Cultural Exception Cultivates Civilization, Economy

The French Republic threatens to veto the free trade negotiations between the European Union and the United States of America, if culture is not excluded from the negotiations (as the Cultural Exception in the rest of world trade!). France is right, this essay will show why.

Ultimately, culture is about the greatest wealth. And the greatest wars. Ultimately culture is what makes us what we are, the honor of the human spirit, and the love that endows the mind. It should not be about fighting for bones.

Big Master Is Ordering You

The EU-USA free trade accord is a good idea. Exchanges between USA and EU are already 40% global exchanges, yet, their total GDP is 55% of the world total. That means they could help each other by trading more. (And what about that silly visa thing?)

Custom duties are already low. So the accord is mostly about new, common norms, and the removal of non customs barriers to trade (such as the American regulation that real French cheese is poisonous, verboten).

The rest of Europe is all for free trade with the USA, because a law of 1933 forces the government of the USA to contract with companies of the USA, exclusively (except when there is no choice, and that’s why the US Army ordered 345 combat helicopters built-in Marseilles’ Eurocopter recently, following the US Coast Guard; the USA did not produce a new helicopter type in 20 years, whereas Eurocopter churn them out, so this is a case of no choice!).

But France looks at the millennia, and the mind breathing through them. France does not want to see vacuous, mono-cultural minds. History shows that vacuous, mono-cultural minds have always translated into civilization-destroying horrors. Thus France decided to cultivate cultures, by introducing in GATT (General Agreeement on Tarifs and Trade) the Cultural Exception. Bush’s America never liked that.

Let’s not forget that, in 1938, and 1939, or even 1940, American culture did not overwhelmingly see something ultimately objectionable in Nazism. Literally. So there was no ultimatum of the USA to Hitler (whereas France and Britain gave one). The father and grandfather of two American presidents, Prescott Bush, was Hitler’s most precious collaborator. All the way to August… 1942. August 1942, that’s three full years after the Franco-British declaration of war to the Nazis.

The mind France wants is much grander than that of Big, Uncle Sam Watching All, As Ordered by Greedy Wall Street. In 1948, the perfidious USA proposed France to forget all the French debt owed to her self-interested liberator of sorts during World War Two, as long as France would allow free reign of American movies over France. France, wisely, declined.

This, by the way shows that, from the American point of view, cultural supremacy is more important than money. Even from the American point of view, culture is priceless. Thus why should not others brandish the same principle? As I am going to show, culture ought to become more important than ever. And, if the Americans were smart, instead of having a dog fight with the French, they should learn even about, and from, the importance of culture.

Let’s call Princeton to the rescue.

Excellent editorial of Paul Krugman in Sympathy for the Luddites, about the drawback of technological progress:

“In 1786, the cloth workers of Leeds, a wool-industry center in northern England, issued a protest against the growing use of “scribbling” machines, which were taking over a task formerly performed by skilled labor. “How are those men, thus thrown out of employ to provide for their families?” asked the petitioners. “And what are they to put their children apprentice to?”

Those weren’t foolish questions. Mechanization eventually — that is, after a couple of generations — led to a broad rise in British living standards. But it’s far from clear whether typical workers reaped any benefits during the early stages of the Industrial Revolution; many workers were clearly hurt. And often the workers hurt most were those who had, with effort, acquired valuable skills — only to find those skills suddenly devalued.

So are we living in another such era? And, if we are, what are we going to do about it?

Until recently, the conventional wisdom about the effects of technology on workers was, in a way, comforting. Clearly, many workers weren’t sharing fully — or, in many cases, at all — in the benefits of rising productivity; instead, the bulk of the gains were going to a minority of the work force. But this, the story went, was because modern technology was raising the demand for highly educated workers while reducing the demand for less educated workers. And the solution was more education. “

So far, so good. However Paul, although he means well, then gets confused by the evil spirits, and unwillingly deviates to the Dark Side, at least, the way he concludes:

“… there may have been something to this story [more education, less equality] a decade ago.

Today, however, a much darker picture of the effects of technology on labor is emerging. In this picture, highly educated workers are as likely as less educated workers to find themselves displaced and devalued, and pushing for more education may create as many problems as it solves.”

… Education, then, is no longer the answer to rising inequality, if it ever was (which I doubt).

