"The Age of the Imbecile: The World is Turning Catastrophically Stupid. Here’s How Not to Join It"
#Civilization #Postmodernism #PoliticalPhilosophy #Politics #Economy #Sociology #Culture #CulturalAnalysis #HumanCondition

"I’d bet, these days, shortly after reading the headlines, you’ve thought, shaking your head and muttering, something like: “Jesus. We live in an age of impossibly catastrophic stupid.”

You’re not wrong. About a decade or so ago, hot on the heels of the financial crisis, something happened — an old story began to be rewritten, as the world found itself poorer once again. There was an explosion, somewhere deep in the human heart, and a tsunami rippled across the globe — one boiling and bubbling with every imaginable variety of stupid: human folly, gleeful ignorance, self-destructive greed, reckless spite, dim-witted cruelty parading itself as enlightenment.

And so now a tsunami of imbecility is rolling like a slow-motion thermonuclear bomb across the globe. Lightning bolts of foolishness shiver down it. Smoke clouds of idiocy billow from it. Here are the five kinds of stupid wrecking the globe — because your first job, these days, as a human being, is to make sure you’re not being turned into an imbecile by this wave of stupid, too.

Economic stupid is nationalism, populism, or austerity, three words that craftily mean the same thing. It’s the idea that “we don’t have the money to pay for it!!”, whether “it” is school lunches, healthcare, education, parks, libraries, media, or trains. Sure we have the money. What do you think an era of zero interest rates mean? It means that there is so much money sloshing around in the treasure chests of the global economy, so much loot piled up by Jeff Bezoses and Bill Gateses, that there is nowhere left to put it. Not a single place: all the yachts, super mansions, and trophy castles have been bought. Nada left to buy equals zilch interest to lend at. Zero interest doesn’t just means “societies can borrow for better than free and give everyone healthcare, education, an income, and savings” — it means that if they don’t, the economy will go right on cruising into oblivion, because that money will go on piling at the top, instead of doing anything remotely useful, beneficial, or necessary.

Now, who’s the prime exemplar of austerity? America, of course. There, thanks to four decades of people imbecilically destroying their very own government, those very people live in rank indignity — they have no healthcare, retirement, pensions, safety nets, and therefore, they have no mobility, opportunity, stability, security, and therefore, quite reasonably, they have no hope or optimism left, which is why they’re turning to harder and harder drugs to numb the pain of it all. But see the point: the nationalist says: “us first!!!”, but ironically, he only means “them last!!” He is too stupid to invest in his very own society. He wants, instead, to kick out the scapegoats, exclude the minority, scorn the weak. But he doesn’t see that “us first” and “them last” are not opposites — they quite often go hand in hand in a race to the bottom of the abyss. Ah, only a true imbecile would confuse up for down.

So my next form of stupid is social stupid. Social stupid is the idea that a society can function without a social contract. That Uber can replace ambulances and hyperloops can replace buses and what next? Vending machines can replace hospitals and schools, I guess...."

Read the full article here:
https://eand.co/the-age-of-the-imbecile-c52ee205d94c

Reminiscing the best moments I've lived in 2018: It was at #CERN in #Geneva, participating in "CERN Alumni First Collisions: First reunion at CERN, 2018"

I'm 30 years old, I've witnessed many lectures and talks in my life in so many universities, conferences, and meetings, but I consider Professor #BrianCox as one of the best lecturers I've ever listened to in my life.
Taking a Selfie with him is as cool as Brian is ;-)

By the way, I should mention the Algerian Theoretical & Mathematical Physicist Professor Mohammed Lagraa and salute him as one of the best teachers in my life, he taught me between 2007-2010: #QuantumFieldTheory ( #QFT or #RelativisticQuantumFieldTheory), #Supersymmetry ( #SUSY), & The Mathematical #TheoryOfDistributions

During the event, I've had the chance to meet some of my 2010 CERN summer school friends. It was amazing and very nostalgic. We had to do our epic classic BBQ that we're known for at Julián Cancino house.

Finally, I'm very supportive and activist in #WomenInScience movement, especially #Physics, and having now Professor #FabiolaGianotti as the first female Director-General of CERN is pretty awesome! (She talked first, she was wearing a red costume).

The event:
https://alumni.cern/events/2751

Photo Album of the event:
https://alumni.cern/news/36103

My picture with my friends wearing a nerdy white Schrödinger's cat T-shit is in "Networking Breaks" album, second row, forth picture:
https://cds.cern.ch/record/2303583
https://cds.cern.ch/record/2303583/files/DSC_0074.jpg?subformat=icon-1440

We didn't get any information about the second meeting this year 2019, so I guess that this Alumni event will not take place every year.

