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I have no objections to the idea that God (or the Goddess) can speak to people. And maybe the Lord really spoke to the apostles the day of Pentecost. But if you plan to fool other people, then “speaking in tongues” (known also as “glossolalia” in modern terms) can be a good idea. You start with uttering something that vaguely sounds like a language. Then you “translate” it into something that you report as the word of God. An easy trick that sometimes works. Even in science, some researchers seem to use this trick to gain academic points by publishing articles that contain mostly gibberish, or even only gibberish. We could call it “scientific glossolalia”.

You may have heard the recent news of 44 scientific papers being retracted from a scientific journal after they were discovered to be nothing but gibberish. The usual reaction in these cases is to speak of “a few bad apples.” But this fraud exposes a problem that goes deep, very deep, in science. Science suffers from “glossolalia” — a syndrome that makes people utter meaningless sounds as if they were speaking a real language.

To start, “papers” are the main output of a scientist’s work. It is the harsh law of “publish or perish,” meaning that for a scientist publishing something — anything — in an academic journal is the first line of defense against being fired. Even if a scientist has no money, no grants, no instrumentation, no ideas, they have to show that they are doing something. Woe betide the scientist who does not publish at least one paper every year! Anathema! Abomination! Horror! May you be eaten by the h-index bugbear who punishes those who sin so hideously against the sacred rules of science!

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Coming Age of Illiteracy: What Future for Science?

November 9, 2021

The Coming Age of Illiteracy: What Future for Science?

One of the 16th century reliefs still existing at the monastery of “San Vivaldo,” in Tuscany. It is an early example of a purely image-based communication: an attempt to tell complex concepts, the stories of the gospels, to people who couldn’t read conventional text. It was a failure, but it was a remarkably innovative approach. The time for image-based communication may return with the rapid loss of literacy affecting our times. The problem with this evolution is huge in science, with fewer and fewer people able to read the scientific literature. We are now depending on professional interpreters to tell us what “Science” is, just like long ago illiterate Christians were forced to rely on professional interpreters (“priests”) to tell them what the scriptures said. The result is that Science is becoming whatever these professional interpreters say that Science is. And this is bad, although perhaps not beyond redemption.

Let me start this post by citing a fascinating article written by “Marty Mac’s and Cheese” I don’t know who Mr. Marty Mac is, but he is clearly someone who has a remarkable cultural vision. He notes how Catholicism and Protestantism evolved along separate lines of thought. Protestantism was born as a literature-based religion: Protestants were “people of the book.” Conversely, Catholicism catered more to the illiterate.

You can see the difference in the respective churches: Protestant churches are normally austere, while Catholic churches are highly decorated and full of images. The image below is from Marty Mac’s post.

The idea of using a visual language was exploited in full by the Catholic Church. The multi-colored reliefs of the San Vivaldo monastery, in Italy, are one of the few remaining examples of the attempt to create a completely new visual language that would bypass the Babel of spoken languages that Europe was at that time…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Propaganda Trap: How to get out of it?

November 5, 2021

The Propaganda Trap: How to get out of it?

You probably saw the Hitler clip from the 2004 movie “Downfall.” And you may have noticed the detail of Hitler’s left hand trembling out of control. It is based on historical data: Hitler’s hand was really trembling in that way, a typical symptom of Parkinson’s disease. And he was also subjected to fits of rage, just as shown in the movie. Surely, many people must have noted his erratic behavior and thought he had mental problems. Yet, nobody could find a way to remove him from power, ensuring that maximum damage was done to everybody. It was the result of German propaganda: a giant machine that fed on itself and that could not be stopped before it was too late.

The story of the 20th century includes several “mad dictators” who did great damage to the people they ruled, and not just to them. Benito Mussolini in Italy and Adolf Hitler in Germany are the best-known examples. I wrote several posts on Mussolini (here), who clearly suffered of an extreme case of the Dunning-Kruger syndrome, but was not mentally impaired, just a run of the mill psychopath who cared nothing about the suffering of the people he ruled.

