What Is A Logic? Just A Piece Of Mind

January 15, 2017

I would propose that a logic is anything which can be modelled with a piece and parcel of brain.

I will show, surprisingly enough, that this is a further step in Cartesian Logic.

At first sight, it may look as if I were answering a riddle, by further mysteries. Indeed, but with mysteries which can be subjected to experimental inquiry (now or tomorrow).

What is a brain? A type of Quantum Computer! And what is Computing, and the Quantum? Well, works in progress. There is something called Quantum Logic, but it does not necessarily defines the world, as exactly what Quantum Physics is, is still obscure.

In practice? Logic is what works, a set of rules to go from a set A of statements to a set B of statements.

In this perspective, Medieval logic did not decline. Instead it transmutated into mathematics.

The teaching of Logic or Dialetics from a collection of scientific, philosophical and poetic writings, French, 13th century; Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, Paris, France. The 13th century was a time of extreme intellectual activity in Europe, superior to anything else in the world, centered 800 miles around Paris. In particular the heliocentric system was proposed by Buridan, after he overthrew Aristotelian Physics, by inventing and discovering inertia.

The teaching of Logic or Dialetics from a collection of scientific, philosophical and poetic writings, French, 13th century; Bibliotheque Sainte-Genevieve, Paris, France. The 13th century was a time of extreme intellectual activity in Europe, superior to anything else in the world, centered 800 miles around Paris. In particular the heliocentric system was proposed by Buridan, after he overthrew Aristotelian Physics, by inventing and discovering inertia.

An article in Aeon, “The Rise And Fall And Rise Of Logic”,

https://aeon.co/essays/the-rise-and-fall-and-rise-of-logic

Reflects on the importance on the history of the notion of logic:

“Reflecting on the history of logic forces us to reflect on what it means to be a reasonable cognitive agent, to think properly. Is it to engage in discussions with others? Is it to think for ourselves? Is it to perform calculations?

In the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), Immanuel Kant stated that no progress in logic had been made since Aristotle. He therefore concludes that the logic of his time had reached the point of completion. There was no more work to be done. Two hundred years later, after the astonishing developments in the 19th and 20th centuries, with the mathematisation of logic at the hands of thinkers such as George Boole, Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Alfred Tarski and Kurt Gödel, it’s clear that Kant was dead wrong. But he was also wrong in thinking that there had been no progress since Aristotle up to his time. According to A History of Formal Logic (1961) by the distinguished J M Bocheński, the golden periods for logic were the ancient Greek period, the medieval scholastic period, and the mathematical period of the 19th and 20th centuries. (Throughout this piece, the focus is on the logical traditions that emerged against the background of ancient Greek logic. So Indian and Chinese logic are not included, but medieval Arabic logic is.)”

The old racist Prussian, Kant, a fascist, enslaving cog in the imperial machine turned false philosopher was unsurprisingly incorrect.

The author of the referenced article, Catarina Dutilh Novaes, is professor of philosophy and the Rosalind Franklin fellow in the Department of Theoretical Philosophy at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. Her work focuses on the philosophy of logic and mathematics, and she is broadly interested in philosophy of mind and science. Her latest book is The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Logic (2016).

She attributes the decline of logic, in the post-medieval period known as the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, to the rise of printed books, self-study and the independent thinker. She rolls out Descartes, and his break from formal logic:

Catarina writes: “Another reason logic gradually lost its prominence in the modern period was the abandonment of predominantly dialectical modes of intellectual enquiry. A passage by René Descartes – yes, the fellow who built a whole philosophical system while sitting on his own by the fireplace in a dressing gown – represents this shift in a particularly poignant way.”

Speaking of how the education of a young pupil should proceed, in Principles of Philosophy (1644) René Descartes writes:

After that, he should study logic. I do not mean the logic of the Schools, for this is strictly speaking nothing but a dialectic which teaches ways of expounding to others what one already knows or even of holding forth without judgment about things one does not know. Such logic corrupts good sense rather than increasing it. I mean instead the kind of logic which teaches us to direct our reason with a view to discovering the truths of which we are ignorant.

Catarina adds: “Descartes hits the nail on the head when he claims that the logic of the Schools (scholastic logic) is not really a logic of discovery. Its chief purpose is justification and exposition.”

Instead, Descartes claims and I claim that a new sort of logic arose: Medieval Logic transmuted itself into mathematics (Descartes does not say this, but he means it). And mathematics is not really logical in the strictest sense. As it has too many rules to be strictly logical.

Buridan, a great logician who studied well the Liar Paradox (which gave the Incompleteness Theorems) had students such as (bishop) Oresme, who demonstrated what, it turned out, were the first practical theorems in calculus (more than 2 centuries before the formal invention of calculus by Fermat, and Fermat’s discovery of the Fundamental Theorem of Calculus, that integration and differentiation are inverse to each other).

For example, under the influence of Buridan and then Oresme, graphs and later equations themselves were invented. So logic became mathematics. That was blatant by the time Descartes invented Algebraic Geometry. Algebraic Geometry gave ways to deduce, to go from a set A to a set B, using a completely new method never seen before.

In turn, by the Nineteenth Century, mathematical methods contributed to old questions in Logic (the most striking being the use of Cantor Diagonalization to show incompleteness, thanks to the Liar Paradox, self-referential method.

In this spirit, not only Set Theory, naive or not, but Category Theory can be viewed as types of logic. So is, of course, computer science. Logic is whatever enables to deduce. Thus even poetry is a form of logic.

Logic is everywhere there is mental activity, and it is never complete.

If logic is just pieces of brain, then what? Well, some progress in pure logic can be made, just paying attention to how the brain works. The brain works sequentially, temporally, with local linear logics (axonal and dendritic systems). The brain tends to be deprived of contradictions (but not always, and nothing infuriates people more, than to be exposed to their own contradictions and gaps in… logic). Also all these pieces of brain, these logics, are not just temporally ordered, but finite.

As we try to use logic to look forward, as a bunch of monkeys messing up our space rock, it is important to realize that what logic is, has not been properly defined, let alone circumscribed. Indeed, if, surprise, surprise, logic has not been properly defined, let alone circumscribed, much more is logically possible than people suspect!

Patrice Ayme’

 

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“Anti-Racist Racism” Is Racism

January 14, 2017

One of the fundamentals of (evil) Political Correctness has been that: “when we do it, it’s not evil, but righteous’. Unbeknownst to these criminally PC fools, evil men have always said that, when they did it, it was not evil.

The ideology of Négritude” (“Blackness”) appeared in France in 1931. Jean-Paul Sartre had plenty of time to contemplate it. In the 1950s, Sartre called Négritude an “anti-racist racism”.

“Anti-racist” here is an adjective, racism is the substantive. Substance versus adjunction. 

In the preceding essay, I observed that:

‘Aimé Césaire was from Martinique, not Africa. So he did not know that, in Africa, qualifying people by skin color is viewed as racism.’

Césaire was first of all a French intellectual posing as a rebel. This judicious observation of yours truly  ticked off François Luong. Luong wrote: @Tyranosopher An utterly ridiculous claim. & I’ll take 1 Aimé Césaire over 10^6 Patrice Aymé. The former made the world a better place.

Whereas, I suppose I am working hard to make it ever worse…

That of course was a gauntlet thrown. I am an African, talking in the name of the Africa which brought me up. Aimé Césaire was not an African, and he talked in the name of skin. Not just this, but he talked against colonization, namely civilization. Consider this:

.

Africa Enjoyed Slavery For 1200 Years After the Franks Made It Unlawful In Europe. Actually One Of The Argument For Imperial European Control ("Colonization" Without Colons) Of Africa, Was To Stop The Slavery & Cannibalism There. I don't Object To That Lofty Goal.

Africa Enjoyed Slavery For 1200 Years After the Franks Made It Unlawful In Europe. Actually One Of The Argument For Imperial European Control (“Colonization” Without Colons) Of Africa, Was To Stop The Slavery & Cannibalism There. I don’t Object To That Lofty Goal.

Analyze this: For Césaire’s (1913–2008), the concept of Négritude is historically derived from the Transatlantic Slave Trade and the slaves’ plight in the New World. In his own words, “Négritude is not a cephalic index, or plasma, or soma, but measured by the compass of suffering.”

