Joan of Arc Roasted Too Late?

 Of worshipped stupidities the most vicious aspects of thought and emotional systems are made. In particular regarding nationalism and other religions of the violent type. As the emperor who was never observed to have no clothes, those stupidities live on, unruffled, as long they have not been denounced for what they are. 

 It’s only when slavery in the colonies was denounced, as the outrage it was, that it could be outlawed. 

 A case in point of vicious worship: that of the homicidal bigot, Jeanne d’Arc. Behind that? Mass homicidal nationalism as religion. 

Daughter French King Marries King of England, Her Son Henry VI Became King of France & England (1422).

 A definitive settlement of the “100 year war” between Paris and London had been reached: Henry V, and his descendants, were to rule England and France. The Treaty of Troyes, signed 21 May 1420, in cathédrale Saint-Pierre, between Charles VI, king of France, and Charles V, king of England, anticipated that Henry V, son in law of Charles VI, would succeed to him after Charles’ death.

 The Treaty was immensely popular: Henry V was celebrated when he entered Paris. Unfortunately the English monarch died in August 1422, three month before his father in law, Charles VI. Henry’s ten month old son, Henry VI, became king of France and England.

 A definitive settlement of the “100 year war” between Paris and London had been reached: Henry VI’s descendants, were to rule England and France. His mother, Catherine de Valois, was as French as French could be. The advisers were French, although the Duke of Bedford was made regent of France & England. By austerity, Bedford used cheap English speaking troops. 

 Jeanne d’Arc shattered the peace, re-launched a civil war. 

 Joan of Arc’s legacy is four more centuries of Franco-English war. For no good reason, whatsoever. Let me forgive those who may wish that she had been roasted sooner. 

 What’s the story of Jeanne in a nutshell? That of a vicious pawn.

Signature Of A Devil?

 To understand the “100 Year War”, one has to backtrack to 1300 CE (at the very least!). Philippe IV “Le Bel” decided to tax the Church, in accord with his (part) vassal, the king of England. The Church begged to differ, but was forced to obey. Later Philippe had the Pope arrested (and soon dead). Besides Philippe expropriated banksters, the Templar Monks. The chief bankster, while roasting in the Royal presence, threw a spell on the king.

 Within a year, the king fell from his horse, and died from it. His three sons followed in quick succession: to the kingship, and then, death. 

 The Salic law said that the next in line was their sister. Isabelle. Isabelle de France… Queen of England. Absolute Queen of England: her husband had been killed (in a painful way, making lots of noise). 

 Isabelle had a reputation in Paris. Having made her own sting operation, she denounced to her  (usually extremely well informed) dad the wives of her brothers, for drastic infidelity. Two were sent to monastery, and the future (would-be) queen spent winter in a very cold jail, before being (some say) strangled.

 In any case, lawyers in Paris refused to apply the law of the ancient Salian Franks. They refused to have Isabelle as Queen of France, on the ground that she was a woman, inaugurating centuries of grotesque French sexism contradicting the very roots of Francia, the philosophical roots of equality.

 Isabelle, trying to outsmart her Parisian opponents, then resigned, and put her 16 year old son, Edward III, on the throne (of England). Something she would soon regret. Edward, grandson of Philippe Le Bel, a Frenchman in blood and claw, son of Isabelle de France, no less, then asked for his due, the throne of France. 

 The lawyers in Paris refused, again: they had made other arrangements. The war between London and Paris was on, and lasted nearly five centuries (until 1815).

 Who-was-boss was not a new problem in Franco-Anglia (the Franks, like imperial Rome, had been plagued by that problem, because only re-establsihing a full republic could solv it).

 When the Duke of Normandy, vassal to the King of the Franks became king of England, he established an oath between him and the People similar to one that existed in Rome with the army, or between People and Princeps (hence the executions of around 3,000 Christians who had refused to take that oath, mostly under emperor Galerius’ influence, in the 300-310 CE period; “Christian” leaders would later use that martyrdom to justify, sort of, the killing and terror on millions they would exert in the following 14 centuries).

 A weird situation followed: was, or not, the London king subject to Paris? According to the old ways of the Franks, yes: the king in Paris was viewed as (Roman) emperor (since the Verdun split). What was clear is that French were in command on both sides of the channel. The entanglements only got worse, from 1066 until 1320.

 An example was Eleonor of Aquitania, duchess, and ruler of an immense realm, semi autonomous for two millennia. After her long union with the king of France was, clearly sterile, she divorced. And married the King of England, with whom she had many children. In the process she brought Aquitaine over, and that’s why Richard the Lion hearted was born, raised, married, lived and died in France (but for a few months he spent in England; he spent more time crusading side by side with the king of France, his “compagnon d’arme”).

 After immense destructions, generations of war, and further dynastic problems on the Paris side, cooler heads prevailed. It was admitted that the rightful sovereign of France was Henry V, king of England, descendant of Philipe Le Bel, and it was decided that he would become, indeed, king of France.

 The University of Paris, the City of Paris, and people all over the regions that had known generations of inconclusive war wholeheartedly agreed: give us just one king, one government, and peace!

 Right from the start Jeanne of Arc got military support by a Queen from the South, the formidable Yolande of Aragon. 

 While “Jehanne” was still very young and unknown, Queen Yolande sent her soldiers to act as her bodyguards. Jeanne’s early miracles were fake (surprise, surprise). For example, she had encountered the would be king long before recognizing him “miraculously” in a crowd (that miracle is still repeated to this day, as if a fact, whereas it was just a ridiculous lie).

 There was more than one Jeanne (at least another was burned; Jeanne bore witness against one of her competitors at some point). Preacheding against the English was a successful business model (similar to Muslim Fundamentalism as a convenient façade to banditry). 

 Same story as with the several would-be Christ that really existed at the times of Christ (differently from the mythical Christ himself, whose existence outside of Saint Paul’s head remains unproven).

 So what happened? What was the real story of Jehanne d’ Arc? The southern lords of France were anxious to NOT see a formidable rule by Paris and London in the north: the double capitals, sitting in the middle of the largest arable lands in Europe, would have subjugated them totally.

 So they contrived a story for children. Then the story ran out of control, and deep real hostility between England and France appeared. The truth was simpler: the story of a woman spurned by fate, who fought back.

 Yolande of Arago was also Queen of many other things, including Sicily. She was married in 1416 to become queen of France, too, but her husband died before he could be crowned. Yolande later became the mother in law of the king of France she installed later on the throne, Charles VII. She was a specialist of legal assassinations, and the like. She was a most efficient diplomat: she turned Brittany against Britain, among other feats.

 Yolande of Arago really won the “100 Year War”. Books have been written about her. She was the determined enemy of Isabeau of Bavaria, Queen of France, architect of the Troyes treaty (that had put Henry V on the throne of France). The two queens fought, on battlefields, for 22 years. Interestingly, women are the main actors of the “100 Year war”.

 Such is the truth never told about Joan of arc; she was just another pawn of Yolande. Jeanne of Arc has nearly no redeeming value. In the end, all she preached was war, “booting” (“bouter”) the English out of “France”. Some God or Mary in the sky, or in her ear, had told her that some guy was the real king (although, logically, and historically, he was not).

 Jeanne d’Arc was a dangerous fanatic, of the worst type. After a truce with the so called “English” left her idle, she wrote to the Hussites, an intellectual group, backed by the university of Prague, which had broken with the standard Catholic Church on some doctrinal points. The followers of Huss had defeated crusades sent against them (they were defeated thanks to the highest treachery of the topmost Catholic hierarchy, sealing the doom of Catholicism).

 Joan’s letter is extremely violent. It accuses Hussites of “obscenity“, “superstition“, threatens them with “extermination“. She promises to “remove your madness and foul superstition, taking away either your heresy or your lives.”

 On the fanatical scale, that letter puts her higher than Osama ben Laden: she threatened to kill people who threatened her country in no way, just because they had “exerted a choice” (that is what “heretical” meant). [Fanatical supporters of "Jehanne" have argued that the letter was a fake, but then the Latin original was found, signed by her secretary, Pasquerel. Although "Jehanne" spoke several languages, she did not read or write, making her the equal of Muhammad!]

 We have numerous letters of “Jehanne” where she promises, under various formulations, that she will “kill all those who don’t obey her“. (See note.)

 Many of Joan of Arc’s exploits consisted often in attacking French cities. She had to siege Paris, while supposedly trying to deliver France from… the “Anglois”!

 Jeanne taught hysterical trust in superstition, voices in one’s head (but only if the right person heard them, the others should burn). Jeanne taught hatred of intellectuals (as found in the universities of Paris and Prague), hatred of the “Anglois” (that is the other, whoever the “other” is; in truth only the foot soldiers spoke English, at a time when France enjoyed many languages). Jeanne taught, to all of Europe, that nationalism should raise to sainthood, and thinking, to the backwoods.

 Voltaire had made fun of Jehanne in a 20,000 words work. As the homicidal ideology of nationalism rose, so did Jehanne. Jehanne was made a saint in 1920. Jeanne became a Twentieth Century nationalistic sensation. Some go around saying Joan of Arc is a “patron saint of France”. Whatever that means. She is in good company, one of her colleagues is “Saint Louis”, a dedicated criminal of the worst type, who wrote a lot of his bloodlust.

 There should be a philosophical cleansing program of all the celebrities incarnating vicious ideals. The Austrian philosopher, Sir Karl Popper did this a bit in “The Open Society & Its Enemies“. There is much more to be done. In particular many of the French and European leaders loom large on today’s civilization, and some of them had tremendous flaws. By honoring them, one honors trains of thought and emotion that were conducive to immensely vicious activities.

 Reciprocally some thinkers have been ignored, or defamed, for all the wrong reasons… To learn well from history, one has to get it right first.

 Yes, Jehanne d’Arc was charming, extremely witty, attaching. But Jehanne also incarnated the passion for one of the oldest vices: superstitious tribalism. Her towering presence in history hides much more valuable characters, such as various French and “English” kings who, in the  50 years preceding her roasting had not just decided that the Franco-French war had to stop, no matter what, but instituted extensive truces, and even, in the end, found the legal solution that the forces behind Jehanne illegally shattered.

 Joan of Arc represents exactly the sort of evils that we have to learn to throw in the fire. A tasty morsel, best carbonized.

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Patrice Ayme

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 Notes: Jehanne As Anti-Sexist heroin: The only teaching of Joan of Arc worth keeping is her insistence that women could do a lot of tasks men did in the Late Middle Ages, such as war. She was, technically, burned for, wearing man’s clothing (after pledging she would not do that anymore)… In any case, whereas Jeanne was a nationalistic, superstition devil, she was a genuine anti-sexist saint. Supposing, of course that she was really the one who burned (there is some historical evidence that she did not, and considering her extremely mighty sponsors, that would not be surprising; burning a woman a month was routine in Rouen!) Because of her mighty, conspiring (plutocratic!) sponsors, much about “Jehanne” is unknown, even though it’s supposed to be known (for example there are no portrait of her, at a time when photographic like reproduction were made). Her age is a case in point; she is given as 19 when burned, but there is one piece of very strong evidence that she was actually 23!

 Jehanne as Devil: Here is some typical Jehanne’s prose: “je suis chief de guerre, et en quelque lieu que je actaindray vos gens en France, je les en ferai aler, veuillent on non veuillent, et si ne vuellent obéir, je les ferai tous occire. Je suis cy envoiée de par Dieu, le Roy du ciel, corps pour corps, pour vous bouter hors de toute France.”

 (“I’m war chief, and in any place where your gents are found, I will have them leave, whether they want it or not, and if they don’t want to obey, I will have all of them killed. I am sent here by God, King of heaven, body for body (sic), to boot you out of all of France”)

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PLUTOCRACY: NEW WORLD ORDER

Western Intelligence, Oriental Despotism; Redux? Democratic Occident, Fascist Orient, & Vice Versed?

Obama just  nominated Commerce Secretary the billionaire heiress who discovered him, and introduced him to the Rubin-Summers-Goldman-Sachs-Citigroup conspiracy. Penny Priztker was condemned to pay a 460 million dollar fine by the Federal government in 2001, for financial malfeasance. 460 million, that’s more than Mitt Romney’s fortune, that made small rank and file democrats huff and puff, in indignation, a few months ago, just like their mighty masters told them to do.

Now, if the 460 million dollars fine felon becomes chief, that’s fine, as long as the masters of the people don’t ask the People to huff and puff about the fine. The finer the fine, the finer the master, say the little People, and they bleat, satisfied. As Obama put it:”Priztker is one of the most eminent personalities of our country“. When Pluto reigns, down is up.

When Common Decency Is A Hindrance

Plutocracy is the New World Order. The New World Thinking. The New World Emoting.

To get some perspective on this, it’s good to have a retrospective look at the greatest plutocratic realms of the past, and ponder why extremely wealthy fascism rose, increasingly, in the Orient, while clever democracy rose, occasionally, in the West. And sometimes fell, disastrously, for reasons related.

It turns out that, when Rome became fascist and plutocratic, it turned to Oriental despotism, and criminals, indeed, came to command and control.

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PERSIA REIGNED WITH ALL CRAFTS; YET NOT SMART ENOUGH:

Establishing  giant, metastatic empires in the Orient is nothing new: the Hittites tried it, they proceeded to invade Lebanon and the rich valleys behind, Egyptian territory. However young Pharaoh Ramses II, defeated them at Qadesh, next to present day Damascus. Through courageous combat in that battle which defined his long rule, Ramses rescued victory from the jaws of defeat, somewhat miraculously.

Ramses lost ground, though, and later made a loving peace with his enemies. Then, the Hittites having been destroyed by the mysterious coalition of the Peoples of the Sea, the Assyrians tried to impose their own giant metastatic empire, using the harshest methods. That brought them so many enemies that they got invaded from all quarters, annihilated as a nation first, and an army, later.

Then the union of Medes and Persians, thanks to three remarkable leaders, established a giant fascist empire, from Ethiopia to Central Asia, Libya to India. The third emperor, Darius, besides being excellent at sword-play in the dark, and a great general, proved capable of using a free market economy, switching to so called Keynesianism, and then a command and control economy, as needed. Darius established a giant “Royal” road network (ancestral to the one the Romans would build, four centuries later).

A Persian Pony Express, with posts every five miles, would bring news from distant corners of the empire in a week. Darius went on to invade the Scythians, land of the Amazons, present day Ukraine.

Darius’ Persia was the greatest empire, so far, larger than the present day continental USA. It became so, thanks to a great variety of methods of socio-economic governance. Some of these methods would later be used by the West, massively. Not just the communication network, the free market, the command and control, but also a crafty diplomacy of seduction, cooptation and local autonomy (that’s how the Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians became collaborators of Persia; whereas Alexander would annihilate Tyr).

However, unbelievably, tiny Athens broke the Persian empire, inaugurating the next great event, still on-going, the rise of the West. Again and again, minuscule Greek armies routed the juggernauts of professional giant armies. Again and again, small democracies proved superior to large fascist foes. I claimed that mental superiority entailed military superiority.

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FREE IN THE WEST, SLAVES IN THE EAST

Herodotus explained the Greeks’ military superiority: free men are more motivated in battle, as they fight for themselves, he said. But it’s not clear that elite Persian soldiers did not feel free.

So I hold something slightly different: free men are, living in an “open society” are not just more motivated, but, simply, more intelligent. Yes, intelligent.

Yet how come that the free men tended to be in the West, and the subjugated ones, in the East? And this for 4,000 years, defining the “West” as anything west of Mount Lebanon. Why did so much of the Mediterranean turn out propitious to freedom and individual initiative? What of the enormous Celto-German forests, from Spain to the Baltics?

