RATTING ON THE RATERS, And Related Remarks.
Europhobia And Plutophilia Go Well Together. Why? Societies Pack Thought As A Weapon.
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Abstract: Ideas can kill. Why? Because societies can kill, and often do. Let’s put it slightly more pedagogically: sociobiology evolved most fundamentally, for the most violent reasons: defense and attack. And new ideas have an impact only when they become social (although seriously different ideas get born among the asocial). Thus, when ideas come around, there is a good probability that they are propagated for offensive reasons.
And please be it that nobody evoke the lethal hypocrite Gandhi (self described “friend” of Hitler, and cause of the Pakistan split) again! My model is Mandela. Mandela used bombs, with high explosives. (It’s not that I like bombs: I was bombed myself, by some fascists, and did not like it at all.)
Mandela, once jailed, switched to even more explosive ideas. (Mandela was viewed as a terrorist by the USA until 2008!) But the very power, the very violence, of Mandela’s ideas mangled the racist thought system South Africa was suffering from.
A symbol of the intrinsic violence of societies is given by the most exclusive society of all, the UNSC. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the victors against murderously insane racist fascism in WWII, all have nuclear arsenals, and certified moods and means to strike with them. This threat of devastating violence has kept global peace for 66 years.
At the bottom of the social instinct, having evolved through the eons, is, fundamentally, the need to survive, a need relating to the ultimate forms of violence. Society is as important, and as violent, as life itself. Hence, when a society produces ideas, it is not generally from sheer curiosity, but, rather, from aggressive mania.
Richard Feynman resigned from that society called the American Academy of Sciences, when he discovered that all what Academicians worried about was, not science, but rather, who was in, and who was to be kept out.
We have to keep in mind that societies are not made to be smart, whatever they say. Be it Harvard or American economists, societies defend first of all their bread and butter, their influence, not the intrinsic truth. That is why American economist prefer to talk about Europe’s bonds, rather than about failing American ethics, failing American school, failing American energy policy, and, generally a failure of American thinking. And the latter failure can be directly traced to American universities.
Plutophile intellectuals such as Pinker, Ferguson, or even Krugman, illustrate this with the multidimensional apologies of the established Wall Street order they eternally spew. Pinker does it by claiming mathematics have shown him we live in the best possible world, Ferguson by confusing Anglo-American plutocracy with civilization.
Krugman supports Wall Street by spewing absurdities about Europe, calling it “Orwellian“. Is that a trick to better forget the much more eerie American situation, and to keep on insisting that the big banks which caused the disaster should be sent as much money as they want?
(That’s called “Quantitative and Qualitative Easing“: so that guilty banks can keep on investing that the leverage they create from the so called “monetary base” with their equally hyper wealthy friends, especially in the universe of derivatives, which is hostile to the real world).
Krugman insists that Keynes taught him all that, but, since Keynes tried to prevent to have the dollar as reserve currency, in 1944, as the head of the monetary and currency commission at Bretton Woods, Krugman did not learn his lesson well.
In truth, and contrarily to what Paul Krugman brazenly preaches, Keynes believed that an international monetary system needed an international reserve synthetic asset, with components proportional to their output contribution.
By fighting a European currency, Krugman is fighting not just Keynes, but a point that Keynes viewed as the most important in the world trading system. Keynes was obsessed by trade imbalances, and righly so. Trade imbalances caused the Great Depression, and even worse problems, but Krugman will never tell any of this to his smitten readership! Instead the honorable Paul preaches according to the considerable needs of the biggest, dirtiest American bankers!
How do we want Obama to take the right decisions, when the left wing, the self declared liberal intellectuals, the technocrats, are so much at the service of Wall Street, that they cannot even imagine the outside of the Wall Street box? Franco-German leaders are getting slightly better advice, and that is why they are getting down rated by that most influential society, Wall Street. Under covers, a war is brewing between Franco-Germania, and Wall Street.
War between societies? What is more natural? The sun and the stars?
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INTELLECTUALS ARE NO BETTER THAN THE SOCIETIES THEY ARE FROM:
Obama has officially discovered that his roots are much more from Kansas rather than Kenya, and that Teddy Roosevelt was right to attack the plutocracy. Better belated truth than dreams from an absent father, indeed!
