Nuke Bad Comets

IT’S THE ONLY WAY (TO FULL EMPLOYMENT, AMONG OTHER THINGS).

Abstract: Appropriate use of technology is paramount, as civilization tremble, and the Earth turns into a gas chamber. The way drones have been used to kill extra-judicially in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, is deeply inappropriate. Yet, drones can be used very appropriately on a battlefield. But to use them to bomb millennia of Western morality, is definitively inappropriate. Our technology is turning us into gods, but we better be smarter than the Greek ones of lore. Remember what happened to the Greeks.

The way nuclear energy has been used has often been inappropriate. Yet, nuclear energy shortened up World War Two by several million deaths. Nukes could also save billions, should a bad comet suddenly appear.

Comet Pan-STARRS Visible This Weekend

The comet pictured above was detected by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawai’i. It’s a “sun-grazer” comet with an elliptic orbit of 106,000 years (so it’s predictable). Perihelion: .302 AU, March 10 (today!). So it is getting as close to the sun as Mercury gets periodically.

Guess what? By a troubling coincidence one such bad comet has precisely just surprised us. OK, it’s not coming for us, but how many of those are there out there? Obviously more than we thought.

Space faring nations with the appropriate technology, nuclear, military, electronic and ballistic, such as France and the USA, should make well financed contingency plans to prepare to engage such a giant object with a nuclear bomb upon very short notice. This is not trivial, because of the unusual speeds and energies involved. The technology would also allow to intercept “city killer” asteroid, even with only a few hours’ warning (after dialing down the megatonnage of the bomb).

Only nuclear energy would work to deal with large impactors, forget big tales for small children, about painting them blue or something. One does not deflect comets with brooms, or firecrackers, but with an explosive energy a million times greater than what Genghis Khan used. That we fortunately have mastered. If we are masters of our souls, we can be masters of fusion.

***  

A BIGGER BANG:

Cosmic warnings are piling up. On January 3, 2013, a comet was discovered. It’s called C/2013 A1. It is on a hyperbolic trajectory, and moves in a retrograde orbit. That means it may be extra solar, and should be leaving the solar system. Maybe it is coming from outside the solar system.

Comet C/2013 A1 is on a collision course with Mars.

October 2014?

Even The Economist, the rogue free market magazine I subscribe to, in “Hits Keep Coming”, thinks that the big governments’ program promoted by the present essay is a good idea, and would give something meaningful for NASA to do. 

A crucial articulation of the present Greater Depression is that people in Western countries are running out of meaningful things to do, as the plutocracy has deliberately robbed them of employment and power, thus meaning. This essay speaks of struggling against comets, but that will not happen, before a bit of class struggle.

C/2013 A1 is a completely different style of comet from Pan-STARRS. C/2013 A1 is hyperbolic, not elliptic. It means that the comet has so much kinetic energy that, should it not collide this something first, it will escape the Solar System.

C/2013 A1 will come so close to Mars that it may well hit it (comets, because they emit jets of steam, behave a bit like rockets: they can go sideways). Should C/2013 A1 collide with Mars, the event should be most remarkable.

The current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3 indicates a diameter from 10 to 50 km. Worse: the energy imparted is proportional to the square of the velocity, and that velocity is very high, much more than what is needed to escape the sun. C/2013 A1′s speed would be approximately 56 km/s by the time it approaches Mars. By comparison the Solar System’s escape velocity in the vicinity of Mars is 34km/s! The comet has more than twice the energy needed to go visit other stars.  

The energy of impact on Mars, should it happen, might reach the equivalent of staggering 20 billion megatons of TNT!

***

SPACEGUARD NEEDED:

We are lucky that C/2013 A1 is heading towards Mars and not Earth! One has to understand that big planets are for comets like honey strips for flies. They attract them.

That effect protects us. Jupiter is our existing Spaceguard system: it sucks in comets. Jupiter has 318 times the mass of the Earth, making it literally 318 times more attractive for comets (from the gravitation law that Isaac Newton reminded us a scientifically minded French priest had found earlier; often misattributed to Newton nowadays, in a spirit of manifest Anglo-Saxon, hence Wall Street-City of London supremacy).

Two large comets collided with Jupiter in the last two decades. That changed the mood among professionals.

Pre-Socratic philosophers would have been fascinated by all the understanding we have gathered on all these celestial bodies. They were already fascinated, as all this astronomy shook their metaphysics to the core. Before Socrates, it was thought that thinking had to do with learning about what was out there. (After Socrates-Plato-Pluto, it was thought the universe was all about what was in one’s heads. And, sure enough, within a century, plutocracy, Macedonian backed plutocracy, had won all over… Except the Roman republic. Who said metaphysics had no impact?)

In 466 BCE, Halley’s comet passed by for the longest time, 75 days. Simultaneously, an enormous meteor (perhaps associated to the comet) crashed into Northern Greece. A piece, as large as a wagon, landed on the ground and stayed a tourist attraction for more than 5 centuries. That shattered the ancient theories of the Greeks about the heavens. Anaxagoras’ science came to the fore.

The Greeks would  have been fascinated by Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. Irresistibly attracted by the giant planet, that 15 kilometers diameter comet came too close to Jupiter. Shoemaker-Levy, quartered by Jupiter mighty gravitation, broke in 70 pieces or so, and went back to space. Still irresistibly attracted, the comet, now a train of comets of all sizes, hit the gas giant on its next pass. The pieces entered the Jovian atmosphere, making giant black impacts in it.

Each of the largest 7 fragments’ explosion was bigger than Earth herself. One explosion made a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and released an energy equivalent to 6 million megatons of TNT. That unreal succession of impacts into Jupiter in July 1994 blasted smugness about the stability of heavens to smithereens. Astronomer David Levy stated: “The giggle factor disappeared after Shoemaker-Levy 9″.

As the comet would pack 20 billion tons of TNT, something packing a few million tons of TNT may help Earth to negotiate with it. I want pacifists munching grass placidly in those vast, awesome Elysian fields in their heads, to meditate upon that.

***

JUST ONE SOLUTION. NUCLEAR ENERGY:

Nuclear energy, because of the basic reason that, by a factor of a million, nuclear energy is the greatest energy source we have. This is why the main problem of our civilization has become the problem of nuclear energy. How to use it appropriately, and not freak out.

If the comet were heading towards Earth we would be scrambling to put together a giant thermonuclear weapon. It could be done. The French republic, by itself, could do it, using in-house equipment. The chance of success, though would approach 100% if, and only if, one were to prepare well, in an international program.

Lots of Uranium 235, and Lithium 7, for a bigger bang, in the monster fission-fusion-fission thermonuclear device we would be hastening to prepare. One of several (because we would need back-ups). If we were really pressed for time, we could rigged together several conventional nuclear warheads, packed together to explode simultaneously. 

As NASA puts it in 2012: For non-technical reasons, this would likely be a last resort, but IT IS ALSO THE MOST POWERFUL TECHNIQUE and could take several different forms, as discussed in the report. The nuclear option would be usable for objects up to a few kilometers in diameter. http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=183

The efficiency of a thermonuclear explosion is augmented by an order of magnitude if it happens three meters below the surface rather than on contact, one centimeter above the surface. So NASA (2012) has proposed to extend the Nuclear Explosive Device with a frontal penetrator which would create a three meter crater. Easy computations show that, had the hyperbolic comet headed towards Earth, the interception speed would have been at least 80km/s, meaning that the thermonuclear fusion sequence would have to be started just before first contact.

Fast Electronics Required @ 80km/s

Of the shelf H bombs could take care of comets a few kilometers across.

The power of nuclear devices is hard to fathom. The Castle Bravo device made a crater in the atoll reef. Although it was exploded 7 feet above the reef, the crater  had a diameter of 2 kilometers (6510 ft), with a depth of 80 meters (250 ft). It would have been much worse if it had been buried by 3 meters (five kilometers across, 160 meters deep).

For larger comets, a true bomb from hell would have to be devised: a fission-fusion-fission with a powerful third stage. A third stage is simply a Uranium envelope around the thermonuclear bomb. When it gets hit by “fast neutron” from the H bomb, it fissions in turn. The largest bomb ever tested, Tsar Bomba, over the arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, was 58 megatons TNT. It was deliberately made with NO third stage. (And the second stage may have contained some lead, instead of uranium.)

It’s not that a third stage is hard to make; it’s just uranium metal. But Soviet physicists computed that, with a third stage, Tsar Bomba would have been too powerful. The plane dropping the bomb and its parachute would have been destroyed, to start with. As it was windows were broken more than 1,000 kilometers away, in Finland and Norway. Because so little uranium was used, relative to the Lithium Deuteride fusion fuel, the mightiest bomb ever was also the cleanest, ever, at 97% pure fusion. (Fusion is cleaner because it fuses light elements to create slightly heavier, but still light, elements, and light elements tend not to be fission, or then not for long.)

By enriching the third stage tamper with U235, one could probably go beyond 200 Megatons (and such a tamper could be rigged around conventional warheads, too!).

Thus, contrarily to urban legend from luddites in denial, the largest thermonuclear bombs could take care of the largest comets.

Man-Made Fireball 8 Kilometers Across.

The largest comets are 60% larger than the entire picture, if one uses the fireball as a measuring unit.

Even the largest comet would fragment and the pieces would rocket away. If done a few weeks before Earth impact, clearly all the pieces would miss (another rocket or two would be in back up, just in case).

***

BACK TO THE CATASTROPHE SCENARIO:

So let’s suppose again that C would be headed towards Earth instead of mars.

The next Ariane V would have to be modified hastily. Why Ariane V? First, that flight is already being assembled. It is Flight VA213, signifying the 213th launch of an Ariane from French Guiana since the family’s maiden liftoff in 1979. Its Automatic Transfer Vehicle, named Albert Einstein, would have to be modified with a booster, interception electronic package and basically a boom system in the front to detonate fast enough the nuke in the back, at the staggering speeds involved, so that the bomb can explode at 3 meter depth in the comet… 200 megatons against 20 billion megatons. Fun. Unreal reality.

In general, Ariane is the most dependable, most frequently launched rocket in the West’s arsenal. So it should be part of the quick reaction force to be assembled, as one would need to fling a hefty load.

***

IS IT ALL REAL?

When “experts” come, and talk about the frequency of impacts, the truth is that we do not have any idea what it is, up to a factor of ten, or more. It is certainly higher than what experts used to believe. three cometary impacts, or near impacts of comets on planets close to us in 20 years is a bad omen.

I was listening to National Public Radio where some scientist from John Hopkins pontificated that the asteroid strike in Siberia (which, a few tens of seconds off could well have annihilated a  major city) happened only every century. In truth, on land three impacts about ten times bigger are known in the last century. Scaling with the ocean, one gets nearly ten of these ten times bigger impacts. Not to say that this is the long term average: it could be a fluke. The same stupid guy was saying that, if we had only 6 months warning, we could not do anything.

And he works on preventing impacts! NPR said.

But what he forgot to say is that his program strictly uses the explosive technology Genghis Khan already had at his disposal. (And what happened? After a costly victory in Hungary, the Tumens had to turn back, them and their fancy black powder rockets.)

(Scientists should stop pontificating, or talk as if they knew, when they don’t, reserve that to the Pope.)

There may have been other impacts in historical times. Unrecorded.

Strange events happening in the Sixth Century, recorded by Chinese and Romans (the only civilizations recording anything reliably at the time) could be explained by impact(s) at sea. (Or then a large volcanic eruption, unidentified so far.) Those events, whatever they were, altered the climate.

Some will smirk, and ask to see the craters. Celestial bodies colliding with the Earth are not on any kind of trajectories. They are ruled by the sun, that is they tend to have trajectories similar to the Earth, but at an angle. So a typical impact will involve a low angle atmospheric entry, spreading death, fires, shock waves and devastation for thousands of kilometers. A crater will not necessary form (elongated craters have been found in Argentina). And remember, 2/3 of Earth is water.

Speaking of which, a proposed impact, the Mahuika impact, 1443 CE, off the south coast of New Zealand, would have been gigantic, typical of a mini comet 500 meters across. There is some evidence for such a cometary impact, from the existence of a crater, from Maori evacuation of the area, to suspected tektites, to suspicious ice cores in Antarctica, to megatsunamis, up to 220 meters high in the region (and 143 meters high in Australia). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahuika_crater

So much for these things being rare.

***

CHANGE THE MOOD ABOUT MOODS:

In recapitulation: learn to do what you can do about what matters.

Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Nobel Laureate, etc. in Science Mag. editorial “Denial of Catastrophic Risks”, March 8, 2013: “In a media landscape saturated with sensational Science stories and “End of the World” Hollywood productions, it may be hard to persuade the wide public that real catastrophes could arise as unexpectedly as the 2008 financial crisis, and have a far greater impact. Society could be dealt shattering blows by the misapplication of technologies that exist already … we should be more concerned about events that have not yet happened but which, if they occurred even once, could cause worldwide devastation.”

What Rees is saying is that we should change MOODS. We should change our system of mood. Preparing for a comet impact, and how to defeat it would help to change the mood we have about moods.

We need to learn to deny our Denial of Catastrophic Risks.

And we learn to do something about catastrophic risks we have identified (I call this new way of thinking catastrophic calculus). Having an active Spaceguard program against asteroids and comets of all sizes and origins, hyperbolic or not, would be a good symbol of the new attitude we need to adopt. Besides, it would reduce unemployment, and push technology forward.  That’s appropriate.

***

Patrice Ayme

Pluto’s Cosmic Impact

Abstract: There is a real, serious impact threat, from small asteroids, and, much worse, long period comets. Yet our great leaders are not too interested, because they prefer the world population as they will it to be: ignorant, despondent and impotent. Cutting science budgets in the guise of austerity helps. So they are busy cutting: austerity for humanity, and anything that makes the honor of mankind, wealth for those who lead us towards oblivion.

A world unwilling of solving problems to the point of being incapable to do so, is perfect for those who profit from the established order, and yearn for divinizing celebrities and more exploitative stagnation rather than real progress and empowerment of the commons.

Far Away Meteor’s Fireball: 27 Kilometers High (90,000 ft)

The comet problem is a case in point. It’s perfectly solvable. But it is left unsolved as a paradigm that unemployment is better than all and any alternative, including cosmic catastrophes. The ways of Pluto are subtle, and vicious.

Don’t ask for whom austerity tolls, it tolls for thee, and any science, wisdom or knowledge you may want to acquire. Admire the celebrities: they are the best lives you will ever get.
***

In less than four years, two nuclear explosion sized asteroid impacts were observed over continental plates. One was more than four times the power of the Hiroshima bomb (Sulawesi in Indonesia, 2009), the other was 33 times Hiroshima (Urals, 2013). So much for the notion that these things are rare and innocuous events. Just above land, I know of four explosions of city killers in 105 years.

(There have been eyewitnesses of major explosions at sea, too; a scientific debate is ongoing about whether there was a truly giant, country killer impact south of New Zealand, 5 centuries ago.)

Only 1,500 people were hospitalized by the shock waves of the Ural meteor, because as luck had it, the meteor was on a grazing trajectory when it collided with the atmospheric wall. It streaked through the wall sideways for 32.5 seconds before experiencing three explosions. The first one, and strongest, happened 27 kilometers above the Urals, 60 kilometers south of the center of a city habitated by one million people.

If the asteroid had been a minute late, on the same trajectory, Tokyo may have been hit. If the meteor had been 30 seconds ahead, on the same trajectory Moscow, moving at 30 kilometers per second, would have caught up with the meteor. In either case, the damage on the ground would have been considerable, and massively lethal.

Why? Because the angles of entry would have been much sharper in either case than they were above the Urals. So the asteroid would have delivered its 500 kilotons, 33 times Hiroshima, much lower. Low enough for either capital to have been partly disintegrated.

For those who want to have a good laugh, zombie style, let them be appraised of the following fascinating twist. The deliriously clever Soviets had installed an automatic nuclear retaliation system (“Dead Hand”) in case Moscow had been destroyed by surprise by the vile capitalists. (Western Strategic Submarines could have hit Moscow in three minutes, hence the hair trigger paranoia.)

“Dead Hand”, also known as “Perimeter” , worked by detecting flashes and seismic waves, and then firing nuclear tipped rockets automatically. The Russians have been coy about whether the system is still in use. May be that is why Putin was so ashen faced when speaking about the Ural meteor. Putin may have been told of my little computation above: 30 seconds or so later, and the meteor may have released 500 kilotons above the Kremlin.

When the folly of men insults the might of heavens, fireworks are guaranteed…

The debate about space impactors has been deflected towards the wrong problem, the obviously silly red herring, the problem one should not worry about, the non dangerous problem. That’s indeed the case when an asteroid CAN be deflected.

Deflection, per se, means one has decades to do it. Thus it is not an emergency, by definition. Why to assume celestial mechanics and happenstance will be that accommodating? Is the Solar System a restaurant where one makes reservations when one feels like it? Of course not. Thus asteroid deflection is the wrong problem. Asteroid deflection is a bit like worrying about being eaten by a shark while skiing out of bounds. What needs to be addressed is a different problem, impactor interception & destruction.

Why so much talk about deflection, when annihilation of the offender should be the focus? Why so much denial? Why change the conversation from a clear and present danger, to talk about a red herring?

The real danger is long period comets: they are huge, unpredictable, undetected, and the warning would come only with months to spare.

So why don’t we talk about them?

Is this blatant denial related to other difficulties we are experiencing, such as the Greater Depression, the Asphyxiation of the Biosphere with man-made greenhouse gases, the Waning of democracy, the Blossoming of Plutocracy? Yes to all.

The refusal to solve the space impactor problem is a baby example of the mood that enables the rule of plutocracy rather than the rule of reason for all.

One avoids to talk about the cosmic difficulty at hand to avoid a mood that plutocracy finds politically dangerous: solving problems and one can, you know, before we know it, solve the problem of rogue finance, corrupting fossil fuel industry, etc …. As NASA put it in 2012:
“For non-technical reasons, nuclear explosions would likely be a last resort, but IT IS ALSO THE MOST POWERFUL TECHNIQUE…
The nuclear option would be usable for objects up to a few kilometers in diameter.”

Nobody Can Resist Me

So what are we waiting for? Well we are waiting for plutocracy to keep on impacting our world ever more deeply. That’s what the plutocrats want. They want to deeply impact civilization with the sheer glory of their rule.

As I write this the threats of austerity cuts are already affecting the science budgets in the USA by more than 5% (from the looming “sequester”, which has already forced scientific agencies to implement thousands of cuts). In the European Union, scientific cuts are turning into a massacre.

Indeed, in the European Union, the cuts to the scientific budgets are in excess of an unbelievable 13%. Another victory for Kanzler Merkel and the very wealthy heir, David Cameron! Instead of cutting science, why don’t the politicians put a 93% tax on multi-millionaires, to finance science and education?

