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.
***
“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

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

King Wastes Euros, Elephants; CO2 Denier Blames Cows!

THOSE WHO TEACH WASTE OUGHT TO BE TAUGHT A LESSON.

Five millions Spaniards are unemployed (out of 40 million). And now the king broke his hip. How? He was in a safari. It turns out that the good king loves to assassinate elephants in Bostwana. Each time the king reaches ecstasy by killing one single elephant it costs 37,000 euros ($50,000) to European taxpayers (and even to the American ones: globalization, remember?) But there is no money for the 35% of Spanish youth who are unemployed. Each time the king presses the trigger, it’s more than two median family incomes in Spain, which go to pierce flesh. It’s highly symbolic: you earn it not, while the king penetrates a terrorized victim with it.

King Juan Carlos loves to pose with elephants he perforated with bullets. It makes him feel mighty, he has got to feel completely empty inside.

The truth is that this assassin of elephants was put in power by a fascist, the treacherous general, Franco, who killed more than a million Spaniards, while overthrowing the republic, and even more for years after that. With the crucial help of Texaco, and other American plutocrats, Mussolini and Hitler. Franco and his subalterns were even engaged in child trafficking (killing the parents to get the children; no wonder the Catholic church who has had an obsession with abusing children ever since Abraham, was all behind Franco: Opus Dei!)

The latter two, Mussolini and Hitler, were punished, but they were only the puppets of the former, a worldwide conspiracy of plutocrats, whose heirs are doing better than ever, thank you. We are moving in a new phase, where their role and tastes are becoming obvious, in part for an extremely sinister reason: they don’t feel they have to hide anymore.

Starve millions of Spaniards, kill the elephants. Hopefully they all suffer very much, pleasing Juan Carlos to no end.

After one more scandal too many, should one want to improve matters for the commons, Juan Carlos and his family ought to be removed from their influential position. We have seen enough of his kind. Juan Carlos, a Bourbon, that is a descendant of a family that made France suffer so much, is there because his ancestor, the sectarian criminal, Louis XIV of France, put him there. OK, first France had to win a war, the War of the Succession of Spain, an enormous world war that lasted more than 13 years, devastating all of Europe, and even America, but especially Spain, France and Germany.

The main reason why Spain could be democratized is that admiral Duke Carrero Blanco, Franco’s confidante and successor was thrown, still in his armored vehicle, into a ballistic trajectory by ETA. After overflying the church where he had attended mass, Prime Minister Blanco was in for a rude landing. He died later, after contemplating his crimes.

It’s high time for Spain to become a republic again, a generation after the fascists killed millions to make sure it was not. The fact that several members of Carlos’ family have been stealing Spain in full sight makes Spanish, hence European, recovery difficult.

We have seen that problem in Italy with Berlusconi. Now that Berlusconi is gone, a great cleaning has started. As much as 35% of Italy potential tax base is evaded, one now hears. Italians are poor, Italian political parties, are filthy rich. It turns out that some in one of the parties, the Ligua Norte, stole in excess of ten billion dollars. The son of the founder had never seen an expensive sport car the Ligua did not buy for him.

That reminds one of the Chinese Princelings who all go to Harvard, to live like princes. Plutocracy is a world phenomenon and Harvard is a crucial link of this somber conspiracy of unprecedented reach. Harvard profs wrote Saif Al Islam Qaddafi’s PhD thesis, passed in London at the urge of George Soros (another plutocrat multi billionaire). Bo, the son of Bo, famous for his extravagantly expensive lifestyle was in Harvard, but now that his mother has been accused of being an assassin, he has disappeared. Don’t worry: the daughter of the coming Chinese president is also in Harvard.

Some Harvard supporter told me that 60% of student there receive scholarships. Paid by American taxpayers? and does that mean we are left with 40% heirs of plutocrats, and 60% future sycophants? Plutocrats need servants. The latter can go to Harvard, and get acquainted to their masters, who are, conveniently enough, in the same locale.

Spain’s problems mostly arise from a conspiracy of the bankers with the politicians. Bankers, backed up by taxpayers, engaged, thanks to politicians into projects that could not bring a profit, but would just force the People of Spain (hence Europe) to pay them rent.

Time for the clean-up. It has to start with the symbols.

Just as there is a worldwide banking mafia feeding its pet politicians, academic and media, there is a worldwide fossil fuel mafia feeding the same sort of critters.    

Paul Handover from the excellent Learning From Dogs site has detected a new angle of the fossil fuel mafia. I thought that I saw I read everything from the CO2 deniers, but this reaches new heights of perversity! Thanks to Paul to bring this to light.

Arizona State University Professor Darnall claims that:

“Livestock generates more greenhouse gases than all the planes, trains and automobiles on the planet. In part, that’s because the methane from, well, the other end of cows, has 21 times the greenhouse gas warming effect as carbon dioxide.”

Whatever. Good trick to utter a lie, and then explain it with something true. Yet, Prof. Darnall does not even know her own propaganda well. The Global Warming Potential (GWP) of methane, CH4, over 20 years, is actually seventy-two times that of CO2, and twenty-five times over 100 years. However its global Global Warming effect may be as little as 25% that of CO2.

Methane from herding may have spared us a re-glaciation, 7,000 years ago, some scientists have suggested. The good professor rides on that notion all the way to hell.

There is crushing evidence that what the good professor says about cows is NOT just incorrect, it is outright absurd. And the absurdity is easy to demonstrate. Why? Because the CO2 went from 280 ppm (1800 CE) to 395 ppm, but only up to 460 ppm in CO2 equivalent (see Radiative Forcing, below).

As Paul Handover points out: “Darnall’s solution? Meatless Mondays — to start curving that scary trend line.”

Just to visualize, that’s a lions’ diet. Once a week, lions at the zoo are NOT given meat, for better health. So prof. Darnall suggests that Americans, who, as Homo Sapiens, are omnivorous, should actually eat just like lions at the zoo, with “Meatless Mondays“.  

So even if all the supplementary CO2 like gases were all methane, CH4 (and they are not), one would get a methane contribution of only 30%, over the 1800 base.

The good prof. should have said that one could cut off all greenhouse gases of industrial origin. Some have 32,000 times the Greenhouse Warming Potential of CO2. One easy way to mitigate the greenhouse would be to outlaw them all. Their Radiative Forcing is about two-third that of methane, itself a third of CO2.

 So I would dare to say that the good professor’s discourse is corrupt. She looks cute like that, young and smiley, but she is out to seduce the big industrial interests of the fossil persuasion, or to seduce on their behalf. Obviously. It’s all about small people not doing enough, she says. They just eat too much of the bad stuff. Let them eat arugula instead.

This is typical: those who don’t want to change anything claim it’s enough to change a few little things: put the cardboard in the green container, eat grass, don’t shampoo, etc. In truth, the real problem is energy. Energy has to be made expensive. Why? Because it is. At this point, it is kept cheap by big armies, and an exploitative mentality. Even if there was no greenhouse and CO2 poisoning, fossil fuels will run out soon.

Whereas I say: rise energy taxes colossally, force professors, bankers and politicians to video-conference, instead of jetting around. I am myself jetting around right now, but it’s for (literally, vital family reasons). I have known professors who go around the world all the time, as if frequent flier miles were all they were really after, thanks to taxpayers’ ever more colossal generosity (does not beat Obama sending an army around his 13 year old to play solo student in Mexico, or Sarkozy recovering his bad belly adult son in Ukraine with one of the French republic’s fast jets).

I have not eaten much meat in my life (last time was a few months ago), so my defense of meat is altruistic. I know that in vast swathes of the planet, meat is the ONLY source of protein. Lack of proteins is a huge problem in Black African children, cattle and bush meat their salvation. We are far from arugula salad there. Cattle is also an important export and source of livelihood in the Third World.

