Aphorisms November 2010



A man is gored by a so called "Mountain Goat", which then stands guard over the bleeding man, while timid hikers cannot chase off the ferocious herbivore (that particular horned individual had been known for its bellicosity). The man dies, bleeding there, undeterred a few feeble stones from the goat fearing, probably God fearing tourists.

I had to throw rocks on hungry and angry bears on two continents, in the total wilderness, even hitting them. Bears and other predators like unresisting food, but they fear stones. Mountain bears are particularly cognizant of stones. A little bit of knowledge can go a long way, when a stone is thrown precisely enough. (A noisy hit on the side is often best.)

The afore mentioned goring happened in 2010 in the Olympic national park (USA’s Washington state). In Africa, gazelles are well known to be very dangerous, as they pierce bellies readily with their sharp horns. They make nice pets, until that day comes.

An editorialist of the New York Times sanctimoniously concluded that: "The goats were introduced to give humans something to hunt. A sport. A game. A chase. For almost 100 years, we never feared them. Now, they’ve stopped fearing us, and are even pursuing us. Playing God has its consequences."

So? What are we supposed to play instead? Dead? Sheep? Impotent, as these hikers played, unable to chase off the mountain goat, that arrogant herbivore? (Actually Mountain Goats hid below their huge long haired white coats the morphology of antelopes.)

Verily there is God indeed, and it is us (we even wrote the books, did we not?) And godliness includes the usual partnership with Satan. Never forget it, on the other side of Obama’s huge smile. Actually Obama ought to be the first one to remember that. Sometimes the most moral being to be had is a very dark, very angry man, with very black thoughts.

At least such a man could chase away goats with their fake virgin white coats. An eye for an eye, maybe not. But a ferocity for a ferocity, certainly yes.

Nature was dangerous to man and its fundamental ancestors for hundreds of millions of years. That’s the balance and the poetry of the wild, and of the universe. Learn about it not, and be diminished.

Nature in its wild state is a necessary humility to learn, and earn, as deep as it gets. In this spirit, I have been through immense wilderness, unassisted, on three or four continents (and a few islands), precisely because there is no better place to learn humility and responsibility. Make a serious mistake, in the absolute wilderness, it is easy to make one, and you may die. One is far from the comfort of cities. One is far from the routine of conventional thinking living robots need, and they call themselves civilized, because they know nothing else.



The mentally challenged G.W. Bush is going around, selling his book. Spewing lies, absurdities and stupidities, as much as he could, same as he always did. This is not just the past: immense forces, the same as those who were behind Bush, are still active.

They still want to attack Iran.

The irony with G. W. Bush, aka "Shrub", is that his Christian God told him to attack Iraq, but his attack and devastation of Iraq is leading to the extermination of the Iraqi Christian community there. In that sense, Bush is worse than the Mongols.

The Mongols killed most Muslims in Baghdad, but not the Christians; the Frank-Mongol alliance conquered Syria, but the racist, sectarian pope saved the Muslims by excommunicating the Franks. So working against one’s own camp is nothing new.

A massacre in a Christian church in Baghdad, by a bunch of foreign Arab mercenaries: 56 dead. France organized the treatment in France of 150 wounded. Oh, where is the great indignation some primitives had when the bearded one was drawn, just drawn, just imagined, with a bomb in his turban? To the criminally superstitious, the myth has become sacred, and the most dreadful reality, nothing worth mentioning.



Well, Captain Obama has put the plane in a valley with very high walls, and it can’t fly out. Obama has led as a bipartisan, although he was elected as a democrat. That was his sin. Obama calls his reforms historical. They are nothing of the sort. They are just back room deals with the plutocracy.

And that was completely deliberate: for many months, democrats had total control of the Congress, the Senate (with a super majority of 60 votes), and the Presidency. What did they do? Sign useless pieces of paper about Guantanamo, and send 30,000 more professionally trained killers to Afghanistan (to create more of a problem where there was already enough of one). Otherwise, kill time until they could claim they had not the votes to do anything, but compose with the plutocracy.

