Photon, Graviton, Contradiction

 Abstract: No need to dig very deep to find glaring contradictions in today’s physics. A discreet warning to those who act as if everything important is already understood.  I exhibit a few elementary reasonings where basic physics ominously implodes like an overstuffed star. Among other implosions, the “Planck Length” is derived, not from dimensional analysis, but through a perfidiously simple outrage.

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EVEN THE BRIGHTEST CIVILIZATIONS CAN MAKE THE GROSSEST ERRORS:

 May 8, 1945, the 68th anniversary of the defeat of Nazi Germany. A big deal in France. Starting in 1934, the French republic armed itself to the teeth to crush fascism. It took a while, but it worked. At this point, fascism is only history in Europe (and don’t forget the collapse of the USSR).

 Keeping May 8 as a mandatory vacation day helps to remind the young generations that for the Republic to fight racial fascism cost, over 31 years, more than four million dead, in the French empire alone. (More than 100 million, 5% of the world’s population, died, all together. More if one counts the (“Spanish“) flu epidemics that hitched a hike on the military situation)

 Fascism was an erroneous system of thoughts and emotions. All the more striking as it struck mostly the country with the most intellectual hubris, namely the “German Reich“. The basic mental deviations inciting such errors are best studied in pure science, or aeronautics; as the  situations are clearer.

 When looking at history on the largest scale, what counts are optimal results. If one gets optimally to a disastrous result, it’s still disastrous. The Greeks had tremendous physics. At least, they built excellent ships. Roman cements were astounding; they made siphons on such a scale, aqueducts could cross valleys this way.  

 Yet, both Greek optics and Greek were full of correct, intricate considerations. Yet, both were not just false, but inside out, the exact opposite of the truth in the most fundamental message.

 How did it happen? The Greeks had overlooked the obvious. It should have been obvious that the Sun, being so much more enormous than the Earth, did not turn around it: that contradicted intuitive notion about centrifugal forces (say when launching a stone from a sling), and the fact the much smaller moon rotated around the Earth.

 In optics, simplistic experiments would have shown light came from the observed objects, not conversely.

 The Greeks had overlooked the obvious in physics. I will talk about something that maybe similar. Now. Keeping in mind that the Greeks overlooked the obvious so much that their democracy lost three wars to plutocracy in 250 years. Thereafter democracy, or even a republic was not to be seen in Greece again for nearly 2150 years. I claim that’s related. The lack of necessary criticism. It may show up in politics, but it trains best in physics.

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 SIMPLEST DERIVATION BLACK HOLE:

 Let’s assume light had a mass, m. (OK, modern physics assumes that light has no mass… otherwise modern physics would not be coherent. But that does not prove that light has, indeed, no mass!)

 If the mass of light were small enough, it would not be experimental detectable.

 Now let’s equate the energy of said mass to 1/2 mvv, the traditional kinetic energy. (Purists who know the Special Theory of Relativity will scream, as this is only the leading term in E = mcc.)

If the star is massive enough, it will bring light to a standstill, by pulling on it hard enough (forget about the geodesics of General relativity!)

 Now the potential gravitational energy of a mass m located at radius R in the gravitational field of a star of mass M is: GmM/R .

 Equating the kinetic energy with the gravitational potential energy:

 1/2 mvv = GmM/R. Putting v=c, the speed of light, eliminating the m’s, we get:

 R = 2 GM/cc

 This is the so-called Schwarschild Radius. When a star of mass is smaller than R, light can’t get out. That reasoning was made by the super mathematician and physicist Pierre Simon de Laplace in the Eighteenth Century. That is, during the Enlightenment. Laplace concluded that “les objets les plus massifs de l’univers ne peuvent etre vus (the most massive objects in the universe may not be seen). [To be entirely fair, an obscure Brit seems to have had the same idea too, at the time.]

***

 GRAVITON BLACK HOLE, IN ANALOGY TO PHOTON BLACK HOLE:

 Laplace above made the hypothesis of what some physicists in 1929 came to call the “photon”, the particle of light. Meanwhile De Broglie rolled out his hypothesis that to each body a wave is associated. Although that does not prove the converse, namely that, to each wave a particle is associated, physicists take this for granted. 

 That there are gravitational waves, there is no doubt. Why? Because if one wiggles around a source of gravitation (say, a star), the direction of the incoming pull will vary, so a distant observer will be tugged back and forth. As the distance from the source augments, this will organize itself in nice waves.

 Backtracking conceptually, one gets particles of gravitation similar to particles of light, the gravitons. 

 Why not to play the game above?

 I made this smart remark one day to a Field Medalist specialist of General Relativity. He literally got enraged, fuming, repeating the offending sentence to himself, but unable to find a smart repartee. Indeed. There is none.

 If one plays the game above, the game Laplace first played, no graviton will be able to exit a sufficiently massive star, so the star, not only will not be seen, but not be felt. No wonder my friend got enraged.

 Could that really happen? Why not? Where would the energy go? if one insisted to keep the conservation of energy law? Well, what about coming out somewhere else as Dark Energy? 

 (Remember, we do not know, at all, about the dimensional structure of the universe; so energy could leak, through another dimension; a similar argument is central to some ultra modern theories of gravitation.)

***

 PLANCK LENGTH MEANING; NO HIGH ENERGY GRAVITON:

 Another avenue of meditation is to observe that the Schwarschild Radius also exist for a graviton of mass m. It’s 2Gm/cc.

 The graviton’s own mass pulls the graviton itself towards itself. At high enough energy, the graviton becomes a contradiction onto itself.

 2G (hv/cc)/cc = 2G hv/cccc.  … Lv =c, v = c/L

Thus: L = square root (2G h/ccc)

 This “L” is the Planck Length. If the graviton’s matter wave  is confined within “L”, nothing will come out…

 It goes without saying that all of this ought to be taken with a grain of salt. First of all, the real structure of elementary particles is completely unknown. 

 String theory and M theory are attempts to guess said structure. However they assumed topological properties (such as compacity, locality, separability) that basic Quantum Theory violates enthusiastically. So they miss the essence conceptually, right from the start.

 Nevertheless, the reasonings above form the core of Quantum Gravity, the first order approximation. If that has no bearing on reality, neither will the rest.

 One of the main interests of the advancement of science is that it forces us to advance and refine what we mean by reason. In a world where the survival of the many will be increasingly in question, and depends essentially upon ever mightier reason, this is of the essence.

***

Patrice Ayme

Austerity: As Wild As It Gets!

AUSTERITY BENEFITS THE FEW BY STRANGLING THE MANY:

 To fully understand the austerity drive, one has to go fully prehistoric, at the dawn of Homo Erectus. For at least a million years, Homo has known how to profit from fire, and, thus, a scorched earth strategy. That, itself, belongs to an even deeper instinct of apparently wanton destruction. Apparently, but not really.

 The austerity drive has gone further than simply dismantling the welfare state. Austerity has attacked the very heart of the solution to get out of the deep economic, energetic and ecological crises we are getting into. Scientific research and education themselves are getting slashed, in Europe, or the USA.

 For civilization, austerity has become the equivalent of banging one’s head on a wall, in the hope of improving one’s mental faculties. For conventional wisdom, it should make no sense at all, considering the grave catastrophe it’s bringing along. Yet, it makes sense, when one realizes that man has always fought man, even more than the ocean has always fought the ocean.

Even Oceans Fight

 In places where oceans meet and struggle, giant rogue waves often form. They can destroy even super tankers. (One such place is along the south-east African coast, off Mozambique).

 Some pontificate that class struggle is quaint. They are generally paid by the plutocratic system, that made the upper class a subsidiary of evil itself. Yet structures appear through struggles. Austerity itself is a rogue wave from such a struggle.

 The notion of structure is not fully explained: thorough explanations have to go through Quantum Physics. Yet the transition from Quantum Physics to Classical Physics is not part of Twentieth Century science (this is the essence of the debate on the foundations of Quantum Mechanics, and why the last Nobel Prize in Physics was given to students of this mysterious transition).

 The Honorable Paul Krugman lists a number of reasons for the austerity drive, while, correctly, decrying it (See Note). Paul credits humanity, or more exactly its leadership, with too much goodness. The most obvious reason for austerity is the one less talked about: benefiting the few by strangling the many. A master idea of the oligarchy is that class structures are no more. Yet, structures are all over: morphogenesis makes up the universe.

 I wrote against austerity many times before (see Note), explaining in particular that it was the proximal cause of the fall of Rome.

 This Fall is very striking, because it shows that plutocracy will sell its own country to make a buck. Indeed, there was no more money to pay the legions, from lack of taxation of the hyper wealthy. Thus evacuation, from sheer Will-To-Austerity, by the legions of Britain and of the “limes“, throughout the entire north-west corner of the empire.

 Defense was entrusted to the Franks; the idea was that the Franks came for… free. The Franks had no choice, but to ferociously fight, as they were mostly peasant-owners, and needed to defend their land, thus, indirectly, the Roman cities and villas. However, the enemy, knowing the legions were out of the way, got lucky (frozen Rhine) and broke through at Chrismas 406.

 It’s amusing that the “Fall of Rome” is always presented as a deep mystery, when it can be explained by exactly two battles, one lost by Valens at Adrianopolis, and the other as just related. In any case, austerity caused a tremendous military disaster within six years of its fiercest implementation!

 Austerity always favors the rise of plutocracy, and the neo-feudalism we can observe blossoming today; when there is not enough money to employ the many, what needs to be done is still done. But it’s done only by what becomes an indispensable oligarchy.

 Even those criticizing it are feeding the austerity machine: watch the Honorable professor Stiglitz in his palatial office at Columbia University, teaching economics by the People, for the People, while employed by a school that charges, 58,000 dollars a year, namely 20% higher than the median household income of New York City surrounding it. OK, let me explain. The austerity machine is the other face of the luxury machine. By thriving in the luxury machine, and making it thrive in turn, Stiglitz himself is a clog in that giant machine that made We The People irrelevant to the Luxury Tower of Power.

 The deepest reason for austerity is also the simplest, and most shocking. Austerity is not just incidentally causing the strangling of the many by the few. It’s all about benefiting the few by strangling the many.

 Most of the public has been well indoctrinated in Christian like ethics (see Nietzsche below about slave morality). Thus the naïve public will accordingly reject that such an inclination for a final solution of the public problem makes sense. And yet, it does. Thus, the very outraged denial of an inclination to the final solution has allowed it to happen many times before.