So what is the answer? If the picture I’ve drawn is at all right, the only way we could have anything resembling a middle-class society — a society in which ordinary citizens have a reasonable assurance of maintaining a decent life as long as they work hard and play by the rules — would be by having a strong social safety net, one that guarantees not just health care but a minimum income, too. And with an ever-rising share of income going to capital rather than labor, that safety net would have to be paid for to an important extent via taxes on profits and/or investment income. I can already hear conservatives shouting about the evils of “redistribution.” But what, exactly, would they propose instead?”

Well conservatives want to conserve things the way they used to be before the awful revolutions in England, America, and France: bring back feudalism. In the ancient order, the Nobles paid no taxes, just as plutocrats nowadays increasingly do not.

And, of course, it was silly to want to use education to fight rising inequality: inequality and education live in different dimensions. One dimension cannot subtract from another, that’s basic math.

Ultimately, in all and any society, the ruling class decides how much it will earn. In a democracy, the People (Demos) Rules (Kratos), and so it earns well. In a plutocracy, the People is nothing, and gets nothing, beyond what is needed for serving the Devils (Plutos) who Rule (Kratos).

There is only one way to prevent democracy to turn into plutocracy: the application of severe and efficient methods to prevent the exponentiation of wealth. Either one can put an absolute limit on the wealth any family can control (that was the method used by the Roman republic for five centuries). Or one can apply heavy, exponentiating taxes (as most societies have done, sometimes with the help of human sacrifices).

Yet, as machines are going to take over most work, what are we The People going to do? A related question is that studies have shown We The People to be very sensitive to propaganda. It has long been known that People, like animals, can be imprinted: the first knowledge they get exposed to, because the only knowledge they own.

An experiment on 6,000 students, using 48 songs, showed that People pretty much love and appreciate what they have been told the tribe love and appreciate. What the better songs are, has more to do with what People are told they are, rather than any other criterion.

This, of course, threatens the very existence of democracy. As people believes what they are told to believe, how can one have democracy? This stage has been reached in the USA, one may fear.

For most People to be happy one needs two things, once decent living conditions are taken for granted: employment and happy, that means, correct, beliefs. Hence the importance of culture. Variegated culture presents minds with choices, and choices means imprinting does not have it easy. (So cultural diversification also fights the rabid oversimplifications leading to war.)

Indeed, there is one way out, and only one of the quandary posed by exponentiating technology: make culture more of an industry. Yes, because there is not just plutocracy that is exponentiating. Besides the government surveillance programs, technology itself is approaching a singularity.

The first Luddites were not English. They were the Roman emperors themselves. Later, after the French refugee + built the second steam boat, and went down a river one hundred kilometers, enraged conservatives destroyed the ship. That set back steam power by nearly a century (well the Roman emperors had set it back by 16 centuries, prior!)

Machines can do farming, and all sort of other tasks, including, increasingly, knowledge service. There is no doubt that robot doctors will do better than doctors in the future. For example, as far as automated gross diagnostics, they already do better. A robot brain surgeon can go where no human hand can, and no human can be so precise.

So machines can do more and more of everything. And that, even before Quantum Computers are massively for sale.

But machines cannot do culture. Yet, everybody can potentially become a culture worker. People can sing, paint, experience the world and tell about it, educate, relate and narrate (“blog”), etc.

It can be ascertained that culture is the growth industry with the greatest potential. In all and any industry, one should outlaw cartels. A fortiori, if culture is to become a growth industry, one ought to refute cultural hegemony, in other words, cultural cartels, cultural monopoly. Hence culture ought to be a “protected industry”, an industry where the grossest, simplest minded free trade rules do not apply.

The corporate culture of the USA’s cultural industry has certainly behaved as a cartel: it’s very difficult for small movies from a small author of a small studio to make it big in the USA. Whereas it can, and does happen all the time in France. “The Artist”, for example, which got the top Oscar, even in Hollywood, started as one such French state subsidized small movie.  

As the cartel aspect already shows, the very size of the cultural market of the USA makes asymmetric any “liberalization”. It’s as if one claimed that it is “liberal” and a “free exchange” of blows, between two fighters, one a gorilla, the other a human child.

