IT’S ALL IN THE MIND, AND THE MIND IS LOCALLY COUNTABLE, BUT THE UNIVERSE IS NOT.

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In a nutshell: The discovery of a general theory of incompleteness, in the last century, is one of the greatest advance in civilization, 25 centuries in coming. It ought to have a gigantic impact on general human understanding, greater than any other scientific theory, but it has failed to do so, so far, because it has stayed all too esoteric.

I give a new, neurological approach to incompleteness, designed in part to remedy this. Verily, mathematics is not out there, but thoroughly inside the mind. Just as symbolic systems are limited, so is the mind, in the same exact way (although the later found a way out). And the limit is countability.

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Introduction and abstract:

Incompleteness is a common characteristic of all axiomatic systems (Turing demonstrated this by a variant of Cantor diagonalization). Therein a formidable weapon against human hubris. Too bad so few philosophers, and, a fortiori, politicians, have heard of it. (If the politician realized how incomplete his mind is, he may think enough before going out, and killing innocent people with robots, that he may find other ways, like talking to people with the discourse that kills the conflict, rather than babies.)

In any case, incompleteness has been hard to understand, because it is a major advance in understanding, and, as all such advances, it leaves the savage mind behind. New, and fresher generations will be exposed to incompleteness early, and find it as natural as zero. the concept zero. How? By finding, as usual, a natural approach to the existence of this new concept, and how to build a reproduction of it in one’s mind.

Zero is, because zero does. Zero does what nothing else does, namely introduces nothingness into the computational realm (take that, Sartre!) This is how, and why, people find the concept of zero so natural, and many other basic mathematical concepts, so natural, although, well, they took the best minds millennia to develop. It took millennia to find the correct approach. In the end, zero is an axiom. But, a very useful one. We are going to do the same thing for incompleteness in this essay, with a simple observation which has vast consequences, and will be taken as completely obvious in the future (just as zero is now obvious, except zero is more of a convention, and we are going to make an observation).

To make a new concept self obvious, one always has first to find the correct, that means the simplest and most elegant approach.

Godel’s work on incompleteness was complicated in its details (because he imposed to himself a minimalist setting, working only with integers). Less so complicated is Cantor’s much more crucial breakthrough (reproduced below), and others’ work (Turing, Chaitin). Therein this essay a new demonstration of incompleteness in mathematics, using the (author’s) neuromathematical approach (taken for granted here as a background, an admittedly unfair but necessary short cut).

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NEUROLOGY IS MORE SOPHISTICATED THAN EXISTING LOGIC:

The neuromathematical approach claims that any mathematical theory is a neuronal geometry (you can call this an axiom, if you wish, but, one day it will be proven in the lab in minute detail). This goes much beyond the usual theory of neural networks, which has no geometry, and the simplest of topologies (mathematical semantics is used, common readers can ignore it).

Neuronal geometry is given by a metric, itself given by the time it takes to process neuronal logic (see annex; dentrites, neuroglia, synapses, firing rates, and the finite speed of action potentials are involved in this delay in communication, hence in the distance function).

The crucial point is that any neuronal geometry rests on a countable network. Hence it is clearly incomplete. This is the essence of my argument. One cannot make simpler than that.

Of course some will smirk that it cannot be that simple. How to generate the richness of mathematics (let alone poetry!) from this madly simple picture? Well the point is that it is not that simple, it’s an immensely complicated configuration space of very high dimension (from neurotransmitters), endowed with geometrodynamics (right there, it’s much more complex than General Relativity, a very simple geometrodynamics, with just 4 dimensions and a fixed topology).

The geometrodynamics allows each neuronal geometry to morph into a neurology next door, topologically inequivalent to it (so neurology is also endowed with a topologicodynamics, differently from the much poorer General Relativity). This is how the space of all neuronal geometries can mimic (what Cantor called) the power of the continuum (see below).

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THE IMPORTANCE OF INCOMPLETENESS:

The realization that Incompleteness Is A Non Compressible Feature Of Understanding has been a major philosophical and scientific advance (arguably the greatest, and not just of the twentieth century). It has been a new notion, so enormous that it surfaced slowly over 25 centuries (!). Only now have we reached a final understanding of what is going on.

In its modern version, due initially to Gödel, incompleteness showed up as the Gödel’s incompleteness theorem, which states that the theory of numbers theory includes undecidable propositions. So propositions exist that can neither be proven, nor disproven (this is somewhat similar to the parallel postulate being neither proven nor disproven from the other axioms of Euclid).

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HOW THE GREEKS STUMBLED REPEATEDLY OVER INCOMPLETENESS: LIAR, IRRATIONALS, PARALLELS, ZERO.

Incompleteness is the opposite of the all knowing god, it shows that one such being could never be (that is why the Greeks had gods all over, probably, they were smart, they guessed the truth). The first inklings that something was amiss in the theory of human knowledge came from (first) the paradox of the liar. The paradox of the liar surfaces in self referential statements that make logic literally short circuits. An example of the liar paradox is the statement: "this sentence is false!" Indeed, if it is true, it is false, so it is false, but that is true, etc.

It sounds stupid to worry about such things, but it is not, when one tries to establish perfect logic as some Greeks, and later, philosophers in Paris around 1100 CE, tried to do. The problem resurfaced brutally in 1900 after Friedrich Frege wrote down what he thought was perfect axiomatics for arithmetic. Bertrand Russell found the paradox of the liar just below Frege’s surface, causing a serious crisis (which is not fully resolved yet: when set theory is taught, what is taught is so called "naïve set theory", which ignores most serious problems, see annex).

Another way in which incompleteness appeared, a little while later, was with the apparition of irrational numbers (as they came to be known). The Greek mathematicians, building up on the work of their Babylonian and Egyptian predecessors, thought they had a full axiomatic of arithmetic, with just their pathetic little integers. They had connected that with their axiomatization of geometry, through the concept of length.

The Egyptians lined up their pyramids perfectly with the true north (within three-sixtieths of a degree), thus demonstrating they knew how to measure stuff. Geometry was used mostly to determine property extent, obviously important in the periodically flooded rich arable land of the Nile valley. It had come to be that numbers were used to measure length, and both concepts had been identified, through the concept of ratio of integers (giving fractions of a measuring unit).

Pythagoras, a Greek in Southern Italy, proved the theorem that the square of the hypotenuse was equal to the sum of the squares of the sides of the triangle. Soon after, he and his students found that the diagonal of a square of side one, whatever it was, was not the ratio of two integers. It could be calculated with an arbitrary precision, but the process was never ending.

The Greeks had thought that all numbers were "rational numbers", which supposedly made sense because they were… well, may be, not numbers that one could count on one’s fingers, the integers, but, at least, ratios of integers.

Thus the notion of rational number was incomplete, in the following sense. The Greeks had hoped that all and any length was a number, AND they had also hoped that any number was the ratio of two integers. That was a lot of hope they wanted to believe in. Suddenly the world was not something the Greeks mastered anymore.

If one made the esthetic decision that a number was always a ratio of integers, as the Greeks did initially, then, they found to their dismay that not all lengths were numbers. But then, if one made the decision that all and any length had to correspond to a "number", the notion of number had to be extended, beyond "ratio", to include all the hypotenuses of all and any triangle (thus the ir-ratio numbers). That was philosophically maddening, completely, well, irrational. Indeed then what was a number? Were there still other definitions extending further the notion of number? Where did these extensions stop? OK, so suppose, as the Greeks ended up doing, that any length was a number, and that so was any ratio of lengths.

According to this new definition, the ratio of circumference to diameter of a circle, named pi, is a number. Could it be represented as a length obtained by Greek instruments, line and compass? If not, how to compute it?

Meanwhile the Greeks stumbled on the concept of zero. Instead of completing their mathematics in that direction, they passed the concept to the Indians (who, with a more numerically aggressive religion, friendly to big numbers, were not afraid to develop it, while using a more advanced notation perhaps following the Chinese).

Meanwhile the postulate was made by Euclid that one could NOT deduce from the rest of Euclid’s axioms whether one, and only one parallel to a given line passed by a given point exterior to it. This so called "parallel postulate" nagged the Greeks, and everybody else, for 2,000 years (it was not as self obvious than the other axioms of Euclid). It should not have, but it did. People tried to prove the postulate (from the other axioms). Finally, starting in 1829 with Lobachevski, geometries were found that satisfied all of Euclid axioms, except the parallel postulate. (Exotic geometries were so scandalous that Gauss claimed he did not publish his research because he feared the "cries of the Beotians", the Beotians being peasants north of Athens known for being civilizational retards.)

Exotic geometries should have been obvious, as long as one had made the esthetic, not to say hedonistic, decision to make Euclidean geometry on a pillow, or a saddle, or a sphere… Why to restrict oneself to a plane? Was the world flat? No, and the Greeks knew it was not, they even had measured the size of the Earth with great precision (so big was Earth’s size that Columbus was not believed when he said he could sail to China, because it was known that China was beyond the range of existing sail boats… But America was not, and the Vikings had traded ivory, and even timber, from there for 5 centuries…) So it was irrational to restrict oneself to flat geometry (and Euclid’s predecessors knew this, but has the world veered into Macedonian fascist domination, full blown thinking became the enemy).

In the meantime, "numbers" which, when multiplied by themselves gave a negative product, had been found to be useful to solve equations. Those "imaginary" numbers led to real solutions, and had many other esthetic advantages. For example any polynomial equation of degree n had exactly n roots (d’Alembert’s theorem). Very pretty, very handy. Finally a magnificent, trivial and beautiful interpretation of "imaginary" numbers was found (1806). That was more or less coincidental with the discovery by Faraday that a moving magnet created an electric current (1821).

A stupid journalist asked Faraday what was the use of that effect, to which the great man replied: "What is the use of a new born baby?" (1821.) Faraday law of induction is of course at the basis of all of the world’s industry now. Tellingly a madly rotating turbine in an electric power plant, or windmill, describes a geometry that exactly depicts imaginary numbers (Argand’s diagram, 1806). So an extension of the concept of number that would have driven the Greeks completely mad, at first sight, had a natural geometric description… Simply geometry was not just about line and compass.

So the parallel postulate was solved by being more open to what one meant by geometry… In general understanding further is similar to what happened with the parallel postulate: suppose more stuff, to get richer abstractions, abstractions that can do more. The world is rich, a richer mind, correctly made, can model it better.

Then it turned out that pi, although calculable (its square being an infinite series of rationals), was transcendental (that is, it was not the solution of a polynomial equation).

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THEN CANTOR INVENTED THE CANTOR DIAGONALIZATION PROCESS:

Mathematicians massaged the Cantor diagonalization process for the next century, extracting juicy theorems and spectacular results from it (with generally trivial proofs, see annex). It is very simple.

Cantor supposed that all the real numbers could be counted like sheep, from top to bottom, and so he lined them across, developing each real number in its full decimal expansion horizontally. OK, the bottom was down to infinity. That gigantic array he obtained is also called a matrix.