There is probably more cattle in Africa than in the Americas. So not so good prof is saying millions of African children should go around with enormously distended bellies, and the poor there, getting poorer.

I am presently generating lots of CO2 myself, as I travel around the planet. But I am no hypocrite: I admit to it.

Plus, I have to do this for family reasons. I minimize air travel as much as possible. Out of dozens of flights, I remember just one for pure “tourism”. I may be somewhat hypocritical though, as my destiny was sprawled over three continents plus one archipelago. Thus I was condemned to conflate sightseeing and common decency. There are no free trips.

***

Patrice Ayme

No Law Up High, No Republic

ULTIMATE AUTHORITY OF THE REPUBLIC RESTS ON THE LAW.

Is Government Too Separated From The Authority That matters Most?

***

The planet we have is increasingly ravaged by several conflating crises. Burned by the carbonic acid created by excess carbon dioxyde absorbed by the oceans, young fishes die, go blind or become crazy, as bees do on land. The plancton, which fabricates the oxygen we need, is dissolving in the acid bath we used to call a sea.

But the fossil fuel polluters’ crimes are not even fiscally discouraged. Instead they are allowed to also spew lies, and persuade everybody that there will be plenty of air for ever (see the financing of the Tea party in the USA by the Koch brothers).

Meanwhile, the grip financial pirates have on the world has become obvious since 2008. After they seized the world economy, they asked for a ransom. And then again, And it was paid again. Now the serfs are asked to pay for distant banks by allowing themselves to become destitute (and this is happening even inside prosperous Germany, where old retirees discover they have to go back to work!)

Ever since the amazing financial crisis which grips the planet came to everybody’s attention in 2008, it has become obvious that a handful of men in suits take all the decisions with the money, and even the fate, of the public, allowing their class to thrive ever more, while, and because, the public deperishes.

The spirit of the law, if not its letter, has been denied.

I claim that this comes directly from the fact that the executive branch has eluded its responsibilities in implementing the spirit of the law. This is not just a question of the present leaders being plutophile  (lovers of Pluto, thus, wealth). Institutionally, the way executive powers are presently set-up, has less to do with wielding justice than it had under the Roman republic.

Western democracy, led by the English, American and French revolutions of the preceding centuries, consists of representative democracies with three branches of government: the legislative, the judiciary, and the executive. Legislation is established by a bicameral parliament of elected representatives (an inheritance from 6,500 years old Sumer).

In a purely parliamentary system, parliament also elects the executive. In the USA, France and Russia, a powerful president is elected directly (by a college of a few hundred special electors in the USA, by the people in France or Russia).

In any case, the judiciary is supposed to be separated from the executive. It is not clear what this exactly means: after all, most judges are nominated by the executive in the USA, and confirmed by the legislative. In other countries (e.g. France) the judiciary self nominates.

So the judiciary is a bit more independent in France: see the Dreyfus affair, where the independent judiciary forced the executive, the army and the anti-Judaists to eat crow. What I will contest here is not the independence of the judiciary, but its power: an ant may be independent, but it is easily crushed by a plutocrat.

In the USA no judge is powerful enough to judge the obvious, namely that the Federal reserve has no right to transfer arbitrary amounts of “monetary base” to the same old crooks, year after year (although a judge recently blocked an all too comfortable accord between the government and a major bank).

The difference in judicial independence between France and the USA shows: the popular Chirac, 12 year president, and Prime Minister before that, was condemned to two years in prison (suspended). For allowing City Hall finances as Paris mayor to provide supporters with somewhat fictitious jobs with real salaries. The offense is so puny, it would not really register on American radar.

The Roman republic was not organized this way. In Rome, the top executives, the two Consuls, were also viewed as the top judicial officers. Why so? It is very simple: the republic rested on the law.

No law, no republic. That had to make the law more important than anything else, including the army. Military power could be used if, and only if, it was legal. The law was the highest value, and thus the highest authorities took care of it. The founders of the Roman republic saw this clearly. Justice was not a department, it was the foundation.

The superpower of the Consuls was compensated by the shortness of their terms: just a year. But they could be re-elected. Gaius Marius was elected seven times Consul. Ex-Consuls were called proconsular officers. They were frequently nominated governors of provinces, and had many prerogatives, including being protected by lictors, special trained bodyguards carrying the axes of the fasces representing the union of the Populus around the power of the law.  

When there was war, it was made in the name of the law, under the eye of the law, as the Consuls often personally directed the operations of the main armies (many Roman Consuls died in combat, over a millennium).

Let’s remember that a mostly functional Roman republic lasted about 5 centuries. And arguably for much longer: after all, there were Consuls, and a Roman Senate, for more than 11 centuries! The founder of Francia, elected king and imperator Clovis, was also Roman Consul. Stretched to the max, a Roman state existed for 23 centuries (753 BCE to 1453 CE).

So where does the system we have presently come from? How come justice got separated from the executive? The break happened around the 13th century. In England, the French barons limited the power of the king through the Charter of Liberties (1100 CE) and the Magna Carta (1215 CE): their ancestors had joined William The Conqueror, a Duke, (that is a high commander in the Roman army of the Late Empire), to invade England, bringing with them most of the (French) army that invaded England. William had been recognized as first among equals, and the descendants of his acolytes intended not to forget that fact.

In France the break came later. Elizabeth de France, the ferocious intelligent and domineering daughter of Philippe IV Le Bel had become reigning queen of England (having visited an unspeakable end to the father of her four children, a Plantagenet, Edward II). When her brothers all died, she ought to have become (absolute) queen of France too. She, and her son, the war like Edward III, were blocked by lawyers (her father had already rested heavily on lawyers, in his hunt for popes and Templars: his closest executors were lawyers). This is how the 475 year long “100 years war” started.

So parliaments rose, ever higher, taking judicial power away from the executive. By the time of the French revolution, England, France and the Netherlands had long seen the judicial system become nearly completely autonomous of the executive. The Bastille was stormed in France to take away from the king the last shred of Roman like power the executive had on the implementation of the law.

After the English, American and French revolutions, too much of the new system has still more to do with the monarchies that preceded it, than with the Roman republican system. The chief executive was elected for longish terms, as if it were a monarch, and directly from the legislature. In other words, the parliament now elected the kings (and queens).

Here a comical aside. The USA elects its president as if he were the Roman emperor. The Imperium Romanum officially re-established by Charlemagne in 800 CE, made Holy under Barabarossa (German: Heiliges Römisches Reich, Latin: Imperium Romanum Sacrum) indeed elected its head from a college of “grand electors“. Thus in 2001, the People elected Gore president, but the plutophile Supreme Court selected Bush, instead. (Perhaps the point when, in the future, the USA will be seen has having given in to the Dark Side!)

The representative democracy, separation of powers system is viewed unanimously as fine and good. (Although Switzerland, the oldest democracy around, uses less representation, and more direct rule of the people.)

But the question remains: when a massive injustice arises, quickly and powerfully, who can handle it? Who is going to deliver maximum power in the name of the law defending the People? In other words, when executive power is needed to re-establish the law, how can the meek executives we now have, thoroughly checked and balanced, exert the required power? America’s Founding Fathers were obsessed by checks and balances, but, although Founding Father Washington became filthy rich (317 slaves in his Mount Vernon house!), the Founding Fathers had no idea what real plutocracy was like. The only plutocrats they knew were in England, and that was judged to be an ocean away.

President Andrew Jackson, one the fiercest generals ever, had a better idea. He hated the Rothschilds (great practitioners of fractional reserve banking, who considered themselves the real power behind the thrones in Europe). Jackson prevented their implantation in the USA. Next he disintegrated the Bank of the United states, and considered that, on his deathbed, to be his greatest achievement. If he was around, as chief executive, he would probably occupy Wall Street and Congress with twenty divisions, the next day.

