of the Roman empire in the Fifth Century.

The change from the Latin-Roman Catholic civilization to the Latin-Frankish civilization which succeeded it was primarily a change of growth model: the basic law, the spirit of Roman Republican law, was unchanged. The Franks adopted a superior growth model (in this order: religious tolerance, more secular education, no more slavery).

Eurasia and the “West” provide many examples of this, changing growth models in a smart way. This is why and how “the West” and East Asia came to dominate the world. A case in point is the contemporary rise of China, which, in light of full Chinese history and the secular technological-legal mood which often drove it, is more of the same “socialism with Chinese characteristics”… which is at the core of the Western success too.

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The Maya provide a warning of what happens when one succumbs to hubris while lacking long duration smarts:

The Maya did not understand, predict, and innovate in a timely manner, and hubristically adopted an erroneous growth model, making a bad situation worse. By the Eighth Century, around 750 CE, Mayan society had thrived for more than 2,000 years. The population was at an all-time high: high-tech mapping suggests that at least 10 million people may have lived within the Maya Lowlands alone. 40 major new stone buildings were built every year (it used to be 10, it would fall back to zero after 900 CE). Mayans were experts in astronomy, mathematics, architecture, with a complex language of written symbols. The city-state of Tikal comprised more than 61,000 stone buildings.

Then a megadrought struck. It was the worst drought in 7,000 years, it lasted more than two centuries, and became terrible after 1000 CE (when most of the Mayan civilization had already disappeared). That megadrought was partly a consequence of human, Mayan, activity (greenhouse warming plus deforestation so drastic fundamental some raw materials were gone). Devastating wars of cities against cities, rebellions, killing of the incompetent elites, and the burning of cities followed.

Population collapsed. Less than 200 years later, the core of the Maya civilization (the southern lowlands) was no more (most of the rest would progressively go down in the next two centuries, as the drought kept on going). A civilization that had stretched across southern Mexico and Central America was nearly completely gone (the Conquistadores would meet its haggard remnants). 

The Mayan collapse was not caused by invasion (Toltec influence or not)… whereas Athens, Rome, Constantinople, the Xi Xia, and of course the Mexicans, fell partly, mostly, or completely, from invasion, the Mayan collapse is a study in self-generated devastation. (It is not that the Mayans were particularly stupid; just the opposite: they succeeded to create a massive civilization in an unlikely place, thanks to advanced technology, massively deployed; but that civilization was vulnerable: there had been a first collapse after a megadrought around 200 CE; see graph below.)

There are a number of theories to explain what happened to the Maya. However, from my point  of view it is possible to gather all these theories in just a single logic. The Mayan collapse was greatly an implosion of a highly technological society from ecological collapse with population, war and hubris loss of control as triggers: the social and religious implosions are consequences of the technological implosion. 

Graph from Professor Kennett, expert of the subject. Several things from it. Around 200 CE there was a first drought, and a first collapse. It is imaginable that the causes were the same, and that the absence of books and a strong intellectual class led to a repeat. When the late classic collapse started the drought was not that bad and just reflected poorly from the wet 2 centuries prior. However, the wars and the ecological devastation this relative difficulty caused made the situation way worse. Then the terrible drought after 1000 CE prevented any recovery.

There is evidence that the fall of Rome shares some of the elements of the Maya collapse:

Let me repeat this slowly: the Mayan ecological collapse started before the full impact of the mega drought. It was obviously caused by a population explosion in combination with mismanagement (namely Mayan wars; in the Seventh Century, Tikal lost its prominence thanks in part to an uppity warrior queen from a lesser city; Tikal would regain the upper hand, but with a mood that had changed towards more hubris than the climate could take).

Europe would experience something similar around 1300 CE. In the last two decades before 1300 CE, there were a few severe winters (foreshocks of the Little Ice Age). At the time, ushered by a technological and rational revolution, the European population was exploding, severely stressing the ecology. Successful intense agriculture and construction devoured the forests (a bit like Brazil nowadays)…

However, instead of sitting on their hands or going to war against each other, the European governments took ferocious countermeasures around 1300 CE, outright banning people from some mountainous regions to limit erosion and deforestation (Japan did something similar at the same time). When the Little Ice Age struck, followed by the Plague of 1348 CE, half of the population was killed, but society itself, give or take a few roasted noble families, and a few thousands peasants butchered, in the Jacqueries… society itself survived intact. Actually the economy rebounded and the Franco-French and Anglo-French gaily persisted into fighting each other for the control of France and Britain.  

Rome is another case of ecological implosion: clearly the metal mining of Rome collapsed a full century before the empire started to collapse socially, financially, militarily, and into barracks’ emperors anarchy. We know that Roman metal mining went down before anything else went clearly very wrong, by studying traces of metal in Greenland ice cores.

Why would the collapse of metal mining bring Rome down? Rome high tech society was extremely dependent upon metals. No more metal, no more economy, currency, military… or even roofs (!) When one reads Viking sagas, one is struck by the importance of mining, swords and forging. Superlative swords had names and were passed over the generations, and between clans. Rome had, by far, the largest army in the world all equipped with swords, helmets, armor, and other metallic objects. A Roman emperor would come to Rome in the Seventh Century to strip the metallic roofs, to make weapons to resist the Muslim invasion.

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Often triumphant technology creates the conditions for its own failure. As shown by the Maya:

The Mayan irrigation system was gigantic. It used special materials. The Maya’s home was a tough environment plagued by droughts: what is called a seasonal desert. The land that they farmed was often porous limestone, rocky terrain with the water table often 100 meters below the surface, but also massive wetlands. How did they manage to feed their huge population in this chaotic environment?

It is estimated that the Mayan population may have been above 18 millions… Well, to start with, Mayans used the swamps, next to which their cities were located. About 40% of the Yucatán Peninsula is swamp today. The Maya mucked out the ditches, and tossed the soil onto the adjacent land, creating elevated fields which would kept the root systems of their crops above the waterlogged soil, while allowing access to the irrigation water. They also drained some land outright. That irrigated land is hundreds of kilometers across. Sixty or so cities each with a population of 60,000 to 70,000, sprouted during two centuries of abnormally wet weather, setting the Maya for a fall. 

On satellite pictures forests around Mayan sites look discoloured. On the ground remnants of orchards and edible plants are still in abundance.

Mayan lands are now a sea of green forest. However, their appearance in the Seventh Century was that of a man-made landscape. By 700 CE the Maya had completely run out of their main construction trees. It has been suggested that massive deforestation helped cause a megadrought. When the elites proved they had no solution but war of all against all, devastation followed.

The Mayan megadrought was caused mostly, or at least severely aggravated, by human ecological devastation. 

Not all megadroughts are that way. Across the Mediterranean and west Asia, the effects of the 4,200-3,900 years Before Present megadrought included synchronous collapse of the Akkadian Empire in Mesopotamia, the Old Kingdom in Egypt and Early Bronze Age settlements in Anatolia, the Aegean and the Levant. That megadought left marks all over the planet, including in Alaska and the Yukon. There was an estimated 30-50% reduction in precipitation delivered by the Mediterranean westerlies in the eastern hemisphere, where they provide for dry-farming and irrigation agriculture across the Aegean, Levant, Anatolia, Mesopotamia, and Iran. There was a synchronous disruptions for the Indian Summer Monsoon. That was clearly a larger scale disaster where the human influence is not obvious… keeping in mind that a greenhouse caused by the rise of human agriculture, and herding which may have prevented what would have been otherwise significant cooling, 8,000 Before Present.

The Mayan megadrought was roughly coincidental with the “Middle Age Optimum”, when a warmer clime enriched Europe as glaciers retreated spectacularly (and the Viking got to Greenland and America). the phenomena are probably related (science to come). But the point is that Mayan agriculture made a bad situation way worse.

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Agriculture Can Cause Ecological Devastation:

… This is something that the promoters of agriculture as a panacea keep on forgetting. Plants interact with the atmosphere and the climate. Large dark plants—such as dense tropical forest—absorb a lot of energy from the Sun. At the same time, they prevent much evaporation, thanks to their shade: a tropical forest is darker than a cathedral. Tropical forests restitute the sun energy, and the moisture, in the evening, making warm moist air rise high; it falls back as rain. 

Lighter colored plants (crops and dry yellow grasses like wheat) reflect some, and sometimes most energy. They act like snow, rising the albedo of the land, sending back sunlight energy to space. 

When a forest is replaced by thinner, less massive and less shady, lighter colored plants, the land reflects more sunlight, which cools the atmosphere (because the ground does not warm up, filling up with sun energy to give it back later). Cool air sinks, while water vapor needs to rise and condense to create a rainstorm. Without warm, unstable air rising into the atmosphere, rainstorms became less common. 

The lack of rain helps raise temperatures on land. When energy from the Sun reaches the ground directly, it either bakes the ground or it causes water to evaporate from the soil or transpire from plants. With forests producing less moisture and croplands holding less water, droughts deepened as more and more of the Sun’s energy heated the ground. Thus deforestation makes  droughts worse, and may even create a desert. An excellent example is an Hawaiian island which was deprived of its forest, and is now a baked red piece of land with low bushes, Kaho’olawe. 

In ancient times, the Maya had practiced good forestry management. They were not allowed to cut down the sacred groves. That changed during the Late Classic period with the adventures of Jasaw Chan K’awiil. The Tikal Maya had been defeated and had fallen to second-rate status prior to his ascendancy. Jasaw Chan K’awiil led an army to the competing city, Calakmul, captured its ruler, bound him, brought him back and sacrificed him. There was plenty of instability at the times, including the rise of ferocious warrior queens; one queen built the longest plastered white road going north among orchards and cornfields… to enable her army to go defeat a rising northern city, Chichen Itza.

In any case, Tikal had a one century hiatus characterized with neighboring competing cities having plenty of warrior-queens (at least ten). So agriculture can cause devastation and women can mean trouble… Queen Bathilde of the Franks outlawed slavery, successfully, not because she was weak, but because she was stronger than the (male) Chinese emperors who tried the same. Some of the pseudo-“woke” may be be rendered too awake from this essay….

Nice Quetzal hat… Maya Holy Snake Lord known as Lady K’abel who ruled El Perú-Waka’, a city-state one hundred kilometers west of Tikal…. for more than 20 years with her husband, King K’inich Bahlam II. She was the military governor of the Wak kingdom for her family, the imperial house of the Snake King, and she carried the title “Kaloomte,” translated as “Supreme Warrior,” higher in authority than her husband, the king. This representation is not a figment of imagination: we have actually ceramic figurines of her!… And much documentation besides. The exact chronology of what happened is not fully clear yet, but plenty enough for the theme of this essay!

After these wars between cities, the Maya rebuilt the city of Tikal in a way never seen before. They began building huge temples that required considerable resources, especially large, straight trees whose wood could withstand the weight of tons of stone. Their choices were limited to two types of strong trees.

Jasaw Chan K’awiil tapped into their sacred groves to do this. The stands of virgin timber were more than 200 years old in some areas. After building a few of the temples, the Maya ran out of timber from the Manilkara zapota (sapodilla) tree. That wood is easy to work, until it dries up and becomes very strong. It’s denser than water. Then they switched to an inferior tree —Haematoxylon campechianum, logwood or inkwood — which is found in swamps. This had adverse consequences on the maintenance or expansion of the irrigation system.

Tikal’s irrigation system was high tech. It contained at least eight large dams, the largest with 75,000 tons of water, was used as a causeway linking two parts of the city. Dams were equipped with filtration sand boxes, to produce clean water. The quartz sand is not found in the Tikal area; it was imported from more than 30 kilometers away.