Putting a 93% tax on the wealthiest is what Republican president Eisenhower did to reimburse the World war Two debt. So why not? Why to throw the baby, but not the dirty bath? Answer: because the politicians would lose the friends that will make them so incredibly rich tomorrow. Politics would not be a lucrative career anymore.

This is a point Beppe Grillo is making in Italy, and now he has 18% of the Italian Parliament to show for it.
OK, Eisenhower taxed the wealthy when Lincoln’s party was really republican, instead of being thoroughly plutocratic, as it is now. In Eisenhower’s time, millions of citizens of the USA could go to the most advanced schools, for free. Including Medical School. Somebody will a normal job could feed a family and provides it with a roof without excessive debt (now a couple can barely do that with 2 jobs and excessive debt, as long as oil is not too expensive).

The mood the careerists such as Cameron, Merkel and the so called Republicans in the USA, want to avoid absolutely, is the mood of solving the problems at hand, with the technology at hand.

Indeed such a mood could impact hard plutocracy itself. Plutocracy is an even mightier threat for civilization than any comet. Any comet could be dispatched with a 200 Megatons thermonuclear bomb, should be act swiftly. In other words, disposing of a comet would be a technological project much easier to implement than getting rid of plutocracy. Why? Common people would understand that something four kilometers across at 40 kilometers per second would affect them adversely.

Yet, common people have been hypnotized into believing that plutocracy is their best friend. It’s their new religion. They salivate when beautiful people show up on the screen. they live through them. They don’t feel like the lobsters they are, slowly cooked for dinner.

Solving problems is a very bad habit for a society to have, when it wants plutocracy to rule. Because plutocracy itself is a problem. The worst chronic problem. So one may fear that plutocracy itself would be solved, by problem solvers… As it was under the Roman republic, for five centuries.

Roman emperors, the “Princeps”, those “First men in Rome” who stole power from the republic, were fully aware of this. So they avoided solving problems scrupulously. One could make a curve of problems solved by the Roman state, and see that it goes down to basically zero once the fascist empire started to rule in full.

A society that makes a habit of solving problems will solve excessive plutocracy first. because only the intelligence of the People is freed from celebrity cult, and starts to contemplate the universe at large. That is why one observes that highly innovative societies were also highly revolutionary socially, and cut down to size their own plutocracy. First.

For example the golden age of Greece was preceded by massive, well, drastic, revolutions, starting with the draconian Draco himself in Athens (around 622 BCE) Sparta would later free Athens from tyranny). And of course Solon in Athens, probably inspired by Draco.

During the French revolution, in 1792, as plutocratic armies invaded the country from all direction, the Polytechnique and other engineering schools were founded. The idea was to defend the homeland of human rights supreme with smarts. Immediately new explosives were invented at Polytechnique, and put to good use at Valmy, a few miles from Paris, to stop the Prussian Duke of Brunswick, who had promised to do to the Parisians what Hitler would do to the Jews, nearly two centuries later (tradition, tradition…)

Thus the Beatles were wrong when they sang hypocritically against revolution… (While racking the cash, and rubbing against the plutocratic order; Mc Carney married the Kodak heiress…) The revolutionary spirit infects all dimensions, once it’s allowed to grow in one of them.

During World War Two, the USA functioned pretty much as an equalitarian republic. Old French revolutionaries, ancient republican Romans, 22 centuries ago, Athenians 25 centuries ago, would have recognized the spirit immediately: out of the many, one, liberty, equality, fraternity… And plenty of ideas. The US navy in the Pacific, or the scientists involved in the atomic bomb project were pretty much self governing bodies, guided by truth.

Solving problems leads to an obsession with truth. Thus, if one wants to avoid the truth, one better stick to avoiding problems, and the solutions they bring. Thus the Roman emperors discouraged paradigm changing technology. As the mood of changing what could be changed could prove contagious, and thus threaten the order they ruled over, they astutely felt.

In the case of the threat of a space impactor, the solution is obvious. It calls for maximal, but existing, technology. The interception of the offensive object with a thermonuclear bomb is only rocket science, not Quantum science. It’s nothing off the shelf.

But to decide to do what can be done, and could do it efficiently, would recognize the preponderance of the metaprinciple that establishing an order of more or less vital priorities and taking care of high ranking priorities ought to rule over economic considerations.

It is this (meta)psychological subtlety that holds back Spaceguard.

After the Ural meteor’s strike, the Russian Prime Minister called for constructing Spaceguard. This would be intolerable to the world financiers and profiteers: if one used economic power for something useful, would not the world of finance supreme look irrelevant? Where would the spirit of enterprise stop? With finance’s heads on spikes?

Better to stick to the usefully childish, such as the muscle bound Princess of the USA (see the note about the meaning of the word “Princess”) giving a “best movie” award to still another motion picture glorifying wars of the USA in the Middle of Eurasia.

Such movies are much useful, to the plutocratic order. Hollywood seems to have a factory churning them out, and the Main Stream Media (“60 Minutes”, say) re-iterate the message.

Such movies, with their partial view of history, insure that We The People of the USA learn what a continual pain the Middle Easterners have been directing towards the USA, ever since they have oil, and have to be continually encourage to fork it all over to Wall Street.

Iran is particularly insensitive that way, as the USA worked hard changing the government there after the Iranian People voted for the wrong guy (Mossadegh) in the early 1950s. Then the USA installed by a real Shahanshah (“King of Kings”) with the help of its friend of the CIA, Khomeini. It’s good to be reminded of all this, and celebrate the “greatest country on Earth” (Shall we give it the title of Country of Countries?).

So never mind comets, asteroids, H bombs and heady stuff. Celebrities is where it’s at. Muscle and glitter. Now Sandberg, the Facebook woman, before that the Google woman, and before that, for more than a decade, the Larry Summers/Financial derivatives woman, since he got to meet her as an undergraduate when he was president of plutocratic Harvard, is coming out with a book to teach women how to succeed. I guess, that’s done the old fashion way, by meeting the right guys and accumulating that way a “stellar resume“.

They sleep, thus they rule, and they are even sleeping at the wheel.

Those who rule know how to take care of what’s important in the universe: the awe that become them. Let the universe take heed.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
Note: Ms Obama is given the title of ‘First Lady’. Yet, as anybody who knows Latin will testify, this is exactly what “Princess” means! It’s wonderful to discover that aristocracy is as American as motherhood.

Indebted To Lies

LIVING IN DENIAL ABOUT DEBT A PLUTOCRACY MAKES:
Abstract: Too many illusions governing, and a civilization dissolution guaranteed. A vast conspiracy extending from the financial right to the self conscious “liberal” elite, including the honorable conscientious liberal, Paul Krugman, claims that there is not that much of a debt problem in the USA.

Yet, a careful examination of the numbers and concepts involved shows that the esteemed pundits who howl urbi et orbi that there is no debt problem, coolly propose to steal Medicare and the Social Security Trust Fund.

This is pretty typical of the eerie manipulations that the powers that be engage in. Official progressives living in mansions end up in total solidarity with the plutocracy. One shudders at the possibilities.

Servicing Our Lords

Servicing too much debt is servicing plutocracy too much, and denial is its prophet.
***

UNDERESTIMATING DEBT IS AN ECONOMIC DRAG:
Why did the presidency of Obama bring only change that we can’t see? Bush has been gone more than 4 years. Yet, the giant tax loopholes for the hyper rich are still in place (including “carry interest“!).

Not to worry, say many of the self proclaimed liberals and progressives opinion makers. In their latest tactic, they claim that there is no debt problem in the USA. They observe contently that interest rates have never been so low, that the deficit has disappeared from places such as the state of California, and that Obama’s reforms have been the “f… big deal“, as the robust Biden said, and Krugman confirmed.

What that self satisfied elite omits is that interest rates are low because the economy is not recovering. In a self amplifying loop, total debt (also called “leverage”), so easy to acquire with low interest, so stifling to serve later, is obviously a factor.

Because debt is accompanied with interest, too much debt means too much interest paid. At the limit, the debtor owns nothing, the debtor pays interest all day long, and the debtor becomes a serf.
***

WHEN DEBT EXPLODES INTO SLAVERY:
Servitude from debt did not just happen in the Middle Ages. And it does not just happen to individuals.

In 2011 and 2012 Italy’s real economy was doing rather well: a bigger industrial sector than Great Britain, and no PRIMARY deficit (the USA primary deficit is 7% of GDP). Yet, Italy was engulfed in a catastrophic debt crisis.

How come? International investors asked for unsustainable interest to renew Italian debt.
Why they got in that mood, pouncing on Italy instead of Britain, say, is very complicated; but one of the factors is the madness of crowds; another, of course, is that the plutocracy has had a multi-generational conflict with France, and the Eurozone, or even the EU, is viewed as a dangerously French amplification machine.

During that crisis, Italian deficit (that is how much debt is added each year) came to be caused entirely by added interest on very old debt. (Total Italian debt was 121% of GDP when the interest rates charged to that country exploded.)

Greece went through something similar, just way worse (some Hellenic interest rates went above 100%).
Long ago, I advocated that Greece should default. This is what was done, in the end, because there was no other choice (although the default involved most of the governmental debt, Greece still owes hundreds of billions of euros, something that will have to be reduced further).

The European debt crisis abated in the second part of 2012 thanks to three factors. The most important factor was that unambiguous signals were given that France and Germany would do whatever it took to preserve the European banking system.

Thus the European Central Bank (ECB) was given a green light to stretch its mandate, and resort to USA style “Quantitative Easing” (QE). (The Europeans use another term than “QE”, in the hope that one does not feel they are just Americans infeodated to private finance as the government of the USA is!) QE consisted into sending a trillion euros to private banks, in the hope that they will show a profit. In the USA, QE has given to the banks more than 8 trillion dollars (about half of the yearly GDP). (See note on liabilities.)

The other cause of the abatement of the European debt crisis has been a ferocious crack down on deficits. Italy has no primary deficit, Germany has no deficit whatsoever. Even France is breaking hard to try to bring her deficit around 3% in 2013. Spain’s unemployment, now at 26%, keeps climbing, but the government helps ever less (after years of a delirious construction binge).

As Europe imports much of its energy, the climb of the euro, a consequence of these healthier finances, is viewed positively (it forces European industry to excell, a ball Switzerland and Germany got rolling, to great success.)
***

WHEN DEBT CUTS INTO THE BONE:
Many countries are overdoing the austerity: Germany has no deficit, but it’s interior demand has long been very weak, as it rested on the likes of Greek and Iberian madness. Now the German economy is contracting. In Great Britain, savage cuts are proving self defeating: the deficit is still above 7%, the country is rolling again in recession, with long term GDP numbers worse than in the depression of the 1930s.

David Cameron, an extremely rich scion, Britain’s chief, thinks smart to duplicate the degeneracy that afflicts the USA, ever since Reagan imposed Voodoo economics. Thanks to Cameron, it can cost 10,000 euros to attend public university in the UK. Such cuts, should they stick, guarantee that the historical strength of the West, intellectual power, will sink in England, as surely as the Titanic.

California does not have a deficit, Paul Krugman boasted. Sure. Because of horrendous cuts, through the muscles, into the bones. Say in education: the, supposedly public, University of California charges California residents more than $12,000 in tuition, about a quarter of the median USA family income. Another sneaky deficit fighting measure is to let children enter primary school a year later. Meanwhile health costs considerably more to the public, thanks to genial Obamacare.

No more education, no more health, while Paul Krugman, self proclaimed “conscience of a liberal”, extols California as an example. The hyper rich have something to celebrate, many of the richest of the elite still pays no taxes, thanks to loopholes that the media never talks about (while the working stiff pays nearly as much tax as in France, without any of the free stuff there).
***

LET’S LIE ABOUT FEDERAL DEBT: WHAT COULD GO WRONG?
Paul Krugman, much of the New York Times and much of the official left, claim that there is no debt problem in the USA: the debt is only 73% of GDP (less than France or even Germany). This chorus has recently been joined by the Congress Budget Office (CBO) and the Wall Street Journal.

And yet… The debt ceiling has been broken through. The ceiling was at 16,4 TRILLION. Total debt is now crossing $16.5 trillion. The USA GDP is around 15 trillion. Thus the debt is 111% of GDP, as the IMF says, it’s not 73% as many democrats claim.

USA Debt/GDP Worse Than During WWII

(The green line above depicts what would have happened if Reagan had balanced his budget instead of practicing the Voodoo Economics that debt did not matter.)

If one tried to point to that fact, the 111% debt, the New York Times censorship bureau was long in the habit to find such news unfit to print, and would censor them immediately. They did this to me, dozens of times. I amused myself seeing the liberally correct establishment crack down on this apparently anti-liberal notion. the real extent of the debt. Another trick was to publish unfavorable comments informing me that I “did not know what I was talking about”, and should “do [my] homework“.

The Economist, apparently recognized that there was something good in this conspiracy to underestimate the debt. So it nebulously recognized that the debt was “actually 25%” higher than 73%. That is 100% of GDP.
But, as I said, the total USA debt is above 111% of GDP, and growing by 1% every two months. Not exactly a viable proposition. Those who deny this are, on the face of it, just sycophants of the present economic-financial system. As it is, the USA cannot apply to the European Union, on financial grounds alone. Ironical.

Debt is not computed in the same way in Europe and the USA. First, one has to distinguish “gross” public debt and net public debt. Net public debt subtracts fiscal assets (cash, bonds, shares) owned by the government.

When Europeans talk about the debt their states owe, they talk about the gross debt. That makes a huge difference due to the many assets owned by European states.

The French government could argue French debt is not that bad, because it owns shares in Renault, EADS, etc. The Greek government is busy selling various assets it owns to reduce its debt (countless islands, etc.).

But this is not the mentality ruling the bean counters in the USA. There those who want to under-estimate the debt of the government of the USA, far from being rigorous as the Europeans, go to the opposite extreme. They do NOT take into account the money borrowed FROM Medicare and the Social Security “Trust” Fund. Those who want to underestimate the debt of the USA do not count government bonds owned by the Social Security Fund since it is seen as one arm of government having a claim on another arm of the government.

This sleight of hand reduces the debt/GDP of the USA from 111% down to 73%. In other words, according to this subterfuge, the government general fund does not have to reimburse the five trillion dollars it owes to Medicare and Social Security. Paul Krugman and many at the New York Times and the CBO find this conscientious and liberal.
***

LITTLE DEBT, IF WE STEAL SOCIAL SECURITY & MEDICARE:
The debt situation shows that many of the many prominent American liberals are actually not liberal at all. They just play one on TV. Because the most important message they have about the Federal debt of the USA is that, the money owed to Medicare and the Social Security TRUST Fund is actually ZERO.

It’s cool with the New York Times, Krugman and company, if the government stole five trillion dollars to We The People. How conscientious and liberal is that?

But why should we be surprised? Did not the same crowd embrace Obamacare’ public subsidies to private healthcare plutocrats?

Some say that there is no danger. They assume that government bonds will stay as worthy in the future as they are now. Yet this will happen if, and only if the Greater Depression we are in extends indefinitely. If the economy happens to improve significantly, there is no way that the present bonds, with their extremely low returns, would interest investors. So the bonds would lose most of their value.

As the money those bonds used to represent would still be due to Medicare and Social Security, it could either be stolen outright, from The People, or it could be raised from taxing The People once again, for the same thing as they taxed for, before.

Hence ignoring the part of public debt held by the… public, through public institutions is sustainable, if, and only if, the economy keeps on sinking. How progressive.
***

TAX FREE RIDERS, TAX CARBON, SPURN UNPRODUCTIVE DEBT, EMBRACE JOBS:
So? Are the loud progressives dominating the media actually regressive? Would that be, by any chance, entangled with their membership in the plutocracy serving oligarchy?

By underestimating the debt problem, the problem of the present economy can keep on being underestimated. A huge deficit can insure that money can keep on been thrown at the People. And that the free riders will keep on riding for free.

Whereas what we The People need, to be fully satisfied, is jobs. Jobs don’t just bring money, but empowerment, pride, satisfy the instinct of utility, mental, and physical activity. A society where People work is fully human, a society where People don’t work, is not.

By realizing how severe the crisis is, jobs can be brought over to bear on the peoblem. Just to make sustainable energies work, millions of jobs have to be created.

Because those jobs would be profitable by definition, they are worth getting indebted for.

Take for example power lines. Power lines are needed because sustainable energy tends to jump around in space and time; lots somewhere sometimes, and then somewhere else, another time. Germany has wind in the north, sun in the south. Washington State has much hydro power in early summer, and not enough power lines to get it out. Much power line work is needed all over.

Windmills work. Especially the latest types, offshore. A problem, though, is that the wind does not blow all the time, or when needed. The same problem affects solar energy. Power lines cannot solve it all. But dams can remedy the rest.

In the case of offshore wind, the solution is obvious: artificial, multibillion dollars islands, to turbine up water in artificial reservoirs, when demand is slack. To build all these islands will surely be a lot of work.

Mandated weatherization of homes and buildings is another obvious target (that is done in some European countries such as France, but not in the USA, where the Obama administration just gave subsidies to weatherize one million homes; a completely different activity, as it redistribute taxpayer money, instead of leveraging private economic activity… without using any taxpayer money).

So here we are: face the debt problem. It’s enormous. Debt ought not to be used for everyday expense, but only for worthy investments, as used to be the case.

And if there is too much debt, the solution is not crushing taxes on salaried people (top tax margin in California is 52%, although the truly hyper rich still pays nought, as they are not salaried…) Nor is the solution savage cuts. Instead the tax system ought to be overhauled: make the richest individuals and corporations pay tax, and make the richest economic activity pay tax too (for example financial transactions ought to pay tax, like all other transactions do; 11 countries of the Eurozone have decided to do so.

Another obvious revenue generator is a worldwide carbon tax. If the USA cooperated with the European Union there, instead of opposing it ridiculously, the tax would become reality so fast it would have a positive economic effect right away. Verily the least carbon burners can do is to pay for the damage they are causing to the biosphere.
***

SERVICING CAPITAL IS LESS IMPORTANT THAN SERVICING NATURE:
On the most macroscopic scale, debt services the most wealthy persons, those who have the capital. That’s OK, civilization needs capital. For worthy investments. It’s not OK, when it gets out of control, and debt becomes a way of life.

By insisting that Federal debt of the USA is only 73% of GDP, one lives in denial. One more denial in a web of illusions. Too many illusions governing, and a civilization dissolution guaranteed.