Hitler, like Mussolini, was convinced to be a military genius and he often overrode the suggestions of his competent military staff. And he was a psychopath, too, with all the typical traits of cruelty and indifference that characterize psychopaths. But, unlike Mussolini, there were evident problems with Hitler’s brain, especially during the last years of his rule. He had clear symptoms of Parkinson’s, and he was subjected to fits of rage that rapidly went out of control. He regularly consumed methamphetamine, barbiturates, opiates, and cocaine, as well as potassium bromide and Atropa belladonna. His symptoms worsened after the assassination attempt against him in 1944.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Great Dying: Ireland as a Distant Mirror

October 30, 2021

The Great Dying: Ireland as a Distant Mirror

After a series of six posts on the “age of exterminations” (one, two, three, four, five, and six) I wrote that I was moving to different subjects. But then I stumbled into this video on the Irish famine of mid 19th century. It is so fascinating (in a certain sense) that I can’t avoid sharing it with you.

You may know something about the great Irish famine that began in 1845. History tells us of millions of deaths, but the whole thing for us remains remote. We don’t really realize who the victims were, how, why, what exactly happened. But I strongly suggest you set aside 50 minutes and watch this movie. “Hunger” from 2020.

It is a hit direct to the stomach. After having seen this movie, I don’t know how to describe what happened in Ireland from about 1845 to 1850. A nightmare? A horror movie? A Flemish painting of the triumph of death? Munch’s Scream multiplied by one million? Just imagine for a moment what it might have been like to live in those years for the Irish. No food, no money, no possessions, no power, no friends, and no hope. Even burying the dead became impossible: you can still see in Ireland the mass graves of the time where the bodies were thrown in thousands. The film doesn’t mention cannibalism, but there are reports that it happened at least in two cases. Surely there were many more.

What’s really horrifying is how the British government treated the Irish. Think about it for a moment: the Irish were citizens of the United Kingdom, at least theoretically. You could define them as “second-class” citizens. But they were not treated as such. Not even as non-citizens, they were treated as not belonging to the human race…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Exterminations (V): Suicide as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

October 23, 2021

The Age of Exterminations (V): Suicide as a Weapon of Mass Destruction

Regina Lisso, 21 years old German girl, photographed in 1945 after killing herself by ingesting a cyanide capsule. She was unlucky enough to find herself in the crosshairs of a major propaganda effort where the Allied and the German governments collaborated to convince Germans to commit suicide. It is hard to convince people to kill themselves, but we cannot exclude that it could be tried again in some indirect forms.

This is the 5th part (one, two, three, and four) of a series dedicated to exploring a dark area of human behavior: mass exterminations. Here, I examine perhaps the darkest part of it: when the victims can be convinced to submit to be killed or even to kill themselves by lies and propaganda.

During the last two years of WW2, the German and the Allied governments found themselves in an unholy alliance. Both wanted the Germans to fight like cornered rats up to the very last moment, but for different reasons. The Germans were trying to postpone their defeat, the Allies wanted the destruction of Germany’s military and industrial base. You can find this story told in some detail in my book “Before Collapse” (1).

A side effect of this weird bipartisan effort was the rise of perhaps the first psyop in history that tried to convince an enemy population to commit mass suicide. In 1945, the British printed and distributed in Germany a propaganda postcard written in German and supposedly issued by the Nazi government. It provided detailed instructions on how to hang oneself (postcard “H. 1321”) (2). Even more weirdly, the Germans collaborated with the allies in pushing German civilians to commit suicide…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

October 15, 2021

The New Paradigm of Renewables: if we want something to change, we need to change something

We can make it: the latest results of the analysis of the performance of renewable energy, photovoltaic and wind, show that their efficiency in terms of energy return on investment (EROI) is considerably larger than that of fossil fuels. It is becoming clear, too, that renewables don’t need rare and disappearing mineral resources: the infrastructure to build them and maintain them needs only abundant and recyclable minerals: silicon, aluminum, and a few more that can be efficiently recycled (rare earths and lithium).

In other words, renewables can’t be considered anymore as an emergency replacement for the depleting and polluting fossil fuels, but as a true step forward. They are the new, “disruptive” technology that people expected nuclear energy to be, but that never was.

Tony Seba — sharp as always — has diffused the idea of renewables as the new energy revolution. Seba’s ideas have been popularized by Nafeez Ahmed in a two parts series, (Part 1 and Part2). These assessments may be too optimistic in some regards, but they do note how things are changing. We have a chance, a fighting chance, to falsify the scenarios that saw an irreversible decline — actually a collapse — of the industrial civilization during the next few decades.