Two factors played a role:

1) Trade, with the big man, the leader being the ship owner-captain (Tyr, Phoenicia, Crete, Athens, Carthage, etc.). This required to excel at technology and adaptative intelligence, confronting nature.

2) Small owner-peasants. The West’s agricultural system did better thanks to small, free owner-peasants.  The owner peasant was captain of his own plot of land, and found himself in a situation roughly similar to the ship captain. Such people worked hard, and thought hard about outwitting nature. All of Germany was this way, until the military encroachment of Rome in the beginning of its plutocratic phase, brought, by reaction, a militarization of German society (this is what archeology shows).

A demographic core of owner-peasants was the core of the success of the Roman republic, and its successors, the Imperium Francorum, and France, or anything working along French lines (most of Europe). When enjoying this basic culture, of free, independent peasants, the West did very well. Why so? Because thinking by oneself, for oneself, makes one more intelligent.

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WHY THE ORIENT IS DUMBER:

The Orient did better when the peasants could cultivate. That meant, when they had water. That was not obvious in the increasingly parched lands, from the Maghreb to India. First, there, one needed to bring water to agricultural lands. Whereas in the West, both water and arable land were in the same place, not so in the East. In the East water was on rocky mountains, arable lands in parts of plains at the bottom of said mountains. To bring the former to the latter, one needed great hydraulic works. Underground canalizations, sometimes fifty feet deep, could extend dozens of miles.

Such extensive works meant armies of workers and maintenance people. And also standing armies to establish and protect the necessary order. Plus a field army to roam around the empire, and keep the static defenses obedient.

In other words, food on the carpet in the parched, basin and range Orient meant a large fascist system to make it possible, and everybody enslaved to it, in a military organization (Christianity and Islam, both oriental religions, kept much of this essential psychological character: fascist god on top, giving absolute, even capricious  orders to its slaves below).

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ALL TOGETHER NOW, DOWN THE ROMAN ROAD TO HELL?

What consequences today? Western countries do not depend upon small owner-peasants anymore, but upon giant farms, or agribusinesses, for food procurement. Even trade has become unbalanced: production on one end of the Earth, increasing unemployment, at the other end.

Giant agribusinesses, and unbalanced trade became facts of empire in Rome, and lasted centuries. It was a deliberate plot of Roman plutocracy. At some point, six senatorial families owned most of North Africa. Seneca, Nero’s tutor, the plutocratic philosopher of note, used to boast that he had no idea how many giant properties he owned on the various continents.

That delocalization and globalization made Rome, and Italy into an empty shell of its former self. As those who had the power, the senatorial families, wished. What they feared first, was a proud, potent, empowered People.

(Part of) Italy would resurrect as independent republics, more than a millennium later. 

What’s the morality of the story? Men have a strong instinct for doing things right. In a plutocratic system, though, men who do things wrong get rewarded, and this goes on, until the situation exponentiates and breaks down. Thus plutocratic systems are intrinsically pathological: they reward criminals. Not just criminal according to the laws of men, but criminals according to the laws of nature.

In the Orient, life is harder, less natural, militarization exploits part of the Dark Side, because human beings, by living there, live in a less optimal situation. In the West, the rise of plutocracy did not have these excuses.

The Romans knew this well. The Roman republic was the product of a revolution against Tarquinus Superbus, the king of Rome, of Etruscan origin. So the founding act of five centuries of Roman republic was an anti-plutocratic revolt. Same for Athens (several times, during the same centuries). 

The Romans passed a strong anti-plutocratic law. That law limited, by force the size of a family’s fortune; it fixed an upper bound on how much one could own. The Second Punic war saw the death, on the battlefield, of too many of the best leading Romans. Meanwhile the conspirators of wealth, back behind the walls of the fortified cities, as Hannibal was roaming the countryside, established a New World order of rents.

When Carthage got defeated, those men of greed kept on pushing, and tried to grab control of the state. After several wars of distraction against Macedonia, Carthage, Numantia, Corinth, etc. it became clear that was what was going on to thousands of the best Romans, led by top nobles (in mind and ancestry), the Gracchi.

The Gracchis mostly tried to impose the wealth limitation law. They also succeeded to impose a land redistribution (an unthinkable socialist measure in the post Thatcher-Reagan world!). Yet, the Gracchi and their supporters lost a civil war. All got killed, by the private armies of the plutocrats. By 100 BCE, when Caesar was born, the dice had long been thrown. Only extreme measures could address the situation (extreme measures that Caesar and Cicero, on the good side, would try).

Now what? Losing democracy, means, ultimately, that we will lose not just freedom, but intelligence itself. It is difficult to imagine how the Americans will pull out of their present death spiral into furthering the wealth of the .1%. When bandits are called “philanthropists”, all values have been inverted in a country: gangsters are in control, the mafia has got metastatic. It will go on, all inverted, until it explodes, or get trampled over. The commerce chief will be a certified felon.

The situation in Europe is not as desperate: conditions for a revolt exist. Although Goldman Sachs has its servants in place all over, the Italians threw out one of them, a Goldman Sachs partner, Mario Monti, at the first chance they got.

Some may sneer, as they notice that, once again I used “Orient” and “Occident” according to old Greco-Roman semantics. What of the true Orient, the far-out East, China and company? Well, I will hide behind my usual observation: it’s Western culture that conquered the world. Present day China’s ideology has very little that is specifically Chinese, besides what the West and China had in common, such as the more or less free market. The idea of “People” (Populus) and “Republic” (Respublica) are Roman. So the very title of China, the “People Republic of China” is, well, (Greco-)Roman.

The dangers threatening China, accordingly, like those threatening us, are those that devastated the Roman republic. For the reasons exposed above, the development in the West, of a more advanced civilization was first, thus why everybody adopted it later.  Rome was first to rise as high as it did. But, the greater the rise, the greater the fall. By 700 CE, the fall of Rome had been so great, that China had risen higher, on many indicators. The West, invaded by hordes of savages for more than six hundred years (beyond even 400 CE to 1000 CE) was fighting for survival.

Plutocracy as a New World Order is not just the end of many things. In the fullness of time, plutocracy is the end of everything.

Even the Will to Power. Slave masters are not so masterful. After all, they are enslaved to their slaves.

When Rome went down, Roman plutocrats whined that the “world was getting old“. By this they meant that resources were being exhausted, and that, in its stupidity plutocratic civilization could not find a technology out.

Right now, the world is not getting old, it’s getting killed. And that’s worst.

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Patrice Ayme

Times Praises Mind Control

RULE THE MINDS, & YOU SHALL RULE THE WORLD.

Abstract: The New York Times deliberately avoids to call a duck a duck if it quacks inside the government. This strategy is revealed, explicitly, by the New York Times itself. The New York Times, by its own admission,  deliberately misinforms the public, as it judges what semantics to use, in the service of what it perceives as being the White House’s best legal strategy.

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How can large modern societies veer towards mass murder? Why did 80 million Germans goose-step behind the Kaiser, and then Hitler, to fight the world and achieve barbarian domination? I have the simplest explanation: mind control of the masses by cruel masters through carefully contrived emotional, semantic, logical and data input.

Germany 1938. Seeing What You See: Bad For Worship

["Bird Hell" detail; by German Max Beckman, 1938. Obviously A Parody Of Hitlerland.]

Hannah Arendt, a suspect thinker, came instead with a convoluted theory (in the second edition of her “Totalitarianism”  book, in 1958). She suggested that “individual isolation and loneliness” are preconditions for totalitarian domination. Speak about pop psychology.

Was Hannah saying that the several hundred million people who embraced totalitarianism, in Europe alone, were isolated and lonely? Is that why they gathered in vast herds? When 50,000 Brownshirts paraded together, were they isolated and lonely? Were the comrades of the Politburo standing with Stalin isolated and lonely? An obviously stupid theory. It’s the exact opposite that is true.

Arendt’s fancy was actually contradicted by an explicit study of Columbia University’s Theodore Abel, published in 1938. The study “Why Hitler Came In Power” showed that the characteristic 1931-1932 Nazi supporter was employed, but not educated. The supporter’s mentality, far from being isolated and lonely, was shared by the Nazi herd. Nazi supporters were enraged by the World War One defeat, the Versailles Treaty, and all and any revolutionary movements contesting the old plutocracy.

In other words, Nazi supporters had their minds programmed expertly by the very class that caused World War One, and their own suffering.

Arendt’s weird considerations sound like excuses (for herself, for her lover Heidegger?).

To find the truth, it’s better to read Nietzsche’s broadsides against the German herd, or Hitler’s detailed explanation on how to make the multitudes goosestep, spiritually speaking. Hitler explains that the way to lead the folk (“Volk”) where it does not want to go is by using “big lies“. Nietzsche explains that Germans were in love with the instincts of the herd, and cultivated them by choice first, a will to baseness, and then because they did not know any better, that’s what they became. That’s why Nietzsche broke with his (ex) friend and fellow musician, Richard Wagner.

Now fast forward to Twentieth First Century USA. The New York Times, the ‘newspaper of record’ practices, of its own gloating admission, semantic mind control.

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LET’S CALL EVERYTHING EMBARASSING DIFFERENTLY:

Wonders Margaret Sullivan, the New York Times “Public Editor“, about her own paper: “If it’s torture, why call it a “harsh interrogation technique”? If it’s premeditated assassination, why call it a “targeted killing”? And if a suspected terrorist has been locked up at Guantánamo Bay for more than a decade, why call him a “detainee”?”

Funny she has to ask that. Recent leaks from inside the CIA showed that CIA officials therein were afraid of International Warrants of Arrest against them in the future. So they did what bandits have always done, when they don’t fear summary execution. They switched from torture to assassination (assassinated people don’t tell tales to the International Criminal Court).

Ms. Sullivan went to ask Mr. Shane, a national security reporter in the Washington NYT bureau, and Philip B. Corbett, the associate managing editor for standards of the New York Times, to respond to some of these issues.

Mr. Shane addressed the question on “targeted killings,” noting that editors and reporters have discussed it repeatedly. He wrote:

“Assassination” is banned by executive order, but for decades that has been interpreted by successive administrations as prohibiting the killing of political figures, not suspected terrorists. Certainly most of those killed are not political figures, though arguably some might be. Were we to use “assassination” routinely about drone shots, it would suggest that the administration is deliberately violating the executive order, which is not the case. This administration, like others, just doesn’t think the executive order applies…“Murder,” of course, is a specific crime described in United States law with a bunch of elements, including illegality, so it would certainly not be straight news reporting to say President Obama was “murdering” people.

So, basically “assassination” is banned by decree, so “is not the case” and murder is illegal, so it’s not “straight news“. Thus Mr. Shane opines that: 

“This leaves “targeted killing,” which I think is far from a euphemism. It denotes exactly what’s happening: American drone operators aim at people on the ground and fire missiles at them. I think it’s a pretty good term for what’s happening, if a bit clinical.”

Clinical? The CIA is a hospital, and drones, presumably, scalpels? By that token whenever somebody shoots at children, it’s “targeted killing”, not murder! Indeed, an “operator” aims at children on the ground, and fires. Mr. Shane added that he had only one serious qualm about the term: it’s not “what’s happening”.  

Indeed, that, he said, was expressed by an administration official: “It’s not the targeted killings I object to — it’s the untargeted killings.” The official “was talking about so-called ‘signature strikes’ that target suspected militants based on their appearance, location, weapons and so on, not their identities, which are unknown; and also about mistaken strikes that kill civilians.”

“Mistaken strikes”? What’s mistaken about exploding a home one knows harbor women and children, in the alleged hope to get some potential terrorist, potentially inside?

In any case, Mr. Shane calls, from his own admission, “untargeted killings” and “signature strikes” by their opposites, “targeted killings”. In other words, black will be white, as long as it would be illegal, were it black.

Such are the standards at the New York Times. One can be barbarian because one is cruel. One can also be a barbarian, because one does not know how to use words. This is where the word barbarian comes from. The Greeks viewed those who could not talk well as saying: ba ba ba ba… (Notice I avoids any mention of the babama who wants to exponentiate Social Security out of existence, in an effort of remarkable restraint.)

Finally one can be a barbarian, because one views as valid a proposition and its negation. Mr. Shane seems affected by these three versions of barbarity: cruelty, at a loss for words, and self contradiction.

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TORTURE HAS LEGAL RAMIFICATIONS, WE CAN’T TALK ABOUT IT:

On the matter of “detainee,” Mr. Corbett called it “a legitimate concern” and agreed that the term might not be ideal. He said that it, not prisoner, was used because those being held “are in such an unusual situation – they are not serving a prison term, they are in an unusual status of limbo.”

They are not serving a prison term, but they are in prison. This is the New York Times, thinking.

The debate over the word “torture,” he said, has similar implications to the one Mr. Shane described with assassination. “The word torture, aside from its common sense meaning, has specific legal meaning and ramifications,” Mr. Corbett said. “Part of the debate is on that very point.”

Which point? What Mr. Corbett is saying is that the debate is about not torture per se, but about the “legal meaning and ramifications” of torture. Does that mean that the New York Times cannot talk about “torture“, because it has “legal ramifications” for its client?

The New York Times wants to “avoid making a legal judgment in the middle of a debate,” he added. The New York Times shall not judge before its time. We are not talking about “news” anymore, here. We are talking about judgment, once the debate, thus the news, are over.

***

NEW YORK TIMES AS A PROPAGANDA OUTFIT:

The most notorious failure of the media of the USA was when Nazi’s barbarity was not revealed to the public to the extent it deserved, in a timely manner. That’s how Hitler got on a joy ride for as long as he did.

The New York Times re-tweeted all the talking points of the Bush administration in the march to the Iraq war in 2002-2003. For years, if I sent a comment mentioning Mr. Bin Laden had been recruited and trained by the CIA and the SIA, my comment was immediately censored (I did this deliberately, just to experiment with the lemmings at the Times).  

What the authorities in Washington wanted, and it was amplified by the Main Stream media, is to make the folks believe that the Involvement of the USA in the Middle East started with a treacherous, mass murdering attack on 9/11. (My spouse worked for a firm that had offices in one of the collapsed towers, by the way, but moved just weeks before, so I’m not belittling 9/11, even on the personal level!)

In truth, 9/11 was a consequence of Washington’s policies more than that of some god crazed maniacs. And the consequences were highly predictable: after all the same trick of crashing a jumbo jet had been tried on Paris a few years earlier. Does that mean Washington never heard of Paris?

The first way to fight criminals, is to reveal, and then denounce their apparent, or suspected crimes. If there is a murder in the street, one does not call it a “targeted killing” especially if one knows that it is actually “untargeted” or a “signature strike”.

Also torture is the deliberate infliction of pain. It’s simple. Torture was stopped by European powers in the Middle Ages, because police techniques of interrogation had become more effective (and could be used legally, whereas torture could not… by law).

To stop barbarians in the modern world, the first thing to do is to uncover and denounce them. This is the job of journalism. The New York Times refuses to do this job. Instead it imagines it has another job, that of a legal authority. It also has the jobs of judge, and White House advocate. Not only it does all these things, which contradicts journalism, but it does it consciously, and deliberately.

Nazism was made possible because enough journalists and editors in the Anglo-Saxon world refused to report what the Nazis were doing. If they had, public opinion in the Anglo-Saxon world would have turned, and the collaboration with Hitler would have been declared unlawful, and then German general would have made an anti-Nazi coup.

So this is serious stuff.