At this point, we can emulate the immense Khmer empire around 1300 CE. We can refuse to change so long, that we cannot change when we are forced to. With one million inhabitants, the capital, Angkor, was perhaps the world’s largest city, larger than China’s Hangzhou. However, the Khmer devastated their ecology, precisely by doing as we do now: using up all the carbon around. That deforestation caused a massive drought, combined with intense floods, and the combination killed the capital of Angkor.

Maybe the Khmer were paralyzed by the debt they were servicing, and, certainly, they were paralyzed by the plutocracy that they were servicing.
What they needed to do was to repair the giant reservoirs they depended upon, that were fillong up by debris from the floods. And stop the deforestation. And they needed to do this in timely manner, when they still had the power. They waited too long, weakened, and were invaded.

The Maya also waited too long in a huge ecological crisis they contributed to, along the same lines. So it was with Sumer: deforestation, drought, salination, biblical (literally!) flood…

Rome went through something similar, long enough to debate the problem. However, the plutocracy barred the way to go further than that.

It’s always the same pattern: not working hard on the ecological problems, when they could still be solved, because one is paralyzed by a self obsessed plutocracy.

Why underestimate the debt difficulties of the USA, while maximizing bad rhetoric about those of Europe? Is there a pro-American cult out there? Not really. It is more a cult of capital, and underestimating the debt one owes to capital is part of it.
***
Patrice Ayme
***

Note on liabilities: Liabilities are more general than debt. Although this is too arcane to deal with here, QE extends the liabilities of the central banks, and one can view it as augmenting considerably, maybe 50%, German or French debt… But of this no one never talks. For example although USA debt is nearly $17 trillion, all the liabilities of the government of the USA go beyond $62 trillion…

Carbonizers Worst Monsters Ever?

ONLY a worldwide carbon tax CAN SAVE THE BIOSPHERE as we know it: tax all products according to how much producing them has brought up the carbon content of the atmosphere. Only this will stop the intolerable. With the present policies, we are sure that the devastating rise in CO2 will accelerate.

The tax ought to stop the burning of the 450 million years of FOSSIL fuels we are trying to carbonize the planet with at this point. (That does not mean we would have to go without fuel: algae fuel is carbon negative; that means it absorbs CO2; it requires only CO2 and sunlight; the U.S. Navy, among others, uses it. By contrast, oil from tar sands produces 3 times the CO2 of fossil oil!)

Only morons, masochists and sadists don’t fear this chart:

CO2 Now Off The Chart

This represents 450,000 years of data. We are actually around 450 ppm, off the chart, when counting, as one should, ALL the human made, industrial greenhouse gases.
The carbon tax ought to be put progressively, with allowance for the construction of dams and elevated lagoons next to solar and wind farms (to use them as basal energy), electric trains, power lines, and other heavy machinery needed for a sustainable economy.

***

CARBONIZATION: WORST CRISIS IN 65 MILLION YEARS:
In his second inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed climate change a priority of his second term. Thanks partly to his self-obsessed inaction in his first term, it’s too late to avoid a state of the climate unknown in civilization, within a decade or so.

Except if drastic measures are taken, much worse is to come. In a weekend near you.

In about two cnturies, 7 out of the 9 driest Januaries in California have happened since 1976. In 2013, California suffered its third driest January ever. Why? Because the storm belt has moved too much north. The same phenomenon tied to warming brought 74 degrees Fahrenheit (24 Celsius) to Kansas in that same January (instead of the usual freezing temps).

The first measure to take is for the USA to implement carbon taxes similar to those in Europe.
Why the USA? Because the USA lead the plutocratic dance, and plutocrats rule. They persuaded the rest of the world that Europe was wrong about coal, oil, gas, tar, and that full carbon ahead was the way of the brave.

After Obama’s re-election, a bill glided through Congress with broad bipartisan support and won a quick signature from President Obama: the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011. Just as in most things, Obama talks one way, spectacularly, and acts the opposite, even more spectacularly. However, here it is not a question of naming Wall Street insiders to watch over Wall Street (as Obama did twice, for his new cabinet).
When Obama “prohibits” doing something about carbon emissions, he enables the destruction of the biosphere, one day to be viewed as the greatest crime ever.

Obama goes to Kailua, contemplates an immense magnificent white sand beach he has known since he was a boy. The Secret Services and hordes of black clad special forces hold back the rabble… 500 meters away. A magnificent beach, and soon to be under water, thanks to his good offices.

Why would one want to live on in infamy?

Yes, destroying the biosphere is not among the greatest crimes. But, clearly, the greatest ever. it’s worse than nuclear war, in the fullness of time. Holocausts are bad. Organizing a holocaust (whole-burning) of the whole biosphere, the worst.

Nobody he can talk about in public, forced Obama to sign the planet killing bill: he had won re-election. Casual remarks of his about Lincoln shows that he has no awareness proportionate to the gravity of the situation.

The pollution caused by planes is enormous. Supposing the most efficient plane flying today with a full passenger load (the A380 Superjumbo) three round trips Chicago-Frankfurt produce 11 tons of CO2, per passenger. When Obama translate his person to Hawai’i, it’s about dozens of times that, hundreds of tons. By comparison, the average USA house uses less than 7 tons, the average USA driving per year, 3.5 tons, commuting, less than 2 tons.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are on track to exceed the limits that scientists believe could prevent catastrophic warming. CO2 levels are higher than they have been in 15 million years. And CO2 is less than 8/9 of the story. Because there are other industrially generated greenhouse gases. And carbon soot contributes to warming, it turns out.
The Arctic, melting rapidly and probably irreversibly, has reached a state that the Vikings would not recognize. Yet, when the Vikings colonized Iceland, Greenland and Vinland (America), the climate was at the warmest since the heydays of Rome.
Right now forests are growing in Greenland, and wood has been harvested there, for the first time ever (the Vikings, having ravaged the forests of Iceland, imported their wood from America).
“We are poised right at the edge of some very major changes on Earth,” said Anthony Barnosky, a University of California Berkeley professor of biology studying the interaction of climate change with population growth and land use. “We really are a geological force that’s changing the planet.”
***
WHOLESALE SHIFT NEEDED
The Arctic melt is occurring as the planet is just 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) warmer than it was in preindustrial times.

One has to realize that, at the peak of the last major glaciation, when an ice shield united New York and Aquitaine, all across the Atlantic, the temperature of the North Atlantic was only five degrees Celsius lower.

At current trends, the Earth could warm by 4 degrees Celsius in 50 years, according to a November World Bank report. In truth, it could go much faster, because of a couple of NON LINEAR effects neglected in conventional analyses.

The coolest summer months would be much warmer than today’s hottest summer months, the World Bank report said. “The last time Earth was 4 degrees warmer than it is now was about 14 million years ago,” Barnosky said. However, in the past, changes of climate were slow enough for animal species to accompany them by quick evolutionary changes.

With a few exceptions. Notably the catastrophic extinctions of the past, when the climate changed brutally within a million years or so.

During the extinction of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and plesiosaurs, birds (flying dinosaurs), and mammals barely resisted whatever happened, and the subsequent cooling of the climate. However during the more severe Permian-Trias extinction, 252 million years ago, 96% of marine species got extinct. Major terrestrial megafauna was annihilated.

It is technically feasible to halt the incoming catastrophe by nearly ending the use of fossil fuels, RIGHT AWAY.

It would require a wholesale shift to renewable fuels that the United States, let alone China and other developing countries, appears unlikely to make, given that many Americans do not believe humans are changing the climate. It’s all about the citizens of the USA, because only them can stop the mad rush to disaster. The USA leads world public opinion more, than, say, the French Republic, or the disparate European Union.

Even the superstitious based is starting to realize that Earth has a problem. “Science is not opinion, it’s not what we want it to be,” said Ms Hayhoe, a loudly evangelical Christian and climatologist at Texas Tech University who was lead author of a draft report on U.S. climate change issued this month by the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee, which was created by the federal government.

“You can’t make a thermometer tell you it’s hotter than it is,” said Hayhoe (she and her husband, a linguist and West Texas pastor, have written a book on climate change addressed to evangelicals).
“And it’s not just about thermometers or satellite instruments,” she said. “It’s about looking in our own backyards, when the trees are flowering now compared to 30 years ago, what types of birds and butterflies and bugs that … used to be further south.”Robins are arriving two weeks early in Colorado. Frogs are calling sooner in Ithaca, N.Y. The Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting earlier. Cold snaps, still happen, but less often. The frost-free season has lengthened 21 days in California, nine days in Texas and 10 in Connecticut, according to the draft climate report.
Whereas North-west Europe’s winters may become more severe, if the Gulf Stream short-circuits from flooding of the ocean (!) by light cold waters from accelerated Greenland melting.
***

EXTREME WEATHER, EXTREME CHANGE:
Scientists are loath to pin specific events, such as SuperStorm-Hurricane Sandy, to global warming. Outliers events have always happened.

But “the risk of certain extreme events, such as the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave and fires, and the 2011 Texas heat wave and drought has … doubled or more,” said Michael Wehner, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-author of the climate report. “Some of the changes that have occurred are permanent on human time scales.”

It’s not just droughts. As temperature rises, the water content in the atmosphere augments, so flooding augments. And, and this is a clear statistic, extreme weather events, overall, are much more frequent.

Last year, the continental United States was the hottest it has ever been in the 118 years that records have been kept. Globally, each of the first 12 years of the 21st century were among the 14 warmest ever.
Connecticut was 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average. At current rates of CO2 emissions, scientists expect New England to have summers resembling the Deep South within decades.

The pine bark beetle, killed by winter freezes in the past, has become epidemic over millions of acres of forests from California to South Dakota. Mountainous forests die, and then burn, to be replaced by sagebrush, accentuating the drying of the South West USA. Similar insect invasions are happening throughout the giant forest of North-West America, all the way to Alaska.

Oceans, which absorb CO2, in a reaction that makes carbonic acid, have increased in acidity. The acid gnaws at the calcium based skeletons of the micro life in the oceans, damaging coral reefs, shellfish and organisms at the bottom of the food chain. Washington state shellfish growers have seen major failures in oyster hatcheries because the larvae don’t form shells.

A report this month by the National Research Council, a public policy branch of the National Academies, said such changes in ocean chemistry in the geologic past were accompanied by “mass extinctions of ocean or terrestrial life or both.”

No wonder: those tiny organisms fabricate roughly half of the oxygen of the atmosphere.
***

TIPPING POINTS:
The clear and present key question is when greenhouse gas emissions reach a point where changes become so self-reinforcing, that they get completely out of human control.

Polar sea ice reflects the sun. As it melts, the dark ocean absorbs more solar heat, raising temperatures. Similarly, the Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly, reducing reflectivity and heating the Earth faster, speeding up the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet (much of which will be replaced by very dark ocean, accelerating the warming further).
(Some of these effects can play, against each other, for a while: for example, it snows more on the Himalayas and East Antarctica, a desert; precisely because temperatures are rising, and moisture !)

The northern permafrost is thawing, with the potential to release massive quantities of CO2 and methane, CH4, a ten times more potent greenhouse gas, presently stored in frozen soils. Hundreds of billions of tons of vegetation frozen solid since dozens of thousands of years.

There is no faulty logic here: in the past there were episodes of warmer overall temperatures, due to the solar exposition of Arctic lands to strong sun in July-August. But the CO2 was MUCH lower (see graph above!). During those episodes, plants grew, on the surface, for millennia, above deep permafrost. Then the planet’s orbit changed, and plants froze again. Then the cycle repeated. In some places, the frozen vegetation is dozens of meter deep. And the present colossal greenhouse threatens to melt the whole thing, and the North will literally rot.

These non linear factors guarantee a sudden change, the timing of which is hard to predict.
“We could be at a tipping point where the climate just abruptly warms,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s atmosphere/energy program. When Obama following Cousteau, warns of the children’s future problems, he follows Cousteau, who used to warn about the grandchildren’s fate. Well, all indication are that the catastrophe is already upon us.
***

CHANGES OVER TIME
UC Berkeley’s Barnosky says tipping points could come earlier than anticipated when factoring in population growth and land use. (Cautiously, as a good academic, he does not consider the real catastrophic potential tipping points, just those which are sure to impact.)

More than 40 percent of the Earth’s land surface has been covered by farms and cities. Much of the rest is cut by roads (which can destroy bird species, Hawaiian studies have shown). By 2025, that human footprint could reach 50 percent, a level that on smaller scales has led to ecological crashes, such as a fisheries collapse or an ocean dead zone.

“It’s just sort of simple math: The more people, the more footprint,” Barnosky said. “If we’re still on a fossil fuel economy in 50 years, there is no hope for doing anything about climate change. It will be here in such a dramatic way that we won’t recognize the planet we’re on.”

Not all climate scientists are so factual. Ashley Ballantyne, a bioclimatologist at the University of Montana who studies paleoclimate records, said the climate has always changed, with ice ages, warmings and mass extinctions. At current CO2 concentrations, the Arctic and Greenland are likely to become ice free, as they were 4 million years ago, he said nonchalantly, in his simplicity.

We know very well that the Antarctica ice shield appeared when CO2 went below 440 ppm. We are presently ABOVE 450 PPM in CO2 EQUIVALENT greenhouse gases (at the present rate, in CO2 alone we will reach 440 ppm within ten years). Moreover, it turns out that carbon soot is accelerating the warming further.

This means that the only reason there is ice in Antarctica is ice itself. It Antarctica were covered with forests, as it used to be, the forests would stay. Today. In other words, we are no more in a glaciated climate, we have ice, purely because the fridge is still cold. But the fridge is broken.

Thanks to USA policies, burning coal will be again the main source of energy produced, within 5 years: more soot, more CO2, more arsenic, more mercury. But all what fashionista ecologists can do is go nuclear about Fukushima (total number killed: zero), whereas in the meantime coal has killed millions (nearly all of them indirectly).

“Polar bears are poorly adapted to an ice free Arctic, Ballantyne said, “but it wasn’t bad for boreal trees. They were quite happy.” Right, Ballantyne. Military men should be very happy too, as tremendous wars will flare up all over.

An international political consensus set as a danger zone a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), which is expected in 25 years based on current trends and when atmospheric concentration of CO2 reaches 450 parts per million (by then CO2 equivalent gases should be above 510 ppm).
CO2 is now almost 400 parts per million.

Two degrees Celsius is “an arbitrary number,” said Alan Robock, director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University. “On our current path, we will go zooming way past that.” Namely we will cross two degree Celsisus, while the temperature increase accelerate.

Climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and activist Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, believe the only way to preserve the Holocene climate humans are used to is to cut CO2 concentrations to 350 parts per million, last seen around 1988.

Ballantyne dismissed the 350 goal: “That’s like a 70-year-old alcoholic saying, ‘I’m going quit drinking when I’m 60 years old.’ “
McKibben and Hansen propose a tax on fossil fuels at their source, to be reimbursed to all U.S. residents, as Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent-Vt., plans to propose in a “fee and dividend” scheme modeled on Alaska’s oil royalty rebates to state residents.
***

THEIR NAMES WILL LIVE IN INFAMY, FOR MILLENNIA TO COME:
In November, having won re-election, Obama distinguished himself by signing on a Republican law that outlaws the European Carbon Tax on planes landing in Europe. Little does he visualize that this sort of biosphere-hating decision is sure to make the planet into a sort of hell. which sort exactly, we don’t know.

White House press secretary Jay Carney, asked Wednesday about the Sanders bill, said: “We have not proposed and have no intention of proposing a carbon tax.”
In other words, we are monsters, and we have no intention to not be monsters anymore.

The Carbon Tax would have to be a big tax, McKibben said, “that drives up the price quickly. Maybe you go to the pump someday and YOU’RE PAYING WHAT PEOPLE IN EUROPE PAY FOR GASOLINE, WHICH IS GOOD, because then it reminds you every time you go to the pump that you don’t really need a semi-military vehicle to go to the grocery store.”

Stanford’s Jacobson maintains that wind and solar could power the world many times over. He calculated that the world would need to install 1.7 billion solar rooftops and 4 million wind turbines.

A little detail that Jacobson overlooks, though, is that the only way to store that energy efficiently, barring spectacular progress in, say, fuel cells, is by BUILDING DAMS all over.

However, it can be done. There is a project in Belgium to build a multibillion dollar island-dam next to an offshore wind farm.

Jane Long, chair of the California Council on Science and Technology, said any such conversion would be costly and difficult at best. Still, she said, “one way to get out of the hole is to stop digging.”
***

WHEN LED BY PLUTOCRATS, HELL IS HOME:
Plutocracy is a world disease. It learned to make itself invisible in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mussolini, and then Hitler, claimed to be socialists, when, in truth, they were just in the service of their plutocratic masters.

Some will say that’s the past. But not at all. It’s worse than ever. Just better hidden. Berlusconi, a multi-billionaire, serial Prime Minister running for re-election, again, just claimed Mussolini was “good“, and Mussolini “just allied himself with Hitler because he thought it was the winning side“. Plutocracy is all about winning. Never mind the consequences, never mind that it is infantile. Never mind that Mussolini killed 6,000 Italian Jews to death (among many other problems, such as 455,000 Italians killed).

The new Chinese plutocrat in chief, a billionaire president, is putting pressure on Honk Kong supposedly free media to not inquire about plutocracy. Being led by plutocrats has known consequences.

Speaking of inquiries, on 10 June 1944, SS assassinated 642 civilians at Oradour, France, including 247 children burned alive. German prosecutors are visiting the site for the first time, as they study possible prosecution in 2013. Hey, I guess, better late than never. The judgment of history will be terrible. Always is.

That brings us back to the greatest crime ever. Murder of the biosphere. Obama and company cannot say that they did not know. They were told.

Now they can go with their little games of actors, self important toddlers with the wisdom of crabs. All about the pincers. History will judge them, and, before crushing their memories, will make them live in infamy.

If our great biosphere destroying leaders want to start to redeem themselves, two words: CARBON TAX. Very simple.
***
Patrice Ayme

ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

AWE FOR INDUSTRY
INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINES & MEASURES INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS

Some pontificate that we are experiencing the “third industrial revolution”.

This erroneous naivety, rich in lessons, beholds a lack of measure, and a lack of history. As I explain why, I will introduce the INDUSTRIAL INDEX, which rests on the concept of energy and AWE, ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY, which rests on humanly effective energy usage.

Together both energy related concepts allow to found rigorously the notions such as industry, progress, even revolution, and the dismal science, economy.

Athena Parthenos: lots of energy to build, metal therein.

Economy has been dismal, because it had no scientific foundation. Energy gives that foundation to economics. While generalizing… physics.

Verily, there have been many “industrial revolutions” before. Scholars of antiquity call them “ages”, instead of “revolutions”. A tradition.

