nyuuzyou/wikis huggingface dataset:
Pacte de famine

The Pacte de famine was a French ancien régime predecessor to the more recent useless eaters conspiracy theory. The theory was popular from about 1715 until 1789 and a major contributing factor in the French Revolution. This period was one of severe droughts and food shortages; instead of blaming poor farming practices or bad weather, it was easier just to claim that, for inscrutable reasons of their own, the omnipresent, malevolent "They" were intentionally withholding food from the masses. This resulted in bread riots and what became known as the Guerre des farines or "flour war".
==Background==
The basis for the conspiracy theory was a contract signed in 1765 between Louis XV and the head of the guild responsible for the grain trade. In 1767, Jean Charles Le Prévost de Beaumont published a number of pamphlets claiming that this contract was an explicit attempt to cause a famine.From Larousse (in French) The situation only got worse from there.
Why the king would want to starve the portion of the populace most responsible for producing everything was never really explained. Historical scholarship suggests that far from an attempt to restrict access to food, the contract was an attempt to stabilize food supply and prices.Cahen (1926) Le Pacte de famine. In Revue historique. JSTOR link
==Attempts to alleviate the issue==
Attempts to lessen the food shortage by means of tax reformYounkins (2006). Turgot on political economy and the introduction of free tradeThis was headed by then minister of finance Turgot - see here. largely proved counterproductive, as corrupt officials took advantage of increased deregulation to line their own pockets.
==Impact==
The hysteria over the rising cost and scarcity of food fueled resentment towards the aristocracy and helped to spark the French Revolution. Additionally, much like other conspiracy theories, the idea of a conspiracy to starve the French populace became the subject of much popular fiction,For example, this 1847 novel. and, to a lesser extent, the Russian Revolution.
==Notes==
==References==
Category:Conspiracy theories
Category:European history
Category:Moral panics
Paedophile Information Exchange

The Paedophile Information Exchange was a British organisation founded in October 1974, originally set up by Edinburgh-based student Michael Hanson. Like NAMBLA, it can perhaps be seen as an example of sexual rights gone mad.
The group's aim was to campaign for the rights of paedophiles. In 1976 it began publishing a magazine entitled Understanding Paedophilia which was later replaced with the punnishly-named Magpie. Amongst the contents of Magpie were book and film reviews written from a paedophilic angle.<capture>http://www.ipce.info/host/radicase/chap11.htm</capture>
The group came to the public's attention in late 1977; at the time it had around 250 members.
During the course of its existence, PIE absorbed a similar group called Paedophile Action for Liberation, itself a breakaway from the Gay Liberation Front.
==Affiliations==
The LGBT rights advocate Peter Tatchell unwittingly contributed to a book written by Warren Middleton (former vice-chair of PIE"Paedophiles jailed after 3,000 child abuse drawings found", The Guardian, 15 July 2011) called the Betrayal Of YouthScans of which can be seen here. (initials BOY, geddit?), leading to claims from far-right organisations such as the British National Party that Peter Tatchell was an apologist for paedophilia and child sexual abuse. Tatchell denies any wrongdoings, stating that:
===NCCL===
The National Council for Civil Liberties (now Liberty) was loosely affiliated with PIE in the 1970s after a successful entryist campaign.Williams, Zoe (25 February 2014) "PIE, the NCCl and Harriet Harman: why she was right not to apologise", The Guardian The NCCL argued that photographs of undressed children should not be considered "indecent" unless it could be proven that the subject had suffered harm or that an inference to that effect or to the effect that harm might have been caused could reasonably be drawn from the images themselves, with Harriet Harman (later deputy leader of the Labour Party) arguing that it would "increase censorship". NCCL had excluded PIE by 1983.
In February 2014, , the director of Liberty, issued an apology for the previous links between the NCCL and PIE. She said: "It is a source of continuing disgust and horror that even the NCCL had to expel paedophiles from its ranks in 1983 after infiltration at some point in the seventies."
==See also==
* Online pedophile activism
== External links ==
* "Child-lovers win fight for role in Gay Lib", written by the right-wing firebrands at The Guardian (Archived).
* Inside Story – The Secret Life of a Paedophile, BBC documentary on the founder of PIE, a child care worker and convicted child molestor (Available via YouTube).
==References==
Category:Organizations
Category:Paedophilia
Category:Sexuality
Paganism

