Strikes Against Civilization

Dramatis Personae: Obama, Tyranosopher, and assorted characters meet in hell to discuss Obama’s “Signature Strikes”, the bombing by killer robots, of crowds of unknown people, on the chance an enemy would die.

***

 Obama, face contorted by contradictory emotions, affects not to understand the strikes in Boston: “Why did young men who grew up and studied here, as part of our communities and our country, resort to such violence?… We will determine what happened. We will investigate any associations that these terrorists may have had.”

 Tyranosopher: The deepest association is with the breakdown of the spirit of the State of Law. In the West, now, as it happened 2,000 years ago, the spirit of republican law, equality, has broken down. Galla Placidia, made the “association” that counts.

Galla & Socrates: Absolute Power To Law Only

 Galla reigned as a Roman empress, for more than three times as long as you will be president, and in much more trying times. She was acutely aware that the notion of State of Law was the fundamental bedrock of the State, and wrote eloquently about it.

 She explained that it is the Law, not individuals, who should reign. Equal law. Thus the law should apply absolutely, even to the absolute sovereign. The embodiment of the enforcement of this is the International Criminal Court.

 Treat people unequal, they will treat you unequal.

 Brainy Salafist: Obama, you have shown us the way. Killing civilians, you know nothing about, calling assassination of the innocent fighting terrorism. Hiding perfidiously, but ineffectually, behind the CIA to commit acts of wars against Pakistan, as the sedate New York Times’ editorial board pointed out in April 2013. 

 While you, in your unfathomable stupidly, advertized worldwide that you approved every single strike, as if you were anxious to be the first ever Nobel Peace laureate prosecuted for war crimes.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. That makes me infallible. Plus we the leaders of the USA have been careful to refuse to recognize the International Criminal Court.

 Brainy Salafist: Thus you, Obama, are just a mafioso leveraging “A Secret Deal on Drones, Sealed in Blood“ (New York Times, April 2013 again). These “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” your National Security adviser and now CIA head, Brennan, obliquely confirmed their existence in front of the Senate. Many of your associates, Obama’s associates, have confirmed the existence of an association, the Assassination Panel at the White House. So we, the Salafists, imitate you, and kill people we know nothing about. Thanks for teaching us. We call it fighting terrorism too.

 Tyranosopher: Yes, an official assassination panel is something unparalleled in the history of all and any known states. Yet, after the Boston bombing you, Obama, declared that any bombing of civilians was an act of terror. But that’s what your “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing” are all about. 

 Obama: I was shocked  when I became president, and I found out about “Signature Strikes” and “Crowd Killing”. But that’s the only game in town, and I am a team player. It works. We killed thousands of terrorists, using them.

 Tyranosopher: Try to pay attention to your own sick sport semantics. It’s not a game. Killing people does not make you player in a team. You were right to be shocked. Now you are shocking.

 Napoleon, Corsican dictator: “Even in war, moral power is to physical as three parts in one.” “Signature Strikes” bomb the USA’s moral power. The more you use them, the weaker you get. Your “Signature Strikes” are an anti-American strategy.

  Brainy Salafist: Obama you told us terror is the way. We want to be like you when we grow up. We want to do hundreds of “Signature Strikes“, on your territory, as you did, on ours, the House of Peace.

 Tyranosopher: Mr. President, I am afraid Salafists have been associating with the own past behavior of the USA, “Signature Strikes” its latest symbol. This is what a full enquiry would reveal.

 The notion of military-industrial complex was introduced by Eisenhower, as the greatest danger for the USA. At the height of the Cold War! Now we have something worse, the notion of enemy-industrial complex. It looks as if some in the government of the USA consider that to make sure of having enemies is the best way to have an industry.

 Obama: I did not start the violence in the Middle East.

 Tyranosopher: You sure did not. Arguably, from his own declarations, Muhammad started it, for the present period, in the sense that he revealed to his followers that the Persian-Babylonian-Zoroasthrian and Greco-Roman empires were exhausted, and could collapse if struck vigorously, hence allowing the Arabs to re-instigate the raiding they had been deprived of for more than a millennium.

 Young Salafist: Watch it, Tyranosopher, don’t you insult the Prophet! The Prophet is all I dream about, all the time, wet or not.

 Tyranosopher: You know very well, Young Salafist brimming with uncontrolled hormones, that this is what the fundamental Muslim texts say. Muhammad’s analysis was astute. The Greco-Roman and Persian empires were culprit each in their own way, of the tremendous war they made to each other, and they were on their knees. Muhammad’s hatred of the Jews grew from the Christians’ hatred of the Jews.

 By the way, if I want to insult long dead characters, I have the right to do so, according to my own religion.

 Young Salafist: You don’t have a religion, you believe in nothing, you insult everybody, even your friend Obama.

 Tyranosopher: Quite the opposite, I am helping everybody, by telling the truth. I believe in truth, and I believe in desperately searching for truth. That makes me a follower of the second most fundamental religion of man. And I subscribe to the first one, too, love.

 The truth is that Muhammad came from a prominent family in Mecca, but differently from the rest of them, was an analphabet. Somebody less charitable than me may think that had to do with his tough youth, and attending neurological problems he may have suffered from, PBUH! 

 Young Salafist: Spare me the sarcasm. Peace Be Upon Him, that man I dream about all the time.

 Tyranosopher: Are you gay? I find you rather sad. In any case, Muhammad gave too much of a military mien to Islam. But then, he had to, or Islam would not be on the map. After all, it’s the Roman military dictatorship, that decided to put Christianity, or, more exactly “Orthodox Catholicism”, on the map, and in command. They did so in a disastrous way. Later, the Franks found the right way: use the Church, to impose… progressive secularism.

 Obama: Can you guys come back to the subject at hand? Why such violence? Why couldn’t they all just play basket ball? That’s what I did, look where I am!

 Tyranosopher: Don’t worry the reservoir of potential Salafists inside the USA is a small fraction of that it is in a country such as France. One will hold them back with the idea of the republic, not by taking their rights away, even before judging them.

 You, Obama, could afford to not take your studies seriously. You were the missing link. Your life experience was, from the start, out of the ordinary. You lived in a mansion in Indonesia, with servants’ quarters. You went to the top private school in Hawai’i, Punahou. You also went to Harvard, same as your father, and, because your father had been there (“legacy admission“). Harvard is where the leaders are selected, and the spider web of worldwide leaders is set-up. Most recent USA presidents came from the Ivy League. Aka the Evil League.

 Even the guy who organized Pearl Harbor, the head of the imperial navy, admiral Yamamoto, went to Harvard. Speak of a guy who “studied here”! And let me exceptionally not mention the Nazis.

 It’s not about smarts, but about connections with wealth, as an owner, look at the Bushes, Kennedys, or… as a servant. For compliance, look at Bill Clinton, who did exactly what Goldman-Sachs told him to do, in a Faustian contract. Clinton went to Yale, still Ivy League.

 The contract made him swear. But he did what he was told to do, namely to deregulate finance in a way never seen before in the history of civilization. The total devolution of the public to the private. OK, something like that happened to the republic in Florence, when it turned into “The Prince”, plutocracy, basically a few private banks. (But then notice that Italy fell off civilization for several centuries.) So now here we are, neo-feudalism coalescing.

 Harvard plays into a form of violence. Its connection with various bloody dictators were left unpunished, even unpublished. In economics, many of its professors have published academic papers claiming that transferring more assets to rich people was what the Harvard doctors recommended (allusion to austerity propaganda from famous Harvard professors: Reinhart. Rogoff, Alesina, Ardagna).

 Under the guise of fair, balanced, learned, equal opportunity, extremely stealthy methods of vicious exploitation have been invented. They are different from those denounced in the past, in the period from 1648 (year of parliamentary revolutions in England and Paris, La Fondre) until Proudhon, Marx, etc.

 Obama: Once again Tyranosopher you are drifting through an immense historical landscape that seems to have nothing to do with the Jihadists in our midst.

 Tyranosopher: The most important connections are the ones that have not been made explicit yet, because they are deeper.

 As I was saying, the USA outsmarted the Western European powers, partly deliberately, partly by serendipity, in a sort of selection of the most effective behaviors, however devious. Devious support, by the USA, for the worst of Islam was crucial, in the rise of the present day Jihadism.

 Young Jihadist: See, Obama, you are devious, even though you don’t know about it.

 Tyranosopher: A preferred devious method, has been the traditional one of dividing to conquer. To enact these divisions, support was given to extremely violent enemies of “American” values. Including various fascists, in particular the Soviets, the Nazis, and violently regressive Islamists. Those enemies of the USA turned out to be its best tools. 

 Such fascist embodiments are unsustainable, making them valuable. The mess they create leads to divisions, hence easy pickings. Since 1945, contrarily to the cautious policies of Britain and France, Roosevelt’s USA threw its mighty support to Salafists, starting with the Saudis. (For comparison, the Brits annihilated the fiercest Wahhabist army, not even two decades prior; most of the 9/11 highjackers were Saudis.)

 CIA support was given to Khomeini’s followers, in 1953, and still later to Pakistani Fundamentalists, then to bin Laden (and the SIA), etc.. Thus we see it was more than a plot. It was a plotted strategy, that unfolded over 60 years (the support of Bush II for various Muslim extremists in Iraq was a continuation of that strategy: let the museums and archeological sites be looted, help the fanatics, bury the secularists).

 This strategy is coming to an end for diverse reasons. Terror by drones the way practiced presently by the Obama administration tries to extend it, but it is not sustainable. However, it’s causing, long term, tremendous civilizational damage. The West is losing credibility.

 Obama: “Civilizational damage”? What kind of weird notion is this?

 Tyranosopher: Civilizational standards are not just what make a civilization worth defending. They constitute a fundamental military asset, as Nap said. Civilizational standards are how the Athenians won at Marathon, or Salamis against the immense might of the giant Persian empire. On the verso, uncowed Sparta vanished from history, because its civilization was racist and plutocratic, something that leads to unrecoverable stupidity, among other problems.

 The drone program may have killed only a few thousand people, but the bombing of civilization itself it wrought is unequalled. (Although it may still be reverted at this point, should one be contrite enough about it.)

 Faisal Shahzad, USA citizen of Pakistani origin: “I entered a 2010 guilty plea, to try to set off a car bomb in Times Square, and I justify targeting civilians by telling the judge, ‘When the drones hit, they don’t see children’.

 Obama: I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I say this all the time. Pay attention. I am not your average terrorist.

 Tyranosopher: You call the ones you killed, terrorists. Just like in Vietnam. However, the law says that people are innocent, until proven to be terrorists. So you do not respect the most fundamental pre-condition to law, namely that punishment never precedes conviction.

 We know for example that a 16 year old USA born citizen was killed on a beach in a USA drone attack (apparently with a number of other teens), in one of the “Signature Strikes”.  Such an assassination, in the name of civilization, is the signature of a failed civilization. For such a crime, in old republican Rome, you would have been executed the “old fashion way“. (The one Roman president Nero was condemned to by the Senate.)

 Where are the excuses for that, killing boys having fun on a beach? Where is the enquiry? Or do you, Obama, president of the USA, consider, justify and order, killing teens on beaches on the other side of the planet? Explain to me why this is not much worse than the worse pedophilia?

 Obama: As I always say, I am the leader of the Greatest Nation on Earth, under God. I am not a terrorist, by definition, but the very definition of respectability. Fear me.

 Young Salafist: If we killed you, Obama, you, and your followers would not be as respected. However we will not kill you, because you are our best agent. We kill for the Greatest Religion on Earth, in the name of the one and only God. We are not stuck in one nation, our house is the House of the rising Sun, the House Of Peace, the Ummah. My universal God is better than your national god. Watch me and other martyrs die for it.

  Obama: You can’t kill me, I am invincible. Wherever I go, there is an army protecting me. Same for my family. Taxpayers will support me and my family forever, making me forever invincible. As they did with other great USA leaders.

 Tyranosopher: Our Salafist friend here is correct, Greatest Religion beats “Greatest Nation”.  Mr. President, you are too fond of calling the USA “the greatest notion of Earth”. This does not serve the country well. Not at all.

 Obama, laughing: Nation, not notion. Keep your words cogent.

 Tyranosopher: Calling the USA “the greatest nation on Earth” is not just a ridiculous notion. It is also extremely dangerous. There is a plethora of examples in history about the extreme lethality of nationalistic hubris. Athens went down that road to hell.

 Obama: I will remember you for the next drone kill list. See who is lethal.

 Tyranosopher: You feel lethal, as a child, but supreme thoughts kill better. All you are doing, is messing up civilization. Killing crowds, just because some enemies may be there, is the end of any pretense to civilized behavior. Flaunting it, is an attitude that aggravates the practice. 

 The USA is not the first democracy proclaiming, urbi et orbi, that it had a right to kill innocent civilians. It never ended well. it’s a philosophical red line. When a civilization crosses it, it dies. Such a murderous hubris was the proximal cause of Athens’ downfall.

 “Signature strikes” the killing of civilians associated by mere physical proximity, is as low a notion as humanity ever got. You do not even pretend to hate them, or that you want to eat them.

 In the hierarchy of anti-civilizational values, “Signature Strikes” are lower than torture, because torture comes from giving some value to the person one tortures. One values the knowledge that person may have, or one appreciates the pain one inflicts to them, or one values theirmind enough to break it.

 Signature strikes are lower than hate crimes. Signature strikes are lower than even cannibalism. Signature strikes are all about smitting people utterly, as if they were insects.

 Signature strikes makes the president of the USA in a devil Picasso, signing horror with pride of office. It’s beyond terrorism. It enrages people worldwide so much, it does not even bring terror. It only brings horror for the absence of values you embody. It deserves a new name, horrorism. 