 The Final Solution does make sense, once one realizes that ecological imbalance has been the greatest enemy of humanity for two million years. Ecological imbalances caused by an (over-) abundance of people. Thus, as the Romans put it, Homo Homini Lupus. Man is a wolf for man.

 Thus, all the proximal, technical reasons given for austerity act as a cover-up for the deepest drive: making war to others, especially when it feels that there are too many, or at least too many of a kind one does not like. Thus the insistence that only a few should be served.

 Reagan and others of his kind, speaking of government, said that “the beast should be starved“.

 According to what I am saying here, they really meant, what they really wanted to say, as their wild, basic instincts told them, was that the beasts should be starved. Thus ultra hard line conservatism is as mean as the eons have had it. And as mad, as mean as the older evils had it: racism, colonialism… in all cases, it was all about the war of the few against the many, that war that never ends, the war of man against himself, killing, not just because that’s a force that gives us meaning, but because that’s the culling, that gives us a world.

 We could, of course, do differently now. But, instead of insuring the luxury of a few individuals, as the greatest good, we should then strive to make understanding of everything our greatest luxury. And that’s start

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Notes:

 1) On preceding remarks on austerity: I wrote nearly a year ago, “Why Austerity?”. That listed detailed causes for the austerity drive. “Why Europe Lays Supine” addresses the peculiar European case; Europe credited humanity with too much goodness, too, and believed, that, by being virtuous, the world would follow. Instead the world used European naivety to its advantage. Now Europe finds herself on the verge of an obvious depression, and is finally throwing overboard its ecological drive to lighten the ship: it refused to support its carbon price system, the world’s most advanced mechanism to control CO2 emissions.

 2) Sade agreed with the Romans that man was up to no good. In particular, Sade observed  that politicians had to be among the worst individuals, and relished inflicting their “sadistic” powers on others. And that much of their “politics” was motivated that way. he wrote about it as outrageously as possible, including Prime Ministers torturing the innocent, just to relax. Accordingly, Sade was jailed for decades by the Ancient dictatorship of Louis XVI.

Sade was freed during the Revolution of 1789. He had been one of its main instigators, directly and indirectly. He found himself in some of the highest responsibilities, and advised strongly against imposing the revolution by force throughout Europe, precisely because he was aware of the calculus of violence of man against man, the inclination to commit violence, while covering it up  in noble fashion.

 3) Nietzsche pointed out that there were two moral systems in force in Europe. Christianity, officially enforced, was the morality for the slaves, imposed to the slaves, and they did not know any better. Slaves had been made to believe that Christianity was the only morality in existence. Whereas European aristocracy ruled according to its exact opposite, the rule of the strong. Nietzsche’s analysis is still true today.

Yet, from my more cynical viewpoint the “aristocracy”, is not just admirable, literally a “rule of the best“. Instead, it’s a vile plutocracy at heart. So, instead of embracing the masters’ race, as Nietzsche seems to inclined to do, I reject it, when it’s just a vulgar plutocracy, just as I reject slavery, as another form of the Dark Side. I basically believe that the double morality system goes on today, with the same sort of results: that’s why financiers get to pay taxes at a much lower rate, from complicities in government… While preaching the free market and meritocracy (the moral system for the Plebs, precisely the one plutocrats are violating).

 4) In light of the preceding, Paul Krugman’s remarks, although well meaning, are rather meek. Said he:…”calls for a reversal of the destructive turn toward austerity are still having a hard time getting through. Partly that reflects vested interests, for austerity policies serve the interests of wealthy creditors; partly it reflects the unwillingness of influential people to admit being wrong… a further obstacle to change: widespread, deep-seated cynicism about the ability of democratic governments, once engaged in stimulus, to change course in the future.”

But Paul, of course, has to be published, and thus appreciated enough, by Very Serious People  Very Sadistic Plutocrats.

Mali: Lesson III

Abstract: The USA has to realize that enforcing civilization, worldwide, is a matter of security, not just high principle.
Yes, it was uncivilized for the USA to attack Afghanistan in 1979 and Iraq in 2003. However, it’s civilized to help the French as much as possible to defend the secular Malian republic and the Malian People.
As far as fighting a long war, the USA itself was born no earlier than 1776 from a conflict that had started earlier than 1756. Rolling back fanatical invading Islamists since 721 CE, and other invaders before that (Huns, Goths, Vandals, etc.) has been Francia’s main business. Not for the pusillanimous, right! If civilization is not strong, civilization is nought.
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“U.S. Weighing How Much Help to Give France’s Military Operation in Mali” say the New York Times’ David Sanger and Eric Schmitt in Sat, Jan 26 cover article. Let me discuss.

The historico-geographical context of the Mali war is global, spanning a small planet, and a very long history.

French Mirage 2000 Thirsty Over Chad

New York Times: “WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is debating how much more aid it can give the French military forces who are battling Islamic militants in Mali, weighing the benefit of striking a major blow to Qaeda-linked fighters in Africa against concern about being drawn into a lengthy conflict there.”

Oh poor little scared USA, plausibly dragged into lengthy conflict, never had a war longer than 11 years. Let me explain to USA how the civilization that gave birth to the USA a millennium later arose to start with. Well, through a lengthy conflict. Actually the present civilization arose through several lengthy conflicts, and would not have existed without them (after all after defending by themselves against invasions, starting in 400 CE, the Franks finished the conquest of Europe, something Rome had given up on).

Franks’ Mirages F1, Mali: Civilization, Tradition.

Several of the French quirks that irritate the Wall Street Journal, such as nationalizations, or controlling the Church as an organ of the secular state, were invented, or amplified in a terrible war against invading fanatical Islam in 721 CE to 750 CE, the first phase of a war that never really stopped.

So, speaking of lengthy conflict, that’s nearly 1,300 years of conflict. More, if one views Francia as part, and official heir of the Roman state, which she was by 400 CE. The first Muslim attack against Rome was led by Mahomet himself, mounted on a horse, at the head of his army. The Romans did not offer battle, and a disappointed Mahomet returned home to Mecca, where he promptly died…

In the early Eight Century Berber and an Arab armies, having recently embraced the war religion of Islam, wrestled Spain from the (divided) Visigoths, ruling over a divided country.

How? The population of Spain was divided in (more than) three Judeo-Christian sects and ethnic groups (including the Basque). The Visigoths did not believe that Jesus was as much of a god as his “father”, an idea traced to the bishop of Alexandria (Egypt), Arianus. So they were Arians, and not liked by the Catholic Orthodox, who made the majority of Spain, and believed in the Trinity, that is, that Jesus was god just as much as his dad.

The Jews, numerous in Spain, also did not like the Visigoths who ruled them, and some cooperated with the invading Muslims. The end result of all these acerbic divisions was that the Muslims seized Spain. Then they proceeded to kill a fifth of the Catholics (from church records).

The occupiers and decimators then got very strong, because they controlled now a huge new territory. Yet, in 718 CE, the Muslims failed for the third time, under the enormous walls of Constantinople.

In 721 CE, the Muslim armies invaded Francia. (Yes, Francia. I corrected Wikipedia which ignorantly called the place “Gaul”.) The Muslims followed the old plan to finish Constantinople from behind. Grecian fire, a mystery, but highly efficient weapon, had annihilated a Muslim fleet of more than 2,000 warships besieging the capital, thus going around was in order.

The Muslims tried to seize Toulouse, besieging it for three months. They confronted the army of Duke Eudes, the Duke of Aquitania, and put it to flight. They chased it, and fell into a trap. As they contentedly feasted, celebrating their victory, Eudes rushed back and the Muslims were taken by total surprise.

The invaders suffered an enormous defeat. According to Al-Maqqari, Duke Odo/Eudes had an army of 300,000, and the Muslim death toll was an astounding 375,000 on the invading Ummayaad troops. It is fashionable to say these numbers are inflated, as it allows to belittle the triumph of the Franks. But why not to believe the only eyewitnesses reports we have? The astounding figures give an idea of the scale of the confrontation.

In any case, all historians agree that the battle of Toulouse in 721 CE was, for sure, a gigantic defeat, and the turning of the Islamist tide, the first catastrophic defeat that the Arab, Syrians and other Yemenites had ever suffered.

The Muslim invaders had taken decades to conquer the Catholic Roman cities of the Maghreb. They had suffered reverses, until they allied with savage Berbers from the hinterlands. But never, ever, did the Arab islamist armies suffer a devastating defeat, on land before Toulouse.

They tried another method, good old fashions razzias: after seizing Narbonne and other cities they dashed all the way to Autun, not far from Paris (725 CE). But they could not hold territory.

The rest, as the commons say, is history. Exasperated and troubled, the Caliphate in Damascus insisted, and launched an even more formidable invasion, incorporating in the army crack soldiers recruited all the way to Yemen (learn, White House, that, even then, the terrorists came from afar!).

This time Duke Eudes was defeated, in a terrible battle next to Bordeaux (eyewitnesses say we would never be able to determine how many died, so many there were). The South West of Francia got ravaged.

But Charles Martel, “major of the Palace” had had 11 years to constitute the most formidable army since the heydays of Rome. To pay for it, he had nationalized the Church. The gold paid professional soldiers handsomely, to provide for their families. Charles’ formidable army had been busy conquering Germany, all the way to Frisia… a nice way to train.

The Muslims reached the region of Tours. They spread far and wide, in at least a third of Francia, pillaging, and bringing back lots of goodies and enslaved captives to a central camp, by Poitiers. Meanwhile, they kept surveillance on the Roman road between Tours and Paris. Roman roads were made to carry armies.

The Muslims had annihilated, in Syria, nearly a century before, the main Roman army, 160,000 men. After that, throwing to the winds the most basic laws of war, they had hunted and killed potential Roman soldiers all over the east. In a few decades half the Roman empire had been conquered, and all of Persia.

Charles Martel did not take the road. Suddenly he appeared half out of the woods, on a hill, just where he wanted to be. The Emir called back his troops from far and wide. They took eight days to all come back (so some may have been 200 miles away).

The Muslim cavalry charges broke on the “ice like” wall of the Frankish phalanx, bristling with lances. The Franks had better armor, better swords and battle axes (they were heir to 1,500 years of Gallic metallic superiority). Duke Eudes attacked the Muslim camp, freeing prisoners, threatening booty and camp followers of the Muslim army. The crazies with god were routed, and not buried. Frankish heavy cavalry successfully pursued them, for weeks, killing countless numbers. The whole place was named the “Alley of the Martyrs” by the discomfited Arabo-Berber invaders.