#ParticlePhysics

Brains of 3 People Have Been Successfully Connected, Enabling Them to Share Thoughts

I said: "The interface between brains is getting better in the last 5 years. It was in the beginning question-answer interface linking two brains, then communication, now it's way better, full communication, sharing thoughts and ideas, and it's linking three brains at the same time. Awesome!"

This article:
https://www.sciencealert.com/scientists-successfully-connected-the-brains-of-3-people-enabling-them-to-share-thoughts

Direct brain interface between humans (2014)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2014/11/141105154507.htm

Team links two human brains for question-and-answer experiment (2015)
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150923151359.htm

#Neuroscience #ConnectingBrains #MindToMindInterface #Science

New Theory: The Universe is a Bubble, Inflated by Dark Energy
"Very mathematical work, its translation is that our universe may be an expanding bubble in an extra dimension."
1) https://futurism.com/the-byte/new-theory-universe-bubble-inflated-dark-energy
2) https://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2018-12/uu-oua122818.php

It's 2:20 AM, January 1st, 2018+1, I'm re-reading now "The Ego and Its Own"
by Max Stirner in my den in Marseille, France. I will post some interesting passages from it about Christianity and Religion on my Philosophy and Religion page later on.
However, I'm still thinking about the universe, space-time, dark energy, and cosmology related topics. Check out my last post:
https://plus.google.com/u/1/+AmineBenaichouche/posts/AEifKap7GCh

#TheoreticalPhysics #Cosmology #AstroPhysics #Inflation #DarkEnergy

Are #DarkMatter and #DarkEnergy the same thing?!

It's 10 PM. I'm reading "Facts From Space" By Dean Regas now in my den in Marseille, France.

#Cosmology #AstroPhysics #AstroParticlePhysics

Can New-Atheism be justified? I don't think so. However, I can see why it appeared after 9/11, and this conversation with this Christian conservative +Ben Hoffman is a good example of how religions can create terrorists.

It all started with an innocent question to +Ben Hoffman about something I don't know in Christianity, and I told him the Islamic point of view. He started his craziness by getting angry because I put the Bible and the Quran on an equal footing.

I'm a Deist, and the post was about abortion, women's rights and fetal rights.
https://plus.google.com/u/1/+AmineBenaichouche/posts/MhcVMj3A7B8

I've elaborated my thesis, as a neutral Deist philosopher, who, under the given philosophical and theological meaning of Monotheism, finds Christian Trinity less convincing than the Islamic monomonotheism.

The rest is an incredible rage, and I felt threatened just by imagining myself next to him in person where nobody is watching and not far from him on my computer discussing ideas and concepts with people from all around the globe.

The funny thing is that in his first comment he was standing against murder (murdering a fetus), and in his last comment, he asked me to "Go away", which is murdering me as a human being, or murdering my voice and my opinions. And honestly, I'm perplexed, I'm still asking myself where should I go away? Because I'm on my personal page and not his!!! In the same post, you will find in one of my comments the link of the post where a person introduced himself to me as "The Messenger of God" and threatened me to send me to hell to cure me, just because I was advocating teaching children philosophy lol LMAO.

This kind of moments are priceless, I'm afraid that I won't have the chance to live them again after shutting down G+ ;- )

#Discussion #Debate #Religions #ReligiousDogma #Dogma #ReligiousExtremism #Civilization #CulturalAnalysis #Cultrue

#Facebook reminded me that 5 years ago I said: "I simply do not believe in anything which is not described by mathematics." (The picture is new though, I look sad because #GooglePlus will be shut down)
I say now: "Until I couldn't decide whether mathematics is discovered or invented, because if it is discovered, (and I guess that this is the case) then I'm a Deist."

Why does #Reality follow a mathematical lead? The answers to such puzzling questions depend crucially upon what we think mathematics actually is. There are four clear options: #Formalism, #Inventionism, #Realism, and #Constructivism.
Think for yourself, read, listen, discuss, ponder, take your time, don't you ever think when you take a given position that it's the absolute truth, and simply live on...

Recommended readings:
The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences
by Eugene Wigner
https://www.dartmouth.edu/~matc/MathDrama/reading/Wigner.html

The Mathematical Universe: The orderliness of nature can be expressed mathematically. Why?
by JJohn D. Barrow
http://www1.lasalle.edu/~didio/courses/hon462/hon462_assets/mathematical_universe.htm

#Philosophy #God #PhilosophyOfScience #PhilosophyOfMathematics #PhilosophyOfPhysics #Mathematics #Deism #Atheism #Agnosticism #Theism