Paganism is, broadly, a term used to describe religious beliefs that differs from main world religions. They are not a unified religion; "pagan" comes from the Latin pāgānus ("rural, rustic"), used by Christians during the fourth century to describe the opposing ethnic and local religions to the "universal" one of Christianity.
The term "Pagan" was also a pejorative term used by Christian missionaries to describe the peoples and beliefs of almost any person not "of the book".
The term is often used to describe the former religions of the later Roman Empire that Christianity replaced — although the followers of those beliefs never called themselves Pagans. Christians during the Crusades also often called Muslims pagans, even though they worshipped the same deity and Islam was technically the newer religion. The term is also used for the present day Neo-Paganism, which partly draws on various historical mythologies for inspiration, though the Neo-Pagans typically embrace the term.
==Major examples of pagan faiths==
*Asatru
*Greek mythology
*Wicca
*Druidry
*Animism
==See also==
*Heathen
*Neopaganism
*Woden's Folk
Pakicetus

Pakicetus is the genus name of a proto-whale fossil, the first discovered ancestor of modern whales that is distinctly a transition from early artiodactyls to today's whales. Palaeontologists basically just call it a "whale". It is one of several recent finds of transitional fossils that clearly show an evolution of land mammals returning to life in the water.
==History==
Pakicetus lived more than 50 million years ago, during the Eocene, in what is today Pakistan. Locations of fossil finds suggest that Pakicetus may have hunted or lived partially in the ocean.
==Discovery==
Four species of Pakicetus fossils have been identified and named. Though partial fossils were found in the early 1980s, a complete fossil was not found until 2001. Pakicetus inachus was the first Pakicetus fossil taxonomically identified, in 1981, by P. D. Gingerich and D. E. Russell.http://paleodb.org/cgi-bin/bridge.pl?action=displayReference&reference_no=8326
==In creationism==
Creationists really hate whale ancestor fossils. Answers in Genesis noted in 1996 that "Pakicetus consists of only a few skull fragments.(!)"http://www.answersingenesis.org/articles/cm/v19/n1/world-of-whales When much more complete skeletal remains were found in 2001http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v413/n6853/full/413277a0.html, AiG had nothing to say about the development. Jonathan Sarfati wrote for the Institute for Creation Research that "evolutionists" believed it was not at all like a whale,http://creation.com/not-at-all-like-a-whale which is the opposite of the truth (though pakicetus was not like modern whales in that regard, but of course, creationists leave everything ambiguous).
==See also==
*Indohyus
==References==
Category:Evolution
Category:Transitional fossils
Palmer United Party

The United Australia Party (formerly The Palmer United Party, self-named after Clive "national living treasure" Palmer), is a political party in Australia who, unfortunately, hold significant sway in the Australian Senate. It is also known for its atrocious, hard to look at, website given that its two primary colours are yellow on a white background.
==Support base==
The United Australia Party drew its support from typically uneducated, working-class, politically disinterested Australians who are easily sucked in by Clive Palmer's "everyday 'Strayin" rhetoric. In other words, they are basically the same type who support One Nation - which is clearly evident given that its support is most potent in Queensland. Even though Palmer's immigration policy (see below) aligns somewhat closer to that of the Australian Greens, on face value at least.
==Policies==
According to the party's website, its policies are as follows.
* Party officials should not be lobbyists, thereby taking a strong position on paid political lobbyists, saving taxpayers dollars and introducing fair policies.
* Establish an emissions trading scheme, another form of carbon pricing, that will not come into effect until other countries – US, China, EU, Japan and Korea – also establish such a scheme.
* Revising the current Australian government refugee policy to ensure Australia is protected and refugees are given opportunities for a better future and lifestyle.
* Creating mineral wealth to continuously contribute to the welfare of the Australian community. This will be achieved by utilising mineral resources from Queensland and Western Australia, and incentives from the Commonwealth of Australia to establish downstream processing in the States of Victoria, New South Wales and South Australia; and exporting products at a higher dollar value, thereby creating more revenue, jobs, tax and more facilities.
* Establishing a system where people create wealth in various parts of the country and for that wealth to flow back to the community that generates wealth.
* Closing down detention centres for asylum-seeker boat arrivals: "... abolish the detention camps, restore our navy to its traditional role, save the lives of children and families, keep families together and recognise the legitimate rights of those that have a lawful reason for entering Australia."
* Moving towards free trade and closer economic relations with Asia.
* Decentralisation and regional self-government, such as a new North Queensland state.
* Encouraging competitive markets by restricting monopoly and prohibiting unfair trading practices.
* Abolish higher education fees.
==External links==
*
==References==
Category:Australian political parties
Paluxy River tracks