Cultural diversity is a very old debate: the Celts had it with the Romans, 25 centuries ago. The Gauls, Romans and Franks spent the next 13 centuries conquering each other, until Europe became another name for cultural diversity.

Conclusion: in trade talks between the USA and the EU, culture ought to be off the table. Culture ought to be traded, but trade is not culture. That’s what the French republic is trying to say.

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Patrice Ayme

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Note: Decent, clever, civilized Americans of course agree with the preceding: In a press conference headed up by French culture minister Aurélie  Filippetti (Google’s enemy), Harvey Weinstein threw his support behind the cultural exception. “The cultural exception encourages filmmakers to make films about their own culture. We need that more than ever,” he said. He cited some countries moribund film industries and the morbid propensity to simply copy the American model to the detriment of indigenous creativity. “The most important thing is to preserve the environment of cultural films, because it’s good for business too.”

As we have seen, it’s a question of the global economy and global democracy too, especially looking into the only decent future we can have.

Cannes Festival Jury President Steven Spielberg called the cultural exception “the best way to support diversity in filmmaking” during his closing ceremony remarks. As Spielberg came to Cannes with his 80 meter yacht, and spent two million there for his creature comforst, one cannot suspect him to be scrapping the bottom of the barrel.

Rolled By Rawls

  It’s a grave thing when your leaders are turncoats. And worse when you don’t even feel that this is the case. Has John Rawls led the philosophy, and, even worse, the economy, and financial system, of the world, dramatically astray in a subtle way? So that we will end down worse than where we started? Is Faust lurking within Rawls?

  John Rawls, “arguably the most important political philosopher of the twentieth century“, is widely viewed as progressive. But I will show here that, down in his philosophical fondations, Rawls shares the same universe, the same building materials, with Ayn Rand, the notorious pseudo-Nietzschean business fascist. I will proceed to demonstrate this while demolishing the very core of Rawls, just as Luke Skywalker with the Death Star in “Return of the Jedi“.

Raw Rawls, “Left”, Enlightening Human, Right

  In “Ben Bernanke Endorses A 73 Percent Tax Rate“, Paul Krugman extols his past and present chair: “the big thing in Bernanke’s remarks was his discussion of the obligations of the successful, even within a supposedly meritocratic society:”

  I do, of course, agree with a 73% tax rate (and even higher). I also do agree with most of the practical political aims of Rawls (widely viewed as on the left…in the sense “left” has in the USA). The point I am going to make is otherwise subtle. I will show that Rawls and his followers are embracing a metaprinciple that contradicts goodness. Namely that everything is a deal. Sorry Rawls, your brain is perfused by markets, not goodness.

  Here is what some of the head of the central bank of the USA said, June 2, 2013, at Princeton:

  “We have been taught that meritocratic institutions and societies are fair. Putting aside the reality that no system, including our own, is really entirely meritocratic, meritocracies may be fairer and more efficient than some alternatives. But fair in an absolute sense? Think about it. A meritocracy is a system in which the people who are the luckiest in their health and genetic endowment; luckiest in terms of family support, encouragement, and, probably, income; luckiest in their educational and career opportunities; and luckiest in so many other ways difficult to enumerate–these are the folks who reap the largest rewards. The only way for even a putative meritocracy to hope to pass ethical muster, to be considered fair, is if those who are the luckiest in all of those respects also have the greatest responsibility to work hard, to contribute to the betterment of the world, and to share their luck with others.”

  And Krugman to add, by complimenting, while exposing, Ben Bernanke:

  “OK, this is, whether BB realizes it or not (he probably does) basically a Rawlsian view of the world, in which you think of life as a kind of lottery in which you draw a ticket that includes things like your genetic endowment as well as the wealth of your parents. And what you’re supposed to do, ethically, is support the economic and social system you would choose if you had to enter that lottery not knowing what ticket you were going to draw — if you were making political choices behind the “veil of ignorance”.

  It’s more than “basically” a Rawlsian view, it’s raw Rawls, rehashed. Rawls’ “lottery” is one his most famous ideas.