 American historian of the racist type: Tyranosopher, I would hate to call you naïve. Yet, face the facts: in WWII, we imprisoned citizens of the USA of second and third generation, if they had some Japanese ancestors. It was brutal. But the reputation of the USA as a brutal power serves the USA well. If, centuries ago, the European colons in North America had not killed nearly all the Natives, the USA would be like Bolivia or Peru. Look even at Mexico: by 1600CE, there were basically only a million natives left. Too many. Now Mexico is like half Indian.

 Tyranosopher: I am not naïve, just the opposite, you are. What worked before, to establish an empire, against naïve Neolithic Natives, can have the exact opposite effect, trying to grab resources from the rest of the world. each “Signature Strike” may kill one hater of the West, and create ten thousands. Better get your anti-missiles working well against Pakistani ICBMs…

 Herodotus, Greek historian: A more general problem is that, by deciding who, among citizens of the USA, would live or die, at your own whim, Obama, you have made yourself, symbollically and practically, into what the Greeks called a tyrannos, a tyrant. As I said of the Athenians under tyranny: …”they let themselves be beaten, since they worked for a master…” To establish new wisdom as Tyranosopher does, one has to be unique. But when a politician reigns as one, that’s a tyrant.

  Obama: Signatures strikes are effective. They show the power of the USA. Not only we can do it physically, but we have the moral strength to do it.

  Tyranosopher: Tyrannies are always short term effective. You do not know what “moral” means. It means: “sustainable”. A traditional war, although with supersonic bombers, drones and smart bombs, as the French republic does in Mali, is indefinitively sustainable, fair and square. But the French fight warriors, on the battlefield. They are not killing crowds of unknown people, not fighting anybody. That earns them respect, even from their enemies.

  Whereas Carthage, long a top civilization, was undone by its immoral morality, killing innocent children. You are making the USA into a modern Carthage.

  Obama: Carthage was defeated by Roman armies, not morals.

  Tyranosopher: Conventional wisdom, the seduction of the superficial, that’s what you want to overcome. Instruct yourself, young man, lest you came to be known as Obabad. The Greeks called barbararians ba-ba, because they thought like children. You add badness to the mix. Obabad.

 The planned annihilation of Carthage in a Third Punic war, was hotly debated in the Roman Senate. Many, including the imperator put in command of the destroying army, were fully aware that Rome was crossing a philosophical red line. That transgression could, and even would, bring Rome’s destruction. This was said explicitly at the time (source: Polybius). The tough-as-diamond Roman imperator cried, as he saw the great metropolis burn under the extermination assault of his crack legions. he knew Rome was sealing her fate.

  Yet, it was foreordained. The fact that Carthage had sacrificed children to the fire made the difference, in the minds of the Roman senators and the military. It was the excuse that allowed to forget the real reason for wanting the annihilation of Carthage.

  You, Obama, sacrifice children to the fire, including the occasional, highly symbolic American child. Killing other people’s children, on the other side of the earth, does not make it any less so.

  Don’t deny.

  If you insist to deny that you are flaunting child killing as a new bedrock for civilization, then make full light about who, among your drone people, decided to kill that 16 year old American born boy, and how. And if it was a honest mistake, so to speak, let’s confront it. Only then can you talk to history with an honest face.

***

Patrice Ayme

Truth Is Hell: Iraq, etc.

TRUTH DIGGING CONSISTS IN UNMASKING EVILS:

Abstract: I celebrate the Iraq invasion my way, pointing out some of the devils, or evils traditionally ignored. The lack of learning after the disastrous Iraqi crusade is directly due to the persistence, in the USA, of the power structure that brought the war. The war itself was a giant red herring to hide much worse, the collusion between Washington and some of its worst creatures.

A red herring that between 2003 and 2007, killed more than a million Iraqi. A red herring that caused morality in the USA to collapse, and stay collapsed, every day that the war criminals are not prosecuted (interestingly many major French politicians are on trial in France for unlawful activities in Iraq… for much lesser alleged crimes than the ones Bush and company would be charged with).

Often devils (O’Connor, Saint Louis, Joan of Arc) are still viewed honorably.

With Saint Louis, the Dark Side overwhelmed any other side. Contrarily to his reputation. [In the Sainte Chapelle, Paris, 76 meters high, that he had built in 33 months.]

This failure to perceive devils for what they are is a consequence of the same cognitive-moral failure that brought us Bush, and his adulation by the sheeple. A lack of attention to the details, where devils lurk. Ever since there were evil beasts, and they wore camouflage, precisely because they were evil.

Democracy only survives if a truth machine, elucidating all hidden devils. If the devil is in the details, only the devil knows the truth. Truth should strive to go where evil lurks.

***

WITHOUT CORRECT DETAILS, HISTORY IS JUST THE HOUSE OF DEVILS:

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Said Edmund Burke, who added: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

Sounds good. Yet in Burke’s mind, his version of history called to invade France, destroy the Constitutional government there, and  replace it by the Ancient Regime of time honored plutocrats and theocrats. Never mind that king Louis XVI himself had spent all his long reign trying to make plutocrats pay. The alternative was default. So Louis called for a revolution.

Burke yearned for the likes of Saint Louis. Somebody who kills in good faith.

Saint Outside, Devil Inside.

Saint Louis was a co-patron of the Order of Saint Francis. By modern standards, he would have been caged immediately (see below). Nice to see the present pope being unaware of these intricacies. So he was with the Argentinean dictator Videla who he used to feed.

Never mind that Louis XVI himself, as king, had initiated, condoned, and literally signed on the French Revolution. Burke’s murderous policy was implemented, bringing the death of millions, in France alone. And many times that, over all of Europe. Armies roamed from Lisbon to Moscow.

In the end, Human Rights won, which revolted Burke so much, that he thought moral to risk killing much of Europe for it (as France was three times england, and as the government there was constitutional, to call for an invasion was to call for devastation throughtout Europe, as, indeed, happened).

Unfortunately for Burke and his followers, Human Rights are now the core of the charter of the United Nations. That god who Burke had the presumption to help, is in full retreat, except in the most desolate places (that will include the vacuity of many an American youth’s mind).

Burke was a hero to crypto-fascists such as Hayek and Friedman, who provided the “intellectual” justification for atrocious dictatorships from Chili to Argentina, all the way up to Mexico, just as Heidegger provided it for Nazism. Hayek, Friedman and their ilk, actually provided the ideology  for the new plutocratic order we are enjoying nowadays, all the way to Moscow, Cyprus and Dubai. (More on these forsaken pirates havens in another essay soon.)

So Burke lives to this day, in very many places, including the red hot anti-French hate among a significant part of the Wall Street journal readership (I’m a subscriber, so in a good position to judge.)

In a similar vein, the famous elected German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, started his mesmerizing work, “Mein Kampf” with pages of (anti-French pseudo-) history. Same idea as Burke: hit on human rights hard, right away. Only then did the fascist Guide switch to the ethological description of Jews in Vienna.

By April 1945, and 70 million dead later, the Guide conceded he had been misguided all along about the Germans and the Slavs.

So it’s not just enough to remember history, it’s important to know history, that is the facts as they really happened. History is about the details, and the devils therein, all of them. Leave none unturned.

***

PLUTOCRACIES USE THOSE POOR DEVILS, MERCENARIES:

In “Marches Of Folly“, an excellent editorial, Paul Krugman asks: “Did we learn anything from Iraq?”.

“Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.”

Let me comment  here right away on Krugman’s “somehow”. “Somehow” is the crux. A quick historical reminder helps to understand the madness that gripped the USA.

A similar situation happened after the Second Punic War. Carthage’s own mercenaries revolted, and attacked Carthage. Carthage defeated them with great difficulty.

Why did Carthage employ armies of mercenaries? Because it was a plutocracy. At that time, the Roman republic was a rather direct democracy. So Rome could bring up armies of citizens, who were fighting for themselves. Self motivation made Roman soldiers much more determined than any of their paid adversaries.

The lesson of that disaster was that Carthage had to become much more democratic. Ironically, considerably enriched by conquests all over, plutocracy simultaneously took Rome over (and that was going to lead to the crash of Greco-Roman civilization).

How does this relate to the “somehow”? Very simple.

Carter, the very Christian president, had launched war, secretly, against Afghanistan. Although he had entire armies of goons at his disposal, the Geneva Fourth Convention violator in Washington needed more, to attack an entire country. Using a mercenary army raised by the Saudi plutocrats was the solution implemented in 1979.

Al Qaeda was initially an organization created by the CIA and the Saudi Intelligence Agency: they literally went to fetch the young Osama Bin laden in Turkey. As he was very pious, the bellicose side of the Qur’an could be manipulated to guide him, by making him believe he was as good as anyone to interpret the sacred texts. Then the godless goons taught Al Qaeda how to conduct asymmetric warfare against the Afghan republic (attack schools, not the military).

The entire political, plutocratic and propaganda class of the USA was immersed in all this. And it worked well for 15 years, until, well, just as with Carthage, the mercenaries understood they were being played, and underpaid. Then they turned against the hands that had taught them. The result: an asymmetric war between the gigantic army manipulated by Washington and the mercenary force. And then 9/11.

By then the Washington establishment had to admit everything, namely that, since 1945, it had instrumentalized Salafist Islam, in Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, etc. Or then it had to deny everything, and be more in power than ever. It just had to tell a good story, and stick to it. The story was that on 9/11, the sky was very blue, and then planes came out of nowhere…

Just charging bin Laden presented the inconvenience that some were bound to dig, and ask how bin laden appeared on the scene. It was best to go charge an enormous red herring first, with the largest imaginable lies possible ( a technique used and explained by no less than the German Chancellor above). The very size of the lies would have distracting properties, all by their absurdity.  So Powell went to the UN with kindergarten drawings.

How does one disguise all this mess? Under which carpet does one hide it? Well, war against Saddam Hussein. (It also had the advantage of destabilizing the Middle East, and that is to Israel’s colonizing advantage.)

***

PLUTO PROFITS FROM WAR, ANY WAR:

Here is Krugman again: “Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.

There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.”

Counter-intuitively, many of the war party of the USA love a bigger and more influential Teheran:  with a bit of luck, Teheran will do like Saddam, feel overconfident, and offer a casus belli. Then full war against Iran could be joined. However, of course, not all wars can be won. Overall, although it may not look like it to the clueless, the war against Iraq was a defeat for the USA.

The USA has a lot of false friends in the Middle East. The SIA is feeding Al Nusra, a Syrian Salafist army in Syria, and something will have to be done about that, and soon.

Krugman again: “So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.”

Why would they look as if they learned something? That would mean they went, somehow, through something untoward, that something adverse happened, to THEM. It certainly did not happen to them; they are richer, and more domineering than ever. Fortunes were made. Not far from New York, a war profiteer built for himself a sort of Versailles. Don’t expect to see this sort of data points, or giant architecture, appear in USA Main Stream Media (it was on French TV).

***

ATROCIOUS WAR CRIMINALITY IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN:

The USA invaded Iraq. Now it has completely lost that war. 4,500 USA soldiers died, and more than that in allied soldiers and mercenaries. Dozens of thousands of other soldiers were gravely wounded and millions got psychologically damaged by suffering, or inflicting extreme violence.

After the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a naive decision parroted by many other Americans around the country: he enlisted in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who killed nearly 3,000 men, women and children. Little did he know that those enemies were in Washington, where the war had been fully engaged July 3, 1979. Little did he know that these enemies were just American mercenary forces. As a good vacuous American youth, he was unaware that his own government had already caused the death of three millions, not three thousands, in Afghanistan.

Less than three years later, Young’s Army service placed him not in Afghanistan — where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated — but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young’s convoy was attacked by resistance fighters. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again. For the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks, and now intent to die by withdrawing treatment. Neofascists should not worry: Young will not count as an Iraq war casualty.

From Young’s letter, published on TruthDig:

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Young goes on to attack the “cowardice” of Bush and Cheney for avoiding military service themselves, and to encourage them to “stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”

(Read Young’s entire letter here.)

Not to worry: plutocracy is also a mood, where all values are inverted. Greed is viewed in more regards than altruism. As far as Bush and Cheney are concerned, Tomas Young is just a loser, with not enough brains to make the correct investment.

It goes without saying that international law ought to be brought to bear on all war criminals. Justice is not just about trying Serbs and Africans. Plutocrats should qualify too.

One of the USA’s main axes of exploitation, since 1945, has been to instrumentalize Salafist Islam. That was initially used against Britain, France, and even Israel (times change…) The difference between now and 60 years ago, is that many of the Salafists have realized they have been played (and first of all the Iranians; OK, technically the term “Salafist”, the “old ones” does not usually qualify Shiites, but I am generalizing, for semantic convenience!)

The hostility of the USA against the French republic during the Franco-Algerian civil war made a bad situation irreversibly worse:

***

ONGOING FRANCO-ALGERIA DRAMA:

51 years ago, on March 19, 1962, the Evian Accords finalized the transfer of power from the French Republic to the (“Algerian”) FNL (Front National de Liberation). Officially, this was a good thing, a step forward, the flow of history. In truth, it was basically a transfer of power from one terrorist organization, to another.

That was a disaster for the populations concerned. About 15% of the people living in Algeria fled, living everything behind, and many committed suicide. Algeria has known dictatorship ever since, first from the FNL, then from the military. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the following decades, at the hands of terrorists (from official Algerian numbers).

There is no doubt that the French state behaved extremely badly in Algeria, starting in 1945. Before that, it was just behaving badly. There is also no doubt that the FNL was an extremely nasty terrorist organization.

So there is nothing good to celebrate there. And the mayor of Perpignan, a major French city had the courage to recognize this simple fact today, that a very bad thing happened on March 19, 1962. The mayor ordered to bring down the French flags, and circled them with black.

Truth always start with an emotional admission. Even in mathematics, or science.

The politically correct emotion about the Evian Accords has been, for 51 years, that they were good, and necessary, however grim it was to sign them. They went with history. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The French republic’s abuses in Algeria were not wiped out clean by another 51 years of abuse, starting with abusing truth.  