Cantor ended visually with a gigantic matrix of integers, let’s call it the CANTOR MATRIX. Cantor labeled that gigantic matrix as R(n, m): R(n,m) being the mth integer in the decimal expansion of the nth real in the Cantor matrix.

Then Cantor built a real C by considering the diagonal R(n,n) of his giant Cantor matrix. He defined C by giving an algorithm for its decimal expansion, namely a way to compute C: the nth digit of C would be C(n) where C(n) would be R(n,n) plus a (perhaps variable, or not) non zero integer. To define things precisely, say: C(n) = R(n,n) + 1. In other words, the nth decimal of the made up number C can never be the nth decimal of… any number: at this point, the conclusion is obvious: C cannot exist. But let’s pound it, the way mathematicians like to do.

Indeed, since Cantor had supposed that the reals could be lined up like sheep, the number C ought to be in the list, as the kth (say) number. In other words: C = R(k). Hence we should have the nth digit of C, C(n), equal to the nth digit of R(k). But that is R(k,n). But C(n) was constructed to be R(n,n) + 1. In particular, C(k) is then both R(k,k) and R(k,k) +1. So, either 0 = 1, or the initial hypothesis at the root of the whole contraption, that it was possible to build the Cantor Matrix, containing all the integers, was FALSE.

A more intuitive way to look at the proof is this: suppose each number is viewed as a mountain range, each point in the decimal expansion being viewed as an altitude, anything between 0 and 9. A Cantor mountain range is made up, by modifying one of the heights of each mountain range at some point, and gluing all such modifications along to obtain a mountain range guaranteed to be different from all those lined up initially. This means that the Cantor modification is geometric in nature (height being a distance). As we will see neurology can do more, because it can not only make geometric changes, but topological ones (changing its genus with all sorts of surgery) .

What has exactly happened here? Well, I claim, something neurological happened.

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FORMAL INCOMPLETENESS:

Now go forward another generation or two to Godel and Turing. Godel demonstrated that, as long as one had basic integers, with multiplication and addition, a sentence could be made that would say:"I am not demonstrable".

Turing generalized this, and Chaitin, generalizing in turn ideas of Leibnitz and Borel, found a probabilistic approach. Borel had observed that chance could not be defined, because, if it were, it won’t be chance anymore. This may sound too philosophical, but, remember, mathematics is about philosophy. Or, as I point out, neurophilosophy.

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INCOMPLETENESS IS HOW WE REACH FOR THE STARS:

For 2,000 years, mathematicians were mystified by parallels, but all they had to do is look at any curved surface to realize that they were mystified erroneously: the problem was not what parallels did, or did not do, but how they should be defined. Same for the concept of numbers, same for the concept of chance.

The paradox of the liar was a big subject of (non trivial) reflection in the depth of the Middle Ages, between Paris and Oxford (circa 1100-1400 CE). As It is still alive and well; Bertrand Russel used a variant of it to show the axiomatics of mathematics were self contradictory (circa 1900). He considered the set B all of which elements are sets which are not elements of themselves. Now if B is an element of B, it is not an element of B. And if it is not an element of B, it is an element of B.

Godel used a variant of the liar argument.

OK, so what is the verdict? Can we progress by introducing much more powerful semantics and abstraction? What do I mean? Imaginary numbers were hard, until it was realized that they corresponded to rotations in the plane (Argand diagrams, rotating electric fields). Then that a number multiplied by itself could be minus became trivial. Similarly, curved geometry, irrational numbers, became obvious, once looked at the right way. This is the case for the zero, or negative numbers, everybody take those for granted.

Abstraction consists at forgetting the details, and concentrating on an essence, which becomes the new definition. Incompleteness is made to work in reverse.

Neurologically, abstraction corresponds to establishing a shorter, less energetically and temporally costly neural network going more directly to the meat of the matter (don’t forget you are dealing with the mind of a killer ape).

It is my opinion that pieces of mathematics correspond to subsets of neuronal architecture (I should say neuroglial architecture, because glial cells, which make up 90% of the human brain, are involved). Any of subset of neuronal architecture is countable (actually, although large, it is finite, say involving a skeleton of at most a of a trillion trillions pieces of networks (yes, ten to the power 24), counting everything, even dendrites). So basically a mathematical reasoning is a neural network (a subset of all paths possible with a trillion trillions pieces). But the neural network can be changed in a non trivial way, TOPOLOGICALLY speaking (topology is the science of neighborhoods, forgetting about distance measured by number: distance gets measured only by the notion of neighborhood -literally, not by a number).

Although any given neural network is countable, it can readily morph into something completely different. [Neural] countability is next to the infinity of the continuum. According to me, this is the essence of Cantor diagonalization: any countable array gives rise to elements not in it.

And it is the essence of incompleteness: any mathematical theory is, by essence a COUNTABLE neural network, and thus misses most of math. Realized mathematics will always be of measure zero in the set of all possible mathematics.

Notice that the neural networks can vary geometrically (which is in a way what Cantor did), but can also do much more, because they can morph into some which are not topologically equivalent (and do this all the time, since their connectivity varies through new neuronal, axonal, dendritic and glial geometry).

Now, of course, if even any mathematical reasoning is that incomplete, a fortiori all and any reasoning. Thus the preceding result has impact on all knowledge and cognition.

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LIAR AND NEUROLOGY:

And what of the paradox of the liar in all this? (Another version of it is: "The following sentence is true. The preceding sentence is false.")

Well, Russell solved it with his theory of "type", a hierarchy avoiding self reference. I think the solution is just to realize that neurology has a hierarchical organization that can be called "meta" (loosely corresponding to Russel’s hierarchy, or one founded by Von Neumann, which starts with the empty set, then the infinity, or inductive et axiom: if y is in it, so is y U {y}).

"Meta" enables abstraction. It basically consists, given a neuronal set S into a set of higher neurons, H, which, observing the quasi-simultaneity of some sorts of firings, draw the consequences, in the form of new axonal chains between S and H that short circuits the long axonal chains confined to S (this corresponds to the logician Alonso Church’s definition of abstraction).

Say neuron A, after a long chain of intermediaries, makes neuron Z fire always; then a neuron B appears that connects directly A and Z, shortening the axiomatic/program structure: such is the abstracting process, reproduced in mathematics by forgetting (some of) the details (of course, it is the same abstracting process which is used all over).

The liar paradox disappears in neurology, because neuromathematics eliminates self referential loops. These cannot happen (neuro)logically (neurons don’t short circuit, be it only because they cannot fire immediately again, let alone the fact that neurology sees no interest in close by, loopy circuitry).

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INCOMPLETELY YOURS:

In any case, such is my resolution of incompleteness. All and any theory is countable, but the universe is not. And neither is the mind (thus the mathematics). The related liar’s problem is done with by the geometrodynamics.

Some will say: what sort of proof is that? But what is the proof of zero? Or the proof of irrationals? Or the proof of hyperbolic geometry? Of course, there is none, they are just choices, and then observations we make in life.

I realize this is incomplete, and (not yet) demonstrable in its entirety, but, as I was saying, all and any theory is incomplete…

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Patrice Ayme

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1) Annex on why neurology has intrinsic geometry: Generally, neurology is viewed as set of neural networks. Neural networks are almost trivial things: a directed graph with edge weights, and perhaps a "transfer function" at each vertex. The interesting content is in algorithms that progressively improve a solution to an inverse problem — calculating edge weights that result in desired couplings between input and output edges. The picture here goes completely beyond that, since NEUROLOGY BECOMES VARIABLE GEOMETRY, AND EVEN VARIABLE TOPOLOGY.

indeed, neuronal logic incorporates a temporal hierarchy, given by the time it takes to process the logic. Neurology, among other things, is logic + time delayed causality (notice the analogy with special relativity, and, or field theory, be it electrodynamics or gravitational, where a crucial point is delayed, hence local, causality).

Neuronal geometry is thus given by the time it takes for logical processes (neuronal firing and the propagation of signals down axonal-dentritic-glial chains is far from instantaneous, because not only are nerve impulses slow, but the signal is reprocessed along the way, with typically a glial cell’s foot interfering into each synapse, which is itself, all by itself, a geometrical computer).

*

2) Annex on how the debate progressed in Paris circa 1100 CE: The notions above address, and are an attempt at solving, once and for all, directly the debate between realism (Champeaux, Archdeacon of Paris, teacher of Abelard) versus nominalism (Roscelin, preceding teacher of Abelard), versus conceptualism (Abelard). Those thinkers, circa 1100 CE, all knew each other, and were busy going well beyond Aristotle’s metaphysical uselessness in the debate on "universals" (ideas). Champeaux thought "universals" were real, out there (a position started with Plato, I guess, where it made strictly no sense). Roscelin thought "universals" were all in the mind. Abelard was in between. The position above, neuromathematics, is that universals are real, but all in the mind. This is how the universe teaches us to become human. (BTW, this shows that the European thought system had gone well beyond the Greeks by 1100 CE, and thus was not dependent of getting reacquainted with the Greeks, contrarily to what is generally depicted. The argument can even be made that forgetting the forgettable details of Greek thought is exactly what the doctor ordered.)

*

Cantor diagonalization has many spectacular applications. For example, suppose we considered a number m, and then suppose we enumerated its properties: P(1) could be whether it is even, P(2) could be whether it is prime, P(3) could be whether it is normal, etc… Each property could be expressed by an expansion as a sequence of 0s and 1s, as is done in computer science. Then one could consider diagonals, and tweak them as Cantor did, getting properties not found in the original list. Conclusion: the properties of any given number are not countable. (That puts an ironical light on the physicists searching for a "theory of everything" and the believers who believe in just one got: they should take the diagonal of god, see what happens…)

*

The foundations of mathematics have proven to be a jungle: Many foundational systems have been elaborated (ZFC, MK, T-G, NBG, etc.), to try to have enough logical power to support the elaborated reasonings of some mathematicians (such as Grothendieck), or theories such as category and model theory, while avoiding paradoxes. The final word is not in, but the implicit morality modern mathematicians have extracted from it is that your foundation depends upon your construction, just as in the building industry. All foundations are local, only the mind is global.

DIFFERENTLY FROM PASCAL’S MALEVOLENT DEITY, CO2 IS REAL, YOU CAN BET ON IT.

Pascal, the mathematical genius and philosopher, is famous for his wager about the big man in the sky. Although the existence of God cannot be demonstrated through reason, Pascal argued that a person should bet as though God exists, because living in such a way has everything to gain, and nothing to lose. (It is found in note 233 of his Pensées, a posthumously published collection of notes made by Pascal in his last years.)

Basically Pascal said that there may be this all powerful presence up there, and if we do not believe in it, and it exists, we may be all destroyed, so we better believe. Moreover, if we believe, and the all powerful presence is just an illusion, we would become better anyway, by doing what this illusion asked us to do.

Pascal’s bet can be transposed, strategy for strategy, to the carbon catastrophe. However, differently from the God of the Parisians in the sixteenth century, carbon dioxide really exists. So the wager is much more real. It is not about existence, but about MALEVOLENCE. (Yes, philosophically speaking, it may feel funny that CO2 is accused of malevolence: without it the Earth would be a ball frozen at minus 14 degree Celsius; but the people who overproduce it now, and the main power behind that overproduction, or rather its leaders, can be accused of malevolence.)

