Caring State, Crafty Solidarity: Why The German Economy Is So Superior.

***

Abstract: Eco-Nomy is House-Management. A house is ruled by emotions. Narrowing the emotions to a few shrinks the house, and makes it stupid and unqualified.

This apparent abstraction has very practical consequences, as the example of the German socio-economy, a model which rejects Wall Street supreme, shows. American economists who believe only in giving free money to banks which are too big ought to ponder this.

A narrow, Fear & Greed, Wall Street interpretation of the economy (“Profits next week!“) has come to rule the USA, and much of the West (under unrestrained American influence, as Anti-Americanism has faltered since the USSR croaked).

I roll out a few facts and pieces of logic pertaining to the mood of the situation, as electoral campaigns heat up in France (resident Skrozy is on his way out!) and the USA (Obama promising the moon while Gingrich wants to return there for real!). Economists have not been wrong by accident, but by design. They are paid to get it wrong, as needed.

By putting the correct accent on their campaigns the future American and French presidents can elevate the moods of the rather bovine populations in the correct direction (to restrain finance). Democracy is not just about passing laws, but realizing that a better and bigger boat make all safer. present day Germany gives an example of a better designed ship of state, at least economically speaking.

***

WHEN BAD DESIGN IS DELIBERATE, AND ENCOURAGED BY THE STATES:

A cruise ship hit a rock, off the island of Giglio, causing a huge seventy meter long breach finishing with an enormous boulder inserted inside. Whatever its faults, the crew turned the ship around, and tried to steer it into the tiny port of Giglio. It nearly succeeded. And it is good it did.

Indeed those cruise ships are incredibly poorly designed, and it’s deliberate. To maximize profits (what else?)

The Costa Concordia leaned one way, then the other, making it impossible to lower many rescue boats. This sort of thing was not supposed to happen ever since the Titanic. Even the Titanic was better designed in the sense that it stayed upright, which allowed to lower the insufficient number of rescue boats: the contemporary cruise ships stand twenty stories tall over water, but have only a draught of 8 meters. So, whereas in the Second World War it was standard to flood the compartments of a ship such as the 32,000 ton aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6), one cannot do so with modern cruise ships. The one which sank was 114,000 tons. The world’s largest cruise ship, the European made Allure of the Seas, is 240,000 tons, but has only a draught of 9 meters. If its water tight compartments are as well designed as the ones of the Costa Concordia, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

***

STIMULATE THE RICH; THEY LOVE IT, AND WILL REWARD YOU:

When Obama launched his insufficient stimulus program, much of it went to financial tricks. Obama was just implementing what all the democratic economists (most on the take from Wall Street, one way, or another) told him to do.

Thus the stimulus was more of the “less taxes, more economy” erroneous mantra. 75 billion dollars of the stimulus consisted in the readjusting the Alternate Minimum Tax to inflation, just as Bush always did every year. Another 287 billion went in tax rebates, mostly on the rich. (Britain and France also engaged in welfare for financiers, see below.)

It is true that direct capital was injected to save the American car industry, a justified emergency measure. But this was a brute intervention, short term, of the USA government, playing Wall Street investor. It did not solve any long term economic problems, as the German Kurtzarbeit did (see below). Worse: it ignored the underlying ethical problem of the existence of a CEO class in the USA.

While Obama was stimulating the richest, the Federal Reserve, the central bank, was engaging in Quantitative Easing, which is basically free money for big banks. In the USA, banks can get all the money they want, by taking it all from the public. Then they are supposed to lend it to the economy. But if the economy has no future, they will not.

(Krugman disingenuously insists to call that free money for banks the “monetary base“, and claims that is very different from money: a lie hiding behind a superficial truth. Indeed banks leverage themselves enormously from this base of money, lending, to themselves, through derivatives may be 50 times what they truly have. By contrast Obama himself has, correctly, explained that Krugman and his kind were wrong, and that what one gives to the rich, one has to steal from the poor: money grows on trees, only in Krugman’s mind! Even though there are very big trees in Hawai’i, Obama has never seen a money tree; a revealing case where the president knows more basic economy than the Nobel Laureate!)

There were no strings attached to giving free “monetary base” to banks: the banks and financial piracy outfits (the likes of Goldman Sachs and its ilk) were free to use that free money to “reimburse” the government, to pay themselves 150 billion dollars of bonuses a year, and play with seven hundred trillions of financial derivatives (yes, that is 14 times world GDP; of course no sum of transactions can exceed by a factor of 14 all of the world transactions: these people are mad, and taking the public for naïve children!)

But never mind. Now, elections are coming again, and, again Obama is promising to us all the change we can possibly imagine. Now Obama himself is not too specific on the details, besides another real estate welfare program for banks painted in camouflage to “help homeowners”. What was mostly obvious was the transparent glee Obama exuded when he informed us exuberantly, during his State of the Union speech, that he, too, belonged to the hyper wealthy class (“People like me can afford to pay more taxes“… in other exalting news, people like me. Obama, can ride waves ten stories tall, and go to idyllic pacific islands in the biggest plane you can possibly imagine, with thousands of servants attending to my every whim, and some you cannot possibly imagine…)

In this debacle, the role of economists, even supposedly left leaning economists, has been major. It led the USA astray. it led Obama astray with their aura of Very Serious Persons, fully deployed. The errance at the foot of finance is far from being Obama’s solitary sin.

During Obama State of the Union speech the Steve Jobs widow, a blonde parody, was next to the first lady (does that make her the second lady for a day?). The Steve Jobs widow is on countless boards, including Stanford, being Steve Jobs widow (that’s how plutocracy works: plutocrats get on all the boards, congratulating each other for their braininess, until there are only plutocrats on the boards, and then they take plutocratic decisions exclusively… very differently from Germany, where union representatives are on the boards of company, by law! In Europe, the lack of taste of plutocrats and their consorts parading at the head of the state is kept under wraps… ever since 1789…).

***

BAD APPLES, GOOD GERMANY:

Immelt, head of General Electric, playing Obama chief economic adviser, pontificated that what was good for General Electric (namely that it pays no tax) is good for the USA. To make his case worse, he added in his towering ignorance, that it was the same in Germany:”What is good for Siemens is good for Germany.”

This is confusing today’s Germany, and Hitler’s Germany. Hitler’s big companies were made in Wall Street: for example IG Farben a made in Wall Street monopoly devised to turn around the anti-monopoly laws passed under president Teddy Roosevelt (there is a cover-up about the theme of Hitler and Wall Street on the Internet; nowadays there are firms whose main business is to manipulate Internet rankings and data).  