Five years later, the Muslim invaders were back, with another giant force, combining a land and sea attack. They thought they were ready for Charles’ mighty phalanx. But this time Charles had joined to his phalanx an enormous heavy cavalry with giant horses (737 CE). Fighting with lances and battle axes standing on stirrups made the “EUROPEAN” knights unstoppable. Yes, that’s when the word EUROPEAN appeared first.

The Syrian and Arab army destroyed, Arabs supported by the Persian took over, and the Caliphate was displaced to Baghdad (750 CE), close to the Iranian plateau. (Conventional historians do not point this out.)

So how does this connect to Mali?

First Muslim terrorism against the West was invented by Mohammed the Prophet himself. Islam was presented as a specifically anti-Western war machine (that can be read in the Qur’an, where the Romans are specifically mentioned, and the strategy to attack them).

Five years ago the terrorists in the Sahara desert were 200. But the Sahara was left at their disposal, and they are financed by drug trafficking and feudal Wahhabite regimes from Arabia. So around Mali alone they are now 10,000. Leaving a territory to terrorists enables them to grow.
***
New York Times: “The immediate issue is whether and how to supply American aerial refueling planes… any refueling would probably be approved only with restrictions.
“The discussions center on cost, and the concern about whether this becomes an open-ended mission for the French in Mali,” one Defense Department official said. “What does that mean about our commitment?” “

Is big bad Pentagon scared? France fought Qaddafi on and off for three decades, nearly killing him at some point in Chad. Instead of worrying whether France is going to fight too much, the leadership of the USA ought to worry about the fanatical Islamists in, say, Egypt (they are in power there!)

New York Times: “Most of the reservations about whether President Obama has the legal authority to engage in military operations were resolved, officials said, after it was determined that the main targets were linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But the degree to which President Obama wants to get involved in Mali is still an open question, presenting the president and his national security team with the latest in a series of decisions about how heavily to intervene in remote conflicts.
Also in play is the depth of the American commitment to France…”

There is nothing very remote about Mali. Florida and Senegal are geologically identical: they used to be part of the same plate.They are facing each other across the ocean, six hours of subsonic flying will get you there from USA territory, it’s about half the distance to Hawai’i from washington, DC.
Lose Mali, lose West Africa (including Nigeria).
Commitment this, commitment that, commitment to, our commitment… The USA seems to have lots of problems with the concept of commitment. Do the USA need to be committed?
As far as being committed to France, well, ought a son be committed to his mother? Camus said yes. I concur.

New York Times: Mr. Obama’s aides say that the model under way in Mali now — with the French taking the lead, and a force from the region backing them up — is exactly what they want to encourage. But some officials say they believe the French went into Mali hastily, in the words of one official “before they understood exactly what they were biting off.”

France has fought in the desert for centuries, and won quite a few. There was nothing hasty about the French counter-attack. Left alone, left to seize Bamako, which they could have done in one day, the followers of the fanatical terrorists would soon have been millions (they indoctrinate children as young as 12 as soldiers).

It’s a strange sight to see those warriors, crazed with god, driving the largest trucks, on which they mount tanks’ gun turrets… why did nobody think of this before? Because never before warriors so little attached to their own lives thrived in such great numbers.

New York Times: “White House officials say they want to understand the broader political and strategic plan to end the conflict before they get more involved.”

There is nothing to understand strategically, while the house is burning down: destroying the terrorists is the immediate goal. Another immediate goal should be to make sure the black Malian forces do not exert reprisals against the white, Tuareg or Arab “Malian” rebels. That is where pacifying officers from the West could help.

More subtle, but long term necessary, is giving the Tuareg a state (“Azawad”?), or secure autonomy (but say, Algeria, Morocco, will not like it).

New York Times: “But since France entered the conflict in early January, there has been little time for strategic planning. The United States has begun transporting a 600-member French mechanized battalion and its gear to Mali, and is providing intelligence information, including satellite imagery, American officials said on Friday. “The spigot is opened all the way,” one official said. So far that help has been provided at no cost to the French.
But the refueling would bring the American involvement to a new level, directly supporting military attacks. And for Mr. Obama, who devoted part of his Inaugural Address on Monday to a celebration of the end of a war in Iraq and the winding down of the American commitment in Afghanistan, the prospect of getting involved in a conflict against a shadowy enemy far from the United States is unwelcome.”

There is nothing far, anywhere, in this world. North Korea is closer to the USA than England and France were under Napoleon.

One has to distinguish wars one should not have done (Afghanistan since Carter attacked it on July 3, 1979; Iraq since the West has been messing with it, that is since before Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein December 20, 1983)… And wars one should do.

The only reason the enemy is “shadowy” is that the USA is unwilling to trace the money back to the feudal oil states it supports. Because they are part of the world’s plutocratic order. It is of course troubling to see Socialist France attack with wild abandon the mignons of the world plutocratic order’s feudal branch.

New York Times: “In the case of Mali, one official said, American intelligence assessments have concluded that the Islamic extremists have little ability to threaten the United States. “But they can threaten the region,” he said, “and that’s where the argument for American involvement comes in.””

Once again, that’s an illusion, that they don’t threaten the USA. Indeed with French precision bombing in the middle of the night, it’s hard for them to concentrate on the USA (but they do threaten the USA when they talk on French TV!).

True the Islamic extremists have little ability to threaten the 48 contiguous states at this very moment, but if they come to dominate the region, they will.

New York Times: “The government of President François Hollande has said it will stay in Mali and the surrounding region as long as needed. The United States has been more hesitant about supporting the new government in Mali, which came to power in a coup mounted by an American-trained military leader.”

These are details. True, American trained troops in Mali were a disaster. But Mali is SECULAR REPUBLIC. One can have a republic, even after or during a coup, because republican institutions are not restricted to the (“elected“) upper governmental structure.

Another point is that sending an army to free a country from terrorists support We The PEOPLE of that country. When France sent an army and a fleet to the English colony of North America, she was not sending them to a government, but to We The PEOPLE of the USA.

New York Times: Mr. Obama talked on the phone on Friday with Mr. Hollande, but White House officials did not say whether the leaders had dwelled on the refueling issue… Several French tankers are providing air-to-air refueling for … Mirage and Rafale combat and reconnaissance aircraft… but officials in Paris would like to have American tankers ready as a backup if the ground operation faces stiffer resistance than anticipated, or an unforeseen crisis requires France to send more aircraft.
A White House statement said [Obama and Hollande] had talked about the need to quickly establish an African-led force in Mali, as well as the importance of Mali’s establishing a path to elections and to “restoration of democratic governance” in the country.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French defense minister, said:“The goal is the total reconquest of Mali, we will not leave any pockets.”But Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, voiced more limited objectives.
“We would all like to see the elimination of Al Qaeda and others from northern Mali, realistically, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption so that Al Qaeda is no longer able to control territory.”

Well the best way to wage war is to win it. That is, if one is not just humoring a greedy military-industrial complex, and friendly rapacious feudal states in the Middle East.

Ultimately, Islamic terrorism is not compatible with the pursuit of an advanced technological civilization, and will have to be dealt with it thoroughly, that is, philosophically. That is, deal with it definitively, as we did, say, with Moloch, Gallic human sacrifices, or with Aztec terrorism.
But first the military side, the Dark Side, has to be taken care of. This is now.
***
Patrice Ayme

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

Crazy Lie Technique

The Economist, the celebrated British tabloid, teaches economy thus: it siphons its European profits behind a mangy door of a second floor apartment in a poor part of Luxembourg. Would it be economical to pay taxes in the countries where The Economist is sold? Tax havens is where the good life is at, and The Economist just contrived a list to prove that.

Major profiteers and corporations do the same all over the world: they hide profits in tax havens they enabled through subtle conspiracies and deep propaganda. Why is the insanity allowed to go on? Not just because of corrupted politicians. Also because plutocratic agents made common people too confused to realize they are robbed blind. Instilling insanity is the plutocrats’ first barrier against common sense and decency.

Propaganda fabricates the spines of the sheeple (sheep-people). Here is a spectacular example. The ”Economist Intelligence Unit crunched hard numbers” to answer this: “Which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?” Here is its somewhat deranged answer:

Better Serving Emirs, Without Health Care?
Intelligent To Make Us Crazy & Stupid?

First of all notice that, among the first 15 countries, none is a major military power. In other words, these 15 countries depend upon the military superpowers for their protection. That is nothing to encourage, lest one wants to repeat World War II.

We saw what this kind of parasitism brought in 1939-1940: the pro-Hitlerian antics of Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands caused the loss of France, enabling 50 million Europeans to die subsequently; as a telling aside, Dutch Jews were killed nearly to the last person. 

Observe that sexist Muslim Fundamentalist regimes, with their subjugation of women, score high in The Economist’s esteem. This sadomasochism theme, unsaid, runs deep.

Among other amusements, Cyprus is one of the better places to live, according to The Economist Intelligence. Cyprus is an island cut in two, a few years ago, when Turkey attacked militarily by sea and in the air, invading it with its army, twice (well named operations Attila). Cyprus survives, without a peace treaty, the butt of Turkish hostility. Another full war, with more atrocities, is entirely possible as Turkey increasingly veers towards Islamism. But, according to the mental retards at The Economist Intelligence, Cyprus ranks higher than Japan, France and Britain, none of which is under foreign occupation. Maybe The Economist Intelligence finds lethal atrocities of the massive type one of the better spices in life?

So? What else? Why to live in a place that could be wracked by war again, just off Syria, with so many who have lost their property and can never again where they were born? Cyprus is a tax haven. Tax avoidance, the meat of life, according to Economist Intelligence!

According to The Economist Intelligence, Singapore is deemed safe, while the acceleration of sea level rise is 60% higher than the most pessimistic official forecasts (countries such as the Belgium or the Netherlands are spending already much to fight the advancing sea). For those unawares, Singapore, a tax haven, is barely built above high tide.

The Economist self glorifies, as it pontificates that “the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.”

So the other times, The Economist admits that it was not “deadly serious“? It was just seriously deadly, as when it  supported Pinochet? I sent the following to The Economist, and they published it:

The Economist’s biases comes in many guises. The Economist now tells us that tiny Israel, hated on all sides, surrounded by a ghetto like wall, and with the high likelihood to be plunged into five or six horrendous wars, nuclear or not, with impacts all over its minuscule vegetated territory, scores higher for a “healthy, safe and prosperous life” than all major West European countries?

Does The Economist know how to spell C R A Z Y?