Health care and financial re-regulation could have been done in one morning, by expanding Medicare, and re-establishing by decree the separation of bank and speculation (which had been put in place by president Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

So Obama has collaborated with the plutocracy, a six headed hydra. Now that he will have to compose with a Republican Congress, it’s going to be in the open. With republicans everywhere, Obama may have to play democrat. Ultimately, a war, an expanded war, albeit expensive, could be an excellent distraction. By coincidence, Obama has tripled the war in Afghanistan, a good start, in this cynical view of the politics of the USA.


A PASSAGE TO INDIA: To celebrate the great victory of bipartisanship in the election, the great democratic leader goes overseas, with a giant retinue, as befits the "Leader Of the Free World". Free of what? Jobs, of course. So the Great Leader goes where the jobs are: India, Indonesia, Korea, etc. To tell the foreigners, it’s the fault of China if it supports the US financial system, and emulates the currency policy of the USA. 

Who needs jobs, when one has Wall Street?



Lamarck unrecognized: Anglo-Saxons know only Charles Darwin, because Darwin demonstrates the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon, and more particularly American, empire. Wallace accused Darwin to his face, and in writing, to be just Lamarck’s parrot, in spite of Darwin’s daughter exasperation that her dad would do nothing about it.

Amusingly, the Nobel prize was given in the 1960s for experiences on mice "proving" there was no Lamarckism. Verily, casual observations of rodents, and cats’ coats, showed that the laws of genetics, as understood then, were clearly coming short. Now epigenetics is official science. Why did it take so long?

Selection of the fittest characteristics was a concept invented and published by Maupertuis, the inventor of "Least Action". 114 years before Darwin’s "Origin of the Species".



Some conservative New York Times editorialist (David Brooks) picked up on Woody Allen by declaring that the USA was at a crossroads. Mr. Allen said that: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Some republican outfit also calls itself "American crossroads".

The whole planet is at a crossroads. Not just the USA.

The only nation still using the Roman imperial system of units is obviously also at those same crossroads, but stuck in reverse.

The New York Times writer vaunts "German engineering", as the wave of the future, whereas" for fashion, you go to Paris". As a good "conservative" American, Brooks nurtures profusely the feeling and idea that France is irrelevant: thus there is only one serious republic, the one located in Washington, with its 14,400 officially registered ‘lobbyists" (competing for the 535 representatives of the people).

Once one has dismissed France, the rest of the world is easy to discard: China is a dictatorship, Russia is Stalinist, Great Britain has a queen, Germany is a recovering Nazi addict, Japan has lost its decades, and the other countries are not serious.

As a good red blooded conservative, the editorialist does not know, or refuses to know that there is no more border between France and Germany, and that trying to distinguish between French and German engineering when their top engineering is entangled is completely silly: is Airbus British, Spanish, French or German? All the preceding, and more. Airbus is European. Is Arianespace, which launches most of the serious commercial satellites, worldwide, German? No, it’s mostly French led, but still, overall European (it launches so much American sensitive satellites, that the Americans are carefully listened to, though). Is Eurocopter mostly French? No. It’s mostly located in Provence, but as a mostly Franco-German entity.

Europe, finally, after 1, 000 years of benign alienation which turned progressively to murderous silliness, is integrating the right way. And the world is better for it. One thing is sure: in the future, countries which reward stupidity and mental frigidity, as the USA in recent decades, will not make it on top.



Anti-nuclear activists tried to block a train carrying nuclear waste from Normandie to Northern Germany. The giant La Hague recycling plant takes exhausted nuclear fuel for German power plants, and makes new fuel with it, using 96% of the old stuff to make new fuel. After accumulating the remaining 4% over a period of years, that waste is piled up and put on a well guarded train, to be stored in a deep salt mine (with the idea of using it some day when new technology becomes available).