And it’s still serious today. Obama basically proposed to do away with Social Security, by exponentiating out of it (more on that in another essay). What does the New York Times really know, and think about this? How come the reactions in the media have been so mild? How come not seeing what’s plain to see?

***

CIVILIZATION WITHOUT BRAINS CAN’T BE CONCEIVED, LET ALONE DEFENDED:

And so it goes. People are programmed by their (mental) environment. A devious mental environment makes for devious people. A base mental environment makes for base people. A false mental environment makes for small people. A mental environment where people learn to be only excited by trivialities makes for trivial minds.

Nietzsche condemned Christianity as a slave religion, while pointing out that the European aristocracy, while outwardly breathing Christianism, actually practiced the opposite. Nietzsche also noted that the strength of Greece came from keeping a balance between two completely opposed mentalities, the Dionysian and the Apollonian.  

Vast minds with vast personalities are more powerful than those who know only a few. When man domesticated an animal, the animals’ behavior registry got sharply reduced. A wolf is capable of much more behaviors than a dog. Domesticated animals are tools.

Tyrants rule over people because they have turned those people into low dimension minds with fewer emotions, and fewer thoughts, and less ability to form them, just like dogs relative to wolves. Ruling over weak minds is not just easier, it’s the only way. It’s also why democracy, which is more clever, keeps on defeating fascism.

Indeed a mental universe where people demand that ducks be called ducks is more powerful than one where they are not named. Intelligence is about discernment. Thus, the proper labels.

Mental freedom without mental power is only illusion.

The New York Times grandly proclaims the slogan “All News That Are fit To Print” on its front page. As pointed out above, the New York Times does not like to talk about it “while a debate is going on“.

New York Times, tell me: if “torture”, “murder”, “assassination” are not fit to print, what is fit to print?

***

Patrice Ayme

Swiss Fight Pluto!

Abstract: The Swiss People, in defiance to the Swiss plutocracy and its attached mob of greedy sycophants, has struck a blow against the extremely wealthy, self perpetuating class of those who rule corporations in defiance of their owners.

Most of these owners are (very) small investors. So this blow for ownership is actually a blow against one of the pillars of plutocracy. That pillar uses corporations to steal other people’s money in a particularly blatant way.

How? By creating what I long called the CEO CLASS the entanglement of corporate boards with executive power in corporations (See the essay of November 2008 on Reforming World Finance). Here is the graph of CEOs compensations versus average salary, USA. (It’s a French translation, because the Berkeley original has magically disappeared from the WWW!)

Rise CEO Class. Jump Under Clinton!

USA CEO salaries are the two top curves, with their logarithmic scale on the left. The (lamentable) average USA salary (not indexed by inflation) crawls on the bottom, with its scale on the right. Source: Anti-Plutocratic French site.

CEO payments climbed up to about 500 times that of the workers in top companies in the USA, but only 15 times in France, 12 times in Germany.

[Interestingly, I searched for days this graph in USA search engines; although of USA origin, Professor Saez, UCB, it is (not so) mysteriously unavailable in USA search engines; a friend suggested I look at Google.France, and there was plenty there! Clearly the USA plutocrats cleaned the World Wide Web carefully, so that their English bound sheeple read only appropriate information! Nothing like the happy bleating of the sheep to fill a sheperd's heart.] 

The entanglement of CEOs and the corporate boards supposed to watch over them, is reminiscent of, and probably inspired by, the entanglement of political and business power in the USA. That public-private entanglement dates from the early 20C: think of JP Morgan intervening in the 1907 crash, or think of the diversion of German property towards USA plutocrats after 1918 (don’t worry, the building were all the giving of seized German property was given to USA plutocrats burned down around 1922, erasing the tracks of grand thievery…).

A behavior that is widely admired in the USA, that of the towering CEO with an astronomical salary bestowed on him or her by a board of co-conspirators, is now criminalized in Switzerland. Such CEO and director thugs will be punished by a mandatory confiscation of 6 years of income, plus three years in prison.

In the USA, CEOs and their boards are immensely admired. The connected ones sit on corporate boards at an early age, to be paid extravagant sums of money, while doing nothing, but allowing CEOs and their minions to steal all the companies profits, from small shareholders, and workers.

Thus, Americans will now know that, by admiring CEO and boards, the American way, they are admiring what Europeans are increasingly viewing as criminals, and criminal boards of directors. OK, as slave masters long admired, I guess they have trained hard, and they will not suffer anguish that way.

Yet, one can hope that this criminalization of a motive of admiration should help with a worldwide readjustments of values.

So far, so good. But there is a twist. Why is it that mutual funds of the USA have supported so much the CEO class and its interlocked boards? Worldwide?

Well, the CEO class part of a larger conspiracy with the financial sector, where the real money is made. It is my pleasure to give some pointers. Those pointers, in turn, will allow to criminalize further said vaster conspiracy.

Meanwhile, all democracies should pass laws similar to the one Swiss representatives are now constitutionally obliged to pass. It is, of course, a consequence of Switzerland having a higher democratic index than any other country that explains that such a popular initiative was taken there. It’s clearly not a case of a country being run by rabid leftists.

***

EVIL IN A FEW WORDS, & ITS IMPLEMENTATION BY CORPORATIONS:
Evil triumphs when good people do not fight it. Why? Because the default state of humanity is strife. This is the point rabid pacifists keep on missing, it’s also the point Obama made in Stockholm, when he got his Nobel. It has been well known since there are men, and they think.

Nothing personal: because of its domination, the genus Homo evolved to control itself, quite bit as wolves do, by killing each other. The Romans abstracted this as: Homo Homini Lupo, Man Wolf Of Man (more than 2,000 years ago). Just like wolves, only more so, because we dominate more.

All species need to be kept in check, and the check of man is man.

But how does man fight man? Like all other social animals, by mobbing, or tribal fighting. So tribal effects have to be watched severely. The most famous tribes are the 200 or so nations and territories more or less represented at the United Nations. But there are other tribes, all over. The most ubiquitous being corporations. (What is meant by “corporations” varies in time, nations and space, but the tribal effect is what unifies them.)

The founders, and early presidents of the USA, so called “Founding Fathers” were fully aware of this.

As president and thinker in chief Jefferson wrote: “I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.”

The “example” is that of England (as the rest of the text makes clear). This is taken from a letter to George Logan, Nov. 12th, 1816. There’s a PDF file with scanned images of an edition of Jefferson’s works at this address.
***

WHY THE SWISS CRACK DOWN ON THE CEO MAFIA:
It is no coincidence that Switzerland, the most democratic country, was the first to ask We The People, in a referendum, what they think about the feudal class that is taking over, armed with neofascist ideology.

The answer, delivered March 3, 2013, is that 68% of the Swiss believes that the conspiracy of thieves that has come to dominate civilization, should be forcefully terminated.

Superficially, Switzerland is doing better than ever. GDP expanded in 2012. GDP per capita is nearly twice that of the USA (at nominal rates, not cheating PPP). But these good numbers and nice surroundings mask the fact that the wealthy have been doing incredibly better, while the plebs has lost ground. Most Swiss cannot afford to own there, to start with. Two-thirds of them rent (whereas 55% of French next door own their homes 100%). That way they are like the inhabitants of most “rich” cities of the West in that they can’t afford to live where they work.

An increasing inflow of tax avoiding and tax mitigating plutocrats makes the Swiss increasingly conscious of a feudalization of the country. For instance, most of the world oil trading is conducted out of Geneva, now that London is proving less tax friendly to the world’s richest sharks. That makes Swiss property values skyrocket, and also make average Swiss, like average Belgians, hold the tax bag.

Yet Switzerland is less subjugated by its elite than other “representative democracies”.

This has to do with history. Other places were typically founded by large imperial machines (France, Britain, Germany, USA, Ex British colonies, Portugal, Spain, Spanish colonies, Italy, Russia, Netherlands), and, or slave societies (Spanish colonies, Brazil, USA, Russia). Some countries may look small now, but degenerated from empires. The Netherlands even conquered England; Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden ran empires (Sweden thought it owned Ukraine and Russia for a millennium). The present Swedish regime was founded by Napoleon, etc…

Instead Switzerland started as a rebellion against the family that would run the “Holly Roman German Empire” for centuries. The birth of Switzerland was fundamentally an anti-plutocratic rebellion. Same in the USA, sure, but only that other revolution minded plutocrat, Louis XVI of France, made in possible (in more ways than one). The Swiss revolt was indigenous.

Any initiative signed by 100,000 people can be presented as a referendum in Switzerland.

***

SWISS CRACK-DOWN ON CEO CLASS:

Initiator of the “Rip-off Initiative” Thomas Minder is an entrepreneur industrialist, and right wing politician, who nearly lost his company when Swissair went bankrupt (from obscure financial maneuvers). In recent years, Mr. Minder observed that the world was put on its knees in the service of financiers. This is exactly the point demonstrators were making in Portugal this week.

As Portuguese demonstrators said, why should they sacrifice because infinitely rich bankers cheated? Or went mad? Or conspired with other rich fat cats to rob common people? Why is it that Portuguese people without money now have to pay to use the public hospital, when those who have caused the disaster keep on flying in private jets, shuttling among their mansions, worldwide?

As I said already more than 5 years ago, there is a CEO class. CEOs sit on each others’ board, and attribute each others’ salaries. OK, they are often more crafty, and use agents: relatives, or protégés. It is particularly clear in the USA, where it’s all about who you know really well: see the Summers-Clinton-Summer-Google-Facebook Ms. Sandberg (just a small example).

And it’s even more than a CEO class.

***

CEO CLASS AS A MULTIPLIER:

The CEO Class can be instrumentalized to divest power to talent that will serve plutocracy well.

A lot of people of power are able to transfer quickly and efficiently power to their children, or people they know will serve their children faithfully. It’s happening everywhere, especially in the USA.

Suddenly all powerful young people rise in the USA to seats on corporate boards: thus they are made to integrate the CEO Class, board side. Careful inquests always show connections with the powers that be. See Geithner, head of New York Fed, then tax cheating Treasury secretary, ah, but the son of Geithner (Geithner’s father was a Ford Foundation director who met with Obama’s mother… All and any connection with the painting behind Hitler in his Munich office will not be made, recommended an angel that passed by, dripping with finance…). Geithner was successfully vetted at Kissinger Associates, a plotting organization to connect plutocrats, corrupt politicians and other worldwide tyrants. He was put under the wings of Rubin and Summers (like Facebook’s billionaire woman, the genius feminist Sheryl Sandberg). Geithner was prepared to serve his masters well.

The CEO-boards Class systems enable the plutocratic machine to put large amounts of power to servile critters. This  is how ‘black’ women of the Rice class, such as Rice, Susan and Rice, Condoleezza, were all powerful by the age of 30 (the former a member of the National Security council, thanks to dad, a treasury director, the second on prestigious CEO boards all over, and a supertanker was named after her, because her masters at Stanford had determined she would serve her masters in the Dark Side well… still does: she is a towering member of the CEO class in 2013). Not that I have anything against blacks or “blacks”…

“Are they worth it?” Asked The Economist. While knowing very well the answer was no. One thing the extravagant growth of the CEO Class did not grow is corporate profits:

CEO Class Rising, Everything Else Lagging

***

WANT DEMOCRACY? CUT POWER IN TINY BITS, DISTRIBUTE WIDELY:

Minder’s “Rip-off Initiative” was designed to prevent bosses from receiving huge bonuses by decision of a CEO class. So it makes it harder to congeal a CEO class: board members should serve only a single year.

This, by the way, is something to meditate in a more general way… In the Roman republic, the judicial, military, economic and political executive was incarnated by the Consuls. They served just one year (although they could be elected again: Marius was elected Consul 7 times!). And even in that year, ultimate power switched from one to the other, every month.

Republican Romans knew how fragile the Res (Thing) Publica was. Don’t laugh. The Roman republic, in full, lasted five centuries. Still the world’s record.

Now what we have is, what would have been called in the times of Julius Caesar, (elected) kings. The immense powers the president of the USA are perfectly ridiculous, especially when, as Obama, he does not use them. (An apparent worshipper of Satan, complete with devilish smirks, such as G. W. Bush, did not have such reservations: such a creature never will, by definition!)

Minder’s anti-plutocratic initiative says that companies cannot decide to give their executives “golden parachutes”. Salaries of board members, and companies’ executives will have to be approved by the companies’ owners. That is, by the shareholders. That, by itself, of course, is not enough, because the plutocratic web is entangled in all power structures, and sucks the substantific marrow.

When Novartis gave 71 million Francs ($77 million) to its CEO, Vasella, to the fury of the very numerous small Swiss shareholders of Novartis. The small shareholders could not do anything as most of Novartis’ shares are held by plutocratic institutions, which are part and party to the plutocratic phenomenon.

What plutocratic institutions accomplice to the CEO Class and the financial rip-off sector, am I alluding to? A lot of them are mutual funds in the USA. Or funds for retirement funds. Those used to give rich returns, but, in recent decades, they have faltered. Why? How come? well it’s part and parcel of the worldwide take-over by rich money managers. It may sound strange that they strive towards subpar performance: it’s an apparent violation of the free market principle.
***

WHY MUTUAL FUNDS MANAGERS CONSPIRE WITH THE CEO MAFIA:
The naïve free market principle says that, when a mutual fund has subpar performance, the shareholder should move to another fund. Yes, sure, but what if they are all subpar? What if there is a conspiracy? Because, clearly that is what has been systematically going for like 20 years.

The funds are losing money right and left because the function of fund managers has become mostly to transfer money to the financial fat sharks of the plutocratic class. You know the ones they share the caviar toasts with. Thus small shareholders and retirees, present and future, make richer, ever more, the richest people in the world.

There is actually a closed circuit similar to that between Washington and private corporations and partnerships. Individuals operate as public fund managers for a few years, wasting a lot of investors’ money, and then they become “wealth managers”, “private bankers”, “hedge fund managers”, entangle themselves with the CEO class, and politicians, to make the really big bucks, extracting money from the public, including the public mutual funds for little people… or small shareholders of corporations such as Novartis. Don’t ask me for references: plutocratic universities such as Harvard, Stanford, are not too keen to study the subject, as those who profit from it, are their bread and butter.

Conspiracies to distribute People’s money to friends are all over the so called “representative democracies”. Why should not giant government spending be controlled by the People more directly? It can be done in… Switzerland.
***

SWISS DEMOCRACY VERSUS THE GIANT CORRUPTION IN AEROSPACE, F35 STYLE:
Plutocracy is encountering serious difficulties in Switzerland. Besides the “rip-off” initiative above, here is another example.

Some of the Swiss elite, probably paid under the table, had conspired to buy “Grippens“. The Grippen is an excellent plane made in Sweden. But the Swiss Air Force would prefer the superlative, stealthy Rafale, the world’s best omnirole fighter bomber, from the country next door.

The Swiss are going to be asked their opinion… about purchasing the Grippen. It’s pretty clear that, thanks to outfits such as this site, enough of them will know that they are been rolled in the flour, spending billions on underperforming planes (that actually does not exist in the version proposed to Switzerland). So they will vote against the Grippen.

Not so in the USA, And other countries where the people is supposed to pay hundreds of billions to purchase an entirely useless plane, the F35 Lightning II.

The F35 is already the world’s most expensive military project, ever, anywhere. Yet the plane is military incapable, and will stay so. The entire project is flawed (this kind of passive stealth does NOT work, the plane’s range, speed, acceleration, g loads, weapons capacity are puny).