thumb|right|165px|Heavily weathered three-toed dinosaur tracks. That's all. Not evidence that humans or aliens walked with those beasties.
The Paluxy River tracks are a set of allegedly fossilized footprints that appear to be human, located right alongside dinosaur tracks in the Paluxy River valley, Texas. These tracks were touted by creationists for many years as proof that man had walked with dinosaurs, and hence were evidence supporting Young Earth Creationism.
==Explanations==
It has now been conclusively and scientifically demonstrated that the supposed man tracks are not those of humans. Both sets of tracks are highly weathered, so it's impossible to draw too many precise conclusions. The "man" tracks appear to be not human in origin but seem to have a few different features collaborating to form the illusion of human tracks, including excessive weathering of the details (some of the "man" tracks have clearly visible claw marks, indicating that the others probably also had claw marks that eroded)Man Tracks on the Paluxy River, Archaeology Fantasies.The Paluxy River 'footprints' — Bad Archaeology and some carved features that may have been doctored at a later date.The Texas Dinosaur/"Man Track" Controversy, Glen J. Kuban, talk.origins.The Taylor Site "Man Tracks", Glen J. Kuban.Paluxy Man — The Creationist Piltdown In addition:
There are numerous other tracks attributed to humans, but none stand up to any scientific scrutiny. The Burdick PrintGlen J. Kuban and Gregg Wilkerson, The "Burdick Print" seems to show a well defined human foot preserved in stone, but given the 15-inch length and the hilariously over-defined toes (for something that would have been imprinted in soft mud) no one could seriously suggest it is anything but a forgery. Nevertheless, close scrutiny has been done and confirmed most tracks like these are forged carvings being passed off as genuine fossilised human footprints. The State Park Ledge tracks, small indentations found in a rock formation in Dinosaur Valley, Somervell County, Texas, have been jumped on by track enthusiasts but are just later erosion features with only a superficial resemblance to anything actually man-made.Glen J. Kuban, A Topical Summary of the Paluxy "Man Track" Controversy
Only the most diehard creationists still use this as evidence for a young earth any more. Answers in Genesis includes the Paluxy tracks among those "Arguments that should be avoided" as even they can recognise blatant cases where further research is still needed, new research has invalided aspects of it, or Biblical implications may discount it.Answers in Genesis "Get Answers"
==External links==
*TalkOrigins Archive
==References==
ru:Следы человека были найдены со следами динозавра в Пэлюкси
Category:Dinosaurs
Category:Out-of-place fossils
Category:Pseudohistory
Category:Pseudoarchaeology
Category:Texas
Pan-Arabism