Confronted to that sort of past, in Algeria or Iraq, where reality is viewed as unbearable, there is only one principle worth having first. Namely that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, can prevent nasty outcomes. Especially those lies festering to this day.

Because, of course, the basic reasons for the Franco-Algerian civil war, are festering to this day, just on a grander scale. And now, the USA, instead of pulling nasty (Salafist) strings from the shadows (against France, BTW), is now on the frontlines (with France, happily).

The main reason why Germany is, finally, doing so well nowadays, is that a lot of the truth finally came out about some very bad ways German minds used to consider politically correct to operate under, while knowing no others.

***

WITH SAINTS LIKE THAT, WHO NEEDS DEVILS?

Not that only Germany has to be freed from simplistic, hence devil laden history. It’s not just that the American Founding fathers were slave masters. By contemporary standards, Saint Louis was a vicious criminal, and, at best, would have been interned as an insane maniac (he had declared, in writing, that nothing could be more pleasing to him than planting a knife into a non believer’s gut, and then playing around with the blade, once so inserted; why the Catholic church considers such a creep a saint rests on the fact that Catholics are not familiar with the lives of their most famous saints… and of course, that the church hierarchy is deeply evil).

Speaking of saints, the most revered Joan of Arc was a peace breaker. Paris and London had come to terms, and decided to reunify the kingdom (Treaty of Troyes). The king of England reigned over France. Unfortunately, he died within 2 months. His infant son was supposed to reign upon his majority. Wise people in England and France knew that this was an excellent arrangement, because, France being much bigger than England in all ways, there was no risk she would be gobbled up by England (contrarily to misrepresentations ever since). End of the 100 years war.

But then Jeanne, or rather the forces behind her (Yolande of Aragon) , from the south (Armagnac, Bourguignons, etc.) stepped in.

Jeanne restarted the Franco-French(-English) civil war. This time London and Paris were on the same side. Jeanne had quite a difficult time seizing Paris. Why such a divisive theocratic war monger is admired to this day is no mystery. Once Bush was selected, I mean when Charles VII had been unconstitutionally made king, there was no turning back. Jeanne d’Arc had to be made into a saint, or at least the judgments against her thrown out.

So will say it was better that England and France kept fighting each other for another 4 centuries: war is a force that gives us meaning. Perhaps. However, it’s neither wise, nor glorious not to teach in detail the reality of what happened. What happened is that Joan of Arc is another Christian “saint” who killed millions, and whose message, bloody sword in hand, voices from god in her head telling her war was all we needed, for no rational reason, is really not something one anyone wise would want to promote.

History is sometimes made by rats. As the famous sayingobservation has it, a rat gnawing through a dike can drown a nation. Now to this list of most creative creatures, we can add Sandra O’Connor, a so called “Justice”. Not only she has no notion of history, or justification, but that most fundamental human instinct, regret, central to learning anything important, has been extinguished in her. Her excuse? She is a “Westerner”. (Is that supposed to mean she has a gun instead of a head?)

Speaking of handing the presidency to plutocrat Bush, the vacuous Sandra reverted to a three year old persona. Said she: “There’s no point in my, at this point, saying I regret some decision I made. I’m not going to do that.”

Another bratty behaviour she may want to consider is to stop breathing and turning all blue until wiser people take pity. The Sandra girl by ordering to NOT recount Florida, gave the presidency to plutocrat Bush. The one who won the popular vote by two million, and also won Florida, Al Gore, was given a Nobel Prize instead of the presidency of the USA, to calm his nerves!

The point, O’Connor baby, is that, by saying that you regret your unconstitutional demolition of democracy, you would turn your back to Pluto, and join humanity. At least, symbolically speaking. That’s better than nothing. And better than staying forever, in the judgment of history, not just somebody who should never have existed, a one person democracy destroyer, but someone who persists into not even regretting her badness, contrarily to, say, Darth Vader.

It’s astounding one has to spell such an elementary truth to a big time Supreme Court “Justice”. Why are people such as these next to god? (Answer: because their very mediocrity insures that they will do the bidding of the plutocratic order.)

As the Romans knew, but O’Connor, and most of the truly bad soldiers of evil, do not want to admit: Errare Humanum Est, Perseverare Diabolicum! (Error Is Human, Persevering Diabolical!)

Going for the truth, and yanking it out of the entanglements where it lurks is always hellish in character. After all, woe onto those through whom scandal arrives.

Jean-Paul Sartre said: “Hell, it’s the others.” (L’enfer, c’est les autres): that was a neologism, an unusual way of using “autres”. It is mistranslated as “Hell is other people”, a different idea.

More generally, hell comes with the full reality that requires us to understand we would become obsolete, lest we change our minds. It may be painful to visit hell, but that’s where the hardest truths are lurking. Being ultimately good means turning hell into heavens.

***

Patrice Ayme

Elite Censorship

Abstract: In the guise of “moderation”, the New York Times decides what is fit to know. Some data threatening established lies crucial to the established order are systematically censored therein. And that’s worse than dumb.

Human beings are knowledge creatures. Manipulate what they know, turn them into pigeons, and they will come eat in your hand. Main Stream Media knows this all too well. Distortion of data is why the clear and present “Greater Depression” is turning into something worse than the “Great Depression” of the 1930s.

The refusal of looking at reality is what enabled the catastrophic, ongoing, austerity drive. In a self reinforcing loop, much of the austerity is now directed towards the cognitive part of the economy.

Austerity Exploding Up

“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” (European Commission, 2010.)
In truth, what do we see? What the graph above shows: unemployment in Europe is exploding up. Yet, in truth, providing jobs, is the primary object of economy. An economy does not exist only to make financial capital happy.

Progress has to start with truth, in full, thus reality. That’s why censorship is a bad idea, be it in Pyongyang, Beijing, Moscow, or New York. In states of law, the law ought to be enough. The rule of little chiefs has no place in republics, wherever practice has given institutions a fiduciary role.
***

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE MINDS OUT.
Paul Krugman, main New York Times editorial, Mars 1, 2013:
“We’re just a few weeks away from a milestone I suspect most of Washington would like to forget: the start of the Iraq war. What I remember from that time is the utter impenetrability of the elite prowar consensus. If you tried to point out that the Bush administration was obviously cooking up a bogus case for war, one that didn’t bear even casual scrutiny; if you pointed out that the risks and likely costs of war were huge; well, you were dismissed as ignorant and irresponsible.

It didn’t seem to matter what evidence critics of the rush to war presented: Anyone who opposed the war was, by definition, a foolish hippie. Remarkably, that judgment didn’t change even after everything the war’s critics predicted came true. Those who cheered on this disastrous venture continued to be regarded as “credible” on national security (why is John McCain still a fixture of the Sunday talk shows?), while those who opposed it remained suspect.

And, even more remarkably, a very similar story has played out over the past three years, this time about economic policy.”

In 2010, Olli Rehn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olli_Rehn declared that
“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” For a reality check, see the unemployment rate above. It seems to be sort of exponentiating. But the bankers are safe, don’t worry.

The Rehn of economic terror is currently serving as European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission. Such people are intimately tied to the plutocratic system. Many of these worthies go back and forth with the likes of Goldman Sachs. They never had it so good.

Jack Lew, just named treasury secretary, inventor of the “Sequester” was a great chief at Citigroup where he proceeded to help lose about 50 billion dollars, and was compensated for his troubles by seven figures of taxpayers’ money.

Mario Monti, unelected Italian PM went, with most of his government, to report to his wealthy masters at Davos. It was obviously deliberate: elections were coming, the Italian people were encouraged to acknowledge their masters too, just like their PM. Instead, to general surprise, they voted massively for Beppe Grillo, an outsider critical of the powers that be, once condemned for manslaughter. When going to the slaughterhouse, better to chose an expert.

Back to Krugman’s editorial. The Iraq war has been an unqualified disaster in slow motion. The computation of the neofascists (aka “neoconservatives”) had been that the conquest of Iraq would pay for itself, as the conquest of the West and other parts had.

This did not happen, because the British and American armies were unable to win. Instead they had to give power to the Shiites and agree to leave.

The only positive, for the West, has been that any potential enemy now knows it should not assume that the West would always behave in a civilized, or even in a predictable, manner (that was one the miscomputations of Hitler: he had claimed, loud und klar, that the democracies could never decide anything tough, so he was stunned, literally speechless, after he received the war declarations of Britain and France).

Actually many of the American neofascists explained that such was their computation: make the USA look crazed and dangerous. Recognizing now that the Iraq war was a mistake would be rejecting that last “positive”.

In economic policy, Krugman is rightly indignant of the disaster in Europe (that friends of the wealthy are anxious to duplicate in the USA, see the “Sequester” that started today).

Major economic indicators in some countries, such as Spain or Great Britain, are already worse than in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and are pointing down further (except in tax havens such as Ireland).

UK Flat Line GDP: Greater Depression Today

Britain is doing worse than in 1930s. Cameron is blossoming into a total failure.

I commented on the Krugman editorial. As Krugman had dared to evoke the Iraq war, so did I. Here is what I said:

“Wealth from monopoly and ridiculously low taxes for the plutocrats, austerity for everybody else, is bringing massive cuts in education and science. Having cut to the bone, plutocrats, their servants and sycophants are now sucking the brains out. Hey, if the rabble is stupid enough, it will salute its masters smartly!

Examples of this disaster abound: the European Union elected leaders, led by the right wing, the regressive Cameron and Merkel just cut the EU science budget by 13%! In the name of austerity. In the USA, the sequester promises cuts to science (NSF, NIH) of 5.1%. Over the next 6 months. In the name of austerity.

Cameron, before becoming PM of the UK promised that Britain would regain technological leadership. But Cameron, is, truly, fundamentally a very wealthy heir. Truly, he wants a richer elite, and a poorer plebs. So what did he do? Besides introducing astronomical tuition to British “public” universities, he reduced the science budget of the UK by 7.6%. In the first year.

Austerity is just the latest Trojan Horse of those who brought us run-away banking. It’s just the power of a small class of people who know each other, worldwide, and are preying on the rest of humanity.
No morality stand in their way, not even putting the entire biosphere in danger. The only way we are going to save the planet is through great advances in science and efficient technology. Otherwise mayhem is guaranteed. Among other nefarious consequences.

Donald Rumsfeld used to shake Saddam Hussein’s hand, when the former used to manipulate the latter, in the 1970s. The USA decided a secret war in Afghanistan in 1979, on July 3. See what president Carter’s National Security adviser, Brzezinski, declared:

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/usa-attack-against-afghanistan/

A consequence was 9/11. Three million Afghans dead, another. Bad actions can have terrible fall-out.”

These observations of mine were censored by the thinkers at the New York Times. Nothing really new here. I have been sending comments to the New York Times for more than a decade, more than 1,000 of my judicious observations were censored. I knew that, by evoking the early history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I exposed myself to traditional New York Times censorship. In 2003, overall, the New York Times was for the Iraq war (with the exception of Krugman).

The official line about 9/11 is that the sky was blue over an unsuspecting USA, and suddenly planes jetted in, piloted by very bad men from Afghanistan.

Never mind that 15 out of 19 were Saudi Arabs, and none from Afghanistan! That qualifies as irrelevant details.
Any data contradicting that idyllic picture is indeed viewed as deeply anti-American. Apparently reality has an anti-American bias.

The day following that act of censorship, Krugman wrote a related post about European elites pontificating in 2010 that austerity worked, and the European crisis was over. By then I knew I had been censored, so I re-sent the exact same comment, omitting the last paragraph about Rumsfeld, and Carter’s attack on Afghanistan. It was immediately published.

So what happened to “the truth shall make you free”? Why is the New York Times so authoritarian? Why to censor me systematically when I mentioned that the debt of the USA, according to the government of the USA, the IMF, etc, was 111%?

The NYT’s official line is that the Federal debt is less than 80% because it has decided that the Social Security Fund is NOT a creditor of the government of the USA. In other words the New York Times is part of a vast conspiracy that deliberately masks the fact that more than 5 trillion dollars is owed to CREDITORS, the Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare. Then the establishment turns around and say Social Security is going to get broke!

This is confusing, to say the least. Until one realizes that there is one, and only one elite, and that it is the effective arm of the plutocracy. This is why Obama was so ineffective in the first two years: he had to depend upon a Congress and Senate, let alone a Main Stream Media that was as much part of the same elite as the Koch brothers, the Rockefellers, Bilderberg and Davos conferences circles.

I often read pathetic wishes from small destitute people, for the return of Nancy Pelosi, the professional pseudo-progressive elitist, to head Congress. Drinking Pelosi’s Napa wine, skiing at Pelosi’s Sugar bowl resort (cost: $85!) Something to excite progressives, if elite enough!

In truth, the TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU SMART.

Smarts are what the pseudo left elite fears most. The truth, from smarts. To be found out as those who speak one way, and act just the opposite. And that is why the New York Times has censored me more than 1,000 times, but the Wall Street Journal (where I commented more than 1,000 times) has never censored me. Not once. Nor did “The Economist”, ever.

Official progressives are afraid, because avowed progressivism is their business, whereas in truth they just belong to the elite, and the elite, right now, means the worldwide plutocracy. That’s why massive austerity cuts are implemented when billionaire financiers are taxed less, relatively speaking, than janitors (this is an allusion to so called “carry interest” used by hedge fund managers and the like).

Can one be truly progressive when one is truly afraid of reality? Of course not. Progress comes from the manipulation of reality, and that requires to know what reality is. First. So one can make one’s mind about it, before bringing one’s mind to bear on the problem(s) .

Manipulating histories about hostilities in the Middle East informs energy policies and macro-ethics, looking forward. It also exculpates, as Krugman said, the bad actors of past policies, and, worse, exculpates some cognitive and logical methods used by past, present, and future mass criminality. it is certainly not the way to progress.