How permanent was the change the Mayan civilization at its apogee inflicted on Yucatan? Climatologist Ben Cook from NASA compared climate conditions during the late Mayan era with conditions during the early colonial era (1500-1650 CE), when land use was at a minimum and forests had regrown over Central America. The warming and drying trend had disappeared. 

However the Mayan civilization had not recovered its splendor: after 1200 CE and until the Conquistadores appeared, it was a shadow of its former self, the population being perhaps just a tenth of what it used to be… But it was not for lack of aggressivity: a severe and vast ambush was set by Mayans for the Conquistadores who had to flee back to their boats… And the last free Mayan city, Nojpeten, would fall only in 1697. Some have suggested that the remaining Maya went to the coast, where the Spanish found them. It is fascinating to see that the Mayan civilization couldn’t get restarted: the numerous giant cities were gone for good. But this is often the case of civilizational collapses…

What probably happened is that the Mayan way of life was a huge system which needed a technological know-how which had been acquired during millennia, and then was lost. A broken system can’t be reinstated overnight: the system may have been elaborated over centuries (the case of Rome, Athens)… or even millennia: the case of Mesopotamia, Egypt… And the MesoAmerican civilizations. 

Moreover books are important, as they store information, and not just the concept of the proverbial wheel. This has long been known: when Rome annihilated Carthage, all Punic books were destroyed. Except one: a treaty on agriculture. And indeed the Romans would make Africa a Roman granary, the region became more productive than it would be until the arrival of French. 

The Greek dark ages after the adventures of the Trojan War lasted 4 centuries. However, Western Europe and China have proven quite collapse resistant, probably for having cultural systems smarter than most, thanks to all the books… and aware of collapse, thus keen to take resistant measures. For example when the “First” Qin emperor ordered books to be destroyed, especially of the 100 philosophical schools, many Chinese knew what to do: they copied and buried the books. 

In the 1970s, most Maya scholars concluded that the demise of the Classic Period Lowland Maya was the result of complex systems interactions. Another way to put it is that a civilization has a mind of its own

A civilization doesn’t truly collapse until its culture and know-how have been eradicated. In the case of the Maya remnants of the culture survived (they still knew how to write codices)… but what did not survive was how and why to make Yucatan work, as it did at the apex of civilization.

Could the Maya have prevented their collapse? Some will shake their heads and observe that Mayans would have had to understand science we are barely establishing now pertaining to drought and deforestation. Some of the conclusions above have a fair amount of guesswork, philosophy and modelling, and a few obstinate ones would disagree. However, this guesswork, this philosophy was done in Europe in 1300 CE, and a terminal ecological crisis avoided.

So let me tell a personal anecdote: the philosophical method rises the personal and anecdotal to the general and systemic. When I was in Africa I saw municipal authorities cut a number of magnificent trees. Apparently, inspired by a devious sense of esthetics, they had decided an immense plaza looked even better by making it more desolate. I was shocked, and revolted. How could Senegalese, in a country that was obviously desiccating, cut trees which provided shade, cooling and moisture? Tropical trees can have these huge, incredible thick oily leaves which block sunlight. For me it was glaring that this policy favored desertification, and I had seen many examples of it around Senegal already, so I viewed it as a systemic policy symbolizing a perverse mentality. I was ten years old. So if a ten year old can figure out, that cutting trees dries the climate, and causes a desert, no wonder more ancient Mayans protected sacred groves. And then the question becomes how come Tikal changed ecological policy? The answer is the war mood and the hubris it brings: flushed by taking enormous risks defeating their enemies, Tikal leaders kept on taking risks, this time with the ecology, flaunting, to themselves and others, their covenant with god(s). 

Human reality works that way: exaggerated behavior, thanks to hubris and provocation, fail, fix it, fly again. This is how humanity learns… in a tribal setting. Civilizations can also learn that way. In the best places of Eurasia, like the Fertile Crescent, the Latium, India, China. In such places of Eurasia, the collapse of one civilization taught others nearby: this is the story of the Middle East where civilizations kept on crashing and rising again, until the double headed shock of Islam, followed by the Mongols (after that it was pretty much all the way down)…

But it’s not how all civilizations can learn. A civilization can become such an immensely complicated systems, that, once broken, it can’t be readily reconstituted... Such is the sad story of the Maya.

Patrice Ayme

SQPR Axiom #1: FINITE SPEED QUANTUM INTERACTION

Philosophically speaking Newton: 

It is inconceivable that inanimate Matter should, without the Mediation of something else, which is not material, operate upon, and affect other matter without mutual Contact…That Gravity should be innate, inherent and essential to Matter, so that one body may act upon another at a distance thro’ a Vacuum, without the Mediation of any thing else, by and through which their Action and Force may be conveyed from one to another, is to me so great an Absurdity that I believe no Man who has in philosophical Matters a competent Faculty of thinking can ever fall into it. Gravity must be caused by an Agent acting constantly according to certain laws; but whether this Agent be material or immaterial, I have left to the Consideration of my readers.^[5]

— Isaac Newton, Letters to Bentley, 1692/3

Laplace did the obvious a century later: assume that gravity was a field propagating at a finite speed (18C) [1]. Next Poincaré realized that gravitational waves had to travel at the speed of light (1905 CE) [2]. 

The argument can be made that Quantum observations are actually Quantum INTERACTIONS. Bohr basically said this. Then (Popper-)Einstein counter-observed that if that were true, Quantum Interactions would be spooky instantaneous interactions at a distance.

Indeed.

As observed since (by many experimentalists).

This means that the “QUANTUM COLLAPSE” really happens. Conventional Quantum Theory has no description of it. It is just assumed to be INSTANTANEOUS, and that is ABSURD .

So, experimentally, there is such a notion as Quantum Collapse, and it goes faster than light. Now a simplistic, and erroneous, interpretative conclusion of Special Relativity, sauce Einstein, is that no interaction can go faster than light. The reasoning of Einstein is somewhat erroneous (he applies a formula which cannot be applied), but its strict conclusion has been enunciated as a divine principle since (although Einstein’s exact formulation was very careful, and he explicitly did not exclude absolutely the possibility of Faster Than Light, FTL). So the notion of no FLT has led physicists to not see that there is such a thing as a Quantum INTERACTION (since no interaction goes FLT, says the chorus of parrots, but something does, indeed, go FTL, then it’s not an interaction… while, their god, Einstein, himself called it an “interaction”).

Solution of this conceptual mess: pontificate that this Quantum interaction is happening at a finite speed. We already know it is much higher than the speed of light, by a multiple of 10^23.

That would seriously change the Standard Model, especially cosmologically.

A finite speed Quantum Interaction is the basic axiom of Sub Quantum Physical Reality.

Out of SQPR Dark Matter pops out effortlessly… but then Dark Matter becomes an emergent property modifying the ΛCDM Lambda Cold Dark Matter model of the universe… which is giving different local and global expansion speeds at this point….

All this can be tested experimentally. For example SQPR predicts Dark Matter, and Dark Matter is observed [4]. This being said, SQPR does not violently contradict known theories or experiments (whereas MOND, MOdified Newtonian Dynamics does), It basically conceptually curve Quantum Theory, which stays tangentially valid, just as conventional gravitation is tangentially valid relative to General Relativity…

Some may scoff about splitting hair with Quantum Physics: what is it relative to starvation in Niger for children with 12 brothers and sisters? Or relative to Dylan’s gutter poetry? But this sort of inquiry is fundamental to all thinking. Not only we learn about reality, but we also learn about how we think, because we learn about the errors of our most splendid predecessors, trying their best. Take the Uncertainty Principle: why should it be necessary? What is its proof? Well, turns out much of the “proof” is a whole system sort-of-proof: The Uncertainty Principle is true, because, if it were not our beautiful Standard Model would not work, but it does, so the UP has got to be true. It is a bit like saying that there are beautiful cathedrals in Mexico, and they resist earthquakes, therefore Bible-God exists.

In truth, as Einstein pointed out in the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox (EPR), it looks like one can know at a distance the momentum and position of an object. Well, it has long been demonstrated that we know those retrospectively. But what about directly? Could we contrive something? I have seen well known physicists chuckling, yet confusing the absence of mechanism, with a mechanism of absence. Same general concepts, different logical recipe.

Now finally some clever experimentalists have found ways around the Uncertainty Principle, well below the Standard Quantum Limit. This demonstrates that traditional Quantum Axiomatics may not be fundamental.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Laplace then found gravitational waves (the math is immediate). That did not please everybody…so he cancelled the waves from subsequent editions; Poincaré rolled them back out a century later (Einstein fanatics attribute erroneously the wave discovery to Einstein).

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[2] If gravitation went at a different speed from light, once one has realized that inertial mass was convertible in (light) energy, one could make energy out of nothing (not that this would stop ΛCDM devotees.

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[3] If two particles, A and B are entangled, acting on A will affect B without any cause penetrating the spacetime and phase space spheres around B. So the topology of spacetime and any phase space would be NON SEPARATED (non T2) in a dynamic way.

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[4] As SQPR would be a gigantic advance, it contains many potential axiomatic universes. SQPR in its simplest form uses Euclidean distance in the Euclidean (2n+1) space in which n dimensional space time is embedded. An initial objection to pilot waves models has been that they would happen in “phase space” (the basic Hilbert space which is the arena of any Quantum experiment). SQPR can hijack that objection and turn it into a virtue: a more subtle approach than Euclidean distance would be to use a limit on the number of cycles the Quantum wave can undergo (that would reduce to creating an Euclidean distance limit for the most common frequencies; so this is more general than the most simplistic SQPR theory). That cycle limit would create energy limits on the Standard Model spacetime foam well before the Planck limit kicks in. It may be the problem with the Muon magnetic moment.

DARK GALAXY (Explained?)

A giant galaxy made nearly entirely of Dark Matter has been discovered. Theories of Dark Matter proposed by people salaried for professing physics cannot explain (easily, if at all!) why there would be so much Dark Matter in one galaxy. I can. In my own theory, Dark Matter is not really matter, although matter gives birth to it, under some particular geometrical conditions. In my theory, in some geometrodynamic situations, a galaxy will churn inordinate amounts of Dark Matter quickly. So I was not surprised by the find.

There are many potential theories of Dark Matter. Most are fairly conventional. They typically hypothesize new particles (some of these new particles could come from new symmetries, such as supersymmetry). I do not see how they can predict why these particular particles appear in some places, and not others. However, the importance of location, of geometry, is a crucial feature of my own theory.

I predicate that the Quantum Interaction (copyright myself) does not have infinite range. Thus, quantum interactions, in some conditions of low mass-energy density, leave behind part of the Quantum Wave. Such debris have mass-energy, so they exert gravitational pull, but they have little else besides (most of the characteristics of the particles they were part of concentrate somewhere else).

I Can Explain This Dark Galaxy, By Changing The Foundations Of Physics. No Less.

[From the Hawaiian Gemini telescope.]

In my own theory, one can imagine that the geometry of a galaxy is, at some point extremely favorable to the creation of Dark Matter: it is just a question of dispersing the matter just so. The Dark Galaxy has 1% of the stars of our Milky Way, or less. In my theory, once Dark Matter has formed, it does not seem possible to make visible matter again with it (broken Quantum Wave debris float around like a cosmic fog).

All past science started as a mix of philosophy and science-fiction (Aristarchus, Lucretius, Giordano Bruno, Immanuel Kant, Lamarck are examples). One can only surmise it will be the same in the future, and this is supported by very good logic: guessing comes always before knowing. Those who claim that science will never be born again from philosophy and fantasy are saying that really new science will never happen again. They say that all the foundations of science are known already. So they are into predication, just like religious fanatics.