In other words, Africa as pathos. Africa as a pain. Well, F you, Césaire and your followers. As an African, I stridently object. Africa is neither a pain nor a pathos, except in the eyes of deranged racists. Africa is rather a quickly changing hope.  Césaire’s blackness has to do with “blacks” as found in the new World… Who often have, in part, slave master ancestors (as FLOTUS Michelle Obama does; it was actually probably a love story between Irish owner and colored slave… don’t laugh.). Nothing to do with Africa.

Insinuating that Césaire was racist is not new: “Even then Communists would reproach me for speaking of the Negro problem— they called it my racism. But I would answer: Marx is alright, but we need to complete Marx. I felt that the emancipation of the Negro consisted of more than just a political emancipation.” [Discourse on Colonialism.]

In other words, “the Negro” is a child. The Negro child needs to be emancipated some more.

The argument can be made that making “blackness” as a noble goal, forged the way for the Nazis to make “aryanism” (“whiteness”?) as a noble goal too. This Césaire, who insisted very much after WWII that Hitler was not dead, could be viewed as a fellow traveller of Hitler. Thus, indeed, Hitler was not dead. Césaire angrily denounced “colonialism”, although he was a pure product of it, in more way than one.

Trump has campaigned against Political Correctness for a long time, and me for even longer. I have a total objection for not saying things as they are (except to a dying child, of course!)

Even Socrates practiced Political Correctness: he was deadly set against total democracy, but he refused to admit that he was just that, DEADLY set against democracy… If he had admitted to himself and others that he was deadly set against total democracy, Socrates could have had healthy debates. Instead, he went around like a sting ray, injecting venom which caused a torpor, as was pointed at the time.

Until Socrates was in front of a jury for his life: then he had to either show himself to be a coward, for all of society and posterity to contemplate, or he had to drink his own medicine. He famously did the later; but it may be viewed as an admission that he had to commit (assisted) suicide.

Some will say, some have said: anti-racist racism is OK. Right… Until one knows history well. Racists are generally loudly claiming to be anti-racist: or so they claim to others, and, often, to themselves.

For example the Nazis were out to protect (“German”) minorities from assault, or even holocausts (Eastern Europe was full of German Settlements, just as it was full of Jewish settlements, and the settlements of various Natives, let alone Gypsies). In India, the hyper racist, hyper violent upper crust (the upper castes) viewed itself as an endangered minority (of superior beings).

In Antique Greece, as all Feudal regimes, the best people (“Aristos”) viewed themselves as an endangered race (the Aristos looked racially different, be it in Japan or Europe; interestingly modern genetics revealed that the Japanese Aristos genetically mixed with their own slaves, the original Natives of Japan, hence a different, more “European” physical appearance).

There is good colonialism, there is bad colonialism. Most of humanity descend from colonialists, not just Césaire. The latter wrote a whole discourse on colonialism, influencing generations of parrots thereafter.

Suppose Eurasia were still in the Middle Ages. What would Africans be doing? Besides enslaving other Africans? Well, eating other Africans of course. It is still going on, from conflict zones, to expensive restaurants..

(Notice that I am not trying to apply indignantly degenerate Euro philosophy to robust African wisdom. The philosophical strength of Africa is precisely to contradict a lot of Euro-American received ideas. African barbarity has a wisdom that even American barbarity does not possess).

There is fake news

There is fake history

There is fake wisdom

There is fake knowledge

There are fake intellectuals

If we want hope that really work, we have first to learn to distinguish what’s real, from what is not so. Self-justifying racism is the paradigm of hell paved with good, self-glorifying intentions. As an Asian proverb has it, nothing worse than a tiger who thinks it is in the right.

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

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A Black Problem, Indeed

January 13, 2017

Defining people by the color of their skin, and, even worse, by the color that their skin does not have, is racism. Period. Take that one, and swallow it, it’s good medicine. “Niger” is Latin for “black”. For racist reasons, the word has been controversial. Yet, the situation is complex.

Consider Greek tragedy, during the greatest age of Athens, from space. What is tragedy about? Primarily, reason. Secondarily, the fate reason, or lack thereof, irresistibly brings forth. In turn, fate imprisons human beings in its icy grip. The solution is to educate the Furies, those “Ancient Children”.

Reason can, and should, be applied, not just to instruct children, but to words and the concepts attached to them.

I was brought, raised and educated, as a child, mostly in Africa, among Africans. Let me tell you something I knew, so extremely well, when I was six years old, that I never deviated from, be it only once, for decades thereafter. This ancient piece of wisdom was taught to me by my mom. She uttered it just once, as a warning, she did not have to do it twice:

Calling someone “black” in Africa, is perceived, rightly, as a RACIST insult: never do it. Call Africans, “Africans”. 

A Touareg Couple. The Blue People of the Desert. Don’t Call Them Black: They Would Think You Are A Lunatic, Ignorant, Offensive, Vicious Aggressor. And they are not Arabs, either... Touareg alphabet is more than twice older than Arabic alphabet...

A Touareg Couple. The Blue People of the Desert. Don’t Call Them Black: They Would Think You Are A Lunatic, Ignorant, Offensive, Vicious Aggressor. And they are not Arabs, either… Touareg alphabet is more than twice older than Arabic alphabet…

[The French called Touaregs “Les Hommes Bleus”, the blue men, as they protected themselves from the harsh desert heat, light, wind and sand with layers of blue cloth. They live in the middle of the world’s largest desert, the Sahara. They have been denied a country, so far. The desert was crisscrossed by traders, war parties and raiders, for millennia. And many came for slaves in Black Africa. However empires, such as the Almoravids, were also born there, ruling over 3,000 kilometers, all the way from Mali to Europe’s Al Andalus.]

Most Africans, indeed, are NOT “black”, but of various shades. Thus, if I were, say, beige, why would you call me “black”? I am so little to you that you don’t even look at me? Is calling me according to a color I don’t even have part of the general distortion of me you enjoy inflicting on me, and having me answer to?

Am I so insignificant to you, that you do not bother to find a proper qualifier for me, deeper than skin-deep? Or, worse of all, as many “blacks” are from the deepest forest, or are well-known to be viewed as such, are you trying to insinuate that, I too, are not from a culture worth mentioning?  

In a reply, Facebook DuJuan Ross observed that: “Malcolm X himself popularized the descriptive as a deliberate militating against White Supremacists resorting to it as a pejorative.”

Malcolm X had an interesting trajectory (including among various variants of Islam, one of which got him assassinated). His reddish hair inherited from his Scottish maternal grandfather brought him the nickname “Red”. Malcolm said: “I have more respect for a man who lets me know where he stands, even if he’s wrong. Than the one who comes up like an angel and is nothing but a devil.”

Malcolm X made his little reasoning that calling people of part African ancestry “black” and “negroes” . He was himself following Aimé Césaire and Leopold Sedar Senghor, world-famous writers and activists who made the same reasoning a generation prior. (My father was a friend of Senghor, a great writer, French MP and co-author of the French constitution and first president of Senegal.) The martiniquais poet and politician Aimé Césaire forged the word « négritude » Cesaire and Senghor used outright “negre”. “negritude” (negre being the French deformation of “niger”, namely black in Latin). Fine, I am all for it.

There is something correct about this, when addressing the culture and art of populations which are as black as black can be (say in parts of West Africa not long penetrated by Peuls). Indeed the art, there is delightfully obsessed by ultimate blackness. A painting where the dominant “color” is black can be eerily beautiful, and street artists in… Black Africa are experts at it. I am very attached to this art, tied to my childhood, and which have seen nowhere else. So one can use “black” where it is appropriate. What I am decrying is systematic, deliberate distortions of reality.

Aimé Césaire was from the Caribbean, not Africa. So it is only natural that he did not know that, in Africa, qualifying people by the color of their skin is frowned upon, and viewed, rightly, as racism. North Africans, Peuls, many East Africans, Ethiopians, Christian or not, and most enemies of the Zulus and other Bantus in South Africa, turn livid when one calls them black.

I find much of the work of Malcolm X deep and judicious. However, calling someone such as Obama, who is not any more “black” than 50 members of my own American family (I have seen them together) is not just ridiculous, it’s dishonest. Obama himself knows this very well, so why the double language? What are we selling, which require lies to be bought?

Let me repeat slowly: calling people by the color of their skin, and even more so when said color is imagined (as when someone beige is called “black”) is giving maximum importance to maximum superficiality. It’s not just racism, but an attack against reason.