And Switzerland, a small enclave stuck between France, Germany and Italy, does particularly well? As if it were on another planet? Whereas, in truth, Swiss schemes are highly dependent upon whether the EU and the USA are going to let them happen, looking forward. 

And Ireland, which lives partly from being an outrageous tax heaven (like Switzerland with its Vereins) will keep on being a tax heaven, thus staying rich, while keeping on getting subsidies from its poorer, but ten to fifteen times larger European neighbors?

And Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are much safer than Italy? The Chinese plutocrats will not go silly in the next 50 years? The Chinese leaders will not abide by the deep desires of their underground Lord? Just in case The Economist does not know, let it be reminded that the People Republic of China reserves itself the right to recover Taiwan, anytime, by force, and that, should there be problems within the PRC, it will be only natural to distract the sheeple with a good foreign war.

“Crunching numbers” is good, thinking, better.

This incident offers a troubling two dimensional space: along one dimension, The Economist is really stupid, along the other, The Economist is launched into a multi-dimensional propaganda operation, no holds barred. Notice that in The Economist’s classification, tax heavens score high. Notice also that the large countries, which are taking increasing measures against tax cheats, are scoring low. An argument The Economist uses, even against the USA, is that they owe large debts.

What The Economist “forgets” to say is that the large countries, which defend the West, owe large debts, because they pay rent to tax cheats (including, but not limited to tax cheating plutocrats, tax cheating countries such as those glorified by The Economist, and tax cheating corporations, such as the one that owns The Economist).

In passing, The Economist mentions that the Netherlands, a sneaky tax haven, is the only Eurozone country worth living in. Just in case Luxembourg does not work anymore, the Netherlands, which is 30 times larger, should be able to shelter The Economist from big bad Franco-Germano-British taxes. (Netherlands population: 17 million, UK + FRA + DEU = 210 million.)

The Economist’s analysis of the best places in which to be born started with another piece of classical propaganda. That great plutocratic philosopher, Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest and deepest men (Buffet splurged with various manipulations that turned Greece into a colossal profits him and his associates) was quoted extensively as opining that he was who he was, that splendor of a vulture, because he was born in the right country, as the right time.

The Economist Intelligent Unit is intelligent enough to pose as exemplary the USA in general, and its plutocracy in the 1930s, and in the 2010s, while talking about the good life.

Hitler famously explained in “Mein Kampf” how Big Lies work: “little people use little lies all the time, they do not expect big ones…“By using Big Lies, Hitler succeeded to persuade the Volk of things that were not true, as he pursued what he viewed as higher aims, that he knew the Volk would disagree with, such as preparing for a world war in 1945 or the extermination of the Jews.

If most Germans had learned about either of these secret aims of Hitler, they would have been horrified and would have viewed Hitler as insanely dangerous… So, knowing this, he lied, big time.

However, as time went by, Hitler became a mental investment most Germans believed in, and the more they invested in him, the more they believed. (A phenomenon well known in the stock markets, as all too many people tend to fall in love with their investments… however bad those turn out to be.) In the end complete collective insanity took over, as the book Soldaten, relating secret recordings of German POWs, shows (Soldaten is also in English with same title).

Now we have something new, that even Hitler did not think about: the Crazy Lie. The Crazy Lie technique makes people accepting of modes of apprehending reality that prevent them to think seriously.

The Crazy Lie Technique is, first, emotional. The Economist used to support Pinochet’s dictatorship for its economic prowess (paid in part with around 5,000 killed and 31,947 officially tortured). Some will say: that was then. Indeed. The USA helped or led, and paid terrorists right wingers to make a coup in a democracy that never had any coup (the USA was furious about losing control of Chilean copper).

Chili was, is, a European foundation. What happened to it was horrible, but The Economist applauded, just as Milton Friedman applauded. Many in the Pinochet junta were on CIA pay roll, while heating up their electrical pincers.

By posing the United Arab Emirates as what we need to emulate, The Economist is actually sinking even lower than it did under Pinochet. The UAE has no European foundation. The UAE is a sordid medieval pluto-theocracy. Some emir, son of his father, is chosen by his medieval tyrannical peers to be the chief, just as was the case in Transylvania 8 centuries ago.

Differently from Middle Age France, though, more than 80% of the UAE’s inhabitants are NOT citizens. They are basically salaried slaves. Health spending proportionally to UAE GDP is only 2.8%, the 181th rank in the world (there are only 193 nations in the UN; as Emirati citizens get health care, that means that non Emirati, the slaves, get none). The UAE enjoys four billionaires with worth around ten billion dollars. Out of a million Emirati (among 4.5 million foreign slaves, servants & mercenaries).

The UAE is Sunni Muslim, and it faces hated Shiah Iran just across the sea of the Arabic, I mean, Persian Gulf. The UAE is basically a Western Plutocratic outpost, not exactly what the Iranian theocrats fancy. Fortunately for the thousands of Persian rockets at the ready, the hundreds of huge towers of the UAE (culminating up to half a mile high in Dubai!) offer themselves as ready targets.

To warn Iran off, the French were requested by the UAE to open a sea-air base, with half a brigade of the French Foreign Legion in residence. Thus the Camp de la Paix came to be.

War with Iran is more likely than not. Although crumbling towers and fireworks among great explosions promises a good show, by assimilating this to the good life, the Economist Intelligence Unit apparently advocates massive lethal sadomasochism as the dominant pursuit of our desires.

Not all is dark in the UAE; it is a place that strives very hard, from pretty bad initial conditions (aside from having the world’s 7th highest oil reserves). But here what I target is the cult that Anglo-Saxon plutocratic media such as The Economist, and the Financial Times enjoy.

Both of the much admired tabloids ferry their revenue through Luxembourg for tax avoidance, which, on that scale, surely is satanic.

So why convey the insane idea that the United Arab Emirates provides with a healthier (2.8% of GDP on health, remember) and safer (obvious target for Iranian nukes) life? Just out of love for plutocrats? Not, not just that. What is taught here is insanity itself.

What is taught is an erosion of intelligence. The Economist Intelligence Unit is out to destroy intelligence.

Teaching people that “crunching numbers” leads to the mathematical conclusion that the UAE provides with much nicer prospects than Japan, France, Britain, Italy or Spain, is so crazy that the notion can only be accepted by suspending one’s critical and intellectual capabilities.

And this suspension of rationality and criticism is what The Economist teaches.

So we are supposed to join the plutocratic cult that Singapore is a much better place to be born than the USA. Or that the United Arab Emirates, a rabidly sexist medieval pluto-theocracy where most inhabitants are foreign slaves, just a handful of minutes away for the thousands of missiles of the hated Iranians, is obviously much safer and healthier than… the French Republic (of course!)

After I wrote most of this essay Lord Justice Brian Leveson, mandated by PM Cameron, came up with his report on the UK press. Leveson writes: “Most responsible corporate entities would be appalled that employees were or could be involved in the commission of crime in order to further their business. Not so at the News Of The World” (the now-shuttered tabloid that was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owner of the WSJ, Fox news, New York Post, etc., and powerful enough to be a part instigator of the war in Iraq, hence Murdoch’s nickname: Murderoch).

“Lord Justice” observes that the press “did not fullfill its role of guardian of the nation“. (Hey, The Economist spits on the nation!) The ‘Right Honourable Lord Justice’ recommends that the press  should create its own regulator, backed by legislation to make sure it meets certain standards of independence and effectiveness.

What we contemplate in The Economist is a further problem. What to do when crazy lies are created, just to erode reason? The problem is not restricted to the plutocratic cult, but other cults, as the Islamist one.

Egypt’s Muslim Fundamentalist parliament is rushing to pass Islamist legislation, making the Sharia into law. Never mind that Egypt thrived without Islam, a military-industrial superstition, for 4,000 years. Egypt was 100% Christian, for centuries. The word “Copt” itself is the Arabization of the word for Egyptian in Greek. In other words, to use some humor, the Muslims stole Egypt from the Egyptians, and are still at it, because, well, truth is secondary.  There are up to 20 million Copts in Egypt (Islamists will tell you that’s a lie).

Plutocracy and superstition reign best upon decerebrated chickens. So the chicken they decerebrate. Nowadays, though, the tsunami threatening civilization is not a few meters high, but kilometers high. Even the plutocrats and other exploiters will be destroyed by it, with most of the biosphere.

What we need is legislating for more truth. I proposed to make TRUTH as a new branch of government. After all, experiments show that equity, thus justice, is fundamental to primates. But what is equity without truth? What is a primate without truth? TRUTH & REASON ARE ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN RIGHTS.

What is essential ought to be legislated, thus civilization is enabled.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: Last, but not least, morality, at the scale of nations, makes happy (at variable scales of time). And safe. Thus morality is a crucial component for tomorrow’s health and happiness (although what ‘morrow’ means will vary considerably: Germany was punished on the scale of generations, Sweden never was, the USA already self punished, in part, with the Secession War, but more works need to be done).

Notice that I excluded not just the medievalists countries, or those waiting for heavy military action, but also the tax cheats from the list: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong (also disqualified as owned by a dictatorship). Others have also to disqualified on even worse moral grounds.

I do not contest that Australia and Canada are good countries to be born. If one’s aim is wealth and comfort, in the next few years. However the ecological policies of these countries are so greedy as to endanger the planet’s ecology. They contribute massively to fossil fuel burning. One wants to keep in mind that the unfolding catastrophe of heat trapping gases pollution will be terminated by a massive world war, not just flooding, droughts, hurricanes, mass extinctions, rising heat, and collapse of oxygen production.

Being born in countries where one’s moral system will be tweaked towards tolerance for mass criminality is not, regrettably a criterion that The Economist put as an input. But it is neither willing, nor able, to do so.

Obama As Lesser Devil

LET’S BE ZEHR KLAR: I DID NOT VOTE ROMNEY.

In 2010, a black lady, an accountant, in a town hall meeting, declared she voted for Obama, but now regretted it, as nothing much had changed. Obama, on automatic, flashed his standard mile wide smile, before realizing, too late, that his beaming attitude was not appropriate to the serious mien of his interlocutor.

Telegenic does not a genius make. Obama’s tenure was abysmal, compared to what should have been. Obama was awed by current of thoughts that were pretty much bipartisan, long established, revering Reagan, plutocracy. The buttler approved of them.

Serious People Fleece Together
Smile & The Sheep Shall Follow

(Un)democratic and (Un)republican controlled congresses both signed on all these policies for years. And therefore the deficit! What did Obama start? Obamacare aka Romneycare?