There are still remnants of the old Roman power the Consuls had: Obama, executing Ben Laden, for example. That was well accepted, because that was overseas (and even below the sea).

Besides Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Roosevelt Teddy, and FDR, another one who took himself for a Roman consul, was, of course, Abraham Lincoln. But all those powers they grabbed, as needed, were not really the appanage of the presidency of the USA. The water was boiling, so the frog jumped out. Right now, the temperature is slowly rising, and normal powers, in normal circumstances are not enough to address the various problems. That is made plenty clear with the European banking crisis, the on-going financial crisis all over the world (even… in China!), and the ecological crisis (which the USA resolutely refuses to consider, thus undermining everybody).

In the present financial crisis, and in the ecological crisis at some point, overwhelming power will be needed. The only question is to know if the power will be military, and extraordinary, Lincoln style, or civilian and legal.

The spirit of the law has to be defended. For example against the financial derivative universe (which has no collateral, which means the unsuspecting public is the collateral; see lower down).

Too many checks and balances for the power of the People, and all you end with, is the power of the plutocracy.

The arch-example: Geithner and Bernanke directed untold trillions of dollars towards the banks which had caused the crisis, but asked for nothing in return. At that point a strong executive ought to have stepped in and declare that this fabulous gift violated the principle of the law, which is that the republic does not make gifts to private parties, without compensation. Especially when the beneficiaries are the perpetrators.

(The gifts had started under Paulson and Bush II, when the daemon Dimon was offered 30 billion dollars by the fed, collateralized by what he was buying (!!!) to help him swallow Bear-Sterns, the “Jamie deal“. Thus, Dimon is viewed as a genius. When the state gives in to the daemon, crepuscule of goodness!)

The financial crisis has been allowed to roll on because a general laxity about the law. The laxity is fed even by videogames.

The Red Cross pointed out that in the world’s most popular, most sold videogames, the Geneva Conventions rules were not just violated, but gamers get rewarded for violating them. A whole generation is being raised, feeling that one gains 50 points by shooting on ambulances. The Red Cross wants to change this. The Red Cross is right. The plutocrats and their corporations facing them, making billions from a bloody obsession with an alternate reality, will beg to differ. Not only they make a fortune from violating the most basic morality. But those daemons know quite well that the games they sell preach violations of the law, and also violations of civilization itself.

The acceptance of barbarity, as a way to get ahead, the plutocrats meekly hope, will bring more of the abject world in which, and by which, they thrive.

The mood of the times is important: pathetic plutocrats have gone around, requesting the respect they have come to expect. Meanwhile the law is symbolically stepped on. In the last three years, both the French and American presidents, both trained lawyers, violated in public, the very first thing about the law, namely the presumption of innocence (this is not a good example for the inchoating republics of Ukraine and Russia, where the law is obviously used to hunt the loyal opposition!)

The presumption of innocence says that even suspects are innocent until proven otherwise by a proper legal procedure. The presumption of innocence protects freedom, every body’s freedom, not just the freedom of suspects or criminals.

President Sarkozy claimed that former Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin was “guilty”… although Villepin was later found completely innocent. President Obama, having maybe talked to Sarkozy too much, declared that soldier Bradley Manning, who is accused to have shown the truth to the public, had “broken the law”, as his trial started.

However, as commander in chief, Obama is the ultimate authority for the military tribunal which judges Manning. Constitutionally, he cannot pose as judge and accuser.

(Let’s note in passing that the Nazi government had given orders to not prosecute soldiers who had refused to obey orders, on the ground of violations of human rights. The Nazis were afraid that any official prosecution would shine a light on their violations of human rights, the Geneva Conventions, and German law! It is rather curious that the government of the USA is too arrogant to even be as wise as that…)

Methinks that it is not that Sarkozy and Obama have early Alzheimer, and forgot the very first thing about the law.

Instead I believe that they feel they live in times where anyone up high can get away with everything (witness the enormous transfers of wealth to the hyper rich under their reigns, transfers which threaten the very thrones on which they sit, but the establishments upon which they rule feel they could get away with it, and that there is no other way… Although Sarkozy may soon understand his error, especially when, after losing the next election, French judges start to investigate him in earnest…) 

Is a new age of connivance upon us?

Justice without the determination, or capability to impose it, is no justice.

We just had a beautiful example in Italy: Berlusconi, highest judicial officer of the Italian republic, if one looks at his job in the fullness of the authority inherited from Rome, as one should, refused to prosecute the Mafia energetically. He failed to arrest top mafiosi. Berlusconi was barely gone for a few days, replaced by Mario Monti, a former university president, that the head of the Camorra was arrested (after 15 years living in a bunker in Naples).

It cannot be otherwise according to the spirit of the French and American constitutions: the highest authorities of the state are, have to be, first of all, the highest judicial authorities. It is no accident that leech known as finance is so strong in London, where the Prime Minister has fewer powers (not being head of state, to start with; and according to Rothschild, circa 1820, not the real power in Britain.)

Such disregard for the basics, for the strict letter of the law, I suggest, comes precisely from a general mood which tramples the basics of republican civilization. Or then from having a plutocratic agenda. But to believe that, in the age of the Internet, plutocracy can win over democracy, is itself fiction of the highest order. As people get more and more informed, the transition to a military regime will have to take just a generation, and not five, as it did in Rome. 

To re-establish democracy fully, it will be primordial to realize that the highest authority of the republic is the law, or, more generally the spirit behind it: WE THE PEOPLE.

And the highest officials of the republic have to incarnate it. Maybe we want to have a second look at the institution of consul. Shorter terms of the higher officials (as in Switzerland), with more of a judicial mission may help in blocking the plutocrats. France is also going to imitate Switzerland and California, and make referenda possible, upon popular request. Switzerland has imposed on its banks twice the Basel III reserve requirements. And it is said that the Fed with impose Basel III to its financial daemons; that sounds technical, but, when the banks have not enough reserves, they find them among the unsuspecting public, and then the economy tanks. (It is amazing that not imposing Basel III on American banks was contemplated!)

The derivative markets use enormous leverage (say 25 trillion of net positions out of a notional 700 trillions total, at least that is what the industry claims, giving a leverage of about 30!) But the institutions using them have no collateral. Thus, in case of failure of one, the entire world financial system will come down (as exactly happened when AIG was 200 billion short in 2008). But nobody has had the authority mental, judiciary or political to stop the non sense.

How did Rome fall? The republic faded, Rome became increasingly a fascist empire where justice could not be visited on the mightiest. An intractable financial crisis developed. Its fundamental cause was the refusal of the plutocracy to pay taxes to the Roman state, while its agents were busy disempowering Rome and Italy (to avoid a revolt back to the republic). Since the plutocracy ruled, there was no way out.

Emperor Septimus Severus, a general of at least half Libyan ancestry born in Libya, knew the problem well, and hated the Senate (headquarters of the plutocracy). But he could not fight it.

A man, even an emperor, cannot fight a mood. Only philosophers can do so. But, by the time of Septimus Severus, it was too late for philosophy. All this, because it had become a self serving habit of the mighiest to not apply the law to those who had become too big to fail, too big to flail.

Ultimately, it was a new people’s philosophy, from Germania, which was to transmogrify the ruling mood, and the empire, three centuries later. In the new ruling mood, plutocracy and slavery were out. So the entire economy rested again on small farmers, just as it did in the early Roman republic (those new, northern farmers cultivated the rich heavy soil of the colder, wetter oceanic climes with the new technology of heavy steel ploughs pulled by oxen… or horse).