If the New York Times wants to keep on pretending it is about reality, its censorship bureau should be put out of business.
***
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.

Washington Taliban

No need to go to Afghanistan to visit with the Taliban. It was invited at the Presidential Inaugural.

INAUGURAL VIOLATION OF CONSTITUTION:
The Constitution for the United States of America starts with a preamble:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Notice: Not a word about Allah, God, or whatever Deus ex machina, or any sort of superstition grounded being. So why did a so called “Episcopal Priest” come to the “Inaugural” of President Obama, to address the multitude in a so called “benediction”?

Benediction means saying something good. But it was nothing of the sort. That priest, “Reverend Doctor Luis Leon” proffered insults against humanity. Is that the message the President of the USA wanted to convey?
Dutifully all the potentates lowered their heads as they absorbed the wisdom. They mimicked well giant penguins watching eggs between their webbed feet. Only Sasha Obama looked as if she could not believe what she was hearing:

No God, No Good? Are They All Lord Crazy?

***

WITHOUT LORD, MAN IS HELL, SAYS INAUGURAL MANIAC:
Below is more than half of Leon’s benediction:

“Let us pray:

Gracious and eternal God, as we conclude the second inauguration of President Obama, we ask for your blessings as we seek to become, in the words of Martin Luther King, citizens of a beloved community, loving you and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

We pray that you will bless us with your continued presence because without it, hatred and arrogance will infect our hearts. But with your blessing we know that we can break down the walls that separate us. We pray for your blessing today because without it, distrust, prejudice and rancor will rule our hearts. But with the blessing of your presence, we know that we can renew the ties of mutual regard which can best form our civic life.

We pray for your blessing because without it suspicion, despair, and fear of those different from us will be our rule of life. But with your blessing, we can see each other created in your image, a unit of God’s grace, unprecedented, irrepeatable (sic) and irreplaceable.

We pray for your blessing because without it, we will see only what the eye can see. But with the blessing of your blessing we will see that we are created in your image…

We pray for your blessing. Bless all of us, privileged to be citizens and residents of this nation, with a spirit of gratitude and humility that we may become a blessing among the nations of this world. We pray that you will shower with your life-giving spirit, the elected leaders of this land, especially Barack our president and Joe our vice president.”
***

YOU MONSTERS NEED A LORD TO RULE YOU:
OK, let’s recapitulate; 5,000 years ago, Sumerians established a fun religion with plenty of myths, such as Adam, Eve, the Apple, the Snake, the Garden of Eden, etc. Meanwhile the Egyptians wrote a number of fairy tales for children, including the waters parting, etc.

2,500 years later those myths and fables were gathered together in a book (=”bible”) by some obdurate Jews enjoying Babylonian hospitality in a concentration camp. The central personage of the bible is Allah, or “Yahweh”, the “jealous god” of the Jews, always keen to destroy those who don’t obey his maniacal insanity. For example Yahweh tortures to death the son of (the famous king) David of Goliath fame, because David did not enforce mass murder with as much enthusiasm as Yahweh had ordered, and Yahweh becomes obsessed with making David suffer.

These monstrosities were made into a religion to make monstrous soldiers more thrilled by mass murder than David had been. That was the smart plot the emperors of the decaying Roman state found to persist with the plutocratic rule with the help of a bloody theocratic terror. It was not that smart: the killing of intellectuals, in connection with the continuing persistence of the hyper wealthy to pay few taxes, brought a quick collapse.

The evacuation of Britannia, while passing over of Roman military power to the Franks in Germania and Gallia, in 400 CE followed the theocratic, Sharia like terror edicts of emperor Theodosius, a Spanish general, by just 19 years. The consequence was the military collapse of the “Occidental Part” of the empire. But the monstrosity of Judeo-Christianism kept on going, and the destruction of thinking throughout the empire kept on going for another two centuries.

The monstrosity of the Judeo-Christian god was the gift that kept on giving, for more than a millennium after that. After all, if We The People are monstrous, why not exploit us? Don’t we need to be punished?

Now Luis Leon, a refugee from Guantanamo (!), Cuba tells us that, without the blessing of that imaginary divine, jealous imaginary ogre in heavens,
hatred and arrogance will infect our hearts
distrust, prejudice and rancor will rule our hearts
suspicion, despair, and fear of those different from us will be our rule of life,
we will see only what the eye can see.

So if we don’t abandon ourselves to pathological naivety, ignorance and superstition, we would be full of hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia. But everybody semi-intelligent nowadays, except for some forlorn peasants, ought to know that the bible is made of recycled fables, now that we have the originals, 2,500 years older.

Thus what Reverend Doctor Luis Leon says is that if we are not hallucinating, we are full of hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia. In other words, he views humanity as emotionally disgusting when not insane.

well Luis Leon and his Jesus Christ are wrong. Nearly all and any human has been brought by love, through love; such is the truth of nearly all babies. And Jesus was wrong, and the so called “Golden Rule”, “love others as you do yourself” is also wrong. And so is the biblical Ogre in the sky.

Parental love for the child can, of course, be much greater than the love the parent has for herself, or himself. So the Golden Rule is too weak to describe the beauty and strength of human love. Why? It’s not just a question of neurohormones. It’s also a question that the child, the little child, is precisely completely alien to all what the Reverend doctor Luis Leon believes defines us, as a despicable species.

One could even say that, as Mr. Leon apparently believe small children are full of hatred and other terrible traits, Mr. Leon is a child hater. One must fear that is just not step from child molestation, as clearly, he has already stepped over into (verbal) child abuse. Why are the leaders of the USa so keen to respect a child abuser?

Too bad I was not invited at the Inaugural. had i been there, i would have risen my head, spit on the ground, and walked out. differently from Beyonce’, I don’t do play-back.

Learn, followers of Leon: if we were as despicable as Leon says, we would never have evolved as a . Our hateful, arrogant, distrustful, pre-judging, rancorous, suspicious, despairing, xenophobic ancestors would never have established enough cooperation with each other to survive.
Learn Leon: as you preach that we are despicable, the debasement of humanity, you preach that hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia are us, and thus to be expected in others, as we expect them in us. As some crazy with god act as you say they naturally ought to do, we will get plenty of exploitation, greed and terrorism.

And learn, USA leaders: what’s crossing your silly minds as you bow to horror, and make a religion out of despising humanity? Because that is what Luis Leon preached, the contempt of humanity, one could even say the hatred of humanity.

If you believe we are all that despicable, and you bow to that revelation, as if an object of wonder, you are telling the entire world what you are.

It’s not just ugly, it’s a contradiction, as you too, were brought in love. Your abject submission to Luis Leon’s horrors makes you into hypocrites.

Or maybe you forgot? How come? Too much greed, too much hubris for too long, too much association, for too long with those who are all about greed, power and hubris made you forget that, without love, there is no humanity?
Practicing the Dark Side too long does not make just for a bad heart, but also for an incompetent, senile mind.

Just look at Sasha Obama’s unbelieving face. Truth, children find hard to hide. Yes, Sasha, no Lord can endow humanity with what defines it.To believe otherwise is to make abjection into a religion.
***
Patrice Ayme

Why USA Is Gunning For Guns

Abstract: DOES THE USA HAVE HUMANITY AT THE POINT OF A GUN? The obsession 70% of Americans have with shooting other Americans is the most violent violation of Civil Rights imaginable. That’s why they want it. The will to shoot others is worse than the will to enslave them. Who would profit from such a mentality? How did it come about? Why is the pro-gun obsession progressing in the USA, in parallel with the progression of plutocracy?

This essay explains why plutocracy pushes guns onto society. It opens new perspectives sure to make the nasty scream, and reveal who, among us, deep down inside, overflow with nastiness at heart. It may shame the majority whose action enables child killers (see teachers financing Assault Rifles makers).

Guns in the USA against all and any reason, but the most abject, is not just an Americano-American problem. Life at the point of a gun imposes, in the world’s leading nation, a mentality of privileging violence over reason, and hatred over empathy. That mentality, in turn, is forced onto the rest of the planet (say from movies, universities, opinion, diplomacy).

The Grossest Propaganda Works the Best

Most legislators in the USA are millionaires, and that’s not from their salary! But by doing exactly what their plutocratic masters want them to do. And one fundamental lesson to legislate is: France Bad, Guns Good.
[See note.]
The gun mentality plays the central role in the greenhouse-acid seas disaster: no nation has been so keen to block meaningful action as the USA. The most influential right fanatics who insist upon making the USA into a gun society are those who want plutocracy and maximal fossil fuel burning. Everybody is afraid of them. Letting them shoot their way through civilization, the most basic humanity, and common sense, is not how matters will improve on this planet. (But, of course, making things worse is exactly what they want, and that’s why they caress their warm guns.)

Those who have little time can read my main thesis immediately following (the rest of the 5,000 words of the essay just buttress that main thesis by going into the nitty-gritty, including the direct implication of plutocrats):
***

Main Thesis:
GUNS ARE NOT JUST ABOUT SHOOTING PEOPLE, BUT ALSO ABOUT SHOOTING DOWN LOVE, REASON, By, And While Embracing The Very Mood That Enables Cruel & Violent Masters To Reign:

Possessing guns to kill people with, is about imposing one’s own violence as the ultimate arbitrage. Many Americans claim to view this as the ultimate expression of the American sense of freedom. Call it the freedom to inflict carnage.
The mood dominating the present USA depends upon commoners accepting violence as an overriding principle, and guns symbolize that. Instead of trying to understand things, the way Europeans have learned to do, not knowing enough to know any better is erected as definitive, glorious, all-American.
So right from the start gun advocates are tied in to the worst of man, the Darkest Side, when thoughts are only directed towards murder. Getting them out of that spiral of horror means giving them the courage, and knowledge to recognize that they have made a pact with the devil: their souls, against the orgasmic feeling a warm gun give them. They represent, they have made into an idolatry, the worst of man.

Moreover, gun fanatics succumb that way, not because they are free, but precisely because they are slaves, not because they are courageous, but because they are cowards.
The preceding is not insulting, but objectively descriptive. Insults claim what is not. An accurate depiction is not an insult.
If I describe a garbage pile, that I am contemplating, it’s not an insult. If I describe an angel as a garbage pile, it’s an insult, to the angel, and to reason.
By turning innocent little children regularly into garbage, the gun advocates of America are insulting humanity, as they claim to have the freedom to make holes into children. All the more as gun fanatics cover it all by holier than thou inanities. This essay will come up will plenty of reasons to justify the preceding, turning what precedes not into insults, but into faithful representation of what is.

A plutocracy is not a civil society. Thus, to have a plutocracy, one needs, first, to have a society that is not civil. Guns help to achieve this lack of civility indispensable to plutocracy. This is why the plutocracy insures, through the mass media enough mind control to make sure that, in the USA, people attack each other like rats in cage, with the biggest weapons they can find.

Through its control of mass media, and unending repetition, of the same lies and idiocies, the plutocrats have made the citizens of the USA believe half a dozen absurdities about gun ownership. The result is exactly what the plutocrats wanted: a society where everybody is afraid of everybody, and where the most basic human right, the right to life, is violated. Once the most basic civil and human right is violated, other violations shall easily follow. Such as having the richest and nastiest pay no, or very little taxes. Yes, my point is that the gun problem is just one aspect, part and parcel, one more way to help enable plutocracy.

More subtle, the trite idiot thoughts supporting massive gun usage have made people deeply stupid. The cowards blurt:”We have to defend ourselves!” and grab a gun. Never mind if children get killed. It sounds good to them, so they believe in it, all the more since the rest of them also bleat that way. However, statistics and observations contradict the argument that they have guns to defend themselves. Actually they have guns to kill themselves. Not only are they sadists, but they are also suicidal narcissistic masochists. (The lunatic at the primary school still had hundreds of rounds, but as the police closed in, he killed himself, proving the point that his fundamental mission was to take out his despicably low life. This is typical.)

In the USA, keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one. Never mind! They believe in it! It’s all about faith! Gun and God! Gun is god, and bullets make the only points they can understand.
Gun ownership is not about reason, it’s all about the opposite. Gun ownership is about violating reason: the more one says guns are for defense, and the less true it is, the better! Thus the little minds learn that reason is irrelevant, that what their masters, the plutocrats they venerate, told them, is dominant.

Thus, symbolically, Civil and Human Rights, and reason itself, are exhibited as secondary to what gun fanatics have been told to believe in, namely their right to murder. And they have been told that, again and again and again, by big money, all over the media they control, by the wealthy ones who devise the American discourse. That is all what the plutocrats want their commoners to believe.

Conclusion: A guns totting society is scared, divided, prone to violence against itself, stupid, and, having no time or inclination to establish a class consciousness, cannot organize itself against cruel abuse, as it is too busy dodging bullets. What a better place to establish plutocracy, which is vigilantism writ enormous, for the benefit of the few? And if small people are small vigilantes, is not it natural that the plutocrats employ armies of lobbyists and politicians, let alone body guards and private enclaves, to, well, defend themselves, too?
It goes without saying that the internal violence of the USA comes out externally, and that is why the USA has sabotaged all efforts against heat trapping industrial gases, in the last 30 years.

Interestingly, the same situation exactly, of violence unchained, brought down the Late Roman empire, when plutocracy mutated into the feudal order. Not a coincidence.
Now for the details.
***
Patrice Ayme

Google Slave Master?

I disagreed strongly with G.W. Bush’s lies and folly in Iraq. Presto, my web site disappeared from USA search engines. I was ridiculed by Silicon Alley “friends”: information wants to be free, search engines were beyond any suspicion, did not care about ants such as me. Fast forward to 2012: Google hissed it will be “constrained” to “no longer reference French websites“. Admire the hypocrisy. So much for not manipulating searches. Here is the object of Google’s ire:

Google Slaying French Culture Minister: Brains & Style.

Aurélie Filippetti ministers to advanced culture.