What is it, to believe in the carbon catastrophe? It is to believe in the presence of overabundant CO2 and the malevolent, cataclysmic consequences thereof. We have to believe. Why? Because if we do not, and the malevolence arises in its full cataclysmic consequences, the following will happen:

1) The food chain in the oceans will collapse.

2) In the acidified oceans, now full of carbonic acid, photosynthetic animals which fabricate oxygen will dissolve, resulting in a considerable reduction of oxygen production in the biosphere. Global Warming is just a subset of what is going wrong from the cataclysmic increase of CO2. Learn.

3) Most species, unable to escape the rising heat, will disappear. Crocodiles will thrive in the archipelago of Northern Canada. Oh, by the way, most food production will collapse.

4) Sea level will rise by 75 meters, as Greenland and Antarctica completely melt (a process already started, satellite studies reveal).

Some of the consequences above are proximal: they will affect people living today. The latest lab studies show that the rate at which CO2 turns into carbonic acid in the ocean presently should make the resulting brew too acid for much oxygen making life by 2100 CE, in a generation. Already the rising heat of the water has robbed giant expanses of tropical oceans of enough oxygen to support life: these parts of the oceans are dead (sometimes all the way to a kilometer down).

So, if you do not believe in CO2, you make yourself accomplice of that HOLOCAUST. Now, of course, as the situation quickly deteriorates, many nations would take it very badly, and massive nuclear wars would wreck the planet, in the most efficient effort so far to reduce CO2 production. Morality as we have known it for thousands of years may completely collapse, and reintroducing cannibalism on an industrial basis, Aztec style (or worse) may become a no brainer.

On the other hand, if you do believe that having now a CO2 equivalent of 450 parts per million in volume (450 ppmv), greater than the maximum of 300 ppmv of the last 15 million years (latest science, fall 2009) will have cataclysmic consequences, what do you lose? Answer: nothing.

Life without carbon will be more virtuous. After all, burning carbon kills (mostly indirectly) millions a year, worldwide (mostly through pollution, although the oil wars, and preparing for them, is also costly in lives, be it only by diverting resources).

The part of the world economy that needs oil the most is air transportation (because oil has the highest energy density, short of nuclear power). But that can be solved, because algae based fuel is just a matter of technological and economic deployment: algae are wonderful, they absorb huge amounts of CO2 to produce their oil.

Some freakish American servants of the plutocracy have suggested to cool the planet by mimicking volcanoes. Volcanoes produce giant amounts of SO2 (sulfur dioxide, easily turned into SO4, sulfuric acid). It is a bit as if one "solved" a holocaust, by making another, killing all those who complained about the first one. As I will show in an accompanying essay, giant volcanic eruptions, the super traps, have caused massive extinctions (in particular the P-T and K-T extinctions, the former being the greatest, 250 million years ago, and the later having exterminated the dinosaurs).

Super traps eruptions are characterized by enormous production of deadly CO2 and SO2. That is the way they kill (most of) the biosphere. In other words, the American idiots who suggest to re-engineer the planet with sulfates want to recreate the super traps in all respects: complete with SO2, not just the CO2 we presently have.

It is better, wiser, more prudent and compassionate to believe that one should bet carbon burning is as malevolent as can be. So bet to boot carbon burning out, please.

Patrice Ayme

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1) Addendum on SuperFreaks from the USA:

It is one of my contentions that it is Wall Street that contributed the most to the arrival of the Nazis, a splendid operation that brought worldwide Wall Street supremacy (the so called "American Century"). Now Wall Street and its servants want to bring MASS EXTINCTION. Proof? Read more:

Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, in their new book, “SuperFreakonomics: Global Cooling, Patriotic Prostitutes, and Why Suicide Bombers Should Buy Life Insurance” (William Morrow; $29.99), claim that, if, at any particular moment, things look bleak, it’s because people are seeing them the wrong way. “When the solution to a given problem doesn’t lie right before our eyes, it is easy to assume that no solution exists,” they write. “But history has shown again and again that such assumptions are wrong.”

What is right, though, is that Americans do not study history. Sure Levitt, sure Dubner: I guess, when the problem was Auschwitz, right before our eyes, it was better to believe in the solution the Nazis found: don’t talk about it, except, discreetly, as the "final solution".

Levitt and Dubner tell the horseshit story as a prelude to discussing climate change (the famous horseshit story is that there were too many horses in big cities, and horse dung was a major problem). “Just as equine activity once threatened to stomp out civilization, there is now a fear that human activity will do the same.” As usual, they claim, the anxiety is unwarranted. First, the global-warming threat has been exaggerated; there is uncertainty about how, exactly, the Earth will respond to rising CO₂ levels, and uncertainty has “a nasty way of making us conjure up the very worst possibilities”. To this one should reply that there was uncertainty about how the Jewish race and the French republic would respond to Nazi politics. As it was, the Jews got exterminated, and the French republic declared world war.

Second, solutions are bound to present themselves, Levitt and Dubner boldly assert: “Technological fixes are often far simpler, and therefore cheaper, than the doomsayers could have imagined.” Yes, in the way of a simple technological fix, it took just a little world war to stomp out fascism and racism. Only 75 million killed, no sweat: the USA is now on top, so Levitt and Dubner love it. But if the USA had lost half of its population, the indecency of such a drift would be blatant to Americans (example: without the twentieth century wars, the population of Russia would be 300 millions, not just 140 millions as it is presently!)

Levitt and Dubner have in mind a very particular kind of “technological fix”. Wind turbines, solar cells, biofuels—these are all, in their view, more trouble than they’re worth. Such technologies are aimed at reducing CO₂ emissions, which is the wrong goal, they say. Cutting back is difficult and, finally, annoying. Who really wants to use less oil? This sounds, the malevolent pair writes, “like wearing sackcloth”. Wouldn’t it be simpler just to re-engineer the planet?

One scheme that Levitt and Dubner indeed endorse features a fleet of fibreglass boats equipped with machines that would increase the cloud cover over the oceans (talk about unreal). Another scheme calls for constructing a vast network of tubes for sucking cold water from the depths of the sea to the surface (great, so we will accelerate the release of methane from the depths). Far and away their favorite plan involves mimicking volcanoes.

During a major eruption directed explosively upwards, huge quantities—up to tens of millions of tons—of sulfur dioxide are shot into the very high atmosphere. Once aloft, the SO₂ reacts to form droplets known as sulfate aerosols, which float around for months. These aerosols act like tiny mirrors, reflecting sunlight back into space. The result is a cooling effect of the stratosphere, troposphere and ground. In the year following the eruption of Mt. Pinatubo, in the Philippines, average global temperatures fell, temporarily, by about one half of a degree Celsius (one degree Fahrenheit).

“Once you eliminate the moralism and the angst, the task of reversing global warming boils down to a straightforward engineering problem,” Levitt and Dubner write. All we need to do is figure out a way to shoot huge quantities of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere on our own. This could be done, they say, by sending up an eighteen-mile-long hose: “For anyone who loves cheap and simple solutions, things don’t get much better.”

Those super freaks have forgotten that Anthropogenic Global Warming warms up only the lower troposphere, while it cools the stratosphere. In the mimicking-volcanoes scheme, the stratosphere is cooled even more, which may well have unforeseen consequences, such as augmenting ozone losses through cold chemistry (ozone blocks Ultra Violet light, which sterilizes life, all of life, including oxygen producing plankton, so actually the sulfate scheme would make a bad situation with the oceans worse…this remark is a world first, to my knowledge, by the way: differently from Levitt and Dubner, I am scientifically trained, math and physics.)

Neither Levitt, an economist, nor Dubner, a journalist, has any training in climate science—or, for that matter, in any science of any kind. It’s their contention that they don’t need it. The whole conceit behind “SuperFreakonomics” and, before that, “Freakonomics,” which sold some four million copies, is that a dispassionate, statistically minded thinker can find patterns and answers in the data that those who are emotionally invested in the material will have missed. (The subtitle of “Freakonomics,” published in 2005, is “A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything.”)

Now, of course super freaking idiots do not need any background in anything, as long as they make money, and yield influence, because super freaking idiocy is better produced that way, knowing nothing about everything, and super proud of it: see Hitler and Heidegger (both of whom were super freaking thinking idiots). OK, this is violent language, but do not forget that the thought system pushed by Levitt and Dubner may cause the death of billions, making them an order of magnitude worse than the likes of Hitler and Heidegger. Shocking, but true. And by the way homicidal violence can only be vanquished by greater force.

Read more: http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2009/11/16/091116crbo_books_kolbert?currentPage=all#ixzz0WduzbRVr

2) Addendum on Pascal’s moral deficiency: I will not make here a wild attack on Pascal’s wager itself, since I just used it cynically… But let’s say that ethically speaking, some interpretation of it can be made that does not wash. Indeed Pascal’s deity is fundamentally malevolent (because if one does not believe in it, one gets to burn forever). So to believe the way Pascal does is to give in to malevolence.

CALIFORNIA, SINKING, CAN’T BE GOVERNED. THE USA, DREAMING, IS NOT FAR BEHIND.

Paul Krugman, in "Paranoia Strikes Deep (New York Times, Nov. 8), feels that the Californian global failure could propagate to the rest of the USA (part of his work in reproduced in the Annex below).

California used to be America’s America. California used to be the dream, the world’s dream, it’s turning into a nightmare, the world’s nightmare, where the hyper rich builds hyper yachts, and orders the government around to pay lower taxes, while the rest of society falls into a bottomless pothole.

When California elected one more republican disaster governor, the first, and defining move of that actor was to terminally gut California’s fiscal structure by removing a crucial tax on automobiles. As it turned out, that fiscal potholes was exactly big enough to have California sink into it in 2009. But never mind: the terminator-governor owned two dozen giant trucks for his own personal entertainment. Entertaining celebrities is big business in California. meanwhile, the gov and his republican cohorts gutted the budget of the University of California (whose Berkeley campus is one of the top three in the world, according to Shanghai).

California used to have the best school system in the USA, at a time when the USA had the top school system in the world. Now California has the worst school system in the USA, and the school system of the USA is in free fall. Some polls say that most Americans think that they used to share their lives with dinosaurs, and it sure increasingly looks that way.

How did California sink? Taxes (not enough). Expenses (too much of the extravagant, useless, feel-good, long term stupid type). I claim that the common cause of this has been the failure of the thinking process. Too much new Age, not enough Think Age.

Krugman does not analyze the causality behind the Californian mental collapse. That we will presently evoke.

Too many years were spent playing up the irrational side. They have led to poor schools, and an increasing inability to think enough to keep society on an optimal trajectory. Once that will is gone, where does the republic go? What holds it up?

The noblest and more characteristic function of human beings is thinking, and this rests on the capability and inclination to make logical arguments. But guess what? "To argue" is a sin in the USA, or at least so say the usage which is commonly made these days of the American language, something used all the time by Americans. it is as if, every day, Americans said to themselves, and others, that is bad to think.