So Greenpeace goes berserk, as usual, and tries to block the train, over the 1,000 kilometers of its trajectory. is Greenpeace worried about Pakistani nuclear weapons? Perhaps, but it does not show. Is Greenpeace worried about the hundreds of thousands of people killed directly every year by fossil fuels? Perhaps, but it does not show.

Instead, the civilian nuclear industry in the West arguably killed nobody, ever. The worst incident, "Three Mile Island", caused by an amazing pile-up of incompetence, mostly killed hundreds of microscopic insects, drowned inside the containment building. The grave accidents in Russia have more to do with Stalinism unchained than nuclear science properly applied. Russia had all sorts of accidents, as it did all sorts of things wrong; on land, in the sea, in reactors, in deposits, etc. it has to do with Russia being as big a nuclear power as the USA in spite of its tiny GDP, so doing everything on the cheap, using quick dirty and extremely dangerous methods (although the concept of "method" may too exalted here).

Back to European Greenpeace, edition 2010. Asked by a French journalist what Greenpeace proposes instead of nuclear energy, the pretty Greenpeace spokething was ready with her talking points: renewables, she said, and look at Brazil, with its tremendous hydropower. We have to do like Brazil; dams not nuclear plants.

Funny; they call it "Greenpeace". "Mudpeace" would be more like it. Indeed the giant Brazilian dams turn into mud provinces several times a year, and fast plants grow there, soon drowned, killed and converted in… methane, which has up to 25 times the greenhouse power of CO2. The giant dams have turned an absolutely enormous part of the Amazon into a muddy moon.

The Greenpeace idiots are not aware of this, or the fact that hydro potential has been completely tapped out in a country such as France. Even although using the nuclear plants to refill the dams in the wee hours of the morning.

Could France do more in hydro power, although the mountains and natural streams are tapped out? Sure. An idea is to use offshore wind to fill up elevated artificial lagoons, with their own hydro plants. Otherwise, one could bar the giant mount Saint Michel bay, with the world’s highest tides. It is feasible. it would be as powerful as several nuclear reactors. The project was barred for obvious ecological and esthetic reasons.

Being pretty is not all there is. Being clever is more important when taking decisions. Greenpeace ought to show the importance of cleverness, by putting it forward, rather than the importance of the superficially cute, and trying to out-fox Fox News with pretty broadcasters.

It is true that nuclear war is a huge threat, but it has nothing to do with civilian nuclear power. The argument can actually be made that civilian nuclear devour the stockpiles of military Plutonium… Because so it does. Pushing nuclear through Thorium (as India is doing) is rich in clean energy possibilities, without plausible military threats attached.

In "Greenpeace" there is "green’, and there is "peace". Greenpeace should carry the agenda of its name.



"I think, therefore I kill": such is the motto of man, de facto, since there are men, and they think. (Note: Pascal did not think of that one!)

That is why Christo-Islamism, the planet most popular religion, is led by an homicidal god, full of indignation. God’s adulators are supposed to find Him "merciful", as He may torture you, unless if you do exactly what He wants, whatever it is. In the original, Roman imperial Christianity, and in the Qur’an, the admirers of God whine on their knees, praying that they will get to prey ("jihad").

Too bad there are nukes now, and other Weapons of Mass Destruction, which put the survival of mankind into question in case of all out war. (The nuclear war between democratic India and Fasco-Islamist Pakistan, within a decade or two, will have worldwide ecological consequences, as thermonuclear detonations over huge cities will rise stratospheric clouds of radioactive ashes.)

The whole idea of good old fashion mass cruelty and destruction was the exact opposite: to insure the survival of humankind, by pruning it just right. Thus killing is not appropriate anymore, ecologically speaking, in the grandest scheme of things.

Thus now we have to leave it at thinking: "I think, therefore I am not threatening to kill". A huge subtlety is now imposed. And it is imposed on nations. By the force of necessity.

***  Patrice Ayme




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