But of course, it’s no accident. There is a meta-reason for it. When one celebrates attacks against reason in one area, one is then in the mood to make more attacks against in other areas. Thus one ends, deprived of reasons, nude and without defense when exploiters come to issue their orders. Hence the sorry state of affairs.

Ironically, the Obama presidency was a victim of the black problem. Having called Obama “the black president”, and viewing this superficial absurdity as a great success, most of Obama “supporters” did not support him at all, when and where he needed support and encouragement.

The failure of the Obama presidency is greatly entangled with the black problem of brandishing the black label as the end-all, be-all. Let’s stay away from all this obsession with skin color.

Reason is about finding out why people do what they do. There are always reasons. The Universe does not play with dice. Yes, I know Quantum Physics, in its present most accepted formulation, says the opposite. But that was in the last few decades, and evolution has been all about reason, in the last 600 million years, ever since there are brains, and they think.

So please learn to call black what’s black, and leave it at that. Obama was first an Hawaiian (who spent 4 years in Indonesia), brought and educated by white people, at Hawai’i most exclusive private school. Nothing black about any of that, and as any real African would tell you. 
Patrice Ayme’

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Washington, Slave Master, Coverup, Spiritual Gangrene

January 11, 2017

When Big Ideas Are Needed, But Lacking, Extinction Is A Solution:

Obama gave his “Farewell Address” (the most interesting bits of which I could have written myself). Yet, he made a snide remark about those who believe the whole US system is so corrupt, that decent people should not touch it. Well, he does not understand. Some political systems are so flawed, they cannot be incrementally improved.

That was true of Sparta and Athens, in the greatest age of Greece (for drastically opposite reasons which amounted to the same). The Greek political system (yes, there was such a thing), a set of moods and ways, was so unsustainable, it was threatened with extinction. And it sure got extinguished (Pericles, restricting Athenian nationality; Poleis, fighting all over, for often ridiculous reasons, were a serious problem).

The solution? Union. What Sparta refused to even talk about. We are in the same global, worldwide, situation as Greece, by the way, and the solution is the same. The one which was not seized, and could not be seized, because Greek civilization was too flawed in some of its moods (such as the one about honor…) Something to be said for Trump’s desire to sort it out peacefully with Russia…

***   

Much of the US system is, fundamentally flawed:

Especially in some its meta-features. Meaning? The Founding Fathers were lying in the matter of which civilization they truly wanted. Greed was foremost to them, and they hid that below big words. As long as this is not a well-known point, the entanglement between many of the worst flaws of the present civilization will stay unexamined.

If one lies too much, one cannot think enough. This is true of society, as it is of individuals.

One such ruling mood is the lack of examination that presided over the elaboration of the American Republic. The Founding Fathers stole, and brandished, a lot of their soaring rhetoric from philosophers (most of them French), precisely to hide the fact they were the exact opposite.

Slavery Made Washington, & America, Rich. So Did Holocaust. Refusing To Look At The Truth, Enabled These Behaviors, And Lives To This Day, as General Mood, The PC Mood.

Slavery Made Washington, & America, Rich. So Did Holocaust. Refusing To Look At The Truth, Enabled These Behaviors, And Lives To This Day, as General Mood, The PC Mood. Gentleman In Black Is Colonel George Washington, On His Lands, 1753.

Thereupon, a great tradition of lying, fake news, dissemblance, was launched. (Somewhat related accusations can be directed towards the mother civilization, namely France; however, in France, a tradition of excoriating some presidents (called kings, centuries ago), or even a tradition of ferocious philosophical wars is firmly installed…)

Obama, in his “Farewell Address”, claimed “America” (the US, actually, there is imperialism, the Monroe Doctrine, in the over-claiming word “America”) is always improving (and exemplified this by the “smooth transition to a new administration”). Maybe. However, it’s like saying a plane trying to take-off sees its speed always improving. Right. Yet, one has to clear the trees. One hundred H bombs would cancel the “America” show, forever.

Obama talked as if the US would profit mightily from further incremental improvements, as if there was all the time in the world. However he himself admitted that the calamitous effects of “climate change” will be upon us soon, and that they may the only thing the next generation will be doing. (He left war out of it, but that’s how changes shows up, always.)

***

The Evil Origins Of The American Republic,

the USA, have been carefully hidden, to enable the citizenry careful denial that such are some of the traits which animate them. Thus enabled, said citizens are free to pursue, or let their masters pursue, the same ways and means, slightly translated to new settings.

To progress, one has to question the origins, and one’s origins. Those are not questioned enough in the USA. Therefrom the origins of American “naivety”. American “naivety” is a cover-up. Being outwardly naive enables one to practice evil, while claiming, to high heavens, that one is nothing of the sort.

Obama evokes the “corrosive influence of money in our politics”, and he sheds ((crocodile) tears, no doubt feeling all the good money coming his way: all theater, George Washington’s style. Actually, he loves the money. Most of us, normal types, would.

What did I just suggest? That the slave mentality is one of the things that is being inherited (that’s the part of the Trump revolution others missed: those who voted for Trump, voted against the slave mentality imposed upon them, and that  they welcomed, for all too long!)

The results, of so much mental inertia, of course, could be catastrophic; whereas said mentality just enslaved some continents, while devastating others, we are now all the continents, all the Natives, squirming on the chopping block.

President Washington was a slave master. A slave investor. A slave driver. A vicious, conniving exploiter of his fellow-man, exploiting loopholes in law to keep on torturing his fellow-men, by the hundreds, on a very personal basis. Should he have the capital city named after him? Get to know him better, before jumping to the affirmative. As The Economist puts it in The first president, slave-owner. The spectre of slavery haunts George Washington’s house,

Jan 5th 2017, WASHINGTON, DC:

“When Washington was 11, he inherited 10 slaves from his father; when he died five decades later, he owned 123 of the 317 slaves who lived and worked at Mount Vernon. In that time the estate grew from a fairly modest farmhouse with 2,000 acres to a 21-room mansion and nearly 8,000 acres. It was in this way that the first president became rich: by buying, owning and sometimes selling people and by forcing them to work for him, under pain of flogging, beating or being sold away from their relatives and friends. There had hitherto been little acknowledgement at Mount Vernon of this dreadful blot on Washington’s reputation, or of the hundreds of black slaves who lived and worked there.”

This abominable stain on the start of the American Republic was covered-up for decades of fake news:

“Insofar as slavery was mentioned at all in the plantation house’s literature and by its guides, it was to talk up the second thoughts on owning people Washington claimed to have had in the second half of his life. He thought it better, he wrote in 1778, to “get quit of Negroes”… This apologetic view of Washington’s slave-owning is still espoused by many school textbooks and historians… many Americans were surprised when, at the Democratic National Convention in July, Michelle Obama alluded to the fact that slaves helped built the White House.”

Slavery was an elaborate abomination. It was the free market (of people, as usual) in all its splendor. No indecency was left unturned:

“…an exhibition on slavery, “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at [president] George Washington’s Mount Vernon”, describes the lives of 19 of the slaves who lived on the estate. Sambo Anderson, for example, a carpenter, born in West Africa, whom Washington appears to have purchased in the 1750s and freed in his will. His wife and children were owned by the estate of Martha Washington and handed on to her inheritors after her death. Anderson spent the rest of his life saving money, from his work as a beekeeper and hunter, in order to buy the liberty of a handful of his children and grandchildren.”

To this day, The Economist recognizes, a mood of cover-up, of hiding the truth, and of fake news dominate the exhibition of the First President’s disgusting being:

“Even in the slavery exhibition, there is little sense of the violence Washington visited on his slaves—the whippings and beatings, the slaughter of his slaves’ dogs he ordered to prevent them alerting their masters to the approach of his overseers.  Much is made of his growing misgivings about slavery. But there is too little recognition that this appears to have been at least in part motivated by economics; by growing less tobacco Washington reduced his demand for slave-labour.

For Washington’s slave-owning was not, as the experience of Mount Vernon might suggest, a painful footnote to a great life, but as central to it as anything he did. Washington’s zeal for efficiency, order and money-making are all part of his mythology; these qualities help explain his success. They were also the spirit in which he traded in and worked his slaves. He approached the business of buying slaves as he might livestock, insisting, “all of them to be strait limbed, & in every respect strong and healthy with good teeth”. He worked them into the ground, expecting that “every labourer (male and female) does as much in 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health or constitution, will allow.””