“I’m a little surprised by the tone of this correspondence, which is akin to a threat. You do not deal with a democratically elected government through threats.” Warns the French Culture Minister.

What do Google guys know about democracy?

Aurélie Filippetti has (basically) a PhD in classical literature, published books translated in many languages, is  a Member of Parliament, and France’s Culture Minister. In France the culture ministry is traditionally very important. It covers, among others, the information technology ministry. Filippetti, the daughter of an emigrant miner, belongs to a class vastly superior to the mostly uneducated, unelected Silicon Valley filthy rich conspirators.

French newspaper publishers asked the government in September for a bill compelling search engines, to pay them each time a user reads an article by clicking through to their websites.

Let’s go the crux of the matter: Google makes money out of clicks (from advertizing revenue). Click to what? Authors. Are these authors Google employees? No, Google does not pay those authors. So Google is making profits from the work of others that it does not pay for.

Google makes money by using other people’s work, without compensation. When an owner does not pay people for the work that makes him rich, it’s slavery. It’s the first order definition of slavery.

Europe has seen that movie before. More than 1,000 years ago. Bathilde queen of the Franks, herself an ex-escaped slave, outlawed making a slave (“servus“) of any citizen of the Imperium Francorum (to be rebaptized 150 years later the “Renovated Roman Empire”).

Nevertheless, in the following centuries, many a freeman came “to be a slave” (“servire“) through force or necessity. Sometimes freeholders or allodial owners were intimidated into dependency by the greater physical or legal force of a local plutocrat or magnate. Crop failure, a war or brigandage left a farmer unable to survive on his own. A bargain was struck with a plutocrat, or mighty knight (lord of a manor, to pay for the very expensive weapons and training).

In exchange for protection from the knight, service was required, in cash, produce or with labor, or a combination thereof. These bargains were formalized in a ceremony known as “bondage” in which a serf placed his head in the lord’s hands, similar to the ceremony of homage where a vassal placed his hands between those of his overlord (or kissed his boot). Such people came to be known as “serfs”. “Serf” was a modification of the Latin word for slave, just like the condition of bondage was different, but also viewed as related to slavery. Being a serf was hereditary, but could be exited by staying away thirty days (during which time the lord could hunt down his recalcitrant serf).

England was about 20% slaves until 1066 CE, when the conquering Franks outlawed slavery.

The key enabling concept here is intimidation. Very rich persons intimidated the population into plutocracy. Very rich people, or great plutocratic institutions, had attributed themselves, without any constitutional basis, illegitimate powers, through the sheer power of intimidation. An unintimidated serf who fled to a city, taking the law in his own hands, was thereafter free.

Finally, central governments, unintimidated, grabbed back those illegitimate powers. It took a while, and the central government had to play dirty: Philippe IV Le Bel broke both the Templars and the Papacy shortly after 1300 CE, but it’s only with the mighty efforts of Louis XI and his daughter, the regent queen Anne de France, that France got definitively united as a country under an effective, all mighty national government, shortly before the official discovery of the Americas. (Thus inaugurating the archtypical modern nation-state.)

Google’s slave masters, apparently unaware of 30 centuries of rather ferocious history, are trying to intimidate the French Republic into submission. Not knowing, from full ignorance of the great classics, that few passions give more pleasure to the French and their Gallic ancestors than to put a shining armor on, condemn, and charge evil doers.

Here is a friend of mine, the USA born Amna Shiekh, giving us what all too many in Wall Street admiring circles will consider to be the obvious argument:

“The difference between these French people who are crying thievery and myself – I am GRATEFUL that Google provides a service allowing my websites to be found through keywords…. At no cost to me. My websites would have no chance of being found otherwise. There is a service being provided here. And if you don’t want to contribute to it, then don’t cry when it’s taken away? Very simple!”

Patrice Ayme: “Me me me me me me me me me, or, as Mick Jagger would have it in Gloom & Doom: meeeeeeeeeee is, indeed, the best explanation most people have found, under most circumstances. A generalization of me me me me me me, is us us us us us, also known as nationalism. Being GRATEFUL to the Lords is also most wise, for the commoners, and those who, like worms, like to burrow underground. Slave masters were, are, also providing a service, they always have been, always do. Many love to be punished, it makes them feel important.

Around 1800 CE, it has been evaluated that three quarters of humankind lived in some form of slavery.

The ubiquitousness of slavery explains much of the submitted, and impoverished state, most of the world was in, until recently. (By comparison the French Revolution of 1789 made most French allodial owners, that is, supreme sovereigns on their land… which is still not the case in Great Britain (all land is the Crown’s, all Brits are…vassals)… nor in the USA (“eminent domain” being rather relaxed there)).

Nobody is advocating doing without search engines. They existed well before Google. (And, besides having Sequoia Capital and their associates backing up Google, I do not see what Google brought to search that did not exist before). Because searches are manipulated, search engines are a matter of national security. The fact that an obviously plutocratic organization has achieved a world monopoly on searches is obviously a worry for democracy.

When Francia outlawed slavery, in 655 CE, it was to make the median individual more potent. Not because it was easy, but because it short-circuited plutocracy, the accumulation of ever greater wealth, be it through unfair means (Google, Buffet), or even by any means (hence the Frankish Salian law equalitarianism, preventing the growth of extreme power for the few).

Outlawing slavery reconstituted the mood and power of the early Roman republic, and allowed to rise huge republican armies when the so far undefeated Arab and Berber armies invaded France in 721 CE.

In democracy, humanity in full is in power. That makes democracy, all else been equal, the mightiest social organization in brains and war.

Plutocracy says only an oligarchy of individuals, emotions and ideas are in power. It’s a form of mutilation, parasitism, a malaria of the mind.

Humanity in full is more powerful, and that is why the Franks were able to break the “Germani”, the Arab Muslim invaders (721 CE-750 CE), the Avars, the Vikings, and, with their descendant regimes (such as England, or Spain)  conquer much of the world militarily, and all of it, philosophically (at least formally: even Al Assad leads a “republic”). Nowadays the main Frankish philosophical drive is basically the United Nations Charter. Outlawing slavery is its core.

Slavery is why the management of Greco-Roman civilization by the Greco-Romans failed, and why management transferred to the Franks, and their simple idea of synchronizing polity and humanity, by outlawing it.  (In other words, on a giant civilizational scale, what Obama failed to do on his teeny tiny scale, as he left the slavery inducing Wall Street of 2008 in power, throughout his fateful reign, and its symbols are Summers and Geithner… but I digress, although reckoning is at hand…)   

Amna Shiekh: “Yes, I do think the French who agree with you are crying me me me me me me me – though I don’t think it’s very effective. Maybe when we were five years old this tactic worked quite well….your slave master analogy doesn’t work either. Google isn’t providing a necessary means to live (food, shelter, safety, etc.) that forces me to agree with them…they are not offering something I cannot easily refuse….in other words, your analogy fails.”

Patrice Ayme: Living without the Internet (and its searches) is becoming increasingly impossible. So Google provides with a necessary service.

Google does not pay the people they use to make money, for their work. That’s the definition of slavery. You point out that you profit. Some, no doubt, profit. From slavery some always profited, otherwise slavery would not have come to be. In Rome, some companies specialized in catching escaped slaves, and others in torturing, or executing slaves. Such companies no doubt cried a river when the Franks made their work unlawful. It’s not because you can easily refuse to partake in murder, than murder should not be illegal.

Google whined that their business model was threatened with extinction if France went on with making them pay taxes. Well, too bad. If Google charged for air, and refused to pay taxes, it should be driven out of business too.  

French newspaper publishers asked the French government to intervene against Google in September. Newspapers, journalists, editorialists create ideas (hopefully).

But, fundamentally, Google creates… nothing independently of that substrate of ideas it helps search for, but did not create. (I know Google goes around with cars, taking pictures; but so doing is not creating ideas; if Google did not do it, volunteers certainly would do so, it’s very easy with modern technology.)

This is the general problem with the world economy right now: many manipulators have seized command, when they create nothing fundamental. They are like the Duchess of Cambridge, the Duchesse of Hypocrisy, going around, busy making their celebrity and parasitism fundamental, thanks to their symbiosis with a perverted established order of damnation, dragging not just civilization, but the entire biosphere, into oblivion.

Google leaders should have realized that, by being the world’s largest search engine, they had a moral duty, a fiduciary position, and it was only cautious corporate governance, to behave as an exemplary corporate world citizen. When Google threatened to boycott all and any French sites, it showed, not just its ugly nature, but the fact that it imagines itself as a dangerous, all powerful monopoly. Of course, it will become something of this sort, only if the French Republic let it do as it pleases (we do not expect anything from the White House, for the usual reasons, re-hashed by the end of this essay!). If France can bring down the crafty homicidal maniac Kadafi, its enormous army and secret services, plus connection with USA oil companies, she can cut Google down to size.

In 1936, Hitler decided to kill the Spanish republic, and the Nazi dictator carried by air the rebel Spanish Moroccan army (led by rogue general Franco) into Spain. He did this, thanks to oil from Texaco, a Texas based oil company (the fact were later determined by the Congress of the USA, Texaco got a symbolic fine, so they are a matter of official USA history).

By the way, this explains why the French Front Populaire, then in power, and led by Prime Minister Leon Blum, a Jew, was leery to intervene massively in Spain. Blum knew very well that plutocrats from the USA and their evil corporations were the enablers of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, and that the French and Spanish Republics were under systematic attack by the united forces of plutocracy. (And that war is still going on, with different puppets, Karzai one of them… But the strings pulled from the same establishment and mood. A case in point being Harvard, still central now, as it was in the 1920s and 1930s, making Nazi songs really inspiring.)

Nowadays, this sort of things ought to be meditated more carefully than ever: Hitler pretty much became all he could be, from the help of co-investing plutocratic corporations of the USA. To this day, IBM got away with graciously leasing to all Nazi extermination camps computers, servicing them everyday. The entire Shoah was driven by up to 10,000 computers managed directly by IBM New York, through Geneva. And that is just one case out of many crucial aids to Naziland.

Nowadays, as I said, three quarters of world finance is just the largest mafia the world has ever known. That Google thinks it can get giant profits from the sweat of real mental creators, without any compensation to them whatsoever is typical of the plutocratic mentality, namely everything for a few, in exchange for nothing, but insults.

Some will object that evil obsessed companies such as Google, or Apple made the success of the USA. Indeed: both companies have nearly a trillion dollars of market capitalization, more than the GDP of most countries. (I own a Mc Air, which works very nicely with its solid state drive; Steve Jobs honestly admitted that his company pretty much stole everybody in sight). OK. Fair enough: Apple is a technology integrator (by contrast with a real creator such as Intel). However, the real inventors have got to be rewarded. Neither Apple, nor Google are fundamental innovators (as, say, Intel, or the recent Nobel Laureates in physics and biology are). They are just playing some on TV.

A notorious case, long ago, was the neon tube: the real inventors were not rewarded. The fact that they were French is no excuse: by not rewarding real inventors, one discourages new and future real innovators.

Are vultures evil, do we need them in the real economy?  The sixth point of the 10-point corporate philosophy of Google says “You can make money without doing evil.” So why being evil then? To make much more money than society can sustain?

There are two more bones of contention between Google and the French republic: Google’s confidentiality policy, which the French governmental institution Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL) considers violate French and European law. Basically Google buys and sells people’s lives, another way it behaves like a slave master.

When confronted to France, USA plutophiles generally scoff and evoke cheese eating surrender monkeys (exhibiting their ignorance of military history). However France is building the European Union as a French Republic amplification machine (Germany works best when getting orders from above).

In this particular case, organizations similar to CNIL in 29 other European countries (that’s more than half a billion citizens) have mandated the French CNIL to look into Google’s confidentiality policies.

The CNIL found that Google behavior MUST be modified (“doit etre modifie’”). The CNIL found that the selling and “finalities” of personal data could not be justified on security or legitimate Google grounds, or contract, or people’s consent. The Asia Pacific Privacy Authority and Canada are also supporting the CNIL. In other words, France is transmogrifying into the hard point of a worldwide Google modification effort. No wonder silicon minds are freaking out.

And not least: Google pays no tax on all the money it earns from French based companies.

As Sarkozy, the fired French president, not exactly a socialist, pointed out about Google:“It is not permissible that they realize a turnover of several billion euros in France without contributing to tax”.

Silicon dark alley types such as the young Google zillionaires and the old venture capital foxes behind them are not educated in the classical way. The human side of the economy escapes them totally, that’s how they made it. And they have this in common with crocodiles.

But how hard is it to understand? If you make billions in France, you have to pay tax in France. And yes, that could mean billions in taxes. And if you keep on not understanding this, the Republic will use force against you, it is as simple as that. Evil uses force, and only a greater force can dispose of evil.

And what evil is that? It’s not just Google’s hypocrisy shows with its slogan: Don’t be evil (We are in charge of that!), and its worldwide machinations, its tax avoidance. Google can fix all these things overnight. 

The problem is much larger, much older, than that. Why does the government of the USA close its collective eyes on this sort of behavior? Why is it that it is the French Republic which has to set straight an American corporation?

As Google’s anti-democratic threat makes pretty obvious, the same sort of plutocracy of the USA which, 80 years ago, was all fired up, and ready to help impose Adolf Hitler onto the world, is still viewed as an asset by Washington. Only the naive would believe that companies such as those which helped Hitler got away with so much, for so long, operated without a particularly Dark Will of a political nature behind them. The same will is still here, 80 years after its Hitlerian triumph. Generations pass away, systems of thought perdure.

Will is a mighty thing, especially when it’s all about grabbing territory. It’s fascinating to see Rome, rendered completely senile by centuries of plutocracy, still rabid about conquering the world, when it had lost all power to do so, in the Third Century. That’s when Rome made several full invasion of Mesopotamia, all the way to the Persian Gulf, and into North West Iran, all the way to the Caspian Sea. A full century after emperor Valerian had been captured (treacherously, during peace talks), his army destroyed, Julian (the emperor elected in and by Paris) was killed in Mesopotamia (with catastrophic consequences).