If Obama keeps on discovering truths, there may be hope.
Speaking of truth, the United Nations created a Palestinian state and Israel simultaneously in the late 1940s. And now the Palestinian flag officially flies at the UNESCO in Paris. Washington reaction? Cutting the contribution of the USA to UNESCO, 22% of its budget. The 22% correspond to a smidgen higher than the relative GDP of the USA. No doubt, though, that, if the USA keeps taking ethically stupid decisions, it will keep impoverishing itself. And in more ways than just spiritual. Ethics, after all, is the bottom line.
We have individuals such as Krugman going around the world, teaching their ideas, the same old bigoted ideas, we have seen for centuries before. In the case of Krugman, his grand socioeconomic idea is that every European nation should be armed with its own money, to make war on its European neighbors. Is Krugman teaching war and devaluation? What if he is wrong? Is he responsible of the ensuing war because of his influence as a Very Serious Person?
Notice that the sovereign debt crisis is about credit rating agencies. Those private for profit societies have suddenly decided to view economically magnificent Germany with more suspicion than this den of financial piracy called London (with a 12% British deficit, and two million people in the streets, now that the riots have abated).
We have individuals such as Corzine, one the biggest politicians in the USA, ever, senator, governor, whatever. And who became such, because he was one of the biggest bankers, head of the arch-villain, Goldman Sachs. And what was Corzine doing? Buying billions of Italian sovereign debt with American farmers money. Playing with the retirements of millions. Why is that legal?
Does one become idiotic by worrying too much about what worries idiots? Naturally. In general, all thinking is social. If the society is stupid, it will produce stupid thinking.
Intellectuals belong to, evolve, and thrive, in societies. When most intellectuals worried about angels on a pin, it was impossible to do otherwise, if one wanted to be taken seriously.
Nowadays, plutocracy supporting economists (so called “Anglo-Saxon economists“) support the New York, Manhattan, Wall Street cause. That is why Krugman proclaims New York City to be the “greatest city in the world” (meaning, implicitly, with the most beautiful street in the world, the one which is driving the planet into a wall, hence its name: Wall Street; no need for lousy jokes such as New Pork City, the street itself is descriptive enough!)
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EVEN IN MATHEMATICS, MOBS (TRY TO) RULE:
Ideas are implemented by societies of intellectuals. But they are rarely discovered by them. Really new ideas are produced by lone wolves, not by those who howl together with the packs. This has to do with the fact that the emotional complex supporting groupthink is transverse to the one supporting true creativity: be loved by one’s peers is antagonist to going beyond their feeble mental capability.
Those true geniuses, the real originators of ideas, are generally ignored during their lifetime, when they are not the object of active hostility. Others, the professional opportunists, steal their ideas and run away with them. The most honest of them joke about it. Hence Einstein’s contemptible gloating:”The Secret of creativity is to hide one’s sources“.
Einstein had stolen “borrowed” the theory of Relativity from an impressive Areopagus of famous…non-German physicists and mathematicians, and, first of all, Poincare’. This sort of theft has consequences, as lesser minds give lesser colors, or the wrong ones, to what they atole and did not really understand. Einstein did not understand Poincare”s subtle objections to his approach to Relativity, he just reacted like a child, aggressively. To this day, Einstein and his simplistic, dubious ideas rule in Relativity, and the choir sings, attributing to itself many Nobel Prizes. But, someday, the time will come to pay the interest on this “loan” Einstein made on behalf of the choir.
An example of the rabid behavior of packs was exhibited when the Poincare’ conjecture was solved by the Russian mathematician Perelman. A famously greedy mathematician (who I personally know all too well) who controlled access to math journals, and a pack of his followers claimed that it was them who proved it.
As Perelman put it: … “I was dismayed by the discipline’s lax ethics... It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens, it is people like me who are isolated… there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”
They have to tolerate the dishonest: all too often, they were their advisers. I personally think that, among the mathematicians I knew best, precisely the group Perelman was involved with, the lack of ethics was so pathological that it was enough to cause massive violations of human rights. The only safe behavior was to not see their faces again, and leave the field, as Perelman did.