Washington always refused to free his slaves, as Lafayette urged him to do, for years. They were friends; at the battle of Yorktown, when the British army had to surrender, there was one American army, but also two French armies, one of them headed by Lafayette, and one French fleet, which had defeated,and put to flight,  the British fleet. Understand that the tradition, the culture and the legal system Lafayette came from, had outlawed slavery more than 11 centuries prior. Washington came from a tradition, a culture, a legal system, which had reinstalled slavery, 160 years earlier, to maximize profits.  

In truth, the US First President was a great beast of abomination (as I have pointed out in writing for more than eight years: see “Plutocracy Originated Slavery and Racism”). The Economist notices that Washington’s misgivings about slavery are given prominence in contemporaneous exhibitions. A type of Fake News. Fake News of the deepest type.

“Less prominent attention is paid to Washington’s lifelong efforts to protect the system that made him rich.  In 1783 he signed the first fugitive slave law, which authorised the recapture of escaped slaves in any state and the punishment of anyone found harbouring fugitive slaves. He also sought to circumvent anti-slavery law for his own purposes.

Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery of 1780 ruled that any slave who entered the state with an owner and stayed longer than six months must be freed. Because Philadelphia was America’s seat of government at the time, this gave Washington a headache. His solution was to surreptitiously arrange for his slaves to be cycled in and out of the state every few months (“I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington” he wrote to his personal secretary in 1791). Only twelve weeks before he died, Washington was still trying to track down a slave who had escaped three years earlier, having learned that Martha Washington planned to give her away as a wedding present.”

***

The Dark Side Created The USA In No Small Way:

To start with, just as slavery was central to President Washington’s successful life, slavery, and holocausts, were central to the success of the early American society, and its Republic: enslavement and extermination enabled to get rid of the American Natives, their control of the continent, and made the European colonists immensely rich.

Slavery, introduced in the first few years of the English colony, was unlawful in England (since the Frankish conquest of 1066 CE; slavery was unlawful in the Frankish/Roman empire since 655 CE!) Slavery was actually unlawful anywhere in Europe (out of the Muslim controlled area).

However, slavery made the cultivation of tobacco possible, to the point the English American colony became highly profitable.

By comparison, the French colony in Canada did not allow slavery, nor holocausts. Thus French Canada depended only upon trading furs with the American Natives: thus Canada was much less profitable than the slavery propelled English colonies.

The clashes with English authorities about “taxation without representation” were real. However, they were not the main bone of contention. The real, main problem was that real estate speculators and greedy colonists were eager to spread their colonization, and destruction of Native American societies, west of the Appalachians. Whereas the English authorities felt more decent, and wiser, to stop the holocaust (OK, certainly they also wanted to keep control). This was the main cause of the US war of independence, and no accident that a real estate speculator such as Colonel Washington played a central role.

Nor is it an accident that this fact is still covered-up (below the “taxation without representation argument”).

The Economist pondered that “panegyrics to Washington’s generosity and humanity leave little room for the horrors he oversaw. For an alternative view, your blogger asked a young black security guard at the slavery exhibition what he made of the first president’s much vaunted second thoughts on slavery. “You know, I’ve been studying this quite a bit since I started working here”, he said. “People say George Washington was against slavery. I say actions speak louder than words”.”

Indeed. Actually there is a remedy to all this.

Why should we pay attention to all this history? Because yesterday’s origins created today’s reality. Civilizations have moods and meta-moods. US religiosity is entangled with the desire of not wanting to know too much what is really going on. The Bible justified holocausts and enslavement, and the mood that, whatever good men do, it was ordered by God. That overall mentality is still in power, and enabled by the imperial manner of many an US institutions, and the aura they bathe in.

As the USA has become the world’s most influential power, the roots of the American mentality, greed, slavery and holocaust, should be carefully examined.

As whom many have depicted as a clown is going to be endowed by the immensely evil power of thousands of nuclear devices, each capable of annihilating a city in seconds, it is worth remembering how the whole empire got launched.

European conquered America, because they succeeded to do, what the Nazis (stupidly) dreamed they could do in Europe (Nazis had seen too many “Westerns”, and even absorbed all too well the idea that Westerns were fake news, to some extent, thus that Americans were not for real…) To put it even more bluntly, Nazism, for real, armed with the Bible, not the Swastika, is how the West, but also the Eastern Seaboard, and the fly-over country in between, was conquered.

The unexamined life may be too unworthy to keep on living.

And the obverse is true. A thoroughly examined life is much more worthy. Athens had only 60,000 citizens, yet dozens of them among civilization’s most prominent intellectuals. Total democracy endows with total power!

How? Any Athenian could pretend to the highest functions: they may be bestowed on him (many offices were drawn by lot). So all paid attention to what was going on. Obama had only to pay attention to what big money and gigantic power wanted him to do.

Was if why Obama shed a tear in his farewell address? Full of sorrow, for his departed soul, as he looks at the hopeful face of his youngest daughter? Remembering that he was the Faust in chief? President of all the little Fausts out there?

Time to study in greater depth the roots of our moods, lest we want to shed even more tears.  

Patrice Ayme’

 

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Posted in Slavery, Systems Of Moods, Systems Of Thought, USA | 16 Comments »

The rights and wrongs of hunting!

January 10, 2017

The Great Spirit Was A Hunter, And Will Always Be A Hunter. Hunting For Ideas, Is Not Just A Metaphor, Not Just Our Fate, But The Only Way To Have A Superior Mind.

Once, well above timber-line, with the sun low on the horizon, an antelope came my way, running passed me. I was running the other way, and the quadruped rushed, close enough to touch. As I turned the corner, a couple of seconds later, full of wonder, I found myself face to face with an enormous wolf charging my way. We looked at each other, not even three meters away… I will always remember that moment. The intelligence obvious in the yellow eyes of the wolf brought to my mind the look of a primate, not just a canid. It was a late evening in late spring, when days are very long. I could read the majestic creature’s quasi-human surprise:’What is a human doing here at this time of the day?’

Hunting had made his kind smart over the eons. He could have dispatched me to another world in seconds, but he knew what humans were. We recognized each others’ supreme intelligence, an identity of spirits. Two hunters on top of the world. He went his way, I went mine, both owners of the universe, and having recognized the other as such.

The essay reproduced below was penned by a baby philosopher, and tends to philosophy by enumeration, an honorable method, reminiscent of FOX News’ approach to debate. With a silly (anti-hunting) bias not so well hidden. However I agree with it in some ways, with what the author wrote, about the so-called “confirmation bias”. Let me explain by considering the conclusion of the author:
“If your interlocutor objects to hunting, try to discover the basis for their objection. And I believe you should keep nature out of it.

Finally, try to argue with someone who takes a fundamentally different view. Confirmation bias – the unintentional act of confirming the beliefs we already have – is hard to overcome. The only antidote I know of is rational discourse with people whose confirmation bias runs contrary to my own.”

I agree with the method proposed to deal with “confirmation bias” (= “intellectual fascism”, “group think”). However, the sentence “I believe you should keep nature out of it”, is downright silly. The author is part of nature, should he keep himself “out of it”? Whatever “out” is?

I am both for and against hunting. It all depends upon who is hunting what, when, how, why? Hunting with stones, or arrows is one thing, wolves hunting their prey, another. To want wolves living somewhere free, but wolves who are not hunting, but devouring protein pills, would be akin to wanting the biosphere, albeit, without biology.

Let’s not forget civilization was founded by the genus Homo, fundamentally a hunting species, the greatest hunting genus of all times. Hunting is especially the genius of Homo Erectus and Homo Habilis. When Homo Erectus got to Georgia, two million years ago, it survived the cold winters, because it was dressed in animal furs.

Fundamentally, hunting is about domination, and especially total domination of the better ideas. Predators tend to be smarter than prey (they tend to have bigger brains, overall: there has been a brain arm race between predator and prey, at least on land… with few exceptions, like crocodiles). Hence the mood fundamental to hunting (I am smarter than you, so I completely dominate and own you) is also the mood most conducive to civilization.

Hunting has been so central to the evolution of our genus that to be rabidly against it, is to be rabidly against humanity, and even worse against the idea that there are better ideas which can own and dominate.