In “Jobs, Jobs, and Cars” the often honorable Paul Krugman points out that:

“Apple employs very few people in this country.

A big report in The Times last Sunday laid out the facts. Although Apple is now America’s biggest U.S. corporation as measured by market value, it employs only 43,000 people in the United States, a tenth as many as General Motors employed when it was the largest American firm.

Apple does, however, indirectly employ around 700,000 people in its various suppliers. Unfortunately, almost none of those people are in America.

Why does Apple manufacture abroad, and especially in China? As the article explained, it’s not just about low wages. China also derives big advantages from the fact that so much of the supply chain is already there. A former Apple executive explained: “You need a thousand rubber gaskets? That’s the factory next door. You need a million screws? That factory is a block away.”

This is familiar territory to students of economic geography: the advantages of industrial clusters — in which producers, specialized suppliers, and workers huddle together to their mutual benefit — have been a running theme since the 19th century.

And Chinese manufacturing isn’t the only conspicuous example of these advantages in the modern world. Germany remains a highly successful exporter even with workers who cost, on average, $44 an hour — much more than the average cost of American workers. And this success has a lot to do with the support its small and medium-sized companies — the famed Mittelstand — provide to each other via shared suppliers and the maintenance of a skilled work force.

The point is that successful companies — or, at any rate, companies that make a large contribution to a nation’s economy — don’t exist in isolation. Prosperity depends on the synergy between companies, on the cluster, not the individual entrepreneur.”

(Since the honorable Krugman has borrowed several of my expressions, from “Very Serious Person” to now “Greater Depression“, I will consider thereafter a partly owned subsidiary, and will quote him even more extensively.)

OK, Krugman is all about economic clusters (although the concept if 2,000 years old). Well, one can go deeper. It’s more than that just clusters. In the technological society we have, prosperity depends upon intelligence, and a synergy between the minds.

***

INTELLIGENCE IS A SOCIAL PHENOMENON, GREED IS ASOCIAL:

Make no mistakes; a lot of American high tech success is due to the size of the American market, not the fact that Silicon Valley’s garage people are more clever than European engineers.

(The Minitel and Skyrock were French predecessor to Google and Facebook. They were replaced by American products, mostly due to scale factors. The invention and use of the Internet by CERN did not translate in a commercial product, because American businessmen did it first: the fragmented European market pales relative to the giant American ones, and all the business conspiracies it has established. That is why Facebook moved from Boston to the Silicon Valley, center of the spider web; as Obama knows very well… Since he comes down there to milk the friendly plutocrats every few months.)

European conservatives are dangerous socialists, by the deranged standards of Main Stream American Thinking. Watch the ultra conservative, ultra austere Cameron and his 50 billion dollars Very High Speed train project (Britain has already two 200 km/h, 125 mph lines, and the VHS line to Paris goes at 300 km/h, putting Paris 2 hours from London).

Intelligence can be devoured by greed. (This is one of the reasons for real deep thinkers to stay away from money; when Newton got rich, he stopped producing great ideas, in contrast with the poor Leibnitz and Kepler.)

One can see this devouring of society by money when comparing Britain, France and Germany. Those three places were long the world’s industrial and technological leaders. However, in the last few decades, Britain dropped off technologically, as it became obsessed by finance. Under Sarkozy, or Skrozy (as Standard & Poors has it: Sarkozy having lost his “A”, I remove it from his name, in a discreet allusion to his many children from his many wives), France also took the Anglo-Saxon turn for the worst of finance supreme.

Skrozy cut down the taxes on the hyper wealthy, in the Clinton-Bush-Obama style (according to his own numbers to the tune of 73 billion euros in tax reduction, and 50 billion in tolerated fraud; a year, that’s more than 3% of GDP! So most of the present 5.5% French deficit is due to Skrozy making gifts to plutocrats). Skrozy has several major plutocrats in his immediate family, he was just trying to do his part. with a bit of luck, like his mentor Chirac, he will end up with a jail sentence. Just warming up to handle the banksters.

The result of the financial turn of Skrozy is that France collapsed, relatively to Germany. France went from a balanced balance of trade to now a deficit of 75 billion euros, American style. Industry has left France, so France has to import industrial products more than she can pay for, American style. Skrozy was nicknamed ‘the American’ for good reason. Thanks, Skrozy.

In Germany, engineers and qualified workers stayed kings, and industrial production has increased, relative to France. Now, contrarily to what the likes of Krugman have been arguing, Germany is pulling the rest of Europe with it, in a positive feedback loop: the country exports massively to China. Positive for Europe, that is, not so positive for New York and New Jersey, which Krugman haunts. But not just that.

France’s present false leadership has betrayed France’s proud, time honored tradition of seventeenth century Colbertism. At Valmy in 1792, it is superior French artillery which saved the republic against the Prussian fascist juggernaut. Superior technology: the main axis of Colbertism, resting on a social contract.

What is Colbertism? It is the state intervening to rearrange society and companies to make them technologically supreme. What Germany has been doing in the last decade is pure Colbertism, on steroids. Just like under Colbert, Germany, to feed its high tech export machine, is now drafting qualified workers from all over Europe.

*** 

KURZARBEIT MACHT FREI:

[OK, I could not resist; but it's important not to resist a joke in poor taste from time to time: respect and the politically correct are terrible masters!]

The present German exportation supremacy was the result of a program of general, but intelligent, austerity implicating all agents of the German society, including owners, management of companies, unions, workers, government and taxpayers. This was started under the Socialist Party (Chancellor Schroeder).

One could even argue that the austerity was started under Chancellor Kohl, Merkel’s mentor, who engaged in a first austerity policy to forcefully gobble East Germany (with the complicity of his friend Mitterrand, who secretly financed Kohl, while getting the euro in exchange, to tie the new, much bigger Germany down to France).

When the bank crisis hit, the German government of Conservative Angela Merkel went for Kurtzarbeit.

Once again all the preceding actors cooperated: workers were paid less, worked less, went to school more, and the state paid the workers directly so that the workers and the companies they worked for not only did not lose their skills, but improved them. it helped that the owners of companies tend to be, in Germany managers and owners of the premises on which they work, rather than faceless, nameless Wall Street style financial pirates with addresses in remote Caribbean islands.

A German welder employed by a manufacturer whose order book had collapsed, for example, would work only half of what he used to, but would be paid 30% by the state, 60% by his employer, and then would learn laser welding.