Well, much of the same can be said throughout science, and there is no doubt that rising the ethical level would rise the science too, as it would protect the real creators, and hinder the opportunists, more than now.
Read more:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact2#ixzz1gOvWg0Gn
I know several of the actors involved, and I was dismayed by their disgusting (lack of) ethics before. They would make anybody decent want to leave mathematics. The problem, looking forward, being that the most decent are the deepest. Yau, not to name him, had been immensely rewarded in the past, in no small reason because he was the student of Chern. In math too, it’s who you know, and how much they love you.
Notice that mathematics will suffer, going forward, because somebody of the depth of Perelman left mathematics (and he is not the only one to have done so). So what’s left? Great thinkers can always meet on the Internet, and let the likes of Yau plot with the Chinese “president”…
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BAD ETHICS, BAD THINKING:
Low ethics of course create low thinking. Those who put so much effort into an abysmal lack of ethics cannot occupy their brains with maximal mental depth.
This is why German nationalism, by putting the German Einstein forward, put on the backburner subtle objections (ironically, lots of Germans later condemned Einstein’s “Jewish science”…And there is indeed something biblical in Einstein way of thinking!)
More towering creators, those interested primarily by maximal mental performance, can only turn away from greedy insects, lest they be eaten alive, or turned into “pets” as Perelman puts it (and I personally experienced). This is why so many of the deepest thinkers turn away from the crowd, and any association of would be “peers”. Thus Spinoza refused a university professorship, and preferred to go on with his daily grind (from which he soon died).
The preceding is a fortiori true in physics, economics or philosophy (and why Nietzsche retired from his full university professorship at the grand old age of 30, having suffered fools and their follies all too long, in a Germany which was already going nuts, he said!)
Conversely, that vermin of Heidegger taught Nazism, in Nazi uniform, and, having thus associated himself with a pretty mighty society, the Nazi Party, sees his reputation thrive to this day. (The same is a fortiori true for the Bush family!)
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WALL STREET, .1% GROUPTHINK:
Anyway back to the global civilization we have now, led by a few prominently noisy nations, among them, our formerly great leader, the USA. That the USA is increasingly dominated by morons is pretty clear from the panel of republican candidates. The thoroughly corrupt, nutty Gingrich (Gang-rich?) looks like a genius relative to the rest of the field.
Citizens of the USA, contrarily to the opinion they have of themselves, are more like pack members, than lone wolves. That has long been the strength of the USA: it allowed to neglect ethical objections, and occupy an entire continent with an exploitative culture, no questions asked. Indeed pack mentality comes in handy when invading foreign lands.
Even Tocqueville had noticed, long ago, the tendency of Americans to stand in societies obsessed by the concept of peers.
Tocqueville had considered American public opinion to be based on respect for sheer mass (rather than the respect for sheer intellect). The biggest pack was always perceived as correct. He saw in the respect for crowds as intellectual authorities, a threat to independence of thought: “In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion” (Democracy in America, 1835 CE, page 117)…“I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke because it is held out to me by the arms of a million men” (ibid., p. 149).
But of course, the oligarchic American universities have interest to raise formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion. They are paid for that, after all, by their rich sponsors.
Conversely, the same richly endowed universities have never produced an Einstein intellectuals of the very highest caliber (as I explained above, a caliber higher than Einstein: Europe has produced dozens; when Yau was asked why he tried to steal Perelman’s discoveries, he justified that by saying he wanted to show to the world that China, too, could produce intellectuals of the highest caliber… Just like Europe; hmm, it rather backfired…) And it is no coincidence: money does not make a bird fly above the commons. Frantic competition is not conducive to deep meditation.
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TICKLE ME PINK:
Being a Wall Street groupie is why Pinker (Harvard) tells us in “Our Better Angels” that we are the less violent society, ever. So Wall street is not violent, not at all. You are hallucinating, you the 99%.
Professor Pinker does not see, he cannot see, he is paid not to see, he is paid to tell you that the millions of dead his defense department, defending Harvard, caused in the last 30 years did not happen. Those five million dead or so (Iraq + Afghanistan), caused by various American master operations simply did not happen. According to the statistics Pinker uses.