Going from the Bronze Age to the age of (carbon reinforced) iron (steel) was a change of “age”. (Trojan War Greece fell to the iron equipped Dorians, launching the Greek Dark Ages.) To make bronze, one had to bring together copper and tin, sometimes from very far away. To make iron, one had to reach temperatures higher than any naturally occuring fire. Those new metals were all about new, and more intense, energy management.

One needs to define “industry” and one needs to define a measure for “revolution”. I will do both. Defining industry depends upon a measure of industry, and this is the same measure that defines revolution. So I will do the measure first. (See note on measure.)
***

INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINED:
A woman, with her bare hands, can do only that much. But if she drives a bus, she can do much more. Much more what? Much more work, in the exact physical sense of “work”. In physics, work is force time the distance along which said force acts. It’s equivalent to energy. (See work note)

An obvious question is how would industry be defined? Very simple: by work. A human, au naturel, can do only that much work. Industry does much more.

The concept of industry comes, through the French from the Latin “industria” “diligence, activity, zeal” itself from the old Indo-European roots “in”, or “indu” and struere (building, giving structure).

A measure of industry is how much work a human can do, or does, or depends upon,
or commands, in the average. To evaluate the industrial measure of a society, one sums up energy potential or realized, over the entire society.

To get an index, divide that generalized energy by the total population.

This is intuitively satisfying: the index equates the increased mastery of energy with increased industry. As energy is the most important notion in modern physics, this new economic theory fits smoothly with modern physics.

We need a name. I will use II, for Industrial Index.

How to measure the II varies according to societies. A herdsman will a flock of sheep brought in more calorie than his colleague running after wild mountain goats. In this case the relevant II springs from the difference of how much calories is produced (including by milking the goats) versus how much is expended (including training dogs, building fences, or making arrow heads…)

The Neolithic revolutions of herding and agriculture brought tremendous jumps in II. The first dams were built apparently in present day Yemen, then solidly connected to the rest of Middle Earth by a wetter climate, and Jawa in Jordan, 3000 BCE. By irrigating vast lands, a dam does automatically what would be a lot of work for people carrying the water by hand, so it brings lots of energy (jump in II), and in the service of mankind (thus an equal jump in II(AWE) see below).

An industrial revolution occurs when II jumps. II will jump when significantly more powerful science or technology is introduced or deployed (for example the science of breeding less dangerous almond trees or boars). It took 2,000 years to deploy the technology of the steam engine, from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to the Frenchman Papin (who made a steam powered boat, outright!).

The size of revolutions can be compared across the ages, using the ratio: II(before revolution)/II (after revolution).

For example the steam engine allowed to jump from the maximal power of a dozen horses to ten times that, an II jump of ten. Advanced coal based steam power plants reached at most 100,000 horsepower (around 100 megawatts). A nuclear fission U235 reactor ten times that. So going from fossil fuel to nuclear represented another II jump of ten. (But that jump has mostly failed because the military based nuclear technology partly deployed was found to be insuffiencently safe enough.)
***

ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINED:
An objection could be that this first order definition of II does not take into account, waste. However neither does GDP. GDP is notorious to augment with waste, so some countries have higher GDPs, just because they are tremendously more wasteful (what the Swiss and the French do does not differ much from what Canadians, or Americans do, under the same latitude; however Canadians and Americans need three times more CO2 to do it, a tremendous waste).

I have an answer to the problem of waste too. To remedy this, a notion, AWE, Absolute Worth Energy, does NOT consider the energy spent, but only the energy of the effect one is looking for by the activity that this energy deplyment intents to serve.

This II(AWE) is computed otherwise just as the II. A measure of the efficiency of a civilization is the quotient:
II(AWE)/II.

Examples: a traffic jam has zero AWE, but a Light Emitting Diode has an AWE close to 100% (as close to 100% of the LED output is used… as long as there is someone to enjoy the light of its energy output).
When a plane’s flight’s AWE is the energy of transporting people and goods, on that flight, NOT the energy spent to transport them (pretty much equal to fossil fuel spent + cost of training, flying, repairing, etc.)
It becomes a bit delicate when one determines the AWE of a PhD (but it can be done, using modern computers).
***

INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS THROUGHOUT THE LAST 10,000 YEARS:
The Mayan civilization rested upon a tremendous irrigation system with reservoirs and canals. The largest canal, about 100 meter wide and more than 100 kilometers long, can be seen from space. So there was such a thing as Mayan industry. However, the American civilizations were violently destroyed, and contributed even less than East Eurasian civilizations to the present One world Civilization (the east’s greatest contribution, besides its very existence, may have been Chinese black powder).

Ultimately, civilization has been mostly the work of the Middle Earth. It makes civilization pretty much in one locale. The successive revolutions that articulated the civilizational mainstream all happened there, knew about each other, and are thus easy to compare.

The first industrial revolution was the invention of cities, the second one that of herding (or the other way around), the third one was intensive agriculture of engineered crops, the fourth revolution was writing (6,000 years ago). The fifth the political system (Sumer, 5,500 years ago), arriving simultaneously with copper-tin alloys, that is bronze. As tin and copper were often not found in the same place, they had to be transported by massive shipping (Crete, 4,000 years ago). Shipping was crucial for Western Eurasia, which, by the time of Carthage, enjoyed a trade system, shipping enabled, extending from the British isles to India, and even Black Africa; for example tin was shipped from Britain, and salted fish, from Black Africa).

There is no doubt that Rome had industry. The first Roman fleet, 200 warships copied from Carthage, was constructed in a few months, while the crews were trained in the dirt to move oars and obey commands (Carthage promptly sank that first attempt.) Rome had an enormous industry and economy.
But did Rome see an industrial revolution? Well the Industrial Index jumped. Roman dams are still in use today. Yet, the Greco-Roman empire mostly cheated. It split the population in two: the free, and the slaves. The Industrial Index and the II(AWE) applied mostly to the free.
***

ARE THE INDUSTRIAL INDEX AND THE II(AWE) PERTINENT TODAY?
Extremely. There are, or ought to be, two industrial revolutions in full swing, one of intelligence, axed on II(AWE), the other of energy, axed on II. The first is still in infancy, the other, in trouble.

The present Artificial intelligence revolution is blossoming, but, like an infant learning to crawl, it is far from fully capable yet. Its potential to augment II(AWE) is very far from fulfilled. That will happen when all the tasks requiring NON CREATIVE and NON CONSCIOUS intelligence can be done by robots. No more driving; the car will do it for you. No more cooking; the kitchen will serve you what to eat. Etc.

What about the energy revolution? It’s somewhat in regress. Although so called “sustainable” energies are developed, they stay an epiphenomenon, and will stay so, as long as they cannot replace base energy. The USA has decided to go the other way, full blast, burning the planet for its own profit, encouraging China and India to do the same with coal.

The new energy source was, of course, nuclear energy which has energy density greater by a factor of one million. A succession of red herrings have mentally unbalanced civilization about nuclear energy, and this is having the disastrous consequence that the biosphere is in the process of quick irreversible destruction. Nuclear waste fades to nothing dangerous after a while. But not so for the poisoning by coal combustion, which permeates the biosphere with eternal contaminants such as arsenic and mercury. Or CO2, that will stick around for millennia.

The Industrial Index is actually in danger of collapse. How? Because the population is augmenting fast (II is obtained by dividing total energy commanded by the number of people), while the catastrophic consequences of fossil fuels burning have reached a tipping point. So energy production may have to shrink. Better AWE (such as more efficient planes, high speed electric trains, photovoltaic electricity) may compensate for this enough. Or not.
***

SO WHAT TO DO? II AND II(AWE) NEED TO GO UP.
To get out of the deepening depression the world is entering, we need a jump in Industrial Index. Why? For the same reason as imperial Rome needed one: the resources accessible with deployed technology are getting exhausted (the case of Rome, and also our case). Solution: new technology, with a higher II, thus capable with greater energy to reach further resources (say bottom of the ocean nodules or Helium3 on the Moon).

Otherwise we can do like the Romans and wait until we don’t even have the resources to conduct war. By the way, India and China have understood this, and their policies are axed around augmenting the Industrial Index. Whereas, stupidly, in the West some have claimed we have reached the “post-industrial age”. Apparently that means that the factories are in China.

We are also experiencing a problem that Rome did not have, namely the collapse of the biosphere.

A greater II means a greater massive energy source. There is one, and only one. It’s energy intensity is a million times greater than fossil fuels.
So start a crash program to make high temperatures (hence high efficiency) thorium reactors (the radioactive waste of that energy type is neglectable). They would give massive amounts of clean base energy.
India and China have them, but the West has more capital and expertise at the ready. Maybe Japan can show the way? (Japan needs energy but not 1950 tech Uranium 235/Plutonium plants, which are too polluting and dangerous.)

By all means, pursue sustainable energy. But, as it is, for a huge variety of reasons, it stays a sideshow, or an invitation to disaster: watch Germany go coal crazy.
***

THE USA THINKS IT’S CRAZY LIKE A FOX, TO OPT FOR CATASTROPHE, JUST AS IN 1939:
Already in 2008, and before, I explained that “Energy Is the Foundation Of Economy”, and I introduced AWE.

That the USA has chosen a catastrophic energy policy goes according to American historical know-how. War has been good to the American Anglo-Saxon colony. Four centuries of war have brought unending success. The bigger the war, the bigger the success.

India, China, Japan, Europe and even Iran know differently. They know that there are wars that bring extermination rather than satisfaction. The Mongols hesitated to destroy China, and replace it by a steppe (Genghis Khan’s generals had the souls of geoengineers!). Just like Sparta saved Athens at the last moment, so did Genghis with Northern China. Iran and Iraq were not that lucky.

The present leadership of USA believes it will always be lucky, and war is a friend, so the more CO2, mercury, arsenic, coal, oil, gas, and rising, acid, lifeless seas, the better. Well, the Greco-Romans went down that road before. All the way down. In the end, they licked obsequiously the toes of the Franks for the next 15 centuries. That was not so bad, but this time is different; the planet is at stake.

If the USA were truly wise, it would opt to increase the Industrial Index instead of military know-how. The former implies the latter, but not conversely.

This is so true that even the U.S. Navy got it, and tried to conduct war exercises in 2012, using algae fuel. That fuel augments the II, because it produces energy from sun and air. It also sucks the CO2 out of said air (so plants making algae fuel could be fossil fuel plants’ best friend! algae fuel is basically the only method of Carbon Capture that could work significantly). The U.S. Congress, more controlled by plutocracy than the U.S. Navy is, was furious, and tried to block the Navy’s efforts. Funny how everything connects.

The military has long been partial to a higher Industrial Index. The first ‘automobiles’, in the Eighteenth Century, were commissioned by the French military. Earlier than that Middle Ages gunners found that Aristotelitian ballistics were false (physicists abstracted that generations later).

Even earlier Constantinople was saved “Gregian Fire” a long range flame throwing system based on fossil fuels. Gregian Fire allowed the Greco-Romans to beat back Muslim fleets for three centuries, sometimes burning up to 2,000 ships in one battle below Constantinople’s fortifications.
Meanwhile in France three full scale Muslim Arab, Berber and Syrian invasions were beaten back in 30 years, because the Franks succeeded to establish a slight industrial edge, using a number of techniques, from better steel to gigantic war horses, to a nationalization of the Church (to pay for the largest and better trained army since the heydays of Rome).

Plutocracy does not like revolutions, industrial, economic or political: they are all related, all having to do with ideas. All what the plutocrats want is to rule. And the way for them to do that, 2,000 years ago, or now, is by paying no taxes. That the world needs an industrial revolution and a paradigm breaking jump in II(AWE) is of no use to them, just the opposite. What’s good for the world, is not good to those who find their call in other people’s misery.

Ultimately, the industrious disposition of a society depends upon the psychology of its leadership. In a real democracy, that should be that of the People, but “representative” “democracy” often represents the People in name only. And industry is not the call of plutocracy, quite the opposite.

Carnegie himself, the USA’s first billionaire, pointed that out, and advocated, in writing, 50% tax on the rich’s income. Carnegie said that it was so that the rich pay back the society that allowed them to become rich in the first place. Carnegie also advocated confiscatory taxes on inheriting wealth, because, he said, the children of the hyper rich, per their psychological upbringing, are adverse to industry.

So why can’t “democrats” in the USA at least preach the way Carnegie did? Because they are “democrats” in name only?

***
Patrice Ayme
***
Work Note: apparently more sophisticated definitions just integrate work, as defined as above exactly, but infinitesimally, along paths.

Measure Note: I am using the word measure in the mathematical analysis sense. So I have equipped civilization, progress, industry and even technology with two measures: II and the more sophisticated II(AWE).
(I chose Industrial Index II, and not Industrial Coefficient to avoid a confusion with IC, Integrated Circuits, a good example of jumping II; besides, II is indeed an index, not a coefficient.)

Hurricane Vetoes Sandbagged USA

Quantum Style Causation Resplendiscent.

The USA is being sandbagged by its billionaires, in particular its fossil fuel energy billionaires [Like those heirs known as the Koch brothers; See Note]. “Sandy” is the second hurricane to strike the North East USA in a year (after Irene last year). And it is the first hurricane to mix with a North-Easter:

Do Whatever To The Planet, The Planet Will Do Whatever To You

Sandy, a crossfire hurricane!

The USA’s sabotage of the Kyoto Protocol, the USA’s fossil fuel policy, and its encouragement of CO2 pollution by proxy in China are amounting to a deliberate disruption of the biosphere. A refined analysis (not done in this essay) shows that the USA has a Machiavellian interest to proceed that way (as does, say, Russia, or Canada). So it does make sense. Satanic sense. Plutocratic sense.

A hurricane is basically a Carnot engine with the warm ocean for its energy reservoir, and the stratosphere as its cold sink.

A strip of ocean 800 kilometers wide, & 3 degrees C (6F) above normal along the USA eastern seaboard was a direct enabler of hurricane Sandy. These days, 20 degree Celsius waters off the eastern seaboard passes for normal, and an already formed hurricane can survive with such temps. Sandy gained strength, though, because the temps were higher than that.

But not to worry: hundreds of millions of citizens of the USA will be told by their wealthy, much admired masters, that one cannot establish a direct causal relationship between the rise of CO2 and other industrial greenhouse gases and the big bad hurricane-northeaster.

Never mind that this rise of warm blanket gases is about 60% since 1750 CE. Indeed we went from 280 ppm of CO2 to 450 ppm of CO2 + CH4 + N20 + an entire zoo of other greenhouse gases, such as CFC-12, ( CFC-12, (CF2Cl2) diChlorodiFluoromethane is more greenhousey, overall, than N20, and is now banned; thanks to a weird low temperature chemistry, it devoured the ozone layer).

And never mind that the world is ruled by impossible-to-determine-with-pin-point-precision causality. Causality where it is the system that causes, and not the one cause, because, ultimately, there are no causes, but for waves. A wave is intrinsically vague (in French, “vague” means “Wave”). The Quantum says processes have no points.

George Lakoff points out in Global Warming Systemically Caused Hurricane Sandy: “Yes, global warming systemically caused Hurricane Sandy — and the Midwest droughts and the fires in Colorado and Texas, as well as other extreme weather disasters around the world. Let’s say it out loud, it was causation, systemic causation.

Systemic causation is familiar.Smoking is a systemic cause of lung cancer. HIV is a systemic cause of AIDS. Working in coal mines is a systemic cause of black lung disease. Driving while drunk is a systemic cause of auto accidents. Sex without contraception is a systemic cause of unwanted pregnancies.

There is a difference between systemic and direct causation.”

One can go further than that. Systemic causation is all over. Quantum Physics itself is systemic. That was its most baffling aspect. Whereas Classical Mechanics used direct causation, Quantum Mechanics did not. Quantum Physics is all about inferring the singular, from the whole.

Nor did the modern statistical mechanics advocated by the Austrian Ludwig Boltzmann. Boltzmann was  immensely successful by average standards (he met with the emperor, and his first lecture in philosophy (!) more than filled up the largest hall at the university of Vienna, standing room only). However, he took badly asinine criticism of Mach and others, and committed suicide in 1906, just after Planck had published that postulating that energy was only sent by packets (“quanta”) provided with a process explaining the observed blackbody radiation, and the non occurrence of the “ultra violet catastrophe“.

Notice that Planck introduced the “Quanta of Light” (Lichtquanta”) as an unknown mechanism. The greatest strides in science are not made by connecting causality what is known to what is known. Great strides come from postulating a meta-phenomenon, something outside of the realm of what is known.The fundamental axiom of the Quantum is that it is processed by the entire system it can access (and partly penetrate, as it’s made of waves).

The fundamental practical axiom of the Quantum is that it is processed by the entire system it can access (and partly penetrate, as it’s made of waves).

Interestingly the greatest minds (including Einstein) had a very hard time to understand this. Even the Copenhagen School (Bohr, Heisenberg, etc.) did not really understand it fully.

If the Quantum itself is systemic, it’s not surprising that nature is systemic.

How is the Quantum systemic? Through the interference of waves. That is the fundamental axiom of Quantum Physics, the De Broglie axiom: any matter is guided by a wave whose frequency is determined by the momentum-energy of said matter (it’s then not too clear what’s matter, and what’s a wave, or a bump in the night, a charming difficulty of particle physics).

Waves can interfere constructively, or destructively, or somewhere in between. So think of systematic causation as such a thing. It makes sense, even in detail.

For example smoking causes cancer after the smoke interferes with inhaling, or not and various waves of diet and genetics and epigenetics, and immunological competency, and what not. So many causal waves give haphazard looking interference patterns. The same thing happens in a hurricane.

Ultimately there are no causes, but for waves interfering: that image applies extremely well to hurricanes. In particular Atlantic hurricanes originate as the spawning of easterly waves.

One thing is sure, though: if Wall Street keeps on going the way it does, it will drown, and not just for 6 hours. As the Rolling Stones have it in “Jumping Jack Flash”"

“Watch it!

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane

And I howled at my ma in the driving rain,

But it’s all right now, in fact, it’s a gas!”

The hurricane generated tide, the storm surge, went 4 meters high. Present USA policy will certainly lead to sea level settling permanently dozens of meters above that.

A two degree Celsius average temperature rise will certainly insure this. Why? Because at the maximum of the last glaciation, 20,000 years ago, the temperature on the Northern Atlantic (center of the problem) was only 5 degrees Celsius less than now. Yes, five Celsius. So two degrees Celsius over the entire planet can make a giant difference: we would go back, quasi instantaneously, to the situation, 4 million years ago. Most species will not resist to the shock, oxygen production itself may be impacted.