The central idea is that nature needs hunting and nature is about hunting. Even human nature is about hunting and contemplating hunting means contemplating nature.

Overall, one has to dominate the debate. The crux we presently face, is the preservation of the biosphere. Genuine hunters want this, so that they can hunt. Actually many species were saved by hunters who had established preserves for them. So genuine preservationists want to preserve the biosphere. So they should cooperate.

Hunting teaches a meta-morality about the animal conditions which pre-Neolithic people understood very well: hunting was part of the digestion of the Great Spirit, so to speak. Hunting was a process consubstantial with the universe itself. This viewpoint, no doubt held for millions of years, is entirely correct.

By contrast, denying that hunting is central to the universe is in not just unreal, it violates the very idea of having a spirit. Wanting to protect the universe from hunting is to try to build a god that would be like a dog, something mastered, with no supremacy of its own, but for blind love.

Maybe we should grow up instead, and join the Great Spirit, in its full spirit? If we want the better spirit, we cannot just be prisoners of love. What we need, instead, to save the biosphere, is the greatest spirit. We won’t save the spirit if our only guide is to spare the pain. Quite the opposite.

Learning from Dogs

The philosophy of hunting in terms of it being ‘right’ or ‘wrong’.

Anyone who comes here for more than a couple of visits will know that both Jean and I are opposed to hunting completely. Period!

That’s not surprising as there have been a number of posts over the years describing how we feed the wild deer. Here’s three more photographs that haven’t previously been shared with you.

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p1160189oooo

p1150179But, of course, the opinions of Jean and me are not, and should not be, the rule for the wider population of this part of Oregon.

All I would ask is that there is a proper, mature discussion as to the pros and cons of hunting wild animals in this, the twenty-first century.

All of which leads me to a recent essay posted on The Conversation site and republished here within the terms of that site.

ooOOoo

Is hunting moral?…

View original post 1,373 more words

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Posted in Animal Rights, Evolution, Moods, Systems Of Thought | 11 Comments »

Global Sea Ice Collapsing: Carbon Tax!

January 7, 2017

Any linear process, pushed too far, will become non-linear. This is true in psychology, as it is in imploding stars. (It is even true in Quantum Physics, where it used to be called “collapse” and now is called “decoherence”, because “collapse” did not sound too good, probably… Actually the switch from linear to nonlinear, is the greatest mystery of the Quantum; we will massage it below, with an ominous message, naturally…) And it is obviously true for the climate. Climate change can be slowly and steady (it took 35 million years to cool the dinosaurs into extinction, although the end of the process was nonlinear…) Climate change can also be extremely brutal, on the orders of years, not millions of years (contemplate the Younger Dryas, dramatic, extremely brutal glaciations which lasted no more than a millennium, the most spectacular being 18,000 years ago).

This is a complicated world. We are its gods, and we are warming up the party. Global sea ice is the sum of sea ice, worldwide, mostly found in the Arctic and Antarctica. It is suddenly collapsing. Yes, global ice fluctuates with the seasons. Yet, consider this graph:

 

Catastrophic Collapse Inevitable. Any linear process, pushed too far, will become non-linear.

Catastrophic Collapse Inevitable.

Just invert that graph, transforming the ice collapse into sea rise: this is what is going to happen. And not in 5000 years, as corrupt scientists have hopefully suggested. No: it could start to happen in 2017. And it will certainly start very soon, in the lifetime of existing politicians.

How did these scientists get corrupt? By hope and inertia: good jobs are given to those with good news, however fake those “news” may be. Especially if said good “news” reinforce the existing establishment. There was actually nothing new in claiming that Greenland and Antractica would stay covered with ice. It was actually old news.

There was no reason, whatsoever, to think that the giant ice sheets of Greenland and Antarctica would stay stable under enormous warming. (Whereas global air warming is only 1.2 Centigrade above the baseline, warming in polar regions is several times this. This fact is explainable by logic alluded to below.)

However, there were excellent reasons, excellent because they were very simple, to believe they were not going to stay stable. I have found them, and exposed them on this site. Two reasons are most prominent.

One I could call that the permafrost argument: as temperatures shift up, by a few degrees Centigrade (= Celsius), the permafrost line has to travel hundreds of kilometers north, or south. As it does, ice sheets melt.

However, and this is the second major reason, ice sheets, which are up to four kilometers thick, exert a pressure of 4,000 tons per square meter (that means roughly 40,000 tons over the footprint of a car). The ice sheets thus press the continents down by thousands of meters, so warm water will slip below the ice, falling all the way underneath, and the disintegration will be brutal. (Such brutality has been caught on film.)

I am struggling with an essay which demonstrates why Obama wanted Trump elected (and how he accomplished this). Not easy to explain to those who cling to a simpler world (so the work is still in progress). Yet there is a first lesson therein:that our world has become so complicated, so poorly organized, and so dangerously managed, and our powers so great, that a single individual’s brain structure impacts significantly the biosphere.

A case in point is Kim of North Korea: a certified maniac who rules the world by instilling respect for his own insanity (he claims to be developing a nuclear “deterrent” by being able to throw nuclear bombs at any country, anywhere.)

So what’s up with the ice? Sea ice depends upon a cold sea. Ice on top of the sea, or land, throws back sunlight like a shield, back to space, before photons can dig in the ground, or the ocean, and deliver in the depths their momentum-energy, raising the agitation, thus temperature there. Once the ice cover is gone, photons can heat up the depths. Normal temperature measurements which make headlines are just about air temperature, a meter off the ground. They are not about the rise of temperatures of the depths.

If, at some point the rise of temperature of the depths becomes to great to allow ice or snow cover in winter, ground, or ocean temperature is exposed to photons, thus heat, even in the cool season, and a vicious circle, a different regime, starts.

The transition does not have to be smooth. In Quantum Physics, a system can “tunnel” between a local minima, and another, even lower (this is “classically” not allowed). So will object that climatology is a “classical” system. And they are obviously wrong: this is the famous paradox of the hurricane started by a butterfly’s wings. Ultimately, Quantum systems decide of everything: if zillions of Quantum systems switch to a lower energy state together, we have a “classical” transition.

Thus, the climate of the entire planet will LURCH to a different state. The collapse of global sea ice is an early indicator of the incoming catastrophe (reminiscent of when some temperature indicators went up inside the left wing of the Space Shuttle Columbia; by then, Columbia was doomed; in our case, we are not doomed terminally: we will be more or less doomed, depending upon how we react now).

This happened countless times in the past: the AMOC (or Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation), is the planet’s most significant current: it enables the Gulf Stream to go warm-up Europe gently. However, sometimes, it gets cold before making it to Iceland, and drops to the sea bottom, 6,000 meters down, short of the entire north-east corner of the Atlantic.

As it does in the fictional and exaggerated movie “The Day After Tomorrow”, when the AMOC brutally changes (this we know, for a fact explained mysterious flash freezes in the past, more than 10,000 years ago).

Actually my own position is more subtle: I do not expect a brutal glaciation in Europe, as when the AMOC lurched last, because there is plainly not enough easily liquefiable cold in the Arctic. However, I expect something way worse: brutal sea level rise, in the tens of meters. My reasoning is terrible in its brutal simplicity: warm oceanic water will slip underneath, and then fall thousands of meters below the ice sheets. Yes, below. For more details, please read:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/21/west-antarctica-melting-amazon-not-helping/

Warm winds on top will not help, and have already disintegrated major ice shelves in days (like four days: by happenstance, measuring instruments caught the disintegration of a major ice shelf, ten years ago: it was immediately preceded by a four-day, 16 Celsius (62 F) wind storm (with hurricane winds). Said winds are of course augmenting. Because of thermodynamic effects, extremely warm winds can occur even in July, in the heart of Antarctica’s winter, bringing temperatures up by 40 Celsius (from minus 30 C to plus 10 C), vaporizing the snow cover (winds are augmenting all over the planet, as more energy is pumped into the biosphere).

The Obama administration did precious little about the developing climate catastrophe (his own administrator just testified in Congress that Obama administration policies had an impact of .01%; even the much derided governor Perry from Texas did much more, by transforming the One Star State into a large wind farm!)