Pan-Arabism is a cultural nationalism which seeks to establish a single Arab state by unifying the countries in the Arab world. It is different from Arab nationalism, which is the belief that the people of the entire Arab world are bound together by common cultural heritage. Pan-Arabism also believes in Arab nationalism, but goes further to advocate an Arab nation-state.
Common characteristics of Pan-Arabism are:
*Opposition to Western imperialism and Western involvement in the Arab world
*Secularism
*Pan-Arabism has sometimes embraced socialist economics, as in the case of Gamal Abdel Nasser‎. Ba'athist regimes are commonly left-wing economically while pursuing a strong nationalist (and often Pan-Arabist) agenda.
Modern pan-Arabism dates back at least to the First World War, when the British encouraged rebellion by Arab tribes against the Ottoman Empire. Various Arab nationalists, including Sherif Hussein of Mecca, patriarch of the Hashemite Dynasty, and Ibn Saud, future founder of Saudi Arabia, attempted to take up the mantle of Arab leadership and create a single Arab state across the Middle East. After the war, Allied designs in the region, codified by the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Treaty of Sevres, and fighting amongst Arab leaders, caused its collapse. 
Later, Nasser‎ was a prominent proponent of Pan-Arabism. Under Nasser's aegis, Egypt and Syria merged into the United Arab Republic, which lasted from 1958 to 1961. Pan-Arabism declined in popularity after the defeat of the Arab states in the . Nasser's death in 1970 dealt the movement another blow.
Muammar Gaddafi attempted to revive the concept in 1971, proposing a Federation of Arab Republics to include Libya, Egypt, Syria and the Sudan. Though approved by referendum, none of these countries formally attempted to join together, and the movement died in 1977. 
More recently, Saddam Hussein adopted pan-Arab rhetoric during his efforts to invade Iran and Kuwait in the '80s and '90s. Ironically, Hussein succeeded instead at uniting most Arab countries (including his fellow Ba'athists in Syria) against him during the Gulf War.
Pan-Arabism has sometimes been associated with racism due to the persecution of non-Arab minorities in the Middle East (including the Kurdish, Jewish, and Persian people), and the Amazigh people, the original inhabitants of North Africa.
category:culture
Category:Political movements
Category:Imperialism
Category:Nationalist pseudohistory
Pandemic

A pandemic occurs when a dangerous disease breaks out across the world — as opposed to an epidemic, which involves a localized disease. The usual criterion for a pandemic is something that spreads across different continents at epidemic levels and that isn't the seasonal flu. Pandemics used to take years if not decades to cover the globe, but due to the increase in travel technology, an outbreak in one part of the world can now quickly spread to a major city and from there to the rest of the world. The term "pandemic" has a connotation of referring to an especially bad outbreak, but it refers to the distribution of the event, not the severity.
Because pandemics are very real low-probability but high-consequence events that strike with little or no warning, there is an intersection between concerned government officials (who have to plan ahead of time because of how fast a disease may spread) and survivalism circles. Some of the latter can descend to woo (for example: "The world will be purged in a tide of blood by ebola") but there's no one in the relevant fields who isn't afraid of bird-flu adapting to mammals. 
Notable pandemics include the "Spanish" influenza pandemic of 1918-1919, which was encouraged by large numbers of military personnel during/after World War I suffering from poor sanitation and traveling between continents, and the ongoing AIDS pandemic which started in the 20th century. A recent (if less fatal) disease which the media called a "potential pandemic" was SARS, which originated in China and made its way to Toronto, Canada. The bird flu virus (H5N1) has been seen as a possible pandemic virus. In May 2009 the World Health Organization classified Swine flu (H1N1) as a pandemic — it killed over 14,000 people. (Some portions of the press seemed to think that this pandemic never actually happened, and that it was all scaremongering.)
The 2019-20 COVID-19 outbreak (also known, before the virus was named, as the ) is an ongoing pandemic caused by a named SARS-CoV-2 (formerly 2019-nCoV), causing the disease named COVID-19.
"Coronavirus disease named Covid-19", BBC News, 11 February 2020.
==See also==
* Contagion — a pro-science film about developing a vaccine to counter a pandemic
==External links==
* Can you kill the President of Madagascar?
==References==
Category:Disease
category:Medicine
Paraconsistent logic