His American colleague would get fired, lose his house, his health insurance, his health, and then contribute to the shortening for American life span recently observed. So doing the USA would lose a qualified welder, a house, a family, etc. In Detroit City hall is destroying houses rather than having them as dilapidated ruins…

The coming new German cars and machine tools are much better than those which preceded them, from this program of improvement of the minds (this is good for Europe, because Europe, through Germany can preserve supremacy, exportations, and employment!).

Thus it is the deep involvement of the state in its noblest functions which has made the success of German capitalism.

Now, Merkel is no greedy would be plutocrat. She is not going around, flaunting the fact she is a rich multi millionaire. Indeed, she is not. She has been in politics for twenty years, but, differently from an American politician, she has not been on the take. Merkel, an ex-research physicist lives very modestly, in an apartment she has owned for a very long time with her husband, a university professor.

By contrast all the eight American republican candidates for the presidency had palatial residences (more than 5,000 square feet, 500 square meters; of course Romney has some in many states). Some of these wealthy politicians are heirs of multi billionaire (for instance the ex Obama ambassador to China, “republican” Hunstman; then his dad created a super pac for him, a political spending fund…).

Merkel could never afford the complex of sea side mansions Obama and his entourage rent when they go to Hawai’i (I have been there). She could not, even for a day. Merkel’s modesty is not just an indication that she did not make a Faustian deal with the devils who man western finance. It also allows her to identify with common people.

The revolving door between American politicians and the plutocracy have made the former identify with the latter. Obama even crowed about it in his state of the union address… in the guise of criticizing the tax code. You could read the glee on his face: “I am a very rich success, look at me!“

(By the way it was not reassuring to see that glee was the main emotion on Obama’s face, as his hands pointed to himself: that means that the main true message he perceived was:”I am very rich, look at me, and my huge smile“. It was not: “I am going to raise the taxes of the hyper wealthy“. If the latter emotion had been ruling him, he would have exhibited the dour determination necessary to overrule all his very wealthy friends he has all around him. Instead Obama exuded self satisfied glee about himself, an entirely inappropriate emotion if his purpose had been genuine.) 

The consensus in France is that the wrong social and economic turn was taken by the country. By becoming more intelligently social, Germany beat France at her own French game. Polls show a great admiration for all things German.

So lamentable president Skrozy will have to go, with major consequences on the international mood about how to handle the financial vultures (the German Socialist Party, the century old SPD, is on the same frequency as the French Parti Socialiste: more Europe, less financial piracy, more schooling, more engineering).

A good occasion to put the plutocracy of the USA back in its place, by yanking the French army out of Afghanistan (there are French weapons going to the rebels in Syria, and Turkey and Iran are all enraged, so no worry to be had by those afraid to run out of wars; the afghan war, aiding a Fundamentalist Islamist Regime, is in contradiction with the French secular constitution).

***

THE RULE OF FEAR & GREED MAKES PEOPLE STUPID:

The economy, how to manage the house, is articulated around the various emotions to which the inhabitants of the house react. Greed is just one emotion people have, and not the most important. Care is more important. Germany cared, Germany is rewarded. It’s not all about business clusters, professor Krugman!

And what about the USA? Well, fear is another emotion. The USA is more organized around fear than the European, and other, countries (that is why Greeks or Senegalese go to violently demonstrate in the streets; they are not afraid, they refuse to be!).

American citizens have good reason to be afraid. As the magazine the New Yorker puts it:

Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country [the USA] today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America—more than six million—than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height.

(Last I checked myself, it was more like ten millions, as several more millions are under state punishment in various guises labeled differently.)

Right wing Americans love to criticize what they call disparagingly the “European Welfare state” (forgetting many of these states are richer, per capita than the USA). They typically condemn the presence of the European state in everyday life. Maybe they think that presence is just like the carceral American state, just bigger? In truth, few people are in prison in Europe. France, with more than 65 million citizens, has only 65,000 incarcerated. When Reagan the actor got to power, in 1981, there were about two hundred and twenty people incarcerated for every hundred thousand Americans; by 2010, the number had more than tripled, to seven hundred and thirty-one.  

Fear and Greed rule Wall Street. Successful traders play with both, like surfers with waves. Thus Wall Street maniacs consider that this is the best model to run an economy, as they know little else (many of the operators are ignorant brutes selected for their good brutish looks with a background in football, or other team sports).

Fear and greed also increasingly rule the USA, because the American economy is increasingly organized that way (by the Wall Street operators inside the White House, and halls of Congress).

Fear and greed are plain not enough to manage the house of man. Just as a democracy is stronger because many rule, and think, an economy is stronger when many emotions rule, and think. And care is one of them.

The welfare states fares well. Get a grip.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

 Questions: Why is there a “Will To Power”? Is it because there is a natural state of tranquility, and power is not a low hanging fruit, but has to be willed? Is has to be decided first? Why not a “Will To Love”? Does not the fact that there is a need for a Will To Power, but no need for a Will To Love show that Love is more primordial than Power?

 And is the “Will to Power” enough to explain all the vice found in history, or is there something even more terrible, something the great religions all guessed? Roll over Nietzsche! What about The Will To Vice? (In French: Volonte’ de Nuire, which is actually better because more encompassing.) And, if so, if there is such a thing as striving to inflict pain, why is vice so alluring? We have to dig deep in the psychobiology of the genus Homo to answer these questions.

 The meta-psychology of power and vice are actually born from the most practical considerations, evolutionary speaking: one can see them at work in many a place in the Middle Earth, where the two largest continents, Eurasia and Africa meet. All and any of the combatants fanatics and other occupiers will tell you that they fight for excellent reasons, and they are right. Such is the Will To Vice. Always right. Greed is good, and so is cruelty.

 Power and vice arise for reasons, thus causes, that one can understand, it turns out. They are even deeper than evolution, because they inflected it. Some are exposed below. The need to effective leadership, and to do what is necessary, ultimately rule, and animate those reasons. Understanding this will go a long way to steer civilization correctly. 

 I know people have little time. Those who want to cut to the chase, can avoid the preliminaries on the domination of cruelty in all religions, and the section on how the Will To Power grew in primates from evolutionary pressures. The meat of the essay are the sections HUMAN IS TO BE LOVED and WILL TO CRUELTY. 

*** 

***

WISDOM OF THE AGES HAS INCORPORATED VICE (However Poorly):

 Viciousness is prominent in all the great religions. And not just to condemn it, but to advocate it: after all, if the gods do it, why not us? I am not just alluding to the Aztecs and their industrial cannibalism and the Incas, and their propensity to spill the blood of virgins on top of volcanoes. The Celts, and Carthage, which were most advanced civilizations, also practiced human sacrifices (even the Romans dabbed in them).