The auto rescue (good), rescue of the banks (good), just as the sinking of homeowners, rescue of the banksters, Patriot Act, drone strikes on civilians, tax cuts for the rich (all very bad): all started under G. W. Bush.

The question of love is a vast subject. Obama’s sycophants, feigning love, did not help him, nor did they help the polis. I do not see myself as unloving, nor do I see myself as angry. However, I think passion is important to generate creative thinking. Broadcasting abstract creative thinking, when not connected to profit, is intrinsically mass loving, because only to the masses it is addressed, and only love is present as the gift that keeps on giving.

Obama needed a greater aura he could trust to counter-balance the errant oligarchies, but, differently from Pericles, had apparently none. Thus Obama presided over the wreck that fakes intellect.

I met an American in Paris. “My compatriots are such fools,” she grumbled, “they say France is a 2.5 world country. They do not realize everything was invented here, even most of the laser.” Me: “You mean Alfred Kastler discovered Optical Pumping at the same Normale Superieure lab where, 50 years later, Haroche discovered how to see light with atoms, earning him the 2012 Physics Nobel Prize?” “Yes, that’s what I mean. without optical pumping, there would be no laser.” Me:”But Kastler got a Nobel prize all to himself.” The American PhD in Paris:“Yes, well, occasionally those infeodated Swedes in Stockholm have to recognize the truth.” 

Me: “Is not the French social system too expensive?” Connie shrugged:“Well, France buys nearly all its energy outside. The oil from the Middle East, the gas from Russia. Even the uranium comes from Africa. The rare earths are bought all over the planet, France has nearly none. The USA is fortunate owning such a rich continent that it could out-Saudi Arabia, Saudi Arabia itself, as the right wingers have been arguing.

Plus the French president told, at the Elysee palace on Monday, the CEO of Google that Google had an outstanding tax bill of more than a billion euros. Americans have to understand they cannot go around the planet like vultures around the savannah, picking the bones of their victims clean.”

So much with the big argument that Obama is a dangerous socialist who wants to turn the USA into France. The USA uses lasers all over because Alfred Kastler in Paris found how to make optical pumping. Americans may have invented mother and apple pie, but even the laser they use on Mars is made in France (by the French defense giant Thales).

Haroche succeeded to see light with atoms, a proposition so insane that no firm would ever support it (be it only because it’s not ready for showtime in the economy). Several Physics Nobel Prizes at the University of Colorado, Boulder, for  the good and simple reason it’s associated with NCAR (National Center Atmospheric Research) where Federal funding for farfetched ideas is steady (the Connie above worked at NCAR on sun physics).

CERN, Kastler and Haroche were not financed by private plutocratic friendly universities, but by state institutions. I know lots of Nobels are attributed to American universities, in a feat of lucrative self glorification. But the judgment of history is clear: the deepest basic research tends to be state funded (something Obama somewhat violated because he got confused between medicine men trying to make a buck (Solyandra, Musk, A123, Fisker, etc.) and fundamental science… and thinking.)

Another, and very important, example are the giant governmental budgets for archeology in France. They allow us to know the ways and means of the past, hence ourselves, today (in turn they entice the rest of the planet to research archeology too).

What of the reproach Obama is a socialist? Misspelling: he is rather a socialite, the best friends banksters could have had. If Romney had been president, giving, as Obama, $8,000 billion to the banksters so they could pursue more of the same conspiracies, the democrats would have been in the streets, and Romney would have had to arrest banksters. But, with the Obama put, banksters were protected.

All economies are socialist, and they have been in the last five millennia since the West’s representative democracy exist (I’m thinking of Sumer). More or less. Why did the Papuans not develop civilization, whereas the West did? Because the West was full of socialism, whereas the Papuans concentrated on human meat recipes, however delicious, not enough a socialistic end. [See note Egypt versus cannibalism.]

What to do with the elections in the USA? I already voted, and it was NOT for Romney. The big argument in favor of Obama is that he represents the devil we know.

The Obama we have now makes us believe that he is less in love with banks and Wall Street. That is partly corroborated by Wall Street, which was the main contributor to Obama’s campaign in 2008. Apparently Wall Street is now heavily supporting Romney.

In most states, there are other candidates than Obama and Romney, such as Jill Stein, the Green Party candidate. The establishment, to celebrate her candidacy, arrested her several times in the last few weeks.

Evil is the label attached to the mental system that allows to override love, the human mental default state. Due to changing martial, social and environmental circumstances, all we need is NOT love always. Sometimes, evil deed is all you need, nothing else will do.

Obama could say:”I told you so! Did I not read this all over your sites? Practice evil, do what’s necessary. I love it.”

Well, no, Barry-Barack, your problem, precisely, is that you mostly did easy war, with CIA robots in Eurasian mountains, or in a senseless Afghan built-up. You, Obama, as president, did not do the hard war against mad, terrorist finance. Instead, when the banksters were on their knees, you practiced bankster worship, as your cultish association with carnivorous Wolf (UBS) and daemon Dimon (JP Morgan) amply demonstrated. And when you finally reluctantly paid lip service against mad finance, hiding behind, of all things, the financial criminal Buffet, who you personally adulate, mad finance dropped you like the sloppy butler you revealed yourself to be.

Michelle Obama:”I am confused. Patrice, are you in?” Me:”Ask not, Michelle, whether we are in or out, but whether your mind is plugged in, or not.”

***

People such as me are advocates of civilization, that is, the state that makes it possible. The state of the state is both problem, and solution. Nothing else compares.

When Obama set-up his lamentably small stimulus, he forgot, or did not know, rule number one: if it is not big enough, it may well have no effect. Rule number two is that one should have an effect that can be used as a symbol.

Say as the Hoover dam. As I asked:”Tell me Mr. big time socialist (as alleged by republicans) president, where is your Hoover dam? Obama should have concentrated on making one (North East corridor) or two (California) High Speed train line(s) work. Another symbol would have been to equip the financial damnation capital, New York City, with sea gates. Even London, another financial pirates’ den, has sea gates. And London is not threatened by hurricanes.

New York was lucky this time: it did not take a direct hit from a force five hurricane, with sustained 300 km/h winds and a fifty foot storm surge rushing in at 20 km/h. But it is sure to happen, in the fullness of time, considering the CO2 built-up. So Obabla could talk about this, and not just look smart, but be smart. Of these sort of intelligent forward thinking does the survival of civilization depend. Big time government thinking. Not just hanging around the small bore sharks in Silicon Valley, who confuse technology they did not invent with civilization they cannot stand.

Obama did not do anything much when he became president, because he was a house divided between what he knew he had to say, and his self interest, his “navigation”. Romney would certainly not fall in that hypnotic self glorification. Romney would do a lot, change everything in a few weeks. Thus, he may make a much better president. Or then Paul Ryan, his ideological VP candidate could be unleashed, and full regression yowards the jungle applied. We don’t know. 

Some have called my acerbic sounding critique of Obama “nihilistic”, and have even compared me to PM Chamberlain (supposedly too nice with Hitler, as I am supposedly to Romney). Three points about that:

1) I am not nihilistic. Quite the opposite. Obama has a high nihilistic index relative to me.

2) Chamberlain was not the worst PM of the 1930s, far from it. He was from the other side of the pro-Nazi divide (after the UK got rid of those who were too clearly pro-Nazi in 1936). In his argument with Chruschill about the Air Force, Chamberlain was right about developping the new planes versus mass producing the old ones, as Churchill wanted. Simply, at Munich in 1938, the UK was strictly unable to go to war… having no Air Force, and no Army, among other problems. Churchill was rather pro-Nazi in the 1920s, BTW….

3) What is needed in USA politics is normal people getting in it, not through elections (that’s close to hopeless, see prop 37 in California), but through everyday awareness and protest. As long as USA politics is the exclusive province of a few thousands professionals instead of 200 million citizens, the march towards plutocracy will proceed…

With Obama in power, one may always dream that the left would finally wake up, and help him with a spine. Probably we would just get Romney light. That’s more survivable than Ryan strong. Outside of swing states, I would recommend the Green Party. Greens, worldwide, have often had a positive influence when they start to look threatening to the established order.

There is also a more general problem in the Obama versus Romney choice. Let’s rise above the individuals involved. ever since Reagan, the motto has been that:”The government is not the solution, the government is the problem.” This is a very erroneous notion. So bad, that Reagan himself did not believe in it.

However, the slogan was removed from its context, namely the caveat that Reagan did not exclusively believe in it, and the slogan took a life of its own. A new generation was brought up, and learned to believe in that slogan as if it were the gospel (Obama, and certainly Ryan belong to that naive crowd).

The truth is pretty much the opposite.

To many deep problems in society, only the government can bring a solution. Civilization cannot exist without government.

An article in Slate argues the obvious: socialist Europe is better for families than plutocratic USA.

This, let it be said in passing, has been my argument, since ever, against Price Purchase Parity: PPP takes the price of hamburgers into account, as if child care did not matter. (Or does the heartlessness of the conventional PPP mean that children should be turned into hamburgers, or are not any better than hamburgers, or are best represented as hamburgers?)

Some could say:”Government should not do child care.” Answer:”The government always did child care.” Indeed, in prehistoric groups, there was child care. Even wild dogs packs have child care. A fortiori humans. So the healthy adult parents forage, and the rest of prehistoric society took care of the children. Civilization had to reproduce that prehistoric set-up, because that is who we are, as we evolved under these circumstances, those of child care.

It’s not just child care. Running through the Lyon train station in Paris, my sick American spouse who had flown the preceding day from California was given antibiotics by the pharmacist. (OK, not given: a ten day course cost nine dollars.) The antibiotics did wonders. The same scene is unimaginable in the USA (one would have had to make an appointment with a doctor first, and the doctor would have been indoctrinated with the notion that only fowl, sheep, cattle and pigs should get antibiotics) .

I argued above that a more socialist system does wonder for deeper thinking, even in, say, physics.

Let alone mathematics, philosophy, sociology.

Hence by supporting Obama one supports the idea of the state that has been vehemently criticized by plutocrats and their obsequious servants, and attributed, by them, to him.

Romney is not a bad person, and could have been a much better president than many of the recent ones (including the dissembling Clinton). However, the election has also turned into an implicit referendum on ideas of the Tea Party, and some of those ideas are very bad.

The truth is often quite the opposite of what the partiers having tea hold. Namely, in truth:

No government, no civilization. No socialism, no civilization. It is not the state that is a problem, but the state of the state. And to the gravest problems, only the state can bring a solution.