It was fashionable to say so, among physicists in the 1990s, the times of the fable known as TOE, the so-called Theory Of Everything. Shortly after this orgasm of self-satisfaction by self-appointed pontiffs, the evidence became clear that the universe’s mass-energy was mostly Dark Energy, and Dark Matter.

This is an interesting case of meta-mood shared: also in the 1990s, clever idiots (Fukuyama, etc.) claimed history had ended: a similar claim from the same period, permeating the same mood of stunted imagination. The advantage, while those who pontificated that way? They could claim they knew everything: they had become gods, living gods.

I had known about Dark Matter all along (the problem surfaced nearly a century ago). I considered it a huge problem: It held galaxies and galactic clusters, together. But maybe something had been overlooked. Meanwhile Main Stream Physics (MSP) dutifully, studiously, ignored it. For decades. Speaking of Dark matter made one despicable, a conspiracy theorist.

Another thing MSP ignored was the foundations of physics. Only the most prestigious physicists, such as Richard Feynman, could afford to repeat Einstein’s famous opinion that “nobody understands Quantum Mechanics”. I gave my intellectual life’s main axis of reflection in trying to understand what nobody wanted to understand, that nobody thought they could afford to understand, the real foundations of physics. (So doing I was forced to reflect on why it is that people do not want to understand the most fundamental things, even while professing they do. It is particularly blatant in, say, economics.)

I have long discovered that the real foundations of physics are entangled with those of mathematics (it is not just that physics, nature, is written with mathematics, as Galileo wrote; there is a dialogue between the mathematics that we invent, and the universe that we discover, they lead to each other). For example whether the infinity axiom is allowed in mathematics change the physics radically (the normalization problem of physics is solved if one removes the infinity axiom).

Right now, research at the foundations of (proper) physics is hindered by our lack of nonlinear mathematics: Quantum mechanics, as it is, is linear (waves add up in the simplest way). However the “collapse of the wave packet” is obviously nonlinear (this is why it’s outside of existing physics, from lack of math). From that Quantum collapse, when incomplete from great distances involved, comes Dark Matter. At least, so I propose. 

Patrice Ayme’

CLIMATE CHANGES: CO2, Islam, & The Eternal Return Of Fascism

Another day, another Islamist attack in France. This was “Islam de France“, as it is among all too many youth. The two (French) Islamist “martyrs” were shot dead by the BRI (Brigade d’Intervention Rapide). Armed with knives and a gun they took hostage several parishioners in a church. The 86 year old priest was made to kneel before his throat was cut. Several other elderly persons were cut. The Islamist “martyrs” were so busy filming their “heroic” deeds, that a nun was able to escape discreetly, and alerted the police. As with the latest attack in Bavaria at a music concert two days ago, the Islamist pseudo-state ISIS claimed it set it up. The area, in rural Normandy, is known as one of the most Islamized places in France, thanks to a Salafist mosque (which, if one followed Israeli methods, would have been dynamited long ago!)

No wonder Donald Trump wants “extreme vetting” of French visa applicants.

Yes, I know, it’s dreary. Yes I know, among the looming threats gathering out there, Islamism is the silliest fanatical cretinism on steroids. However, Islamism is dreadful enough to cause great dislocation, and lack of focus on the real problems. After all, it was the (de facto) pro-Islamist mood which Kanzler Merkel organized, all by herself. The reaction to this pro-Islam mood, in turn, broke the European Union’s back with Brexit (I watch plenty of German TV, and I was aghast with the let’s-embrace-Islam mood the Merkel-led authorities promoted rashly, with their naive approach… Admitting refugees (which I am for) is one thing, welcoming the mood of the religion which has caused the refugee crisis is something else: it is in an absolute contradiction).

Want to see a real threat? Something really hot and hard? Here it is, spiking up, as I said it would, so long ago: 

Climate Changes: CO2, Islam, & The Eternal Return Of Fascism. Temperature In 2016 Is Exceeding All Expectations Scientists Who Are Paid To Sound Nice Officially Expected.

[Image source: Dr. Stephan Rahmstorf. Data source: NASA GISS. Data 1880 CE to April 2016.]

What is the reason for this sharp spike? Fundamentally the global rise in temperature is driven by the man-made GreenHouse Gases (GHG: CO2, CH4, NOx, ClFs, etc.). The GHGs block infrared radiation more than normal air does, trapping heat in the biosphere. This “climate forcing” warms up the lower atmosphere (and cools the irrelevant stratosphere!) The GHG density is increasing at a steady pace from human industry. But the resulting warming, and thus the GHG emissions have clearly now started to self feed. (How do we know this? From the divergence of the graphs. More on this another day.)

What of the change of mental climate Islam brings? Is it benevolent as the proselytizers of Islam claim, a “religion of peace”? Or do we need to read what is really going on, and find out why 18 year olds with criminals pasts, and no education to speak of, know Islam way better that judicial and legislating authorities in the West claim to?

Those who fight for Islam get “special reward”:

Quran (4:95) – “Not equal are those believers who sit (at home) and receive no hurt, and those who strive and fight in the cause of Allah with their goods and their persons. Allah hath granted a grade higher to those who strive and fight with their goods and persons than to those who sit (at home). Unto all (in Faith) Hath Allah promised good: But those who strive and fight Hath He distinguished above those who sit (at home) by a special reward.”

Those who don’t help God, go to hell:

Quran (9:39) – “If ye go not forth God will afflict you with a painful doom…”

When fighting the unbelievers, God hates a coward and throws him to hell:

Quran (8:15-16) – “O ye who believe! when ye meet the Unbelievers in hostile array, never turn your backs to them. If any do turn his back to them on such a day – unless it be in a stratagem of war, or to retreat to a troop (of his own)- he draws on himself the wrath of Allah, and his abode is Hell,- an evil refuge (indeed)!”

Those who die, fighting for God, go to paradise:

Quran (3:169-170) – “Think not of those who are slain in Allah’s way as dead. Nay, they live, finding their sustenance in the presence of their Lord; They rejoice in the bounty provided by Allah: And with regard to those left behind, who have not yet joined them (in their bliss), the (Martyrs) glory in the fact that on them is no fear, nor have they (cause to) grieve.”

As usual, the preceding is confirmed, and amplified, in numerous parts of the Hadith and the Sira:

Muslim (20:4678) – It has been reported on the authority of Jabir that a man said: “Messenger of Allah, where shall I be if I am killed?” He replied: “In Paradise.” The man threw away the dates he had in his hand and fought until he was killed (i. e. he did not wait until he could finish the dates).

Abu Dawud (14:2515) – I asked the Prophet (Peace Be Upon Him): Who are in Paradise? He replied: “Prophets are in Paradise, martyrs are in Paradise.”

If you are young, depressed, and believe in the preceding, and surrounded with what preachers and sacred texts tell you are unbelievers who deserve to die, what would you do? The answer is all too obvious.

I was watching a top, senior, just retired, French judge,  and she calmly pontificated that youth who committed assassinations of unbelievers in the name of Islam perverted Islam. Well, if you read Islamist sacred texts, you can judge the judge. I judge that judges like that, who pontificate that fanatical Jihadists “pervert Islam”  are themselves perverse idiots and could well be viewed to be a deeper source of terrorism than the youth who commits such assassinations, to start with. Yes, some will say I am out-Trumping Trump. But think about it: the white judge just claim that Islam, Literal Islam, is perfect, and youth was perverse. OK, then the judges say that the quotes above are perfect, while accusing those who act on them of what, exactly?

Another angle on the same problem: imagine that a youthful would-be assassin confronts a judge. The judge tells the youth to be less perverse and to follow Islam more closely? In the case of the assassination of the priest this happened precisely with one of the two 19-year-old Islamist assassin: the youth opined that he would be a better Muslim, follow the Qur’an better. So he was judged mature enough by a lady judge to be freed from jail, where he had been for eight months after being arrested in Turkey for trying to slip into Syria.

The climate in the West has been that Islam was good, whereas poor youth was bad, uneducated, not worth of correct schooling and employment. Verily, the truth is the other way around: Islam has been good for plutocracy, and orienting, actively or indirectly, youth towards Islam, Literal, Wahhabist, Salafist Islam, a perversion.

***

When Climate Changes, Species Go, And Smarter Ones Thrive:

Dinosaurs, pterosaurs, mesosaurs, plesiosaurs, and the like were all what some now call “mesotherms”: their temperature was in-between. They depended too much upon the balmy Jurassic and then Cretaceous climate to insure their own temperature. When the climate cooled, they faltered, and then disappeared. Whereas the hot “endotherms” (self-warm), mammals and birds, thrived.

A change of climate changes which species thrive, or even exist. It is the same with ruling systems of ideas, such as religions, and the mental climates they bring.

Islam created a wonderful climate among desert nomads. Prior to it, Arabs were at each others’ throats, and killed girls to limit the population explosion. Meanwhile, the Arabs were fully exposed, and frustrated, by the great civilizations swirling around them: Ethiopian, Yemenite, Egyptian, Zoroastrian, and then the formidable Greco-Roman civilization, and its partial descendant, the Persian Sassanid empire. However, soon after 605 CE things changed: a formidable war between Sassanids (Zoroastrian Persians) and “Rome”, turned suddenly to Persia’s advantage (the Persian Shah In Shah was all the bolder as the Romans had put him back on his throne earlier: a case of back-stabbing).

It is a long story, and I want to tell it (but will have to do so some other time). It is a matter of climate. In more ways than one.

***

Mental Climate Catastrophes Brought Islam:

To understand the change of species which Islam brought, one has to understand the anti-intellectual climate which brought a deep mental freeze in “Rome” (Constantinople), and the influence the resulting refugee crisis of fleeing Roman intellectuals had in Persia. Then a terrible storm arose: an all-out war between Constantinople and Persia, of an extraordinary violence, back and forth, like a tsunami going one way, and then the other.

Thanks to a crazed out Persian emperor, Persia made the greatest invasion of the Mediterranean basin in 1,000 years, even conquering all the way to Libya, something it had never done before. By 622 CE, the situation was so desperate, that emperor Heraclius thought of evacuating the Roman capital to Carthage. Just when the enormous reforms he had made back to a citizen army and other reconstitution of ancient Greco-Roman traditions, changed the climate completely in the Roman empire. That change of mood mobilized the population, and enabled to reverse the military tide.

***

Why Islam Swept All:

Islam is a war religion. As simple as that. It went much further that way that Roman Catholic Orthodox had (= Christianism imposed by the Roman state, now headed from Constantinople and Milan). Christianism celebrated a “Lord” mimicking Constantine’s behavior. That included the summary execution of the son… and Verses of the Sword:  Luke 19; 27 is unambiguous. The mythic Jesus Christ supposedly said:

“But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

It could not be any clearer. A total negation of the state of law. A proclamation of human sacrifice. Yes, when thinking of religion, remember this: human sacrifice is about having a religious reason for killing others.

“Religious” means non-legal. “Legal” does not just mean legal in the Roman sense, but legal in the ethological sense.

Hence the imposition of (fascist, mono-dictatorial, lethal, jealous, imperious) Christianism, between Roman emperors Constantine and Theodosius (both initially generals, reigning absolutely on the entire empire) changed the climate completely. Instead of having a state of law, one passed to a state of caprice of the emperor, sultan, prophet or caliph at the head. Or, as Constantine modestly depicted himself “thirteenth apostle”.

This anti-intellectual climate appeared just when a greater intellectual activity was called for. This is what generally happens, it’s no accident.