Paraconsistent logic refers to alternative (non-classical) systems of logic which reject the principle of explosion, which states that once a contradiction has been asserted, any proposition can be inferred from it.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/logic-paraconsistent/>http://www.iep.utm.edu/para-log/ Some (but not all) paraconsistent logics are also dialetheic, meaning they hold to a view known as the view that some contradictions are simultaneously true and false.
Does this mental voodoo perhaps destroy the entire point of logic? Not necessarily; some philosophers and scientists assert that true contradictions (dialetheia) exist and therefore should be represented by formal logic. Others, however, hold that these true contradictions are purely semantic or linguistic in nature & believe that dialetheism can make sense of certain paradoxes. The most notable defender of dialetheism in the contemporary philosophical scene is the British-Australian philosopher Graham Priest. Priest implements the concept of dialetheism in his own system of relevance logic, a particular type of paraconsistent logic.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dialetheism/
Paraconsistent mathematics refers to attempts to develop mathematics on top of a foundation of paraconsistent logic and paraconsistent set theory.
Historically speaking, paraconsistency and dialetheism have been common themes in Indian logic, especially Jainist and Buddhist logic.http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/contradiction/#LNCBudTethttps://aeon.co/essays/the-logic-of-buddhist-philosophy-goes-beyond-simple-truth Whereas in classical logic a statement is either true or false, but not both nor neither, Indian logics have traditionally been accepting of statements being both true and false simultaneously, or neither true nor false. Paraconsistency applies in particular to the both case — although it often allows the neither case as well. Paracomplete logic allows the "neither" case by denying the law of the excluded middle.
==See also==
*Fuzzy logic
==References==
Category:Logic
Category:Mathematics
Category:Philosophy
Paranormal

Paranormal activity is a catch-all phrase for anything supernatural or supposedly "unexplained". By "unexplained", this usually means that it lacks a supposedly scientific explanation — or more likely, the scientific explanation of people being hysterical isn't as fun, dramatic, or interesting as real ghosts and spirits. That is why all paranormal woo-meisters do not (and cannot) base their arguments on empirical evidence, but rather on anecdote, testimony, and suspicion. The paranormal is a subset of pseudoscience. 
More often than not, paranormal activities invoke supernatural rather than naturalistic explanations — although a few sub-fields of paranormal investigation, such as cryptozoology, do claim "naturalistic" explanations, but these are mostly bullshit.
Bullshit or not, a large percentage of the population apparently believes in some level of paranormal activities, at least according to 2006 Baylor Religion Survey. Of course, how that relates to the belief in religion in general is debated.
==General pseudoscience==
In general, paranormal phenomena are outside of what one would normally expect to observe in the real world. Furthermore, the phenomena are generally not reproducible under controlled conditions and it is therefore not possible to investigate them using the scientific method. For these deep-seated reasons (among several others of equal hinderance to the "believers"), paranormal phenomena are per definition classed as pseudoscience.
However, many of the legitimate scientific investigations that have been made into paranormal activity have turned up interesting results, although most, if not all, turn out to have naturalistic explanations. Ghosts, for instance, can be explained by minor hallucinations that have been replicated in labs. The 'spooky' or 'sickly' feeling of walking into a haunted house has been replicated by using very low frequency soundwaves. Acts such as fortune telling or talking to the dead can easily be replicated in controlled conditions by people, such as Derren Brown, utilising the techniques that mediums and fortune-tellers are suspected of using to dupe otherwise innocent customers (e.g., cold reading or hot reading).
==External links==
* paranormal — the Skeptic's Dictionary
==References==
 
Category:Pseudoscience
Parasite

Parasites are a proof of the wonders of creation. That a benign divinity could create such beauty and elegance as the autumn leaves, the butterfly's wing, and the which AAARGHKLGHlghlghghgllgh...
Ahem.
We apologise for the poor quality of that opening paragraph. Here instead is a better one:
Parasites are, of course, disproof of a benign god. Why would a benign being create a creature that survives only by causing disease and suffering? Answer: because the creature wasn't created, it evolved. The possibility that god created it, but is not benign, isn't really a starter among fundamentalists, and is possibly blasphemy. Parasites used to be thought to be failed results of evolution, but in fact, they are some of evolution's "greatest achievements". Almost perfectly adapted to their environments, some are able to ensure they get to the right host if they fail the first time around. Toxoplasma, the most successful parasite in the world, is a prime example. Many parasites are also experts in sustainable resource exploitation, stopping well short of outright killing their hosts, since that would screw the parasite over too.
==Alternative uses==
In an ill-informed commentary on the social contract, "parasite" was a snarl word used by Ayn Rand to denigrate people who relied on government services to survive. She refused to explain why the same couldn't be applied to business owners earning profits from their workers, nor when she herself signed up for Social Security checks.
==See also==
*Disease
*Insect
*Symbiosis
*Lawyer
*Toxoplasma gondii
Category:Biology
Category:Horror