Ironically, Obama, who did so little progressive, when he did not apply full reverse, with the extravagant powers conferred to him by an obsolete constitution, has been transformed into the vainglorious knight symbolizing civilization.

***

Patrice Ayme

Hurricane Vetoes Sandbagged USA

Quantum Style Causation Resplendiscent.

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

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

Sandy, a crossfire hurricane!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There is a difference between systemic and direct causation.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Watch it!

I was born in a cross-fire hurricane

And I howled at my ma in the driving rain,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

***

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

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

2. To hit with a sandbag.

3. Slang

a. To treat severely or unjustly.

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

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

Duchesse of Hypocrisy.

NO QUEEN BUT QUEEN OF NAKED HYPOCRISY. KNEEL, RABBLE!

Hypocrisy the crew of spaceship Earth has to learn to do without.  Today, to relax the atmosphere, we evoke much Western hypocrisy attending to plutocracy, and how it thrives that way, drinking from an arriviste’s nipples (see picture at the end of this essay).

British press shows naked women routinely (page 3 of the SUN). But not Kate Middleton, the naked Princess. A French magazine was condemned for uncontrolled pictures of the exhibitionist Kate. Could the interdiction of representing Kate be related to the incapacity of observing much that is moronic, and exploitative throughout the West, commodities markets, banks, Qur’an, plutocracy, and the world order in general?

Tartuffe Kate: Hide This Breast That I Would Not Know How to See

[Picture taken a few hours after Muhammad Middleton sued for pictures of herself in too simple an apparel. Did they ask the brown woman about whether she agreed?]

Hypocrite: pretending that what is there, is not there, and what is not there, is there. Middleton, thereafter to be addressed in this essay as the Duchess of Hypocrisy.

Kate Middleton is from old English money, with hidden finances, even worse than the “sneering plutocrat” Romney (who claims to be a self made man, but is not). Kate owns a 1.5 million dollar apartment in Chelsea. A gift from her parents. She and her two siblings went to an elite private school where the tuition is at least $ 40,000 a year, per child. That’s more than three times the median British family income for the three children, per year, just for “education”.

The disinformation (aka propaganda) has it that her parents are self made millionaires. Actually the family fortune goes back more than 250 years, she is old plutocracy (an ancestor had a fortune of more than 50 million dollar). Middleton is also a media expert, like the rest of her family (she and her sis were nicknamed the “wisteria sisters“, an allusion to their social climbing ability, similar to that of this vine).

Notice the complicity of the British press: it’s all one solid establishment. Everybody respects the Duchess. She is a symbol of plutocracy. Accept the Kate, as an object a reverence, a sacred cow, a prophetess of what’s done, and what’s not done, you accept the rule of the few. Said establishment put the heat on another arriviste, Tony Blair, the PM, and persuaded him to attack Iraq (Murdoch, an Australian billionaire, did). Blair has been well rewarded since.

This apparently side issue, the cover-up of Kate’s mammaries, and related issues, denudes something worrisome: the naked urge of British media to please its masters and manipulate the public’s mind, by setting up the context of the debate. The plot has been unveiled in a particularly silly case: whatever the plutocrats say to hide, will be hidden. (One remembers the astounding insults the same British tabloid press directed to the French when those held that Hussein in Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction.)

10% of British GDP comes from the financial piracy complex. One can imagine how the British mind is expertly manipulated, so that the Brits can goose step behind ‘their‘ banks.

As I was putting forward these considerations on Facebook, a British citizen who worked in France and lives in Germany reacted the old fashion way:

Reaction of Chris Snuggs: “The publishing of these photos was disgusting. Women shown in “The Sun” agree to it and well paid for it. It doesn’t matter WHO is the victim. Would you like YOUR chest (flat or not) sprayed all over the world? Would you like photos of YOUR children playing naked around their paddling pool? This action is, I repeat, disgusting and shows the utter greed and tastelessness of so many people.”

To which I replied: I have a house on the Cote d’Azur. Everybody in the plush parts there can see professional photographers scurrying about, carrying enormous cameras with zoom lenses more than a meter long, and a foot across… One wonders how they carry them, it’s quite remarkable. Plutocrats showing off on yachts and mansions know well they are taken in pictures, and they play that game for whatever it’s worth. If they really do not want pictures to be taken, it’s easy to do: all plutocratic properties are in extremely exclusive areas, protected by high walls, security guarded private roads…  

As France (hypocritically) makes a business attending to the world’s plutocracy, no wonder a tribunal in working class Nanterre found out for the Duchess of Hypocrisy. The French have the world’s most severe privacy laws, short of North Korea, and know how to protect the mighty. Bongo, not a monkey in Africa, but the president of Gabon, had hundreds of millions of property stashed in full view of Nanterre. Finally the French authorities noticed, after a few decades, of being told so, that the immense wealth of Bongo did not seem coherent with his civil servant salary. Just an example that it’s not just the Duchess of Hypocrisy that cannot see what she does not know how to see.

In Switzerland, the daughter of the Uzbek president is involved in laundering money from women and children trafficking, some say (such as the previous city prosecutor in Geneva). But no worries: that other princess has diplomatic immunity as ambassador to the United Nations.

***

MONARCHY AS PLUTOCRACY’S FLAG:

But back to the plutocratic exhibitionist, one of many in the British Royal family. So, it it’s so disgusting, why did Kate strip, exhibiting herself on a yacht (see below), knowing full well she would be taken in a zoom lens? Why did she show off? because she knew a French tribunal would come to her rescue (they always do, all British celebrities know this).

Kate was trying to pose as if she were interesting, a victim. What else? Kate is not innocent, she playing the media like an expert: look at me, I am all harassed, hounded by the plebs! We are supposed to cry for her.

She is trying to show she can make a buck, like the rest of them, royal types, in the most outrageous way. After all, Prince Charles, the future king, got, for years, a personal subsidy of several million euros, a year, from the European Union… For his enormous farm. They say it’s because he is ecological. I say it’s extortion money. In exchange for his benign silence about the EU, the Prince rakes up the cash.

The debate on Facebook kept going:

Nathan Daniel Curry: “Oh when oh when will they get rid of the monarchy?! Peleeease!”

Chris Snuggs: “There are two aspects to this. A) The Monarchy is a feudal anachronism and an insult to all plebs (among whom I am proud to include myself) from whom the land was stolen by a succession of fascist lords and monarchs,

B) The present Royal Family did not CHOOSE to be born royal and most of them – in particular the Queen – are doing their best to fulfill with devotion and dignity what they see as their “duty”. The Monarchy is indeed silly. If it did not exist and you proposed setting up a Head of State by selecting a single family emerging from vicious fighting upon which to bestow immense wealth (your wealth) and power then they’d lock you up as a lunatic. However, it is a historical accident. As such – and given the nature of Man – it could be said to be the least worst of numerous other methods of selecting Heads of State, many of whom become extremely nasty dictators.

I personally desire the end of the Monarchy, but not until the Queen has died. And there has to be some sort of mechanism to prevent – for example – Blair or Brown or any other cretinous ex-politician from becoming President.”

This shows, on the part of the honorable British gentleman, a lack of understanding of what a head of state does. As the head, the head of state should take decisions, be a decider (to talk like George W. bin Bush). The argument that royalty was bestowed on the Royals, that they did not chose it, applies to all and any royalty in all places where royalty has been hereditary. For example the dictator of Syria, Bachar el Assad inherited his job, after his brother died in an accident, so, well, it was a historical accident. Does that excuse his presence and behavior? Same in North Korea, or Uzbekistan.

Nathan Daniel Curry, answering Mr. Snuggs: “No no no – get rid of them now. They are a pointless dinosaur. It won’t happen because of the intense jingoism of the British people. But anything is better than a constitutional monarchy. Please be gone!

This is from a comment I made about the Saudi Regime: It’s very difficult to introduce democratic principles into nations that are dominated by fiefdoms. So it’s very difficult for civilization to develop without those changes. And greed and oil and caring less often go together. Sadly. It could be repeated – with slight edits – for the Brits…”

I share Nathan’s opinion. European monarchies ought to be cancelled right away. Monarchies are the most outrageous symbol of plutocracy. Accepting them is to accept to be dominated by corruption and entrenched elites, and finding honor in it, while the rabble get their spinal cords conditioned to wave flags and be happy about having lords.

The heads of states of republican Rome, the Consuls, were elected just for a year. Two of them had to share the job and rotate the ultimate responsibility every month. When (very rarely) Rome elected a dictator (who had full power during a national emergency, overriding all other institutions of the republic, exactly as what would happen after the USA, or France had been hit by a nuclear strike), the dictator was often elected for only 6 months.

European monarchies ought to be cancelled. Precisely because they symbolize, and practice plutocracy. Accepting them is to accept to be dominated by corruption.

John Michael Gartland joins in: “Corruption and rampant nudity. They just can’t keep their clothing on.”

That’s an allusion to Prince Harry, playing around and swimming naked in Las Vegas. Hey, what are huge VIP suites for? Who is paying for that VIP suite already? British taxpayers? Or European taxpayers? Both? As Harry will inherit from his “dad”, I guess both. Now Harris is back to what plutocracy does best, harrying, and shooting at, the natives from a big armored helicopter (natives in Afghanistan, but that’s just a detail; the idea is to shoot the destitute, while using the resource of the state commandeered by plutocracy; he should paint little natives on the side of his chopper, each time he kills one). The implicit idea to burrow in the subconscious; we are the plutocrats, and we can shoot you. It’s not just a message for Afghans and other Muslims, but for us all, the plebs.

Not only have the emperors no clothes, but they are happy to flaunt the fact they can go around naked, and be complimented on their beautiful clothes. Literally, and figuratively.

***

HYPOCRISY, CRUCIAL TO BUILD AMERICA, OR IMPERIAL, RAVENOUS ROME:

Kate Middleton is the “Duchess of Cambridge“. This is entirely appropriate for an hypocrite. Cambridge University is where the Puritans who colonized America came from. They were so intolerant, so hypocritical, they left England for the Netherlands. Then discovered their children wanted to leave them, and go Dutch. So they migrated again, this time en masse to the USA, where they became instantaneously much richer than any European, by commandeering the resources of a virgin continent.

Yes, the forests, in much of Western Europe had not recovered from the Romans, let alone the Middle Ages.

It helped to massacre the pre-existing natives. The first two natives the “Pilgrims” met, spoke fluent English (they had lived in England!) In a major historical mistake from the Native American point of view, they taught the Pilgrims how to survive from the land, just when the Pilgrims were starving.  