So it is time to go back to the essentials, the exact opposite of what was instilled in recent decades. Those are taught at the age of two. Lesson number one at age two ought to be: thinking is good, and it rests on the capability of making cogent arguments.

The present government of the USA, went all out to save its "friends". Semantics matter; "friends" was the term used by Obama speaking of his self described "friends" Jamie Dimon, or Warren Buffet. So the government of the USA went all out to save its friends. The government did not bother to go through "Congress", the national assembly. The government of the USA saved the banksters, by throwing to them all the capital that could be found. Thus, there was not much more capital that could be borrowed, and the "stimulus", the capital to save the economy, was the object of a lengthy national debate, and came out much smaller. This enormous capital offered to banksters, as the rest of the economy was deprived of it is now paid at the cost of considerable unemployment.

In a way, feeding the most corrupt and incompetent bankers ever seen, and, so doing, starving the general economy was a sort of insanity of the leadership. This lamentable example, from the Federal government itself, does not help. Limbaugh or Beck, two showmen of the right, are not in power. Obama and his self described "friend", Jamie Dimon (Daemon?) are. And they have sunk the economy, forgetting that is the branch they sit on. how rational is that?

When California started to go down, Californians did not think that the abysmal decisions they were taking mattered, because, and they still think this, California could not, cannot go down.

So what to do? Try to explain to Americans what is happening to their country, and their minds. it is not easy: the hubris is considerable: the latest batch of Nobel Prizes, most of them "Americans" (born overseas, attracted by money).

Meanwhile, Europe has got to lead, in the realm of deep ideas, and correct emotions. After all, with its 18 trillion (real) dollar GDP, the European Union does not have to take orders from Washington, its wasting characteristics, and its decaying economy. It is ironical that France’s and Germany’s conservative governments are pursuing genuinely social policies, much more to the left, and much more to the right (in a good way) than the policies of the USA. It is also ironical that, although the preceding leadership of the USA violated international law (by using torture by ordering it from the top, something the Nazis never dare to do), it is the French leadership which is on trial, by French justice, for reasons American justice could never see (because American politicians are given immunity by their successors, one of the rare American traditions still in force).

***

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

***

Annex. KRUGMAN’S FEAR OF CALIFORNIA DISEASE: "If the G.O.P. essentially shrinks down to a rump party across America, the country could become ungovernable in the midst of a continuing economic disaster… with the rise of Ronald Reagan: Republican politicians began to win elections in part by catering to the passions of the angry right.

Until recently, however, that catering mostly took the form of empty symbolism. Once elections were won, the issues that fired up the base almost always took a back seat to the economic concerns of the elite. Thus in 2004 George W. Bush ran on antiterrorism and “values,” only to announce, as soon as the election was behind him, that his first priority was changing Social Security.

But something snapped last year. Conservatives had long believed that history was on their side[...] After the Democratic sweep, however, extremists could no longer be fobbed off with promises of future glory.

In fact, the party of Limbaugh and Beck could well make major gains in the midterm elections [...] they feed the base’s frenzy instead of trying to curb or channel it[...] So all the old restraints are gone. The Obama administration’s job-creation efforts have fallen short, so that unemployment is likely to stay disastrously high through next year and beyond. The banker-friendly bailout of Wall Street has angered voters, and might even let Republicans claim the mantle of economic populism. Conservatives may not have better ideas, but voters might support them out of sheer frustration… what has already happened in California could happen at the national level. In California, the G.O.P. has essentially shrunk down to a rump party with no interest in actually governing — but that rump remains big enough to prevent anyone else from dealing with the state’s fiscal crisis. If this happens to America as a whole, as it all too easily could, the country could become effectively ungovernable in the midst of an ongoing economic disaster.

The point is that the takeover of the Republican Party by the irrational right is no laughing matter. Something unprecedented is happening here — and it’s very bad for America."

***

And bad for the planet, because what is bad for America, is bad for the planet.

***

WHEN PIRATES ARE IN POWER, DOWN IS UP, AND ANYTHING GOES.

Something we have hammered for years. Paul Krugman points out that: "…Advanced economies actually grew faster in the era before modern finance took hold. There have been assertions that it was all about rebuilding from the war, or that the picture looks very different if you look at per capita real GDP, with some flat assertions that if you look at the numbers right growth has been better since 1980s.

Um, no.

Take the United States, which wasn’t damaged in the war. Take per capita real GDP. Give hostages by taking data from 1950 to 1980, which means including the 1980 recession, but stopping at 2007, so that the current slump isn’t included. Then here’s what you get:

Growth in per capita real GDP from 1950 to 1980: 2.2 percent per year
Growth in per capita real GDP from 1980 to 2007: 2.0 percent per year

Oh, and if we look at real median family income instead, we get:

Growth from 1950 to 1980: 2.3 percent per year
Growth from 1980 to 2007: 0.7 percent per year

Sorry: there’s no measure I can think of by which the U.S. economy has done better since 1980 than it did over an equivalent time span before 1980. It may be something you’ve heard, it may be something you’d like to believe, but it just didn’t happen."

And of course the GDP growth from 1980 on was polluted by the metastatic growth of financial sector piracy. By that token, the GDP of the Caribbean augmented enormously when the pirates took over in the seventeenth century: after all piracy and its innovations, like finance and its "innovations" are a form of frantic activity, and if one decides to measure that proudly instead of the rest, this can grow instead of the rest. For decades the pirates of the Caribbean played government against government, nation against nation, same as today with financial pirates. When the real economy of the Caribbean region fell apart, the governments finally took concerted action: laws were changed, justice was enforced, the pirates were arrested, and many were hanged.

That was nice. Now, what about getting the governments together, change the laws, and send some of the financial pirates to jail?

What some finance and economy professors and other critters serving the oligarchy claim not to understand is that the pathetically low growth of the median income proves that the financial sector sucked up way too much of financial capital. In the present, grotesquely undemocratic fractional banking system, it’s the banks themselves which create most of the money, and then, in an obvious conflict of interest, decide who gets the money. To stabilize this outrage through carefully tuned influence peddling, they then take political manipulators such as Rahm Emanuel, and give him quickly 16 million dollars in two years, so he would know, and let it be known, who the true masters are (then he can teach his friend Obama).

Democracy is clearly at bay. The financial sector is sucking most of mother’s milk of free economy, capital, become it controls, it has become the mother itself. But, fundamentally, whereas the economy needs shoemakers, it does not need financiers. finance ought to be just a trusty communication device between savers and entrepreneurs. so finance is servant of the economy, not its master. a fortiori, finance ought not to be the master of the democracy. but when finance is the greatest contributor to the democracy’s elected representatives, when finance is therefore buying itself a democracy, things have got out of control.

The "democratic" governor of New Jersey, Corzine, just thrown out by voters, used to be CEO of Goldman Sachs. His right hand man was Paulson (who succeeded Corzine as the next CEO of Goldman Sachs). Paulson, with Geithner (Obama treasury man), was the main architect of the Bush-Obama plan of sending all the disposable cash of the USA to the world’s richest men, so that they can stay in control. Why? because as long as the fat cats big bankers control all, the rotten politicians, already rich, and soon to be much more so, can stay on their future payrolls.

One cannot sweep things under the rug, and shrug that, if Americans want to stay oppressed by their plutocrats, and the oligarchy connected to them, that the business of the USA. A century ago something similar developed and the possessing elites were favorable to a big distraction, a mighty source of profits, and comforting for most of the worldwide oligarchic system (or so most oligarchies hoped at the time). That distraction came to be called the First World War. Socialists, in France and Germany (among other places) came to see it that way, and tried to stop the war, by calling for a strike instead. Jaures, prestigious leaders of the French socialists was assassinated, though, and the World War started a few days later. Although it is true that the fascist Prussian generals who decided to assault the world, had a mind of their own, the oligarchies in Europe, and especially in Germany, viewed the socialists as a greater danger than the nominal enemy.

An amusing proof of this is the defeat of France in May-June 1940. Although the Nazis lost 2,000 planes (!), their Luftwaffe was able to acquire control of the skies. How? The French had plenty of state of the art fighter planes, several hundreds of them, equal to the very best that the Nazis had, which were not engaged, at a time where every single supremacy fighter counted. They were not engaged, because they were not armed. They were not armed, because the political powers that be did not trust the workers with the heavy guns needed to arm the planes…

Iraq, Iran, and Afghanistan are obvious distractions. More damage is made to the strategic supremacy of the USA by the pathetic spectacle of the Wall Street government in Washington.

Obama has not decreased the military spending and augmented the adventurism in Afghanistan, hoping for a while that technology (drones) would replace ideas.

Let’s leave the final word to the Macroeconomics blog:

Just look at the red line of the “Not In Labor Force”:

That hasn’t happened, as I reproduce again in this chart:

The "Not In Labor Force" graph is worse:

This graph continues to accelerate in a near-parabolic rise since June.  In the history of the data available for this series, unfortunately only back to 1999, this has never before happened.

Our government, by choosing to protect the oligarchs and banksters instead of allowing the market to force the bad debt out into the open where it defaults has chosen to saddle our nation’s citizens with unconscionable and unsustainable debt loads, both at a government and personal level.  This was a critical error and, as I expected and predicted, it is now being reflected directly into the employment situation.

I would add this: it is not just a question of debt, a notion that strikes the future, and attacks the dollar, but of MISASSIGNEMENT OF CAPITAL. That, the latest notion, is why the unemployment rate is skyrocketing up, right now.

I have been saying this, I have been fulminating against this, much more than a year ago when the Geithner-Paulson plan, of saving Wall Street and losing democracy got enacted. Some day it will be known as the Bush-Obama strategy of Wall Street first. The Macroeconomics blog also shows that the latest GDP numbers are not what they look like: they actually mask a dramatic deterioration of the financial situations of individuals.

Can Obama back off? Well, first he would have to understand that there is a problem. But he can’t, because he does not have the philosophical background. It’s simple, though: if you save your financials when they got metastatic, you lose the patient. Does not matter how many health bills you pass.

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

OR THE EMPIRE OF BUSINESS?

A US president famously uttered that:"The business of America is business."

In contrast, the old (US president) Monroe doctrine (1823) has been presented as "América para los americanos", meaning: the Americas (north, central, and south) for the USA. The fact is, as it is, the USA is the greatest imperial military power that ever was, with considerable armed forces all around the world. It may be argued that the worldwide power of USA based corporations, and supply chains directed towards the USA, go a long way to explain the riches of said USA.

Instead, those partial to the might of the finance industry of the USA, argue that the power of the USA comes from its Ayn Rand character, of private entrepreneurship, muscularly envisioning and building a better world.

As Sherry Jarrell, a finance professor, puts it in "Learning from Dogs": "The reason the U.S. economy is as strong and vibrant as it is is because of our labor market, our capital market, and free enterprise. These markets are supported by the legal and regulatory systems that define the rules of the game; they are damaged when the government steps in and tries to play the game or change the outcome of the game."

Sure. But who invented the game? The government, also known as the democracy. And who allows the children to play their game in their playground? The government, also known as the democracy.