Not realizing this has been a giant mistake of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). (Of course the IPCC acted that way, that is, erroneously, because only then could it get support from the governments! Corruption is a many varied thing…)

The seas will rise dramatically very soon, because the system being set in motion is highly non linear, like an avalanche… or a storm surge (which practically can take the exact appearance of a tsunami!) True, before an avalanche, a tsunami, or a storm surge, or an earthquake, nothing much is going on, and the cicadas are busy singing. It would be wiser to learn swimming.

Will awareness be born in a cross-fire hurricane and ma [Wall Street] being howled at in the driving rain? Or will the gas be all right now, in a spasm of collective hypnosis?

Its leaders make no mystery that they want to make the USA again the number one producer of fossil fuels. Cutting off mountains to produce coal to export to the American factories in China, fracking the wilds all over, buying off farmers with dollars, chasing them out with fumes and foul waters. No problem. That’s why Sandy paid a visit: to remind the two plutocrats running for residents of the White House, that they are nothing.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note: sand•bag n. A bag filled with sand and used as ballast, in the formation of protective walls against a flood, or as a weapon.

 v.tr. 1. To put sandbags in or around.

2. To hit with a sandbag.

3. Slang

a. To treat severely or unjustly.

b. To force by crude means; coerce: sandbagged us into cleaning up their mess.

c. To downplay or misrepresent one’s ability in a game or activity in order to deceive (someone).

“Greatest Nation On Earth”? Really?

YES WE CAN, MURDER WHOEVER WE WANT:

What Else? Not Much. 

The Higher The Assassin Climbs, The More It Shows Its Bottom.

***

[Those who spurn critical thinking can take the blue pill offered by Krugman, trying desperately to mumble vaguely positive about who history may abstract as the assassin in chief! Uncritical thinking: what mussels do.]

***

“We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” 

Thus boasted Obama at the democratic convention. If a politician in France proffered such a lie, voters would think he was not just deranged, but nationalistically crazed. What’s true instead? We are much less employed:

Employment Ratio Prime Age Population

If one had an ethical graph, it would crash through the floor. Obama stood on its head 25 centuries of Ius Belli (see below). Assassination without due process is the only category where Obama unquestionably surpassed G. W. Bush (Bush had implemented free drugs for seniors, effective immediately, so, in a sense, Bush beat up Obama at the health care game: Bush really did something major, and positive, while president).

The naive may object that the collapse of employment was not Obama’s making. But the opposite is pretty much true. Obama approved, with the republican presidential candidate, John McCain, in a showy way, the decisions of the Bush administration. Obama even left the main engineer in charge, tax avoiding New York Fed chief Tim Geithner. Geithner is still in place, having presided over a collapse of employment.

Plutocrats, starting in ancient Rome, have always loved unemployment, because it transforms the People into hungry pigeons who eat in their hands, humbly. Nothing makes Pluto happier that this daily humiliation.

Moreover Obama resurrected Larry Summers, and took him as economic guru, starting in August 2008. This is exactly when unemployment rolled over, big time. The obvious causal relationship is that, at the time Summers gave a presentation to Obama about the importance to save the criminals, the banksters, and re-establish their wealth. that, in turn, gave the Bush administration a green light to do just that. So, instead of playing FDR, that means, stimulator to the economy, Obama played stimulator to banks.

A the time Bush was lost, his dreams smouldering, and checked out (and not just out of Iraq). Geithner, Summers, and the Mc Cain advisers were all in agreement to save the banksters, and damn the real economy. So here we are. Worldwide.  

Instead what had to be done, ALL OVER, was what was done to save the car industry. Obama did it, but just for the car industry (I gave explicit recommendations on how to do it in other industries, so it was possible to do so, obviously… Trillions were spent on the banks, for the banks, by the taxpayers, order of Obabush.)

Mr. Summers was the architect of the sustainable crushing of the economy by an unregulated bubble of financial derivatives and activities, under money hungry resident Clinton. It made the economy red hot under Clinton, and after that, it imploded. For this, people are much grateful to Clinton.

People are mesmerized by Clinton, like birds by a mamba. Something about bird brains, that even mambas understand.

Verily, the much despised Greeks work 2,100 hours a year (that’s because Greece is the country with the most family owned businesses). Koreans work 2,200 hours, and USA citizens work “only” 1778 hours. At least 15 nations work more per hour than the USA… In the OECD alone.

These numbers are known by all serious people. So why is Obama seriously lying to the thunderously applauding multitude? Why is the pseudo left multitude applauding those serious lies? So that they can better forget that their great leader is busy reverting 25 centuries of civilization, replacing justice by assassinations, in the best tyrant style?

It is revealing to compare the French and USA presidential elections. Raw nationalism is very strong, all too strong, in the USA. Nationalism is even viewed as a moral duty, in the USA. In France, among other European countries, nationalism is viewed with intense suspicion, so one does NOT go shrill that way, there. In France, nationalism reeks of insufferable bad manners (except in the despised National Front, despised precisely because of its nationalist rhetoric). 

After all, when the Nazi tanks rolled in, the most important mental force in plain view was nationalism. Nationalism is the “Na” in Nazism.

So no wonder nationalism is not hot in Germany anymore, either. And that’s very gut.

Civilization is not made just of things one does, but also of things one does not do anymore. Lying about other countries is a very bad habit to have. Just as it is a rather bad habit not to reveal that the USA attacked the Republic of Afghanistan, with the help of its henchmen in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, more than 35 years ago. Attacking people, killing millions, for no good reasons, has consequences. In the fullness of time.

True, Rome killed and enslaved millions in Gaul; but there were good reasons, said Caesar, although the Senate stridently disagreed. The judgement of history, and of most of the Celts themselves, at the time, and even more afterwards, was that Caesar was right. So killing millions is not necessarily bad. (Anyway, conflicts cascaded in Celto-Germania, and Caesar did not start the war, the Helvetes did.)

Killing more than ten million Germans was the price to get rid of Nazism; there was an excellent reason. In Afghanistan, all the reasons of the USA, to sow religious war there in the 1970s, were terrible, anti-civilizational, and part of the price is the unravelling of the constitution of the American Anglo Republic into an unprincipled Principate.

The official story about how 9/11 came about, is an enormous lie. In truth, the USA attacked civilians on the other side of the Earth, and that was followed by a counter-attack, more than a quarter of a century later, after the primeval action of the USA led to the death of several millions in Afghanistan.

The truth is mean, but it is the truth. And even so called “god” cannot do anything about it.

“We are endowed by our creator… we are the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world has ever known…” We we we we… Is that a mutation of the self satisfied he he  he he of G. W. Bush?

We, we, we, we have a president who is personally acquainted with his “creator“. Was that creator UBS, or Wall Street? Those were the only creators in plain sight, for the objective observers (except for the millions of suckers like me, all the little tini tiny creators who helped decisively Obama come to power, last time, of course. But then he forgot us all, because we were not banksters!).

Speaking of that great other USA president, G. W. Bush, his CIA tortured those it captured for Qaddafi first. Hey, what are friends for? “We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” Indeed, some world records may have been shattered. Torture records and cover-ups records are piling up. For the whole world to contemplate.

Some victims were left dangling from manacles around their wrists and feet for four months straight (interview on French TV from a famous survivor captured in Asia by the CIA). This assuredly demonstrates that USA torturers can get lazy: leaving a guy to hang around for four months does not smack of hard work. Besides those CIA goons are not that smart, because they forgot to kill all those they tortured, so now they speak (at least to non USA media).

People will say: “Oh, that was Bush, that was before”. Right. Things have become much worse, as a policy of systematic assassination by robots is being conducted worldwide, even on USA citizens, even on some of those who are still children. People should meditate this carefully: do they want a world where a so called “commander in chief” selected by some tribe with 4% of mankind go around the world, assassinating people without judicial process?

The Roman Republic leaders, 25 centuries ago, found such a notion atrocious, repulsive, uncivilized. Some of Rome worse terrorist adversaries received a sort of legal process (for example, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Simon bar Giora and John of Giscala; the former three were judged and executed, the latter, condemned to life imprisonment). These events were, in order of people killed, relative to the population then, and the danger they represented to Rome, greater, by orders of magnitude, to relatively puny 9/11. Still the Romans kept their constitutional cool, they applied due process to the criminals.

Formidable adversaries such as Josephus, the top Jewish general in the (treacherous Judea war) in the end was adopted by emperor Vespasian, and inherited his mansion, in Rome.

And the Romans kept their constitution intact, whereas Obama considers he has right of life and death on anybody, worldwide, without a semblance of due process. Definitively a violation of Ius Belli and international law. Say the millennia.

The Romans knew that “Ius Belli“, the Law of War, killing the adversary philosophically, was more important than killing the adversary physically. Obama confuses looking cool as a chap, and cold blooded assassination. Worse: goose stepping behind, cheering and applauding Obama’s exhibitionist love for his family, a circus for little children, USA citizens are carefully arranging their forgetfullness about what the Romans knew, 25 centuries ago. Namely that it matters when one goes and kill people, that everybody understand why, and that the cause be just.

The main axis of France’s foreign policy, since May 8, 1945, has been to re-educate the Germans in the way of peace and love. Franco-German reconciliation has been number one top priority. This was not compatible with nationalism, and that is why France did not seize one square kilometer of German territory after the Nazi defeat.

I turned the TV on, to watch the democratic convention, and here were sexy girls speaking like they knew it all, telling the USA what to think. They were movie actresses, and the crowd just loved them. With a teleprompter, any mental retard who knows how to read can work harder and smarter than anyone else.

Talking about plastic surgery, here was Vice President Jo Biden. All excited, and delivering a pretty good speech. He celebrated, (for want of a better word),  the death of more than 6,000 soldiers, and 50,000 wounded some so very severely, he marvelled with exorbited eyes. The RESOURCE WAR, aka “war against terrorism“, brought a tear eyed evocation. Biden finished on :”God bless you, God bless you!“

God bless you for what? Destroying Afghanistan since 1978, just because “yes, we can“

What struck me, beyond Joe’s predictable rhetoric, was how Biden had suffered from plastic surgery. His eyebrows were angling up, then came down hard on the side. His eyelids were wide open, as if he had been immensely struck by the incongruity of it all, after been hit on the head. What did that creature remind me of? It felt familiar. Yes. Those Batman movies, with the Joker. OK, I am not a specialist of Batman, and I have not really seen the movie, just extracts, so I cannot explore further what Biden has been trying to say by being a real life imitation of the joker incarnated by Jack Nicholson. Is it all a joke? Is that what he wants to say?

Another contrast with France was the so called “First Lady” that introduced “the love of my life“. Nobody of importance in the USA is aware that the “First Man” semantics was invented by Augustus, Rome’s first life long tyrant. But, even Augustus, did not introduce the ridiculous notion of “First Lady“. Who are the Last Ladies?

And why is the First Lady’s sex life so important? Sorry, I meant romantic. Hey, go easy on the steroids, by the way, those shoulders… And why does the resident instrumentalize his daughters? “Malia, Sasha, we are so proud of you… and tomorrow you have to go to school.” Why is that national news? Why does the president’s official business includes telling his daughters he is proud of them? It’s not obvious? He did not think of it before? He needs a teleprompter to communicate with his family? 

And why are taxpayers paying 100 million dollars for this pathetic, clownish circus?

Are USA citizens so deprived of these things they need to see them on TV? I was amused when Michelle made a huge smile off sync while telling the story of someone who could not afford health care. It was meant to express compassion, but the timing and intensity were off. With these little things sincerity, or lack thereof, shines through. Can one work the appearance of a heart harder and smarter than anyone else? A question much of the world has for the USA.

“Michelle…I love you so much” Thus Obama does not just love to coolly assassinate citizens, worldwide. His love is all encompassing. And the other clown who smiles, immensely touched by this apparent revelation, just made to her, watched by hundreds of millions. And they embrace, and embrace… Why don’t they go all the way? Would not that augment the audience? Worldwide exhibitionism. What happens when it turns out that the president was sleeping around with the hordes, as happened so many times in the past, with many other presidents? Maybe all these drugs they are given to perform 24/7, like circus animals who would never, ever, rest in a cage.

For that matter, how come ex-resident Clinton, now filthy rich, is immensely popular while everybody should know, by now, that he planted, with his gardener, Larry Summers, the seeds of the financial disaster? Namely plutocratically engineered derivatives to the horizon, devouring the world economy? Is WE THE PEOPLE dominated by masochism?

So why the exhibitionism? Because when there is enough style, it can displace substance. And when the substance is banksterism as far as the eye can see, it’s best hidden in plain sight.

The best joke was Obama’s content empty discourse. He even forgot to mention “Obamacare” also known as the “Affordable Care Act”. His sycophants used to call that monstrosity his “signature achievement“. And here he was, refusing to sign his achievement again! Tell us it’s not true, Barry-Barack, tell us that you do not just say what the polls tell you to say.

Health care is much improved, just wait for the bill. Apparently Obamacare has become better not talked about. (True the ACA is supposed to increase how much most people are supposed to spend in health care: the act may be affordable, but is it care? The Republicans have noticed that Obama proposed to reduce the funding of Medicare by $750 billion… So naturally they pounced on that, while proposing to transform Medicare into Vouchercare. Democrats are screaming it ain’t fair, as if that were not predictable. Either they are lying, or they really have puny brains)

In truth, Obama and his Pelosi plutocrat carefully wasted time when they had total control with a health care plan that will not work (because it does not have a sustainable mechanism for cost control). They agitated the ACA as the red flag it was, thus distracting the attention of the People away from the banksters (neither jailed nor even prosecuted), and from Quantitative Easing (print money for the banks that caused the crisis), and from allowing banks to use loans as rents for over-valued properties (over-valued by the banks themselves), while they, those Pelosi plutocrats, were keeping the taxes on the hyper rich at rock bottom, more than ever, and closing their eyes on giant loopholes in taxation (such as billionaires borrowing instead of spending).

Did I mention the tripling of troops in Afghanistan? (The Iraq withdrawal was pre-set by Bush the torturer, but that did not prevent Obarack to claim success for it, whereas, in truth, he was kicked out by the Iraqis, after trying to stay.)

The Pelosi plutocrat has long posed as a leftist, while owning Sugar Bowl, among other things. Never mind that Sugar Bowl had plotted with Royal Gorge LLC to destroy a huge amount of wilderness to extent both resorts (now an ad hoc conservation group has saved the wilderness from the claws of Pelosi plutocrat and her kind).

“Hope has been tested“. Obama has switched from being the candidate of hope to the candidate of “hopeful“. So cars will go twice further “in the middle of next decade” (news: they already do, in Europe, and they will anyway, even in the USA, when oil hits $200 a barrel). OK, could have been worse: Obama could have passed a law to improve cars in the middle of next century, and improve health care by selling body parts. Small favors are better than no favors. Four more years of empty promises, and love of my life celebrations. In the Roman Republic the two Consuls were elected for a year, and rotated supreme authority every month. OK, Romans did not have plastic surgery honey babies to tell them what to think.

Obama finally left the stage, after bellowing about the “greatest nation on earth“. A god nut, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, took the stage to deliver a general blessing. May this land of the free never lack those willing to grab guns, and kill others, said the holly man in substance, as he circled several times around the notions pertaining to “men in uniform“.

‘One nation under god, so dear god, bless the USA.’

The old fat man of god was a nice contrast with the young sexy actresses who had warmed up the scene before. Sex and the City of God. Even more weird was the gun fanatic who got shot in the head (with many others) and came to be rolled out as a great hero, whereas all she proves is that, even before being pierced by a bullet, she did not think right.

But 73% of USA citizens attach the greatest importance to shooting other USA citizens. A problem when crazies get crazier: craziness is viewed as heroism (for further reference, see our historical guinea pigs, the Nazis: the deeper they got in their madness, the madder they got).

So what is Obama proposing to do, by the way? Change you can’t believe in! Obama is mostly proposing to do what he did not do when he was in total control, namely rising taxes on the rich, and imposing a minimum tax of 30% on the hyper rich. It’s safe to propose it now, his masters have determined: he is not in control anymore (the Republicans are). So his masters told him: OK, go ahead, tell them what they want to hear, the Dream, the American Dream.

We work harder and smarter than anyone else. Who is that “we” who haunts us? The plutocrats?

Raising taxes on the rich is also insufficient, in any case: it won’t solve the deficit, right now augmenting at one trillion a year, for a grand total of 16 trillion dollars, nearly as much as the 17,6 trillion GDP of the European Union.. . And certainly higher than the 15 trillion dollars USA GDP. (European countries have an Added Value Tax of at least 15%, by law, 17.5% in France and Germany, up to 20% in Great Britain, 23% in Greece. That reduces deficits, but Obama does not know what it is, although I wrote extensively about it, and offered him a book, where it is, black on white.)

Partisans such as Krugman speak only of a USA deficit of around 10 trillion dollars, allowing the USA to look slightly better than France or Germany. How do they do it? How do they cheat? Partisans of USA greatness omit what the USA government borrowed from USA government funds whose spending in the future is mandated by law.

By the way, recent graphs show the USA GDP going up by leaps and bounds, whereas the EU’s stagnates (with Germany not enough to compensate Britain rolling over, lower, while Italy and Spain sink, and France is going nowhere). This looks good, for the USA, but it means nothing. Inefficiencies, waste, jams, and the intrusion of pay services in what ought to be free (like school and care) augment GDP artificially, or, let’s say in ways that cannot be compared!

Obama crowed that he had signed free trade agreements that allowed to sell lots of products stamped “Made in America”. Never mind that “America” is not an official country.

Never mind that the free trade agreements with Panama, Columbia, South Korea, were long stalled, because of the fear for USA jobs, and passed… by the Republican Congress in October 2011. The democratic crowd roared its approval, of the great Obama victory, grabbing his pen to sign on Republican policy, I guess. I am also for free trade… But only if and when everything else been equal. Actually the USA administration (and also Europe) are claiming that China dumps solar panels. Among other things.

Obama forgot to put a carbon tax, so his ‘5 millions‘ renewable energy jobs did not materialize. (By comparison Sweden passed a carbon tax in 1990, to great success for employment and CO2, let alone energy independence.)

Nationalist frenzy, and plutocratization, are hard to reverse. Citizens of the USA view as a self evident truth that they got attacked on 9/11 by a country they had nothing to do with, as they were careful, and still are careful, to NOT learn what really happen. Namely they do not want to read that the USA was engaged in a war of aggression in Afghanistan as early as 1978. (Shortly after three government sponsored Franco-Afghan geological missions under Dr. Laparent, found great mineral wealth. Is the Afghan war just a Franco-american conflict?)     

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, stated in 1998, to the French “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began… after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan… But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise:

Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” [Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 1/15/1998] After Brzezinski’s confession, other US officials who denied US involvement prior to the Soviet invasion, also changed their story. (For instance, Charles Cogan, head of the CIA covert aid program to Afghanistan at this time.)