Why killing millions dead? In part to keep an aura of terror around the world (the USA attacked the Socialist Republic of Afghanistan in July 1979. To get to the billions in oil in Iraq, and the billions in minerals in Afghanistan. Let’s dig a bit in the later.
Funny story here: the billions in rare minerals in Afghanistan were found by a French campaign (my father collaborated with it). The French geologist Lapparent, and his colleagues (including my dad), prospected under French and Afghan government mandates, until the savage intervention ordered by American Eternal Peace president Carter. Carter’s lethal violence destroyed socialist and republican hopes in Afghanistan. It also helped remind France that the USA owns the world, and, in particular, all minerals.
According to Pinker, is this peace exploding? Oh no: he simply does not see that war which killed, over more than 32 years, at least two million (maybe three million) Afghans. It simply does not exist. For Pinker, and Pinker wants all Americans to know, as Obama never fails to remind us, that the Afghan war started the day the towers fell. But of course the towers fell because the USA had organized mayhem by in Afghanistan, for 22 years, killing millions.
In other words Pinker worships the same sort of mental ability which allowed not to see Nazism for what it was until after France fell in 1940. He would of course change his music if a few more towers fell in New York. Ferguson author of another Harvard book, “Civilization”, tells us that Britain invented civilization, and he recommends to read great Western books such as the Bible and Locke’s celebration of slavery (that’s on the last page of his book).
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NOT ENOUGH HEAT FOR THE USA YET:
Wonderful climate conference in South Africa: the USA, with 17.5 tons of CO2 emitted per year and per person, got its way: no efforts, at the earliest, before 2020 CE. This means that the foreseeable heating of the planet will be 4 degrees Celsius. Within a generation. Overall. But most of the heating will happen at the poles, melting the icecaps, and rising sea levels enormously. Within a few decades.
The Europeans, distracted by internal banking and sovereign problems, did not dare rise the heat on the USA at Durban.
The attitude of Americans is, at first sight, baffling: the supposedly left wings economic commentators there kept on talking obsessively about Europe, as if Europe were a more important problem to the USA than it is for Europe itself. And thus, implicitly, the discourse of American left wing economists was that the fact the USA produces so much hot air and CO2 is not a problem at all.
The European banking crisis is not that much of a crisis: officially, the federal spending on the banking crisis in Europe so far is 2% of GDP, whereas it has been 13% in the USA and the UK. This difference in numbers (the blaring Anglo-Americans spent about eight times more so far on the banking crisis, as behooves their plutocratic status; but that also means they are much vulnerable, and would like to make the Europeans pay, even if they owe nothing, in the grand tradition of piracy!)
As far as pollution is concerned, a power such as France, with, a much better health care, Human Development Index and equality (as measured by GINI), and arguably a higher effective GDP per median person, makes do with only 6.1 ton of CO2 per year. And it’s not just France: Italy emits only 7.5 tons, Japan and Germany around 9.5 tons.
It is significant that Australia and Canada emits about as much as the USA: these are all vast empires whose implantation went according to an exploitation model (for example the Americans deliberately exterminated 60 million bison to weaken the Plains Indians into eradication). In other words, when one has founded one’s riches on over-exploitation and holocausts, applied of the entire continents, it’s entirely normal to extend the concept to the entire planet. Canada actually just decided to quit the Kyoto CO2 pollution treaty, as its egregious violations invited fines.
In general the greatest polluters are all (literally) bloody empires! This is of course not a coincidence. First one massacres people, then the environment. Actually massacring the environment has often been the best way to massacre people.
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WHEN THRIVING FROM HOLOCAUSTS BECOMES A HABIT:
Indeed, one may wonder what the USA’s collective consnciousness is exactly after? Making New York and Washington into polders? The final solution to the problem of right wingers in Florida or Texas? By drowning them?
Why does the USA want a climate catastrophe? Why? Because the very rise of the English colony in North America (or Australia, or Canada) rested on cataclysmic change (the French model in Canada was about the Mission Civilisatrice, instructing the Indians, but not massacring them; the English model consisted in first deporting the French out of half of the territory they occupied in Canada).