In any case, the assertion that the “US economy is strong and vibrant” needs to be stridently revised. I have long lived in the San Francisco Bay Area (where I am thoroughly familiar, not to say familial, with the university and venture capital system). More recently, I have been residing in the French Alps. One cannot compare the strength and vibrancy of the French economy, where everything gets done, with that of California, where everything seems, weak, decaying, falling apart, and crucial elements of society seem on their way out.

At this point Northern Italy and the parts of France I have seen resemble construction sites, and one does not need SUVs to go around because there are so many potholes (as is the case in California). The French know how to dig deep and repair roads with high quality materials.

But of course road repair is government financed, even in the USA, therefore worthless according to Wall Street profiteers: if people cannot stand the potholes, the Wall Street types seem to be saying, let them all buy Porsche Cayenne Turbo: after all access to cheap oil is financed by the Pentagon!

In the SF Bay, the state (overseeing) and its private contractors are still trying to replace the main bridge since …1989. The most important bridge there was damaged in a quake, and nearly collapsed in the SF Bay. Said bridge is supported by rotting firs (!), stuck in Bay mud, screwed together with rusting bolts, ready to snap.

This happy crew, of state supervising, and private contractors contracting, are still at it, forever building that bridge, an apparently insurmountable task for their incomparable incompetence. The fact that the bridge is built in China may explain some of the problem. Strong and vibrant China is, no doubt. But it is a zero sum game: strong and vibrant there, to do that particular job, and it means it does not get done somewhere else. Apparently another insurmountable piece of logic for Wall Street, its minions, and servants.

The French built the world’s tallest bridge in three years, a few years ago, with a freeway on top (the five kilometer long Viaduc de Millaut, built by Vinci, a private contractor). The bridge elements were built in France, on the spot, not in China. Industry is not all about financial tricks to make Wall Street critters richer, it’s also about common sense: build the USA in China, and, instead of “comparative advantage”, you will get the USA to become a colony of China. You don’t get “comparative advantage”, you get comparative decay.

The Chinese imperial state understood this perfectly well went it refused to allow the free enterprise of the opium trade on its territory. Britain insisted. To force “freedom of enterprise” on China, France and Britain invaded it with their armies (enforcing the cultural exchange with the destruction of various architectural monuments, including the Summer Palace).

Here in La Salle Les Alpes, a village in the Alps, the city government decided a few months ago on a whole set of pharaonic projects, including replacing the local main bridge over the local Alpine river, one mile of re-made torrent, with Inca style stone blocks, and an impressive dam to slow down potential floods. All will be finished before the ski season. Nothing made in, or for China.

A lot of pro-plutocratic theoreticians in the USA do not seem to realize that their “level playing field for business and finance” is organized by the government of the USA. They do not seem to understand that the government, also known as the democracy, needs to be financed appropriately to make the sand box the financier and the entrepreneur play, possible at all. The French, though, have understood this since the 1600s. Some of the Americano-American debate on economics was word for word vocalized and written down in France in the 1600s. The dust has settled since, and the present pro-business, conservative government, just as the one in Germany, is practicing policies that are so much left wing, that they are unimaginable in the USA.

The USA has become increasingly an unreal place which has frequently assigned other parts to war, but was never visited seriously by war (except for the Civil War; 9/11 was just a minor scratch, relatively speaking). In France, people are still busy repairing damage from WWII, or from emergency measures, themselves damaging, taken as a result of WWII, and several other wars, before or since. Now the long term, sustainable, much more democratic European model is rising, and it seems much more competitive, strong, vibrant, just, free and equalitarian than the decomposing system in the USA.

It may be time for the USA to learn, from overseas, a few tricks it seems to have no conception of. And some integrity too. If the "game" organized by the government is biased in favor of a few particular individuals (as it is right now in the USA, be those individuals private-public politicians, or Big Bankers, friends and clients of the preceding, and vice versa), what has happened to democracy, equal opportunity, freedom, and the like?

What sort of integrity was it to give or lend or guarantee to Big Bankers so many trillion of dollars, without anything in return from them? Are the richest people in the USA so used to get money for nothing (thanks to a perverse tax structure, and decades of buying the most powerful politicians), that they cannot even say thank you?

People with a democratic and republican mind ought to ask these questions, instead of celebrating an incomparable rot.

Patrice Ayme

Abstract: Beyond the debate about the stimulus in the USA, the real question is:"Who is the boss?" What is the best method of governance? Can the economy do better with a measure of public thinking? A bit of public planning, for the vision thing, the French way, or only just the entrepreneur-hero, a la Ayn Rand? Rand is found in this essay to be naive, even self contradictory, since, from her own exalted definition, her ultimate role model ought to be Joseph Stalin, precisely who she escaped with her body… but, I would propose, not her mind.

Moreover Rand’s entrepreneur-hero has been swallowed, as Gold Man Sacks. Time for a re-think.

***

Recent US GDP numbers show that the slide of the USA into a clear and present economic disaster has stopped, no doubt thanks to Obama’s rather small stimulus (small, once one has considered the cuts in states’ spending). The idea of that Obama stimulus was, indeed, to stop the slide into the abyss. But the idea was never to learn to climb out, of the abyss. As Paul Krugman points out, "if we take 3rd quarter growth to be more or less equivalent to average Clinton-era growth, even after 8 years of growth at that rate we’d only expect unemployment to have fallen from the current 9.8% to a still uncomfortably high 6.3%. It would take us around a decade to reach more or less full employment [...] that’s well into President Palin’s second term."

The USA is controlled by abyssal, not to say abysmal, critters: they like it down there, in the dark, obscurely financing their dark politicians, somberly advancing their entangled "derivative" plots and variously related conspiracies.

Its leaders want to think of the USA as an Ayn Rand society, where the entrepreneur is supposed to create all that be. Ayn Rand, a philosopher popular in the USA, was an ersatz of Nietzsche rendered innocuous enough for usage by the Chamber of Commerce (she has enthusiastic followers, such as Alan Greenspan, the ex Fed chief, full of bubbles in the shallows of his mind).

One difficulty of the Ayn Rand vision is that without capital, the entrepreneur is nothing, because he cannot do anything. He is at best an engine, without fuel. Then the entrepreneur has to meekly pray on his knees that he will be noticed by his one and only one jealous, greedy and unpredictable God, the Big Banker, who is Too-Big-To-Fail, and Goldman Sachs is its prophet,

Peace be Upon Them. But of course Big Banker does not need the entrepreneur anymore: he can call the White House and the Fed, and bark out orders to manipulate both the markets, and the capital he disposes of, which, as it turned out, is all the capital there is.

As Ayn Rand put it:"I am not primarily an advocate of capitalism, but of egoism; and I am not primarily an advocate of egoism, but of reason. If one recognizes the supremacy of reason and applies it consistently, all the rest follows."

Rand conveniently overlooked the fact that the Big Bankers would end up crushing everybody and everything with the supremacy of their own selfish reason. Rand should have known better. Of her real name Alisa Rosenbaum, Rand had fled Stalin. Stalin started his career by stealing banks at the head of an extremely heavily armed gang (the money fed the Bolshevik party). Stalin ended up being the world’s largest banker, since he controlled all the capital of the Soviet Union, all by himself.

According to Rand, the essence of her philosophy, which she somewhat deviously called "objectivism" is "the concept of man as a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life, with productive achievement as his noblest activity, and reason as his only absolute." Stalin fit that definition perfectly.

Since Rand held that the only moral social system is "laissez-faire capitalism", this ought to be a wake-up call for those that consider that Rand makes sense, and, or, that it is moral to be opposed to democratic government… which is what they are doing when they claim that one should let the Big Bankers laissez-faire whatever they want with capital… because, as it turns out, Big Bankers control all and any capital. Democracy has fallen into an abyss dug by the Big Banker as "a heroic being, with his own happiness as the moral purpose of his life".

To climb out of the Big Banker abyss, the US government, supposedly by the People, and for the People, should keep the economy from falling back into the pattern of a few unelected, incompetent Big Bankers taking all the decisions, enjoying all the profits, suffering none of the consequences, and being replenished by taxpayers’ money each time they suffer a loss (so that they can keep making campaign contributions and pay for the politicians’ "talent", as soon as the later stop "serving" the nation, and start splurging for themselves.) Since said Big Bankers take all the decisions, and their servants in Washington just implement them, no change has happened that Big Bankers could not believe in.

The debate about the principle and interest of a stimulus is a debate about central planning by elected public officials, versus private development planned by Goldman Sachs, for Goldman Sachs, and for those who pull Goldman Sachs’ strings. (Here "Goldman Sachs" is an all too real euphemism for politically connected individuals who their lackeys in government allow to control and create the nation’s capital.)

France, with its three trillion dollar GDP, has resisted the crisis better than any other large economy. Not by accident. The French socioeconomic model has become very different from that of the present day USA: the short term French stimulus was augmented by a medium term, and then a long term stimulus. (The short term stimulus is publicly financed, longer term ones are increasingly public-private partnerships, where the government’s role is to facilitate private investment in projects that elected officials, and other democratic institutions, plus the People in general, view as of public interest. An example of long term stimulus are the Greater Paris plan, with a giant, fast, automatic 24/7 subway, supposed to break ground in 2012, or various, and many very high speed rail, or nuclear plants, or investment in various physical plants, etc. France will finance some by a National Emprunt.)

Now, of course, France is not on the radar of the officials of the USA; it is the bad example, better forgotten as totally irrelevant (lest it be reclaimed by the American populace).

So GDP grew over a quarter at a 3.5% annual rate, no doubt mightily helped by the financial sector. But GDP Growth is relative to population growth: if the later increases fast, the former needs to grow just as fast, just to stay still. The population of the USA is still skyrocketing: it’s now 307 million, it was just 300 million two years ago (source: CIA). So the GDP number, in the case of the USA, ought to be replaced by the GDP per person.

A lot of the GDP growth in the USA having to do with financial growth (which means nothing to those who don’t get financial bonuses, 99.995% of the population), how is that sort of "growth" to be distinguished from the metastatic growth of anthropologically useless financial "derivatives"? I want to know: "Collaterized Debt Obligations Squared", anybody? Of course no one knows what a "Collaterized Debt Obligation" is, and, a fortiori, a CDO of a CDO, which is what a "CDO Squared" is. Rest assured: it can be way worse: Big bankers have invented "CDO Cubes", the CDO of the CDO of the CDO. The Big Banker is a big hero, and you are a Big Zero. Keep on voting for your dark politicians.

"CDO Squareds" and various even more grotesque "derivatives", that is a lot of what the USA produces nowadays. Rest reassured: it produces increasingly less of everything else. Only American style financiers can buy those "[products" and "financial innovations" from American style financiers, and they have no collateral (Why? Because the total market of derivatives being 800 trillions, 40 times world GDP, no real collateral for these financial notions is imaginable).

Because the best and brightest have been detoured towards organized finance, there has been increasingly precious little best and brightest for any other activity, thus the expertise of the USA in non-finance has faltered. The miserable nightmare called the "Dreamliner" illustrates this best.