Can we really make it? It is a chance, but not a certainty. The quantitative calculations made by Sgouridis, Csala, and myself indicate that we can only succeed if we invest in renewables much more than what we are investing nowadays. If we maintain the current trends, renewables will be able to slow down the decline, but not avoid a “dip” in the civilization curve. Then, we will re-emerge on the other side in a new and cleaner world…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Exterminations (IV). How to Kill the Rich

October 12, 2021

The Age of Exterminations (IV). How to Kill the Rich

In our times, the Knight Templars have gained the fame of exceptionally good warriors. That may be more than a little exaggerated because when the time came to defend their leaders, arrested by the King of France, they vanished into thin air. Yet, the history of the Templars is interesting as a case of the periodic exterminations of the financial class in history. Could something similar happen to our modern financial tycoons, the Internet barons, Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, etc.? We cannot say for sure, but we cannot exclude that, either. The recent “incident” that shut down Facebook for a while may well be the harbinger of a reckoning to come.

“A house filled with gold cannot be defended.” Lao Tsu, the Tao Te Ching

“All political power comes from the barrel of a gun.” Mao Zedong

The Monastic order of the Templars (Pauperes commilitones Christi Templique Salomonici), was founded in 1119 as a military force to defend the Christian holdings in the Holy Land. In time, the order evolved into a financial structure: the Templars became bankers and they developed a sophisticated money transfer system that helped pilgrims and warriors to move to and from the Holy Land and to transfer money from Europe to Palestine and back. They have been termed “the first multinational corporation” in history.

As you may imagine, the Templars were rich, despite the term “pauperes” (poor fellows) in their name. They had land, castles, palaces, and, of course, plenty of gold and silver. The problem was that, with the loss of the last lands controlled by the Christian crusaders in the Holy Land, at the end of the 13th century, they had become useless: no more crusades, no need of a banking system to finance them.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Exterminations (III). Why you Should be Worried. Very Worried

October 4, 2021

The Age of Exterminations (III). Why you Should be Worried. Very Worried

Disclaimer. I am no prophet and I have no crystal ball. I am just trying to find patterns in history. And I think many historical events can be explained simply on the basis of the tendency of people to try to make money whenever possible, even at the cost of doing the most evil things imaginable. That sometimes leads me to making rather somber predictions, as in this post, the 3rd of a series on mass exterminations (part one and part two). Sorry about these rather negative considerations, but think that I may well be wrong — and I hope so! (above: a hospital in Chernobyl in 2018: is that the destiny of our health care centers?)

The extermination of social subgroups is a relatively recent phenomenon in history but, unfortunately, it seems to have become more and more frequent in recent times. Often, as in the case of the witch-hunting age, extermination is the result of a perfectly rational attitude that develops in societies under heavy stress. When a social subgroup is relatively wealthy, can be identified, and can’t offer significant military resistance, there are good chances that its members will be exterminated and their assets confiscated. The classic case was that of the Jews in Europe up to the 1st half of the 20th century.

At this point, considering that our society is surely under heavy stress, the question is: which subgroup could be the next target for extermination? I think I have an answer:

The most likely target for the next extermination round is middle-class retirees.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Ilaria Perissi explains why mousetraps are like oil wells and why the mousetrap experiment describes the Hubbert curve of oil extraction

September 28, 2021

Ilaria Perissi explains why mousetraps are like oil wells and why the mousetrap experiment describes the Hubbert curve of oil extraction

https://photos.google.com/share/AF1QipP85oId2rjjNujQlqY4GM44Hjuu9_WWmiFmg24wfx4pL8vT3_pYdyy3Utl-0x1kJw/photo/AF1QipOwGJoFJG-J8mDS4k9265aJQSXzW9iRGFQQQeWf?key=aVJ5V25GSkFLZ0g3dHFrSG1lUFJpTzdVQ0l5Q0FB

The Age Of Exterminations (II) — How to Exterminate the Young

September 28, 2021

The Age Of Exterminations (II) — How to Exterminate the Young

In 2018, I published a book titled The Shadow Line of Memory.” It was the biography of an Italian intellectual, Armando Vacca, who did his best to fight for peace at the beginning of the Great War. He was eventually defeated and punished by being sent to the most dangerous frontline of that time, where he survived for no more than a couple of weeks. This book led me to study the story of how propaganda managed to win the hearts and minds of the Italians in 1914-15, leading the country to attack Austria. The ensuing disaster is not usually listed as an “extermination,” but the Italian losses amounted to something close to one-third of the young men of military age at that time. If this was not an extermination, what was it? And I think there were deep reasons for it to occur. I thought I could propose this story to you now. You may find something in it that may help you understand a few apparently unrelated things that are happening nowadays.