 Viciousness is fully obvious in the old Norse religion, or Hinduism, which were prone to burn young women alive on the slightest pretext. The old Babylonian religions made the universe into a giant arena for the fight between light and darkness, truth and lie, Ahura Mazda and Ahriman. Of course in the Abrahamic religion, the genocidal god is so much into his criminogenic and megalomaniac “jealousy”, that he wrote a few books to advertise them proudly. One of the Abrahamic sects even made a torture instrument of death its very symbol, and then called it love (OK, it worked. Charlemagne would point at the crushed Angles and Saxons and Hungarians…)

 Buddhism, although milder at first sight, does not escape the vice of vice. Buddhism is so obsessed by viciousness, that it throws the world out with the bath. Buddhism claims that nihilism (“nirvana”) is better than living in the world, by the world, for the world. Instead, to flee that horror, the world, it promotes detachment from it (but not so much detachment that its priests do not go begging in the streets !)  

 The mildest of the great religions may have been the Egyptian one, and may be that is why it lasted 4,000 years. But it is also why it found itself unable to resist enemies with more ferocious, extraverted gods, starting with the Libyans, the Achaemenids and finally the Christians, thoroughly rabid from god as they were.

 So can one safely say that old wisdom has fully integrated the Dark Side, the set of behaviors and knowledge associated with “hell”?

***

TO BE HUMAN IS TO BE LOVED (At Some Point): 

 Maybe one should ask first where the expression “Dark Side“, as incarnated by the tenebrous Lord of the Underground, comes from? OK, it fully belongs to the Greek and Babylonian mythologies. The idea is at least 4,000 year old. But that does not explain what it is.

 In truth, it’s very simple, and that causal relationship reveals the hierarchy of emotions within Homo Sapiens. One speaks of the “Dark Side” because one does not like to look inside at what is lurking down there. A fortiori one does not like to talk about that Dark Side. 

 Why such reluctance? First, man is a social animal, and the social group holds together from love. It’s a bit like the nucleus of an atom held by the strong force. The strong force in human groups is love. It is needed, or there would not be a social group. (At a far distance, love does not reach anymore, thus huge social groups cannot be held by love, except if the state manufactures a form of love which carries far, and that is how nations hold together.)

 Understanding promotes love, whereas hiding one’s true brainwork promotes the opposite, misunderstanding, hence conflict. So what is in full sight is appeasing, whereas the ambush from the dark, just the opposite.

 Another reason to eschew the Dark Side is that, man is anywhere, and always, born out of love. [See the note on the errors of Christianism.]

 How does love come first? Simple. Nearly all and any baby, anywhere, and always, is loved, for quite a long period. Years. The first years, the ones during which one gets imprinted. Without enough love from enough people around the baby, the baby would certainly die. The same holds for young children. 

 Human children brought up by wolves prove the point. Certainly they would have been devoured, had some wolves not been overwhelmed by love (that wolves become more loving at some point during their massively fluctuating hormonal existence is a case in point; even in wolves, love can overwhelm all; human beings do not have such huge hormonal fluctuations and are more permanently loving).

 So love comes first. It is the base layer, emotionally. Vice comes first as a transgression (later it can become a habit, in individuals or a culture in countries, something some Germans try to mask by accusing Hitler of all the vices old style German culture infused him with).

 The Dark Side is thus condemned to be a second order effect. But, in some cases, it is the only ensemble of behaviors and knowledge that will provide with a solution (an obvious reference: the Bible, when the Chosen People comes onto the previous occupants of the Promised Land, and has to eradicate them, to occupy it in turn; this is the scheme reproduced throughout the (ex) British empire, allowing to eradicate indigenes from a godly portion of the Earth, hence the importance of the Bible throughout the Brutish thing).

***

THE WILL TO POWER IS HOW PRIMATES MARRY LOVE WITH COMBAT:

 Nietzsche talked about the “Will to Power”. Why would this be? Why a “Will”? Does one talk about a “Will to Thirst”, a “Will to Hunger”? (OK, a “Will to Sex” exists among those who purchase aphrodisiacs, but that is a recent perversion, with no evolutionary meaning.)

 So is there a “Will to Love”? Most of the time, and more prominently, not at all. When love is there, it is overwhelming. One does NOT need to will it. A normal parent does not will to love her child. The parent just loves. Love is fundamentally an hormonal state. The strongest love is not something one decides to engage in. One can decide to love, true, but this is a secondary, weaker form.

 Nietzsche is correct that searching for power is a conscious decision, something one wills. It’s not as natural as love.

 Wolf packs are led by alpha couples: other animals in the pack are not just subservient, they just don’t get to eat first, and the best parts. They also don’t have sex. They are subservient, otherwise they will be attacked with lethal force.

 However, primates are not wolves. Primates are less on a war footing than wolves. They don’t need to live in a fascist state with absolute rule all the time, as wolves do. In primates, although sex is the object of conflict and impacted by hierarchy, (most of) the whole group reproduces. Thus not only primates do not need to be leaders, but they can perfectly reproduce without brimming with the utmost domineering characteristics. Thus primates do not reproduce domineering characteristics in an overwhelming manner. They also reproduce other sorts of manners.

 In wolves, those who reproduce have been selected, by the struggle for power, to be particularly domineering. So baby wolves tend to have the power drive genetically engineered, because only the dominant ones reproduce. Only domination to death reproduces. Wolves are born as topmost domination machines.

 Baby primates are not genetically pre-selected for so much domination, since non domineering members of the group also genetically contribute. 

 However some primate species need leaders. Why? Because they have evolved to live in primate hell, namely the savannah park, where trees stand among grass, as if they had been planted in a park by a divine gardener (most of Africa was endowed with that landscape, in combination with a web of narrow forest gallery where water and predators lurked). 

 The savannah park was, historically speaking, ten million years ago, no place for primates. Primates evolved in the trees, in the age of dinosaurs, from ancestors we probably have in common with squirrels. In the forest, monkeys have few competent enemies. After primates left the equatorial trees, and their huge juicy fruits (up to 50 kilograms), though, primates became dependent upon sources of fresh water. Moreover, primates were the object of gustative desire of a magnificent panoply of carnivores, from dogs, to many species of hyenas, giant cheetahs, leopards, lions, and saber tooth cats, let alone giant carnivorous baboons, boars, and bears. 