What an example indeed. Plane making is a master economic activity, because it leads thousands of the most high tech subcontracting technologies, from energy, to material science, to software or the most sophisticated electronics. The democratic allies won the war against Hitler by bombing his mad kingdom to the point that one million soldiers were manning anti aircraft guns, and still all the Nazi industry had to go underground, or hide in small units in the forest, and, or be destroyed (which it mostly was). In Japan, the US Army ran out of objectives to bomb. Boeing produced thousands of superb bombers, during that war, so mighty and fast, they could fly over Japan without escort. Fast forward 65 years: financiers have done what the fascists could not do, they have conquered Boeing, and hold it captive in Chicago.

To make planes, a company such as Boeing now contracts with the entire planet, especially with Japan and Europe, where the know-how of the real world is (remember, the USA specializes in the "derivative" world).

Boeing wings come from Japan. Huge parts of the 787 aircraft’s body arrive from Italy. Britain delivers engines, and China contributes rudders. France is producing the (carbon fiber) landing gear, doors, glass cockpit, and overall design software ("Catia"). It’s estimated that close to 70 percent of the 787 "Dreamliner" is a dream built outside the United States. That means fewer than 1000 jobs in Puget Sound to assemble the new jetliner (Boeing used to be based in Seattle).

Clearly the "Dreamliner" has become a nightmare for US workers. And it should be a nightmare for prudent and patriotic Americans: do they really want to depend upon the French for airframes in the near future? (Of course depending upon the French would be like depending upon the mother country, it is not a problem; but the USA has only one mother, and depending upon other countries than France, could be a strategic disaster; France knows that there are strategic industries, and acts accordingly.)

Instead of the real world, the USA is becoming expert at the Goldman Sachs world. That American world has become derivative, instead of integral (this is an insider joke for those who know rudiments of calculus, as a few Americans may still do outside of Wall Street).

To insist that private individuals, unelected and incompetent, known as the Big Bankers, who, like God, are too "big to fail", will solve all the problems of the USA, as the present US government persists to believe, requires, first of all, to suspend a healthy sense of reality, and then to leave the US interest rates so low for so long that they will discourage the dozen of millions of would be savers out there in the USA. Then who is supposed to save to finance the USA? The Chinese? How patriotic is such as plot? Why does the USA thinks China is propping up the USA? Because China, differently, from Ayn Rand, is intensely altruistic? Or is it because China has a plan? What would be more normal, for China to have a plan about what to do with the USA, for a country that makes detailed economic and social plans, all the time, and stick to them? Is China crafty like a fox, while the USA is disorganized like a chicken?

If the organization of the economy, and society of the USA, sounds like a mess, it is because it is one: a few individuals, notoriously incompetent, unelected, all no doubt laureates of the Nobel Prize in Greed, for their impudence while robbing the planet, are driving the "changes they can believe in", or rather the lack thereof. The Big Bankers are the best example of this species. But they are not the only one. A good example is the health care debate, where "progress" could happen only if profiteers were promised they would profit some more (so this is the only aspect of health care "improvement" one can be sure of, and polls show that the American People is wise to that, hence the low popularity of the proposed Obamacare, which will force all Americans to fork money over to private insurers, if a "public option" does not pass.)

It is certain that the USA needs to change development models, from hoping that private initiative, and greed, will be enough to organize the entire society, to a touch of central planning, and public empathy, helping the private sector to get focused as needed.

Public planning, and public socio-economic engineering are not un-American. It used to be the case, say under Teddy Roosevelt (who broke the firms that were too "big to fail"), or Franklin Roosevelt (who prevented the banks from playing Wall Street with the public’s money, something reverted by Clinton, Summers and Geithner), or even under republican president Eisenhower (the Interstate freeway system of the USA was a government program, that is a stimulus program, apparently inspired by the earlier German one; in France, "freeways" were developed instead by the private sector, encouraged by the state, and so are not "free"). Of course Johnson created Medicare, etc. That was the good old USA, not in any sense very different from, say, hmm, the French republic. Some of what plutocratic propaganda nowadays views as "European" welfare was actually implemented in the USA first.

If the People of the USA, and its elected representatives, regained control of economic planning and capital, economic growth could be torn away from the casino in the sky of Wall Street, and its unregulated "derivatives", and economic growth could be instead concentrated where the People and the country needs it, in the real world, instead of the derivative world.

Such a stimulation of the real economy would also allow to bring interest rates up, since they are presently exaggeratedly low. Non-existent interest rates for saving accounts punishes savers, aka average Americans, and especially retirees, while punishing the prospects of the workers. Near zero interest rates also risk the danger of a run on the dollar. A run on the dollar is an increasing risk, as the USA is increasingly losing its industrial edge, meaning that the economy of the USA has ever fewer added value goods to sell as the dollar goes down, thus preventing an automatic stabilization of the currency (as foreigners would purchase American goods, which they cannot do, if such do not exist).

As it is, the economic system of the USA has socialism, and even social welfare, for the biggest and the ugliest, those who are free to create and dispose of the capital of the entire nation (not to say the world). That would not be Ayn Rand’s proverbial entrepreneurs, creators armed with visions, as she naively hoped, in another age, but the Big Ugly Bad Bankers, armed with all the world capital, which they just stole, before losing it all, and then stealing it all over again, drunk on greed.

When the Big Ugly Bad Bankers lose it all, the US government grabs, from average Americans, from taxes and borrowing in their name from other nations, all the capital that the ex-capitalists just lost, and reinstates them precipitously in their capitalist role, same as they had before. It’s communism for capitalists, and exploitation for everybody else, and everything else, and, first of all, for the future, including that of the entire planet.

At least Stalin had one good excuse: he knew the Soviet Union would be, within a decade or two, the object of an exterminating attack. So he mobilized all its capital, and his associates and victims with and below him, knew this analysis was cogent enough, with stakes high enough, so they let him get away with it. Notice too that Stalin’s fundamental emotional drive could be viewed as altruistic: saving the Soviet Union. Today’s Gold Men sack everybody for no reason in particular, except that they own the world. Always had, always will. Starting with the White House, and its dark pursuits.

As Meyer Rothschild (a made up name from "Red Shield"), creator of the fractional reserve central banking system put it:"Let me control the money of a nation and I care not who makes its laws." But then what? At least the bandit Stalin or his colleagues, such as Lenin or Trotsky, had higher purposes. But the greedy financiers have none beyond financial greed. When they, and only they, drive the investment policy of a nation, financial greed is all there is in that nation’s future, and that is not enough, as the USA will find, soon enough.

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

Roger Cohen compares the fall of the Wall, the "Iron Curtain", across Europe in 1989, and the revolution that-was-not this year in Iran. Cohen ponders events driven by systems of thought:

"In 1989, the revolutionary year, the Tiananmen Square massacre happened in Beijing and, five months later, the division of Europe ended with the fall of the Wall in Berlin. Could it have been otherwise? Might China have opened to greater democracy while European uprisings were shot down? "

No. These things do not happen by accident. When the proto-revolutionary American leaders went to Paris, in the 18th century, they learned by the feet of the Enlightenment (itself partially a product of the English "Glorious Revolution", itself in turn the fruit of a long democratic process in England and France which had its root in Rome, Greece, even Phocea…).

American leaders were told, by the police of the French Ancient Regime, that slavery was not lawful in France, that they had to free and pay their slaves minimum wage. Thus, when France was shaken later by a tremendous revolution, going much further than the English one, and the American one, it ought to have been no surprise: even under the French Ancient Regime, the system of thought in force was more advanced than anywhere else, including the USA.

Thought systems tell people what to think, what to feel, what to expect, what to be. People learn, and follow.

Relative to the advanced system of thought Europe had known, the Stalinist system imposed on Eastern Europe was incredibly primitive, and intolerably rapacious. It was an anachronism, and an exploitation. In the Middle East Islam is not viewed as the anachronism it is, and the exploitation of the many by the few that it is, and can only be. Cohen overlooks this when he says: "Iran is experiencing a brutal clampdown, but memories of 1989 suggest that the dam must break when a repressive regime and the society it rules march in opposite directions."

In China, the repression in 1989 worked, because the communist leadership of the People’s republic was not anachronistic, relative to the history of China. It was a relative advance, of civilization. The argument could be made that it was primordial for China not to fall into the anarchy, and primitivism of the past, and keep on developing as fast as possible under various Western European thought systems (at least four of them: technical and scientific development, communism, Colbert (French) like central economic planning, and free enterprise capitalism). To force onto China Western European thought systems that it was deeply foreign to, ever since Confucius, 26 centuries before, required pretty ferocious methods (and thus it is a meta argument in favor of the People’s republic political system; India had been much more in contact with Europe, ever since the early Greeks, so democracy is much more natural there.)

A society thinks according to the system of thought it uses. Left to their own instruments, evolutions of societies are all about the systems of thought they use. The system of thought of the so called "communist" Eastern European LEADERSHIP was fully self contradictory: supposedly it served the People, such was its fundamental axiom. So how could the "communist" leadership prevent the People to walk, if the People wanted to walk? The East European crowd’s thought system had no such contradiction, though: since the official socialist system was supposed to serve them, they wanted to serve themselves accordingly. So they walked. What were the leaders going to say, to try to contradict them?

The present Iranian thought system is an obvious contradiction onto itself: it wants to be medieval, superstitious and fascist (because it follows the Qur’an to the letter, and so are many of the fundamental statements in the 400 pages Qur’an). But Iran also claims to be a "republic". Res-publica: the public -thing. But only professionals can interpret the sacred writings, not the "public". Hence the so called Iranian republic is also a theocracy, where professional specialists of the study of God have an oversight position.

Iran is equipped with a fascist, non publicly elected leadership made of Shiite Muslim priests, one them being the "supreme leader" (chief of the armed forces), a "council of Guardians", and an "Assembly of Experts". I call them "priests" just as I would call Aztecs religious professionals "priests". Nothing mistaken or biased there (I know perfectly well that Muslim propaganda claims that nothing stands between man and God, so there are no "priest" in Islam, they claim, to try to distinguish themselves from the Medieval Christian Inquisition; this claim does not resist the simplest of observations).

In any case, once the public uses in its mind the Quranist thought system, in its Shia variant, to the letter, that is, a thought system which is, among other things, superstitious and fascist, how could it become democratic and rational? It would be as if one could be a sincere Nazi, and then claim to be a democrat (this is not an insult, but a description of fact: Hitler knew Islam very well, and was inspired by it, or at least so he claimed explicitly).

The "communist" Wall in Europe was bound to fall, because not just of the self contradictions of the thinking of the pseudo "socialist" system, but also from the fact that its most fundamental axioms were supposedly rational and democratic.

Thus the repression of the most primitive communist leaders kept on going down in the intensity of its ferocity. Germany, however culprit, was treated in an abominable way by the "communist" and Stalinist leadership during and after the fall of the Nazis. But then, of course, Stalinist leadership was in charge, with the explicit approval of the leadership of the USA (Roosevelt gave half of Europe to Stalin at the Yalta conference).