Trump could do much more, by killing two birds with one stone. He could do what Obama and the establishment which used him as a puppet, did not dare do. Mostly because they are very serious, respectable people getting their power from even more serious, more respectable people.

Set-up a worldwide carbon tax. Europe will cooperate: several European countries already have carbon taxes, all tax gasoline and diesel at enormous rates. It happens that, under Obama, the US government was selling the best coal in the world, five times below cost (a Science Magazine lead article detailed this in December 2016; I planned to write an essay on it, but did not find the time-energy…). That dragged all coal prices down, worldwide, and was an anti-carbon tax.

By lifting that best-coal price in Federal lands, thanks to a carbon tax, Trump would bring coal prices up (thus momentarily helping the coal miners who voted for him).

Such is the way. There is no alternative (slogan of the stupid Thatcher!). Of course, there is so much inertia in the system, a rise of three degrees Centigrade is guaranteed, and coastal cities will have either to be evacuated, or sit behind ten stories tall levees…

Anyway, let climate skeptics munch on the graph on top. Brutal floods are a historical fact. Sumerian civilization was drowned in a sudden flood. And yes, it was man-made, we understand this now. 43 centuries ago, the most advanced civilization, or, more exactly, one of the roots of what would become the most advanced civilization (ours) was wiped out in a matter of days, by a man-made cataclysm.

Meditate that.

Meditation is the noblest pursuit of humanity. Or, at least, the one activity which characterizes humanity best.

Patrice Ayme’

 

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Posted in Antarctica, Catastrophe, Climate Change | 22 Comments »

Want More Wisdom? Get More Life!

January 2, 2017

ANTI-AGE REVOLUTION NEEDED FOR EXTENDING WISDOM

What is the primary strategic goal of anti-aging? Extending not just life, but wisdom!

(Some may sneer that strategia, generalship in Greek, is about war. But life, preserving life on Earth, is a war, and fighting that war, what wisdom leads to.)

In the European Middle Ages, a colossal discovery was made, which made civilization much smarter, wiser, and far-sighted: glasses. Glasses changed everything, by making plenty of other inventions possible. Glasses were an invention amplifier..

By age 40, in the European Middle Ages, aside from the Black Plague of 1347-53 CE, the death rate was slow, but artisans could not engage in precision technological work, because they lost their short distance vision (as people lived outdoors a lot, they tended to be far-sighted, thus lost proximal vision early).

The same vision problem affected intellectuals: they could not read, write, or copy, anymore, by the time they reached their 40s, and the heights of their mental powers.  Mental power is something which grows with age. A cephalopod observes, learns, and then duplicates. On the left below, the mollusk: 

Nothing Here But Us Algae. To Build A Civilization, One Needs The Functional Equivalent Of Hands, But Also Speech, Society And More Of What They Require, Longevity. All These Cephalopods, However Bright, Do Not Have.

Nothing Here But Us Algae. To Build A Civilization, One Needs The Functional Equivalent Of Hands, But Also Speech, Society And More Of What They Require, Longevity. All These Cephalopods, However Bright, Do Not Have.

[Cephalopods have typically 500 million neurons, five times the number of neurons a rat has; they use it to instantaneously mimic the colors and patterns of their environment, not just by changing colors, but even shape, as seen above, for all sorts of dissemblances; and also for manipulation…]  

Reading glasses changed everything having to do with WISDOM. Shortly afterwards, precision mechanisms could be developed by artisans and scientists: the telescope (late 16th century), the advanced mechanical computer (Pascal, early 17th century), and the mechanical clock, which enabled mariners to know where they were (thus enabling the conquest of the world by civilization, and global trade, the excesses of which we are presently experiencing now…)

Glasses were industrially fabricated in Italy by 1286 CE. They were an extension of rock crystal magnification known, and used, for centuries.

The invention of glasses corresponded to the mood of deliberately helping, or even beautifying, life by new technology through national invention programs, the archetype of which was the invention of stain glass windows and metal architecture in Cathedrals, Frankish style. Or the use of giant hydraulic hammers to bend giant iron, one thousand times too strong to be bent by hand, also for cathedral construction.

That mood, of developing technology to facilitate and prettify life, was not new, it dated from the early Imperium Francorum, but gathered momentum as the Middle Ages advanced.   The Tenth Century was full of newly invented (cultivars of) beans. Beans brought lots of proteins without having to go though the less efficient meat production…

So here we are. We went through considerable revolutions in energy and telecommunication, and produced antibiotics industrially (instead of gathering them in the forest, as prehistoric men did).

However, it has been a long time since our civilization made a drastic extension of useful life time. Sophocles was in his nineties when he wrote (or, rather, dictated) some of his work.

Glasses doubled the number of decades intellectuals could spend furthering their studies. It is no coincidence that full-blown printing with movable type appeared within two centuries after the invention of reading glasses: the glasses augmented the availability of books, and the reading of books. Glasses basically doubled the lifespan of intellectuals. Basically doubling the wisdom (doubling the time to gather,.distill and teach wisdom).

The easiest way to double wisdom again, is to double lifespan again.

Further anti-age revolution is needed now to help wisdom. And, as the biosphere totters under the blows of our irresponsible civilization, more wisdom is not just desirable, but necessary.

So extent lifespan. Bill Gates, who got his fortune from his mom’s influence, pontificated recently that the search for life extension, as pursued by, say, Google, was fundamentally “selfish”. Well, no. Bill Gates is an early college drop-out (see mom, an IBM director, above), Bill Gates does not have much formal education. Gates does not have the conception that it takes years to learn esoteric knowledge. And digest it. And forget it. And reconstruct it, to become a master of wisdom.

We need more time. This year, it was learned that Greenland sharks apparently can live more than 500 years. And that some Bowhead whales live more than 280 years.

So why do we live so little? We, the wisest of them all? Because that was the optimization between fast generation renewal and the wisdom we needed to gather, teach and transmit for the new generation, the whole thing protected by enough war-like instincts. So our wisdom, so far has had a lot to do with how to make war wisely, accelerating the evolution of our species.

Well, we need more wisdom, more gathering thereof. We need a different sort of wisdom, of a less bellicose type, a different sort of war, against fate, rather than men. And thus more time, to find out carefully what is really going on, even inside ourselves. it’s not just about ourselves. Earth needs it.

Patrice Ayme’

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Posted in Animal Intelligence, Biology, Wisdom | 11 Comments »

Banality of Rogues

January 1, 2017

The famous Prussian Jewish philosopher Hannah Arendt, an anti-Nazi who slept assiduously with the Nazi Heidegger, her thesis advisor, married to someone else, wrote about the “banality of evil”, a concept that became famous… Although Arendt’s “discovery” would have made the Catholic Inquisition shrug and smirk, five centuries prior (the Inquisition would have said:’This is exactly what we have been talking about, evil everywhere!’)

Today I will speak of the banality of rogues. You see rogues tie in with the (re-)Foundation Principle. No rogues, no civilization. (There goes one of the main critiques against Donald Trump! Yes, I just saw the movie “Rogue One”…)

We have a real, huge example in history, the very base of our present civilization: the Franks were both rogues, and “renovators”, as they themselves described themselves, of the Roman empire. No less. But actually the Franks did much more, founding Western civilization in full, by outlawing slavery, making secular education mandatory, and running an imperial, military society which, somehow, saved and overcame antiquity, while preserving an open society (the whole picture got in trouble with the First Crusade: see, it’s the fault of Islam, once again, ha-ha-ha).

I was reading in a history publication, how the Roman empire went down, and they mentioned all sorts of barbarians: Visigoths, Ostrogoths, Burgundians, Vandals, Alans, Huns… They forgot to mention the most important ones, the ones vested with Roman power, more than any others, the Franks… It was as if they talked about breathing, but forgot to mention air.

Ignoring the re-foundation of Rome by the Franks is ignoring, not just history, but the re-foundation of civilization, no less. Indeed the Franks removed the most glaring defects of Rome.  (That “renovated” empire officially went on until Napoleon, emperor of the rogue imperial part of said Roman empire called Francia, then France, shut it down in 1804.)  

Habitable Exoplanet With Ring In the Movie Rogue One: In Our World, Our Mental World, There Are Now Exoplanets Everywhere. In 1600 CE, Giordano Bruno got burned, just for suggesting that.