The great peoples of the great democracies such as the USA, Great Britain, etc. are not consulted about whether they want to keep on going with that F35 corruption. The total program cost already more than 400 billion dollars with not one single plane that could go to war. It’s expected to end up costing about a trillion dollars with planes no better performing than the Vietnam war F105… And just as detectable.

But so far, while People go starving in several countries involved in F35 corruption (including in the USA’s Silicon Valley, where hundreds of thousands are on “food stamps”), nobody is exhibiting very much indignation.

***

PLUTOCRACY IS A SEVERE PROBLEM, IT SHOULD DEALT WITH SEVERELY:

The Swiss referendum forces the Swiss Parliament to draft a law giving shareholders the right to hold a binding vote on all compensation for company executives and directors. The law will also ban signing and leaving bonuses for senior managers and push greater corporate transparency. As said above, criminals will be punishmed by the confiscation of 6 years of income, and three years jail.

The Swiss have just struck a severe blow at the plutocrats, exposing them for the conspiring, manipulative thieves they are. Other European countries will be encouraged to follow, including Germany and Britain (in both countries laws on executive compensation are being elaborated, the German law may come up for a vote as soon as next week). The French Socialists will come back with a 75% tax law, that will pass muster with the French Constitutional Court…

The European Union in preparing a law cracking down on bankers’ bonuses. Great Britain is desperately trying to block it, as it will apply there, inside the very the den of thieves, too. But Great Britain will be overruled. It just revealing itself to be ruled by money. Plutocracy in fact, not just from crowned celebrities.

To have kings is bad. To have money as king, is worse.

It is high time that countries that call themselves democracies be as democratic as Switzerland. It would be a good start towards a more intelligent civilization.
***
Patrice Ayme

Lincoln, CO2, Oblabla, etc.

REALITY HAS AN ANTI-AMERICAN BIAS:
I don’t know much about Lincoln or the Secession War. Although I confess that I certainly know more that American college graduates. While I admit that this is nothing glorious, it’s enough to say plenty, in a grand American tradition of knowing it all, that I will denigrate, later in this essay.

Propelled by the momentum acquired by watching the excellent “Django Unchained”, I went on with doing my duty, and watching “Lincoln”. This movie frenzy started with “Life of Pi” watched with my three year old daughter. She is familiar with natural food procurement processes unfolding in nature documentaries. So she did not mind that the tiger killed the hyena. What scared her more were the waves, a healthy fear to have.

No Dark Side, No Humanity. A Paradox.

I heard that Obama liked the “Life of Pi”, while he did not like as much the Spielberg movie, “Lincoln”. I could guess why: “Lincoln” the movie had got to be boring for those not anxious to boast that they are intellectually inclined. The movies reminded me of a shallow version of one of my own essays, spread over three hours.

The movie depicts the last 4 months or so in Lincoln’s life. The Confederacy is running out of steam and men. The Civil War is finishing, but the mass dying on the battlefields is in no way abating. A butchery without compare in the history of the West. Lincoln is trying to use the momentum of his re-election and battlefield victories to abolish slavery. (As it was, slavery was finally outlawed after Lincoln’s assassination, in December 1865.)

Contemporary citizens of the USA can only find that picture uncomfortable. Is that all what the great USA was about? Buying people? what sort of city on the hill was that? what sort of example for humanity? And it was a scandal not being able to buy people anymore? Was slavery the greatest cause worth dying for?

The movies is thus somewhat anti-American, as it shows too much reality, the incredible trash that political life was in the USA at the time. OK, sorry about discriminating against that particular period. it’s still trashy today, one could even say trashier than ever. After all, courtesans in Washington are trying to kill the planet.

I saw a picture of Obama shooting a gun today (OK, that was an appropriate gun, so gigantic it was not conducive to mass shooting). Apparently to show he still loved guns, in spite of all the little children dying, pierced with bullets. Is this was the presidential moral fiber has come down to? Salute the shooting of the children by the shooting of the guns? Should have Lincoln tried to seduce his opposition too? Will I have dreams of Lincoln passing by, pulled by with powerful black men chained to his chariot, he whips softly?

If Obama had been in the White House instead of Lincoln, in 1865, would he have had photographers immortalize him, whipping up a slave, to show to the slave lobby that he, Obama loved slaves too?

Obama could point out that gun totting Americans shooting down gun totting Americans is not as big a problem as Americans buying Americans. Right. Especially in Washington: is it not the essence of the place?

However Americans shooting down their own families (according to statistics, that’s the most marking activities of those with guns) is only a psychological hook: something very small, very hard, with lots of consequences.

If Americans are obsessive about shooting other Americans, should we be surprised that they don’t mind thinking exactly what they masters told them to think, and shooting the biosphere down too? Something about the rage inside rather that the speech outside. A complementary principle. obama is often too subtle by half, and gets played instead of being the one playing.

Strictly from statistics, the USA is the only developed country where most of the war dead happened during a Civil War (the losses were close to one million, the latest scholarship shows: about 3% of the population).

***

HIS DARK SIDE WAS BIGGER THAN YOURS:
“Lincoln” the movies, shows that Lincoln, the president, had to buy his way out of slavery. Lincoln used whatever it took. Big difference with the not-doing-anything-much president.

Obama and his plutocratic demoncratic Congress (yes: demon-cratic) did not put much pressure on banks, health providers and corporations. According to Obama, these problems do not compare with slavery.

But Obama is wrong. Slavery was a joke. A very very very bad joke, but still a joke. They might as well have sold human meat at the market. Actually that’s what they did. But it went against the flow of civilization. The Romans themselves would have been shocked by American racism. American slavery was that weird. That full of hatred and greed.

The problem with the present atmospheric crisis is that it is doing judo with civilization; it’s using the very momentum of civilization, to trip it. The present crisis goes with the flow, and was never seen before.

The worst scandal being the USA-led total absence of any serious efforts to stop the climate catastrophe.

In all these things Obama did not exert presidential powers, contrarily to what many of his predecessors did, and Lincoln did, first of all. Obama was opposed within his own party on cap and trade, and, instead of threatening to destroy his opponents, small hurtful piece by small hurtful piece, he made clear he did not want to fight.

A commander in chief who can’t fight? A commander in chief who thinks it is wiser to not engage in battle? What a bizarre notion. It’s the symptom of someone who did not read the job’s description.

I suspect that Obama, who tries to ride Lincoln as he were a horse, has reason to feel diminished by the 16th president. Obama goes around writing on official documents, that he is black. And Obama went all out to kill Bin Laden. And Obama went all too much out ordering extrajudicial killings and drone madness. True. But all this is Mickey Mouse style Dark Side.

The real, the glorious Dark Side is about shock and awe, not popularity, but fear, and justice. The real Dark Side, the useful Dark Side, the honorable Dark Side, is about doing what is necessary for the highest moral purposes. All has, always will be.

Obama’s Mickey Mouse Dark Side is a smokescreen that should not fool those who are real tough. When he had to be really tough with financiers, corporations, the fossil fuel lobbies, gun lobby, military (Afghanistan), and the for profit health care lobby Obama just meowed, and purred.

In other words, when Obama had to be real tough to the modern slave masters, he just folded. Lincoln did not fold. That’s why he has a big statue in Washington standing in a silent judgment on those of his successors who just aspire to free rent, girls, bodyguards, and lots of money, a la Bill Clinton, the president of the Degenerate State of America.

(Or Utterly Stupid America? It’s Clinton and his minions who empowered financiers, by diverting most money creation towards financial derivatives, and the likes of Enron. To this day, the fact that the Demoncratic Party is full of Romneys escapes the little minds.)

Lincoln had to use the Dark Side, for the triumph of goodness, big time, because George Washington had not had the moral courage to do his job. Lincoln went, well, all out. This is mentioned in the movies during an exchange Lincoln has with the commander of the US Army Ulysses Grant (himself president later).
***

SLAVERY IS NOT EASY TO QUIT:
Lincoln, as president, using his considerable war powers, had made an Emancipation Declaration, January 1, 1863. It freed the slaves over which the Union had no power (!)

The Emancipation was not a law passed by Congress. But by Lincoln’s personal “war powers” as a modern Caesar.

Caesar himself indeed used similar war powers during the Roman civil war, as Consul, and, or, elected Dictator; that’s where this is all coming from, through the Franks, and, in particular, through Consul Clovis who had to knock some sense in his Franks, that, from now on, the fascist Roman model of war would rule (incident of the Vase de Soisson!).

As Lincoln explains in the movie, that Emancipation Declaration was full of contradiction, because it recognized slaves as property confiscated from the enemy. Except Lincoln did not want to recognize the South’s rebels as enemy, as that would recognize them as an independent nation. Nor did Lincoln want to recognize slaves as property, because, when the war was over, logically the owners would be able to recover their property.

So Lincoln wanted to pass the 13th Amendment to the Constitution of the USA, which recognized explicitly that people could not be owned, or forced to work, except if they had been convicted of a crime through due process. In other words, no more slavery.

Some claimed that the amendment would entice the Confederacy to fight to the bitter end. But that was nothing the military could not fix. The bitter end was at hand, thanks to Sherman’s March to the Sea. The best way to handle terrorists is to destroy them, as president Hollande pointed out, in connection with Mali.

The various quandaries encountered in abrogating slavery were nothing new. Bathilde, an English slave, escaped an abusive plutocrat, who had her recaptured. But she caught the eye of the Prince, who bought her, freed her, married her, and engrossed her. Then he became king and promptly died.

The Franks, as all Germans, had arisen, long ago as independent farmers, and hated slavery. However they encountered Greco-Roman civilization, more advanced in many ways, but also pervaded by fascism, slavery and militarism. The Germans learned from their Roman masters, but both their implementation of fascism and slavery was unenthusiastic. However the Gallo-Roman aristocracy had become entangled with the Christian Church, who claimed to be very good, although Christ never said (supposing he really said anything at all), against slavery.

But there it was, a queen of the Franks, who had been a rebellious slave, a few years before. Her government and the regency council agreed to do away with slavery. But Bathilde had it less easy than Lincoln: there was no civil war with enslaving rebels. Bathilde’s government could not just expropriate bishops. Bishops, being scions of the plutocracy, had often armies of slaves.

So Bathilde had to be subtle. She outlawed SLAVE TRADING within the Merovingian empire. That was as good as outlawing the slave trade outright. That was in 658 CE.
This prohibition was later extended to the even more gigantic Carolingian empire that surfaced within a generation. (That Venice made lots of money trading non Frankish slaves with the Islamists is irrelevant, except in that it created a conceptual pattern that would allow to authorize slavery in the colonies.)

Fast forward 1207 years, it’s 1865, and the USA, institutionally, militarily and historically a Franco-British colony, is trying to finally outlaw slavery, as Lafayette had urged relentlessly his good friend George Washington to do. Lafayette was a French military man, and he knew all too well what a monstrosity slavery was.

All over Europe, but for the vast areas controlled by the Muslim Turks, and the wilds of Russia, thanks to Bathilde, slavery was unlawful.

Lafayette entreaties were unsuccessful. Washington congratulated his friend about his humanity, but obstinately refused to do anything positive. Jefferson (3rd president and a babble box) was pretty much the same.

Arrives Lincoln. Lincoln, you see, is courageous. Instead of going around with armies of bodyguards, he goes around pretty much unprotected.
President Hollande made a visite éclaire to Timbuktu, 5 days after the sacred city fell to the French Guerre Éclaire. (Contrarily to Anglo-Saxon-Wall Street French bashing legend, it’s French generals who invented the concept of Blitzkrieg, and cleverly published it, in 1932, teaching Nazis something!).

Hollande’s visit was courageous. So did Lincoln’s 15 battlefield visits during the Civil War, oceans of bodies still writhing on the ground, a general holding a pistol cocked up, just behind him, lest one of the Confederate soldiers was not completely dead.

Armies of bodyguards is no new trick. One of Caesar’s generals used to always go around with such an army, Caesar contemptfully observed in his memoirs. The fact that the underling survived (with wounds) an assassination attempt, did not impress Caesar very much.

Caesar himself refused even the accompaniment of Marc Anthony, a superlative special force brute, to go to the Senate, although he had been warned of an assassination plot that day. What was Caesar’s point? Well, he did not run a dictatorship, he governed with the approbation of the Populus (funny for someone who had made himself “dictator for life”, but the word “dictator” became pejorative only after Caesar’s assassination!). In the Senate, pierced by dozens of knife wounds, Caesar found out that he did not govern with the assent of the plutocrats.

Lincoln did not run a dictatorship, either. He wanted to make that very clear. At the battle of Appomatox, the army of the chief of the Confederate Army, Lee was surrounded on three sides. After 700 casualties, Lee surrendered. 29,000 Confederate soldiers were paroled. Lincoln wanted, and had ordered, generalized forgiveness.

Caesar and Lincoln died, when they were still on the verge of attempting great things (Caesar by putting an end to the Persian-German problem in one stroke, Abraham Lincoln by freeing colored people from all those other chains that still held them, such as no right to vote, or no right to marry out of their “race”, etc.)
***

THOSE WHO DON’T KNOW SHOULD LEARN, INSTEAD OF BARKING OUT ORDERS:
Are there lessons, within Lincoln wondrous adventure, to be drawn for the world today?

Something striking about the USA, is the tendency to give lessons to everybody, as if the USA invented civilization. Now, OK, slavery was still lawful in Turkey in 1865. But there was no slavery in most states, worldwide. In 1865. The USA was a glaring exception. Can one be that primitive, and still give lessons about how to live, as the USA does to the planet, year after year? Yes, sure, Jihadists do that every day.

What is striking, in the politics of the USA is the absence of towering intellectual figures dominating the debate. No Montaigne, no Montesquieu, no Voltaire, there. Instead, mongrels are disputing in front an electorate of the gullible what god wanted, while filling up their pockets.
In Antiquity, even a fascist philosopher such as Aristotle had to make excuses to justify slavery. He knew he had to. That was from a tiny city, Athens. In the gigantic USA of 1865, no philosopher dominates the landscape, except, well, for the philosopher president, Lincoln himself. A philosopher among mice is still a philosopher, I guess.

Aristotle whined they, his kind, the slave masters, had no machines, so they needed slaves. However that means Aristotle had the concept of machine. Aristotle knew that there were machines… The Greeks had just made no effort to develop them, and the Romans were going to become even more lazy.

Because there were machines: slavery just looked more convenient, thus machines were not deployed.
***

IT’S WORSE TO ENSLAVE THE PLANET THAN TO ENSLAVE MAN:
Just like now. But now is worse. Combining the oxygen we breathe with 450 million years of poisonous, flammable rocks and rotten fluids, looks more convenient to the monsters who lead us to oblivion, than deploying the new energy sources we have at the ready. While there is still time.

Slavery was convenient, until Bathilde outlawed it. Then there was no choice. The machines that had been waiting in the wings were deployed., and animals were bioengineered. It took Papin 1,000 years more to introduce a perfectly functioning steam boat, but Papin’s steam engine was the logical evolution of centuries of metal works and engineering. The Cathedrals could be constructed only because of hydraulic hammers, to bend the enormous steel girders.