Soviet tanks in Hungary killed 40,000 in 1956, with more or less explicit American approbation. In 1968, a similar scenario in Czechoslovakia was much milder: only 72 killed. Moreover the Soviet invasion force was invading a fellow communist country, led by communists: Dubcek, who led Czechoslovakia, was the leader of the communist party. Dubcek had gone to the end of the logic of the fundamental axioms of the communist system, and was serving the People. Whereas the invader, Brezhnev, was contradicting these fundamental axioms, an UNSUSTAINABLE logic.

As long as the fundamental axioms of the Iranian thought system come from an analphabetic culturally challenged epileptic desert bandit thriving 14 centuries ago in the desiccated wilds, it will be friendly to Ayatollahs, and not to republican, democratic, secular, rational, informed politics. The very fact that the opponents to the Ayatollahs rally with the cry:"God is great!" show that there is no hope: they do not even know that religion is central to the repression they whine under. Let the raiders of the lost desert take care.

In 132 BC, having supported the revolt led by Aristonicus against the Romans, the Greek city-state of Phocaea was saved from destruction thanks to the intercession of Massilia, the Roman republic’s oldest ally. Massilia had been founded as a Phocean colony in southern France, six centuries before. Phoceea, the modern Foca (Fossa), is in present day Turkey. To this day, this vast history is part of the system of thought of Western Europe: thus empathy, freedom, republican principles have been long anchored in the collective semi conscious. Of Europeans.

To this day, Marseille remembers, and celebrates its Phocean origin. In the same area as Phocea, 500 kms to the south-east, the country of Phrygia long maintained its independence (1200 BCE to 600 BCE), and so its characteristic red bonnet became the symbol of liberty, worn by Macedonians, Thracians, and later freed slaves in republican Rome. Eighteen centuries later, American and especially French revolutionary would wear the Phrygian "liberty cap", a red bonnet worn forward, ubiquitous in French republican iconography to this day. Meanwhile 12th century Normans had worn it, making their steel helmets in its shape, as they fought Islam all over Europe.

Thus freedom, revolt, republicanism, secularism, and not the mindless and obsequious adulation of the desert God, are mainstays of the European thought system. And deliberately, symbolically so. Not such an importance of liberty in Iran, and for Iranians. Who momentarily interrupted the independence of Phrygia? Well, Iranian Cimmerian invaders (circa 690 CE). But, beyond this, most Iranian religious holidays, to this day, are celebrations of their tremendous defeats and victimizations at the hands of (Sunni) Muslims. Celebrate torture and horror, rejoice in pain, and enjoy Ayatollahs! To each his own desire and must!

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

P/S 1: On Iran’s fascist theocratic leadership: The "Supreme Leader" is Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces, controls the military intelligence and security operations; and has sole power to declare war or peace. The heads of the judiciary, state radio and television networks, the commanders of the police and military forces and six of the twelve members of the Council of Guardians are appointed by the Supreme Leader. The Assembly of Experts comprises 86 "virtuous and learned" clerics elected by adult suffrage for eight-year terms. As with the presidential and parliamentary elections, the Council of Guardians determines candidates’ eligibility.

P/S 2: The French revolution of 1789 was very anti-clerical. Although the Ancient regime was not theocratic.

P/S 3: Oh, and when will Americans start to wear the red bonnet Phrygian cap again, to free themselves from Gold-Man Sacks? Stay tuned…

It is a curious thing to observe how far some humans will go to make themselves the center of attention. Maybe it’s out of cowardice. After all, to become the center of something, however illusory, allows to forget the fragility of the human condition.

A handful of top notch elite scientists can be found, who are among those who are skeptical about the fact that burning the fossil fuel accumulated in the last 400 million years is causing a dangerous warming of the climate. When one looks at their arguments, though, or even their graphs, one generally find obvious bias.

A preferred trick is to cut the graph depicting the concentration of CO2 at, say, 360 parts per million (ppm), when we are actually at 390 ppm! This has the undeniable advantage to mask the sort of exponential growth of atmospheric CO2 in the last few years…

(We now know that the CO2 concentration did not exceed 300 ppm for the last 15 million years, 150 meters to the left, at the scale of the graph above.)

A related trick of the deniers is to "forget" that man has generated a lot of gases which can be up to 10,000 times better than CO2 at blocking infrared light (a greenhouse consists into allowing visible light in, while blocking the light that heat makes, the infrared light; three large greenhouses are Mars, Earth, and Venus. Thus the heat gets trapped close to the ground, and the high atmosphere, now less warmed by infrared light on its way to space, cools down. Some ignorant fools have heard of that cooling, and screamed that it proved that there was no greenhouse, whereas, it is expected, and proves the exact opposite!).

When one is considering the man made greenhouse, one has therefore to also include these gases and evaluate their contribution to the greenhouse. For example, the Greenhouse Warming Potential for methane over 100 years is 25 and for nitrous oxide 298. This means that emissions of 1 million metric tons of methane and nitrous oxide respectively warm up the lower atmosphere as much as the emissions of 25 and 298 million metric tons of carbon dioxide, over the following century. Perfluorocarbons (CFCs) are the worst. They are used in refrigeration. The most frequent is tetrafluoromethane. Its GWP is 6,500 times that of CO2. The GWP of hexafluoroethane is 9,200 times that of carbon dioxide. (Over ten years, the GWP of methane is 100 times that of CO2, I know you wanted to know…)

In any case we are around 450 ppm in CO2 equivalent (the exact number is fiercely debated, and irrelevant, because the yearly augmentation is so fast)… We started from 280 ppm of CO2 equivalent in 1850… At this rate, we will pass a DOUBLING within twenty years.

Recent research on marine fossils has allowed to find out the CO2 concentration over the last 20 million years: it never exceeded 300 ppm durably.

I would even go as far as saying that many papers in Nature and Science, when they deal about the climate, systematically underemphasize the danger we seem to be getting in. Typically the authors’ research reveals an ominous evolution, but, then, rather meek conclusions are drawn. There is no doubt an implicit pressure from the powers that be to not disrupt big business as usual, and climate scientists prefer to not bite the hand that feeds them (considering where the money, hence power, goes, that would be Goldman Sachs, or, at least, the fossil fuel/pollution establishment).

The IPCC, the world panel on "Climate Change" is the number one exhibit of meekness, and lack of common sense as far as viewing a "small" global temperature rise as tolerable.

The IPCC claims to believe that limiting the global temperature rise at 2 degrees Celsius would be fine. Instead, it would be a dangerous stupidity to approach a two degree Celsius global rise (yes, I thought carefully before using the word "stupidity": all alternatives were found wanting).

Indeed the whole problem is not to warm the poles, which constitute the planet air conditioning system. But most of the warming, so far, is at the poles, and it has already reached nearly 5 degrees Celsius in parts (the Antarctica peninsula, for example). But the global temperature rise, so far, is roughly ONLY one tenth of that. Scaling up, on present evidence, a global planetary rise of two degrees Celsius may mean a rise of twenty degrees Celsius in many glaciated polar areas (yes, a rise of 40 degrees Fahrenheit). So the poles would melt, and the Earth would lose its reflectors. Tipping points would tip, and things would get worse from there.

Many people, reading this, will scoff, and say that this will not happen, because it did not happen before. Paleontologically, this is not true: although there was no human industry to start a CO2 bubble, they have happened before (they can be generated by continental drift or super giant volcanic eruptions known as "traps")

Besides, it’s not all about "climate change". Half of the CO2 is presently dissolving in the oceans, so a rise of two degrees Celsius means extremely acid oceans (CO2 turns into carbonic acid after it reacts with water). At the present rate of acidification, marine life will dissolve big time by 2100. That’s how a lot of the oxygen is produced, by photosynthesizing unicellular animals, with acid sensitive skeletons.

Ah, also, just a reminder: some gigantic, and deep, parts of the oceans got too warm to contain enough oxygen to support life, and they have already died.

And yes, the oceans are rising, and the icecaps are melting, both in Greenland, and Antarctica: the rise of sea level is itself augmenting at the rate of 5% a year (as many facts in this post, this was published in summer or fall of this year, 2009). It’s an exponential.

Accelerating down. The trend line of Greenland ice mass (green) curves downward with time, suggesting that ice losses have been accelerating.

[Credit: Isabella Velicogna, geophysical research letters.]

The more fossil fuels burned, the more hot air, the less oxygen. But not to worry, American politicians will be pleased to inform you that their super private, super bank, the one which advises the White House always, and pays bonuses with taxpayer money, Goldman Sachs, will make a future oxygen market, and will sell it short. Trust American capitalism, White House style, to adapt. Down to the last gulp of air.

On a slightly more serious note, the expression "climate change" is thus a misnomer.

We are facing a man made collapse of the biosphere, just because full grown men want to keep on playing with fire. There ought to be an IPCB: Intergovernmental Panel on the Collapse of the Biosphere.

Patrice Ayme

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

***

Technical annex 1: To calculate the radiative forcing for a 1998 gas mixture, the IPCC in 2001 gave the radiative forcing (relative to 1750 CE) of various gases as: CO₂=1.46 (corresponding to a concentration of 365 ppm), CH₄=0.48, N₂O=0.15 and other minor gases =0.01 W/m2. The sum of these is 2.10 W/m2. One obtains CO₂ equivalent = 412 ppm. That was in 2001, we are in 2010 (about). CO2 concentration is now 290 ppm, which means that CO2 equivalent is above 440 ppm.

***

Technical annex 2: Quoting straight from Science: “Climate Change:
Fixing a Critical Climate Accounting Error.”

The accounting now used for assessing compliance with carbon limits in the Kyoto Protocol and in climate legislation contains a far-reaching but fixable flaw that will severely undermine greenhouse gas reduction goals (1). It does not count CO₂ emitted from tailpipes and smokestacks when bioenergy is being used, but it also does not count changes in emissions from land use when biomass for energy is harvested or grown. This accounting erroneously treats all bioenergy as carbon neutral regardless of the source of the biomass, which may cause large differences in net emissions. For example, the clearing of long-established forests to burn wood or to grow energy crops is counted as a 100% reduction in energy emissions despite causing large releases of carbon.

[Science 23 October 2009: Vol. 326. no. 5952, pp. 527 – 528.]

It is hard to believe that errors of such magnitude, committed by scientists (and implemented by the European Union and the US Congress) are not deliberate.

***

BEGGAR THY NEIGHBOR NOT, REWARD THE SAVERS, AND PLAN AHEAD.

(All policies the USA is NOT presently following.)

***

Abstract: I explain why the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) of the USA makes no sense, for several independent reasons. It robs US savers and retired people, feeds the robber barons of Wall Street and giant banks, causes an intolerable, and perilous devaluation of the US Dollar, a Beggar-Thy-Neighbor policy. But the worst of all is that the ZIRP implicitly says that the economic policy for the USA is the law of the Wall Street jungle. Not the best way to conduct civilization and to drive a modern economy, I assert, following countless economists ever since the French economy and finance minister Jean-Baptiste Colbert (August 29th, 1619 – September 6th, 1683).