Meanwhile, to the south-east, the Arabs saw all of this. They saw the Persians invade Yemen and seize Aden. They saw Rome nearly collapse, and, while Muhammad was fighting Mecca from Yathrib (= Medina), from 622 Ce to 630 CE, he saw the fabulous Roman counter-attack, and Persia collapse in coups, civil wars, queens reigning for a year or two, top generals assassinated…

The Roman nadir was in 622 CE. In 630 CE, Muhammad was religious dictator of Mecca. As a prophet, he could re-organize the Qur’an, and he did. Exit the kind, loving and tolerant Islam. However, quite a bit of the Meccan religious arsenal was preserved, including perhaps the Satanic Verses, and certainly the Moon as a symbol, Mecca as a religious center, complete with meteorite and recycled Kabaa.

So Muhammad changed the climate, but not too much where not needed. Instead he led a crusade of united warriors to the north, to attack the Romans (who smirked and avoided contact, as they had just concluded peace with the Sassanid Persians, reconstituting the old borders… and had decided to spurn Monophysite Arabs).

Kill or fight the enemy, go to paradise? What better mental climate to impose an empire?

What is sure is that, if we don’t kill the CO2 rise pretty soon, the notion of paradise will change. And that this Literal Islam, Salafism, Wahhabism, Wall Street compatible Islam, thing is an un-amusing distraction.

***

Nothing new under the sun; civilizations can die quickly:

1,500 years ago, or so, the mighty Moche civilization, along the coast of Peru knew a drought and a super El Nino (certainly amplified by natural climate change, probably of volcanic origin).

The Moche survived initially, but their religion became all-consuming (full of human sacrifices and pyramids). It is the usual reaction: when a society gets stressed, it reacts as a baboon troop: everybody of one mind, behind the chief (right now Trump).

In a civilization, if more than one fascist movement appear (say the Communists at the same time as the Nazis, as in Germany in the 1920s; or Syria now), civil strife ensues. This is what happened to the Moche, and in such a violent manner, that the civilization collapsed.

Something similar, a super drought in the Seventh Century, accompanied by civil war and ecological devastation, nearly eradicated the Mayan civilization, thereafter a shadow of its former self (until the Spaniards showed up, 6 centuries later).

***

“Hydraulic Dictatorships” And, Or Fascist Over-Reaction?

The basic problem of the zone where Islam festers, has been ecological. A massive, epochal drought, tied to the interglacial cycle, started more than 6,000 years ago, triggering the Egyptian civilization. The drought forced the Egyptians to get along with agriculture, in a very long and narrow valley, and vast associated oases, where hydraulic was crucial. Fernand Braudel rightly introduced the notion of “Hydraulic Dictatorship”. And the reasoning is obvious: big hydraulics means big society, armies of workers, relative wealth, hence big army to protect the whole thing, etc. So I supported that reasoning (which I had developed on my own). However, I am starting to have second thoughts: after all, many Western societies, including some Greek city-states, and Rome for much of her history, and the various regimes which descended from the Franks/French, including England, did not fall into the same pattern (nor did Egypt, mostly, for that matter).

After all, the entire region was long the richest in the world, where many Neolithic and civilization basic techniques were discovered, invented and blossomed. And the climate got desperately dry 6,000 years ago, when the deserts became basically uninhabitable. Still, the area was at the very forefront of civilization until the massive Celto-Greco-Roman (“The West”) took over, starting 23 centuries ago. Some of the degeneracy occurred before Islam, or even just before the Hellenistic civilization of the Trojan War took off. However Babylonians and later, the Achaemenid empire still made civilizational innovations. And yet the fact the Achaemenids’ greatness depended mostly upon one man, Darius The Great a sort of Zoroastrian Muhammad, with more brains, experience and statesmanship, reveals the truth: the Middle Earth had become way too fascist already 3,000 years ago, used as it was, by then, upon depending on just one individual. A climate of intellectual fascism had come to rule. (It’s no coincidence that the monotheism of Abrahamism, blind obedience to the Lord, mauling all and any human decency, came to fester there.)

So what could be going on? The mental climate may have over-reacted to the increasingly desertic situation. A climate of intellectual fascism had come to rule, and rightly so. Yet, in my view, there was an overshooting of the fascist mood. A bit like an immune system over-reacts, and a lethal auto-immune disease develops. True, strong government were needed, associated to strong religions, such as Judaism, and Constantine’s “Catholicism”. A bit of the Dark Side is often necessary. But Islam ended changing the mental climate way too far to the Dark Side (contemplate the quotes above).

Political and intellectual fascism can self feed, through religious effect (= the madness of the crowds), similarly to the self-feeding of the climate we are witnessing now (the ever crazier ending of the Nazi regime is a case in point! The more desperate the military situation was getting, the more insanely lethal the Nazis became, including against their own ilk!) Thus, as fascism arises from bad situations, as a healthy, and most effective defense reflex, it can bring in an even worse situation, through its own actions, which, in turn, ask for even more fascist action. Just as, the higher the temperature, the more methane and carbon dioxide released, hence more greenhouse, more temperature, thus more methane and carbon dioxide, etc…

The climate is changing, whether we want it or not. We have to do as the Egyptians did, 6,000 years ago: change minds, moods and civilization. We have to do much because now history is moving at the fastest clip ever. And history shows that civilizations which lasted many centuries, or even millennia, can collapse in days, and commonly do so in years.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Only Philosophy Can Reverse Civilization Collapse

World population is presently exploding. How many human beings were there before dogs became in wide use? In 35,000 BCE, it is estimated that Earth had three million human beings. Before the rise of cities, in 10,000 BCE, world population had reached 15 million. The rise of civilization was enabled by a technological explosion, the discovery, invention and intense use intense use of science, technology, writing, genetic engineering (dogs, cattle, goats, chicken, cats, wheat, rye, millet, rice, beans, potatoes, sweet potatoes, corn, etc.), irrigation, fuel, etc.

Civilizations rise when they find new technological tricks to dominate and exploit their environments, be it the human, and, or, natural, environments. Those tricks exhaust resources after a while, bringing stress, thus war (against people, and, or, nature). War activates the fascist instinct, bringing the rise of plutocracy (as observed nowadays), and complete cretinism (also known as theocracy). This makes the collapse worse. Civilization can be destroyed by fate. The most famous case is a civilization we owe so much to: Crete. It was devastated by one of the worst volcanic explosion in 25,000 years (as it tried to recover, it was hit by a “plague”, according to Greek historians). 

Cretan Girls Leaped Over Bulls In The Nude

Crete is part of our cultural inheritance. Today, the status of women depends upon the breakthrough ancient paintings (from the Knossos Palace, above), some 40 centuries old, depict. The status of women was high in Crete. Women could be in authority, for 2,000 years. Women were then to be subjugated in Greece, for 3,500 years (yes, time flies, these are big numbers: civilizational setbacks can last millennia).

Europe is named after Crete, an acknowledgment. The goddess Europa was from Crete (and one of her sons was the famous king Minos, after whom Minoan Civilization is named).

An example of self-imploding collapse is the Maya. The Maya were, for millennia, an extremely advanced civilization which seemed to be on its way to accomplish on its own something similar to the ascending superiority of Middle Earth (my term for the Mediterranean plus Egypt-Middle East-Arabia plus India area).

However, a terrible century long drought starting in the Seventh Century struck the Maya who proved unable to manage the crisis, to which they added terrible wars (the worst involving a queen, in the leading role, not just the usual demonic males). All Maya cities were destroyed. When the Spaniards landed, eight centuries later, the Maya were just shadows of their former selves (yet, they proved to be tough customers).

As Jared Diamond (2005, in his book “Collapse”) wrote, one can only be struck by “the disappearance of between 90 and 99% of the Maya population after A.D. 800 …and the disappearance of kings, Long Count calendars, and other complex political and cultural institutions.” Not just that, but much more importantly, the giant irrigation system of the Maya, with its dams and canals, was one of the world’s largest, ever: it can still be seen from space. When that centuries old irrigation system was left in disrepair, civilization became history.

In the close-by very extensive highlands of central Mexico, many powerful states also rose to high levels of power and prosperity, only to rapidly collapse. Teotihuacan (the sixth largest city in the world in the Seventh Century) and Monte Alban among those to experience dramatic collapse, with populations decline of at least 20–25% from their peak within a couple of generations (Tainter, 1988).

Civilization collapses come in many guises. Egypt cycled through more than two dozen dynasties, and a couple of century long occupations, tweaking itself every time. However, in the end it was unable to stay an independent, original civilization, undergoing thereafter 2,000 years of subjugation. 

The present civilization was born from a near-collapse. And was born thanks to a philosophical reset.

Indeed, in the case of the Greco-Roman empire, full collapse was avoided. The Franks rebooted Greco-Roman civilization, with their own Germano-Christian sauce, by the early Fifth Century (defeat of Goths who were ejected from Gaul, 507 CE, thanks to the battle of Vouille’). This is completely clear, when one inspects known facts, battles, laws, and the Storia Francorum of bishop Gregory of Tours.

The truth of what happened was masked by severe setbacks which were endured in the Sixth Century, under (Constantinople based) Roman emperor Justinian: Christian madness made Greco-Roman intellectuals flee to Persia (!), while a terrible plague (“Justinian Plague”), and a mysterious cataclysm (asteroid, volcano?) struck Earth’s climate. (The reality of what happned under the Franks was also masked by French Revolutionary propaganda, which was anxious to put all and any “ancient regime” in a bad light, and the usual Anglo-Saxon propaganda, anxious to disparage its absurdly French origins in all and any way.)

Differently from the Maya, the Franks centered in, or around Paris, and the Romans in Constantinople, were able to adapt to the catastrophes of the Fourth (Christianization, Gothic invasion), Fifth (Germanic invasions of 406 CE; then, the Huns), Sixth (as related above), and Seventh Centuries (dramatic war with Persia, followed by the surprise attack of the god crazed Arabs).

Both then defeated in the Eight Century those fanatics of war who had attacked like carnivorous locusts.   

The official “Renovatio Imperii”, the Renovation of Rome, was made formal when Carlus Magnus (Charlemagne) was endowed with the sole “Imperator Romanorum” (Imperator of the Romans) title in 800 CE, an imperial tradition which went on with say Otton II in 962 CE, and for more than a millennium (formally, Napoleon I, as leader of Francia was entitled, the Roman way, to grab back the title for himself).

Greco-Roman civilization incorporated the Cretan, Egyptian-Sumerian, Phoenician civilizations (with more than a touch of Etruscan). Then other Middle Eastern elements were included (Mythra, Great Mother Cult, Judaism, etc.) Western civilization incorporated even more: the fierce love of freedom, and women, of the Germans, and the generalized tolerance and open mindedness of the Franks (by 600 CE all citizens were Franks, and, within a generation the slave trade was outlawed by the Imperium; that latter fact was a world’s first). Interestingly the Franco-Roman synthesis incorporated traits which Crete had, but that the Hellenes had lost (for example maximum sexual equality, in at least some respects: there were female Cretan matadors, playing with ferocious giant bulls).

Conclusion? Even in an horrendous situation (the decline of the Roman empire, under fascism, theocracy, barbarity, invasions, ecological collapse, plague, unfathomable impact of a giant explosion somewhere), fresh new ideas, arising from shock philosophy can turn things around. The Franks demonstrated this thoroughly. The Chinese also did, on a more modest scale… Until Mao came, and unleashed the Dark Side onto fossilized Chinese thought, habits, and a philosophy, Confucianism, which had ruled for 26 centuries, as the symbol of ultimate wisdom (which it was not).