To this day, about half of the population of New Caledonia descend from the original inhabitants, whereas the same cannot be said in Australia. True, Maoris survived in New Zealand, but, precisely, because of the efforts of the courageous governor Fitz Roy. If Fitz Roy had been like Jefferson or Jackson, Maoris would only be a few thousands, at best, in a few reservations on the worst lands of the micro continent.
Deep American strategists close to the Dark Side can only make the same computation as the Prussian generals who planned, plotted, and launched World War One: if there is a world war pretty soon, the USA could come on top. Later on, not so sure. It is pretty sure that, when sea level will have risen 5 meters, some sort of world war will be on, as probably more than a billion people will have to move, from desiccation and inundations.
A civilization can get stuck in a mood. China was stuck in Confucianism (until Mao), Japan in a form of militarism (until 1945). Russia is (still) stuck in Czarism (= Caesarism). Or at least Putin is. For Rome the mood was slavery, which blossomed into theocratic plutocracy. In the end, Rome had to be shut down. This said, the USA destroyed its slave system, in a monster civil war. A successful reaction against plutocracy would be a generalization of that.
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TAX ME PLUTOCRATS NOT:
So the biosphere is exploding, and what do American economists talk about? Europe. Why? Because the Franco-Germans want to tax financial transactions, and refuse to write a blank check to banks. Thus the Franco-Germans threaten the financial pirates in Wall Street on both counts. Franco-Germania does not occupy Wall Street yet, but the assault is on the way. The Franco-Germans are also assaulting the so called “City” (of London). Said PM Cameron.
Krugman, is for the war of all against all, at least in Europe: his opinion is that each European country should have its own currency, and devalue, as needed. When they have all devaluated, and they have no value, only the USA will have value, order will have been re-established. One does not expect anything else from an economic adviser of Ronald Reagan in international economy (as Krugman was, although he is not too keen to explain, so I will: by today’s standards, Reagan was a left wing politician, so Krugman was always on the left!)
Krugman, of course, loves to quote fellow professors from the universities at the service of the hyper wealthy. (Except for Niall Ferguson, who is too obviously right wing, and is considered by Harvard to be not just an historian, but an economist, so he wallops in Krugman’s garden, claiming greater depth of analysis, infuriating Krugman.)
Krugman thus quotes approvingly a Oxford professor, O’Rourke, who wrote a “Summit To The Death” where a colossal number of naïve assertions are made. O’Rourke starts with: “As many feared and most expected, the just-concluded European summit left much to be desired.” But desire is precisely needed to integrate Europe. So desire is actually nothing to fear, but something to, precisely, desire.
And then professor O’Rourke goes on, ranting against the monetary union. The best answer to these europhobic clowns from England, is to have Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland secede from London, and join the Schengen customs free union, and the Euro. Maybe Northumbria ought to do the same too!
One can also look at Professor O’Rourke’s discourse as suggesting that much more federalization of Europe is needed. Sure. But it takes time. We have to pile up the desire high.
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ENRICH MY BANKS, I FEEL WEALTHIER ALREADY:
O’Rourke also suggest to follow the Quantitative Easing path of the USA promoted by, say, Krugman. what’s Quantitative Easing? The buying, by the Central Bank, of worthless financial assets from the biggest banks As I have pointed out, Quantitative Easing has been the main driver of plutocratization in the last three years. It just enriches the banks, and they invest in derivatives (several hundred trillions of Credit Default Swaps, for example). Why would Europe strive to enrich Wall Street too?
Because Europe lives near to, and from Wall Street (as all hyper rich American universities do, since their venom is basic to the plutocratic propaganda)?
Instead the ECB will lend to banks as needed, at 1%. That’s much better; not a blank check to invest in yachts and derivatives, obviously.
Krugman made another ill informed, europhobic commentary on O’Rourke’s article. Europhobia, and Germanophobia have long been staples of the media of the USA. Thus the erroneous can build on others’ errors.
Among other things, Krugman neglected the fact that the 3% deficit rule limit before prosecution, could be overruled by a qualified majority (instead of the present qualified unanimity). Also miscreants will be referred to the European Court of Justice, meaning that only willful cheating will be punished.