For a fuller quote and a more comprehensive story see: http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

By the way, it’s really hard to search the web, in the USA, only in the USA, about the Pelosi plutocrat‘s plutocracy, or Carter’s henchmen terrorizing Afghanistan. It’s not just the People Republic of China which manipulates the search engines.

But it works: the professional killer who was leader of the section who killed Bin Laden, although increasingly cynical in all sorts of ways, really believed that the USA was treacherously attacked on 9/11. Attacked, sure. Treacherous? Not so fast. That soldier had no idea that USA henchmen instructed the Islamist Fundamentalists to attack civilian objectives in Afghanistan, and, preferably school for little girls, a full generation earlier. (No, I will not bother to make a search for this from the USA; I would come empty. But, overseas, the documentation is plentiful.) 

Obama also strokes the dream of the unprovoked 9/11 attack.

Whatever happens, plutocracy will soon elect its next USA president. It would be funnier, if it were Biden. With his distorted face, he looks the part. Joker.

Obama has accomplished his role, that of a vaccine against change. You can read through his face his great interrogation: are they, my rich friends, replacing me with one that they would like more? So he mouthed the change-y thing unconvincingly. He took the left for granted, giving it only pittance. All the horrors inaugurated by G W Bush were left in place, more, even more terrible, were added. Worst: the left took Obama for granted Brown skin, lofty rhetoric, what could go wrong?

Fact is, although the assassination program and its death panel is going strong, the economy is going, at best, nowhere (in France, EU, or the USA) once population change is factored out. See the fawning Krugman, September 7, admitting in a burp of honesty, speaking of employment:“A plunge and a stabilization at a depressed level, which has now gone on for almost three years. Everything else is just noise.” (By the way, Krugman is now looking at the employment ratio, which I long advocated as more pertinent than the U numbers.)

Systems of minds are dynamic. As they go on, they become their own initial conditions. Plutocratization is hard to stop. In Rome it got unfettered after Hannibal’s forever wandering cataclysm. The situation got ever worse. 160 years later, the Republic had fallen. Augustus, of course re-established the Republic, formally speaking, so he claimed. With a caveat: he was to be known as the “First Man In Rome.” Princeps. Or as the French, always inclined to abstraction, put it: prince.

Whatever that was, whatever that is, it’s not democracy. Certainly not democracy as the Greeks understood it, and not even democracy as the Romans understood it. An abomination looking for a catastrophe is more like it. In the fullness of time, sometimes the present itself turns into a golden legend, as the floor disappears below a civilization.

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Chanted Obama and his helpers four years ago (me among them). Yes, he could. Asssasinate whoever the death panel Obama instituted at the White House wants. This has been Obama’s presidency greatest breakthrough, its true signature achievement. Not fighting climate change. Not bringing jobs. Not rolling back metastatic kleptocratic finance. No. It’s all the way back to the jungle. Yes We Can! Assassinate. Whoever we want. For whatever they do.

And yet ethics was invented for economics, not just survival. When the god fearing Carter sent his assassins to Afghanistan, he set the groundwork for 9/11… And probably much worse to come (the USA has helped Pakistan’s Islamist regime make thermonuclear weapons, thus enabling a potential thermonuclear 9/11).

Nastiness does not just propagates, it feeds on itself. Not that the plutocrats mind. In hell, all fired up, ready to go, their lord dwell. When plutocracy turns into an avalanche, civilization is swept away.

***

Patrice Ayme

Record Arctic Melt Down

ARCTIC SEA ICE IS PLUNGING BELOW 2007 RECORD LOW

Sea Ice is now the lowest in maybe fifteen thousand years (and possibly 100,000 years). Just the beginning of the nuclearized Jurassic.

Ice August 26 2012 Versus Minimum 1980-2010

Notice that Greenland is sticking out like a sore, frozen thumb. Ready to melt, obviously. When the remaining huge white, reflecting expanses will be replaced by dark, light absorbing surfaces (that’s why they will be dark), the heating of the Arctic will accelerate, and become irreversible.

(I am using the adjective “heating” on purpose; it’s exactly how the average rise of maybe twenty degrees Celsius which is coming for the poles, should be qualified.)

With two to three more weeks left in the melt season, Arctic sea ice is certain to fall well below 4 million square kilometers. The previous minimum was the September 18, 2007 extent of 4.17 million square kilometers. The six lowest ice extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last six years (from 2007 to 2012).

And it’s not just the Arctic. In Antarctica, the temperature of the  giant peninsula down there has augmented by at least three degrees Celsius, and plants have started to grow around scientific stations (feeling culprit, the naïve scientists are trying to remove the grasses by hand). In Greenland, forests have been planted, and harvested, for the first time ever.  

Arctic Sea Ice in 2012 is less than half of the minimum extent of 1980. Everything indicates that, within a few years, ice will be at the lowest extent in three million years.

Another drastic fact: in mid July 2012 all of Greenland’s surface was melting, including at Summit Station (up at 3,216 meters altitude, 10,551 feet). Records from ice cores shows that this happens in the average ONCE every 150 years. Should it happen again next year, many of Greenland’s glaciers would become unhinged.  

Why? Because the water flows down “moulins“, all the way down the ice cap, 3,000 meters down, two miles down (to speak in units the Romans used to have before the planet went metric, except for a few savages in the woods). There the water flows below the ice, in channels (in Antarctica, there are hundreds of lakes, 4,000 meters down, some huge, up to 160 kilometers long, and below the icecap water flows from one lake to the next… rather ominously).

Should there be way too much water, it will have to break out of the channels, and force itself more below the icecap, and lubricate it from below.

Entire glaciers have suddenly slipped in Greenland, as if they were rumbling snakes come alive, generating up to Richter 6 quakes. Ice quakes.

Now what’s next? Well, as there is less sea ice than ever, solar radiation will penetrate the sea, even during Fall 2012, and warm it deep down inside. Even ultra violet light can penetrate sea for dozens of meters. So all this solar radiation, usually bouncing on the sea ice back to space, will dissipate itself deep down in the ocean, warming it up. In depth. The huge caloric capacity of the ocean will guarantee a milder winter, and even thinner ice, comes next Winter, and thus an even faster melt, starting next March.

All the more since solar activity is on the upswing (part of the sun’s eleven years solar cycle, which reached its nadir last year). So we can be sure that, come next July, all of Greenland’s surface will be melting again, including at Summit Station. And the glaciers will come unhinged.

What to do? Beyond getting properly informed about the unfolding disaster?

***

FIRST MOVE TO SAVE THE WORLD. A HEAVY CARBON TAX:

First one has to understand that the exponentially rising greenhouse gas curve is completely amoral. In the deepest sense of what “moral” means. See “Immoral CO2 Curve“. (See note.)  

To curtail the CO2 rise is very simple: just put up a hefty carbon tax. If fossil fuel energy is expensive inside the free market, the free market will adapt, and replace it by sustainable energy. Right now fossil fuels and their users are heavily subsidized. Strike those subsidies.

Sweden introduced a carbon tax in 1990. Not only it did not adversely affect economic growth, but now bio mass is massively used in Sweden, thanks to the tax. Most European countries have inchoating, or partial carbon taxes (even Britain). Even in the USA, the San Francisco Bay Area air quality management passed a (local) carbon tax in 2008. A question of intellect reaching a critical mass around UC Berkeley, UCSF, Stanford, the Silicon Valley.

The USA has done its best to block any worldwide carbon tax. The idea of such a carbon tax would be to tax any product according to how much CO2 was created to produce, transport and distribute it. Such a tax would lower the mercury in fish and the Arctic (which is condensed mercury vapor in colder regions from coal burning, mostly in China).

A worldwide carbon tax would not just lower the CO2 and give a chance to sustainable energies, but also a carbon tax would lower unemployment considerably in developed countries (good are transported using what is, by far, the dirtiest oil, bunk oil, being the cheapest and only giant ship engines can devour it).

So why is a carbon tax not implemented? Mostly through opposition of the USA. Because those who truly rule the USA make USA politicians understand they should not disrupt the entangled miracles that feed them so well.

***

CO2 PERPETRATORS ARE MOSTLY ANGLO-SAXON COLONISTS & THEIR SERFS:

One has next to understand that it is mostly the Anglo-Saxon colonies, which have created a mood of CO2 criminality. Here is the CO2 pollution of the USA: 18 tons per person per year. Here is Australia: 20 tons. And Canada: 16 tons. Canada celebrated its choice of the Dark Side by quitting the Kyoto protocol, the only country to have done such a thing. Why? Because not only Canada is not reducing its CO2 emissions, it’s planning to augment them as much as it can. Federal Canada is hell bent to exploit its tar sands. That means burning twice its tar sands, to extract all the money it can from hell itself (tar is so viscous one needs to heat those sands really hard; oil companies are hush about how exactly they heat up and extract the oil from the sands).

Provinces such as Quebec and British Columbia, with splendid unspoiled nature, and no fossil fuels, have implemented local carbon taxes.

By contrast to the federal behavior of the USA, Canada and Australia: Britain pollutes with 9 tons of CO2 per year, per person. Hint: there are hefty fuel taxes in Europe, including in Britain. The Europeans have been trying much harder, for much longer. Big industrial Germany is at 9.3 tons, Italy at 7 tons, France at 6.3. Switzerland, about twice richer than the USA per head, is at 6 tons of CO2. Japan, another industrial heavy weight is at 8.6 tons of CO2 per year.

So why does the USA block a carbon tax? One has to understand the USA is an imperial plutocracy made of entangled components: the banks, their banksters, and shady financial plotters, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), the fossil fuel lobby, the plutocratic universities. The various components have a vested interest in the CO2 exponential, and even the CO2 catastrophe, and they reign in Washington.

For example some have evaluated the price of gasoline at 14 dollars a gallon, when hidden subsidies are incorporated, such as the cost of the various military programs that allow to control the Middle East (and, indirectly Venezuela, etc.) Of course the MIC has interest that this spending keeps on going. And even countries such as Israel, a sort of land locked USA carrier, receiving, with its Egyptian buddy, billions from the USA, are all entangled in the USA MIC and fuel lobby.

The plutocrats have lined up all the colonist Anglo-Saxon sheep, and taught them to bleat non sense. One can read deep consideration on why it is human nature that the Anglo-Saxons ought to use so much more oil than anybody else. Soon the bleating ones will be singing that the ice is not melting, it’s just going to heavens. Fossil fuel lobbyists even sing in unison that the more CO2, the better, CO2 is life sustaining. They congratulate each other for such strokes of genius, bleating even louder.

***

THE USA HAS GOT WORSE:

A fascinating experience in the USA is to visit a truck parking area where dozens of giant gas guzzling trucks can be parked, all running their engines. For hours, with no one inside (the truckers are partying somewhere else). A curious religion of waste erected as a basic expression of pride and freedom. What I deduce from that sort of scene, when I have recovered from the breathing difficulties that cause my brain to nearly shut down, is that the price of oil is ridiculously too low in the USA.   

In a country such as Switzerland, running a vehicle on idle is against the law. In countries with highly taxed fuel, it’s not an economic proposition. European car makers have even invented “stop-start” engines, which cut off, as soon as the car does not require traction. That saves up to 10% fuel (engines have to be redesigned so that secondary systems such as cooling can run on electric engines, as they traditionally run directly on the combustion engine). One may wonder why it is that the USA poisons the atmosphere twice more, per person, than Britain. Why is Britain so much more reasonable?

The fate of the gasoline tax is indicative of how regressive the USA has become. In constant dollars, that tax used to be much higher in the past, although then, people were driving gas-guzzlers. What seems to have changed is that people used to believe much more in sacrificing much more for the common good. Too long frequenting R. Reagan and G.W. Bush?

And the gasoline tax used to be high, just to pay for roads. Now we have a good reason to bring up the tax: Arctic sea ice is now at its lowest ever. And yet CO2 production in the USA peaked in 2005 (just before the Greater Depression took hold).

***

WHY ARE THE BRITS SO CO2 MORAL, & THE USA  SO CULPRIT?

Britain has learned to fear hubris.

It has to do with Britain suffering terribly in WWI and WWII. The British elite knows that hubris is the source of most flaws that affect civilization, because that is what the Greeks believed. Hitler’s hubris that he could free himself from his American masters’ oil, and invade all places with fossil fuels such as Poland, Romania, the USSR, Iraq, was what set him on a collision course with France, igniting World War Two…

Britain knows hubris well, and knows it can work for quite a while. Britain’s murderous expansion in Ireland and then in North America was driven by the “West Country Men” the plutocrats who ruled England in the Elizabethan age. That spirit of relentless exploitation was leveraged further when tobacco growing in America made them rich and the Dutch took control of England, leveraging the bank of England and the Royal Navy to the hilt, in the hope of subduing their creator (at the time autocratic) France… And that in turn also worked.

All fair and good… Until the “West Country Men” exploitative logic backfired, when Twentieth Century USA plutocrats learned to use it against Europe. England, that, ever since Guillaume Le Conquerant had created it, had been obsessed to prevent the rise of a super power in Europe, found itself the pawn of the one, on the other side of the pond. The one that Britain and France had given birth to.

The British started to feel progressively, same as a lot in Europe, as the new Indians. A change of paradigm was in order, and the French ultraconservative approach, to husband one’s resources, won over. Same in Germany (this also explains why the German birth rate has collapsed). And all over Europe.

Where does the ultraconservative French approach comes from? From the fact that, from government policy through the Middle Ages, by 1600 CE, French peasants were small owners of what they cultivated (the opposite of the situation in England, ruled by enormous land owners). The French peasant-owners were no non sense, they were very close to their sous ( a word denoting money that evolved from the Roman “solidus”). The first thing they did was to curb their birthrate, to protect their resources (as they owned them). When Louis XVI, in an astounding access of hubris, idealism and naivety, spent money, trillions, that he did not have, to make a revolution in America, he lost the support of French peasants..

So doing nothing about CO2 is, first of all, an Anglo-Saxon “West Country Men” led phenomenon. It’s a mental world of ravenous exploitation united by hunting Mr. Assange, Mr. Manning and denying that the ice is melting, while having an open season on Iraqis, Afghans, and singing the praises of global, delirious finance.

Unfortunately the USA-Canada-Australia block has 370 million gas guzzling souls, and their collaborator is called China. All together this axis of fossils produces about two-thirds of the world CO2.

***

PLOTTING AGAINST THE MOTHER OF THE GODS:

For the Greeks, Gaia, Earth, was the mother of all gods (including Zeus-Deus). Great powers have always conspired to further their rule. As the power of human technology has exploded, those conspiracies have reached new heights (the arch example being Auschwitz). Now they involve conspiring against the entire biosphere.

Some will say I am going too far by supposing that letting the CO2 catastrophe run its course is part of a conspiracy. But the facts support this. For years great billionaires of the USA, such as the (fossil fuel) Koch brothers have paid professors in what are supposedly the world’s best universities to come up with obviously false science (like CO2 does not cause warming, and there is no warming, etc.)

Here is an anecdote showing that the plutocrats who leads the USA really view hell as a friend. For years USA taxpayers have given, through their government, hundreds of millions of dollars to the Pakistani theocrats to make nuclear bombs. Very strange but true (and reminiscent of the USA support for Hitler!). An excellent proof, though, that the Washington leaders (whoever they truly are) see great opportunities in future crises, such as a nuclear war in Asia. Let alone some terrorists getting their hands on a nuke (of which Pakistan has more than 100). So that they see great opportunity in the mess the CO2 catastrophe will entail, is a small logical step to make.

In this general mood, a melting Arctic crisis spells an even greater opportunity. And it’s coming, much faster than people expect. When there is no more Arctic sea ice in summer, it’s just a matter of a very short time before there will be no more in winter. Because the ocean will warm up irreversibly (while cold sweet light water on top will shut down the Gulf Stream beyond Iceland).

In the Jurassic not only were there polar dinosaurs in Alaska, but crocodiles in Greenland.  Some will scoff, and say it’s an opportunity: Washington will be among the places to drown. Actually fossil fuel and mining companies are scrambling to exploit the parts of the Arctic freed of ice. However the whole planet’s climate will lurch into the Jurassic. In a few decades.

Most of the Earth’s greenhouse is from water vapor (about two third). As the oceans get warmer, steam content is going up. Some scientists say it’s already 5% up. Steam increasing fast is one of the NON linear effects that is going to make planetary heating exponentiate.

The planet, as it is, function as a giant Carnot engine. The moving parts of the engine are the sea currents and the wind. The expansion and contraction come from heating and cooling sea and air. All this will come to a halt as the cold sinks the poles, disappear. Thus a lot of sustainable energy will disappear.

Excepting man, any exponential phenomenon is an immoral phenomenon.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note: Why is the rising greenhouse gas curve exponentiating? Because the CO2 equivalent gases brings up the temperature, which then brings up the water vapor, at a rate proportional to the temp rise! (Thanks to Paul Handover for chastising me for a careless version of this statement)

WWII Details Worth Examining

MUCH OF UNEXAMINED WWII IS RELEVANT TODAY

[And It is Not An Accident That They Are Carefully Unexamined!]

***

Abstract: World War Two, Nazism, everything, and everybody connected to them make for an unending source of lessons in many realms. Some of these truths are eternal, they were taught by history many times before. Nazism was made possible by not knowing, or deliberately ignoring, or, even, cynically exploiting, many of these lessons, with evil purpose.

Certainly Julius Caesar, happening on the scene in 1936, would have known what to do. He had seen even worse before. But Caesar was at the head of the Populares. He was both a plutocrat, if there ever was one, and somebody who wanted to rise above that condition, for the good of the People, not to say civilization (that’s why he was assassinated by plutocratic senators).

Why were the lessons of history forgotten, and new ones not guessed in time, to prevent World War Two? Well, the reason to forget is still in force nowadays.

The establishment breathes, sleeps, dines, or exchanges business, so close together, that it feels that it is better not to examine all the forces behind Hitler, lest they still feed it today.

To avoid talking about that reason, all those connected to the establishment go around, as if they were deaf, blind, mute, mental retards whining that the catastrophes (“Shoah” in Hebrew) of fascism, holocausts, Nazism, World War Two were incomprehensible.

Those connected to the establishment are (implicitly) paid, by their association with the powers which overlord, to claim that WWII viciousness cannot be understood.

But could it be as simple as… the fractional reserve system? OK, that’s not simple, and very obscure to the commons.

What is the establishment made of? Not just people, but of a whole mental universe. First of all the establishment of ideas and moods that allows the reign of the principle of plutocracy.

Certainly in a political system where public money creation, that is power, is privately controlled, while harnessing the power of the state, (that is what the fractional reserve system we have does), is a plutocracy, in the strictest, most classical sense of the term.