Once in “New England”, the Puritans read the Bible to find in the mass homicidal Jewish God the inspiration they needed to kill all the natives.

It was all very hypocritical: finding in a religion supposedly about love, the precedents to justify holocausts. But that is both the central flaw of Christianity, and why the Latter Days Roman emperors imposed Christianity on the empire, as it allowed them to justify their bloody plutocratic rule.

Sometimes the Puritans sneaked in, and burned entire Indian fortified villages, in the midst of winter, with everybody inside: see the aptly named “Mystic Massacre“.

But that was not enough, to eradicate all Indians, so the Puritans soon invented a new method, not found in the Bible: scalps in exchange for money from American authorities. “Along with pious thoughts, I receive 165 pounds 3-3 . . . my part of scalp money,” reads the 1757 diary of a clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Smith of Falmouth, Maine, one of many men of Allah and his prophet Jesus, who supplied provisions and ammunition to a scalping party made up of his parishioners.

OK, these disparate considerations on hypocrisy would not be complete without a bout of Islamist hypocrisy, and hypocrisy about Islamist hypocrisy. But a separate essay maybe best.

Hypocrisy, is, as I explained implicitly, is driven by the global plutocracy.

Hypocrisy destroyed Rome. When Rome mistreated Carthage, it systematically used a mix of (faked) high mindedness, entangled with the basest motives.

That was highly lucrative. Quickly, thanks to its mighty army, amply rewarded, the Roman Republic turned into the world’s greatest kleptocracy, assisted by frequent holocausts. The hypocrisy allowed the Roman elite to feel morally justified.

The Republican Roman army had been, for centuries, a self defense army. It became a tool of plutocrats (as the Gracchi said, at the time). Under the Principate, by the Severian dynasty, 350 years after assassinating Carthage, the Roman army had become a plutocracy of its own, in conflict with the (even richer) Senatorial plutocracy based in Rome.

It was the logical conclusion of a mental process that the Gracchi were unable to stop.

***

PLUTOCRACY, OR ONLY THE PLEBS PAY TAXES:

We are at such a junction in history nowadays. Global plutocracy is imposing a mood of exploitation that knows no bounds: the Romney-Ryan proposals, to tax the hyper rich even less, can be viewed in this light.

The impudence is always growing:

So, in France, Taittinger (the champagne) just announced he had become Belgian. As a plutocrat, he will pay no taxes in Belgium. There was immediately a demonstration of 10,000 Belgian commoners, with their minuscule incomes, wondering why they are assassinated by taxes whereas super rich French plutocrats pay no taxes.

The upper management of corporations have organized the planet as a giant tax shelter. Take the case of Apple, while idiots are camping on the ground in Manhattan, three days before the release of a phone variant by Apple (‘the iphone 5′).

Apple makes most of its profits through a patent system of sort. 70% of Apple’s profits made in the USA transit through Ireland. Ireland, a very poor country a generation ago, taxes at not even one third what the USA charges (only 10%, a fraction of what France or Germany tax). This system is used by Apple and other corporations such as Google and Microsoft.

Most of the profits of apple in countries such as France, or Great Britain transit through Luxembourg. (Why are we waiting to send the Wehrmacht, there and in Belgium?)

Once the profits have been not taxed there, in Luxembourg, they are sent to the British Virgin islands, where 116 billion dollars of Apple profits were last seen landing. So it’s no wonder there is an Apple religion: each time one of the believer does an itune transaction, it connect to the British Virgin Island.

Once the plutocrats have reduced people to starvation, they come around, offer them crumbs, and have the same media who do not show them naked for what they are, dress them with the compliment “philanthropist”.

Meanwhile the plutocratic New York mayor, a financial billionaire, gloats that he commands the World’s seventh largest army (whose main function nowadays is to arrest Wall Street protesters)  

Hypocrisy is a mental property that allows plutocracy to grow, by under (hypo) criticizing it. Kate Middleton, dancing in Tuvalu sexily the next day, after learning the decision of the French tribunal of plutocratic servants, has something to celebrate: she did her class good. She belongs, she earned her keep.

***

RUIN THE SOUL, AND EVERYTHING ELSE WILL FOLLOW:

Bob Dylan says the stigma of slavery ruined America’s soul. He doubts the country can get rid of the shame because it was “founded on the backs of slaves.”

Dylan, the veteran musician tells Rolling Stone that in America “people (are) at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color… it will hold any nation back.” He also says blacks know that some whites “didn’t want to give up slavery.”

The deeper point is: can the USA get rid of the mood of exploitation that brought forward slavery, among other things?  (See Mystic massacre, scalps, Pequots, above). Or, more generally, can the West avoid the evolution that brought dictatorial, bloody, small minded imperial Rome?

Or the somewhat similar process that brought the feudal order in full oligarchic regime by the year 1100 CE? (When the first Crusade was launched.)

As it is the mood of exploitation of the many by the few, of the biosphere by the jet set, has spread.

So back to the Duchess, today’s example of how the People gets softly conditionned to the impudent oppression of its Lords. The titles of “Duc, Duchesse” (French), from the Latin “Dux“, that comes from ducere, to lead. The concept is more than 26 centuries old. So Kate Middleton is a leader, we are told. Are we supposed to kneel? And what does she leads towards? Hypocrisy supreme. Taxpayer financed. Here she is on a big yacht in France, no doubt taxpayer paid: 

Don’t Look At My Nipples, It’s Against The Law

Buckingham Palace has called photos’ of the woman above a “grotesque” invasion of privacy. And yet, if prince Harry puts bullets inside Afghan children, that’s heroic. Do the morons in the palace know what “grotesque” mean?

***

Patrice Ayme

NO LOVE, NO MIND

LOVE IS ALL ABOUT MIND MELDING…

And Mind Melding Is What Makes Us Possible.

The question has long been asked: what is love, where does it come from? But the real question is: what is man, where does it come from? And the answer is love.

I do not allude here to the silly confusion between love and sex called, rather pathetically, ”making love”. At best, it has to do with the amplification oxytocin provides with, and it’s a sideshow; fishes do it.

Love in full is parental love, mammalian style.  

That does involve oxytocin (and vasopressin), sure. But love, in advanced species, goes well beyond chemistry, or biology. It involves intelligence, logic itself. The chemical intervenes just to amplify, and stabilize, the logical. And it is pretty obvious why.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the official name of the species. Sapiens Sapiens: Wise Wise. Where does all that wisdom comes from? Love. Facts are mostly learned. Logic is learned, like anything else. Wisdom is learned, even more than anything else.

And how was most of this learning achieved? From others, and for others. What motivated the teachers, the parents? Love. What mostly motivated those who learned? Love.

What one learns depends upon one’s environment. Famous experiences from  the 1970s have shown that kittens brought up in an unnatural visual environment do not see properly. Their visual neurons are abnormal. Kittens reared in a world of vertical lines do not have any neuron responding to anything within 30 degrees of the horizontal. (They need 5 months in a normal environment to start to see what is horizontal!)

In other words, neurobiology is made from what’s out there (the idea is at least as old as Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish discoverer of neurons, a century ago).

This generalizes to many mental behaviors, and much mental infrastructure. True, one can learn logic, octopus style, by making little experiments at the bottom of the sea. But that carries only that far.

Interacting with the material world does not teach high level Machiavellianism, the gist of social intelligence. And indeed, although cephalopods are intelligent, they have not developed high social intelligence as, say, whales or primates. (Although cephalopods are very social, their lives are very short, they just don’t have the time to be taught by fellow cephalopods; an aspect of the connection between longevity and wisdom; so their brain/body mass ratio is between cold and warm blooded animals; it’s also probably why their brains did not grow much in the last 400 million years, whereas warm blooded social animals are launched in a brain size race).

To see with one’s heart, to have a heart that can see, one needs to be exposed to all the emotional lines imaginable. Otherwise, just as neurons reading horizontal lines do not appear in a world of vertical lines, so will it be with emotions, or other stimuli. Presenting a growing mind with a mutilated world fabricates a mutilated neurobiology.

The mutilated world can be physically mutilated, as with the cats with an amputated visual environment. But if the mental environment is emotionally, logically or experientally mutilated, it’s the same, and it’s worse in humans. For example the chidren of abused people tend to become themselves abusers.

One thing man did when selecting dogs was to evolve animals who are eager to find out the cues that human eyes indicate. In other words, animals eager to meld minds. This is reinforced by an expectation of love, which is necessary as most wild animals interpret direct eye contact as proximal to attack.

High social intelligence is taught by love, for love, through love. High social intelligence makes very complex, caring societies possible. But not just that. It makes technology and science possible.

How? High social intelligence involves Machiavellian Intelligence. Machiavellian Intelligence is, basically, and in its most general sense, the ability to compute with love (real, fake, suspected, or suspicious).

Machiavellian intelligence rests upon, and demonstrates, all day long, that infinitesimal causes, properly piled up, can have enormous effects. This is the hint, the motivation, the inspiration, that entices to create logic, science and technology, thus the human universe, possible. Man without logic, science and technology is nothing. Man simply cannot even survive in nature without technology, ever since stone weapons have been wielded.

I claim that Homo’s social subtlety was the paradigm for science.

Indeed, that infinitesimal causes, properly piled up, can have enormous effects, is the gist of infinitesimal and integral calculus, and the principle on which experimental and theoretical sciences rest: from the apparently neglectable, experimentally or logically, the essence springs forth. (An example is that if one contradiction arises in a logical system, the whole thing is invalidated.)

What we call love is the sensation we experience when our mind is working properly, that is, socially enough to learn most of what it knows from society (as it is congenitally programmed to do).

Love is about mind melding. Love is what makes mind melding possible. Culture is one aspect of mind melding. So is one’s entire emotional system.

To say that love brings the oxytocin up, explains how attachment is amplified, but it does not explain why attachment happens.

Attachment happens, and it is so strong, because minds are mostly programmed by the environment provided to them. OK, in the case of cephalopods the sea itself can provide much. In the case of social insects, a few simple behaviors are easily produced.

But advanced brainy animals have much more sophisticated behaviors. And only that very sophisticated environment called love can provide it.

Our brains have reward centers all over. My guess is that they are set-up so that enriching input from another mind is most appreciated, once basic physiological needs are satisfied.

Without love we would be nothing much. We would not even know how to see or think in a human way. And certainly we would not know how to feel correctly. Most of these behaviors are learned… from the loving environment provided by caregivers. And they are socially learned, and they can only be socially learned because our care givers were motivated to do their job well, by that particular organization of neurobiology found in advanced brains that we call love.