To repeat slowly: the Franks introduced the following reforms, in rough chronological order:

1. The rule of warriors bound to common sense and religious tolerance (in complete contradiction with the Catholic terror, just prior). This was illustrated by Clovis’ quip that, had his Franks been there, Christ would never have been crucified. On the surface, it’s as if Clovis had understood nothing of Christianity. Indeed it looks as if Clovis had not understood that God wanted to be crucified, just to visit a guilt complex on his followers, same as with the story of the snake and the apple. Most probably, Clovis understood all too well< and made a show that he was firmly intend to violate God’s law. In any case, under the Franks, Judaism, Paganism, etc were freely practiced. Christianism with a human, even Frankish face (to the Vatican’s rage).
2. The implementation of a modern, much less sexist, non-discriminatory legal system, applying to all by 600 CE, the Lex Salica, on top of Justinian’s refurbishing of Roman law. By 600 CE, all citizens of the Imperium Francorum were Franks (in a dramatic contrast with the situation in Spain, where the Visigoths applied Visigothic law just to themselves; same in italy where the Lombards, another type of Germans, were above Roman law)
3. The outlawing of slavery (starting around 650 CE).
4. Nationalization  of the Catholic Church, constitution of the largest professional army since Republican Rome, to face the humongous Islamist invasions of 721-745 CE. Destruction of the army of the Arab Caliphate (which thus collapsed in 750 CE, crushing Bin Laden and other Islamists forever thereafter).    

All these reforms were of a philosophical nature: the Vatican discussed excommunicating Charles Martel, for expropriating the Church, but concluded it was safer not to debate with a Hammer. When the Franks formed, named, and made a bishop, within three weeks, from an illiterate Frankish warrior, they were sending a message to the Vatican about who was the boss: secularism, not superstition.

Civilization survived from smarts, not just swords.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Lord Ridley’s Rule

Ridiculous, But Lethal, Lord Ridley Riddled With Holes

Plutocrats are everywhere. Everywhere that matters. You won’t find them in the 99% parts of town they feel are bad, you find them where opinion is molded, the MSM, the Media Sadistic Manipulations. Either they are writing, or, better, controlling the writers.

I always think that I am as cynical as one can get. Yet, I keep on being surprised, as I discover people I thought were honorable, being tightly wound with the worst thinking. I want to share my latest surprise with my readership.

What Lord Bankster Ridley Does Not Want The Commons To Know

Long ago, I came across a scientifically oriented writer, Matt Ridley. He wrote well. I innocently bought other Ridley’s books. A curious fly innocently exploring a sticky web. However I found Ridley’s science increasingly turning to sophistry, over-complicated (“The Red Queen” hypothesis was presented as key to evolution, something out of “Alice in Wonderland”). And Ridley was cocksure about his very restricted vision of evolution. How could one be so sure to explain so much with so little?

Being cocksure about very little explaining everything, is a feature of the intellectual fascists. It’s basically their definition.  

I was always a Lamarckian (just as Darwin himself). I always believed that Lamarckism was too good a mechanism for evolution, for evolution not to have stumbled on it. Although I understood perfectly well the reasoning of Jacques Monod in “La Chance et La Necessite’”, I pushed it to its logical conclusion: natural selection was not just natural selection of genomes, but natural selections of inheritable geometries, and a selection of the selection mechanisms themselves.

So Ridley’s bombastics struck me as the simplistic self-obsession of one who did not know too much, but felt he owned the world (how right would I turn out to be!). I forgot about him. In recent years, it turned out that this vision that genes (sensu stricto) were everything was very far from the whole story.

Now epigenetics, the intelligence of genetics, is established, and just warming up.

Libertarians believe that all government is bad, except for the army. Everything else ought to be bought and sold, somehow that would be fairer, more clever, more efficient, get the animal juices flowing for the best. An extreme libertarian who earns his life well, working for the health industry in the USA, recently tried to persuade me that, if only there were markets, all would be well.

My libertarian friend started to sing the praises of Matt Ridley, who he told me, had demonstrated the superiority of markets, in a book called “The Rational Optimist”. I found that weird. Matt Ridley? Really? Was not just Ridley a zoology student? How did he get into writing a bible libertarians swear by? What a riddle.

Then there was this Wall Street Journal Weekend section, full pages of it.  It was entitled: “The World’s Resources Aren’t Running Out.”

The subtitle, and basic reasoning? “Ecologists worry that the world’s resources come in fixed amounts that will run out, but we have broken through such limits again and again.”

For those who know about history, this master idea was beyond absurd. It was counter factual.

For example, we have run out of Tasmanians, down to the very last one. OK, the politically correct Wall Street thinkers would probably point out Tasmanians were not a resource. In any case, historians know that, out of the 99.9% of the 10,000 or so civilizations out there, which have collapsed, most did, either because they had run out of resources, or because a resource collapse had caused a war. that destroyed them.

That was even true of the Mongol Empire, which in turn annihilated several civilizations: after Genghis Khan had domesticated the half dozen Mongol tribes, the resulting population explosion, deprivation of killing each other, threatening dearth of resources, led to an immediate expansion into most of Eurasia (and all of China). (Thanks to new military methods, and superlative training… That only the Franks could resist.)

Once, a Roman emperor from Constantinople visited Rome, for the first time in centuries. Rome was where the Roman empire had originated, and the Roman Senate still convened.

In July 663 CE, Roman emperor Constans II visited Rome, and ordered all (“omniae”) the metallic roofs of the Eternal City to be stripped, including that of the Church of Mary and the Martyrs (as the Pantheon was then called). Copper and bronze was melted to make Greek fire machines, the gold (the roofs were of gilded bronze) to make coins, and lead to make sling pellets. That was part of a desperate attempt to stop the Arabs.

The brute truth is that the Roman Empire ran out of metals. Romans had exhausted their mines. All over. The Roman metal crisis caused both the inflation crisis that started in the late Second Century, and carried over all the way to 663 CE.

A century later, the Franks (Imperium Francorum) would solve that problem by conquering Eastern Europe, which only imperators Caesar and Trajan had the guts and brains to try to invade (Caesar was assassinated on the eve of his departure; Trajan, though reached through Romania all the way to Moldavia, 2C).

The next huge resource crisis was in the Fourteenth Century, when a situation similar to what we have now developed: an exploding population, a resource crisis (no more wood), and an ecological crisis (“Little Ice Age” plus human devastation).

Then, though, Europe knew what to do, what the Franks had done: keep a strong state, adapt the laws, develop new technology… and be ferocious (that, unfortunately also brought war). Being ferocious extended to the death penalty for those settling in regions where forests were supposed to regrow (in mountainous areas, deforestation means losing the soil).

But here was the Wall Street Journal, rewriting history with superficial, not to say superstitious, feel good, blabber:

How many times have you heard that we humans are “using up” the world’s resources, “running out” of oil, “reaching the limits” of the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with pollution or “approaching the carrying capacity” of the land’s ability to support a greater population? The assumption behind all such statements is that there is a fixed amount of stuff—metals, oil, clean air, land—and that we risk exhausting it through our consumption…

But here’s a peculiar feature of human history: We burst through such limits again and again. After all, as a Saudi oil minister once said, the Stone Age didn’t end for lack of stone. Ecologists call this “niche construction”—that people (and indeed some other animals) can create new opportunities for themselves by making their habitats more productive in some way. Agriculture is the classic example of niche construction: We stopped relying on nature’s bounty and substituted an artificial and much larger bounty.

Economists call the same phenomenon innovation. What frustrates them about ecologists is the latter’s tendency to think in terms of static limits. Ecologists can’t seem to see that when whale oil starts to run out, petroleum is discovered, or that when farm yields flatten, fertilizer comes along, or that when glass fiber is invented, demand for copper falls.

That frustration is heartily reciprocated. Ecologists think that economists espouse a sort of superstitious magic called “markets” or “prices” to avoid confronting the reality of limits to growth. The easiest way to raise a cheer in a conference of ecologists is to make a rude joke about economists.”

An “artificial and much larger bounty” in agriculture? Just ask the Irish, who live next door to the ignorant blabbermouth who wrote the preceding. The 1841 census showed that there were 8,175,124 people living in the four provinces of Connacht, Leinster, Munster and Ulster. The Irish thrived on potatoes. After the potatoes died, from Potato Blight, caused by a fungus Phytophthora infestans, so did the Irish. The population was soon half of what it used to be.

Anyway, who was that ignorant fellow who wrote those idiocies for the Wall Street Journal?

He confessed that:

“I have lived among both tribes. I studied various forms of ecology in an academic setting for seven years and then worked at the Economist magazine for eight years. When I was an ecologist (in the academic sense of the word, not the political one, though I also had antinuclear stickers on my car), I very much espoused the carrying-capacity viewpoint—that there were limits to growth. I nowadays lean to the view that there are no limits because we can invent new ways of doing more with less.”

I, I, I, I… We can invent? We will just ask the Lords overlording in their castles to innovate more with less?

Matt Ridley, because, of course, it is Matt Ridley who had written these mellifluous inanities, and hundreds of similar articles all over (as I found out, to my dismay), pursues:

“This disagreement goes to the heart of many current political issues and explains much about why people disagree about environmental policy. In the climate debate, for example, pessimists see a limit to the atmosphere’s capacity to cope with extra carbon dioxide without rapid warming. So a continuing increase in emissions if economic growth continues will eventually accelerate warming to dangerous rates. But optimists see economic growth leading to technological change that would result in the use of lower-carbon energy. That would allow warming to level off long before it does much harm.”

About eight million people killed a year: that’s what Ridley calls “little harm”. What would be big harm? A tax on hereditary wealth?

Hey Ridley! Ever heard of acid? Half of the new CO2 dumped by humans into the atmosphere, turns into acid presently. It’s true that the atmosphere could globally warm five degrees, and all that would happen is that a few billion people would be under water, but being under acid is something else entirely.

Caviar would not be served on the tables of the great Lords anymore, because sturgeons would have dissolved.

More seriously, accountants are already finding that about half a million people a year are dying from global warming already. Aside from higher winds, higher flooding, widely expected, is indeed occurring. Just this year, precipitations greater than all records were registered in Great Britain and the Balkans. Recent massive flooding in Australia even lowered world sea level (as the water had nowhere to go: there are no rivers in the middle of Australia, where it usually never rains).

Yet Matt Ridley maniacally pursues:

“Until about 10 years ago, it was reasonable to expect that natural gas might run out in a few short decades and oil soon thereafter. If that were to happen, agricultural yields would plummet, and the world would be faced with a stark dilemma: Plow up all the remaining rain forest to grow food, or starve. 

But thanks to fracking and the shale revolution, peak oil and gas have been postponed. They will run out one day, but only in the sense that you will run out of Atlantic Ocean one day if you take a rowboat west out of a harbor in Ireland. Just as you are likely to stop rowing long before you bump into Newfoundland, so we may well find cheap substitutes for fossil fuels long before they run out.”

This is wrong in several lethal ways.

First, fossil fuel pollution already kills seven million a year already, and no market will correct that, as this mass smothering is the result of connivance between governments and polluters.

But, obviously, killing people is not a factor for the incomparable Mr. Ridley. It’s just the cost of doing business, apparently.

It is far from clear that fracking shale and other rocks is not augmenting the ecological crisis. Contrarily to what Obama has been saying, if fracking leaks more than 3% methane, it’s worse than coal, as a contributor of the greenhouse effect (there is proof of massive CH4 leakage).

Another problem is that fracking works economically if and only if oil stays above 60 dollars per barrel. The very fact fracking is “profitable” means that we have a terrible problem.

To say that peak oil and gas have been postponed is disinformation. Peak CHEAP oil is passed. That’s all what matters economically. (And it would be way worse if “externalities were accounted, as they ought to be.)

Matt Ridley then go on to explain that we will not run out of anything important that: “The economist and metals dealer Tim Worstall gives the example of tellurium, a key ingredient…” Yes, getting the advice from a plutocrat trading precious metals goes a long way on the path to wisdom.