  Why is Rawls so famous? Here is Rawls in the raw, at the core of the most famous extract of his most famous book and system of ideas, “Justice As Fairness”

  “The principles of justice are chosen behind a veil of ignorance. This ensures that no one is advantaged or disadvantaged in the choice of principles by the outcome of natural chance or the contingency of social circumstances. Since all are similarly situated and no one is able to design principles to favor his particular condition, the principles of justice are the result of a fair agreement or bargain. For given the circumstances of the original position, the symmetry of everyone’s relations to each other, this initial situation is fair between individuals as moral persons, that is, as rational beings with their own ends and capable, I shall assume, of a sense of justice.

  Key concepts: justice, fair agreement, bargain… In other words: justice 1, business 2. Give that genius tenure at Harvard!

  I will discreetly slip on Rawls’ wonderfully circular logic: justice as fairness, and fairness as emanating between “moral persons… capable… of a sense of justice“. Justice is fair, fair is justice. Just as the crocodile rolls, to discombobulate and disintegrate the prey, so does Rawls. You have been rolled, people!

  What did Rawls do that was not done before? Why so famous on Wall Street? Rawls found a reasoning that Americans obsessed by business ethics (“making deals“) would think they have to find ethical to follow (as deals is what they do). By so doing John Rawls seduced deal makers, the plutocrats, and insured that he would be professor at Harvard for more than thirty years.

  In a further development of his basic drift, Rawls presented society as a lottery, and reflected on what ought to be the rules of that lottery. Those rules, he says, are what is fair, and to be called justice.

  Rawls presents the participation in society as a choice (it’s not; one does chose to be born), and then he presents the form that this participation should take as a business deal.

  So Rawls is saying that all members of society have decided to engage in a business deal. We are all business men! Apparently we started early, when we were six days old. Making deals. You will ask me: ‘How can a 6 days old baby engage in a business deal?’ Beats me: go ask Rawls, down in the abyss.

  Down the abyss? Down the ethics of plutocracy? Rawls and his followers implicitly accept the principle of profit, the principle of the deal, as the base of all ethics. Thus we are invited to make a deal with the devil, in the name of ethics, as if the devil cared.  It’s pure Faust. It’s self contradictory (as Rawls admits there is a “sense of justice“).

  Rawls, and his belief that markets, deals and bargains made by individuals, behind a veil of ignorance (so is ignorance good?), are the way to achieve justice is the flaw behind the thinking of the left leaning American intellectuals, and the democratic party. Reagan, or Thatcher, and their neoconservative followers, worldwide, shared the same convenient credulity and profitable blindness.

  This is all sheer madness:  Rawls is another case of a mental infection started in Harvard, a pandemic of the mind that spread worldwide. In the Rawlsian system of thought and emotion, making deals is what the universe is all about.

  How more wrong can one be? To justify redistribution of wealth, one just has to know what an exponential is, it has been done for at least 10,000 years, except when Lords succeeded to reign (and when they did, it was because redistribution failed and the exponential won!)

  The real reasons for justice have nothing to do with imagining society as a business deal. Justice, as given by evolution, is biological. Justice is not venal.

  Studies on (South American) marmosets showed that such animals had an acute sense of justice. To the point that, if justice gets trampled upon, they can revolt in anger against the human experimenter. Without ethics most advanced primates species could not even exist. Especially not baboons. How come what baboons know is the process of being forgotten in the USA (and its poodle, the EU)?

  Human goodness exists, independently of business deals. One does not make deals with a baby, one gives the baby love. Only the clueless, or the vicious, believe that bargains and lotteries define the core of the human condition. But, however abysmal, this is what we are confronting. Even on the so called left.

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Patrice Ayme

Gods, Imagination, Machinations

Why did they create God? Answer: to feed the imagination. Discuss.

Alexi Helligar. And to build society.

Patrice: True, society needs a common mind, common logic, hence common gods, or, more generally, common myths, powerful enough. Nietzsche added: one interpretation of the gods for the commons, another for the lords.

Evelyne Le Formal: God is not created, HE is…

Alexi Helligar First of all, what makes God a “He”? Why the masculine fixation on God?

Evelyne Le Formal: Exact, maybe it’s “She”. Jesus is the Son of God, but God can be “SHE”.

Patrice: Or maybe it’s a bird. More exactly, a hummingbird.