Thus there is symmetry breaking between the Good Lord and the Dark Side. The Good Lord, Love, makes us possible. Love is our ground state (to use the Quantum analogy). The Dark Side is just something that is sometimes necessary.

Hence a polity should not rest too much on the Dark Side: it’s not our creator. This is the fundamental reason that makes plutocratic or cannibalistic societies so little creative that they always meet an ominous fate, in short order. And also why they contributed so little to civilization.

This philosophical observation has a strong bearing on politics. It means that society has to be built on love first, not profit, or an ill defined “market”. It means that the economic set-ups based on exploitation strategies (that brought us Anglo-Saxon empires and Russia) are suspect.

This is something the Roman Republic, tough as nail, had understood perfectly well. It was built mostly defensively, around the idea that the simplest version of love inside the Republic was the ground state. They called it the law. And thus endures the Roman Republic to this day, at least in the spirit of our laws.

It also means that any other sentient species, long ago, in a galaxy far away, would also have been built first, out of love… At least for itself. Culture is impossible without a cultivator. And why to cultivate minds, if not out of love?

We love, we have been loved, therefore we think.

***

Patrice Ayme

Sorting Out Soros.

A FEW TRUTHS FROM AN OLD PLUTOCRAT:

(With A Bit of Dissemblance Too.)

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Abstract: George Soros, the major plutocrat, made Remarks at the Festival of Economics, Trento Italy, June 02, 2012. A lot of what he said is pretty good.

Soros eschews the deeper things such as: the divulgation of the injustice of the Fractional Reserve System, what it means to be a state, the Plutocratic effect, the Will To Evil, etc,. which are all major constituents of the deeper fundaments of the present crisis.

And of course, Soros made a billion dollars pushing Britain out of the European Monetary Union, so its compassion vis a vis Europe has got to remind us of that of the fox for the hens he killed. Indeed, the EMU would be stronger, with Britain in, as would have happened if no hedge fund manager such as Soros had ever existed. 

But still, his work is worth commenting upon, it’s much deeper than the usual platitudes.

***

A note on Soros: After living under Nazi occupation, and escaping those German monsters by the skin of his teeth, as a Hungarian Jewish child, Soros went to London to study economics (and the philosophy of Popper). Soros made a career as a major financial manipulator, first in the company of Jim Rogers. He was operator of the “Quantum Fund”, one of the earliest, largest and most successful hedge funds.

Soros played a very positive role in the opening of the Iron Curtain, financing Hungarian students.

Soros often talks as if nothing mattered more for him than being viewed as philosopher. He is obsessed by “reflexivity“, a notion he used in his trading. Reflexivity is nothing new for those who reflect reflexively. But Soros is right to insist on its importance. What he means by this, he explains below.

Finance and economics are riddled with non linear feedback loop, entangling subject and object, which often dominate, causing catastrophes. The same is true in politics, sociology, cultures… Such is the human, all too human factor.

As the present German loss of control about Europe demonstrates. Is that one of these famous Hitler’s rages again?

Below I put Soros in italics, my comments are in regular script. I took the freedom of underlining passages of Soros which I find particularly interesting. That generally indicates approbation (and reprobation will be duly expressed, if needed). I cut out one section of Soros’ discourse, for lack of punch. All the rest is there. Let Soros talk:

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Soros: Ever since the Crash of 2008 there has been a widespread recognition, both among economists and the general public, that economic theory has failed. But there is no consensus on the causes and the extent of that failure.

I believe that the failure is more profound than generally recognized. It goes back to the foundations of economic theory. Economics tried to model itself on Newtonian physics. It sought to establish universally and timelessly valid laws governing reality. But economics is a social science and there is a fundamental difference between the natural and social sciences. Social phenomena have thinking participants who base their decisions on imperfect knowledge. That is what economic theory has tried to ignore.

Scientific method needs an independent criterion, by which the truth or validity of its theories can be judged. Natural phenomena constitute such a criterion; social phenomena do not. That is because natural phenomena consist of facts that unfold independently of any statements that relate to them. The facts then serve as objective evidence by which the validity of scientific theories can be judged. That has enabled natural science to produce amazing results.

PA: By the way, that is exactly what fails in Quantum physics: in Quantum physics, facts unfold in dependence with any statements that relate to them. Because the observing act affects the observed. That was Bohr’s great point, and it is the main difficulty with making a Quantum computer.

The Quantum computer can be made, as it is the way the natural world works. But to realize one, in full, I believe, our understanding of Quantum physics will have to progress.

Somehow, Quantum physics replaces local physics, made of points, by the integrated whole. In other words something where all participants participate, be they geometry, potentials, initial conditions, etc. That integrated whole approach is the engine at the heart of biology, and it is the one that allows to circumvent the Second Law of Thermodynamics (you will have heard it here first!). OK, back to Soros:

Soros: Social events, by contrast, have thinking participants who have a will of their own.  They are not detached observers but engaged decision makers whose decisions greatly influence the course of events. Therefore the events do not constitute an independent criterion by which participants can decide whether their views are valid. In the absence of an independent criterion people have to base their decisions not on knowledge but on an inherently biased and to greater or lesser extent distorted interpretation of reality. Their lack of perfect knowledge or fallibility introduces an element of indeterminacy into the course of events that is absent when the events relate to the behavior of inanimate objects. The resulting uncertainty hinders the social sciences in producing laws similar to Newton’s physics.

PA: Quantum computer, here we come!

Soros: Economics, which became the most influential of the social sciences, sought to remove this handicap by taking an axiomatic approach similar to Euclid’s geometry. But Euclid’s axioms closely resembled reality while the theory of rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis became far removed from it. Up to a point the axiomatic approach worked. For instance, the theory of perfect competition postulated perfect knowledge. But the postulate worked only as long as it was applied to the exchange of physical goods. When it came to production, as distinct from exchange, or to the use of money and credit, the postulate became untenable because the participants’ decisions involved the future and the future cannot be known until it has actually occurred.

PA: By the way, Euclidean, and Non-Euclidean geometries, are COMMUTATIVE geometries. Instead…

Quantum physics uses NON COMMUTATIVE geometry (what it consists of exactly is a matter of debate among mathematicians). Basically, the order of events matter, just as the order of rotations in space matter, or just as the order in which what happens to social participants matter.

Soros: I am not well qualified to criticize the theory of rational expectations and the efficient market hypothesis because as a market participant I considered them so unrealistic that I never bothered to study them. That is an indictment in itself but I shall leave a detailed critique of these theories to others.

Instead, I should like to put before you a radically different approach to financial markets. It was inspired by Karl Popper who taught me that people’s interpretation of reality never quite corresponds to reality itself. This led me to study the relationship between the two. I found a two-way connection between the participants’ thinking and the situations in which they participate. On the one hand people seek to understand the situation; that is the cognitive function. On the other, they seek to make an impact on the situation; I call that the causative or manipulative function. The two functions connect the thinking agents and the situations in which they participate in opposite directions. In the cognitive function the situation is supposed to determine the participants’ views; in the causative function the participants’ views are supposed to determine the outcome. When both functions are at work at the same time they interfere with each other. The two functions form a circular relationship or feedback loop. I call that feedback loop reflexivity. In a reflexive situation the participants’ views cannot correspond to reality because reality is not something independently given; it is contingent on the participants’ views and decisions. The decisions, in turn, cannot be based on knowledge alone; they must contain some bias or guess work about the future because the future is contingent on the participants’ decisions.

[...] Bubbles are usually asymmetric in shape: booms develop slowly but the bust tends to be sudden and devastating. That is due to the use of leverage: price declines precipitate the forced liquidation of leveraged positions.

PA: Busts are also caused by panic. An animal generally approaches a threat with more caution that it puts in flight. Panic insures survival, the most important instinct, most of the time. Whereas greed is a luxury, and, if there is an instinct for it, it’s much less developed. Carnivores have been known to kill, for killing’s sake (a form of greed). But if they experience the slightest fear, they won’t engage in it, and will spend lots of energy putting lots of distance between them and the threat.

Soros: Well-formed financial bubbles always follow this pattern but the magnitude and duration of each phase is unpredictable. Moreover the process can be aborted at any stage so that well-formed financial bubbles occur rather infrequently.

At any moment of time there are myriads of feedback loops at work, some of which are positive, others negative. They interact with each other, producing the irregular price patterns that prevail most of the time; but on the rare occasions that bubbles develop to their full potential they tend to overshadow all other influences.

According to my theory financial markets may just as soon produce bubbles as tend toward equilibrium. Since bubbles disrupt financial markets, history has been punctuated by financial crises. Each crisis provoked a regulatory response. That is how central banking and financial regulations have evolved, in step with the markets themselves. Bubbles occur only intermittently but the interplay between markets and regulators is ongoing. Since both market participants and regulators act on the basis of imperfect knowledge the interplay between them is reflexive. Moreover reflexivity and fallibility are not confined to the financial markets; they also characterize other spheres of social life, particularly politics. Indeed, in light of the ongoing interaction between markets and regulators it is quite misleading to study financial markets in isolation. Behind the invisible hand of the market lies the visible hand of politics. Instead of pursuing timeless laws and models we ought to study events in their time bound context.

My interpretation of financial markets differs from the prevailing paradigm in many ways. I emphasize the role of misunderstandings and misconceptions in shaping the course of history. And I treat bubbles as largely unpredictable. The direction and its eventual reversal are predictable; the magnitude and duration of the various phases is not. I contend that taking fallibility as the starting point makes my conceptual framework more realistic. But at a price: the idea that laws or models of universal validity can predict the future must be abandoned.

Until recently, my interpretation of financial markets was either ignored or dismissed by academic economists. All this has changed since the crash of 2008. Reflexivity became recognized but, with the exception of Imperfect Knowledge Economics, the foundations of economic theory have not been subjected to the profound rethinking that I consider necessary. Reflexivity has been accommodated by speaking of multiple equilibria instead of a single one. But that is not enough. The fallibility of market participants, regulators, and economists must also be recognized.  A truly dynamic situation cannot be understood by studying multiple equilibria.  We need to study the process of change.

The euro crisis is particularly instructive in this regard. It demonstrates the role of misconceptions and a lack of understanding in shaping the course of history. The authorities didn’t understand the nature of the euro crisis; they thought it is a fiscal problem while it is more of a banking problem and a problem of competitiveness.

[To be continued in the next essay, "Boosting Soros On Europe"].

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Patrice Ayme