(Shades of Hitler moving decisively ghost armies around Berlin in April 1945.) The immense riches that people who are nothing (such as the pseudo “founders” of Google, Brin and Page), just because their company pays no taxes, is symptomatic of a system that uses corporations for building an empire, the way Rome used Christianity to expand further than its sword could reach.

So the will to let rogue corporations of the USA conduct their own foreign policy and exploitation of the world is still here, as it was in the 1920 s and 1930s, building up Nazism.

All the more as that method, to use criminal businessmen to leverage even greater criminality was extremely successful in connection with the Nazi adventure, and the Stalin venture, with its near fatal weakening of Europe, and the Muslim Fundamentalist venture, with its resource procurement, etc.

Thanks to the rogue corporation strategy, the USA went from a provincial power (a bit like Australia nowadays) to the world superpower, within a few years. No wonder the rogue corporation models keeps on being applied. All the way to Afghanistan…

A militarized plutocratic Rome kept on invading Mesopotamia, for two centuries, when it was not civilized enough, not republican, nor democratic enough, to cling to it. In a similar fashion, the USA has not comprehended that other nations and peoples are starting to understand exactly what’s going on. Obama’s soporific Cairo speech hypocritically celebrating Islam had a short shelf life.

While I get accused of metastatic conspiracy theorizing, let me smile through an article in a major Arabic newspaper, which “reveals” in depth one of my preferred obsession, and allegation, namely the entanglement between dark operators in Washington, and the worst Muslim Fundamentalism.

As I have explained over the years, that entanglement of evil dates all the way back to Adolf Hitler and its minions, and, lo and behold, that’s exactly what the article observes. Hopefully I will write something on this, while Obama and his Machiavellian sycophants cruise to their well deserved doom and gloom.

Tell the truth long enough, and sometimes it ends up setting evil on fire!

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Why the servus of the Romans came to be called “slaves”? Simple: it was illegal to enslave Franks (by 600 CE everybody was a “Frank”, and by 700 CE, they came to be called “Europeans”). But it was not illegal to enslave Slavs… Charlemagne let the Venitian Republic, a sort of subsidiary of the Renovated Roman Empire, engage, with her mighty fleet, in a prodigious slave trading to the Muslim empire of the Southern Mediterranean.

USA & France Do NOT Respect Religion

UNHOLY ALLIANCE OF ISLAMISM WITH DARK HOUSE CLUELESS ON FREEDOM, The Essence Of The West:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney reading a prepared statement: “We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this… We know these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory.”

Muha Bad, or Muha Mad? Neither! White House suggests ‘figure resembles prophet Muhammad’!

This is the cartoon that the (fanatically Islamist?) White House views as “deeply offensive“. What about deeply offending the USA Constitution and the Founding Fathers? [Caption translates as: The movie that inflames the Muslim World; then the "figure resembling the Prophet Muhammad" according to the White House, says: "And my buns, do you like my buns?".] 

“Deeply offensive to many“? Many what? Grand inquisitors? Salafists? Did the White House see the picture of the burned ambassador, not quite completely dead? They have been shown in France. Atrocious pictures. That’s what “deeply offensive” means, burning alive innocent people, good people.

***

“We are aware… we know… obviously…questions… judgment…figure resembling the prophet Muhammad…deeply offensive”. In any discourse, one can gather a lot by the context the key words describe. (Those knowing combinatorial topology will recognize keys words describe a simplicial complex the faces of which define higher concepts…)

The USA administration’s  hostility to the famous French magazine Charlie Hebdo follows the administration’s September 14 effort to persuade Google to take down a short, cheap satirical video on YouTube that also angered a few fanatical Islamists. Thank god, for once Google lived up to its slogan:”Don’t be evil!“

What basically the administration is doing is the following. Some Christian fundamentalists have killed doctors, because,  they said, they were offended by abortion. Suppose a cartoon came out, suggesting that the assassins are narcistic, and obsessed by whether they looked good. Would the White House have declared that such a cartoon was “deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory“? So why the pandering to fanatic criminals? A few days after an American ambassador and three other employees of the State Department got assassinated?

The State Department has been incredibly incompetent: incapable of defending a “mission” against 70 guys armed with diesel fuel. The USA ambassador and another US citizen died in the fire. The attack was on 9/11. In a second attack, a bit later, some of the attackers were carrying weapons bigger than Obama himself. Two ex Navy seals got killed.

The video describing the major contents of the Qur’an, made by an Egyptian, had been out for 6 months. Accusing it was untenable. Still, that is what the White House did, following the discourse of Islamist fanatics. Who is better at determining what insults Islam than Islamist fanatics? Nobody in the world, proposes the White House! No doubt the majority of Muslims, who are deeply hostile to Islamist fanatics, will thus find a new reason to dislike the White House, and to suspect that it’s there mostly to add fuel (diesel or not) to the fire.

Did the administration read the Qur’an? What’s in that video that is not in the Qur’an? I read one and watched the other, and I fail to see in which sense the video is not deeply respctful of the Innocence of Muslims, as revealed by scripture.

By insisting that the attack was caused by “Innocence of Muslims“, the administration made a joint statement with Al Qaeda: trailer kills ambassador. Same thing about condemning Muhammad’s sketches; so doing, the White House is insisting that the Wahhabist interpretation of Islam is the correct one.

Finally the administration recognized the obvious. Yes, it was a terrorist attack. After all. Al Qaeda.

***

USA DOES NOT RESPECT RELIGION, SAY CONSTITUTION, FOUNDING FATHERS:  

Does the administration know the Constitution? Apparently not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution starts with: “Congress shall make no law RESPECTING an establishment of religion…

In an astounding contrast, the White House orders us to respect sketches of naked guys worrying about whether their buns look good, because, well, some crazed fanatics, somewhere, have it that’s against their superstition. Not just against their superstion, but their heavens high indignation gives them the right to kill whoever has displeased them. And the present White House approves? Why should we abhor sketches of naked guys? Why should we obsess about naked guys?

Jefferson, Third President of the USA, wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law RESPECTING an establishment of religion…thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Calling the clowns in the white House “apes” (as the Qur’an does, speaking of Jews and Christians) would be too mild, because apes ape, and the White House boys can’t even do this.

In the Treaty Of Tripoli, worked on by all the Founding Fathers, and signed on by the first two presidents of the USA, George Washington, and John Adams we find this:

 As the Government of the United States of America is not, IN ANY SENSE, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from RELIGIOUS OPINIONS shall EVER produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

“Not in any sense, no pretext ever from religious opinion“: get it, Obama? Learn. A corollary, obviously, is that the USA is not, in any sense, founded on the MUSLIM religion. So Muhammad’s buns, if any, are none of the USA’s official business.

Another corollary is that all the god stuff brandished since 1954 CE in the USA about Allah is unconstitutional. The present period will be viewed in history as the times when the presidents of the USA thought they were Caliphs!

On the whole planet, the total number of demonstrators against “Innocence of Muslims” and the French caricatures, so far, including government organized demonstrations in Sudan and Iran, is 150,000… out of 1.5 billion Muslims, that’s .1%. A tenth of one percent. Yet, when the White House, in the name of the American People, denounces free speech, as Carney did, that’s 310 million speaking, and a major democracy falling for the Dark Side of god.

The Administration insisted, initially that the lethal attack against the USA ambassador and other government officials, had everything to do with “Innocence of Muslims“. In other words, people  supposedly “denigrating” Islam caused the attack.

The White House and others kept on describing the trailer as “denigrating“, but they forgot to tell us why, and how, exactly. Wild accusations without explicit foundation are just devolutions of reason.

Here, watch me go explicit. The trailer was accused to represent Muhammad as a pedophile polygamist who got involved in combat with a bloody sword, and whose ideas came from a Christian monk, cousin to his wife. The trailer mostly follows impeccably the Qur’an and Hadith, as I explained in “Progress kills Killer Religions“.

Yes, Muhammad married a 6 year old girl. Yes he had many “wives” some from the battlefield, some Jewish, some from a irate subordinate. Yes, Muhammad was a raider of caravans, and led battles personally, resulting in the death of thousands. Including an entire Jewish tribe, annihilated. This is all in the sacred texts of Islam.

***

FRANCE’S UNCOMPROMISING STANCE ON ISLAM:

In 721 CE, the greatest army Islam ever had, invaded “Francia”. The Franks of the Dux of Aquitania retreated, setting a trap for the charging Islamist horde, which was annihilated. Two further invasions followed, with the same result, bold Muslim penetrations, followed by encirclement, entrapment and annihilation, hammered by Charles Martel, a Carolingian, grandfather of Charlemagne. Militarily decapitated, the Arab caliphate fell by 750 CE, and was never seen again (other Islamized nations became dominant, such as Iranian, Mongols and Turks)  

The White house kept on debasing itself. A somewhat haggard Clinton read a statement on Friday claiming the USA had nothing to do with the “Innocence of Muslims”. Meanwhile, in the center of civilization, Charlie Hebdo made another massive printing of its Muhammad cartoons. Disingenuously, USA media claimed the French government had condemned the cartoons “swiftly”. It was not ‘swift”, and it did not happen.(The New York Times just misrepresented what French foreign minister Fabius (a “Jew”) had said.)

Quite the opposite. Several days before Charlie Hebdo went on the attack, the French president, Hollande, inaugurating the magnificent museum of Islamic Arts in the Louvres, Paris, condemned religious fanaticism: “Les meilleures armes pour lutter contre le fanatisme qui se reclame de l’Islam se trouve dans l’Islam lui meme. Quand le patrimoine est saccage’, ceux sont toutes les civilisations qui sont attaquees…[ce qu'il faut condamner c'est] L’insondable betise qui rend chaque civilisation vulnerable. “

(Best weapons against the Islamist fanaticism are found in Islam itself. When patrimony is devastated, it’s all of civilization which is attacked… What one needs to condemn is the unfathomable stupidity that makes each civilization vulnerable )

The issue of Charlie Hebdo condemned by the White House had only 2 or 3 cartoons that could be religiously interpreted out of 30 or so in the issue. The weekly comments on the events of the week, it comes out on Wednesday. However, it proved so successful that it quickly ran out, and it was reprinted exceptionally for Friday, the day of the great prayer. So much for the French being terrorized by Muhammad’s buns.

The director of publishing at Charlie Hebdo pointed out that the great religions live out of the fear they inspire. Instead, most people publishing Charlie Hebdo  don’t want to live in fear, they want to live in fun and good humor, lightly. 

One thing the White House should pay more attention to is that to live lightly has to do with light and the enlightenment. Why should those who want to live in the light, by the light, and lightly, care about what master terrorists expert in the mania of crowds claim to worry idiotically about?

***

Patrice Ayme

Great Extermination, Big Nation, Little Minds?

SUPERIOR MILITARY BIG EMPIRE MAKES, BUT NOT CIVILIZATION:

  It’s 9/11, so we should celebrate, I mean commemorate, right? It’s not as if someone like me did not see it coming. I don’t have to commemorate in silence, because I have lots to say that is relevant, to avoid much greater horrors, looking forward (concentrate on Fundamentalist thermonuclear USA sponsored Pakistan for a hint).

 Thus I commemorate by telling the truth about the aggression of Washington DC against the Republic of Afghanistan, starting in the mid 1970s and related, more fundamental, conflict generating issues, such as foaming at the mouth nationalism, as made pathetically manifest in the deluded 2012 democratic and republican conventions.

  When nationalism blinds understanding, it’s evil. The plutocrats, and the corporations they own, irresistibly attracted by the minerals of Afghanistan, have first operated discreetly to create mayhem in central Asia, and then played USA nationalism as a violin, to get what they want; the greedy terror state they own and pay for.

  By coincidence, a day after I criticized Obama for fantasizing about the “USA is the greatest nation” Robert Kaplan published the major article in the weekend Wall Street Journal about why the USA is such a great nation. One would expect the Wall $treet Journal to extoll furiously the grandeur of the USA, and the glory of capitalism, and its armies, as Obama and Biden did last week, in an orgy of imperial self satisfaction. Well, think again. Most people don’t become rich by being idiots 24/7.

  Kaplan says that the pre-eminence of the USA is a lot about occupying a big, wonderful, special place. So make a note of this: while democrats, supposedly on the left, are screaming their heads out that the USA is a great, incomparable Reich, thanks to the intrinsic genius of its great race and its plutocratic ways, the Wall Street Journal, yes the journal of Wall $treet, more humbly conclude that it is all about enjoying the pleasures of treasure island. Kaplan observes:

  ” The U.S. itself is no exception to this sort of [geographical] analysis. Why are we the world’s pre-eminent power? Americans tend to think that it is because of who we are. I would suggest that it is also because of where we live: in the last resource-rich part of the temperate zone settled by Europeans at the time of the Enlightenment, with more miles of navigable, inland waterways than the rest of the world combined, and protected by oceans and the Canadian Arctic.”

  The resources of the USA have indeed proven, so far, practically infinite. No doubt, the wasteful habits of the culture of the USA come from that. And no doubt wasting resources has proven a profitable multiplier. Such as when wasting the buffalo, which, in turn, starved the well armed Plains Indians, a helpful factor in their genocide, that movie goers who watched “Dancing With Wolves” may remember.

  For most of the age of oil, the USA was the world’s primary oil producer. Not because USA citizens are geniuses, but because there is oil in the USA from the North-East, to the Los Angeles Basin in the extreme South-West. It’s something about the ground, not the hogs.