 Primates, to be present in the savannah, had to develop military psychobiology. It was a necessity, not an option. Primate sociobiology evolved into the sociobiology of armies. That is blatant when one observes baboons in the wild, as I had the good fortune to do as a child. Baboons need water once a day, so they have to organize a military expedition to get to the water hole, everyday. Stealth does not work. What works is military organization, and terror in the heart of all and any potential enemy.

 A baboon army on the march is a terrifying spectacle of sound and fury. They shake trees. They bark furiously in unison. Lactating females and their children are inside the formation. In front, demonic big males flashing their eyelids and giant canines, brimming with the threatening insanity of their obvious will to tear into whoever or whatever would dare stand in their way, proceed irresistibly towards their objective. Lion prides rise, and decide to go somewhere else sniff the grass. Leopards disappear in the darkest bushes.

 Armies function because they are the many acting as one: “E Pluribus, Unum“. Forming an army allows to constitute a super beast, with just one mind (that of the leader) and the total mass of the individuals which compose it (total mass matters: in combats between lions and hyenas, the group with the largest total mass generally wins).

 That primate army is endowed with the spirit of the leader. That leader has to be domineering enough to be accepted as the mind of all, and combative enough to look towards combat, when there is no choice. And that leader has to pretend to love combat enough to make the group it leads appear dangerously insane to third parties (thus making way, as needed, the way baboons have to do it, to exist).

 To become a leader, one has to fight, to get to that position which has obvious advantages. This has the interest that not only fighters get selected to lead, and lead into combat, as needed, but the very process of selection develop the leaders into ever more aggressive minds. Evolution found the trick that if the groups were led by individuals more aggressive that the common members of the groups, the groups would battle better, and how to develop a process to increase the combativity of the leaders. 

 So here is the picture: primate groups in the savannah can exist if and only if they are large enough, bound by love. While at the same time, primate groups need to be led by particularly aggressive individuals, capable of leading the group into combat, and making other animals believe that the groups they constitute are the most dangerous thing on earth.

 Thus savannah dwelling primate species have developed, had to develop, a psychobiology which favors the “Will To Power”. Primates are rendered more ferocious by undergoing the power struggle to reach power, and that is obtained only after “willing” it. “Willing it” transmogrifies soft individuals in the loving groups into the hard edge tyrants needed for the victory of the group.

 Some scientists have determined that most of the large animals’ mass, for millions of years, was made of lion sized carnivores (as lions can take down a giraffe and survive on rabits). It’s no more the case now, thanks to the great primate offensive for savannah park supremacy. The war between monkeys and lions has ended with the victory of the monkeys, thanks to the militarized fascism of the latter, as needed.

 By the way, this may be why Newt Gingrich won the South Carolina primary, from his ferocious debate performance: the voting primates perceived in him a greater warrior, the product of a greater Will To Power, promising a harder edge to solve the problems the country confronts, and that too “cool” an attitude of the seducer in chief, with his huge smile, cannot address.

 Let’s recapitulate: love is a necessity, a fundamental imprinting. Ferocious leadership is obtained in a contrived way, through the constructive “Will to Power”.

 But what of the cases when combat is not enough? Say the enemy has been defeated. But now the enemy needs to be eradicated, because there is not enough food to go around, or simply because not eradicating today, means being eradicated tomorrow. Just as chimps do in the valley over there. 

 Genocide of his own species has been, historically and evolutionary speaking, one of the characteristics of the genus Homo. Genocide is what the most domineering hominids have had to do, and did, for millions of years.

 Is the “Will To Power” the answer to impose eradication? No. It is more oriented towards combat. The “Will to Power” wants to overpower, not massacre. The “Will To Power” is about exerting power on others. Will To Power needs the continuation of others to be exerted. And indeed, although baboons kill baboons in power struggles, sometimes (their canines are like small daggers), power struggles among baboons do not result in extermination in the famed chimpanzee-human style.

***

THE WILL TO CRUELTY:

 Thus the interest of the Will To Cruelty. The Will To Cruelty is what motivates the ultimate, all too human activity, genocide.

 Genocide: when man becomes like the legendary god of Abraham, ready to want the worst one can possibly imagine, and turning it into a religion (what is worse than asking a parent to kill his child, out of love for one’s superior, as the Abrahamic god does with Abraham?)

 Omitting the presence of the Will To Cruelty is one of the greatest failures of conventional humanism. It is also a failure of standard economics, and, in particular of the free market fanatics. And a failure of all of those who deify some of their superiors. All human beings have potentially Pluto inside. But those who have the greatest power in their hands have fewer checks left to restrain them, and thus are more inclined to transgress into vice. Thus, admiring leaders is fraught with ethical peril. Leaders, threatened by temptation, ought to be viewed with suspicion.

The only transgression left to those who have most power, the only challenge left, is to cultivate the Will to Cruelty, so they do. It attracts them irresistibly. So they informed their academic servants that it would be best never to evoke the subject.

 Indeed, some of these observations are not really new. Sade was first.

 That grotesque cruelty motivated leaders all too much was de Sade’s main point. They were not keen to hear this, all the more since the People was listening carefully, at least in France. This is why king Louis XVI, and the dictators Robespierre and Napoleon kept Sade in jail for decades. Sade was saying that Robespierre and Napoleon were… sadistic brutes motivated by inflicting pain, they had to be, that is why people like them did what they did… and sadistic brutes they, indeed, were!

 Funny how many busts of Napoleon there are, with rabid Napoleonophiles on their knees lauding that cruel monster, considering most of what he did was to bust the great revolution for human rights, in general, and the republic, in particular, besides ravaging Europe, all the way to Moscow, while destroying his great European army, and killing, among others, millions of Frenchmen… Do they admire the cruelty? The arbitrary assassinations? Keeping Sade in jail?

 Why is genocide so central in the evolution of hominids? Because hominids represented, for millions of years, the ultimate power, and had to use their ultimate power on that ultimate power to keep humanity in check. Only terminal force can master terminal force.

 Left to themselves on (parts of) South Georgia island, reindeer devastated the ecology to the point their population, after booming, having run out of vegetables and lichen to eat, starved, and crashed by up to 90% (in parts).

 But it does not work this way with human beings. Human beings, just like rats, are sociable, and help each other, when their populations are at sustainable densities. Beyond that, the worst enemy of man becomes other men, and there were plenty of thousands of centuries to select for human beings who could get the job of culling of other hominids done. Actually, they self-selected. Not only human beings have an inclination, a will, to cruelty, but they selected themselves this way, because that was most advantageous, evolutionary speaking. So the cruel ones reproduced, and the sweet ones did not. A consequence of this has been the (semi-demented) love for tribalism and nationalism (with major inconveniences such as Nazism, and now neutralized in modern times by team sports).