I Fly, Fear Me

Alexi Helligar: Secondly, which God are you referring to that is not created? Yahweh, Allah, Jesus, Shiva, Zeus, Mithra, Brahma? Evelyne Le Formal: GOD is GOD !! One of 3 firsts for what I believe !!

Patrice: To each tribe its own god(s). The French, like Rome, shall make do with a republic, to incarnate the tribal ideal, without further ado. Amen. My preferred god is Huitzilopochtli (pictured above). He exposes best superstitious religion for the criminal absurdity that it is. Huitzilopochtli ordered the Aztecs to call themselves Mexicas. A unity trick. However his obviously bloody tendencies gave all the pretext the Conquistadores needed to annihilate most of the tremendous Mexica civilization. Huitzilopochtli turned into death of his world.

Alexi Helligar There have been many many gods that have been created by humans. Why evidence outside of the Bible (which is a collection of stories and not evidence) is there that Jesus is any less an expression of human imagination than any of the rest?

A is A. This is true. It is symmetrical and symmetry is what I believe!!

Patrice: The sacred writings of Judeo-Christo-Islamism make clear that they are all referring to the exact same “God”. Using the word “Allah” is craftily alienating, as if “Allah” were different from Jesus’s dad. When the French talk about the god of the Americans, in French, they call it “dieu” in French, not “god”, or “dios”.

Alexi Helligar The belief in God is an empty vessel. Because it is empty people fill it with whatever they imagine. This, I think, is the core of Patrice’s comment. Of necessity, despite its critical importance in building society, imagination is a random and chancy process. This is why the belief in God leads to so many random and chancy actions, many of which are not rational and, in fact, very destructive. The mere belief in God (because God is essentially Imaginary) is not enough to filter sense from nonsense.

Evelyne Le Formal: Jesus is not an expression of human imagination, it’s historic !! He was an human boy ! But, you can doubt, if you don’t believe, than he is the son of God !!

Son Of God: Cute Yet Fake

Alexi Helligar: History is also imaginary.

Evelyne Le Formal: Cesar, Neron, Ponce Pilate imagination ? No, history !!

Patrice: We have extremely detailed records, from various sources, on the first two gentlemen. They are among the better known human beings, to this day. Incontrovertible proof of the existence of Pontius Pilatus was also found, such as an engraved inscription bearing his name in stone. Proofs of Jesus’ existence have been presented. They were all proven to be fake. A famous fake was the textile from Turin. Both the historical record and Carbon 14 date tightly concur about the date of fabrication of that shroud (part of it pictured above), in the 13C.

Imagination has to be fed, to provide the mind’s logic with what is called a universe. In particular, the mind can be fed the concept of omnipotence, most convenient to dictators. Monotheistic God, having no other gods around to hinder him, is omnipotent, by definition.

Christ is NOT, not at all, an historical figure, just a creature of the imagination, found in Saint Paul’s own mind, as he readily admits. Saul was a practicing Jew born a Roman citizen, from a born Roman citizen father, and a feared Roman prosecutor.

Saul wrote the following in 66 CE. “Now as he was going along and approaching Damascus, suddenly a light from heaven flashed around him. He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him, ‘Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?’ He asked, ‘Who are you, Lord?’ The reply came, ‘I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting. But get up and enter the city, and you will be told what to do’” (Acts 9:3-6). Somehow, that led Saul to change his name into Paul.

Evangels were written later (starting in 70 CE). Half of the New Testament stems from Paul and the people whom he influenced. Thirteen of the 27 books in the New Testament have been attributed to Paul. Half of the Acts of the Apostles deals with Paul’s life and works. Tellingly, some of Paul’s students claimed to have met Jesus in person (something Saul/Paul did not dare do).

The record of the arrest, trial and execution of several messiahs at the time of mythical Jesus is well recorded. None of them Jesus. One of these messiahs was condemned, and burned, in Rome. Another, the vicious Simon, was whipped to death in Rome. In all cases, thousands of the best and brightest were watching.

Jewish general Josephus, in his enormous work on the “Jewish war”, covers extensively the religious madness in Israel at the time, and its fanatical madmen. He never mentions Jesus. (The fact that Josephus mentions Jesus, in another work, 20 years later, seems to me a forgery: at some point the growing Christian community realized that they better make Josephus bear witness; the earlier work could not be that easily modified.)