It would take a few centuries for Western civilization to reach higher than Rome ever did.

But we don’t have that kind of time, we don’t have centuries to change moods, and rebuild on a more sustainable basis: remember the methane bubbling in the arctic. And plutocracy is not that ingrained yet: it is nothing that a 90% tax on the very rich, Eisenhower style, cannot fix.

(In Rome, using the Trojan Horse of foreign wars of choice (around 146 BCE), the plutocracy was able to acquire private armies which were above the law. Right now, it is just short of that. Only its business practices are above the law, and the states have been captured to allow them. But a nasty war or two (say, starting with Iran) could fix the problem.)

Applying the law can change the world. As I said for years, mercury pollution from coal burning, kills tens of thousands of lives every year and causes birth defects, learning disabilities, and respiratory diseases among millions of survivors. And this in the USA alone (compare with the civilian nuclear industry, which did not kill one member of the public yet, in the USA: is the hysterical anti-nuclear crowd paid by fossil fuel polluters?)

Finally Obama, apparently remembering some of what he is supposed to do, has unleashed the EPA onto the coal burners. It remains, though, to do the same worldwide (worldwide carbon tax, worldwide mercury tax). And if the polluters in China can’t adapt fast enough, let’s tax them into extinction! Why should they be allowed to put mercury vapor in the air, and ruin our brains? Is not that a casus belli?

The mercury pollution is just a small example of the following. At this point justice, the republic, and the spirit of the law, is not just a matter of taste, but a matter of survival.

***

Patrice Ayme

TRUTH & MONSTERS

TRUTH IS AN UNENDING MORAL QUEST, & AGGRESSION IS ITS PROPHET.

Abstract: Humans are truth machines. To know where the monsters are, truth is necessary. Survival means fighting off the monsters, armed with fully deployed truth. Not enough truth, not enough survival. Survival is written with truth.

Hopefully, survival, that is, the right war, never stops. Stop fighting, stop living. There are two types who love no drama. First the weak meekly hiding in the bushes, who do not want to be devoured, and prefer the obscurity of the undergrowth, and slavery, if need be.

Secondly, there is the exact opposite, those who want no drama, because they rule unjustly. They are just predators who can’t snarl,  their mouths full, devouring their prey. In either case, not a pretty picture, and assuredly a defeat of the mind.

One needs drama to reveal the truth. Drama is the engine at the heart of wisdom. Contrarily to what slave religions have imprinted people to believe. Contrarily to the Obama no drama credo of surrendering to the mightiest. Contrarily to all those financial plots where the poor taxpayers rescue their richest oppressors, so that they can be oppressed some more. Indignation is often the wisest course, whether facing Hitler, or his financial and industrial sponsors (or their grand children).

Micro cameras mounted on helmets, as the French have in Afghanistan, will help change distortions of logical and emotional reality all too conductive to wars on behalf of the Dark Side. (French Socialists, should they win the presidential election, will inform their allies in May that they intend to pull the French army out of Afghanistan before the end of 2012.)

It’s a violent universe: after all, death is insured for all. Keeping death at bay, for a while, means that a lot of truth is in charge, and charging. How is violent truth ascertained? Through a ferocious analysis of history. Even in the hardest core physics. To talk about debt, wars, relativity, or CO2 poisoning, without history to brandish, and rinse with an aggressive theory of truth, is to talk about nothing.  

The philosopher Popper is revered by the establishment, precisely because his notion of truth has no teeth, and barks up the wrong tree. Once truth is denied, plutocracy, a pack of self serving, self replicating lies by the class of top exploiters with the lowest values, can prosper.

In truth certainty is the definition of science, and a good way to create certainty is to falsify liars and the idiotic ideas which support them. Plutocracy being the largest source of falsehood there is, both qualitatively, and quantitatively, teaches false Versailles and false WWII, or even false decolonization, and false financial crises, to better keep on going as before, if not even better, all the way down to World War Three.

Watch Obama claiming, when begging for money double faced plutocrats in the Silicon Valley, September 2011, that “[the Europeans] are going through a financial crisis that is scaring the world “. The truth? The USA has re-entered another recession, on its own (not to say the EU is not in recession too).

To stick to facts, Greece has less of a deficit than the USA. American plutocracy inspired dissemblances is what is scaring the world: how deep down the abyss of lies does plutocracy intent to dive, and how much can it stand before imploding us all, Soviet style? Well, be afraid: it will be long, and surprising, all the way down to Pluto.

The devil is in the details, because that is where the lies are, including ultimate ferocity disguised as benevolence. That is why the knights of truth and goodness have to get down there inside, and fight the good fight, against the biggest lies, and the biggest liars who feed from them.

This is not an easy essay to read, the philosophical turbo is on, especially after the attack on Popper, and the subject deserves thousands of pages. But after all, we are in exhilarating times, revolutions breaking all over, plutocracy going insane, CO2 poisoning on a rampage, seas rising, and now Faster Than Light travel, and inconsistent arithmetic (the latest). Philosophy has to embrace it all, and go beyond.

***

***

BE AFRAID OF BEING UNABLE TO ASCERTAIN THE TRUTH:

According to a recent book, when Obama became president he had the right instincts, as far as finance was concerned. As the present author long recommended, Obama wanted some banks to be nationalized in exchange of assistance, and a financial transaction tax to be introduced. But his own cabinet, made of people with a long life at the interface of Washington and Wall Street, treated Obama as an ignorant child, and did not even inform him of the decisions that they, among the most corrupt adults in the world,  had taken stealthily, to completely discard his orders.

In truth, they were the ignorant ones. And dumb too: they had not even seen that the boat on which they scurried all their lives, as well nourished rats, was sinking. The result is a second recession, after no real recovery, which is not surprising, since there has been no plan to engage finance into profitable, energy efficient job creation (as could have happened if, and only if, the biggest, most corrupt banks had been nationalized).

The latest issue of “The Economist”, in its cover story depicting a black hole as it is presumed that it would really appear in space, asserts that:

BE AFRAID

Unless politicians act more boldly, the world economy will keep heading towards a black hole

Oct 1st 2011

Obviously a very large black holes, millions of suns in mass. What are we confronted with?

First of all a failure of cognition. And it is coming from an even deeper failure, the incapacity to know how one gets to establish truth. The pseudo wise salad of smart watchdogs such as Karl Popper has something to do with it, as we will see. Propaganda of the supperrich does not just emanate from them, but also from their obsequious servants, often frantically anxious to please their masters, to get another chocolate medal.

Having erected the incapacity to gather important knowledge as worthy, is why one can see some important elected American officials running for the presidency of the USA, although they sound more ignorant about human evolution than Kanzler Adolf Hitler himself (and they want to impose their ignorance as the only truth worth having).

All over the West democracy has been hypnotized by the superrich anti-tax religion, a willful unravelling of civilization, that very unravelling which brought the end of the Roman republic and state, and its replacement by the Dark Ages, where the power of the superrich became awesome, relatively speaking. About two millennia of plutocracy in various guises, including the feudal order, ensued.

The Presiding Judge of the superior Court of San Francisco County said that her court nearly “fell off a cliff” before an emergency loan, and that she expects most of the counties in California to fall off that cliff in the coming months, anyway. All of this because Californians want to pay basically no gas tax.

The Presiding Judge, Katherine Feinstein, is the daughter of Dianne, California’s senior senator, a major support of Obama, so one cannot say that she is not politically connected. Civil adjudication could stop altogether, as it already has on one judicial circuit in Georgia. That, says Judge Feinstein, would bring about the “unravelling of society”.

The People of the “California Republic” do not realize that their rejection of fiscal austerity is condemning their society to feudalism now. Why? Because they are completely imprinted by the ideology of the superrich. They may vaguely feel that this is not right, but, just like president Obama, their own thought system is not sturdy enough to be certain about what to do.