The power of propaganda is immense. It is so strong especially because people don’t realize that they are embedded in it and the things that propaganda makes them do look like the most natural and obvious ones. It was Baudelaire who said, “the devil’s best trick is to convince people that he does not exist.”

So, here is a story of a triumph of propaganda: how it convinced most Italians in 1914-15 that it was a good idea to go to war against their neighbors, the Austrians in one of the greatest follies of history, what our ancestors called, rightly, “The Great War.”

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Why did the Taliban Win? Lessons From Ancient History

September 22, 2021

Why did the Taliban Win? Lessons From Ancient History

How did the Taliban manage to defeat the most powerful army in the world? One word: corruption. It is not new, it has already happened in many other cases in history. Here, I propose a comparison of the recent Taliban campaign with the case of the Numidian wars at the time of the Roman Republic. (above: these fighters are probably Tajiki, not Taliban, but that does not affect the substance of my interpretation)

During the 2nd century BC, the Roman Republic attempted to defeat the Numidians, a tribal population inhabiting a desertic area of North-Western Africa. Surely, the Numidian fighters were no match for the mighty Roman armies, yet the Numidian kings held on their own for decades. It was only in 105 BC that their last king, Jugurtha, was definitively defeated by the Romans.

The ups and downs of the Numidian wars left the Romans perplexed. How could it be that those unrefined Barbarians could keep at bay the Romans for so long? The opinion of the historian Sallustius was that the Numidians had used corruption to buy the Roman commanders. Sallustius reports that Jugurtha himself said about Rome, “Venal city! You would sell yourself if a buyer were to appear!”.

Sallustius’ interpretation is believable, even though it is not substantiated by historical data. Corruption is an unavoidable side effect of money and Rome was the most monetarized society of antiquity. The Romans had built their prosperity on the precious metal mines of Northern Spain and used their wealth to pay the large armies that they used to dominate the Mediterranean Region. But money is a double-edged weapon: it can be used to pay soldiers to fight, but also not to fight, or to fight someone they were not supposed to fight.

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille. Something Went Badly Wrong with the Environmental Movement

September 18, 2021

The IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille. Something Went Badly Wrong with the Environmental Movement

Performers from Hawai’i at the 2021 IUCN Congress in Marseille. I am not sure of what sense did it make to come by plane all the way from Hawai’i to Europe to discuss how to reduce carbon emissions. But I am sure these people were well-intentioned and doing their best. The overall result of the Congress, though, was disappointing. (Photo by Ugo Bardi).

In the year 2 CE (Covid Era), I had enough of seeing vitreous-eyed colleagues and students staring at me from stamp-sized images on a screen. So. I decided to make an attempt to reconnect in person with the world of sustainability and environmental science. The IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille looked promising and it was close enough to where I live that I didn’t need to take a plane to get there. And I did. The result was, well, the best I can say is that it was disappointing, And that is perhaps an understatement.

Please understand that I have no intention to disparage the effort of the people who attended the Congress. Most of them clearly did their best and the results were often interesting and sometimes even inspiring. Even the organizers did a good job with the management of such a large congress. My criticism is more general.

Let me start with an impression. Every morning, the Congress Center in Marseille was ringed by an impressive screen of policemen in riot gear. I counted 12 police vans parked nearby, and there may have been more. Then, there were policemen in ordinary uniforms, at least one platoon of the French army in full battle gear, and an unknown number of mean-looking people in plain clothes…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

9/11, the Coup that Failed. The Role of the Memesphere

September 11, 2021

9/11, the Coup that Failed. The Role of the Memesphere

Octavianus Augustus Caesar (63 BC – 14 AD). Perhaps the most successful leader in history, he didn’t just become the absolute ruler of the Roman State, but took over the role of the highest religious authority (the “Pontifex Maximum”) and transformed himself into a living deity. Turning a democracy into a dictatorship is a pattern that was repeated many times in history, but that was not always successful. It was the case of the 9/11 attacks that did not lead to an absolute dictatorship in the United States. Here, I argue that it was because of the different structure of the memesphere in the 21st century.