Habitable Exoplanet With Ring In the Movie Rogue One: In Our World, Our Mental World, There Are Now Exoplanets Everywhere. In 1600 CE, Giordano Bruno got burned, just for suggesting that.

[Earth may have had a ring at some point in the past (some scientist have speculated, looking at some otherwise weird data). Thousands of exoplanets have been found since the first one, 51 Pegasi b, at the University of Geneva eleven years ago. An exoplanet was found, in 2016, around the closest star, Proxima Centauri, a red dwarf; the planet is in the habitable zone. Details are unknown, as the planet does not seem to come between us and its star; good spending in astronomy would allow to look at it directly, using existing technology.But our corrupt leaders have prefered to give money to our plutocratic masters, and, thus, crumbs to themselves, rather than making science all it can be. Science is the one job for all, and necessary for survival, moreover.] 

How did Rome die? Basically from sclerotic thinking, mental paralysis, senility: the establishment by Augustus of his damned “Principate”, with a permanent “First Man” (Princeps) at the helm, was the fundamental cause of mental decay. We The People got completely disinterested from the most interesting question, and the few families at the helm were too idiotic to have any new ideas.

Once mental decay is at the helm, and pervades the base, nothing can save a society: when problems occur, they can’t be solved. This is what happened to Rome. Confronted with worse problems in the Fourteenth Century France sailed right through, as nothing had happened, because Fourteenth Century France was an intellectual power machine, greatest in civilization so far, ever.

Buridan, who was worth ten Newtons, at least, having overturned Aristotelian physics, discovered ⅔ of “Newton’s” laws, and justified, as a result, the heliocentric system, was not just chief of the university of Paris, but counselor to four French kings. That was typical of the situation in France, England, Germany and Italy at the time. Buridan’s network of students and collaborators extended throughout Europe. Meanwhile Florence’s bankers funded that Italian Republic’s mighty army with national bonds…

So the fierce, swift and abominable Black Plague killed half of Europe, and no aristocrats… So what? Rome, affected by smaller plagues, tottered on the brink of extinction…

Yes, one can point to the sorry state of the Demoncratic Party, with its entrenched interests, drinking the elixir served by self-serving plutocrats (such as those who set-up Obamacare without cost control. And no, don’t point at Trump; he and his Kellyanne Conway, among others, are a breath of fresh air, after decades of increasingly metastatic plutocracy. We will see what they do.

Sometimes heavy destruction is the only way to construction. It is alway the case, when the construction is huge. (And this is true for brains too, explaining why philosophers have it hard, when they interact with the commons… and reciprocally!)

Oh yes, it can hurt: this is the implicit theme in the last Star War saga (“Rogue One”). The rebellion has done evil things we are informed, and we see it trying its very best, to do some more (the father of the heroine is assassinated by the rebellion, although he works against the empire; the movie is notable also for the fact the main hero and character is a human female in her full glory, second to males in no way whatsoever!)

It is a complicated world. It will get ever more complicated. Mastering its complexity is the most crucial part in fighting evil. To master complexity, one has to understand it first. Thus, standing in the way of understanding is the greatest, deepest meta-evil.

Only rogues dare to understand, and act upon, what others refuse to understand, or even see. Rogues are necessary to progress, forward, and civilization is riding a bicycle: no forward motion means collapse. Because a ruined ecology is always biting at the heels of civilization.

Civilization may not like rogues, but it needs them, to be born again, with a better intelligent design, necessary for survival.

Being a rogue is not just a neurohormonal state. It is a mental architecture. Studies just published showed that first mothers get their brains permanently modified (details another time). Similarly a rogue brain is different from the brain of a servant of the establishment like Obama. It is permanently different. Giordano Bruno, or Galileo, or Descartes, or Montaigne or Abelard, were permanently different.

The superiority of the “West” (“Pars Occidentalis” as the Romans said) is due to its being just enough of a host medium to rogues. The fate of rogues was not as good in Islam, by orders of magnitude; after he got in so much trouble for fighting the Church, Abelard, in the Twelfth Century, toyed with the idea of going to live among the Islamists (so he wrote). Wisely, he did not do it: he would have been killed there (instead, in the West, his ideas won, over the centuries…)

Happy New Year To All (even the abysmal Obama, basking in Oahu, and his cohort of the corrupt!)

Rogues watch ants with sympathy…

Patrice Ayme’

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Posted in history, Roots of Civilization, Systems Of Mind, Systems Of Moods, Systems Of Thought | 11 Comments »

This Alone Validates Clinton’s Loss

December 31, 2016

I was poking around the definition of “national debt”, by consulting various online entities, some of them governmental. “National debt” varies according to what one considers. I was looking to see whether “Quantitative Easing” (the buying by the central banks of depleted assets to the wealthiest to make them wealthy again — the way it was done by our unforgivable leaders).

The smallest interpretation of “national debt” in the case of the USA is around $13 trillions, 80% of US GDP. That smallest notion of debt considers only the FEDERAL debt held by the PUBLIC… After excluding all sorts of obligations (like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, real estates entities held by the US government)… or what the US government owes to future Social Security recipients (most of the US population). The smallest number is what the Demoncrats love to brandish. However, it will not affect the stunning discovery I made (below).

This Is The Smallest Interpretation Of Debt, The One Held By The Public, After EXCLUDING All Sorts Of Gigantic Obligations, Bankrupt Governmental Entiries, And Inter-Governmental Debt, And Also After Excluding the "Fed Balance Sheet"

This Is The Smallest Interpretation Of Debt, The One Held By The Public, After EXCLUDING All Sorts Of Gigantic Obligations, Bankrupt Governmental entities, And Inter-Governmental Debt, And Also After Excluding the “Fed Balance Sheet”

Obama augmented enormously the US National Debt. What for?

The OECD considers that US government debt, including state and local government, is 125% of US GDP. By comparison, the OECD considers that the “general government debt” of socialist France is a bit less, 120% of GDP (same link).

The maximal interpretation of the US National Debt is well above 50 trillion dollars, more than 300% of GDP. Similar numbers, in terms of percentage of GDP, are true for comparable countries (such as France, UK, etc.)

The US government seizes some revenues, like the Social Security tax and consumes it right away (instead of putting the money in the Social Security Trust Fund). The result of this sort of maneuvers is “intergovernmental debt”, which is around 6 trillion dollars. I knew this. This “borrowing” from Social Security has to be absolutely incorporated in the notion of National Debt, because it represents borrowing from the Public by other (unwilling) means. Fair accounting requires to do this.

By this reckoning, the internationally recognized US Federal debt, in December 2015, a year ago,  was 101% of US GDP (a number comparable to that of socialist France… I don’t mean that as an insult: the present presidency of France is held by the French Socialist Party, and so is the Parliament and Senate! They will be thrown out of power in five months.)

But then I learned something new, which jumped at me. The US National Debt reached 106% of GDP in July 2016, six months later. That is an annual rate of augmentation of roughly 10% a year. In a way, it makes sense: when Obama was inaugurated, the US National Debt was just 68%. So, in seven years, Obama increased the US debt by 33%, a rate of augmentation of nearly 5% a year. So Obama just doubled his rate of augmentation of US debt in 2016.

After I pointed out this enormous jump of the debt on Tweeter, I got the following reaction (from which I borrowed the title of this essay):

Philip N. Beam Sr.‏@PhilipBeamSr

@Tyranosopher @CraigRBrittain @wikileaks Just this alone should be enough to validate Hillary’s loss.

Indeed.

And this debt catastrophe is not going to improve: the cost of Obamacare is up 25% from 2016 to 2017. The New York Times and the Reaganite Paul Krugman (the fellow Nobel of Obama and self-aggrandizing, self-described as “the conscience of a liberal”) swooned that this 25% jump in Obamacare cost, was just a one-time augmentation.

However, as there are no serious cost controls in Obamacare, this is highly unlikely: taxpayers will have to pay increasingly plutocrats such as Warren buffet, who made many billions out of US health care, to better lecture the losers down there who don’t know how to invest or work, and, moreover, vote for Trump.  

One may wonder how, mechanically dear leader Obama generated so much debt. The following graph explains it all: Obama lowered the taxes on the wealthy, while showering the poor with gold, and various services, to make them stupidly favorable. This is a very old method, invented and practiced industrially, by Roman emperors (it did not end well).