This failure of correct certainty extends all over the West. Only the plutocrats, and their bankers, in control of Main Stream media propaganda, are certain of what needs to be done, for themselves, so that they can keep on flying in private jets from Bali to Gstaad.

A guy called Apotheker headed Hewlet Packard for 11 months. Differently from the publicity seeking commercial outfit known as Apple, HP does real research in real applied physics. It’s also a software giant, and the world’s number one computer maker. And based in the Silicon Valley, where it helped, through leases, to make Stanford University wealthy. Apotheker decided to make HP exit its profitable computer business, after starving it from research funds, creating an uproar, and the board threw him out (rightly so!). Terminating HP computers would have led to a desertion of the extremely profitable HP copier business. To keep him happy, Apotheker was given 23 million dollars.

This is what plutocracy means: a few worthless individuals, paid immense fortunes for doing everything wrong. Are they paid that much because they know where the bodies are buried? Or by exploiting CEO class solidarity? Or both?  

***

DYING FOR PLUTOCRACY IN WWI, WWII, AND, SOON, WWIII?

Hitler was a monster. So were Himmler, Goebbels, Goering, Keitel, SS-Obergruppenführer Reinhard Heydrich, and their millions of helpers… Obviously too many millions of monsters for them to be spontaneously generated, so they actually were programmed by a monstrous ideology. The real monster was the ideology Nietzsche had already excoriated, plus added addled ingredients such as Keynes, Henry Ford, and their devotees! That monstrous ideology was dramatically confronted, on September 1, 1939, when France and Britain served Nazi Germany with an ultimatum.

Why would it be philosophical to avoid drama? The age of no drama Obama has demonstrated, if need be, that all reforms are dramatically unmade by putting one’s supporters to sleep with soothing words while conceding the fanatical opposition whatever it wants. No drama Obama has showed us that a never ending blah blah is best to hide the fact one is walking backwards in the other direction. Appeasement of monstrosity only does the monsters good.

Latest cases of this stealth American refusal of any dramatic evolution for good: Washington’s protests against the incoming European carbon tax on aircraft pollution, and the European proposed worldwide Financial Transaction Tax (which Sarkozy is pushing as head of the G20; the UK already has one, the “Stamp Tax“).

Fighting pollution and financial piracy is fine speech as far as the Obama administration is concerned, as long as it requires no effort from those who sponsor it.

In the end, drama is often no choice. At some point, drama is forced by inertia.

The dramatic, plutocratically driven imbalances of the present world economy, mean only two outcomes: revolution, or war. That civilization will quietly degenerate for six centuries, as it did in imperial Rome, is highly unlikely: Rome had no peers. Instead what we have now is a multi body problem. Variants of the European system have been adopted worldwide. In a sense, the world is just like Europe was before 1914, and, considering what happened in Europe in 1853, 1858, 1866, 1870-71, and 1914, we know what it means.

In a dramatic week at the end of July 1914, the socialists in Germany and France saw that German plutocrats had decided upon war as the best way to preserve their endangered status (an explicit plot that a document found in a German attic would confirm, 60 years later). The Franco-German socialists wished to block the incoming war with a general, common strike. However the French socialist leader, Jean Jaures, a top philosopher, was assassinated, and war hysteria took command.

To avoid the most dramatic dramas, timely drama in the pursuit of truth is the way.

The next major drama which unfolded originated in the lies of the economist Keynes and his Anglo-Saxon accomplices about the real dangers of the nature of the French imposed truce of 1919.

Keynes claimed that only on-going hegemony by German plutocrats and their friends would preserve the economy (of the people he cared about; as he was a British speculator, unsurprisingly he was all about fellow Anglo-Saxon plutocrats; Britain would follow Keynes’ line until 1938, and the USA never stopped).

France instead set the peoples of Eastern Europe free from German plutocratic subjugation. The Americans disingenuously have claimed ever since, that France caused Nazism, a theme that the Nazis were all to happy to adopt with a vengeance. The Nazis had to avenge themselves when it dawned on their idiotic selves, starting with their “Guide”, on September 3, 1939, that the Anglo-Saxons plutocrats and their German colleagues had played them. When Adolf the Guide found he had been teleguided, in other words, teleprompted, he was most enraged. But it was too late. Franco-Britannia had declared war. The holocaust had started. Within a few weeks, hundreds of thousands would be dead, and American plutocracy, at its most lethal and stealthy, would feed the war on the fascist side, enabling it to last six years, when it could have been over in months.

Real history is complicated in its details, revealing in its simplicity.

The spirit of plutocracy has been flying from victory to victory, for a full century, as far as American plutocracy and its friends are concerned. Or make that more than two centuries? WWI was turned into the great success of WWII, and then decolonization into a further success, the reverse plutocratic colonization known as “globalization“.

Even the succession of financial crises that plutocracy caused in the last few decades was turned to advantage as the American plutocracy and its friends (from Thatcher to Sarkozy) imposed to the naïve people the further punishment of giving their torturers the banksters ever more money and power.

The exact scheme which plutocracy developed with Nazism is now tried with China: plutocracy is sending enormous resources to the “People Republic of China“, both weakening the dangerously socializing historical base of plutocracy, while increasing its profits tremendously.

The resulting imbalances are unsustainable, as jobs disappear in the West.

Plutocracy would win if and only if it can steer civilization to total war, and its associated fascism, as it did in the Roman republic around 150 BCE. This time it may not work though: not only are some philosophers, such as yours truly, aware of what is going on, but the Chinese and Indian civilizations were not born yesterday. Verily, it’s American plutocracy which was born yesterday. It is now confronting, all over Eurasia, six thousand years of cultural experience, from the “scary” Europeans (dixit Obama) to the impenetrable Chinese (busy launching their own space station, while the USA is reduced to beg the Russians to give them access to space).

Plutocracy has grown with debt, as wealth is created by private banks, through debt. Don’t expect Paul Krugman to explain you this: he is not keen to lose influence and access. I am not even blaming him. I am not even blaming Obama, just what he has been told to regurgitate. OK, let’s plunge in a little piece of that jungle facts, growing all over the place, have been making.

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CASES STUDIES OF DEBT RUNNING AMOK: TEMPLARS, FRENCH REVOLUTION, WEIMAR, 1944…

We hear a lot of absurdities about debt, from both extremes. It would help to know some history. Debt is a very good thing to engage in, for irresistible investments which will improve the efficiency of the economy. And debt is often a necessary thing, when really necessary military spending is concerned, as the Italian republics of the Middle Ages demonstrated. However, for a government’s current account, debt should be banned. A historical  perspective helps to reveal the truth about debt, namely the serious evils it can entail.

In 1306 CE, Philippe Le Bel solved the problem of the French national debt, spectacularly: he destroyed the superrich Order of the Templar Monks the state owed much to, seized its assets, and sent its chiefs to hold congress from the center of roaring fires (Friday 13, 1307). The Templars were a militarized plutocracy extending all across the Frankish empire, from England, all the way to the “Levant”, Palestine. They did not pay taxes, pretty much like today’s world plutocracy.

OK, smarty pants will object that the king of France himself was at the head of a plutocracy. Sure. However long traditions, including the rules of Salic and Roman law, plus being at the head of an enormous state comprising church, university, police, judiciary and army, made the plutocracy the king was leading, a much more civilized and democratic force than the conspiratorial, secretive undemocratic Templars.

Philippe IV’s two closest associates were not nobles, but particularly gifted lawyers who had made particularly good studies, and had a republican conception of the state. Philippe, with his more or less vassal, the English king, he had just made war to (creating…debt to the Templars), decided to tax the entire Christian church (something the contemporary Greek republic still has to do). The pope opposed tax justice strongly, which was a mistake. Mr. Pope had forgotten who had put him where he was, and how he was, namely the Carolingian empire.