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USA: CENTER IS NOT HOLDING, BABY AS UNREAD AS THE BATH:
Professor O’Rourke claims that, if the gumbo shrimp industry ran in trouble in Louisiana, the Federal government would help. This is the redistribution argument which all europhobic Americans repeat, claiming they have it, and Europe does not. Never mind the evidence screaming in their face, the preferred insult from plutophile economists, that Europe is made of “welfare states”.
Then O’Rourke claimed that Germany should have been helped in the 1990s, after reunification, by the European Union, but was not. Right, it should have been helped. And that is why it was. Is O’Rourke paid to blare falsehoods?
Generally Anglo-Saxon Wall Street .1% propagandists say giant lies, because they can get away with them, and the more they say them, the more crucial to, thus rewarded by, Wall Street financial mafia, they are.
Because mafias exist, and they are entangled with the politicians who enable them. Just a few days after Berlusconi was ejected from the Italian Premiership by his good friend Merkozy, the head of the Camorra was arrested in Naples. His name has been known for decades, but, obviously, under Berlusconi, the order had been given to not arrest him.
The entire European budget is about aid. Development aid, or aid to agriculture. There are even food programs attached to the Eurozone. If the periphery of Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece was able to develop so much so fast, it was because a Northern European tax gun showering them with money for decades. True, after countries such as Ireland became much richer, per capita, than France or Germany, the money was redirected to prospective and new EU members in Eastern Europe. Ireland is still richer, per capita, than its generous donators (just as Greece is richer than Slovakia, which helps it, in a redistribution program!) Now some development aid is even directed towards North Africa (as it should).
Professor O’Rourke is actually either monstrously ill informed, or a deliberate liar, and his prophet Krugman is, thus, not doing much better.
Let me explain: O’Rourke shrimp example is fishy, complete utopia, denied by reality.
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REDISTRIBUTION IN THE USA: SCHOOL BUDGETS ARE OFFERED TO THE HYPER RICH:
It is well known that the Gates, who head both one of the greatest personal fortunes in the world, and personally the richest foundation, pose with the president of the USA to say they are going to save the school. So all Americans are supposed to go on their knees, and thank the hyper rich for taking care of them. Such are the Gates of hell: enticing in the moment, seducers posing in wealth and taste, calling you to abandon all dignity, so they can exert their might on your behalf.
What is real is that the school system, from primary schools to universities is collapsing in the USA.
Does professor O’Rourke knows this? Apparently not. He professes to not know it. He is a professional professing denial. For example it costs $31,000 to attend first year college at the University of California this year, a supposedly PUBLIC university. At Stanford University it is more like $70,000 (the supreme outrage being that those called “private” universities get plenty of public funds to support the hyper rich and the ideas that sustain their stranglehold on society). Public primary schools are closing all over the USA.
And what does the government of the USA do? Make sure General Electric and the like pays no taxes. When Obama controlled all, he made sure that the hyper rich individuals would keep paying the lowest tax rate, 15%. In other words the government of the USA is impotent, on its own accord.
All these rich professors from the richest universities in their rich mansions compare favorably a country, the USA, which looks like the Titanic, an hour after the iceberg, with Europe.
Is the school system collapsing in Europe? Are our children learning? As Bush, the preceding moron-in-chief used to say?
Well, Europe is not sinking, but thinking. And European federal debt is basically zero. The American federal debt is more than GDP of the USA, and overall American debt levels, about four times GDP, are higher than Greece.
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RATTING ON THE RATERS:
Last year the American and British deficits were around 12%. Did the richest, biggest banks and their hedge funds drive up the interest rates there? By down rating their sovereign credit rating? No. Why? Because they do not want to saw the branch on which they are sitting.
Example of branch on which oligarchs are sitting, and they won’t criticize: the so called rating “agencies” are central actors in the Wall Street system to extract money from the Public. Employees of these conceptual monstrosities rat on states, which do not pay them, but they have interest to be kind to private companies (members of the plutocracy), for two reasons: they get paid by them, and they move to them. Consult for example the Wall Street Journal article: “Credit Raters Join The Rated“.
It is highly significant that so called credit agencies threatened France and Germany with down rates on credit. While not threatening Great Britain. As the head of the Banque de France (French central bank), Christian Noyer, pointed out:”… a downgrade should come first for the U.K., which has a greater deficit, as much debt, more inflation, and less growth than us, France and Germany. Moreover Great Britain has collapsing credit.”