Under Obama Tax Receipts, Which Come Mostly From Taxing The Rich, Were Kept Artificially, Unsustainably Low. No Wonder the Hyper Rich Were Mostly All For Obama, And Against The (For Them Frighteningly) Unpredictable Trump.

Under Obama Tax Receipts, Which Come Mostly From Taxing The Rich, Were Kept Artificially, Unsustainably Low. No Wonder the Hyper Rich Were Mostly All For Obama, And Against The (For Them Frighteningly) Unpredictable Trump.

So Obama was a Progressive In Name Only (PINO), or DINO (Democrat In Name Only). He built up a giant deficit, and thus National Debt, so that his friends would stay rich.

Yes, indeed. During the 2008 crisis, part of the wealthiest lost most of their wealth to fellow wealthy people (thanks to a lot of leveraging, as organized by Clinton, Bill). Obama could have let the entities in difficulty go bankrupt, as Reagan and Bush Sr. did in the 1980s. And then buy them on the cheap. Instead he went a different route, using TARP and paying TARP with Quantitative Easing. A route which made the wealthiest, wealthier. (He probably does not understand this, to this day!)

A related matter is the striking improvement of some US socioeconomic metrics in the last couple of months before the US presidential election.

For example, the US median family income rocketed up in the last few weeks before the elections.. I was very surprised by this, and suspicious. Indeed, the US median family income peaked, in real dollars, in 1998, when it succumbed to Bill Clinton’s pro-wealth policies of the Goldman Sachs government. Ever since it has been down, as Democrat and Republican leadership followed the sort of Reagan, trickle down policies which got great demoncratic leaders such as Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman launched (Rubin was CEO of Goldman Sachs, while Summers and Krugman were at the White House, telling Reagan what to do).

In Brazil, president Dilma Rousseff did a similar trick: she cooked the numbers to make the economy look better than it really was. She was re-elected, thanks to those numbers, but when the cooking surfaced, and started to smell bad, she was impeached. It turns out that the Brazilian sociopolitical leadership is thoroughly corrupt. All the way to socialist icons and ex-guerillas (such as Dilma; by the way, Dilma did not profit personally materially from the cooking of the numbers… except that she got, however fleetingly, re-elected).

Some will say that the USA is not Brazil. Indeed, the USA is much more corrupt, so the institutionalization of the corruption in the USA is hard to even point out, lest one is ready to be called a lunatic.

It is not just financial corruption, it’s also media, even mental corruption, which is more extensive in the USA: when Brazilian leaders lose an election, they don’t accuse Russia.

So did Obama’s underlings cook the numbers? In light of the stupendous augmentation of the debt in the months prior to the presidential election, one can only be suspicious.

Augmenting the US National Debt, my dear Obama, at a ten percent annual rate, was trying to buy the presidential election. That’s how history will remember it. History will also remember that you tried to lower the American Republic to the status of vulgar Banana Republic, by claiming it was all Russia’s fault.

For years, the USA crowed that it was the world’s hacking master, even making Iranian nuclear equipment spin out of control (Stuxnet virus). Vast arms of the government masquerading as private entities, among them Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, were hacking the world, and it was fine.

A real democratic republic and open society should never underestimate others’ propensity to mimic anti-democratic, anti-republican and vicious means!

This happened before: the Athenian empire behaved several times in terrible ways. And that was probably why Athens lost the Penopolesian war (Athens had stolen the Delian League treasury, and destroyed the island state of Melos, both for no good reason, among other exploits of demented cruelty unbound). Later, other Greek states imitated the Athenian ways, and Athens lost the war, and half of her population. She survived only thanks to Sparta (the ultimate ignominy!)

Behaving badly feels good, until on is found out by the public. Happy new year Obama and your sycophantic pro-plutocratic media!

Patrice Ayme’

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Posted in Censorship, Cruelty, Debt | 14 Comments »

If there’s any doubt ….

December 30, 2016

Paul Handover from the site “Learning From Dogs” penned a very well written essay around some of the issues I worry most about and we should all worry most about. After I complained I had little energy to write essays, Paul replied:”But you inspire productive outcomes in others! My latest post is entirely down to you.”

Indeed it was. Paul’s essay is reblogged below, after my own, suitably apocalyptic, introduction.

Thanks Paul for helping with this problem, a problem potentially as big as one hundred world war twos, potentially unleashed anytime. Some will scoff, but Obama just took the largest sanctions since the cold war. (Against the advice of his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Putin said he will not retaliate; Wikileaks is saying the leaks come from the USA, some hint they come from the NSA, as Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, is listed as a foreign agent).

I will reblog your entire essay, which is much better written than I can master, as soon as I have time….
Thanks again, and happy new year for you and your readers!
Patrice

People whine a lot about World War One and World War Two. Whining is good, as long as it leads to examination of the causes of what went wrong.

World War One was pretty much started, in first order of appearance, through the will of five men, five Prussians (one of them the Kaiser, a plutocrat, eldest grandson of queen Victoria, cousin to the Tsar Nicholas II). Those men actually had planned to attack within 18 months, on December 11, 1912.

Would they have engaged on that “preventive war” without the assassination in Sarajevo, and the subsequent ultimatum of Austria-Hungary to Serbia? We don’t know (the assassinated Archiduke was a strong, albeit grouchy, advocate of peace at nearly any cost, and a close friend of the Kaiser).

However a fact is carefully ignored by history textbooks and history university professors: on June 1, 1914, the adviser of racist US president Wilson, Colonel House, proposed to the Kaiser a world government, with the UK, explicitly adverse to the “racially inferior French”.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/plot-against-france-1912-2013/

Little noticed by textbooks and historians is the fact that the USA, with the help of the “neutral” Netherlands, enabled the Kaiser to keep on fighting in spite of the Franco-British naval blockade (which was absolute). The Kaiser needed cotton for his high performance explosives, and it came from the US.

Conclusion? A trio of men can start a world war, if they have the power to do so: the Kaiser, the US president, and Von Moltke.

The usual conclusion of textbooks is that Europe was a powder keg ready to explode, and that’s good enough to explain what happened. It is basically a lie: Great Britain had no army, and the entire French government was on vacation in late July-early August 1914. So France and Britain were completely innocent. However, the fact remains one had built a machine which enabled a trio to assassinate world peace

The same general context was true for World War Two. through their actions, both the US and the UK rebuilt Germany as a war machine and an economic powerhouse, as a partially owned subsidiary. After the fall of Spain to the Nazis and fascists, Great Britain decided to support the French Republic in opposing Hitler by all means necessary (February 1939).

After France and Britain declared war to Hitler for his invasion of Poland, US President Roosevelt could have made the war stop early by delivering on the “guarantees” he had given France. But he did not. As a result, what should have been a short war against the Nazis, turned into a vast holocaust.

Conclusion: if one sets up a situation where things can go very wrong, given enough time, they will. The Obama administration engaged in a one trillion dollars nuclear weapons program, but did nothing to reduce the nuclear weapon threat. An obvious strategy for peace would have been to withdraw the land based ICBMs (Britain never had any. France dismantled its own; only three countries have them now, including the USA). Those are launched on warning, and are extremely dangerous.

In this, as in so many other matters, Obama has been an immense disappointment. People who want progress, should push for progressive ideas under the Trump administration. We cannot just hope that Trump will trump his critics (as he did so far). We have to push him in the right direction. The fate of humanity is at stake. And it could be gone in a flash, thanks to our previous, highly criminally derelict leaders.
Happy New Year To All!

Learning from Dogs

…. there’s no doubt!

My title and sub-title comes from commercial aviation. It’s one aspect of the safety culture that safely the millions of passengers who embark on a commercial flight each year. (IATA estimate that it will be 3.6 billion in 2016.) In other words, if the flight crew have even an inkling of an issue with the aircraft while in flight they will make an immediate decision to land.

Why I chose this title will become clearer as you read on.

The end of the Second World War so far as Europe was concerned came on May 8th, 1945. In other words: VE Day. London was not a pretty sight in 1945.

Toni Frissell’s famous image of an abandoned boy clutching a stuffed animal in the rubble of 1945 London. Toni Frissell’s famous image of an abandoned boy clutching a stuffed animal in the rubble of 1945 London. (Image taken from this website page.)

What’s the relevance of May 8th, 1945 to me?…

View original post 1,799 more words

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Posted in War, Weapon Systems, World War One, World War Two | 14 Comments »

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