  This generosity with oil was most useful to clients of the USA plutocrats and corporations, such as Adolf Hitler, and his thousands of tanks and planes. Hitler started his invasions propelled by Texas oil…(Sold to him in spite of the Neutrality Acts. ) That was crucial to the self described “French-haters“. In geography is not just reality, but the impact of past and present philosophy:

***

WORLD LARGEST COUNTRIES BY LAND AREA:

1 Russia: 17 million square kilometers.

2 Canada: 10 million sq kms

3 USA: 9.6 sq kms

4 China: 9.6 sq kms

5 Brazil: 8.5 sq kms

6 Australia: 7.7 sq kms

7 European Union: 4.3 sq kms

  The first six largest countries are all recent empires established by military power (whereas the EU was established by debate). About two-thirds of Chinese territory was conquered over people who have fought the Han (most of the PRC’s population), for millennia. The Tibetans, for example, controlled much, or most of “China” for centuries. So did the Mongols and the Manchu. No wonder the Chinese government is not open to minority rights, self determination, and floods the exterior regions with Hans.

  The case of China is not the one where military invasion is the most conspicuous, because, after all, the Chinese have been fighting over China for as long as Rome existed.

  Russia was bottled west of the Urals until 1700 or so. Now Russia controls a land area four times larger than the entire European Union. Russia will be able to hold onto this immensity either by becoming part of the EU, or by deploying (extremely) excessive military force indefinitively (in other words, fascism at home).

  Let’s look at the other four. If one goes back 250 years, one notices that the ethnic composition of the land masses above changed completely over these centuries. The original inhabitants were (mostly) wiped out. Compare French New Caledonia, half made of descendants of the original population, and Australia next door, where the aborigines are mostly gone and the object of genocidal policies even in the 1960s or 1970s. By the official definition of genocide, which applies when one separates children from their parents. Canada used the same genocidal policies, just as recently. The USA had physically eliminated the Indians much earlier.

  One can classify the large empires in three groups. One, made of China, is actively oppressive. that means China did not yet exterminate the 100 or so ethnic groups that cramp the acts and empire of the dominant Han. Another, group, Russia, Brazil, is a mix of invasion and elimination (remember Stalin’s massive, murderous deportations). There are still natives left, and a tension in the air. The rest, made of Canada, USA, Australia has, in practice, eliminated the natives (except in a few zones, where they are shown as counter-examples of little consequence). Ethnic cleansing, at its most thorough.

Some will say that’s instant history. But yesterday’s history makes today’s philosophy. 

***

IF WE KILL THEM, THEY WILL GIVE US WHAT WE WANT: 

  How do we abstract that? Holocausts work. Can we propose a more general abstract from this? FORCE WORKS. That’s not surprising, but the fundamental fact of human evolution.

  Some who know basic classical mechanics will shrug that such is the definition of work: the application of force over an extent of space. This is an example where the categories found by deep thinking in the hard fact sciences can be readily used in the “soft” sciences.

  People on the “left”, would be “progressives” and similar types, do not like to be reminded of this principle, that force works, nowadays. Their excuse is that the fascist, Bolshevik style revolutions, which naturally abused force, being fascist proved to be, well, fascist, and abusive. To the point that they made a bad situation worse: it’s unlikely that the Czar’s regime would have been as bad as what Lenin put in place. By a very long shot. Indeed, fundamentally, it’s the Prussians who attacked Russia on August 1, 1914, who ended up putting Stalin in place. It would never have happened otherwise.

  But the truth is otherwise. In truth, they have learned to be happy to be pawns. Forgetting to apply force is inhuman. One does not have to go bloody in the streets, Lenin style. The most important revolutions are spiritual, mental, brainy.

  Thus the Indignes (Indignados, reduced semantically to “Occupy Wall Street” in the USA) movement is (was?) a good thing. Do we need president Romney to resuscitate it? Well, except for a severe degradation of the economy, there will be no president Romney. just singing the praises of Obama whatever he does not only will not bring progress, but an ever deepening regression down the hell of plutocracy. opening up like a giant, civilization devouring caldera.

  And just as the idiocy and jingoism of the Athenian People brought the defeat of Athens, and ultimately democracy, so it would be again.

  Mental force can be as quiet. A teen age French physicist made sparks in his father’s lab, and observed carefully how an electric circuit reacted. Thus, in 1839, less than 200 years ago, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel discovered the Photo Voltaic effect. So is real innovation: a deep affair of the mind.

  In 2012, the USA will install about 2,500 Mega Watts of Photo Voltaic panels, more than two nuclear reactors. Solar power is now 20 times cheaper than it was when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on top of the White House (Reagan had them removed, because he hated the sun, as pertains those who love the Dark).

  Thanks to Monsieur. Becquerel’s innovation.

***

MENTAL FORCE IS THE GREATEST FORCE:

  Human beings are spiritual creatures. Most of what they do, they do, thanks to their minds. Obama, for whatever reason, some tied to his inexperienced, babe-in-the-woods, background, advantaged the banksters, the Military Industrial Complex and other dark forces in his first four years.

  Some will scoff, they will sneer that the Military Industrial Complexes are what allowed the creation of the world’s largest empires (exposed above), so the MICs are important creative forces (for good, or evil). They create facts on the ground. Those who disagree are just enemies to be, at best, ignored and despised.

  Empires create facts on the ground, thus in the minds.

  Indeed, it is important to realize that force can be applied to spiritual structures, not just material ones (the connection between both notions has to do with the fact that the spiritual world is actually brain based, that means, based in physical structures in the brain).

  Just as force can be applied on mental structures, so can inertia. The main problem of the Obama presidency, so far, has been that, instead of impelling momentum towards the forces of progress, it has, wittingly or not, imparted momentum towards the forces of Darkness. (And his debates about health care and banks, or Afghanistan, were shrouded in fog, mirrror, smoke and impenetrable committees. For example, what’s the name of the Death Panel at the White House? And if it kills citizens, it clearly has turned the executive branch into the executor branch, and overlaps another branch of government, Justice…)

  In all this I am not faulting necessarily Obama. After all, he was just parachuted into the presidency. But where is the rest of the progressive troops? Who is pushing Obama to the left? The Tea Party elected many representatives (Ryan an example). Where are the representatives representing “Occupy Wall $treet“?

***

WE’RE HYPER NATIONALISTIC & IGNORANT, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

  A typical  pseudo progressive commented on my preceding essay:

  “…corporations are behind everything this writer [Patrice Ayme] says is happening. This is one big worldwide mob at work. Obama is just a tool of corporations, as have Presidents been before him. My husband & I have made scathing remarks about Obama and how he didn’t deliver on many things he claimed he would. But the level of scathing remarks of this person [Patrice Ayme] clearly shows a bias and hatred. …even though people are lulled by the rhetoric of positive speech, it’s still positive speech that people need to hear to jerk us out of fear, hopelessness and apathy. Our thought processes need to be elevated. …America is both the greatest nation on earth, from the standpoint of innovation, technology, and conveniences. At the same time, we are also the most corrupt and damaging force in the world. You cannot have one without the other in this world of opposites unfortunately. “

  Pseudo progressives tend to confuse “bias and hatred”, for what is simply… extremely firm advice to my good friend Obama (one voice against a mob of banksters and sycophants!). The text above is typical: after calling Obama a mobster, I am pilloried in the name of… an orgasm of wishful thinking and crazed jingoism.

***

USA AS INNOVATION GREATEST? THINK AGAIN!

  In truth, the USA has not been as innovative as the leading Western European nations. As far as the key breakthroughs. It’s mostly the huge USA market that makes USA products successful. Germany and Britain flew jets before the USA.

  It’s only by distorting reality that the USA is made to look more intellectual that it really is. A lot of USA superiority is not just from dominating a big virgin continent, but also, simply, by having a big market. For example the neon tube was invented in France, but even the French visiting Vegas do not know this, and the French inventors did not win the patent battle with the USA exploiters.

  At least Steve Jobs had the honor of thieves: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”—PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, 1996. I have met Venture Capitalists-engineers, in the Silicon Valley who told me the same, smiling that most of their jobs was to go to Europe and steal ideas in the smaller markets there.

  OK, some major innovations arrived too early, for the USA to play a role. Such as French Hugenot and doctor Papin, inventing the piston steam engine, and the first heat engine powered vehicle.

  Papin’s inventions the English stole for their greater renown, so we measure power in Watts and not Paps (17 C). This is all the more spectacular as it is a French lady  Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, who definitively demonstrated the concept of energy (the core of modern physics). Even Newton did not find anything that important.

  As her lover Voltaire said to Fredrick II of Prussia, du Châtelet was “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”. Also French. So the Anglo-Saxons are on their knees singing the praises of Newton, they don’t even know why, just that it is civilized to do so. A man. White. English. Master of the Mint (he switched England to the gold standard).

  So the France played the crucial role in the domestication of energy. The first cars (truly steam tanks commissioned by the French royal army), were followed by the first balloons (in Versailles) and a century later, the first motorized airplanes (Avion I, II, and III, of Ader, also a military program).  Irène Joliot-Curie, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner (1935), for the transmutation of elements followed this by discovering the nuclear chain reaction, that is nuclear energy, in 1937.

  Once again, for reason of quasi rabid anti-French bias, the discovery of nuclear energy is attributed by the dominant Anglo-Saxon plot, eager to make the French pass for simpletons, to those to whom Irène Joliot-Curie taught the reaction (although with lots of difficulty, because Hahn and Meitner were not as bright, and the former’s relation with Nazism far from klar).

  The French nuclear bomb program, started in January 1938, had to migrate to England and then Manhattan (Manhattan Project), for obvious reasons.   Later Anglo-Saxon political leaders (Churchill, etc.) thought about caging all French top physicists, because, in their anti-French rage, they thought they would tell Stalin how to make nuclear bombs. The scientific leader of the project was Italian Enrico Fermi, another non USA, anti-fascist Nobel Physics winner.

  And so it is for a lot of innovations. Photography, both black and white, and color was invented in France (the French government bought the patents, and put the discovery at the disposition of mankind”). 

  Basically all the basic ideas in cars were developed in France and Germany, from the internal combustion engine (Swiss with hydrogen, then French with gasoline, and then patented to Daimler) to front wheel drive (Citroen) and radial tires (Michelin).

  Same with planes (and that’s why much of the aircraft vocabulary is French)

  The same extent to science. And it’s not just about the Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot engine and the basics of thermodynamics.

  Let me say in passing that it is astounding how much the French did for energy, practically, conceptually, and mathematically, I discovered when writing this! If one adds the discovery by Laplace of the Laplacian, core of modern physics’ manipulations, the French pretty much discovered everything important about energy.

  Most of the ideas having brought the big physics breakthroughs (Relativity, Quantum), came from France (Relativity principle, Quantum principle), Germany (Quantum of Light, Gravitation as curvature), Britain (Atom model, QED), with important Irish (Equations of Relativity) and Dutch (Lorentz) contributions. The significant USA contributions were Michelson-Morley (no ether drag, although that was known from French Fizeau too) and the (accidental) confirmation of De Broglie’s deep inspiration.

  USA propaganda twists reality badly. During WWII Nazi cruise missiles sank even Allied battleships. Why? Germans had discovered Germanium (I am not making this up) transistors in the 1930s… So even the transistor was as much an invented in the USA as apple pie.

  What’s left for a great Americano-American innovation? The laser. But there again, it turns out Europeans did the heavy lifting, and USA citizens put up the last decorations. Thanks to Einstein’s discovery of optical pumping, on paper, and its practical invention, with directed stimulation of radiation by light, in Paris, rue d’Ulm, by Alfred Kastler, and his group.

  Kastler got a solitary Physics Nobel in 1966 for that key invention, which made the laser quasi obvious (although that near trivial consequence, the laser, got discovered at Columbia U in New York, and a Nobel was attributed, there was a legal fight, and the one who did not get the Nobel got the judgment in his favor!)  

  I do not want to denigrate the USA as all too many in the USA view as a mission from god (that would be Wall $treet) to denigrate France, but the USA is a society less carried away by deep thinking. Some will scoff, and point at all the Nobels and the classification of universities, from Shanghai University. But those notions are related, big time and non linearly, to plutocracy.

The Nobels are not just given by Sweden, a nation that collaborated with Hitler and its Anglo-Saxon plutocratic sponsors as early as the 1930s (see the Assange affair for how low Sweden can sink, although the collaboration with Hitler was so great that France and Britain had decided to invade Sweden in 1940). The Nobel committee in Physics, for example, is mostly made of USA physicists. Same in economics. And all intellectuals dream of being paid by the hyper rich USA plutocratic universities, so they are anxious to please those potential clients for their wares.

The process is self feeding and vastly overestimate the intellectual prowess of plutocratically managed countries.
 ***

GEOGRAPHY IS NOT JUST PHYSICAL, BUT HUMAN:

  As Kaplan puts is in the Wall $treet Journal:

“As a way of explaining world politics, geography has supposedly been eclipsed by economics, globalization and electronic communications. It has a decidedly musty aura, like a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, those who think of foreign policy as an opportunity to transform the world for the better tend to equate any consideration of geography with fatalism, a failure of imagination.

But this is nonsense. Elite molders of public opinion may be able to dash across oceans and continents in hours, allowing them to talk glibly of the “flat” world below. But while cyberspace and financial markets know no boundaries, the Carpathian Mountains still separate Central Europe from the Balkans, helping to create two vastly different patterns of development, and the Himalayas still stand between India and China, a towering reminder of two vastly different civilizations.

Technology has collapsed distance, but it has hardly negated geography. Rather, it has increased the preciousness of disputed territory. As the Yale scholar Paul Bracken observes, the “finite size of the earth” is now itself a force for instability: The Eurasian land mass has become a string of overlapping missile ranges, with crowds in megacities inflamed by mass media about patches of ground in Palestine and Kashmir…”

  That, to make it clear, is an allusion to 200 millions fanatical, thermonuclear armed Pakistani, and their best friends have been the plutocrats of the USA. USA plutocrats brought with them immensely greater gifts. than the Greeks could ever imagine. (Ironically, it’s USA plutocrats, Goldman-Sachs, who brought gifts to Greek crooks. Curiously enough the eurocrats, so good at making European People suffer, have forgotten to visit pain onto Goldman-Sachs. Actually Goldman got rewarded, as two super Marios, Monti and Draghi, are now piloting Europe, among other Goldman alumni.