In 30 BC, Octavianus, later to be known as “Augustus Caesar,” defeated his remaining competitors for the control of the Roman state, Marcus Antonius and Cleopatra, and took the title of “Augustus,” the absolute ruler of the Empire. The most fascinating element of this story is how Octavianus established the pattern of how a successful leader takes over the government and concentrates all power on himself. The recipe goes as follows:

Obtain sufficient funds for the task
Build up support among the poor and the disgruntled.
Enlist your supporters in a para-military or military organization.
Obtain a high-level government position using a mixture of intimidation and legal means.
Exploit a dramatic event to scare everyone and obtain special emergency powers.
Never relinquish your emergency powers, but always increase them.

This is what Augustus did: his money came initially from the inheritance he obtained from his grand-uncle, Julius Caesar, but surely also from the support of high-level people who wanted tight control of the Roman State. He used the money to acquire a military force that he used to intimidate the Senate and defeat his competitors…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

The Age of Exterminations: Who Will be Next Victims?

September 7, 2021

The Age of Exterminations: Who Will be Next Victims?

Detail from the book, “England’s grievance discovered…” by Ralph Gardiner, 1655. Note, on the right, the scene described in the text as, “Witchfinder takes his money for his work.” The book was written when the witch-hunting age was already in decline and it emphasized how killing witches was good business for the hunters.

If you think of the story of the witch hunts of the 16th-17th century in Europe, you may be under the impression that the typical witch was an old hag living in a hut at the margins of the village, alone with a black cat.

But no, that wasn’t the case. Maybe this kind of marginal people were occasionally killed for being witches, but they were not the usual victims. In reality, witch hunting had a strong monetary component and it was often carried out with a view on making a profit on the confiscation of the assets of the victims. They were not poor and destitute women but, rather, members of the growing mercantile class in Europe.

The profit-making facet of witch hunting has been often ignored by historians, but it is being reappraised and highlighted in recent times, for instance by Johannes Dillinger (2021) and by Shmakov and Petrov (2018). Both articles are highly suggested and provide a remarkable wealth of data about the financial mechanism that led to witch hunts: in short, there was no (or very little) witch hunting where the government didn’t allow the assets of the victims to be confiscated. Killing witches, then, was just one of the many forms of legalized robbery in history,

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

Climate Change: What is the Worst that can Happen?

August 23, 2021

Climate Change: What is the Worst that can Happen?

A Brontotherium, a creature similar to modern rhinos that lived up to some 35 million years ago in a climate that was about 10 degrees centigrade hotter than ours. In this scene, we see a grassy plain, but Earth was mostly forested. We may be moving toward similar conditions, although it is not obvious that humans could fare as well as Brontotheria did, at that time (image from BBC).

As it should have been predictable, the IPCC 6th assessment report, sank to the bottom of the memesphere like a dead weight after just a few days of presence in the news. Put simply, nobody is interested in sacrificing anything to reverse the warming trend and, most likely, nothing will be done.

So, what’s going to happen? Technological innovation offers the hope to mitigate the pressure on climate, but we may well have passed the point of non-return and be in free fall toward an unknown world. The question can be frame as “what’s the worst thing that can happen?” Here, we enter a domain where models can’t help us too much. Complex systems — and Earth’s climate is one — tend to be stable, but they change rapidly and unpredictably when they are not stable anymore. So, the best we can do is to imagine scenarios based on what we know, using the past as a guide.

Let’s assume that humans keep burning fossil fuels for a few more decades, maybe slowing down, but still bent at burning everything burnable. The atmosphere keeps warming, the ocean does that, too. Then, at some point, the system goes kinetic and undergoes a rapid transition to a condition compatible with the high concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere…

…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…

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“A house filled with gold cannot be defended.” Lao Tsu, the Tao Te Ching

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