***

As the destruction of the racist, plutocratic, fascist regimes of Italy, Japan and Germany was winding down, a conference was held at Bretton Woods, in New England (July 1944, with 44 Allied nations present, not just two or three Americans, as Barack Obama brazenly claimed once: it was not an all American thing, it became so, because of American dishonesty).

The democracies were at Bretton Woods, but also the fascist Soviet Union, and the Chinese regime. The problem considered was to institute a better financial system. No one could forget that the German republic became fascist in 1933. The Great Depression of the 1930s had been mostly an American piece of work, but the countries that had paid the heaviest economic tributes in the 1930s had been Germany, and, even worse, France.

France had clung to gold to value its French Franc. The idea was that money ought to keep its value. This basic idea was shared by the top economic powers, but, as the economies got obviously starved of enough money to keep going, countries went off that "gold standard".

As Paul Krugman, who I am going to criticize in depth, for a change, puts it:

"If there’s one overwhelming lesson from the Great Depression, it is that putting a higher priority on stabilizing your currency than on domestic recovery is utterly disastrous. Barry Eichengreen pointed out years ago that major economies went off gold in the following order: Japan, Germany, BritainBritain, Germany, US, France. [screwed it up in the first draft: the correlation between going off gold and recovery is in fact perfect] And here’s what happened to their industrial output:

All that glitters went off gold…

The Wall Street Journal may not realize it, but it wants us to be France in the 1930s. Let’s not."

This is of course not the main lesson that, I, personally, extract from the Great Depression, although it’s an important one, I agree: it’s better to have unstable money, rather than no money. It is true that France suffered from the gold standard (although this lowering of currency measured economic activity in France was compensated by a three year military service for all French males and the heavy defense works of the impregnable Maginot Line, and may have been partially caused by the dearth of new French males, caused by the lowering of the French birthrate from the butchery of WWI).

In any case, it was felt that the monetary system ought to be made to work. The prestigious British economist Keynes was put at the head of a commission to fix it (Keynes had advocated government command and control of the economy, allowing to win WWII, when the Nazis clang to old fashion for-private-profit capitalism, hence his prestige).

Keynes commission came up with recommendations, but the USA, instead, connived to make the US Dollar the world’s ("reserve") currency. Keynes tried to block this twice, and, on the third try, the USA modified secretly the final document that the states signed. Hence the Dollar-as-world-currency was the result of a fundamental dishonesty. That insured the financial supremacy of the USA, thereafter. And also deeply imprinted American elites on the feeling that bullying the planet was the way to go. The American public, not anxious to know the details, to this day, could only approve.

***

Fast forward to 2009. The US Dollar is close to collapse, and what does some of the American economical elite do? Speak about China’s currency.

China’s bad behavior is posing a growing threat to the rest of the world economy. The only question now is what the world — and, in particular, the United States — will do about it.

Some background: The value of China’s currency, unlike, say, the value of the British pound, isn’t determined by supply and demand. Instead, Chinese authorities enforced that target by buying or selling their currency in the foreign exchange market [...]

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with such a policy, especially in a still poor country [...]The crucial question, however, is whether the target value of the Yuan is reasonable[...]

From 2001 onward, however, the policy of keeping the Yuan-Dollar rate fixed came to look increasingly bizarre. First of all, the dollar slid in value, especially against the Euro, so that by keeping the Yuan/Dollar rate fixed, Chinese officials were, in effect, devaluing their currency against everyone else’s. Meanwhile, productivity in China’s export industries soared; combined with the de facto devaluation, this made Chinese goods extremely cheap on world markets.

The result was a huge Chinese trade surplus. If supply and demand had been allowed to prevail, the value of China’s currency would have risen sharply.[...]

Although there has been a lot of doomsaying about the falling dollar, that decline is actually both natural and desirable. America needs a weaker dollar to help reduce its trade deficit, and it’s getting that weaker dollar as nervous investors, who flocked into the presumed safety of U.S. debt at the peak of the crisis, have started putting their money to work elsewhere.

But China has been keeping its currency pegged to the dollar — which means that a country with a huge trade surplus and a rapidly recovering economy, a country whose currency should be rising in value, is in effect engineering a large devaluation instead.

And that’s a particularly bad thing to do at a time when the world economy remains deeply depressed due to inadequate overall demand. By pursuing a weak-currency policy, China is siphoning some of that inadequate demand away from other nations [...]

The point is that with the world economy still in a precarious state, beggar-thy-neighbor policies by major players can’t be tolerated. Something must be done about China’s currency.

***

In the preceding passage, Krugman is right on everything. But one can be right on one scale, while being wrong, on a larger scale. The truly most crucial point is that the People’s Republic did not start this " beggar-thy-neighbor policies". The USA did. So now the USA does not like its own medicine. Too bad, really.

I agree that China should let its currency appreciate. But the same can be said for the US Dollar. The USA is not a poor beggar whose only hope is to devalue its goods and services, if it wants to survive a desperate world. It’s still mighty Uncle Sam, with military bases all around the world, the world’s biggest GDP (OK, behind the EU), the world’s number one industrial production, the mightiest dens of gentlemen robbers (Goldman Sachs, etc…), and the hubris of delivering asinine lessons to everybody.

So why is the US Dollar 50% down on its very long term value against the French Franc? (The Franc established the value anchor for the Euro: on the very long term one Dollar was worth 6.66 Francs, or so.). Has the USA lost so much value and hope recently? Or is the USA using, once again, an unfair devaluation to gain worldwide advantage?

I say:"once again", because it happened before. Under Nixon, the USA unilaterally devalued. The US Treasury Secretary famously said to the Europeans: "The Dollar is our currency, and your problem." Well, maybe the 96% of non American residents of the planet should fix their problem.

Part of the conceptual framework for valuing higher interest rates is that the Euro was made to equal one Dollar (from looking at very long term valuations of the French franc versus the Dollar). It was not made to equate two Dollars. And if two, why not three? Or four? Both Germany and France went down that road of devaluation before, and it proved to be the valley of tears among those fake, shimmering lakes that are called mirages, reflecting the sky in vain, and quenching only the thirst of wishful thinkers.

At some point the USA has to face the fact that long term American policies have been more favorable to malignant growth rather than sustainable growth. This has happened because short term profit directed selfish individuals worrying about their own personal, selfish individual profits were allowed to direct the ship of the state, for decades. Technically it is caused mostly at this point by the ZIRP (Zero Interest Rate Policy) of the USA. Krugman is all for it, until the unemployment rate goes below 7%, he says. European powers, though, have had, in the past both higher unemployment, and higher interest rates, for years, and came out OK, with societies with arguably much fewer imbalances than the economy of the USA.

Some pain of the American populace and elite maybe the way to get psychologically motivated towards deeper cognition of the economic and social realm. As I insisted upon many times, the economy is not just about private monkeys doing their private thing. Civilization has greater worries, and corresponding to these worries, a greater economy to take part in, than just private, greed obsessed monkey business.

A real economic stimulus is compatible with encouraging Americans to save. Why to always depend upon China’s surplus capital to get stimulated? (France is trying to do just that, with a national investment plan into long term valuable objectives, from private savings.) Higher interest rates in the USA may …interest Americans in the USA more, as they should.

Meanwhile, the Europeans grin and bear it, because both the French and the Germans fear hyper inflation more than anything else financial. The great losers of the Zero Interest Rate Policy of the USA are the American savers, and the great winners are the usual suspects, the American gentlemen robbers, and their big banks and investment dens, which can borrow at 0% and then leverage themselves. In short: this is no way to conduct an economic policy. At least, China has one such thing: for example, China intends to become number one in renewable energy, next year, or so. Meanwhile it is bringing up the taxes on gas. Can the USA even look half as serious? What about joining the metric system?

So it will be easier to take the USA seriously, once the USA becomes serious. First.

Patrice Ayme

THE MAJOR WARDS OF THE USA AS CRYBABIES.

***

Paul Krugman points out that: "new appearance of a zombie lie in the health care debate — the totally false claim that Canadian health care won’t pay for hip replacements for the elderly.

But the hip replacement scam is even worse [...] Because who, you might ask, pays for hip replacements in America? The answer: Medicare pays 63.8% of the cost, Medicaid 6.8%. That’s right, the U.S. government pays for 70% of hip replacements in this country.

Aren’t you glad we don’t have evil, Canadian-style government-run health insurance?"

***

We are glad to have a Wall Street Welfare State in the USA: unemployment at 10%, DJIA at 10,000.

The economy of the USA is much more government dependent than is generally depicted. Entire industries: aerospace, defense, health care (HMO and insurance), the educational system (even "private" universities, who get giant amounts of government money) are all dependent upon the government in an extravagant, but hidden way. Under Nixon, to get started, and to this day, private health care profiteers get government, that is, public money.

The US propaganda loves to represent the USA as hard core “capitalism”. But the truth ought to be hard core “welfare”. The USA is the world’s premier welfare state.

For example, the US housing, construction, and home lending industries thrive with the home mortgage tax deduction. Other countries do not have it. Home mortgage deduction an enormous state subsidy. A giant one. The European "Welfare states" do not have it. So who is "welfare"? The USA, or the EU?

Another way to thrive, for the hyper rich wards of the USA, is not to be bothered by common sense laws or regulations. Banks and Wall Street were freed to conspire, as soon as the Banking Act of 1933 was repelled.

What about the Pentagon spending more than the rest of the world’s armies, combined? The USA has just 4% of the world’s population, remember.

What about churches being rich, but paying no taxes? Not this way in many other countries. And I will not mention agricultural subsidies (because they are only 100 billion, and the EU spends twice that).

The number one exhibit of ward of the state, is, of course, Wall Street. Whereas other economic actors get taxed at every turn, Wall Street, generously inundated with the public money (from giant banks or the secretive Fed), is free to trade like crazy, without taxation (let small economic actors try to trade without being taxed).

The profiteers’ organization, Goldman Sachs is just a ward of the state (playing with borrowed public money, in trades that cannot lose, organized with the complicity of the government). So it is for its peers.

A lot of the trading Wall Street engages in is really organized by the state, and thus a vast racketeering system. But no doubt all the criminals will be tried. This was just demonstrated by chasing down Polanski, long time resident and big chalet owner of Gstaad in Switzerland, where he has been going there with his children every summer: now we know that American justice is beyond any suspicion, and never lose its man.

Why this baffling circus? Why did the Bush family got a fortune for having managed (Prescott did) Hitler’s most important war industry, and no American in good standing knows this?

Why are the most powerful people in the USA wards of the state, while screaming against it, like infants always wanting more nourishment? Because American laws have been written by American lawmakers, themselves profiting from oodles of money thrown at them by the hyper rich wards of the state, created by American laws, the entire contraption stealthily cloaked into the thick fog of ignorance and bovine naivety.

A nice vicious circle of the cognitive type… Not the first time such a thing happens.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt pointed out that European fascism and war started in a similar way down its hellish spiral before the First World War: hyper rich individuals had made the states and their employees into their thing (to be fair, that thesis was developed even earlier than Arendt by the extreme socialists and the communists). Then a hellish co-dependency developed in Germany between the mood of the military and the perception of what ought to be the future of German economic and political dominance.

PA