  Pursues Kaplan: “Even so seemingly modern a crisis as Europe’s financial woes is an expression of timeless geography. It is no accident that the capital cities of today’s European Union (Brussels, Maastricht, Strasbourg, The Hague) helped to form the heart of Charlemagne’s ninth-century empire. With the end of the classical world of Greece and Rome, history moved north. There, in the rich soils of protected forest clearings and along a shattered coastline open to the Atlantic, medieval Europe developed the informal power relations of feudalism and learned to take advantage of technologies like movable type.”

  It was also technology. The mastery of steel of the Gauls (and thus the Franks) was such that the very heavy ploughs necessary to dig in that heavy soil could be constructed , pulled by bio engineered oxen and giant draught horses, harnessed in new ways.

***

CIVILIZATION IS SUSTAINED, LONG TERM, BY, AND ONLY BY, CORRECT PHILOSOPHY:

  An area where the USA lags increasingly is anything touching to the philosophical. This area, of course is, by far, the most important to allow the continuation of civilization. For example, as the Maya went down, because of drought and ecological devastation, instead of thinking deep, they went to each other’s throats.

  And we have counter examples. When Rome fell to the Gauls, the entire Senate put on its most magnificent clothes, ivory staff by the side. All the Senators sat on ceremonial seats, in a vast courtyard. They took the thinkers’ pose, pinching their chins in their right hands. They stood standing completely still.

  The Gallic warriors , shock troops, armed to the teeth, covered with fine  steel mail, and light steel helmets, with their giant steel swords, the world’s best, invaded the courtyard and with their horses clinging with the brand new tech of Celtic iron shoes. The Gallic shock troops were stunned. All of Rome had been open, and evacuated, except for the fortress of the Capitol hill, symbolically held by a garrison.

  Why were all the Senators there? Why is this courtyard? What did they want to prove? And why this ridiculous pose, anticipating Rodin’s thinker by 23 centuries? What were all this most prestigious leaders of Rome thinking? Striking a pose? What were those past consuls trying to show to the finest Gallic warriors?

  The eldest Senators of Rome were trying to show to themselves, to all of Rome, that they had failed, that they had collectively failed, that the mental system, the strategies that they had advocated, for decades, were drastically erroneous. a global re-think was in order. The top mental leadership of Rome had got to be decapitated.

  They were there to offer their lives, to sacrifice them to the cognitive failure that they had committed. The Gallic warriors milled around, astounded, feeling. deep down that something immense was in evidence.

***

9/11: FRUIT OF THE DELIBERATELY ERRONEOUS WAYS OF USA PLUTOCRACY:

  The increasing imbalance is demonstrated by the rising inequity and inequality in the USA, all over the place, not just wealth and income, but also in health, justice, and education.

  This is not just a USA story, as USA clout is such, and the control its plutocracy exerts on allied plutocracies, all over the world, is such, that the cancer started in the USA has become globally metastatic.

  Hey, it’s 9/11, so we should celebrate, I mean commemorate, right? So I commemorate 37 years of the war of the USA against the republic of Afghanistan, with a particular thought for Prince Harry who is keen to demonstrate that it is a patriotic duty for a plutocratic Brit to shoot Afghans to death from his big armored helicopter, while occupying Afghanistan.

  2,700 died on 9/11, whereas more than a thousand times as many Afghans were killed since the beginning of the armed USA intervention in Afghanistan. USA plutocrats and their agents are poised to recolt trillions in minerals, as long as the USA military stay in Afghanistan, after NATO much advertized departure in 2014 (The French, disgusted, are already removing their attack army, they will leave only advisers).  

  As Obama put it: “We work harder and smarter than anybody else.”

  Error for the many, profits for the few.

***

MILITARY MEANS ARE ULTIMATE  TO DOMINATE GEOGRAPHY:

  Here is Kaplan again:

  “If you want to know what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don’t read their newspapers or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can reveal as much about a government’s aims as its secret councils. More than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources.

  Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources…

  In this very brief survey of the world as seen from the standpoint of geography, I don’t wish to be misunderstood: Geography is common sense, but it is not fate. Individual choice operates within a certain geographical and historical context, which affects decisions but leaves many possibilities open. The French philosopher Raymond Aron captured this spirit with his notion of “probabilistic determinism,” which leaves ample room for human agency.

  But before geography can be overcome, it must be respected. Our own foreign-policy elites are too enamored of beautiful ideas and too dismissive of physical facts-on-the-ground and the cultural differences that emanate from them. Successfully navigating today’s world demands that we focus first on constraints, and that means paying attention to maps. Only then can noble solutions follow. The art of statesmanship is about working just at the edge of what is possible, without ever stepping over the brink.”

  Well, we are going over the brink.

The human engineered poisoning of the atmosphere with CO2 and other, even more vicious greenhouse gases, has a superexponential character to itself, that will become very obvious, all too soon. The Military Industrial Complexes have a great future, coming up.

And another thing. All too many, especially on the supposedly progressive left, but also on the self satisfied right, behave as if caring what’s all it takes. Yet, to really care, means to be aware. And of the harsh realities, first of all. If one wants to act well, one needs the facts good.

***

Patrice Ayme

REASON FROM UNREASON

Superior CRAZINESS For Superior LOGIC.

CALM IS OVERRATED, CRAZINESS A LOGICAL NECESSITY:

Abstract: Why do people go crazy? Is it fate, or is it evolution? Is it disease, or is it creativity?

 Two of the creators of modern mathematics and metamathematics, Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel, experienced some craziness. Nietzsche produced some of his best work before he went insane. Van Gogh experienced serious mental difficulties. Bolztman killed himself. All these cases were within a generation. Those may all be unrelated accidents, sure. 

 However I will show below that superior intelligence in a species can only come from an ability to engineer (productive) craziness. (Perhaps the reason why chimps and bears are so unpredictable: they are not just clever, but a bit crazy!)

 What president Roosevelt said of the bankers:”I welcome their hatred!” may sound crazy to some, and it is exactly the opposite of the praises the all too cool Obama bestow on bankers, every chance he gets. But Roosevelt domesticated the bankers, whereas Obama got domesticated by them. Of course the superior intelligent one was Roosevelt, who knew it was smart to go crazy on the bankers. It’s certainly crazy to cling to an appearance of sanity in an insane situation (Eichmann used Kant to justify his crimes, an appearance of philosophy to promote infamy.)

Thus insanity is hardwired in Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Perhaps Homo Wise Wise, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, should be renamed Homo Crazy Wise: Homo Sapiens Demens! 

This has some fascinating, but sinister implications for Artificial Intelligence. In his Turing Test for intelligence, Alan Turing forgot craziness. That was crazy.

 It also means that, as insanity will follow a normal distribution, some substantial part of any human population will be insanely dangerous. 

 As technological capability improves exponentially, the danger exists that this insanity will be also exponentially amplified (as happened with the death camps of WWII).

 Hence the necessity of counterbalancing it by augmenting truth, and thus transparency, just as exponentially, too. 

 If we want survival, we have to become truth fanatics. A new religion.

***

***  

 MADNESS AS THE SOLUTION TO LOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS:

[Advanced.]

 The Incompleteness Theorems in logic say that any logical system big enough to contain arithmetic is incomplete, in the sense that there is an infinite number of propositions, about natural numbers, which are true but that cannot be proven in that logical system.

 If it cannot be proven, it has to be assumed (and that, an infinite number of times! It’s a crazy world out there: it turns out that, if a logical system is complete, it’s inconsistent, etc. (If one supposes the usual properties of arithmetic to be true.) 

 These facts were demonstrated in the 20C, but they were true all along. I claim that there is a strict correspondence between brain circuitry and logical completeness. Thus, brain operations stumbled on circuitry incompleteness, all the time, ever since there are advanced brains, and they think. 

 The problem of logical incompleteness is solved in metalogic by making assumptions. The same holds with brain circuitry: logical incompleteness there is also solved by making assumptions. 

 How does the brain make assumptions? Well it just connects different neurons, or different parts of the brain with axons. In other words: Axons for axioms.

 How does the relationship work? Incompleteness in logic is caused by a confrontation between the finiteness of logic on a piece of paper (or in a Turing Machine), and the uncountable infinity it gives rise to (modulo some assumptions mathematicians classically do). Basically the finite axioms allow, modulo some infinite choice procedure (for example Cantor’s diagonalization), to build an infinite number of further axioms.

 The same happens with neuronal and neuroglial networks: they are finite. But, once given, it’s possible to build other neuronal and glial networks different from them. That’s the equivalent of the Godel proposition built from a Godel number. How does one build such a number? Well, with dendrites, etc. That in turn happens if and only if, some astrocytes get in high gear, andthat happens in case of high emotions. In other words, if the brain builds new assumptions through new emotions. And probably, the more different the assumptions, the more different the emotions.

 Hominids who practiced a bit of craziness were evolutionary advantaged, because they found more readily solutions to logical incompleteness at hand. Craziness allowed to find new, necessary axioms. Thus evolution learned to exploit logical incompleteness.

***

 NO UNREASON, NO CREATION:

 An excellent example is geometry without the parallel postulate; it’s a logically incomplete system. For more than 2,000years mathematicians tried to prove that it could be made complete. 

 But the solution was very obvious, and very crazy: take a sphere, and try to do geometry on it. Take a saddle, and try to do geometry on it. 

 A modicum of craziness is intelligence’s friend.

 Hence a necessity, to make Creative Artificial Intelligence would be to contrive crazy robots.

 [I will deny all and any responsibility when Artificial Intelligence engineers use that idea to make more clever killer robots.] 

***

 LYING AS THE WORST CRIME:

 So there is a hard core of badness out there. If one ignores it, it will grow: fascism, before and during World War Two is an excellent example. The more ignored fascism was, the bigger it got. 

 If one ignores the hard core of badness out there, one is lying, big time. Because one claims that something potentially lethal in giant proportions is of no consequence. That’s a lie, if there ever was one. Lying about nothing is not a lie. Lying about something that can turn into everything is a terrible lie.

 Look at the haggard, drugged out, half dead, passed out face of the cruel and crazed maniac who shot 71 people in a movie theater in Colorado. Or the other crazed maniac in Norway, killing 73 Norwegians to save them from impure blood, or to save Norwegian culture (whatever).

 Such people are bad, they are pathologically bad. Maybe they took too much drugs, maybe their neurohormones are all wrong from more natural causes. The basic fact, though, is that there will be pathologically bad people out there, always. 

 Or at least, there will be crazed out people as long as we do not have a thorough understanding of the human mind. And even then. Because when we understand why people become pathologically insane, some, the same as those who abuse drugs (starting with alcohol and psychoactive smoke), will decide to use their freedom (if they are left any) to become psychologically insane, deliberately so.

 Some will whine when they read this. But they understand neither evolution, nor the logical incompleteness theorems, and even less the fact that evolution has mastered both.

 It is even worse than that. It’s not just that there are bad actors out there. Power attracts bad actors, like flies are attracted by excrements.

 Those who rise up high in human hierarchies, all too often do so precisely because they are bad. This is the Achilles heel of representative democracy.

 Examples abound with dictatorships: there the worst do best. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, are recent cases. Stalin overcame Lenin (founder and theoretician of the Bolsheviks) and Trotsky (head of the Red Army, and also a theoretician), precisely because Stalin was so much worse. as a human being. That was his best qualification (he started by robbing banks…wait…). 

 However, Stalin’s extreme badness allowed him to out-Hitler Hitler himself: that made him laugh, according to Churchill. That Stalin’s horribleness was viewed as an advantage by those subordinate to him seems unlikely, but it’s thoroughly demonstrated by the facts. 

 Hitler attacked his ally the USSR by surprise. Stalin had been leading the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, so he expected his colleagues in the Politburo to punish him severely. After sulking for days, he finally showed up, expecting the chop, and was enthusiastically confirmed as great war leader. Why? Because all his comrades knew he was the very worst. And indeed Stalin put in place policies considering that anyone not respecting an order was subject to immediate execution. Any soldier knew that his captain could kill him any time, and so on, throughout the Red Army. 

 Thus in Stalingrad, workers built tanks while other drove them to engage the Nazis in combat, at the other end of the factory. 

 The Nazis, who thought of themselves as the meanest characters on the planet, and had demonstrated it with engineers doing suicide attacks with explosives on their backs against the French after crossing the Meuse, could not sustain that level of ferocity.

 Hence not just craziness, but criminal insanity can be an advantage to rise to the fore in society. Certainly, if Alexander so called the Great had not annihilated the cities of Thebes and Tyr (crucifying all the men there), he would have been less Great, because Athens would have taken him, and his general Antipater less seriously.

 Ultimately, though, the criminal mood in the USSR was made possible by systematic lying on such an industrial scale that the connection with reality became increasingly tenuous. When enough truth was projected onto the system, the lying, and the political system that depended upon it collapsed.

 If craziness is so useful to augment those mental powers we need so much to survive as a civilization, how do we survive it? Precisely by augmenting the truth. Thus only craziness compatible with the truth will be able to survive. That is why I have not hesitated to tell various truths about Obama (whom I have intensely supported in all sorts of ways), or Hollande, whom I approved of, until he started to say lies about World War Two (details soon to come).

 Truth is my religion. A touch of craziness my sanity. (Latest demonstration: It’s not like I did not know of the danger in advance. I was slightly charged by a large bad mood moose with calf today on an Alaskan trail, where I was nonchalantly running with a bad ankle; after a high speed retreat, as a good predator, I circumvented the difficulty, and anxiety switched sides, the calf nearly spraining its own ankle in the process… . )

 There is no truth but the full truth, and a touch of craziness is its prophet.

***

Patrice Ayme

***