Reading the Bible carefully, one can see that Jesus, would have been born towards Spring, four years or so before what became the official date. The story of Jesus is even more a product of the imagination than viewing Jehanne d’Arc as a good fanatic.

Conclusion: Christ, as a boy abandoned by his dad, is a myth. There is ZERO historical evidence of Jesus’ existence.

There is much more evidence for the existence of the much older Zarathoustra (a real, alive Babylonian philosopher/prophet). Or Buddha (an Indian prince). And Muhammad is, of course, a real historical figure. There is even direct evidence for king David and his son Salomon. Although they are 12 centuries older than the mythical Christ.

Yet, it’s easy to reconstruct what happened: the growth of myth from Saul’s inspiring vision to getting to view, quickly, the vision as fact. In the midst of a war-butchery, the Jewish war of 70 CE, that killed a million (that would have been roughly the proportional equivalent of ten million today), that’s not very surprising.

Religion was a huge business in imperial Rome. All religions were welcome in Rome, as long as they did not disrupt public peace, and did not call for human sacrifices. One could not make one’s religion popular without a great myth attached.

As it was, Christianism was able to grow quietly. Christianism was increasingly made similar to, not to say plagiarized from, the much older religion of Mithra, which was popular in the army. Christians made much of persecutions later (to justify their execution of millions). However, persecution, if any, was light. During Marcus Aurelius’ twenty year reign in the late Second Century, only six “Christians” were executed in Rome.

Around that time (180 CE), we know of the case of several high Roman politicians who announced that, during their retirement, they would write an Evangel.

At the beginning of the Fourth Century, emperor Galerius persuaded his three imperial colleagues to engage in forcing the Christians to pledge obedience to the empire. About 3,000 were executed, total, before Galerius, ravaged by cancer, rescinded the edict.

By then, though, Christianism was a state within the Roman state. Constantine decided to co-opt it, as part of his further fascization of Rome (311 CE). He even chose what the exact doctrine of Christianity: “Catholic Orthodoxy” ( that is “universal common opinion”).

The divisions of the empire that the church had used for its own governance (diocese) were even adopted as the new divisions of the empire. By 400 CE, the “founding father of the church” discovered, among other things, that it would be best to make Jesus’ birth coincidental to the enormous celebrations of the winter solstice known as the “Saturnials”, and to adopt all the traditions attached to it, from gift giving to cutting an evergreen and decorating it (a tradition documented in Greece, among other places, a full millennium earlier).

And then next came a real life philosopher-king, Clovis. Clovis threw the Goths out of Gallia, and built much of what became the Imperium Francorum spanning the core of Western Europe.

More importantly, Clovis renovated Western civilization with a Franco-German, Greco-Roman, Humano-Christian mix. Clovis recreated Christianism in a way compatible with the vision of the Franks (who had helped Constantine conquer the empire, but had stayed extremely hostile to religious fanaticism, attempting a whole succession of coups and civil wars, until Clovis was able to become the new Constantine, as far as north-west Mid-Terra was concerned.

A crucial part of the new mythology was made of continual references to contemporaneous (or quasi-contemporaneous) saints.  

And what of nowadays? Recent generations have been imprinted to feel that greed and fame were all the mythology they needed. No wonder revolution, the economy, and minds themselves are running out of steam. Exactly as intended.

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Patrice Ayme

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.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

 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”)

***

Photon, Graviton, Contradiction

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

***

EVEN THE BRIGHTEST CIVILIZATIONS CAN MAKE THE GROSSEST ERRORS:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

 SIMPLEST DERIVATION BLACK HOLE:

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

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

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

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

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

 Equating the kinetic energy with the gravitational potential energy:

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

 R = 2 GM/cc

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

***

 GRAVITON BLACK HOLE, IN ANALOGY TO PHOTON BLACK HOLE:

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

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

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

 Why not to play the game above?

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

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

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

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

***

 PLANCK LENGTH MEANING; NO HIGH ENERGY GRAVITON:

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

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

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

Thus: L = square root (2G h/ccc)

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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).

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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.

***

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

Elite Censorship

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

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

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

Austerity Exploding Up

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

UK Flat Line GDP: Greater Depression Today

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In truth, the TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU SMART.

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

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

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

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

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

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