In plutocracy, plutocrats define wisdom.

Matt Ridley takes his readers for complete idiots: “Or take phosphorus, an element vital to agricultural fertility. The richest phosphate mines, such as on the island of Nauru in the South Pacific, are all but exhausted. Does that mean the world is running out? No: There are extensive lower grade deposits, and if we get desperate, all the phosphorus atoms put into the ground over past centuries still exist, especially in the mud of estuaries. It’s just a matter of concentrating them again.”

If we get desperate, we could just get plenty of little slaves to fetch the phosphorus atoms in the estuaries, with their little fingers. Better: if we got even more desperate, we could use the slaves themselves as fertilizers.

What’s wrong there with Ridley’s asinine logic, is that extracting takes energy. Given enough energy, we can do a lot of things: fly to the closest Super Earth, establish a colony there, crash a million water bearing comets into Mars for warmth and water. We could even use super colliders to fabricate fundamental elements, including phosphorus and tellurium.

Cheap energy is what we are running out of. We are taking between pincers. One pincer is the exhaustion of resources (hence ever more expensive energy, hence fracking, hence coal), the other is the poisoning, acidification, smothering and warming of the planet.

Ridley is an adept of the Big Lie technique:

“In 1972, the ecologist Paul Ehrlich of Stanford University came up with a simple formula… the damage done to Earth increases the more people there are, the richer they get and the more technology they have.

Many ecologists still subscribe to this doctrine, which has attained the status of holy writ in ecology. But the past 40 years haven’t been kind to it. In many respects, greater affluence and new technology have led to less human impact on the planet, not more.”

So, Ridley tells us, implicitly, the increasing acidity, warming and rising of the oceans, the increasing mercury in the fish, the nearly ten millions killed by fossil fuels, each year, are not happening.

Where does Matt Ridley belongs to? The mental asylum? Make it more rather like jail.

Indeed, who is Matt Ridley?

Matt Ridley is not a nice guy. He just plays on TV, and TED, for millions of adoring fans. Matt Ridley is not just a student in zoology. Matt Ridley is not just a guy with many best sellers below his belt. Matt Ridley is not just a guy who can employ guys to write books for him. He just has to make the right phone call. To a number of servants.

Matt Ridley is a Lord.

Literally.

And not a small, garden variety one.

Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley, Deputy Lieutenant, Fellow Royal Society of Letters, Fellow of the Academy of Medical Sciences (born 7 February 1958), is a British “journalist” who has written several popular science books. He is also a businessman and a Conservative member of the House of Lords.

Such people own the world. They are the owners. Most people at the top of British society have been there for more than 450 years, recent studies have shown.

Such people will tell you whatever allows their class to pursue their rule, through mass hypnotism.

Matt Ridley was chairman of the UK bank Northern Rock from 2004 to 2007. Under Ridley’s rule Northern Rock experienced the first run on a British bank in 150 years. The bank had to be bailed out by the UK government. Thus the People of Great Britain had to pay for the nationalisation of Northern Rock.

(Nationalization is more honest than just giving the money to the banksters, that being the preferred method. Northern Rock was nationalized by PM Brown, but then the plutocratic owners of the world realized that the Peoples did not understand a thing about all this financial stuff, so they just requested governments to fork the money over to them, without bothering with transferring ownership title to the People.)

Ridley has been inundated with honors, on both sides of the Atlantic. Academic institutions love him. He has chaired many institutions.

Ridley is also part of the British government in the largest sense, as a hereditary Peer and member of the House of Lords from the Conservative Party. In that sense, he is one of the overlords of the global plutocracy.

Ridley rules, you commoners, with your pathetic little Internet, kneel to his ideas. How can you beat the exposure of Lord Ridley, all over the Main Stream Media, books and the Internet?

It’s just like magic: you are born, and you get a castle, a title, land, money, you head one of the world’s largest financial institution, as his your hereditary right, plunder it, and while being one of the top pundits at The Economist, and the Wall Street Journal. You get a world-wide following of adoring fans. You bask in their groveling idiocy.

Such individuals do not just overlord the British. They overlord the world. They are the hereditary members of the true world global government. The argument that all those Lords belonged to jail, will seem obvious someday.

As the CO2 parts per million augment, so do the poisonous imbecilities that the Main Stream Media, in a generalized sense, keeps on fumigating public opinion with. It’s hard to know what’s worse.

Patrice Aymé

GASSING EARTH: Tipping Point Passed!

CO2: NOT JUST HOT AIR ECONOMICS.

Warning: The essay below demonstrates, from published official data, that NON LINEAR EFFECTS are now ACCELERATING the CO2 greenhouse. This is no theory, but data that I observe. This is the major tipping point experts feared. It’s here, now. Weirdly I am the first to observe this catastrophic evidence. 

We are making war to the biosphere. We are trying to kill it (biocide?). Gassing Earth with CO2. Calling this atrocity “climate change” is more than a silly euphemism. It’s disinformation.

True information: the bath is heating up. Here is the global heat content of the ocean, incomparably greater than that of the atmosphere.

Global Warming Is Accelerating

Self satisfied frogs croak happily in the simmering heat until they croak for good. Speaking of the stupid, loud and mosquito inclined, a deafening chorus from all over richly rewarded pseudo-science has recently claimed that global warming had stalled, or that the climate was less “susceptible” to increasing CO2 than previously thought.

The graph above shows that those people are either paid too much, or as stupid as the frogs they mimic so well. Unable to deny the greenhouse, they focus suddenly on atmospheric heat content, as if that was the main problem (it’s not, by a very long shot!)

One can see, in the graph above, that the global heat content of the biosphere is clearly not just augmenting, but doing so faster than ever.

Another remark of mine of TREMENDOUS importance, and you read here first. Look at the graph above carefully. And then look at the CO2 graph below, just as carefully. Compare the graphs. What do you see? The horror! The HEAT CONTENT GRAPH accelerates FASTER after 1990 than the CO2 GRAPH!!!!

Thus there is now evidence that NON LINEAR EFFECTS ARE GETTING IN GEAR. Heat is increasing faster than CO2 now! Tipping points have been passed, the heat is growing by ITSELF, beyond human input.

Non Linear HORROR: CO2 Augmenting SLOWER Than Global Biospheric Heat Content!

[Technical math remark, consecutive to readers’ misunderstanding: I have a math background as one high as one can get; so, obviously I am not making the grotesque mistake of comparing the overall slopes, as the scale of the y-axes are arbitrary. What I am doing is more subtle, and that maybe why the NON LINEAR TIPPING POINT was not noticed before: I was trained as a research mathematician, not as a cloud watcher.

I am not comparing the overall slopes of one graph with the other, but the changes of slope after 1990, of one graph relative to the other. The global ocean heat content graph clearly accelerates so much after 1990 that it adopts a steeper trendline; one does not have such a feature on the CO2 graph. So one can say, supposing that the latter drives the former (that sounds intellectually fair), that it has been driving it much more since 1990. End of the high school level mathematical analysis. More details & answers to objections can be found in the comments!] 

So fossil burning is launching the avalanche, but the avalanche is also growing by itself, that’s what comparing the three graphs above shows.

OK, now for some elementary school math. The mass of the top 2000 meters of the ocean is 2 (total oceanic surface relative to continental surface) x 200 (mass of 2000 meters of water relative to atmosphere) = 400 times that of the atmosphere. The excess heat injected since 1990 in the upper 2000 meters of oceans is roughly equivalent to one billion times the energy of the Hiroshima bomb (personal computation). Yes, the inflection point when non linear amplification of CO2 started was in 1990 (look at the first graph ).

The core economic issue of our time is the alarming CO2 curve. That CO2 curve is threatening to become an exponential. CO2 is augmenting by (nearly) 1% a year. CO2 concentration has reached 400 parts per million. If one takes into account all industrially made greenhouse gases, it’s more like 450 ppm in CO2 equivalence, beyond the point where most of Antarctica’s ice shield is stable.

Thus the CO2 curve is also the core survival issue of our time. Every day, the deep oceans are getting warmer, more acidic (the CO2 gets in the sea, turning it to a soda), and lose oxygen. Every day, the deepest currents are absorbing the new energy, modifying themselves. Any day, Antarctica could start melting, big time:

Giant Regions Of Antarctica Are Below Sea Level

The brownish and yellow parts are the WAIS, the West Antarctica Ice Shield’s bed, and are all below sea level, and are why the WAIS will disintegrate.

Areas more than 200 meters BELOW SEA LEVEL in East Antarctica are indicated by blue shading. Notice that a lot of east Antarctica, where the sub sea level basins are, have their margins well north of 70 degrees (and actually just north of the south polar circle).

(Extracted from: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/sun-cooling-ice-melting/)

Some idiots out there have pointed at the fact that atmospheric heat is not going up drastically, in the last decades. Of course. That means the energy is spilling in other dimensions. If those idiots had taken a physics class, they would know that this effect is similar to a well known phenomenon: as ice melts, the water in which it sits stays at zero degree (Celsius, only Americans use crazily obsolete units).

This general change of the biosphere, throughout dimensions so far unsuspected, is due to a generalization of the equipartition theorem:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/the-equipartition-of-energy-theorem-should-be-applied-for-climate-change-and-predicts-wild-fluctuations-of-temperatures/

At any point, any day, formidable non linear mechanisms independent of man, caused by the effects of the CO2 increase, could get in gear. That they did not happen yet is as reassuring as jumping from a gigantic cliff, without a parachute, and then gloating that everything is fine so far.

For example enormous, sudden releases of methane hydrates causing tsunamis (accelerating considerably the greenhouse, as methane is twenty to a hundred time more of a greenhouse gas). https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/05/15/terminal-problem-final-solution/

A slow-down of the sun has bought up some time, in the last decade (see again the very long: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/05/31/sun-cooling-ice-melting/.)

Most of the carbon found in coal has been buried for hundreds of millions of years. Extracting, and throwing  it up in the air, in ever greater quantities, is sheer insanity. This has got to stop. That is the main problem with fracking for gas; not that it makes water flammable, but that it pollutes with CO2. Although fracked gas (CH4) produces half the carbon for an equal amount of energy, that’s still an awful lot of carbon!

Advocating fracking-for-gas as a way to kill coal, short term, is tenable. But then fusion research ought to be massively financed, to make sure fracking-for-gas is really short term. Yet the $600,000 for fusion propulsion at NASA, while Elon Musk the well connected Neanderthal, gets billions, just for looking good, and dishonorable Sen. Feinstein’s whining about ITER, demonstrate that fracking forever, without fusion, is the real agenda!

Managing the planet correctly is real macro-economics. It is much more real economics than the shenanigans of some central bankers, or the dementia of unregulated shadow banking (which is just as big as official banking, 67 trillion dollars, nota bene).

The new Obama plan ought to be a war on coal. Right now, about ten billion tons of CO2 from coal are pumped in the atmosphere, each year. Better a war on coal now, rather the alternative. The alternative is world war, or worse. About CO2 pollution and energy.

This is not just a fancy vision of an apocalyptic future. It is also a sober assessment of an awful past. Around 1300 CE, sextuple trouble hit Europe: a population crisis, an energy crisis, a construction material crisis, a food crisis, an ecological crisis, and a climate crisis. All those aspects were entangled in one huge crisis .

Within a generation, France and Britain, until then part of the same polity, had exploded in a very complicated, but extremely lethal civil war, that was to last nearly five centuries. A terrible plague assaulted Europe (from Yersinia Pestis, a 2000 French study showed in all of 20 samples). The plague itself was related to the preceding, as bad climatic and military conditions in the two years preceding it, favored overcrowding of rats and humans alike. (Tremendous research on how the Black Death occured as early as 1348 CE, and great progress was made, leading to control of many diseases. Yet, the tricky causal triangle between fleas, rats, and plague was discovered only around 1900!)