 The Will To Cruelty, ultimately, protects an optimal version of the planetary ecology. It is timely to remember this, as the greatest attack against the ecology is proceeding ever more. Logically, and evolutionarily speaking, it is only a matter of time before cruelty comes to the rescue of the biosphere.

***

 Patrice Ayme

***

 Note on some fundamental errors of Christianism: Christianism made a big deal of love, as if Christ invented it. Well love is clearly a necessary pre-condition to human life. The fact that Christ had such an unloving relationship with his own father, should not lead us astray about the necessity of that pre-condition.

 Thus Judeo-Christianism was wrong with its theory of original sin! Men are not born bad, quite the opposite: they evolve that way. Such an egregious error can only have been committed deliberately. The manipulators of the Dark Side probably felt that “original sin” made common people feel bad about themselves, thus weakened their resolve. Moreover, if man was born bad, the leading plutocratic miscreants were excused to do whatever nasty stuff they wanted, since they were born that way! 

 Of course Christianism was not chosen by the Latter Days Tyrants of Rome because it was right, but, precisely, because it was wrong.

Species Shifting North, Intelligence Left Behind:

Nothing like raw numbers. In the last twenty years, Europe warmed up by one degree Celsius (about 2 degrees in the primitive, less meaningful Fahrenheit system). That’s equivalent to a thermal shift of 249 kilometers north.

Insects responded by an average shift north of 114 kilometers, and birds by only 33 kilometers. This is creating imbalances (fully obvious in Alaska, and high altitude North America, where the insects move faster than their predators, killing entire forests, which then burn).

This differential adaptation also illustrates an important point the stupid partisans of the “market” always neglect: being more intelligent can make you slower. Birds are more intelligent than insects, so they find harder to leave their families, friends, habits, and landscapes they are familiar with behind. (No, I will not say that insects are more like Americans, driven by the market, and birds more like Europeans, driven also by broader values. I shall resist, lest I move too fast, like an insect, and outrage part of my brainy readership…)

Thus, as the market dominates, so does the stupid.

Adaptation is not always a manifestation of intelligence, and inadaptation often a sign of intelligence. A well known experience is to put a fly, or a bee, inside an open bottle, with a light source opposed to the opening. The bee will search intelligently the bottom of the bottle, where the exit ought to be. The less intelligent fly will buzz around stupidly, and exit first.

It’s no wonder that the partisan of the markets, who are richer and thus more influential, are for something stupid, as they are faster, precisely because they are more stupid, with fewer values, besides the colossal greed which dominates their psyche. So there is a non linear vicious loop, the more the market dominates.

Thus, next year the candidate historically financed by Wall Street will confront the extremely wealthy businessman cum politician, son of his father, also a governor cum businessman. Market against market: the market should not lose. The birds will be left behind by the fast moving insects, once again. Change you can’t believe in.

***

Where is everybody?

“Lord” (!) Martin Rees, “Astronomer Royal”, Nobel laureate, etc., complete with pretty pictures and beautifully spooky music, speculates it’s teeming with aliens out there.

But as Enrico Fermi quipped:”Where is everybody?“

The situation is not helped by us understanding very little about what the universe is made of. In the latest numbers I saw the universe was made 4% conventional matter, and the rest was… Dark. Mostly Dark Energy, with some Dark Matter. Who said the Dark Side was not important?

There are no dominant theories of what the Darkness is made of.

CERN should be able to find stuff below its energy reach. So far, nothing.

We have detected more than 150 planets. It seems one star out of ten, at least, has planets. Some have been detected in the habitable zone, where liquid water is found. But the water has to be continuously present for billions of years. Continuously (which did not happen on Mars and Venus).

400 billion stars in our galaxy. The big question is how many planets can harbor advanced (=oxygen breathing) life. No inkling of that. There are plenty of planets out there, indeed, but most hostile to life. So far. How Much Intelligent Life Out There? On Earth, it took 1.5 billion years to go from advanced life to intelligent, civilized life. A lot of things can go wrong in 1.5 billion years.

That advanced life did not develop on Mars or Venus is not an accident: although on the outskirts of the habitable zone, either planet did not have what it took. Mars was too small, and, just like Venus was not protected by a powerful plate tectonic, with accompanying magnetic field, among other problems (so the solar wind blowing the top of the atmosphere stole the hydrogen, hence water, etc.)

My hunch is that most planets in the hospitable zone, when found, will be bereft of advanced life, although primitive life may be quite frequent. Reason? Too many miracles at work for billions of years in the solar system. Especially in light of what we find out there (We see plenty of Jupiter size planets in close orbits around their suns, presumably after sweeping their entire system clean; OK, that’s partly a result of the method used to find planets presently, but the fact is, we find such situations aplenty! The presence of Jupiter out there, as our guardian protecting Earth from comets looks quite miraculous…)

***

If You Want To Save the Biosphere, Push Tech:

Some people in the Netherlands have suggested building an artificial mountain. It’s feasible, and would be smart to do, not just there, but say in a place such as Saudi Arabia (technical variations on the theme could collect water, as in cloud, or fog forests found in California or Peru).

Another point is that artificial mountains could help protect biological diversity from the greenhouse heating. Cynics would point out that it would take an enormous amount of energy to build them. True, with present tech, and the energy would be dirty too, presently. But that would be another motivation to go green. Green and big.

***

Wind Fall-Out:

Most wind-driven energy system in Europe? Denmark. Most CO2 polluting country in Europe? Denmark. Coal power plants pick up the slack when the wind falters. Another case where nuclear offers its smiling face. Future nuclear that is. Not your great grandfather’s nuclear. Past nuclear tech should be terminated, just like coal. However, there are 100 unexploited, un-researched nuclear energies out there, and only those with insignificant waste will be acceptable. (Nobody would accept a fossil fuel system where only 2% of the fuel would be burned, and the rest allowed to pollute all over!)

Reminder: as the greenhouse heating proceeds, winds will falter because the heat differential between poles and equator will sink, thus shutting down that thermal engine known as the atmosphere (yes, hurricanes will be rarer, but fiercer).  

***

Institutionalized insanity Versus Thinking Right:

In Switzerland a nuclear plant was built one kilometer downstream from a dam, along the same river. None of those two could resist the sort of very strong quake happening occasionally in the Alps. A flood cum nuclear explosion is entirely imaginable. This sort of insanity has nothing to do with nuclear power, it has everything to do with lack of intelligence.