In another gloomy perspective Dr. Chu, the Energy Secretary a Nobel Prize winner in physics resigned. Under Chu a form of Cobertism was practiced: encouraging some industries by direct financing, That’s one pillar, but, to make something a stable sustainable switch, two more pillars were needed: making fossil fuels pay for their true cost (in other words a carbon tax, thus making better energy sustainable), and massive fundamental research.
Quoting Michelangelo, Chu said: “‘The greater danger for most of us lies not in setting our aim too high and falling short; but in setting our aim too low, and achieving our mark.’”
President Washington obstinately refused to see that slavery was a mortal moral danger. He had set his mark too low. Similarly, when Obama, as the biosphere faces the worst crisis in 65 million years, informs us that problems in the USA are not as severe as in Lincoln’s times, he sets his eyes too low, somewhere by his feet.
Chu pointed out that burning fossils and their gases is economically viable in some sense: “Our ability to find and extract fossil fuels continues to improve, and economically recoverable reser-voirs around the world are likely to keep pace with the rising demand for decades. As the saying goes, the Stone Age did not end because we ran out of stones; we transitioned to better solutions.”
Our ability to find and kill innocent victims continues to improve, too. But that does not mean we should do it. The Slave Age in the USA did not end because it ran out of slaves, but because a better solution was imposed onto the slave masters, by force. Lincoln was force. Slavery was outlawed.

Combining all our oxygen with fossilized carbon should also be outlawed. An Emancipation Declaration of oxygen, using war powers, should be made.

Chu used the old tried and true: “There is an ancient Native American saying: “We do not inherit the land from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children.” A few short decades later, we don’t want our children to ask, “What were our parents thinking? Didn’t they care about us?””

The Natives did not inherit the air from their ancestors, either. Air is the fundamental human right, a right that cannot be let to expire for a minute.

So it’s not just about the poorest and the unborn. There is much more than that. It’s about us, too. Why did Lincoln destroy slavery? Lincoln destroyed slavery, not because he was “black”, and not to save his children (one of his sons died in the unCivil War).

No, much more simply, Lincoln destroyed slavery because Lincoln was a good man and he found slavery abhorrent.

Show me what you hate, and I will tell you how good you are.

It’s worse to enslave the planet than to enslave man. Make a note of it. Too bad there is no Lincoln around today to save the planet, but only the greedy to lead the needy.
***
Patrice Ayme

USA Attack Against Afghanistan

[A little reminder!]
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, PRESIDENT CARTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, CAUSED WAR IN AFGHANISTAN
National fables can be the ultimate weapons of mass destruction. One such fable is that the USA was attacked on 9/11 by forces it had nothing to do with.

The conflict in Afghanistan killed three millions Afghans, while wounding and displacing much more civilians than that. This conflict was instigated by the USA’s CIA, through its agents in Pakistan instrumentalizing Islam. The conflict took a worse turn when the White House of demonocrat President Jimmie The Very Pious Carter put its full weight behind it:

The following interview of Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, was never published in the USA:

Question of Nouvel Observateur: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, Obama’s Defense Secretary, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secret until now, is completely different. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: NONSENSE!
***

Thus the USA did attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The CIA and its Saudi equivalent got the good idea of recruiting a god crazy scion of Saudi Arabia’s second plutocratic family, Bin Laden. It was a good choice: Bin Laden was also an engineer and a manager, he quickly organized a powerful army of fanatics well financed by friendly plutocrats. The CIA suggested to attack soft targets, such as schools, and the tactic was highly effective.

After 2001, the USA installed in Afghanistan a theocracy (as a holy book is the basis of its constitution).
Theocracy comes naturally to the USA. On January 21 a benediction was given on the steps of the capitol as part of Obama’s election. In a discourse that the worst of the Taliban no doubt applauded, Rev. Luis Leon informed us that “without the blessing of god” we would be abominable monsters. It was fascinating to see the leadership of the USA bowing to the Reverend’s horrible declarations.

The situation in the Republique du Mali is completely different: it’s a secular state which called the United Nations to intervene, and the UNSC agreed, unanimously. The French Republic is just implementing that resolution.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
For seeing the war of the USA against Afghanistan in a wider context; http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

Why USA Is Gunning For Guns

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

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

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

The Grossest Propaganda Works the Best

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No Rice, No Lice, No Dice

Unexpected happenings all over. UN Ambassador Susan Rice, reportedly involved with genocide and corruption for twenty years, is considered for Secretary of State. Does that beat Obama outlawing the European Carbon Tax? Reality is always spicier than fiction.

Transparency International produced a classification of countries according to (SELF) “perceived” corruption. Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Singapore, Hong Kong, are six tax havens (some with triads!) proclaimed to be less corrupt than France, or the USA. Tax havens are, like corruptocrats, parasites. Parasitism can kill a civilization.

There are 3,000 species of lice. Parasites can’t create civilization. We should not look up to them.

Trying to evaluate corruption, worldwide, and to attract attention to corruption is a good thing. If done honestly. Transparency International says that Finland is one of the three less corrupt countries in the world.  In reality, the Finnish director of Transparency International, himself the director of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, decided that.   

One can only conclude, in turn, that Transparency International is itself corrupt. Or at least mentally corrupt, like an old fish left out too long rotting in the sun. TI is another of these international pretentions, which international finance, and its globalized media, are keen to advertize for, as they serve them well.

The drive is always the same: the big states, the pillars of democracy, are bad, small states, where plutocrats can reign supreme, and lovely tax havens, are good. If the small state is the window of a big bad plutocracy, China, full of triads, as Hong Kong is, that ‘s even better! It’s not corrupt at all!

Just as tax havens are the best places to be born (said The Economist), tax havens are also the less corrupt, as far as international plutocrats are concerned. Similarly rotten rich plutocratic universities, propagandizing watered down values, are the best in the world, and the French ones the worst (hey, is not the Islamophobic Voltaire taught there?).

Corruption tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Transparency International, just as countless elite private universities, “liberal”‘ or “left wing” “think tanks”, are just plain tanks that the plutocrats finance to roll over the People, starting with their minds.

If Transparency International were serious, it would use objective criterions. The Gini Index, which measures inequality inside countries, would be a main ingredient. It’s obvious that any country where an extremely rich elite reigns over an uneducated rabble is intrinsically corrupt.

New indexes need to be created to judge corruption objectively. The Gini index is objective. We need more objective indexes, rather than to depend upon crooks to inform us on how corrupt they are.

One learns best through explicit examples. Here we will mention two cases, one that of an American politician who is a professional democratic party apparatchik. Starting from nothing, on government salary, the lady built a fortune… and part of this fortune is psychologically incrusted in the most determined pollutocratic corporations. (Yes, pollutocratic and pollutocrats are neologisms we will, unfortunately, find useful, looking forward, as the influence of those such as Ms Rice, and her puppet masters, seems to know no bounds.)  

One such index would rest upon how rich politicians become (the Pure Corruption Index). Presumably, the acquisition of otherwise unexplainable awesome riches comes from plutocrats paying them under, or over, the table.

Just add how rich those politicians (and their families!) have become, and divide by how much they officially earned, during their official tenure. Then integrate over all politicians of that country, to get a global index. So my proposed index can be used both individually, and globally. It seems that Susan Rice, Obama’s friend, UN ambassador with cabinet rank, and potential Secretary of State scores very high that way, on the Pure Corruption Index. That Obama defends her ardently tells volumes on the sort of state that we are supposed to admire, as we are supposed to admire Ms Rice’s political-financial genius. Such is the main axe of this essay.

Nietzsche used to crow that he “made philosophy with a hammer“. But the planet needs to be defended with a battle axe.

Another index would take into account how rich politicians are (Pure Plutocratic Index). The Pure Plutocratic Index is not as bad as a criterion to chose our Lords. For example, Senator Kerry, who would make a much better Secretary of State than Ms. Rice, is very rich. But it’s clear how he became rich: he married an extremely rich woman, from Mozambique, herself heir to the Heinz fortune. Kerry does not owe anything to pollutocrats, or plutocrats. It’s unlikely he would pass laws to construct ketchup pipelines across the world, to please his sponsor (namely his wife). Whereas as we will see, what dirty Rice proposes for her pipelines is hard to swallow.

Much of the American deficit (in the last four years, it was a trillion dollars a year) comes from legal, or tolerated tax evasion (the home mortgage interest deduction comes to mind, and the 975 employees at GE in charge of tax evasion, who allowed GE to avoid taxes all together more than once).

Amazon has a multi-billion dollar business in each of France, Britain, and other countries, and it pays basically no tax, while the local bookstores it is killing do. France presented Amazon with a tax bill of $252 million, for unpaid taxes, 2006 to 2010. France presented Google with a tax bill of a billion dollars (I use Google for search rarely, as there are many alternatives).

Massive tax evasion undermines the French welfare system. And also the French military, the world’s most interventionist. It is France who made war in Ivory Coast recently re-establishing democracy, and it is France which is putting the heat on the Islamists who conquered half of Mali (roughly the size of California), and may go to war there soon. This French war activities, in defense of civilization, in the end also protect the tax havens (example: if France had not declared war to Hitler in summer 1939, Switzerland, ultimately, just like Austria next door, would have been conquered by the Nazis).

I have not been following closely the fumbling about Ms Rice as Sec. Of State to replace Hillary Clinton. I knew nothing much about Ms. Rice, except that she is a professional politician, her career having started under Bill Clinton.  I don’t trust professional politicians. They are parasites within a tyrannical system, representative democracy. OK, some are sincere (Chavez, Gov. Brown of California, Hollande and Merkel come to mind; some may be sincere, although slightly deranged; Putin comes to mind.) However, in general politicians thrive from corruption, and thus politics attract those who want to thrive from corruption.

Nobody can accuse me not to be cynical. However, I was stunned to learn that Susan Rice, 48, holds between 300,000 and 600,000 dollars of TransCanada. Reality is indeed much more crazy than fiction.

TransCanada wants to build a pipeline across the USA to find a buyer to the horrendously polluting Tar Sand Oil (British Columbia has refused such a pipe). This fact, by itself, clearly disqualifies her as a potential Sec. Of State. Even if she divested herself, it would remain that she took side against the biosphere, and that she had to be violently separated from an investment who brought her $25,000 last year. And, to top it all of, she has so little judgment that, although she knew her good friend Obama would try to nominate her, she clang to her monstrous money maker. 

It gets better:  Ms. Rice and her husband, an ABC News producer, own at least $1.5 million worth of holdings in Enbridge, a Canadian company that transport Tar Sand oil across the USA. In other words, Ms. Rice will be viewed by dedicated ecologist as satanic. (Ecologists do not seem to worry Mr. Obama very much.)

Where do these people get that kind of money? A quick scan of Ms Rice’s career shows that she was employed a bit in (fake) “liberal” institution such as Brookings, and something called Intellibridge. Intellibridge was a front for selected investors, financial organizations and other corporations, a conduit for plutocratic money, to pay off the servants (and an outshoot from Kissinger Associates, the extreme right wing organization).  Ms Rice’s father was a governor of the Fed, the private-public device to funnel public money to private banks. 

So now Ms Rice is rich, filthy rich, she is fully blossoming as a servant plutocracy can trust. A full time leader of the democratic party. Filthy rich, literally, as Tar Sand oil, which is twice cooked, is very dirty.

So ecological organizations have meekly suggested Rice should divest from her polluting investments. It’s a human equivalent of grabbing a piece of meat from a lion: Rice may give up her reward, but she will resent those who forced her to do so. and the fact is, she was rewarded, enormously, by those who wanted to reward her, and will go on defending them, if she has any sense of decency.

Decency among scoundrels is part of the tribal instinct. Fundamentally, killing is a social activity (as killing en masse requires allies) so, paradoxically the more the killing, the higher the team spirit. Even among Nazis, decency to each other was high: they called each other “Kameraden” (“comrades”), spoke of “we” all the time.   

Rice has made clear, with her obscene investments, who her team is: the team of those who, literally, want to burn the Earth.

On September 16, 2012, Rice went on five major news channels to pontificate about the attack in Benghazi:

“our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy–sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that– in that effort with heavy weapons…We do not– we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned…”

in other words Rice says that it is free expression, the First Amendment, that is culprit in causing the Benghazi attack. Nowhere does she mention that an enormous Salafist base was tolerated, or known to be, close by.

This is wrong in several ways. First the concept that a “hateful video” can “spark” deadly protest.

Second and more importantly, it is wrong to believe that there was such a thing as a “hateful video“. There was a grotesque video, the “Innocence of Muslims“, true. But the pathetic video just faithfully illustrated what is, incredibly, said about Muhammad in the Qur’an, and the most sacred Muslim texts. To wit:

Muhammad married a girl, Aischa, who was 6 years old, and had sex with her when she was 9. Yes, Muhammad killed much more than a thousand men, yes, he did not know how to read and write (differently from his first wife, a rich business woman), yes, the cousin of his wife was a professional Christian monk, and he told Muhammad that it’s Archangel Gabriel that met him in the desert, yes, God had allowed Muhammad to marry as many women as he pleased, and that pleased him a lot, including with Jewesses (and a furious friends’ wives). More can be said that is highly distressing, and the short video did not say.

OK, the video represented a sexual practice that is not alleged in the sacred Muslim texts. Thus one can only conclude that those who protest about the “hateful video” protest about a precise sexual practice, benign between consenting adults. Curious that they do, as they find completely normal that the great Prophet Muhammad had sex with nine year old girls. The only conclusion is that they are sexually obsessed (one way, they love pedophilia, at least when the Prophet does it, and another, they find licking bushes so abhorent, they call it hateful, denigrating of Islam, surely the prophet of child molesting  would not do such a thing!)

It remains that when Rice, and those excited Muslims in Pakistan, call the video “hateful“, they call the Qur’an “hateful”. Outrageous company between Al Qaeda’s theses and a member of the cabinet? Not that much. The USA has long instrumentalized Islam, because Islam, thanks to its Fascist Principle (Qur’an Sura 4, v 59), is friendly to dictators and dictators can be made friendly to those who own the USA. Result? Lots of oil trading is controlled by the USA and its associated plutocrats (many based in Switzerland!), and the profits get recycled through New York and London.

So what is it with Rice? She is rich, and Rice was obviously made rich by the likes of those who want pipelines carrying the most polluting oil to be built, and Tar Sands to be exploited.

The battle about Rice is a small symbolic and pragmatic move in a vast picture.

The essential strategy of the USA in matter of energy used to be that it did not matter how dirty one got, as long as one provided the USA with cheap oil. That was the sense of the pact between F. D. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud in 1945. It was the time of dirty dirty: the USA had left France and Britain fight Hitler alone in 1939, while helping the later not so discreetly. Then at Yalta, the USA had given half of Europe to Stalin, knowing perfectly well that Stalin had massacred at least 22,000 of the Polish elite at Katyn (that the USA knew was revealed very recently). In the end, Europe was hopefully lethally wounded and certainly half crushed.

Thus the Uncle Sam was in better position to free the Middle East, and the Arabic countries, from Franco-British control. It needed an ally, and that ally was Muslim Fundamentalism. Carthage used to do this kind of things, with mercenaries. It famously backfired, as the mercenaries rebelled. Similarly, the USA has been facing a rebellion of Al Qaeda, a formation it basically created to wage war in Afghanistan against republican socialism, starting in the 1970s.

Co-existing with the likes of bin Laden has proven an embarrassment. Although the American people still seems unawares that Bin Laden was a product of the CIA (and its Saudi alter ego), the war against Al Qaeda has spread ever more, leading to Al Qaeda like formations all over, from Mali to Indonesia. OK, right it’s good for the military-industrial complex. However the deficit is too big to support the latter any longer, that extravagantly.

Way out? Well, the USA could have done like Europe, and chose the road of higher energy prices, deploying more advanced technology. But it did not, as it refused to take part in the Kyoto Protocol. Now in Doha, Qatar, Kyoto was just extended. It boils down to 15% of humanity doing all the efforts. 15%, yes. Mostly made of Europe, a heavy burden.

If Europe wants to let itself be exploited, that’s fine with the USA.