The British deficit last year was higher than Greece more than thrice Germany’s. This year the U.K. deficit is forecast to be nearly 10%, nearly twice France’s. 10% of Britain GDP is financial piracy, and France and Germany have the means, and intent, to greatly shut those criminal activities down. So Britain’s future is distinctly gloomier than that of France and Germany.
But Wall Street and its credit agencies have identified France and Germany as their enemies, and Great Britain as their friend. Pirates help pirates, and those who pirates help help pirates. It’s the same idea as the Wall Street prosecutor putting the French director of the International Monetary fund in high security jail for days, while knowing that his accuser was gloating with a jailed former boyfriend on the phone that she would make a lot of money from her accusations. Let alone the fact, known to the police, that the IMF’s director highly secured Blackberry had stopped functioning well before the alleged rape was announced to anyone (that clearly meant that DSK had been victimof an aggression).
To quote from the article on the raters from the Wall Street Journal: ” More than 100 analysts at credit-rating firms have left over the past five years to work for financial companies they once helped to rate… Lawmakers work in an environment where there is a revolving door and they posit that must have also occurred” at the rating firms.”
Now notice that the Wall Street Journal is revealing itself to be left of Krugman. Krugman criticize the European for not sending trillions to banks, and screams about the euro, the malaise of which is caused by the credit rating agencies.
But Krugman has nothing to say about the lack of vital transfer payments from government to public schools in the USA.
Is it stupidity, or is it corruption? Or is it just that the fattest wolves howl from inside the largest packs? In any case, howling is not deep, nor the noblest conquest of humanity.
Perelman, who finished the proof of the Poincare’ conjecture, would consider my attitude offensive.
The prospect of being awarded a Fields Medal forced him to make a complete break with mathematics. “As long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice,” Perelman explained. “Either to make some ugly thing”—a scandal about the math community’s lack of integrity—“or, if I didn’t do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. That is why I had to quit.”
This old attitude is rather curious, in someone as intelligent and modern as Perelman, and I vigorously condemn it.
Perleman’s family is viewed as Jewish, and some of his closest relatives emigrated to Israel. Jews suffered enormous losses in the Baltic area Perleman is from, because of the murderous madness of the Nazis, and of some of the locals. Now a factor in these losses was the attitude of millions of Jews who thought that not making a fuss, not making a scandal, was more important than death itself. (Something they read in the Torah, somewhere, and believed, in their immoral stupidity which helped in the death of millions of children.) As the war evolved into a holocaust, many Jewish resistance groups appeared. They, correctly often prefer to kill than to submit meekly: the line has to be drawn somewhere. And the contemporary state of Israel has learned that lesson all too well.
The entire principle of civilization is that there are ideas worth dying for.
If one cannot tell mathematicians the truth, about themselves, how could one tell the truth to the Nazis, about themselves, and the truth, about the Nazis, to others? Over the years, I purchased many books of Pinker, Ferguson, and Krugman, and meditated their ideas. Paying them respect is telling them the truth in return.
To tell others how it really is: what gift is more human? Is not that the gift we make, again and again, to children?
Morality without outrage, and outrage without scandal, are beyond hypocrisy. They are what made Auschwitz possible. Time to cease and desist.
Why are human societies so prone to nastiness? Because humanity evolved into the planet’s divinity. I made a comparison between “
Rats and Crats“. That was unfair to rats. It turns out that rats are altruistic.
Rats Will Work To Free A Trapped Pal, and neglect delicious food to do so.
Rats have plenty of enemies, but rats are not foremost among them. If there are too many rats, there will be too many cats. But if there are too many humans, there will not be more cats to eat them, quite the opposite. So human societies have to be programmed to put some restraint to the (ecological) non sense that is man. Human sociobiology is intrinsically nasty. I do not mean it’s not also altruistic. That, it had also to be. However…
Man had to create not just God, in his image, but also Pluto. To reinforce the inevitable, the Dark Side that societies have to muster. And ideas are the swords they slice with.
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Patrice Ayme