In a few years, the population of the European continent had been cut by more than two-thirds. Greenlanders, assaulted by plague, climate cooling, and Inuits, died off.

Yet, countries such as France and Germany took effective ecological counter-measures of preservations of forests (thus saving commodities, construction, energy, soils, etc.).  Western Europe did not go the way of the Mayas because of vigorous. scientifically minded governmental counter-attack.

Instead, Europe chose then what we have to chose now. New technology was relentlessly pursued. By 1300 CE, pollution from burning geological coal was so acute in London that regulations were passed to reduce it. Edward III, grandson of French king Philippe IV Le Bel, and official launcher of the “100 Year war”(-that lasted in truth 478 years, as I said above) actually regulated coal trading, allowing the exportation of coal to the parts of France he controlled. Within two centuries, coal would be mined under the sea in Scotland.

No doubt all this would have worked better, the calamitous Fourteenth Century would not have been as calamitous, had superior technology, and careful management thereof, had arrived earlier. It could have arrived earlier.

In Roman Britannia, the usage of coal had been ubiquitous (even down the social scale). The tech was lost for nearly a millennium after the legions evacuated in 400 CE. Superior tech would have allowed to avoid the overcrowding that killed so many during the Black Death (relatively few nobles died, as they lived large).

The proximal reasons why Greco-Roman civilization collapsed are complicated, and are all entangled. Although the story started with plutocracy blossoming, it ended, four centuries later, with technology failing in so many dimensions that civilization could not be sustained anymore.

Basically, rising plutocracy (2C BCE)  led to political fascism (1C CE), that led to intellectual fascism (2C), which in turn led all sorts of technological stagnations or reversals (monetary, ecological, resources, military), and from there massive command economy and theocracy (300 CE) was called on, and then religious terror, anti-intellectualism and mental retardation (starting under emperor Jovian in 363 CE).

Many of these tipping points and causal chains are relevant today. However the situation is different in the sense that not only is history is going much faster, but, on the hopeful side, the world is still endowed with well armed, grimly determined republics (say France). Thus plutocracy may not win this time, as it did under the Gracchi brothers’ Roman republic. Indeed, we can now use meta arguments the Gracchi could not use, namely point at the fact that, ultimately, not only did plutocracy made society unfair, but the Republic collapsed, and so did civilization.

However, some causal chains, similar to those that undid Rome, are being activated presently.

One of them is the technological gradient between civilization and savages. Or, rather, the disappearance thereof. Bear with me a moment here.

Shortly after 300 CE, the Roman empire, in a reversal of hostilities, called onto the Salian Franks to become the shock troops of the empire. For years, the Franks had raided rivers of the empire, Viking style, and Constantine had fought them. Then suddenly, the Franks were at Constantine’s side, conquering the entire empire. And, astoundingly, by 400 CE, the Franks were put in charge of the defense of the entire North-West corner of Romanitas. Although, even more incredibly, the Franks had staged a long succession of coups and civil wars, against what they viewed as excessive Christianity, promoting a succession of secular Roman puppets to fight the central government.

What happened? Why did Christianized Romans put in charge their natural enemy, the Salian Frank Confederation? Simple: the Franks had better weapons, and better military capability. The Romans determined that, if you can’t beat them, you should join them. (Another, secondary reason, had to do with the Franks being more republican than the Byzantine court; Romans nostalgic with the republic, and secularism, and they were many, could only see the youth of Rome in those Frankish farmers).

What’s the connection with the CO2 rampage?

The only way for the most economically advanced countries to stay advanced is, first, by staying technologically advanced. Thus by researching, developing, and imposing worldwide, advanced technologies.  That can only work when those advanced technologies are necessary, and sustainable, that is, moral. As sustainability is the definition of  morality.

As I have long advocated, Obama is going to use his executive power by, hopefully, imposing new technology to stay on top. Not just on top of the problem, but on top of the world. Finally (Welcome to the executive branch, Mr. President!) With executive orders. Four years late. Execute, or be executed. After all, pollution to the extent we are exposed with CO2, is a form of execution. (Obama should have done the same with health care, as I also advocated more than 4 years ago).

The sorry collapse of the Greco-Romans, all entangled as they were with slavery (thus lower tech) caused some physical damage to the planet. Forests in Dauphiné are still showing subtle scars from Roman over-exploitation (mostly from mining). No big deal: South East France is heavily forested.

However what we are doing now with CO2, and other industrial greenhouse gases, is the big deal. The lifetime of CO2 in the combined air-ocean system is counted in many millennia. Projections show that we have already done enough to modify the climate enough to prevent a glaciation in the next 50,000 years . The mind reels.

So we are in life-and-death race to develop a long term, massive, survivable energy source. And there is just one; that of the sun, itself, thermonuclear fusion. Sun in a bottle. Feasible, but only if dozens of billions of economic activity are directed towards fundamental research labs (see note). Let’s not do like the Romans, and rest on yesteryear technology, until it’s so late, that nothing can be done anymore.

Einstein used to say that he knew the Fourth World War would be fought with sticks and stones. Error my dear Albert. The way things are going, the Fourth World War will be fought by scorpions and dragonflies.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note: let’s not be too passive, even if the outlook is sunny. Some are sure to whine that “solar energy” can do it all; what they mean is the passive reception, on Earth of part of Sol’s enormous thermonuclear output. Well, yes, they are talking about thermonuclear fusion, but may not know it (?) Passive solar has a great future. However its usage is bound to stay unimportant in space (!), high latitudes, and, more worryingly, in regions with high precipitations  (the greenhouse is going to get very wet in places!).

Slaying A Few Austerity Myths.

BRITANNIA WAS LATIN & WESTERN. JERUSALEM WAS NOT.

When Austerity Is Too Great Even Reason Shrinks:

Abstract: Austerity can go way too far. Austerity in finance, austerity in military matters, austerity in logic, or in one’s emotional system (“Puritanism“), can be a disaster. For individuals, or civilizations.

 Austerity is why Britannia collapsed, 16 centuries ago. Austerity in logic is why one prefers to cover that fact up, by denying the evidence: English is a  Latin language. Not a Germanic one. The latter “fact” is sheer propaganda.

 A similar situation one tries to cover-up was the take-over of the Greco-Roman world by the Jewish religion, and its criminally sectarian aspects. Making us believe Jerusalem was a “pillar” of our civilization is a form of austerity of evidence.

 Whereas the wealth of evidence is that Christianism was the cross on which civilization got nailed, and that there is nothing loving about brandishing a cross, let alone threatening to kill a child.

***

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WHEN MENTAL AUSTERITY ALLOWS MYTHS TO DOMINATE:

 May First. A celebration, a remembrance in honor of workers killed in a conspiracy in Chicago. (Modern Americans will tell you there are no conspiracies in the USA. They have been trained to say this.)

A conspiracy involving the police, judges, industrialists. A conspiracy long forgotten in the USA, but not in the rest of the world. Someday, maybe the Americans will realize how they were led where no dignity deliberately goes… And that they stayed there, because that was the lazy thing to do. The austerity of little minds, in full evidence.

 Visiting Rome was enlightening. I am writing essays on the subject. The first one breaks new philosophical ground. It has proven difficult to write. A kind critique told me to rewrite it before publishing it, and I have been obeying ever since she grated her teeth in a persuasive way.

 In the meantime, let me handle a few tidbits. They are apparently unrelated, but the misfortune of righteous empires unites them.

 They are erroneous ideas, one should actually say, erroneous moods. Grown from austere, all too austere, minds.

 One of these lies has to do with the myth that there is something as a purely Anglo-Saxon economic model. Verily that model is half Dutch. Great Britain is a Dutch plutocratic fabrication.

 Twelve (12) centuries before, Britannia, left by Rome to its own instruments, collapsed in all ways, as it fell victim to Anglo-Saxon invasions. That was a real holocaust that killed most of the population. England was created by a French counter-strike, much later.

 Another myth is that the West has three pillars: Rome, Greece and… Jerusalem. Please don’t laugh. What does that forsaken small city in the middle of nowhere have to do with great civilizations? Verily, the West has more pillars than that: Sumer, Egypt, Crete, Phoenicia, Greece, Rome, and Germania (not to say Francia!). All these places created ideas we use to this day. But Jerusalem is not of them. A pitfall is not a pillar. A primitive mother of a prehistoric child could not be sure that a turtle did not support the world. But she sure would have told you that a guy called Joshua did not invent love. How come so many people are not that smart? Do they have an agenda?

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WHY A PLUTOCRATIC INVASION IS CALLED  “GLORIOUS”:

 I have long subscribed to several British media. And it riles me up when I read disinformation emanating from London, that speaks of Britain as if it were on the other side of the Earth. Many English media deplore the unthinkable “Eurozone crisis“, decrying anemic growth, and huge deficits.

 Meanwhile Great Britain enjoys negative growth (it’s in a recession), and has at least twice the deficits. It is intriguing that English media fail to notice that the conditions on planet Britain are strangely similar to those on the rest of the same continental plate, 30 kilometers away.

 But the credit rating agencies, owned by Obama’s guru, Mr. Buffet, give a triple A to Britain, presumably because Britain is their friend, just like Buffet is friend to Obama. And that no doubt would come in handy, should Obama go the way of the crazed Sarkozy rushing to hell in his Sarkophage. Friends take care of friends, that’s what friends are for. Each Obama needs a buffet to splurge, like a Sarko, his sarcophagi.

 What are these misinformators trying to do? Hide the total failure of the “trickle down“/plutocratic model, by insisting instead that the Eurozone is disaster. (OK, right, the Eurozone is a disaster, and it needs to grow out of it, as Mr. Hollande, to be elected France’s next president in 5 days, insists).

 This is part of a general mood that the world’s largest continent is isolated, while Britain and the plutocratic model thrive.

 In truth, Britain thrived, because a highly leverage financial system entangled with the Royal Navy and the Bank Of England was imposed by the Dutch, three centuries ago. Nothing very glorious about being successfully invaded. So to prevent examination of this sordid affair, the term “Glorious Revolution” is used to depict the invasion and usurpation.

 Ironically, the aim of the successfully invading Dutch republic was to use the British bulldog to attack France (France was the Netherlands’ creator, it is another case of ingrate child). But that cost a huge amount of money and effort on part of the Dutch, and by 1712 CE, a quarter of a century later, the Netherlands was a shadow of its former self, and stays so, to this day. Britain, though, profitted.

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ROMAN  BRITANNIA FELL, & SO DID EUROPE TO THE NAZIS, BECAUSE OF AUSTERITY:

 Britain was a part of the Roman empire that was cut-off, without a battle, as part of an austerity program! I hope the word “austerity” sounds familiar. That is what is evoked much nowadays. Nowadays that the banks have spent all the public money in the world on themselves and their friends, especially the ones in white houses.

 This observation is nothing really new: for decades in the last century, or so, the defense of the West has been pretty much reduced to France, Britain and the USA. Some will say it does not matter anyway. Wrong. Remember Auschwitz?

 Europe fell to the Nazi invasion in 1940 in part because massive austerity throughout the democracies had left the entire West with just 110 French divisions to face 153 fanaticized Nazi divisions.

 The USA and Britain had basically no armed forces, because they were practicing austerity. The Netherlands and Belgium were even more stingy on defense, as they believed that France would protect them from much admired Germany… And it was most profitable to contradict neither the German, nor American, anti-French drives.

 The “Occidental Part” of the Roman empire fell without a grand battle.