Europe was ruled by various philosophies, with the liberal-let’s-throw-money-to-the-rabble-and-especially banks presently in power. The USA itself is ruled by several philosophies, but the hierarchy of those is easier to figure out. Long mercantilist (a technical term), as a practical governmental policy, it has now become increasingly, since Reagan, plutocratic max. The magically rich Rice is another symbol of that choice: if the plutocrats have chosen Rice, it does not matter if Rice is obviously corrupt for all to see.

It’s actually even better, that one can see that Rice is on the take. It flaunts that the way to get ahead, is to become lice. Because Rice becomes the symbol that money rules, and so it can, assuredly, buy itself ambassadors, cabinet ministers and Secretary of State. It can buy the highest government officials, and then flaunt that fact, and people have to kneel and submit. As Sec. of State is the third authority of the state, in the USA, to contemplate something more absurd than that, one would have to observe the president of the USA invest with several of the world’s top pollutocrats.

Hence the American rush to fracking: it brings energy and autarky, yes, but it’s also symbolic of the rule of the exploitative philosophy. Ten years ago, the USA was planning to import Liquid Natural Gas. Now, in a sudden reversal of fortunes, it’s planning to export it. The USA has so much gas, from fracking, that the USA price of the stuff has collapsed 80% below world prices (the gas is hard to transport, although a desperate Japan had the Ob River inaugurate the North East passage, in winter, to bring in at least ten Hiroshimas worth of semi clean gas energy in).

USA oil production is supposed to pass Saudi Arabia within 7 years. A resource, energy and food independent country with state of the art tech does not have to worry about its currency. It could live in autarky. In this light, the will to appoint Rice can be viewed as the will to make still another pact with the Devil. For those who are real dirty, the fact that Rice is dirty, makes her clean.

After World War Two, many people who should have known claimed they had no idea the Nazis were so dirty. And how could have anybody guessed. Well, that’s why it’s called guessing, I guess. How dirty could Rice be?

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Rice, a well connected arrogant know-nothing, hungry to serve powerful, crushing masters, leveraged her dad, well connected as he was, in plutocratic finance. She is, like Geithner, a princeling (same idea as in China). Ms. Rice advised the Clinton White House to stay silent about the genocide in Rwanda. She claimed to be afraid that doing so would have an electoral impact. How come a girl who knew nothing about Africa, could advise to let millions of Africans die? (I have been raised in Africa, mostly Black Africa, so I care more about that subject!)

The dirty business of the USA in the region, involves high tech minerals such as Coltan. It is still going on. The resulting wars have killed at least 6 million. (If six million Africans die in a forest, does that make any noise in Washington?)

And Rice is directly implicated. Ms Rice may have had deeper motives than electoral ones in 1994, such as helping along Mr. Kagame (master mind of the guerilla that triggered the holocaust in Rwanda twenty five years ago, now dictator of Rwanda, and also master mind of the Coltan war that killed five millions, while feeding with weapons and money the M23 force invading Kivu, in Congo!) 

As the United States’ representative to the United Nations, Susan Rice worked hard last year to block the release of a U.N. experts report detailing Rwandan atrocities in the Congo. To go around Rice, the report was leaked. Question: did Ms Rice get money from high tech companies or African “new leaders“? It certainly looks like it. She certainly did not get all this money from her government salary.

In September, Rice paid fervent tribute at the funeral of the late Ethiopian dictator, Meles Zenawi (who died unexpectedly at a relative young age). She praised the bloodthirsty plutocrat unreservedly as “uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and the long game“. “Long game“, really? By long game, she apparently made a distinguished reference to all the dissidents and journalists who disappeared after being hunted down. In Polynesia human game was pudically called “long pig“.

We are very far from a proximal, global solution such as a worldwide, global carbon tax, right away. Instead the world has been put on a somewhat similar strategy to the one the USA followed in the 1920s and 1930s: have the USA pose as neutral, isolationist, while making a bad situation ever worse, in the hope that the ultimate cataclysm, just as in the 1940s, would turn to the advantage of the USA. Dream on.

For the sake of civilization, it is better not to nominate as Secretary of State someone with genocidal connections. If nothing else, it just looks so bad, that it boosts the prospects of Pluto. Indeed the more satanic behavior is in full view, fully rewarded, the more “We The People” gets used to be led by Satan. So it would be, by making the apparent queen of genocide the third in succession to the throne. Now, of course, this is exactly what plutocrats want, it would be another important step in habituating the commons to be overlorded by the Dark Side. 

Many Tibetans feel, and it is arguable, that China is conducting a genocide in Tibet (there is a technical definition of “genocide” that seems to fit very well). The pain is so great that, this year alone, dozens of young Tibetans have killed themselves by fire, burning alive. How could China take seriously a Secretary of State that was, herself, involved with genocide? How could any other nation?

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Practical conclusion: Senator Kerry who is superbly qualified, and would have been elected president in 2004, but for G.W. Bush’s dirty tricks, should be nominated Secretary of State. BTW, differently from the conniving, conspiring Rice, Kerry was elected many times, and is senior senator of Massachuset.

Note: Starting in 1990, France intervened several times in Rwanda, trying to blunt the violence. Under UN mandate. In 1994, France evacuated civilians in Operation Amaryllis, and finished the Rwandan civil war with Operation Turquoise.

Heat Is On, USA Cooking US All

EUROPE TRIED HARD TO SAVE THE PLANET: Europe limited its CO2 emissions better than the rest of the world. Under the Kyoto Protocol, 37 industrialized nations and the European Union pledged to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 5% measured against 1990 levels by the end of 2012.

This provided the rest of the world, not held back by such efforts, a competitive advantage. Who pays? Europe.

The Kyoto Treaty was not ratified by the USA, but exploited by its plutocracy: as China was (stupidly) exempted, under Kyoto, from emission mitigation, industries owned by American plutocrats were relocated there, to escape modern anti-pollution norms. Result?

Tyranny & Carbon Burning Cooking Biosphere

The Russian gas giant Gazprom announced that a giant (and very dangerous!) Liquid Natural Gas tanker, the Ob River, left Norway on November 7, accompanied by two nuclear icebreakers for nine days, breaking through thin winter ice. It saved twenty days on the trip. Notice that such LNG tankers carry the explosive power of a nuclear bomb, and going through the desolated Arctic may be safer. (Ob River can carry 150,000 cubic meters of gas and weights around 150,000 tons). Thus the North-East Arctic Passage was open for big time business, and, in …winter. The heat is on, indeed.

USA ADVANTAGE IS CAUSE NUMBER ONE OF PLANETARY WARMING:

As usual with important progressive treaties, ever since the SDN, the Society Of Nations, in 1919, the USA baits and maneuvers the other countries into economically, or politically disadvantageous positions, and then switches out at the last moment. The Versailles Treaty was an early example of this time honored technique (the SDN was supposed to impose the precautions that Versailles failed to give, but then the USA made the SDN fail, opening the way to Nazism). This classical bait & switch trick explains why the USA does not recognize Palestinians, the International Criminal Court, or the Rights of Children. 

Non ratification of Kyoto advantaged the USA. It is particularly obvious with the development of shale oil and gas there. Never mind the tremendous ecological consequences. Canada had ratified Kyoto, but violated it completely, by developing tar sands. Canada formally left Kyoto last year, before being struck by sanctions. 

As the Wall Street Journal observed on December 3, 2012, ecological considerations hold back the rest of the world in the fracking race. But not so in the USA, and this gives said USA a tremendous advantage. What the Wall Street Journal did not say is that the willingness of the USA to destroy the planet as it searches for comparative advantage, is a distant consequence of the thoughts and moods inherited from that tremendous accomplishment, the holocaust of the Native Americans. Exploitation, no holds barred: the gift that keeps on giving.

The American indigenes were eradicated through the imposition of a relentless exploitation mentality hidden under an indispensable thick hypocritical mood, the latter enabling the former. Not only are the exploitation mental machinery and its mood still major cultural components of the USA, but the continent is pretty much empty: the USA has more arable land than China, or India, with a fourth of the population. Moreover, some of the states with lots of fracking have little arable land too (Wyoming, North Dakota). Basically, they are throw-away states. After the last polluted farm or ranch has been surrendered to the fracking fumes, the land will be returned to wild critters and evil spirits, while the USA prepares for the world war, that the worldwide ecological devastation will bring.

***

 

POLLUTION DENYING PROPAGANDA:

A tremendously crazy campaign was organized by the CO2 polluters, for years, in Anglo-Saxon countries. The well paid propagandists denied everything, using the Crazy Lie Technique: they claimed insanely, and the more insane, the better, that CO2 meant nothing, that the heat was NOT rising, that climate scientists invented the data, in a vast conspiracy called “Climategate“, that CO2 was not a pollutant, but, instead, the more, the better, etc…

Those crazy lies worked with its target audience, the ignorant, uncritical People of the USA. At least well enough to give a cover for the Congress of the USA, to affect to believe that those insanities ought to be given a serious hearing. This delaying technique allowed the polluters to gain more than two decades. Europeans fought back, by giving hypocritical Vice President Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize. If you can’t beat them, spoil them.

But now polls show that, even in the USA, the citizenry has come to believe that the heat is on, fro the whole planet, and that human pollution by heat trapping gases such as CO2 was the cause (by 65%). So the polluters had to change tac. They are inventing a new approach, and it seems to be working, even with many ecologists (as I discovered to my dismay in the last few weeks). Apparently there is a tremendous number of naïve ecologists out there, the same ecologists whose idiotic posturing allowed the Kyoto Protocol to fail, while the USA leveraged it for comparative advantage.

The new trick by the gas polluters consists in saying that nothing can be done, against the rising CO2, we may as well accept it. The only hope is that the world population would crash massively and to have the culled rabble leading those much simpler lives poverty provides with: see the Simplicity Institute, “A Prosperous Way Down”, and a number of articles exposed in the site “Learning From Dogs”, such as “Unintended Consequences”.

The truth is much more prosaic: 

THE CARBON TAX IS HATED BY POLLUTERS:

A worldwide Carbon Tax would reconstitute the free market as fair and balanced, giving a chance to alternative energy sources, without subsidies, or government programs. The Carbon Tax would just charge for the cost of the damage the heat trapping gas emissions cause, including the cost of repairing the entire biosphere back to health.

The Carbon Tax could be imposed asymmetrically. Say a car comes from China. One would evaluate how much coal was used in the industries providing the car maker and its parts makers, and their energy providers. Then one would add the bunker fuel used in the sea transport in the evaluation of how much fossil fuel has been used to bring the car to market overseas. One would apply that made to ALL goods. China does not have to cooperate.

The World Trade Organization has already determined such a tax is no custom duties, and does not violate its charter.

The Carbon Tax would be a nail in the coffin of fossil fuels. So, of course, carbonizators hate it.

Europe has been slowly taking measures against CO2 pollution, including increasing carbon taxes, here and there. One such law requires airline to pay a carbon tax (as all methods burning carbon should). So the Republican Congress of the USA wrote a counter law to force airlines from the USA to NOT obey the European law. Their counter law, their illegal, the planet destroying law of the right-wing extremists in the pockets of oil men, is now on Obama’s desk. Obama could, and should veto this planet destroying law. Will he? Will he find the moral fiber? Will the president of the USA find the ferocity that is needed, in the face of infamy?

Well, he will not, if all ecologists do is to say there are no solutions but those we would get after a world war that would kill 50 times more people than World War Two did (that is basically what the links above propose to do; in other words a non solution solution!) How did we get there?

Notice by the way that one of Obama’s predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a somewhat similar situation, proved to be a coward. Instead of declaring war to Hitler, in summer 1939, he signed sanctions against the French Republic and the United Kingdom, for having declared war to the atrocious, mass murdering, racist Nazis. So self-interested cowardice is a well anchored tradition of the USA.

However, this time, as superstorm Sandy demonstrated, the consequence of collaborating with mass homicidal folly will be heavy for the USA. For one, Florida will, for sure, disappear below the waves.

The porous limestone bedrock of Florida will prevent the fabrication of polders there: Florida is not the Netherlands! Sea water will seep inside the rock, below any dam in Florida.  

***

 

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS NOT DEMOCRACY:

In Representative Democracy, somebody who knows nothing is put in charge of everything. In truth, Representative Democracy is more akin to what the Ancient Greeks called tyranny, the rule of one.

In the USA that knows-nothing is elected with lots of money. In France, with lots of bureaucracy.

So in the USA money rules, whereas in France bureaucrats do. Most other “democracies” are in between.

Notice that in Germany, which is doing better economically, having reformed its work market quite a bit, politicians have to be a bit more responsive to the masses, due to the use of a proportional voting system (somewhat diametrically opposed to the first-by-the-post British system). Proportional voting is more collegial: Merkel had to govern in the beginning with the Socialists, and is now running in the next elections against her former (Socialist) finance minister. 

Some will smirk, but that Socialist gentleman is very strict and put a lot of heat on tax havens such as Switzerland forcing it to reveal thousands of tax thieves and irreversibly change its laws about banking secrecy. In other words, the proportional voting system can empower the People against the plutocracy. It’s better than the systems found in the more fascist, more militarized France, Britain and USA.

In Switzerland, a (“Con”)Federal Council of seven provides with a collegial direction to the entire country. That works obviously better than having an elected tyran. The problems found in large representative “democracies” are found there too, but on a much smaller scale.

*** 

TWO MILLION JAPANESE VISITED PHARAOH TUTANKHAMEN

in expositions in Tokyo and Osaka. Why? Ancient Egypt played a crucial role in the invention of mathematics and the alphabet. Among others discoveries. Thus Egypt is part of the foundation of civilization. So is Mesopotamia.

Egypt and Mesopotamia, plus Iran and India conducted a sort of conference on progress, for millennia. 

After crops were bioengineered in the area (“Fertile Crescent“), men and their cultivars colonized Western Europe. The original Italians did not just look like Iraqis, they were the real thing. 

So is colonization a bad thing? No. it is actually hard to find a population anywhere in the world that did not descend from colonists. 

And do Japanese descend from Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Greeks, just justifying their interest for Pharaohs with a personal touch? 

Of course they do. because our civilization, which is also theirs, does. After all, the first axiomatic proof of the Pythagorean theorem is in Euclid (300 BCE), although it started to be discovered nearly 2,000 years prior, in Egypt and Babylon.

*** 

NO CIVILIZATION, BUT CIVILIZATION, AND PROGRESS IS ITS PROPHET:

Some have talked about the clash of civilizations. But, in the grander scheme of things, there is now only one civilization. We count in 60 minutes in one hour, because arithmetic in base 60 was useful for the tremendous astronomical computations in Mesopotamia to determine the seasons, when to plant, and the floods of the great rivers (the higher the base, the more compact the computations). That was more than a millennium before Romans did anything more advanced than herding cows.

There is an astounding prolongation of systems of thought, and systems of moods, throughout the ages. For 10,000 years, civilization has proven to be a continual construction, in the Middle Earth, an initial condition onto itself (in the differential equation sense).

On a more minor theme, as climatic and hydraulic conditions became tougher in the Middle East, the place became ever more sympathetic to increasingly fascist regimes and the religion that fit them (the Abrahamic religion being exhibit number one).

However, superior technology, such as desalination installations (some soon available with solar cells, on a small scale) change the fascist equation. If there is no more need for vast centralized military organizations to provide with survival, the Middle East may hope for more democratic days.

***

COCONUT REPUBLICS UNITE FOR TREATING PALESTINIANS AS NON HUMAN!

The USA voted with other coconut republics such as Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, and three other states, against the statute of “observer state” for Palestine at the United Nations.