The secret never to be thoroughly examined in WWII is that the most prominent elements of the plutocracy were genitors and allies of the fascist powers (although both sides, plutocrats and fascists, claimed to be enemies, to hide their true nature from the mystified populace). For doing this, they exploited some tricks, and those tricks are still in use nowadays.

As long as that dirty secret stays buried, so does the true nature of plutocracy and how it relates to the present civilization: it’s not just about the rule of money, and money being the only power. Plutocracy is also about believing that hell is the only heaven worth having. 

I present here just a few of WWII unexpected avalanches of causes and connections. [This post is partly an answer to one of the commenters who contributes to this site, Old Geezer Pilot, and it does not have the pretention of being more than a jumble of little known facts.]

***

***

CLEAR & PRESENT ABUSE FROM INCOMPLETE, OR FALSE HISTORY:

Wall Street glued six major German chemical companies to make IG Farben, a giant monopoly. Great profit would come from going around American anti-monopoly laws passed by Teddy Roosevelt. In general, most of the individuals and firms which became prominent in Germany after World War One were entangled with industrialists and financiers of the USA.

This was just an instance of the sort of interference in the German socio-economy that arose from the other side of the Atlantic. There many others.

For example Dr. Schacht (PhD, 1899) was a pawn of Mr. JP Morgan (founder of the bank JP Morgan, and so mighty he personally put an end to a Wall Street crash in 1907). Schacht became Germany’s most important finance official after WWI (although he had been sacked for corruption by his commanding general during the occupation of Belgium). Schacht engineered the German hyper inflation of 1923, as part of a devious campaign to not compensate for the enormous deliberate damage inflicted on France, from the flooding of mines to the dynamiting of the Coucy castle, the largest Middle Age castle, with the highest dungeon ( French volunteers are still rebuilding it, albeit they barely started to make a dent on that field of stones).

The First World War happened on French soil, invaded by the fascist Prussian army, and the destruction occurred there, but Germany somehow contrived to pose as a victim of big bad France, and the concept of repairing what it had broken. This (absurd)  lesson is taken for granted by many an Anglo-Saxon pseudo intellectual, and is an essential part of the anti-French sentiment in the USA. Even Hitler was not that anti-French.

Dr. H. Schacht later engineered, in the 1930s, the coming to power of Adolf Hitler.

Some, who don’t follow the news, will feel I am rehashing history long gone, and not worth studying.

However, in 2012, German opinion makers systematically warned against providing enough money for the European economy, by brandishing the threat of the hyperinflation that Germany experienced in the 1920s, and conflating it with the Great Depression of the 1930s. As Paul Krugman rightfully pointed out, that was mixing two completely different phenomena from two completely different decades.

The only thing in common between the 1920s, the 1930s and the 2010s has been a common lamentable success by the most influential German opinion makers to persuade the German people that black is white, cold is hot, and criminal insanity is the highest expression of wisdom.

***

WHY THE NAZIS HATED FRANCE:

The First World War was a conspiracy from four German generals, dragging two admirals, the Kaiser (depending upon his highly variable mood), and the acolyte of USA president Wilson, House. Although traitors to civilization such as Bertrand Russell wanted Germany to win (something about the Anglo-Saxon race, same as Col. House), the British recovered their inner French, and allowed France to win.

At the battle of the Marne of early September 1914, multiple counterattacks by French army corps between or around German army corps, nearly cut-off the main German armies.

The BEF, British Expeditionary Force, ten divisions, was helpful to the more than 100 French divisions engaged (although the BEF had to whipped into shape, as it had started to flee way south of Paris). However, the BEF was not decisive. The Germans retreated desperately, and the front lines stayed blocked for four years afterwards, until the Second Battle of the Marne (when Germany tried all out, punched in a vacuum, as French intelligence had anticipated the blow, followed by a French artillery propped counterattack, which led Germany’s commander to inform the Kaiser that Germany had lost the war).

Hitler was in the midst of it all. His company got killed by the French. Ultimately he was gazed, by the French and suffered a nervous breakdown. Gas had been a German idea, but the French and British caught up on it. Thus Hitler’s hatred of France. After World War One, Germany was smarting from its defeat at the hands of the French Republic, half in size in population (when not counting the French empire).

Once, after the German defeat, a British general was having tea with the top German general, and the German complained they should not have lost the war, but for little problems like the insurrection in Germany, and the fact the treacherous French army had cut-off the food supply of Germany in the south. Amused, the British general struck an ironical tone:“In other words, you would not have lost the war, if you had not been stabbed in the back!”

Ludendorff ran away with the notion. He was one of the founders of the Nazi party (at the time when the Bavarian police was paying Hitler to… spy on the Nazi party!) Another thing the Nazis ran away with was Keynes’ outrageous paper, “The Economic Consequences Of Peace”, where Keynes argued that having liberated Eastern Europe from the German boot was a horrible thing, tied in with the deeply manipulative and nefarious French mentality, which put liberty above profit.

That Keynes is still admired by pseudo Jewish pseudo liberals such as Paul Krugman means that, even among the brightest, some are finding history too hard and complicated for their taste. (Not that I disagree with Keynes in all ways, far from it; but I find his influence on human events nefarious enough to avoid naming anything positive in his glory.)

In any case, the end result was that German fascism had been defeated, but not crushed. Clemenceau (much reviled by Keynes) declared in 1919:“Mark my words. Within twenty years, the Boches will attack us again.” Clemenceau was entirely right (but for the fact that it was the French republic which attacked that time; “Boches” is a derogative for Germans).

A consequence is that German fascists were obsessed by defeating France. Hitler starts “Mein Kampf” ranting against the French, the real enemy. Then, and only then, pages later, he criticizes the Jews. Observing a man dressed all in black, like a crow, Hitler observes:“I asked myself, is that a Jew? Then I realized that this was the wrong question. The right question was: ‘Is this a German?’”

[I am quoting from memory. Nobody can accuse me not to know the classics!]

***

EVERYBODY HELPED GERMAN RACIAL FASCISM, BUT FOR THE HATED FRENCH:

France was the greatest military power after November 11, 1918. The French Republic to impose her views fully about what to do next. France insured the freedom of Eastern Europe, liberating several nations, but she was unable to insure her own safety in the West, as the USA opposed this in all sorts of ways (even promising to implement the French idea of the SDN, the Societe des Nations, and then sabotaging it later).

The natural frontier of France is exactly what it was under the Roman empire: the Rhine. The other natural limes was the Danube; in between there was a gap; that gap caused plenty of problem to the Roman army, an hemorrhage that lasted four centuries.

Another natural solution was to conquer “All Men” (Allemagne). That is exactly what the Franks under Clovis embarked on after defeating the Goths.

After Germany’s naked aggression in 1914, which killed more than ten million in Europe alone, the positioning of the French army on the Rhine would have been only natural. (After 1947, France would make to Germany an offer it could not resist: unify and salute; the euro is a means to further the unification).     

However, as far as the USA plutocracy was concerned, France and its enormous empire were juicy targets, as they had been in 1914 (when an alliance was proposed by “Colonel” Wilson, special envoy of USA president Wilson, to the Kaiser). And so were all European empires.

Fascist European regimes supported by American plutocrats were going to be the way the European democracies would be destroyed, and USA rule, after 1945, implemented. OK, there may not have been a central gnome committee underground, the way Obama has a death panel. But I do believe that equivalent ideas were broached in parties. After all, that’s what Manhattan is for. (What else?)

German fascists were fully cooperative, with the machinations of USA based plutocrats, because they did not take the USA seriously. After all, when Jews such as the Warburgs cooperated with Hitler, it could only be viewed as hilarious (certainly Texaco and its oil amused Hitler a lot).

France had limited the German army to 100,000 with the Versailles Treaty, and severely limited the size and nature of heavy German weapons, from tanks to submarines, to battleships. So the (fascist) Germans, to turn around the restrictions of the Treaty, secretly collaborated with a number of countries to develop such weapons. Sweden, Portugal, the USSR, Great Britain, and of course the USA, would be major collaborators in this effort.

The French government, in the late 1920s, warned the German Weimar government that, should this stealth rearmament go on, France would intervene severely.    

Amazingly, Churchill warned France that he would unleash the Royal Air Force on France, if France attacked Germany. That was in 1929. It was also a total violation of one century of entente cordiale, implicit or explicit.

This, meticulously ignored fact, puts a lot of matters in a different light:

1) Churchill was not what he built himself up to be, later. It’s not that Churchill was anti-French the way many USA citizens are nowadays. Far from it. Churchill was a francophile, and spoke excellent French, to the point he used it later during governmental functions. But Churchill also admired, and misunderstood, racial German fascism… Until 1939-1940 (a time when he gave bad advice about the Royal Air Force, which PM Chamberlain did not follow, thankfully). Churchill was also half American and had USA envy, and thus did not understand what American plutocracy was up to (he thought he belonged to that pantheon, and it was OK… Until the war told him it was not OK).

2) France failure to attack Nazi Germany before September 1, 1939 came precisely from the fact its main democratic allies, Great Britain and the USA, were deeply pro-fascism (and mainly pro-German fascism). Being anti-French was a convenient excuse, a seduction of greed (there were all these empires to grab). After January 1933, that pro racial fascism mood turned to a strong pro-Nazi sentiment in the UK and the USA. 

The UK was actively pro-Nazi until 1936. Great Britain allied itself with France firmly only in 1939, when the Spanish republic fell to Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The USA was mostly pro-Nazi and anti French until 1940.

Although the French Republic got help through the USA “cash and carry” in 1940, pro-Nazi policies in the USA were still active until August 1942, when Prescott Bush was told to stop managing Hitler’s greatest military corporation; IBM’s Watson, among other USA plutocrats, did not stop, though, to help the Nazis, even then! The attitude of the USA varied according to the different actors, considerably. For example, subordinates of Eisenhower told him that the French armored thrust towards Paris was a “difficult task” and that he should help it, even if the French infuriated him (Ike consented to join the Fourth Infantry division).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, German generals and their tanks were training… in the Soviet Union. This explains why German generals were so confident, in 1941, that they would crush the USSR. (They were clearly six weeks short, at least to conquer Moscow, and that would have cut-off Leningrad too.)

In 1935, a complex treaty was signed between the United Kingdom and Hitler. The Third Reich could violate the Versailles treaty, the Brits agreed, and build much more capital ships than allowed under it. In counterpart, a complex trading system was implemented between the British empire and the Reich.

France was aghast. The German ambassador confided to his American colleague Dodd that he feared assassination. Both used to take strolls together in the Tiergarten (zoo), to avoid the omnipresent microphones and spies…inside their embassies (or even inside Dodd’s family!). Finally Roosevelt had the Nazi skeptic Dodd, a University of Chicago historian, replaced by a man friendlier to Nazis and American plutocrats. 

***

WHY DID HITLER ATTACK RUSSIA?

Because it was his plan all along (as Old Geezer Pilot pointed out in the comments). Hitler had been conditioned by old Germanic lore, and at best, wanted to make slaves from the Slavs.

In the Middle Ages the Teutonic Knights judiciously found out that the Middle East was too hot for comfort, and that it would be smarter to pursue the work of extending the (Roman!) empire through Pagan lands, as Karl Der Grosse (Carlus magnus, Charlemagne) had done, a work actually started by the Franks a full millennium earlier.

Clovis’ dad, Childeric, was a Roman imperator, another little known fact: he was found buried in imperial purple in the 17C; unfortunately a fire in the Louvre museum around 1830  destroyed the Childeric’s ensigns of power; like Caesar, the Franks thought that the way to protect Gallia was by conquering all of Germania.

The Teutonic knights conquered East Prussia before being defeated, centuries later, by a Lithuanian-Polish coalition. Hence the old Prussian hatred against Poland.  

In 1914, the entire German army had been thrown through Belgium, against France. Eight divisions were supposed to hold Eastern Prussia. After a few weeks, a few reinforcements had to be sent. Ultimately, by 1917, the Germans had Russia on its knees, and the Soviets made an humiliating peace treaty which conceded a huge amount of land to Germany. One can, in a way, argue that Lenin was a German imperial agent! (He had been, with all his entourage, transported from Switzerland to Russia, through Germany, during the war.)

In the minds of all too many Germans, and cockroaches such as Hitler, the Russians were easy to defeat, that had been thoroughly established in WWI, and German generals coming back from the USSR confirmed its primitivism.

On the other hand, Hitler and all the Nazis expected defeat at the hands of France, Britain, and the USA, should those democracies unite again. That is why they were much encouraged by the hostility of the British and USA government against the French republic. Even then, the Nazis thought of attacking France no earlier than 1944. That’s how long the Nazis thought they needed to be ready.

Instead France attacked in 1939, and was defeated, momentarily, in 1940. Hitler found himself at war when he was not ready at all, and it quickly showed.

The defeat of France in May-June 1940 caused heavy Nazi losses, and the strategic disaster that Britain joined France in total war. In June 1940, a drafted French army sacrificing itself, allowed the British professional army to evacuate at Dunkirk (more than 300,000 soldiers escaped the encirclement).

Hitler, and Mussolini, depended upon the American plutocrats for oil, and that was as reassuring as being fed by sharks, I must admit. Hitler attacked Poland mostly for the oil (although he was screaming about Dantzig). Unfortunately the pernicious Stalin moved into Poland too, claiming he was helping his buddy Adolf… And grabbed the oil, first.

So what next? Hitler had persuaded the German generals he could be trusted, because Germany would never engage deliberately in a two front war, again. That is what Germany had done in 1914. So Hitler told his generals he would not attack the despised democracies. The Treaty of 1935 with Great Britain gave him a green light to attack to the east, he thought, and the wealthy Von Ribbentrop, with his large expensive apartment in London, assured him that British plutocrats were with him, and against the French Republic. 

Still the top German generals could see Hitler was nuts. In spite of their training as obedient dogs, they conspired to get rid of Hitler. They contacted the British government to ask it to say that, should Hitler pursue his aggressive antics, Britain would join France and declare war. Instead, traitors in the British government informed Hitler that his generals were plotting against him.

In 1939, France cut the Gordian knot, and declared war, and Hitlerland found itself in a war against Britain and France. In 1940, the German Air Force suffered enormous losses during the battles of France and Britain (thousands of planes and pilots). Earlier, the German fleet had been devastated during the Norwegian campaign against Norway, France and Britain (destroyed German capital ships can still be admired in fjords).

So Hitler told his generals that they had no choice. Britain, at this point, could not be defeated. They had to destroy the USSR first, precisely to avoid a two front war.

That was without counting on “Bomber Harris“, and the long range heavy bomber fleet that Britain had been using for more than six months already. Bomber Harris would quickly open a second front.

Hitler would end up, or rather, down, with three million men (only) fighting in Russia, while a full million manned the 88mm guns inside Germany to shoot at British bombers. Also an enormous part of the Luftwaffe was assigned to air defense over Germany. Part of the result was that, by November 1940, the Brits conducted raids on Berlin (following the earlier French example). By December 1941, Hitler would lose air supremacy in the Battle Of Moscow. It was so cold, only Russian planes were flying, and shooting at half frozen German troops in their summer attire.

***

WHY DID THE NAZI INVASION OF RUSSIA FAIL?

Because, by June 23, 1941, fascism had plenty of enemies, and weakened by wounds.

Mussolini attacked Albania, and then Greece. Greece counterattacked magnificently, and was pushing the fascists back into the sea, through Albania. Mussolini high pitch screams to high heavens, like the sexist little girl he was, enticed the Nazis to intervene. They threatened Yugoslavia which was in the way (Yugoslavia was another product from the French liberation of the German slaves known as Slavs, another country that, according to Keynes, the French had created in their malevolence). Encouraged by the allies, the Slavs said no, and the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, which would keep them busy with guerilla until 1945. So did Greece, their next target. Finally the Nazis got most of their paratroops to win, and die, in Crete.

The Nazis were idiots who did not know history. If they had, they would have heard of king Pyrrhus, who after winning yet another victory against the Roman army, concluded that “one more victory like that, and we will be completely defeated“.

The Nazi invasion of Russia happened six weeks late, and with smaller forces than anticipated (because of the enormous casualties in France, up to 200,000 there, added to what was lost in the Yugoslav-Greek-Crete campaign… plus all those shootings in the German sky against British Lancasters).

The gods of war, which had been so much on the Nazi side in the battle of France, were now against it. First, as general Guderian noticed, the Soviets had been learning the Nazi tactics of circling around. So the Nazi losses were heavy.

Record rains in October-November stopped the panzers, in the mud, which froze a few weeks after, in the coldest cold since Napoleon came that way. The panzer generals could see the gold bulbs of the Kremlin. Moscow had been evacuated, and its defense were tenuous. But Stalin had not fled, and the blocking sections of the NKVD, very active.

Yet Japan, ally to the Third Reich, decided to attack the USA, and target Indonesian oil, instead of attacking north, the USSR. Stalin immediately sent his 270,000 Siberian troop army to Moscow. It was expert at the coldest of cold. It counterattacked on skis among frozen Germans, by late December 1941.

***

VICIOUS MOODS ARE ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN:

Why did Germany attack again, twenty years after the entire world allied itself with France, and it had been completely vanquished? Mental inertia had a lot to do with it, plus lack of imagination. Why did it elect Hitler? Well, Hitler squeaked in electorally, he barely made it. But important people such as Schacht were pulling the strings, and the likes of countless racist plutocrats such as Henry Ford doing what it took (Ford had Hitler on payroll, just as the Bavarian police did).

As I said above, there were important manipulations of the public mind by the wealthiest. Moreover a vicious cultural mood had been created in Germany for generations. Nietzsche shouted about it ferociously, book after book. A mood of Deutschland Uber Alles rotted Germany. A mood that involved hubris. Hubris, called hybris by the Greeks, was the most reviled of moods. Moods have lots of inertia inside individuals and (thus) cultures. All the more since vicious moods are generally supported by thick mats of lies.

The hubristic mood of German superiority got wounded in 1914-1918. That angry bear bred with the racist attitude towards the Jews which Nietzsche had excoriated when it dawned. Germanoid madness received a severe blow in 1945. But only the full truth will vaporize it fully. As some declarations during the recent banking crisis showed, some of the infuriating Germanoid moods are still, unbelievably, alive.

The German Vice Chancellor, Roesler, racially a Vietnamese, declared many times in 2012 that Greece ought to be kicked out of the euro. On the face of it, it’s outrageous: a primate from another country, especially if endowed with a big title, does not have any right to declare that another independent country ought to be expelled from its own currency. Roesler wants to show to all that he is really a good German, the old fashion way, spiting Greece and the gifts it brought.

