The Fire of Notre Dame

The fire of Notre Dame today marks the end of France and probably of European civilization. Although it was just a church and therefore dedicated to religious superstition it is also the probably most important symbol of European culture after the decline of Rome.

The cathedral was built during the High Middle Ages and is probably the apex of medieval architecture. During the French Revolution it became the Temple of Reason and later the place where Napoleon was crowned Emperor effectively ending the Western Roman Empire and replacing it with modern Western society. The cathedral of Notre Dame was far more important to Europe than the World Trade Center ever was for America, since the latter one was a rather modern building.

Although the destruction of a symbol has no real effect, the Fire of Notre Dame comes to a point in history, where the French identity is completely replaced by North-African culture, the United Kingdom is ruled effectively by Saracen sharia law and has left the European Union, and Germany is collapsing under an unprecedented Saracen invasion since 2015.

Europe is broken. It has no will for survival anymore. The most powerful European nations have been lost to Saracen invaders. The national leaders are puppets of the Saracens. And the last decent Europeans feel ashamed for the degeneracy of their own homelands that makes them unworthy of being defended.

In the face of such a situation a symbolic event becomes significant. Its importance might be abstract, but historiography is something abstract. It needs key events to mark the end of an era. The Fire of Notre Dame is such a key event. 

Today we have seen the end of European culture in France. And considering the importance that France had for modern Europe, it might very well be the event that future historians will take to give a date to the end of European civilization as a whole.

The Photography of a Black Hole

First photography of the supermassive Black Hole in the center of M87

https://www.space.com/first-black-hole-photo-by-event-horizon-telescope.html

Black Holes have finally been dragged out of the shadows.

For the first time ever, humanity has photographed one of these elusive cosmic beasts, shining light on an exotic space-time realm that had long been beyond our ken. 

"We have seen what we thought was unseeable," Sheperd Doeleman, of Harvard University and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, said today (April 10) during a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C.

I am not sure, what is supposed to have been proven by this picture?
It is a massive object and its center appears darker, but as I predicted for many years it is not black, but dark red due to the gravity-related redshift.

We know from General Relativity that time slows down in the proximity of a so called Black Hole until it comes to a complete standstill at the event horizon. From this follows that nothing can ever fall into a Black Hole, i.e. cross its event horizon, because all the time of the universe would not be enough for this to happen. This means no photon will ever reach the point of no return and disappear in it. Instead light escaping from the proximity of a Black Hole will be extremely redshifted all the way down to the lower end of the electromagnetic spectrum. And this is exactly what we see. The center of the alleged Black Hole is dark red.

Of course this effect is probably due to the low resolution of the picture, but if the resolution is too low to distinguish anything with certainty, then what are we supposed to see there?

Climatology as a Modern Version of Neo-Luddism

The popular anti-rationalist pseudo-science of »Climatology« and its demand of a reduction of CO2 emissions seems to be a revival of the 19th Century Luddite movement.
The Luddite were radical textile workers that protested against modern technology, especially mechanical stocking frames and had a mystical and probably fictional leader called »Ned Ludd«. The name »Luddite« became since then a trademark for everybody opposing modern technology. Another famous Luddite of the 20th century was the Unabomber Ted Kaczynski who wrote an interesting manifesto called »Industrial Society and its Future«.
Today we have another incarnation of this movement that manifests itself in the fight against Global Warming. It is directed against any form of actually totally harmless CO2 emission, which is a way to quantify the degree of industrialization. The more CO2 something emits, the more industrial it is considered and therefore attracts the wrath of the modern Luddites. Even a new charismatic leader of the Neo-Luddites has emerged in the person of the 16-years old Swedish girl Greta Thunberg and her »Fridays for Future« movement. The fact that a child with no expertise at all on the matter is leading this movement staging a school strike, the symbol of science and reason, shows its general aversion against any form of rationalism. It is hereby very unfortunate that even well established scientists have been corrupted to support the neo-Luddites with absurd theories about threats to the global climate by returning fossilized carbon into the natural cycle where it originally came from.
But we can see that this current phenomenon of climate hysteria is not unique in human history. It had its predecessors that sporadically re-emerge driven by a subconscious skepticism of humans against technological advancement, which they feel they are not prepared for. So the current climate hysteria is not a new kind of the collective madness that has spread in the western world, but part of human nature, which will hopefully be overcome like earlier incarnations of the Luddite movement.