138 nations voted to give the Palestinian state the same status as the Vatican. Even Switzerland voted FOR the Palestinian recognition. 

Obama and his spokesman disapproved: “peace will only be achieved by face-to-face negotiations, not unilateral action”, apparently not remembering the famous negotiations between the Nazis and the Jews, that led to the killing of most European Jews. The final solution was to get rid of the Nazis, but it took five years and eight months of world war to do so. 

The position of the White House, that Palestinians should lay as low as possible, and beg their Israeli masters discreetly, in private, reflects blindness to the fundamental principle of combative goodness.

It is all the more curious, as Obama and company claim to be Christians. The mythical Jesus Christ did not hesitate to confront the forces of evil, indifference and wealth, with ways sure to lead to arrest in the modern USA (and all sorts of subsequent persecutions).

Martyrs, saints, holy persons, peacemakers and Nobel Prize winners, and, more  generally the principle of goodness, act unilaterally. Face to face, slave to master, as Palestinian to Israeli, the way the White House claims to want it, has nothing to do with goodness. The USA is now face to face with the company it keeps: Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, Israel, Harper’s ecocidal , Kyoto defiling Canada.

The Obama administration also does not know how to count: unilateral means one side, but when 138 independent nations throw 138 votes, that is not one sided. What was one sided was the USA and a handful of its ridiculously small and dependent client slave states it showers with money and influence.

Is that civilized behavior?

***

WHY DOES CANADA HATE PALESTINIANS?

Canada, a geophobic state voted with the USA, against human rights in Palestine. everybody knows that one of the interest of Palestine becoming an observer state at the UN is to be able to haul Israel to the International Criminal Court. The ICC, in force in now 121 countries, targets genocide. Several activities of some past or present Israeli governments seem to be genocidal in character. (it is not in the interest of serious Israeli patriots to allow Israel to engage in genocide, a point may orthodox Jewish organizations have made forcefully!) 

Canada is apparently not on USA payroll. But actually Canada’s present federal government and the oil plutocrats are accomplices in crime. Harper, the eco-destructing PM of Canada is anxious to have Obama allow his pipeline of twice cooked oil find an outlet somewhere (since British Columbia is not cooperative). 

In return that outrage will make it easier to pursue further outrages in the USA themselves, such as further fracking. (Although the principle of fracking, per se, does not have to be eco-destructing, the way it is practiced now, it certainly is so… Besides the fact that it leads to further CO2 emissions.) 

***

CAN’T JEWS & PALESTINIANS LEARN HISTORY WELL?

Petty reaction of Israel after Palestine was officially admitted by the UN to be an observer, 65 years, to the day, after the UN created the Palestinian state: Israel broadcast its decision to develop E1, a 12 square kilometers area that will cut off Palestinian East Jerusalem from the rest of Palestine.

Indeed the Israelis are mimicking the Nazi idea of erecting insurmountable walls around their ghettos. Israeli walls are chosen to be vastly superior, though.

The story of Israel is mighty strange; what came to be known as Jews were apparently those Israelis who were deported to Babylon, where they wrote the Bible. Meanwhile other Israelites, more cooperative, had not been deported. When the Jews in Babylon were allowed to come back and rebuild the temple, the relationship with the collaborators who had stayed home were not too good, and those were called Samaritans. Now, of course the Israelites have been chosen by their gods, like all people and all the gods they invent for themselves. However Jews believed it a bit more than usual, and perhaps too much.

Whereas the Celts let go of their bloody gods after the Romans, slowly, and Caesar, quickly, conquered them, the Jews clang to their “jealous” god ferociously, beyond reason. The result were two ferocious wars with Rome. The first one killed a million, the second, 65 years later, under Hadrian, resulted in the dispersion of the Jews. Emperor Hadrian’s government had tried to outlaw circumcision, on the ground that it was a primitive sexual mutilation. After that third savage war, between Jews and Rome, the Jews were outlawed in Jerusalem. The Samaritans kept on prospering.

Yet, in the Fifth Century, the increasingly insanely mass murdering theocratic state based in Constantinople (the one islam is the intellectual heir of) was in a collision course with anything not “Catholic Orthodox“. Intellectuals had to flee to Zoroastrian Persia. The Samaritans chose unwisely to fight. The result is that only a handful of them survive today.

We are all, we humans living on Earth now, descendants of colons, and our ex-gods were made to justify colonization. Judaism and Islam, both sitting on top of Mount Zion, are striking examples. Israelis and Palestinians have to admit this, this flaw they have in common, this crazy colonizing god, if they want to look inside each other, and themselves, as they have to do, should they elect to survive.

***  

OBAMA’S USA MAKES LAWS TO CARBONIZE THE EARTH:

The European Union legislated a tax on carbon emissions for all aircraft flying into European countries, a part of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). However, Obama signed a bill from the fanatical climate denying Tea Party republican Congress that, somehow, shields USA airlines from paying that European carbon tax, when landing in… Europe.

Maybe the USA believes that Europe is still divided, as it was in 1939? I have news for Washington: playing the Germans against the French is so much yesterday!

Obama’s pollution bill gives the US transportation secretary the power to exempt US airlines from the tax. An unusual bill, as it allows US airlines to ignore EU laws. It’s as if Obama signed a law allowing US corporations to ignore British law. Or to ignore German law. And also French law. Besides Spanish and Italian law. Who does Obama believes he is? It’s fine to ignore the laws of other nations outside of their territory, but here, the president of the USA orders its minions to flout the laws of 28 countries on their territories.

Has the Commander in Chief of the USA become the Outlaw In Chief? Ordering robots to kill civilians in friendly countries upon recommendation of a secretive Death Panel at White House was not enough? Is Outlaw-in-Chief, Destroyer of the Earth, the place in history Obama strives for? Does Obama want to live in infamy for centuries to come? It increasingly looks like it, and being surrounded by salivating admirers all the time goes a long way to elucidate the trance of delusion that may end up smearing Obama’s name for centuries to come.

White House spokesman Clark Stevens, in an orgasm of hypocrisy:“the Obama administration is firmly committed to reducing harmful carbon pollution from civil aviation both domestically and internationally, but, as we have said on many occasions, the application of the EU ETS to non-EU air carriers is the wrong way to achieve that objective.” Obama had tepidly admitted that the USA had not done enough on climate change. This shows he firmly intents to keep it that way. How difficult is it for him to get the republicans getting used to his veto powers?

Notice the analogy with the USA failure to recognize Palestinian statehood at the United Nations (as authorized in 1948, finally implemented in 2012!) It’s exactly the same mental attitude: doing something is viewed as worse than doing nothing. The White House is firmly committed to oh blah blah and will do strictly nothing that fosters progress significantly. It’s all about talking one way, so as to do the opposite.

One can only surmise that this same general attitude holds for places such as Egypt (towards which billions of USA taxpayer dollars are directed, while democracy fails under the call to prayer).

Obama says that he “leads from behind“. This is unconventional semantics for lagging behind, desperately clinging to the past. Is Obama just the robot president, programmed from behind?

***

INTELLECTUAL OVERSTRETCH IS WORSE THAN GEOGRAPHICAL OVERSTRETCH:

Let me point out this about the USA’s detestation of the Carbon Tax. Starting with Roman Emperor Augustus, the great-nephew of Iulius Caesar, the theory of Imperial Overstretched  reigned supreme. It has been repeated ever since by many parrots: if a state spreads too much, it hits a state of diminishing returns, leading to collapse.

In truth, the theory is wrong. Completely wrong. At least, completly wrong in the case of Rome, as it turned out. And the proof that it was wrong is called Europe. Caesar did not believe in the silly theory Augustus would later embrace. Caesar was set to act accordingly at the time of his assassination. The Franks agreed with Caesar, and made an effort for more than three centuries, to create the short, highly defendable border in Eastern Europe that Caesar wanted. So doing, the Merovingian and Caroligian Franks created Europe. 

Although various Muslims (for a millennium), Vikings, and Mongols (thrice) attacked Europe fiercely, Frankish Europe operating as one continent proved highly defendable (which Augustus’ Rome spread along the Mediterranean proved, time and time again, NOT to be!). Thus Augustus, and his successors were wrong, with their rigid, all too long “limes“. Caesar and the Franks were right: a short and mobile frontier, with the strong intellectual component that republicanism (even Christian Republicanism, that took over around 400 CE!) was more stable, cheap, sturdy, and full of hope. 

Indeed there are more ways to stretch than purely geographical. Christianity itself is an example of spiritual empire: it spread much of Romanitas far out, where Roman armies never got. For example in Ethiopia, or Mongolia. 

Similarly an ideology can be very powerful, and stretch imperially, dragging armies behind. The Roman ideology, already obvious with the Roman king Tarquinus Superbus, was very universal (“catholic” in Greek), as befit a melting pot such as nascent Rome. 

Yet, in the end, the spirit of plutocracy smothered the spirit of the universal republic that had made Rome’s success. The Franks succeeded to conquer northern and eastern Europe, precisely because, although somewhat plutocratic, their civilization was much less so than the Late Roman empire. (If one could invent a political Gini Index, one would find it, and the economic Gini, were much lower under the Franks than under the Roman empire: decisions and powers were much less centralized.)

So what now? The spirit of the universal republic, prolongation of that of republican Rome (pre-slavery), thrives at the United Nations (and this game the leader of the Palestinian, Abbas, is fully playing). 

Why does the USA often stands as an outlier, with what are unfolding as catastrophic consequences, such as the sinking of the Kyoto Protocol? Why did the USA set back the mitigation of the heat trapping catastrophe by at least a quarter of a century after its extent became obvious? That is reminiscent of the long refusal by the USA to do anything about the massacres the Nazis were engaging in, years after such a horrible situation had become completely obvious. 

The problem with the USA is that the Biblical, relentless exploitative mentality (basically killing all the Indians, and the like) was highly successful. But its time as something that profited the European colonists in America is now passed. The exploitative mentality, no holds barred, is imperially overstretched. 

At this point the exploitative mentality of the USA is not just out-maneuvering the French, and Europeans, as it did, manipulating  the Nazis, the Soviets, the Muslims, and the rest of the world, over the last century.

The relentless exploitative mentality festering in the USA, but historically so central to its success as an empire, has stretched itself all too thin. The relentless exploitative mentality is now trying to out-maneuver the air, the sea, the biosphere, physics and geology itself (see Florida above).  And yet, clearly, fracking all in its way, is not the way. It is the way to infamy. How naïve. How costly, and deadly, all too soon to be revealed.

***

Patrice Ayme

European Peace Triumph

Two important philosophical events serving peace and progress happened October 12, 2012: a Russian Soyuz rocket carrying a very special cargo lifted from French Guyana, and the European Union got the Nobel Peace Prize. Finally.

If there is one individual or entity that ever deserved the Peace Prize, it is the European Union! Nothing, nobody, did more for peace than the EU. A truth all the mad European haters can now be slapped with. (To help them regain their senses.)

Croatia Should Join The Preceding 500 Million People In 2013.

Nobel Peace Prize committee secretary Geir Lundestad said the EU got the prize for its “accumulated record over more than six decades… it was about time.”

He listed five achievements: Franco-German reconciliation after World War II; support for new democracies in Greece, Portugal and Spain in the 1980s; support for former Communist states in the 1990s; modernisation of Turkey; and peacebuilding in the Western Balkans.

Committee chairman Thorbjorn Jagland added that the timing of the award is linked to the euro gloom.

“We should focus again on the fundamental aims of the organisation… If the euro fails, then the danger is that many other things will disintegrate as well, like the internal market and free borders. Then you will get nationalistic policies again. So it may set in motion a process which most Europeans would dislike,” he said.

“Dislike” is a euphemism for war. Indeed, civilization has gone into full, astounding reverse, many times before. Civilization is like a bicycle: pedalling in reverse does not work very long, before it crashes.

(Something the USA leadership ought to have meditated more carefully before engaging into officially sanctioned, officially unpunished, official war of aggression, official torture, official arbitrary detention, official arbitrary assassination worldwide by death panel for all to officially contemplate, and financial criminals officially extolled as saints and great men, and their banks worth giving S8,000 billions of public money. But of course that means that the USA leadership would have to know history in depth; instead all it knows from history is that violence pays handsomely)

***

EUROPEAN UNION AS A NEW PHILOSOPHICAL PARADIGM, 30 CENTURIES IN THE MAKING:

The European Union was launched by the two main continental powers of Western Europe, the two main pieces of the Frankish empire, Francia and Germania, after nearly two centuries of continuous war with each other ended in total civilizational devolution.

How we got there is, by itself a tremendous story, even older than when the Celts occupied Rome, 24 centuries ago. The Franks claimed it came all the way back to the fall of Troy.

The European Union is no less than a reconstitution of the “Renovated Roman Empire” of 800 CE. Now the later had been established by more than 4 centuries of continuous war.

After six generations of unity, an estrangement, an apartheid was tried: the Franks around Paris on one side, the rest of the Franks, on the other side.

That alternative to unity led to vigorous fighting over the for 1,000 years.

That diabolical alternative, the breaking up of Europe, once again, effected 1,080 years ago, the plutocrats love (as it fosters war, hence fascism, hence fascist leadership, hence their “leadership”). The plutocrats, and their many servants in the academia, and media, of the USA, mongrels of money avid, have been pushing.

The European Union is not just being built to insure peace by creating entanglement and co-dependency. (See “Why Europe Why The Euro“)

The European Union represents also a new way of approaching (in particular inter-national) politics, through intense debate, beating the problems into submission with ideas, in the fullness of time. (Notice that this does not require unanimity!) Some (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, countless enemies of the Open Society lauded by Pericles) will say that this was tried in Athens before, and led to disaster.

Well the answer to that one is pretty easy: Athens did not have the democratic institutions that the EU has (answering Socrates’ main objection). And Athens (including Socrates) was often inhuman. And Athens’ National Assembly was hysterical, deciding an holocaust on one day, forbidding it the next (after the orders had sailed away).

The European Union advances slowly, methodically, meditatively (a momentary disadvantage of democracy, be it against Hitler, or against the present plutocratic conspirators).

The first serious attempt at pacific unification between France and Germany happened before Nazism (Napoleon had unified Germany before, but that was not pacific). Nazism is how that pacific unification attempt of the 1920s & 1930s was crushed. The plutocrats know how to instrumentalize democracy, war, holocausts. They are at it all the time, including now.

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THE FRANKS BUILT GERMANIA…

Long ago two philosophies fought, one, the Greco-Roman, strongly exploitative, the other, the Minoan-”Trojan”-Frankish, more comprehensively, and comprehendingly human (“Troy” was actually a subsidiary from a much larger power following the Great Mother religion, hence presumably less sexist, hence the war about free woman Helen, that came to define Greece… sexism?).

The Romans, and later the Franks turned Germania in a place where civilization became sufficiently intense to be worth conquering and governing. The irony was that the Salian Frank confederation was German. It soon understood that a superior philosophy would allow it to become richer, and superior to Romanitas (“Romanity”). Some of the Romans, among the most important generals, were full participants to this devious scheme of endowing the Franks with that advanced philosophy (I know this because the law of the Franks was written in Latin in a neo-Republican, more equalitarian mood).

The Franco-German empire lasted more than 5 centuries in united splendor (from Clovis’ crushing of the Goths, to the election of Otto I after the French refused to provide with any input in the election). The main cause of the split was French contempt, centered around Paris, for the uncouth eastern types… who comprised no less than two thirds of the empire (due to the Treaty of Verdun, 843 CE). Kind contempt veered progressively into estrangement, while the part not controlled by Paris called itself what it was, the Roman empire (it became “holly” centuries later and “German” by 1500 CE).