But Philippe IV had not forgotten his Frankish predecessors’ attitude, seven, six, and five centuries before. The French state, all the way back to Consul Clovis, had always viewed the Church as a tool serving an underlying republican equalitarian secularism. Charles the Hammer had even nationalized the Church, as a warm up before repulsing those peculiar Christians they called the Saracens.

So the church got taxed by France and England. (Later the church cheated again, and England and France, Henry VIII and the French republic, had to correct, all that free riding tax cheating, again.)

A contemporary quandary related to this: why should not the Greek church get taxed too? Is not Greece getting dozens of billions from the French taxpayers? Why is the French secularist republic supporting the Greek Orthodox Church? Was not that all over after the Franks conquered the Byzantine empire and its capital, Constantinople in 1204? During the French revolution, priests had to take an oath to the republic, and now rent (for free) their religious edifices from the French republic. Why is Greek superstition paid for by 16 other secular states?

In an afterthought, Philippe served the arrogant Pope in Rome, with a warrant for his arrest, the equivalent of today’s Interpol red notice (the French king being “emperor in his kingdom”, and the Papal state being a gift from Charles the Great ). The Pope died while in the tender care of French special forces. After that Popes were required to serve in Avignon, not Rome.

In 1789, the debt of the kingdom of France reached 80% of GDP (about what it is now). This came from the fact that the plutocrats, namely the nobles and the church, did not pay (enough) taxes. I guess the same causes have the same effects.

Aware of this looming disaster, the king Louis XVI, fresh from his success in creating the American republic, by sending a massive land and sea force to help the American rebels, his government had enticed, decided to modify the tax system. The king wanted to make the superrich pay, but, in the sort of hesitancy Obama loves to exhibit, he danced around reform for several years, even naming serious revolutionary economists as (to the equivalent of)Prime Minister (some teachers of Adam Smith). But, Obama like, Louis played shrinking violet when confronted to serious plutocratic opposition.

Finally, a bit like Obama named a “super commission” to do his job, Louis XVI convoked the “General Estates” to decide what should be done. The “General Estates” were a sort of giant national assembly of representatives of whoever mattered in the realm. They had not been convoked for 250 years.

The situation escaped Louis XVI’s control when the General Estates decided to transform itself in Constitutional Assembly, and rushed to come up with a constitution as if it were in a race with the USA to come up with a new political system.

The USA was in the process of writing its own constitution. To understand this fully, one has to know that kings of the Franks were elected, and the myth that so it was, persisted for centuries. One has also to know that Great Britain, the fruit of various wars, coups and revolutions, did not have a Constitution (nor does Israel). Constitutions had been written for Sparta and Athens, way back. But Rome, even republican Rome did without a constitution, a habit that it not only died from, but also passed to the Franks.

In any case, Louis XVI, after playing around with debt (he kept secret books to pay for the American independence war), found himself losing his head in a revolution.

After 1919, Germany, having destroyed vast swathes of France and Belgium, a lot of it deliberate vandalism (from the burning of the immense Middle Ages libraries full of irreplaceable books, to the dynamiting and flooding of French coal mines) was condemned to pay reparations (as Prussia had exacted from France in 1871). The German Second Reich (aka “Weimar republic”) was unwilling to pay this debt, and decided to engage in hyper inflation instead (France had paid the reparations unjustly exacted by Bismarck in 4 years in the 1870s).

In 1944, French national debt, laden by five years of total war, was 290% of GDP. France would mostly grew out of it, helped by significant inflation and planned reconstruction. Within 12 months, a devastated Germany would be partly denazified, occupied and go hungry, for years. And the third main piece of the old Imperium Francorum, England, was saddled with enormous debts to its generous American ally, and devastation of its own.

Afterwards the Europeans enjoyed the American Century, now just decried, in French, by the irate president of the European Commission, as a “paternalism“, to be crushed by “European pride“. The experienced German finance minister, another conservative, depicted the three trillion dollars American style TARP the Americans want the European to implement a “stupid idea“. Obama was reduced to professorially intone  a rewriting of history.

The truth is that, as the Europeans clinch their jaws and embrace austerity, they remember centuries of history, and more. Imperial shortcuts and financial craziness, not to say indebtedness, brought disasters, and that’s the truth.

Germany, and France too, did very well with austerity, in the last few decades, and that is also the truth, thank you. All of Europe has very high energy taxes, and even some have taxes on wealth. Britain high income bracket is taxed at 50%. The French just introduced a tax on the most polluting factories. The European carbon tax on airlines, incoming January 1, 2012, drives the Washington republic bananas (oops, sorry about the implied pleonasm; how to drive a banana banana?).

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IF YOU GO TO WAR, FIRST VISIT THE HOUSE OF TRUTH:

The Libyan war was necessary for the European Imperium to engage in. Gaddafi had caused too much human rights violations, all too close. Too bad that vassal Merkel squeaked from the sidelines, after betraying Paris and London at the UN, a behavior that Berlin should remember has no future, except for a very bad past.

Afghanistan is the opposite story. In this case, the Europeans, naively, have flown to the rescue of the trouble maker. It’s the USA which has officially caused trouble in Afghanistan since July 3, 1979. To help the trouble maker is no way out of trouble. And, by the way, Pakistan, as it is, is also the USA’s baby.

French soldiers in Afghanistan mount micro video cameras on their helmets, and film combat. Two came back to France, and found that nobody was interested by that lamentable war. So they left the army, left France, for good measure, and published their internet generation movie making on the web.

It is very interesting: war as videogame. Huge explosions, rockets, unending strands of bullets, all armored monsters running around with giant weapons. The humor is extraordinary, fully appropriate, and highly disturbing. The soldiers laugh, even when shaken by explosions inside a tank.

Deadly combat is best for gallows humor: “Wow! We are surrounded on all sides, we are going to die here!” [Genuine amusement, laughter!] “Shut up, I don’t want to die here!” [More laughter! One of the funniest thing ever heard, the way the laughter sounds! If even their imminent death is a cause of genuine hilarity, how do you get to soldiers like that?]” “OK, guys, shoot on anything which move, except children, I am calling the planes!” [Bombardments, napalm] “Wow! That’s hot!” [Watching napalm: laughter!] “There were children there! We are such bastards!” [Laughter, a bit more nervous, with a sense of wonder at being such bastards… Like they did not know they had that in them.]

People do some things because they believe some related things are true. Man is a theoretical animal, going from theory to theory, like a gibbon goes from branch to branch. If one of these theories proves false, man crashes. So it is, when a gibbon grabs a rotten branch.

In Afghanistan, the gibbons in chief have miscomputed: many, all too many,  of their theories are rotten branches of empty rhetoric, as wrong as wrong can be. They empowered fanatical war-like Islam in Afghanistan, and set-up an Islamist corrupt “republic” there, and now fight bad Islamists in the name of good Islam, or so they say (but their lies fool no one there).

Those gibbons in chief just owe an ever increasing debt to society for the pain and suffering they cause, for no good reason whatsoever, but the inertia of empire.

***

TO FIND TRUTH, START WITH SCIENCE, BUT AVOID POP POPPERIZATION:

The philosopher Karl Popper defended the notion of falsification to distinguish between what was science, from what was not science. At some point, Popper even said that a theory is scientific, if and only if it is falsifiable, which is obviously silly (that would make the theory that Tuesday is on Wednesday since it is falsifiable…)

Einstein’s Special Relativity could not be falsified, or proven wrong. According to Popper does that mean that it was not science? And now that it may have been proven wrong, is it therefore, in retrospect, science?