So it is often with politicians who do not truly belong: they want to show they are true patriots, and overdo it. The disaster known as Sarkozy is an example. The Corsican bandit Napoleon another. Even Louis XIV fits the bill (because of the Fronde). Hitler, an Austrian (and a… Jew, according to some other top Nazis). No, I will not say that a half Kenyan could not prosecute a white bankster, lest he not be admired as a true patriot…

The truth is that the average Greek nowadays has about as much to do with the European banking crisis than the average European Jew had to do with the Great Depression.

The rise of Nazism was endowed with a succession of satanic miracles. Many of them were engineered by worldwide plutocrats, others were pure accidents, especially since Nazi behavior was outside of the expected norms (something Hitler played as a violin). But the moods that enabled it were no accident.

The Greater Depression the world is presently facing is, deep down, a worse situation that the 1930s. In the 1930s, great powers were playing an imperial game. The USA, in particular, felt it ought to be the leader, and had the power to impose that. So it did, by letting its plutocrats run wild, and make their own international politics, supported by the Congress. Surely, if the USA had joined France and Great Britain in 1939, there would have been no Auschwitz. If nothing else, German generals would have implemented a coup, or even a strike against the Nazis. Instead the Ethyl Corporation of America sent lead tetraethyl in enough quantity (hundreds of tons) to keep Hitler’s Air Force flying, while France and Poland had more than 100 divisions engaged in combat. That was extremely high treason, not just of democracy, but civilization itself.

The Poles fought desperately, because they wanted to live. The Nazis wanted to kill them all, it was not just about killing the Jews. Not yet.  

There will be no justice about what happened with Nazism, as long as a full light is not brought to bear on these events, plus the cover-up ever since about who and what supported Nazism, and the impact they both had on the continuation of the plutocratic mood, we and the biosphere, are enjoying today.

The situation is worse nowadays, greatly because those nefarious mysteries of the past were not explored, but allowed to fester. A mood of unexamined civilization was allowed to thrive. If too many feel that it may not be worth living, much may happen all too soon.

***

Patrice Ayme

IMMORAL CO2 Curve

CO2: A NON LINEAR PATHOGENIC IMMORALITY: CRUSH THE INFAMY!

The Other Side Of God.

Abstract: Both the financial plutocracy and the biosphere catastrophe from CO2 poisoning are self feeding exponential phenomena (as Nazism was). CO2 poisoning is with no historical precedent since there were dinosaurs, and they died.

Any exponential phenomena affecting humanity is, by definition, immoral (I explain why, and what it means). The CO2 curve is not just immoral but also pathological. Only extreme force can be called upon crushing such spiralling towards destruction. In such cases,  violence, the usage of extreme force, has to rise to the ultimate occasion. That is moral. Appeasement is immoral.

***

Introduction: Most of the worst civilization destroying calamities are self feeding, vicious spirals down the abyss. Rarely, the disaster is purely launched by nature.

This happened with Crete, which was devastated by the eruption of Thera (Santorini) volcano. The generated huge tsunamis, formidable ash fall, and devastation of the economy of the Orient. Crete did not recover. A more subtle case was Sumerian civilization, even earlier, destroyed by man-made salination and, supernatural flooding. The latter, I would venture to suggest, may have been caused by ecological man-made devastation, upstream.

Famous examples of man induced calamities are tied to the plutocratic phenomenon as happened in Rome and for the Mayas (the Yucatan drought was probably human engineered, and massive wars failed to improve the situation, until the population crashed, and stayed crashed, just as happened with the collapse of Rome, but even worse). “Pluto” is pretty much synonymous to “Dark Side” and “evil”. In all cases the inclination to view elimination as the ultimate solution.

In my view of meta morality, the Dark Side pretty much arose as the ultimate safety mechanism, the one that sacrifices Homo to save Gaia.

Voltaire recommended to “crush infamy“: he was talking about crushing the most outrageous aspects of plutocracy (the doubled headed hydra of the aristocracy and the theocracy). He was certainly not talking about crushing nascent international finance (because the roue’ Arouet was an extremely rich, not to say dishonest, international financial speculator himself).

Now the many headed calamity hydra is clearly graced with a globalized financial front (with a picturesque touch, we just learned that Bank of America was used massively by Mexican drug cartels for laundering), but also, worst of all, it sports the greatest disaster in dozens of millions of years: a man made CO2 rampage. We must speak more harshly than Voltaire to save civilization and its supporting biosphere (that’s why I call on the powers of the son of his friend Sade: only Pluto can fight Pluto). 

***

***

A TALE OF TWO MORALITIES: Reality Versus Superstition (Plutocracy):

Dostoyevsky has one of his characters proclaims that:“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

Now, of course, God cannot be defined, so it does not exist, thus everything is permitted to the members of the plutocracy. This is, so to speak, the other side of god, the one rarely talked about (although obsessing about this is one of Nietzsche’s fortés).

The other side of God was the huge reality of the Middle Ages. The top members of the plutocracy at the time believed fervently in God, especially when it was highly convenient to them. Otherwise, they made fun of god, sometimes in the cruelest manner, as when they went to the Middle East, supposedly to free the house of Christ, while eating and roasting the local children (when it was expedient to do so).

Faced with thousands of prisoners, only some of them heretics, the following declaration was attributed to the Pope’s legate: “Cædite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius:”  (“Tuez les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens!”, “Kill them all, Dominator will recognize who is his own.” The same concept, and word, dominate, was used for emperor, and god…)

Although the attribution is dubious in that particular case, it symbolizes well the mentality of the Middle Age plutocracy while it reigned. Amaury, the legate, had trespassed the Pope’s instructions by invading the giant, republican minded Toulouse County (this hints that Amaury was conspiring with the secular plutocrats in Paris, led by the king there, and the heresy was just a pretext, so what they were after was truly finding cause to kill as many citizens of the county as possible: no plutocrats love a republic, when they can kill it.)

Augustine famously said that there were two cities, one built by greed (civilization), the other by love (for god, the elusive notion nobody sane can define). Instead what Augustine made possible was a tale of two moralities. That of the slave (Christianism), and that of the masters. This is what Nietzsche found while analyzing scripture, and what the historical record makes plain. I would add it made possible a tale of two mentalities: those who care about reality, and those who hate it. Unsurprisingly, at least in the USA, those who love CO2, love Augustine, that is, fundamentalist Christianity, and hate reality. The reality being that, with what they want not to do, Florida will soon be underwater.

***

WHEN CIVILIZATION EXISTS, FEW THINGS ARE PERMITTED:

Sartre said that all of French existentialism held in ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted.’ That of course makes existentialism into a big nothing, because only Nazis and the like believed in such a thing, that “everything is permitted“. It is precisely because Nazis felt thus, that everything was permitted, that they did what they did.

As Nietzsche had guessed, nihilism was a rising scourge. So, the same mood that infected the Nazis, that everything was permitted extended much further, including in places which opposed the Nazis. Nowadays, many of the Internet stupid out there have erected as a nihilistic moral principle, at the grass root level of their subjection, that one has lost the argument, each time one mentions Hitler and company.

In other words, every time one rises an objection to “everything is permitted”, their minds leave the room, and, moreover, they insult you.

In any case, if “everything is permitted” is the definition of French existentialism, one arrives to the apparently paradoxical conclusion that the Nazis were actually French existentialists… It’s paradoxical until one realizes that many of the French existentialists were partial to Nazi like theories… Before, during, and well after the occupation of France by the Nazis.

Some of these Nazi fellow travellers, such as Beauvoir, deliberately collaborated with the Nazis! Sartre proved that aplenty later, with his hysterical support for various Nazi like movements (“of liberation“, instead of deliberation), all the way to Mao’s senile “Cultural Revolution”.

But maybe all what Sartre meant was that everything was permitted to Sartre…

Contrarily to what Sartre and company affected to believe, ever since there are civilizations, there has been interdictions springing out of morality.

An army is crucial for establishing a civilization, as is a treasury and a government (learn Europa, learn…). But morality holds all of it together. “Civilization is repression.” As Freud more or less said, in his Civilization and Its Discontents.

More generally civilization provides the context that individual human logics need to operate. In other words, civilization, all civilizations, determine what minds are going to be, and decree that, out of this arena, immorality reigns.

This fundamental precondition, a common experience, in that case, of (fascist) disaster, all of Europe (more or less) shares. That is why it was part of a healthy debate for the Greeks to remind the Germans what the old reigning German mentality, circa 1941 did to them, and that one should take a wide berth from a repeat performance.

And that is why there is good hope for Europe, and, why, paradoxically, any hard times presently encountered ought to forge some more, with fire and beating, of that common hard steel of moral resolve which forges the hardest, and hardiest civilization.

***

CO2 DENIERS ARE DELIBERATELY TEACHING INSANITY:

The Nazis’ teachings were deliberately insane, they thought that was very smart. They despised those who could not be as insane as them, such as democracies (the fly in the ointment was that the French republic was much crazier than the Nazis had anticipated, and went right ahead to make war to the Great 1,000 years Reich).

The theory behind this was explained thoroughly by Hitler. Stalin made similar declarations.

The general idea was: “Nobody is as crazy as us, so we will win” and… Stalin was right, as its Soviet organization proved even more ready to kill anybody in the way than the Nazis themselves…. Nazis never had “blocking sections“, killing any soldier seen retreating. The Nazis found that method inhuman, and were unwilling to apply it to their Alte Kameraden!

In 2003, as the USA invaded Iraq, clever conservative commentators argued that none of the reasons for invading Iraq made much sense, but for one, that was in no way official. That was that, if the USA invaded Iraq, other countries would believe the USA was crazy, drunk on its power, thus dangerously unpredictable, hence to be left alone, and treated with the respect extended to an unpredictable predator, such as a grizzly bear.

The same ones are now supporting the CO2 built up in the atmosphere. One can see their crafty reasoning from here: climate catastrophe will bring a world war, so we will win the big enchilada (again). As happened in 1945, when the American plutocratic support for the fascists (mostly pre-1942) was determinant to destroy the supremacy of European democracies and other (not so democratic) states.

That strategy of insanity is, of course, nothing new: besides Hitler and Stalin, many brutes, throughout the ages, have argued just the same. If we act really crazy, people will make way.

***

WHEN THE HELVETES WENT DELIBERATELY CRAZY:

A famous example: when the Swiss, the 380,000 Helvetii, a race of Celts, surrounded as they were, by mountains, decided that they would prefer to control a greater territory than Switzerland, they marched West, something they had long planned. They had defeated the Romans two generations earlier, they were unafraid.

So that everybody would understand that the Helvetii meant business, they destroyed all their grain, but for what they could carry, and burned all their cities, villages and houses. There was no going back. That was crazy. That craziness was the point, entirely. Caesar, who knew how to think, was impressed enough to do what it took to stop them. (After Caesar killed all of them but for 110,000, mostly in one tremendous battle, the imperator forced the survivors to rebuild their nation, lest the Germans invade Helvetia, and he obliged the Allobroges to the south to feed the dishevelled tribe.) 

***

EXPECTING REASON FROM BRUTES IS UNCIVILIZED: 

Thus, how can one argue intelligently and politely with Nazis, and the like, when they are often using insanity as a tool, or weapon? This is the question exquisitely civilized people had in 1930s. Following the letter, but not the practice, of great Christian monarchs (the archetypes being Constantine, Justinian, Charlemagne) they embraced a sort of policy of “turning the other cheek, until brutes are ashamed, or their hands tired”. Those naive critters felt they would solve, if not dissolve, the brutes, by being ever more refined. Hence the strategy of “appeasement”. (To call off appeasement, the French republic overwhelmed her distaste, and pushed for a military alliance with the Polish colonels, dragging Britain in the small letters of the appendix; Hitler reacted by making official his long military alliance with Stalin, in the hope of scaring away the French… But France declared war nevertheless, to Hitler, Stalin, and their American plutocrats in attendance… and their snivelling allies in the U.S. congress.)

When facing real brutes, and humoring them, one may as well go to a swamp and read Homer to hungry crocodiles. Ultimately, the only civilized way to handle crocs or crooks basking in the greatest physical violence is according to what they are the most competent at: brute force. It is actually immoral for moral people to expect angry crocodiles to behave. Being moral does not mean to just turn the other cheek, but to know how to draw a line.

Some will notice that my drift tends to justify Obama’s execution policy. Sort of. What I contest with the execution policy is the details of how it is carried out (in particular targeting for death innocent families is not acceptable to me, although carpet bombing was in WWII. Why? Because Obama has other means at his disposal, patience being one of them; that was not available in WWII; in the present case, legal precedent is more important than just winning on the ground, because the battle is all in the minds now (forgetting 9/11), and has already been won on the ground).

***

WHEN CROCS & CROOKS LIVE FROM OTHERS’ DEATHS:

Which brings us to those who deny the immorality of the steep CO2 curve. CO2 and associated, even worse, man-made industrial gases, cannot be denied. However, some still deny them, called them insignificant, or even life giving. Those self fascinated crooks are denying the significance of the steep rise in these atmospheric poisons. They are having martinis, and the good life (because they get paid for broadcasting their absurdities) while the biosphere tumbles towards catastrophe.

The phenomenon is exactly the same as with the crooked financiers. They get paid for their criminal absurdities, and the more absurd, the more criminal, the more money they get, a form of compensation for being immoral fools for all to see. Only brute force, jailing them, will solve the …. exponentiating problem they are creating. If one does nothing, just as with Hitler, the situation becomes quickly worse, and for the same reason: it’s self feeding.

***

CO2 & GREED ARE EXPONENTIAL:

Both financial destruction of the economy and greenhouse heating of the planet are self feeding mechanisms. The evil blooming of the financial plutocracy and of the biosphere catastrophe are two illustrations of the exponential. Below the incapacity to do anything about both, lays a deep ignorance of the mathematical nature of that most important piece of mathematics, the exponential.

As Martin Lack, from “Lack Of Environment“ points out: “Hi Patrice. You talk of the “immorality of the steep CO2 curve”, which reminds me of a point… If people look at the graph of atmospheric CO2 (with its annual peaks and troughs reflecting variations in photosynthesis by plants) they may notice that the long term-trend is not linear – it is accelerating slowly. However, what many fail to appreciate is that, if you look at the data in the context of CO2 levels over the last few hundred years, we are now in the near vertical part of a J-curve. As someone once said, the main reason Hockey Stick graphs seem to appear whenever you look at climate-related data is because they are there; and we are causing them:
See page 6 of the Introduction to David Mackay’s book Sustainable Energy – Without Hot Air.”

One would expect the CO2 curve to be non linear, because heating the planet is highly non linear. When there is such a thing as no more snow in August, the ground starts to warm up, the CO2 and methane in the permafrost bubble up, the dark ocean absorbs more heat, the tropical ocean makes more haze, steam (itself a most efficient greenhouse gas)… then there is no going back, and the climate will yo-yo, as happened many times in the past. Simply, this time, if we do not do something dramatic, we know that the yo-yo will beat anything viewed in at least 20 million years. And that means the yo-yo will break: no more glaciers. At all. (Smarty pants will point out that we will be able to put a planetary sized sunshade in orbit, someday. Maybe, but not before several billions dead, and not before we design safe and reliable nuclear rockets, or something like that!)

Thus I employ the adjective “immoral” deliberately, when referring to the CO2 curve, knowing full well that it is provocative. But it’s much more than that; it is correct. Morally correct. It goes at the heart of my theory of morality. It’s very simple: morality comes from “mores” the long term , thus sustainable, habits a civilization has.

That exponentiating CO2 curve is obviously not sustainable, thus it is immoral. And it is lethally immoral: CO2 is not just innocuous, life sustaining, growing big trees. It’s also lethal at very low concentrations: it became the major problem for the survival of the crew of Apollo XIII, after their fuel cell exploded.

Greed, itself exponential, feeds the CO2 curve. Exponentials feeding other exponential: a gory mathematical spectacle.

***

EVIL ARTS BRING THE DEMON OUT:

And why is greed exponential? Because the more greed brings, the more one wants more, from a phenomenon of habituation, the same one which makes addicts augment the dose. The exact same brain phenomenon is at play: desensitization, and thus frantic augmentation of the stimulation. That is why Larry Ellison, after refusing to pay tax to schools, and buying huge properties everywhere, has now bought an entire Hawaiian island. He was getting habituated to all these outrages: he needed more, to get the same spice, with spitting into civilization’s face.

And that is why the balanced life, long sung by ancient philosophers, is so important, and, ultimately moral: it prevents this neurological desensitization, from an overuse of some peculiar neuronal circuitry. It is also why to be ruled by wealth, by greed, Pluto, is to be ruled by addicts. 

One may also wonder if the same effect is not at work among those who are obsessed by power (on others). it is already known that animals who are dominant, or dominated, suffer important neurohormonal changes. In some fishes, the need for an all fascist, all dominant leader brings enormous physiological changes, from male to super male, and if, there is no male left, from female, to super male.

Thus representative democracy, by its need for super leaders, may lead not just to select for the rather psychopathic, but even to turn the mild ones into physiological psychopaths.

As the astoundingly naïve Obama recently declared:“I did not know that my job’s description required to kill people.” Well, I have other news for him: his job is changing him neurohormonally, transforming him indeed, into a super killer (if not a super leader)… supposing he did not have it in him all along.

Gandhi called Hitler “his friend“, and tried to prevent India to declare war to “his friend“. What Gandhi did not understand is that utmost morality requires using maximal force against maximal calamities. There are no ifs and buts, and appeals to pacifism when facing a lion’s jaw (the morality Obama has been all too enthusiastic to use against Muslim terrorists, perhaps to compensate not using it against banksters!)

Let me truncate and add some sting to a quote of Sade:“Nature put us all to be equal born; if fate is pleased to intervene, and upset the primary order of things, it is up to us to correct its caprices and, through our own skill, to repair the usurpations of the strongest… So long as our good faith and patience serve only to double the weight of our chains…” Our virtues will be as crimes. (What Sade said at this point was the obverse: “our crimes would be as virtues“, also a valid point, sometimes, such as when Obama feels virtuous when killing innocent families of dedicated terrorists…)

As long as we sit quietly in our corner as the CO2 keeps on climbing, our virtues are as crimes.

What to do right away, besides getting more informed? Well the USA should follow Europe, and put heavy taxes on energy and carbon (it would also help the deficit while broadening the tax base). Even Australia just did this (more exactly on mining and carbon, to the applause of even “The Economist“).

Next the EU and USA could plot together, and squeeze the rest of the planet into clean energy. If Obama were re-elected, and not just listening to clever crocs such as Messieurs Summers, Rubin, Dimon, and countless others, he could put such a plan in action within days. It would even bolster employment (see Germany, which has created 300,000 jobs in clean energies).

The statu quo has become immoral. Time to do triage among the mores, and move on boldly where no minds have been before, same as ever was.

***

Patrice Ayme