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POST FRANKISH EUROPE, OR WHEN ESTRANGEMENT MEANS WAR:

The conquest and subsequent fabrication of England by a French army headed by the Duke of Normandy (Nortmanni Dux) made the situation worse, as the king of France, for a while was not much more than the king of Paris (when l’Anglois was not in possession of that too).

Yet Paris was by far the mightiest city in Europe (in the middle of a giant productive agricultural zone), and Paris engaged in centuries of reconquest, a drive, propelled by necessity, to inverse the Treaty of Verdun by force. It was only historical justice that over ten month in 1916, nearly one million young French and Germans died there (at least 700,000 in combat, and the rest, like rats abused to death).

The reason is simple: Verdun itself, not far from Paris, was not under Paris control. Nearly half of present day France, and the ancient Francia and Gallia, had been, unbelievably estranged from itself by force, under the Treaty of Verdun (843 CE) and it made no sense in all dimension of geography: human, linguistic, physical, commercial, etc.

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WHY DID SOME WWI FRENCH HEROES TURN INTO NAZIS?

A curious phenomenon occurred: several of the most prominent collaborators of Hitler during the occupation of France by the Nazis were extreme heroes of World War One. Petain, who went out of his way to betray in 1940-44 was the general leading, and winning, the battle of Verdun with utmost ferocity, even re-instituting the notorious Roman method of decimation (in Roman army units that had disobeyed orders drastically, one man out of ten was executed).

In the Second Battle of the Marne, the French command knew, or guessed perfectly well the Prussian general staff’s plan. In no small measure from commando operation led by perhaps the most famous special operation officer in France, Joseph Darnand, just before the attack: he captured an entire Prussian command, on July 14, 1918, with the plans of the attack for the next day. He was declared one of the three artisans of victory (with Clemenceau and Foch). In 1940, again, he volunteered, in spite of his age, and distinguished himself as a lieutenant in many special commando operations behind enemy lines and was made officer of the Legion of Honor.

Unbelievably, Darmand became the chief of the Milice, an organization of fascist racist criminals (it would be too flattering to call them SS, although many ended in the Waffen SS in 1945), 30,000 strong, most of them got executed (most often, informally). Darmand had a proper trial, and died, shot by firing squad October 3, 1945, while singing a manly song.

Why did such war heroes became like dogs to Hitler? Because the WWI heroes were sick of war, and, in particular, sick of making war to Germany. In their haste to embrace Germany, they did not notice, as much as they should have, that they were embracing Nazism.

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ISRAEL SHOULD HAVE A BIR HAKIEM NATIONAL THNKSGIVING DAY:

The same sort of phenomenon happened on the Nazi side. (Let alone the German side!) One has to understand that the number one objective of Nazism was to vanquish France. (All the rest of Nazi obsessions were afterthoughts!)

One could not find more dedicated French hating Nazis than Hitler and Rommel. Still they underwent radical psychological change… while fighting the French for nearly six years (1939-1945). Precisely because they got spanked so bad. (It was not exactly Hitler’s plan to start a world war in 1939 that he was sure to lose!)

Rommel started the war as a fanatical Nazi general, complete with mass murder, and extremely gifted. The killing of the French and British armies in 1940 was greatly his work. The whereabouts of his Seventh Panzer division were the most mysterious part of general Guderian’s (already secret to the High Wehrmacht command) sickle attack by the ten armored divisions of the Nazi army.

A few weeks later, after Dunkirk, Rommel led Guderian’s attack south. But, on the Somme river, Franco-African units stopped him for three days. Finally the French officers (mostly) surrendered their mostly African troops, as they had run out of ammunition. Rommel, enraged by the losses of his beloved Nazi comrades executed all his French army prisoners. White and blacks. Hundreds.

Then there was the battle of Bir Hakiem. Rommel had defeated the British army, which was trying to retreat, in disarray, along the Libyan coast.

Rommel wanted to win the war, and that meant killing the British army before it could retreat to prepared defense lines at the Egyptian border. For that Rommel decided to implement a fast sickle move behind the British units, slowed down by their heavy weapons. If that encirclement had worked, the elite British 8th army would have been annihilated, the allies would have had no significant force before India.

History’s largest pincer move, planned by Adolf Hitler, would have unfolded in a few months: Rommel would have seized Egypt, the Mediterranean would have become a Nazi lake. After a few weeks of reorganization, Rommel’s re-boosted army would have dashed into Iraq. Azerbaijan, and its considerable oil, would have been squeezed between Rommel and the Nazi south army group advancing through the Caucasus.

The exterminators in charge of assassinating the one million Jews in Palestine, were ready.

However, time was of the essence for Rommel to win. In June 1940, France had been vanquished because the Nazi advance was so fast that the French and British armies got cut off. A few weeks later, the French aerial supremacy, which, after enormous Nazi losses, existed on paper, could not be implemented, as airfields were falling to the Nazi tanks, one after the other.

So Rommel had to go fast. He took all his best armored divisions, and dashed through the desert. He met 4,000 French elite soldiers at Bir Hakiem, in a new version of Thermopylae. The French knew everything about “guerre éclair” (Blitzkrieg) and knew that, to break Rommel, they had to slow him down.

The French held two weeks, suffering enormous losses, until they ran out of ammunition. This allowed the British army to escape Rommel’s encirclement and take refuge into the prepared defensive lines, and their mine fields. Ultimately Rommel tried a frontal assault, months later, and was defeated.

Hitler was livid: incapable of getting Iraq and Caucasus oil, and to cut the flow of supplies going from the USA to the USSR, through Iran and the Caspian, he was losing the war, for sure.

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WHY DID THE TOPMOST NAZIS TURN PRO-FRENCH DURING WWII?

Assessing the Nazi disaster at Bir Hakiem, Hitler declared to his cabinet that the French were the best warriors (after the Nazis), and so France had to be annihilated. However the Nazi cabinet was unimpressed by its boss’ flourish. Led by Hitler’s favorite, Albert Speer, the cabinet pointed out to the Fuehrer that, without French industrial help, it’s Nazi Germany that would get exterminated. Hitler, ever more livid, observed that, if one let the France industry grow to support the Nazi war effort,  France would win the war without fighting. Speer told him there was no choice. Hitler agreed.

Thus, what happened was striking: by Hitler’s own standards, Hitler became a collaborator to France, as early as 1942, after France had inflicted to him a lethal strategic defeat. And precisely because of that. The ways of war are mysterious, and unpredictable.

Meanwhile Rommel reconsidered that war crime, kill the prisoners, fanatically Nazi strategy of his. After all the superior Nazi race had been stopped at Bir Hakeim, not just by a French force, full of french aristocrats, but also a French force full of French Jews.

After a famous SS officer in an SS Panzer division committed some war crime against French civilians, in 1944, Rommel, head of the Nazi forces in France, ordered the SS arrested. Better: Rommel, and much of the Nazi Wehrmacht, joined the top German generals who considered Hitler a menace to Germany, and they made a coup. Next the best Nazis plotted with the French resistance to save Paris, and so on. Towards the end of the war, in an ultimate nail in the Nazi mood system, even Himmler (helped by a Swedish diplomat and a courageous Jew) got into the act of saving Jews (from his own death machine).

The Nazi philosophy had been thoroughly defeated, and buried, by many of the top Nazis themselves. In no small measure because the Nazi war against Europe had proven to be a war against Germany herself, and victory proven to be worst than defeat.

Ironically, Nazism, and its fascist Prussian predecessors, let alone Napoleon, had demonstrated that European Unification was unavoidable, but that war was not the way to unify Europe. Sade had been right, all along: just war is a must.

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WAR BETWEEN FRANCE & GERMANY: SELF DEFEATING, YET SIMPLY STARTED BY NOT SINGING TOGETHER:

Conclusion 1: For Germany to make war against France, or reciprocally, was like shooting oneself in the head, it made no sense. That was clear to people such as Petain (who decorated Darnand) in 1940, and even to most Nazis by 1945.

Conclusion 2: But war is not how it started. Estrangement is how war got started. Thus some Greeks are welcome to parade with Nazi flags in honor of Merkel the Angel: no indifference wanted. Show the passion, express your feelings, push forward the debate. So now, can the Greeks explain why their plutocrats are not taxed, and why they want to build a Formula One circuit with 29 million euros of (Franco-German) government money (while France, 15 times richer, discontinued Formula One because maintenance cost so much).

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TREMBLE ENEMIES OF EUROPE: YOU HAVE BEEN REVEALED AS ENEMIES OF PEACE:

A philosophical Rubicon was crossed by giving the Union the Peace Prize. A declaration of philosophical war against the enemies of Europe, the forces of evil, the forces of plutocracy (of the same sort as those which launched the surprise World War of August 1, 1914). This help from the Nobel Committee does not come too soon.

Hateful, grotesque propaganda and machinations from the richest people and criminal organizations in the world have attacked the European Union with a viciousness unseen since the 1930s. I literally read hundreds of pages of ill informed, but vicious anti-European venom from, say, “the conscience of a liberal” Paul Krugman, a famous academic and Nobel, pillar of the supposedly left wing and newspaper of reference of the USA, the New York Times.

In the 1930s, the fascists were in plain sight. They claimed to be NAtionalist, and ZocIalist (NA-ZI). They were nothing of the sort. In truth, they were serving their masters, the plutocrats of (mostly) three different nationalities (Deutschland, UK, USA), and three different sorts (financial, military, industrial).

Nowadays the situation is simpler. The  plutocrats are in plain sight (although they have been hiding behind some of political parties, most prominently those of the USA, they are in no way hidden as they were ).  Their criminality is blatant. But they are not prosecuted. The supposedly democratic USA president sings their praises (see Obama making criminal conspirator Buffet into god… in supposedly leftist Newsweek).

For example, the financial criminals control more than three quarters of the world financial system (way worse a situation than when banksters supported Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s). How do I know this? That quantitative estimate can be rigorously evaluated. For now, I will leave my method to the imagination of the reader.

Plutocracy, much of it New York and London based did its best to sabotage the European Union, and pushed National “Socialism” instead. It worked, and the result was the Second World War and its holocaust(s). The plutocracy based in the USA came out of it strong and irresistible, establishing its self declared “American Century”.

European haters have been supported in their attacks by ignorant, or deliberately vicious Wall Street sycophants and helpers (generally both ignorant and vicious).

The case of the ignorant Paul Krugman is typical. I say “ignorant” deliberately, because it describes reality most faithfully. Krugman is esteemed by the oligarchy, and advise it. He was scathing against European Monetary Union (EMU), or the general idea of European unification. After thirty years of this or so, from being in Ronald Reagan’s government to a status of semi deity of American “liberals”, trashing Europe, Krugman suddenly discovered the existence of the Founding Fathers of Europe, such as Robert Schuman, and the idea that the European Union was being built to make war inside Europe impossible. Then Krugman declared that the European Union was a good thing… so it had to be saved from the European Monetary Union.  

Of course, a Monetary Union is indispensable to insure peace. The USA actually engaged in a horribly deadly civil war (nearly 3% of the population killed), precisely when, and because, the USA had no monetary union (the greenback was created during the civil war, at the end of the barrel of a gun, to pay for union troops).

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PEACE MEANS STRENGTH, & THUS IN THE WAY OF USA PLUTOCRACY: GALILEO.

One of my main ideas is that, just as Rome, the North American English speaking republic is pervaded by the exploitative supreme mentality. Just as Rome, the USA came to become dependent upon slavery, and the unfair exploitation of man by man.  

That put the USA on a collision course with the sustainable mentality of the European Union.

The best example of that was the propping, by the plutocracy of the USA, of Adolf Hitler, and even of Joseph Stalin. All of these efforts to eliminate the competition from the European democracies (mostly Great Britain and France, and their giant empires). It worked splendidly, this massive, multi generational conspiracy.

When I write this many haters rise and condemn me as mad man. Many pseudo left sites immediately banned me, as a “conspiracy theorist”.

However, the fact are here, they are blatant. Yes, the USA knew, at the time, that Stalin had eliminated the Polish elite, and still supported Stalin like crazy for the following 5 years, even giving him half of Europe, including Poland. The USA hid that fact for 25 years more than the USSR did. In other words, the American public is manipulated at a depth exceeding the Soviet one by a full generation!

So much for the USA being the country of freedom. Plutocratic freedom, yes, public freedom, no.

A secondary conspiracy what the one with the feudal, oil providing regimes such as Saudi Arabia, or Bahrain. Now under stress and contradiction.

My point of view is progressing under the radar of conventional propaganda.

For example the USA provides the GPS signal. Half a century ago, the Europeans would have saluted crisply, and trust Uncle Sam. But what if Uncle Sam was behind Hitler, Stalin, Khrushchev? Khrushchev? remember the invasion and massacre of Hungary, coincident with Suez, Khrushchev threatening to atom bomb London and Paris, while the USA had France and Britain condemned by the General Assembly of the United Nations?

Well, Europeans are starting to understand that the Italian resistants were not crazy to hang Mussolini from an Exxon station (OK, Exxon has craftily changed its name since). USA oil companies made Hitler and Mussolini all they could be.

So the Europeans thought, and, led by the obnoxious French, discovered that the GPS was a vulnerability. They decided to make their own GPS. Galileo. That is why thus astounding sight, back to Franco-Russian ccoperation of 100 years ago, but now with German collaboration:

Within three years, medium Russian Soyuz and large French Arianne rockets should have launched 30 of the satellites.

Meanwhile the USA dragged pathetically the last space shuttle, an error with wings, through the streets of Los Angeles, cutting 400 trees in the process. How do the USA get to space these days? With, well, the rocket in the preceding picture, Soyuz. 

How many man rated rockets the USA has now? Zero. How many does the West have? One. Just one: the European, French built, Ariane. But the USA does not want to use it: pride first. Just as with the Rafale, a superlative fighter bomber without equivalent in the USA, the Washington leadership prefers anything, even being launched by the Russians, rather than cooperating with the philosophical enemy, its progenitor, France and the European Enlightenment (considering that the USA legalized slavery while its antagonist, Great Britain freed the blacks that joined its side, it’s not clear which side was the most enlightened in the American Independence war).

The USA will have to surrender to the European Enlightenment someday, because full humanity is a better philosophical leadership than exploitative scheming, always, in the fullness of time.  Plutocracy is a mediocracy, democracy a meritocracy, where it counts the most, the realm of ideas.

And how do the best ideas win? Through debate, and even more debate. And this is what the European Union has promoted. After Merkel got really mean (as deserved), she took a low cost airline to travel to Italy for vacation. That’s what debating also is: speaking with one’s acts.

As the picture of the Soyuz above demonstrates, the European Union extends way further than its present official borders. Its new civilization of debate supreme is playing a role quite a bit similar to the spreading of Christianity well beyond the borders of the Roman empire, spreading Roman values, well beyond what the Roman legions could reach… (And much of how Romanitas survived to this day.)

European construction, the growth of the European Union, is, in essence, transcendental, as it forces three dozen nations to ever more overwhelm their differences with more brainy convergences. In that sense, it is a most important philosophical movement on the millennial scale, which can serve as a template to many other transplanetary organizations, including the United Nations, necessary to handle fascism, massive terrorism, and the devastation of the biosphere.

If the European Union failed, it would be the very engine of the progress we humans need to survive, which would fail. But, of course, the European Union will not fail. The mighty, and very determined, French and German Republics will see to it that the European Union will not fail.

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Patrice Ayme