Is science science, as soon as it is not science anymore? Is that what Popper is saying?

Some will say that I am confusing “falsifiable” and “falsified“. Well so? Popper makes me both irritable and irritated. Is not that a distinction without much of a difference? If Popper were asked to define “peace”, it seems he would do what he did for science, go to its natural opposite: he would say that a peace can be distinguished from a conflict, if is irritable… which irritates me, for sure. 

Popper was aware of some of the problems with his definition of science, so he apparently switched to “criticizability“. Later Popper discovered the logician Tarski, a deeper thinker, proponent of unadorned truth, and regretted to not have heard of him before… Thus Popper’s statements are all over the map.

All this philosophical self contradictory meandering meant to be clever, had a disastrous effect on teaching in the USA, as U.S. law says that only real “science” can be taught in the school of the USA, under that name. If science cannot be defined, it cannot be taught. Thus the obscure reign of Popper’s naïve considerations became the reign of obscurantism, and now many republican candidates to the presidency seem to have grown up with the dinosaurs.

But of course, disastrous teaching of reason has been excellent for plutocracy; as intelligence, knowledge and common sense sank, plutocracy soared. More and more insane laws were passed, such as anti tax laws in periods of rising deficits, and calling that “stimulating”. Verily, idiots are stimulated by the triumph of stupidity.

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PROPERLY DEFINING SCIENCE:

So let’s reject  Popper’s pauperization of the mind. One should call science what is known with certainty.

That means science is what we can predict what will happen, meaning that it works with better than 50% probability. Yes, that means that making fire with stones was, and is, a science, one of the oldest.

In some cases the probability that it will happen is infinitesimally close to 100%. Otherwise only the suicidal would travel by car, train, or air. Even the most superstitious, nowadays, use science all day long. So, when they deny science and the faith they have in it, it they are hypocrites at best, and completely delusional, otherwise.

Part of a scientific theory can be more or less scientific. Einstein’s critique of his own “general” theory gave me the idea, if nothing else would. Einstein thought that the right hand side of his own Einstein gravitational field equation, that right hand side being the mass-energy tensor, was suspect, and it sure is! (Be it only because it depends upon the left hand side, I would say: curvature of spacetime has energy!)

Most of what is called Einstein’s theory of Special Relativity (ESR) is science because it has been demonstrated experimentally thoroughly, and its logic is simple.

However, some parts of Einstein’s theory are more dubious. It seems to me that Einstein, carried away by a craving for over simplification, not to say divination, got philosophically confused between different notions which he should have kept distinct and separate (such as local time and global light). It is as if he wanted to produce a theory which begged for falsification.

(OK, Einstein had a more subtle reason: his will to oversimplify physics, and do it all with just one interaction, electro-magnetism, as gravitation was geometrized out; modern high energy physics has thrown that out of the window, as many interactions were revealed, starting with the weak force… that of neutrino.)

So part of Relativity is certainly true, and some part unproven poetry (flights of fancy within Einstein’s work are well known, among specialists, for example in his theory of E= mcc, where he thought he could prove more than he could chew).

A more concrete example of science being hard here, soft there: the theory of plate tectonic.  It is certain that there are plates, and they move, and how they have moved. That part of the theory is hard core science, because it is certain. However, why the plates move is much less certain, and even volcanism inside the plates (say volcanoes in Arizona), or the exact nature of the Tibetan Plateau (is it lifted or compressed? Or both?), are very hypothetical.

Just as certainty vary, science varies. After careful observations, Pumas, aka Mountain Lions, aka Cougars, a species with 40 names in English, and many more in Spanish, were classified as Felis Concolor, and viewed as the largest member of the 100 species one could call “cats” (Felis), in a distinction from Pantherinae (lions, jaguars, etc.)

However, it is thought, since 1993, that the ferocious creature should be known as Puma Concolor: it’s not a felis after all, as it seems closer to cheetahs (which should have been obvious to start with, considering that they look very similar).

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FALSIFY LIARS, CERTIFY SCIENCE:

So OK, science is what has proven, and it is more or less scientific according to how more or less certain it is. Simple, back to basics. Having neutrinos going faster than light would not falsify all of Special Relativity, just some imbalanced ideas Einstein pushed, by trying to tell us what his god had decided in all the details, and which Special Relativity can do without, contrarily to what he pretended.

Is nothing to be saved from Popper’s obsession with falsification? Yes, much. The best way to establish certainty is by repeated experiments, until faith is established. But there is another way, which I pretty much (re)discovered by studying top mathematicians. It was a way well known to the ancients. it is implicitly all over science and mathematics: is true what reputable sources believe.

Indeed what of pure math, unconnected from any experience which could indirectly check it? How is certainty established there? Well, most mathematics, operationally, is established by repeated conventions among respectable (wo)men. This is the paradox of mathematics: although most logical, it’s mostly about duplicating authority, in the hope authority is correct.

Some will scream. How can I dare say this? Mathematics as part convention? I have had Fields Medals (a top medal mathematicians of influence give to their pupils), who were friends, turn savagely against me, as I uttered that truth. And they became enemies in seconds.

So no wonder that there has been a lot of screaming, shortly after the neutrinos beat up light, 16,000 times, when a top senior, famous mathematician, Edward Nelson, from Princeton, came up with a purported proof that basic arithmetic is “inconsistent“.  Yes, the most basic arithmetic would make no sense.

I don’t know if that proof is correct or not, but I have a meta argument for inconsistency, coming from my neurological interpretation of mathematics.

From experiment to convention there is the plenitude of the truth of (wo)man. Truth, I believe, is essentially neurological, when not experimental. Another type of experience, sure: the inner, ultimate experience.

Thus truth depends upon a faithful representation of both outside and inner experience.

This is why and where the obsession with falsification comes in handy. To find out where the liars are and the lying lies that lay about. That is why top research mathematicians, or scientists in general, are obsessed by the reputation of people, as it conveys the truth of authority. (And the importance of medals and prizes.)

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TRUTH IS MORAL:

Thus the theory of truth passes by the moral discovery that many human beings are up to no good, and who, among them bear the darkness of deception.

Saint Augustine had claimed that most humans were up to no good, in the old Roman tradition, and thus inflected the pessimistic and torturous attitude of the Christian church ever since. More cogently, Sade observed that deception and the rest of the Dark Side was all too natural (a point reiterated by Nietzsche, in a more Hinduist, classical mathematical way, as the return of the same). To make matters worse, I pointed out the reason why nature is so cruel: as an organizing principle, stimulating the speed of life. It’s all too ecological.

One can proceed towards truth by cutting off what is deception, and what is false.

And an aid in doing that is to find out individuals who are deliberately deceiving (most of them, according to saint Augustine). Thus an approach to truth: expose those who deliberately lie, and the lying subjects they promote.

OK, both methods are aggressive. But aggression is not antagonistic to truth. Quite the opposite. Verily, success is often the ultimate proof. The proof of the truth is in the eating. As wolves will certify, best nourishment is to be had from the marrow of the erroneous. The proof is not just in the pudding, it’s in the kill.

Wolves know that, individually, a puma can kill them. But they also know that, as a pack, they can steal kills from a puma, and even kill the cat. That’s basic wolf science, in the Americas. Wolf science? Why not? Animal knowledge is born from experience, but mostly, from culture (as the insertion in the wild of human raised wildlife has amply demonstrated).

Let’s give an example of the hard pursuit of truth.

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HOT TRUTH: 450.

In the USA, the world’s most wasteful country, global warming is not hot. The plutocrats are cool to the notion. That global warming is actually cool, admitting it happens at all,  is promoted by fossil fuel loving living fossils of the plutocratic type, who pay, in diverse fashions, many outlays to tell lies about the situation, and the responsibilities which are involved.