 Whereas in the Orient the Roman army suffered catastrophic defeats at Adrianopolis (Eastern Thrace, presently, European Turkey) against the Goths (378 CE) and against the Arabs at Yarmouk in Syria (636 CE).

 The defeat against the Goths allowed them to roam the Western empire, until the Franks and the Romans bottled them in Spain. The defeat against the Arabs allowed the latter to quickly seize two-thirds of the Roman empire, before they were mauled by the Franks (721 CE to 748 CE). The Franks did not practice austerity: they nationalized the church, and rose the largest army since republican Rome, complete with professional soldiers.

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ENGLISH IS A LATIN LANGUAGE, OR, MORE EXACTLY, A TYPE OF FRENCH:

 The old Britons, like other old Celts, learned to read and write… From the Romans. Mostly. This explains why the Roman civilization was accepted so well, and so durably (it lives on in these lands, to this day).

 Indeed, the Romans taught much of higher civilization to common Celts, such as how to read and write, and why law was better than gods. The Celtic religion had forbidden that dangerous knowledge to the People. That was a deliberate trick of Celtic oligarchies, as the Celtic civilization was very advanced in other important ways, for example in metallurgy, or ocean going ships.

 One reason for calling English a Germanic language is pure propaganda. Many common Brits talked, read and wrote Latin for at least four centuries, no Jutes, Angles and Saxons involved. Those savages did not read or write.

 The smashing of the Oriental Roman army by the Goths in 378 CE had far reaching consequences. The legions of Britannia were soon withdrawn, to save money. Fascist Catholic terror was cranked up by a new emperor (a Spanish general), throughout the empire, in the hope of stopping the Goths.

 Learning that Britannia was defenseless, the Angles and Saxons crossed the North Sea in ever greater numbers. Civilization collapsed in Britannia, war blossomed. Most people died. Finally, in the mid-Sixth Century, many Romans from Britannia fled to Gallia (Gaul) giving its name to Armorica (now known as Bretagne). 

 In fact 70% of English words are of French (a third), Roman (a third) and Greek origin. The same words of Greek and Roman origin are also found in French (French is degenerated Latin, where much of the efficient Latin grammar was replaced by little prepositions, German style; meanwhile the Franks latinized the Germanic language’s grammar).

 Hence the common content of French and English is roughly 70%. (In truth much more than that, because French and English have many words of common Germanic, Celtic, Arab, Indo-European, Semitic origin, for example algebra, algorithm, amen, etc.)  

 This is a second reason not to call English a Germanic language. English is Anglo-Norman, one of the three languages of the French middle ages… It’s not because the language of the Parisians, the Langue d’oïl , came to dominate, Langue d’Oc, and Anglo-French, through the most brutal means, that we should pursue the oppression.

 This point of view refutes the Franco-French bigotry of viewing English as the enemy. The correct point of view is to use English for what it is, a French language, to foster one of the oldest and most complex civilizations.

 Another myth, another lie, is that, somehow Jerusalem brought something positive to the West. If so, what? Believing in something that never was? How come historical records don’t mention Jesus, how come his bible is full of horrors?

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 JERUSALEM BROUGHT NOUGHT: 
Some say “monotheism” is a pillar of the West. But a close inspection shows that most religions had a principal god. Moreover, Christianism and Islam use several super natural entities that god is unable to submit (Satan and the Djins in the case of Allah… Besides the Moon, and entities in the Satanic Verses).

 Monotheism was invented in India and Egypt, well before Jews appeared on the scene. Vishnu, is the supreme god with many Indian avatars (26?). For example Krishna. 1,000 years before some Jews wrote some book in Baghdad.
Before Indian and Egyptians, there was Cybelle and the cult of the Great Mother. For 10,000 years. The Christians have (re)produced “Mary” from this fundamental religion. A religion which is, altogether, more natural, than the “jealous” god of the Bible (that god is “jealous” is revealed in the second commandment).
 
 “Deus” by the way has the same root as “Zeus”. By the time Jews wrote the Bible, the Greeks considered there was one main god, a version of the 15 centuries old Ahura Mazda.
 
  I do not see what Judaism brought to the antique civilization that was sorely missing. The biblical Jews claimed they stole the land of their enemies the Canaanites (that is the inventors of the Western alphabet, the Phoenicians). However, archeological and textual evidence shows that early Jews were actually Canaanites. So they are liars.

 When one examines the situation in 70 CE, during the great war of Judea, it is clear that the Greco-Roman civilization is completely formed, universalist, tolerant. OK, it’s also a bit fascist, but not as much as the fiercest of the Jewish leaders, such as Simon (who is also completely crazed besides; he was later whipped to death in Rome).

 The enormous population of Jews in Alexandria, next door to Jerusalem, thought the sectarians in Jerusalem were crazy to have treacherously assassinated 600 legionnaires. They did not take part in the revolt… which killed one million, many of them Jews at the hands of other Jews. During the siege of Jerusalem, to make fun of Jewish superstition, Roman artillery bombarded the city with thousands of ripe pig heads…

 Josephus, the most competent and supreme Jewish general, came to the conclusion that the Jewish revolt he had himself led, was not wise. He retired in Rome, where he wrote his extensive memoirs, which provide ample indirect evidence that Jesus existed only in Saint Paul’s head (as the latter admitted).

 The contribution of the Jews to the antique civilization, was, roughly, nought. Okay. the followers of one of their sects, Christianity, have acted as if said sect had discovered, invented and promoted love, first to do so, ever. And there are some naïve, or cruel enough, to believe them. When, obviously, altruism is the essence of civilization. Civilizations had existed for millennia before Jews were invented. (Yes people are invented: Romans, Gauls, Celts and Germans are example.)

 But the doctrine of the “Chosen People”, chosen by jealous (and murderous) god, no less, central to Jewish tribal theism, has caused a havoc. See Fourth and Fifth Century Christianity, busy exterminating, in the best Bible style, everybody, as if everybody were a Canaanite. See Auschwitz. The coup of the apprentice sorcerer? What is Nazism, but for the cult of the Chosen People? “Gott mit Uns”, said the SS, fundamentally.
 
 The Christians say Christianity discovered love and altruism, but it is not the Christians who outlawed slavery.

 Instead it is the “Merovingian” Franks (Imperium Francorum) in the year 660 CE under the “regency” of (English born) queen Bathilde who outlawed slavery. Christian bishops were from the richest families, and they were very appreciative of their armies of slaves.

 Meanwhile, the Christians had burned books, libraries, philosophers, free thinkers, “people who had made a choice” (“heretics“), academies, science, etc. … All this made directly the bed of Islam, another religion that celebrates the myth of Abraham, the guy who ties up his son to cut his throat to please his boss!

 OK, Abraham was right say those for whom exploitation is the highest value. Indeed bible god then gave Abraham the land of the Canaanites. So the fact that Abraham was willing to kill his child was highly profitable to Abraham. And for those who believe profits should overlord it all, have there, all the god they want.
 
 I categorically refute the myth of the would be slaughterer of a child as foundational for our civilization.

 OK, that perverse foundational myth obviously explains why so many priests imitate Abraham, and engage in child abuse. But is this the civilization we want? A civilization where daddy ties up the child, threatens him with death, so that he can satisfy his boss’ strange desire. Is that a civilization we can afford?

 Oh, some say they did not look at it this way. Sure. Willful blindness is most profitable. Mental retardation is the ultimate soporific. Austerity of thinking, indeed. No emotions involved.

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Patrice Ayme

No Vision, No Future.

MIND IS TOUGHER THAN DIAMOND.

There are many reasons why societies collapse. The plutocratic explanation works well most of the time, and explains a lot. In particular, it explains most of the defeat of Athens by Macedonia, and all of Rome’s degeneracy into theocratic despondency.

In a plutocratic collapse, propped up by the redoubtable power of the exponential function, an oligarchy monopolizes ever more riches and power, to the point the rest of society becomes weak and dumb, which is both an effect, and a way to achieve the rule of the plutocracy. Such a process is apparently engaged, once again, in some major countries of the heretofore triumphant West, and that is why the Western plutocracy prefers to put everybody to sleep, by accusing… China.

The plutocratic explanation was actually brandished by the Mongols to the Caliph in Baghdad, before killing him, his family, and about 800,000 Muslims in the capital (Christians were spared). The Mongols insolently claimed to their Muslim victims, that Muslim plutocrats had let the Caliphate degenerate, as demonstrated by the Mongol victory, and thus it belonged to them, Mongols, to put an end to this miserable lot.

Another reason for collapse is ecological devastation. It happened to Sumer, due to salination (agricultural abuse) and flooding (catastrophe at the hand of God). This is also what happened to the Mayas, victim of drastic drought (7C), in combination with abuse they had made of the resources (be they trees or water). Plutocratic strife did the rest, as the duopoly of the two leading cities was replaced by a generalized war.

Still another reason for collapse is determined invasion by bloody aliens (part of the reason for Athens’ collapse). Most societies and civilization go down that way. The case of the Mayas (internal implosion by civil war, down to the bitter end), is rare (and the drought made the difference).

Generally bad plutocracy, or bad ecology makes a society weak, and then it gets invaded. But the powerful Aztecs went down first because of an alien invasion of Conquistadores (having too many local edible enemies was also crucial).

The Incas were also defeated by astoundingly brazen and belligerent conquistadores, but only after the empire and its organization had been already wrecked by a smallpox epidemic (which preceded the European invaders that brought it). If Pizarro had come before the smallpox, he would have probably failed, as he would have encountered a united empire.

Love is a good motivator, but it does not lead armies. Facing the Mongols, the armies of the Chinese plutocracy were overwhelmed. China was very militaristic, but Genghis Khan’s army was much more efficient.

Not so for the Mongols with the Europeans: after a costly victory in Hungary, although they had defeated all European armies, but that of the kingdom of France, the Mongols remembered what had happened to their ancestors the Huns. Hence they wisely decided to not pursue further west beyond the Hungarian steppe. Instead they switched to cooperation with the Franks (they invaded Syria together). Islam survived only because the racist Pope excommunicated the collaborating Franks, and was not keen to cooperate with Nestorian Christians. Peeved, the Mongols became Muslim instead.

Ultimately the collapse of a society or civilization is caused by truth and consequences denying love and future to the people. It cannot be avoided when caused by a giant scientific and technological gap.

Reciprocally, when the Europeans did not succeed to invade durably, it is because the technological gap was not as great as it looked. This is clear with India, China, Thailand, Japan. The latter two could not even be bothered militarily.

Little known, this is even true with Black Africa. Africa was NOT neolithic. Africa resisted European colonization, in great part because it had indigenous steel technology. Thus, when the White Man was not yet dead or morbid from African diseases, steel arrowheads would do what was needed. So, for centuries, White Men, and that includes the Arabs in the East and the Moroccans in the Sahel, stayed on the periphery, unable to get inside the Black continent seriously. The Whites traded slaves with the Black potentates inside (who were busy making war on each other, as usual).

France ultimately "conquered" Senegal and most of West Africa with a dozen French officers, and 5,000 rifled armed Senegalese soldiers. If you can’t beat them, you join them.

In the Qur’an, or the Bible, God is depicted as "merciful". But otherwise, there is little nice about him. He is depicted as jealous, furious, forever vengeful, but also loving (New Testament), or practicing (very tough) love (Qur’an), between two torture sessions for miscreants.

No doubt those who wrote Bible and Qur’an took quite a bit of inspiration from the real universe out there. The Cosmic Comedy, la Divina Commedia, is quite a bit as mad, furious, and tender as classical gods. Nature even mercifully provides with endorphins, and the forgiveness of wisdom.

However, if we want to love the children, and their children’s children, we need to see far, and carry a big stick. Nothing less is moral.

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Patrice Ayme