This is all the more strange since some Swiss cantons such as Valais get 20% of their GDP from research. By the way the medical drug sector part of GDP is twice the banking sector in Switzerland. For those who wonder why Switzerland is so rich (the same holds for Sweden and other Nordic company). It’s not (just) about the banks.

***

(More) Direct Democratic Keeps Bankers At Bay:

The weight of direct democracy has forced Swiss banks into reserve requirements twice those of the future Basel III regulations. (In other words, banks are many times tamer in Switzerland than in the USA, if one uses reserve requirements enforced as a measuring device; Basel III does not cover most of the enormous derivative trading, though.)

The scandal of the central banker heading the Swiss Central Bank buying dollars days before taking the decision of making the dollar explode up against the Swiss franc keeps unfolding. Yes, he knew about the trades, and yes, he had days to stop them afterwards.

It is dawning over Swiss society that those with privileged information should not be legally allowed to exploit them. The whole planet has to follow down that line. But, although it has been obvious for years that American and European politicians and central bankers are rich from insider trading, nothing has been done. Yet.

***

The Plutocrats Cash Out And Shame Does Not Count:

What looked to me as the immensely stupid and arrogant wife of the Swiss Bank President, explained herself from Singapore, where she owns an art gallery. If she really wanted to make real money out of her husband’s job, she knew how to do it, she asserted confidently. And there she was going through a list (a), b), c), d), etc… of things she would have done if she wanted to make more than the measly $75,000 she made. And how to make them secretly, she insisted.

Her name is “Kashya”, appropriately pronounced “Cashia”. In this case, Cashia said, in her native American English, they were in a rush, because they just had some cash from selling a chalet to store, so that is why she hid nothing.  That brings a few questions, such as whether she is used to exploit the mechanisms of further cheating she explicated so adroitly on TV. The central banker, the plutocrat Hildebrand, having resigned, will get a million dollar salary in the next year, from the People, while his fellow plutocrats will rush to propose him a much more protitable conspiracy to join. I propose to put him in jail, instead.

***

Another Claim Of Mental Decline. And The Agenda Behind It: There Is No Good Wisdom, Except Dead Wisdom, Say Plutocrats:

Supposedly some new test showed a decline in “cognitive capabilities” starting at age 45. Apparently people were asked to remember lists of words starting with some particular letters. It does not seem to have come to the mind of the experimenters that maybe older brains do not like to remember such stupid stuff.

Thinking means motivating. Without the right motivation, there is not the right thinking.

In the case of “IQ”, a decline is observed at 24, some say… Military officers would concur that it is better to send 18 year olds to die, because they are bright enough to execute orders well, but not so bright that they would know that they might die for no good reason.

A related point: no doubt a two-year old training to go potty remembers very well each time she goes. Whereas an adult tends to lose this facility of neurological retention for this sort of event. One generally observes. But it is not because adults have suffered mental decline that they do not remember every poop. Simply, they have seen lots of poop passing by.

Actually the argument can be made that consciousness and conscious memorization are needed to deploy automatisms, but once those are in place, they are not needed anymore, and so consciousness, and conscious recall should not be present.

When I was a young driver, I remembered everything I did when driving a car, but now I do it automatically, remembering very few of my gestures. When driving, my consciousness is mostly watching for the unforeseen.

Is there a political interpretation explaining such mental declines claims? Indeed, there is. As people get older, they elaborate higher wisdom. Thus, although the soldiers of revolution are typically very young people, because they have their aggression hormones less tempered by wisdom, the leaders of revolution are typically much older.

Let me explain this carefully: fascist and plutocratic leaders typically claim that they are “conservatives“. It means that they justify their mean rule by a refusal to adapt to changed circumstances.

As the French revolution stirred, the most esteemed leaders were senior citizens such as Voltaire or Benjamin Franklin, and everybody looked up to them, from Louis XVI to Turgot; on the Dark Side, many of the leaders, such as the Comte d’ Artois, were barely teenagers.

Closer to us, in WWII, the SS seduced many a 16 year old. In the last few weeks of the war, many of the most enraged Nazis fighting to the bitter end with the allies in the mountainous heart of Germany were school children with heavy weapons. In more than one case, disgusted American GIs, reluctant to blow up some more enraged children to bits, sent their school mistresses to negotiate with them!

If the (plutocratic) establishment can claim that revolutionary wisdom is actually the fruit of mental decline, presto, no revolution. It will be “conservatism” all the way.

***

Why Do We Want To Always Support Winners?

Supporting the home team is easy to understand: this is the tribal instinct. Human beings are social, they have to love the group, thus dislike what hinders the group, namely, other groups.

One has to love the leader(s) of the group, the alpha(s). In general, to abate social tensions, an instinct has got to exist, which makes the oppressed love the oppressor, or let’s say, the inferior love the superior. or even love the winning group, to be motivated to join it. Something more plausible to females. Hence Beatlemania.

***

If One Wants Happiness, One Should Prepare For The Worst:

Pe Romaneste: So happiness must be an accident.

Alexi Helligar: There seems to be greater power in the accidental than we imagine.

Patrice Ayme: Indeed, to a great extent, everything is accidental. Realizing this means that those who complain that something happened accidentally, and, thus, was not expected, have not understood the first thing about causality. Accidents is how the world happens. Wisdom consists in anticipating their occurrence, and having a plan B, should they occur.

***

Brutality Is Friendly To Plutocracy, Long Life Friendly To Wisdom:

Only wisdom can allow long life. Really very long life, lasting centuries, for individuals or civilization. Short lives are brutish, and this has the consequence in many a perpetrator, to spurn whatever life is offered. Indeed a good way to spurn something is by devaluing it. The brutality of the human condition is self reinforcing…

This why human life extension is a necessity, a preliminary, for the extension of wisdom. Because as long as lives are short and brutish, the short and brutish way of life is all too optimal, for all too many people (although those with children, or grandchildren they love will disagree, but they are not necessarily a majority). 

This is something that life spurning plutocrats such as Mr. Jobs have been busy not understanding, as brutality is their friend.

***

Plutocrats Love Death Indeed:

Steve Jobs, despite leaving Reed College after six months, was asked to give the 2005 commencement speech at Stanford. Why? Did Jobs invent anything important? (Disclosure: My Mom offered me an ultra light Mac Air, and I love it.) No, he was just an artistic technology integrator, but not necessarily as mechanically oriented as a car mechanic (his partner Wozniak was the programmer, but even this one finished his college studies in computer science, 20 years later, at Berkeley, and found them hard!)