The question is: how do we destroy the respectability of those who believe that there is no problem with poisoning seas and air with CO2 equivalent gases? What is the argument they cannot counter, which will make their criminality blatant?

In climate science, the number “450″ cannot be contested. It’s raw data (as “390″ cannot be contested for CO2).

The most important categorization of knowledge comes from the importance one endows to the notions one considers, within the theory one addresses.

For example many modern academic philosophers consider “hermeneutics”, the theory of interpreting gossip, as the most valuable, making them worse than useless. As they corrupt the youth away from the critique of real power.

In turn, the value, or rather the lack thereof, of the notions deceivers put forward, allows to expose those one may suspect of deceiving. Deceivers will typically focus on secondary details, and forget the big pictures.

For the CO2 equivalent gas poisoning, just one notion is enough: 450 ppm. Contesting that number is impossible, it is a fact. Denying its importance, lie or deception. When confronted to a climate denier, just ask her/him what part of “450″ s/he does not understand. And why.

If they say: “450? What are you talking about?” They are just either so dumb that they are like people who would pretend to read, but don’t know how to read a single letter, or they are deliberately lying. In both cases, they are fanatics. Namely they come out of the fanum, the temple.

***

Conclusion: Ideas, situations, feelings, methods, entire cultures and superstitions can turn out to be propitious to evil. They are the ones which are, truly, evil. This is admitted by modern law, which recognizes that “fighting words“, and “hate speech” are crimes.

We need to extent the notion that it is with some configurations of the human mind, or even of cognition, or moral attitude, that the crimes truly originate, they are the true culprits.

In other words, Hitler, far from being pathological, was the all too healthy product of a sick and demented culture. He could have been replaced by many a similarly programmed person (and there were plenty, as Nietzsche shrieked, 50 years earlier, well before Hitler’s birth). This is important: a lot of German hermeneutics, so admired to his day, by preventing thinking, was just to Nazism what a smokescreen used to be to a battleship. It’s playing that exact same role to this day, this time protecting Nazism’s sponsor, plutocracy itself. Thus many philosophical departments are neutralized by the study of gossip made into the only science worth studying.

It goes without saying that however flawed Stalin was (he got started by bringing money to the Party, by stealing banks; one the robberies brought millions and perhaps 40 dead), the real monster was Marxism-Leninism, a hateful ideology no doubt partly prompted by Lenin’s brother’s execution, and similar violence from the Tsarist state.

In today’s USA, those who sincerely believe that their ancestors were running around with dinosaurs in the garden of Eden have deep flaws either in their character, or in the way they establish truth, or in what the raw data they learned at school. Flaws so deep that they are similar to those Hitler had. And the same for all those, who, like Hitler believed they were god, or in the inner circle of god. The edict of Philippe IV Le Bel against the lenders to the French state started with:”Dieu n’est pas content…”. God was not content, no doubt…

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INCREASINGLY, GUILTY MINDS ARE BAD ENOUGH:

When robots act, one cannot claim that the minds who programmed them, rest. To be culprit, in Roman Law one needed to have a culprit mind (“mens rea”). Actus non facit reum nisi mens sit rea: “the act does not make a person guilty unless the mind is also guilty“. Nowadays, having so much physical power at our disposal, we need to have more perfect minds, that is, the thought itself can be a guilty act. This is especially true for the leadership, and not just political leadership.

Economists who thought that some banks are too big to fail and should be given as much public money as their managements and shareholders ask, are, arguably more culprit than the elected representatives that they advised.

All what many a mental attitude or tradition deserves, is extermination. No use tolerating the systems of thought promoting human sacrifice (so it was good to get rid of that part of Aztec, Maya, Inca, Celtic and Punic civilizations).

***

All too many times, the monster is not as much the already monstrous person, as the situation their ilk arise from, and further foster. One should avoid a confusion between individuals and the cultural situations they arise from. It seems that, in his quasi pathological coolness, Obama may have been carried away into connivance, by calling plutocrats such as Mr. Jamie Dimon, head of the giant JP Morgan Chase, or Buffet, his “friends“, all too much.

Mr. Dimon and Mr. Buffet, and their fellow plutocrats are no doubt nice, but that does not mean that so are their ideas, and various dissemblances they hide behind.

I know Buffet has decried the fact he was taxed at a much lower rate than his secretary or receptionist. But that was denounced, for many years by this author, and Buffet, all the while, was careful not to notice the outrage. Now that everybody has noticed, Obama, in a Freudian slip, celebrates the “Buffet rule”. Thus the chameleon changes colors to better catch flies and escape predators. Condemning the tax brackets Obama put in place when he controlled everything, now that everybody has noticed, can be used as a smokescreen. Indeed, Obama and Buffet keep on viewing carbon taxes and transaction taxes as devils view holy water.

Dimon recently revealed his true colors by attacking new world wide banking regulations”cockamamie nonsense…anti-American…anti-European“. Dimon is one of the big guys of central bank of the USA, another monstrosity, as this device, the Fed, far from being independent, is an emanation of the private banks.

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Conclusion: THE ECOLOGY OF TRUTH NEEDS THE DARK SIDE, JUST NOT TOO MUCH:

Many paths lead to truth. They entangle into theories. Erroneous strands and stands can be deconstructed without the theories really collapsing: that would be true for Relativity or Arithmetic. Believing that secularism ought to be the master religion does not mean that superstition ought to be outlawed (that would be a bad omen).

An approach to truth is to seriate problems, and logical components to solving them, according to their logical probability, certainty, value, or importance.

The 450 ppm level in CO2 equivalent gas poisoning has extreme importance, because it is an overwhelmingly monstrous evidence, a carrier of unmitigated doom: this is the highest percentage of greenhouse gases in dozens of millions of years. Only enormous science will get us out of that hole (half of the added CO2 is in the acidifying oceans).

Would there be as many truths, if there were much fewer monsters? Of course not. The logic of the house of truth needs monsters, just as biological ecology needs carnivorous monsters who are indispensable to prevent a self destroying ecology. Just to create the dram which gets our neurons going. Whether we like it or not, we wake up best when we flee, or fight. That is why Einstein made exaggerated, unbalanced claims. A safer way to higher thinking than the tobacco which killed him.

Monsters and truths dancing: it is all a matter of balance, as it is a matter of balance, to keep a plane aloft.

However, right now we have an imbalance of truth, and not just in Syria. We are going down into the black hole of the Dark Side, plutocracy imploding, as happened with the Roman empire. Or the Mayan civilization, whose plutocracy called onto suicidal war, instead of the ecological measures necessary to answer a drought. Or pharaonic Egypt immediately after its Ramses peak, financially imploding, reduced to steal its own treasures to balance the budget, before being taken over by Libyans, and soon, the Assyrians.

Even the Mongols, austere and ferocious, having taken over China as the Yuan, degenerated soon down the plutocratic hole. When a succession of ecological disasters reminiscent of those incoming today, struck, the government’s response was ineffective, and then military. So the Yuan were thrown out by the Red Turban and Ming rebellion.

But maybe the Easter Island civilization is a more appropriate analogy. The late Easter Island civilization, only building giant statues, as if calling for help across the empty sea.  Ultimately “help” came from across the sea, too late, and too genocidal.

Our empty statues we keep on vainly carving with all our resources, are the banks too big to flay. But they should be flayed, and left to rot. The present way in which money is created through leveraged debt, by secretive, unelected, insanely self interested individuals, the conniving bankers, just does not correspond to the highly open, highly democratic, highly scientific society we need, just to survive.

At this point, we are all turning into Easter Islanders. But our sea is even emptier, it is space itself, and we can only hope that no help is coming across that final frontier.

***

Patrice Ayme