In his Stanford address, delivered after Mr. Jobs was told he had cancer, but before it was clear that it would ultimately claim his life, Mr. Jobs told his mesmerized audience of naive sheep that “death is very likely the single best invention of life. It is life’s change agent.”

In this light, the invasion of Iraq by Bush and his fanatical followers made sense: by visiting more than one million deaths upon Iraq, the USA brought the single best invention of life. Everybody, or more exactly 83%, including a majority of Stanford students, agreed, at the time.

Is this love of death why Jobs refused conventional medical treatment initially, until it was too late? Jobs insisted that the benefit of death, is you know not to waste life living someone else’s choices. I guess that extended to the medical.

Verily, death came first, and was denied by life. Life is the denial of death. Life did not have to invent death.

***

Hormuz Crisis Versus Suez Crisis: Spot The Difference!

Why did the USA not get upset when Nasser seized the Suez canal, in 1956? And actually why did the USA instead use the occasion to threaten Israel, Britain and France? Not just that, but president Eisenhower aligned himself with the Egyptian, and Soviet dictators. The Soviets, while invading Hungary, killing at least 40,000 Hungarians, threatened to atom bomb London and Paris. With the loud acquiescence of the USA… Which got France and Britain, not the mass murderous USSR, condemned at the United Nations’ general Assembly. What a crazy week it was.

And now, 55 years later, lo and behold, the USA is getting all upset as Iran wants to stop what’s going on below its nose in the strait of Hormuz? Just asking. Inquiring minds want to know.

Is it that in 1956, France and Britain were viewed as preys of the USA? And now that the USA has grabbed everything from France and Britain, they want to be friends again? Because the rich need servants, maybe? In any case, the Suez Crisis was an incongruous reminder that, in 1939, the USA was allied with the USSR and Nazi Germany, against France and Britain (oopss, something one should never say!)

And my advice would be to be very careful with Hormuz. If one wants long life, one does not want long wars. And one does not want fossil fuels. The sooner we get rid of fossil fuels, the better, and if Hormuz helps that way, so be it. The messy Iranian theocracy will not win a waiting game.

***

No Change, No Life!

What the USA needs to do is to do what all serious countries do, and have always done: change its constitution, since the changed circumstances require it.

***

Cool Is Not Cool:

“Cool”. Why is “cool” such a popular word? Is it supposed to correspond to an attitude? Is it a mark of, and a tool for, our subjugation?

So Obama is confronted to the greatest financial thievery in the history of civilization, and that leaves him “cool“? Having rebooted the perpetrators with public money he goes to them to ask for a billion to campaign for re-election? Cool? I mean: we are not supposed to blow our tops when we contemplate such injustice in the name of change we can’t believe?

In Europe, pretty amazingly intricate financial and semantic engineering is presently deployed to save the banks and the sovereign states entangled with them. There again the bottom line is that the resources of the countries are deployed for the exclusive enjoyment of the few, who happen to be the greatest swindlers ever. Although they are presented as too big to flay.

Actually the same technique as in the USA, Quantitative Easing, is being deployed, and on a similar scale. But, as the head of the European Central Bank, an ex Goldman Sachs partner, pointed out sardonically, a scornful smile on the corner of his mouth, Europeans use a different semantic: they don’t call it Quantitative Easing. Therein the difference. Is not that cool too?

Is the greenhouse effect already that bad that cool is the ultimate state one ought to strive for with all of one’s being? Or are we supposed to reject our mammalian inheritance? Mammals, by being warmer, could do more. So, when climate change happened 65 million years ago, they survived (so did the very warm birds, who evolved from bird-like dinosaurs). Are we supposed to do less now, and not survive? Or then survive like crocs, deep in the mud, super cool, eating carrion?

Is “cool” imposed on us so that people know no higher emotional state than iguanas? Become cool like barnacles, as we cling to the existence the plutocrats condescend to leave us to enjoy? Being so cool we would not be like the American and French hot heads who came forth with new constitutions in 1789? 

So is the celebration of “cool” what forces us to not be outraged, as plutocrats steal and burn the entire planet to forget about their megalomaniac angst? To forget they are just crazy critters in need of some restraint? Is “cool” the state slaves are supposed to be in to optimize the enjoyment of their masters? Is it only cool to be cool like corpses?

***

France anti-genocide law denounced by Turkey:

Now this is hilarious. France passed a law punishing convicted holocaust deniers by up to one year in jail and 45,000 euros fine.

Fine, indeed. Who would turn into a partisan, a defender of holocausts? Is not holocaust denial a form of hate speech? Holocausts remain a problem, because when one has killed most of a human group, there is nearly nobody to complain on their behalf: other people move on, as herbivores do, once one of them has been seized and devoured.

France’s national Assembly passed the anti-genocidal law, with bipartisan support. And what do you think happened?

Erdogan, the three time elected Prime Minister of Turkey, had a fit: how does France dare make holocaust denial a crime? He forbade French fighter jets to land in Turkey (so I guess the no fly zone over Syria will be delayed), recalled the Turkish ambassador to France, and stopped all talks with France.

And the questions are: why does the present government in Turkey love holocausts so much? Are holocaust such an endangered species that Turkey has to protect them with all its might?

Why does Turkey consider that a general attack against holocausts is an attack against Turkey? Is it because holocausts are intrinsic to the Turkish character? Or is it because holocausts are mentioned positively in the Bible and the Qur’an, and the present Turkish government is obsessed with the religion of the child molester Abraham? Is this why Erdogan is angry?

***

We Are Truth Machines.

That monkeys now build cities has not changed that truth. No hallucination added in the last 6,000 years has changed that truth either. Science is what we do, and what stands in the way of that fundamental truth, faces extermination.

***

 Patrice Ayme

Abstract: American economists have been deliberately lying about the most basic data. In exchange, they live in big mansions, insider trading the system with false ideas. (As many other academics, bankers and their political leaders do, and not just in the USA, but throughout the West. Insider trading by central bankers, all over, is an hilarious instance of that: central banks always flaunt their independence from elections, but one can see they are not independent from greed!)

***

How does the plutocratic system work? By subjugating people’s mind into knowing false versions of what they need to know, and nothing else. Making people believe in lies to the point of unhesitatingly going to die for it, and kill millions has its advantages: see the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where more than 5 millions have died since the USA attacked Afghanistan on July 3, 1979. Such wars may look like distractions, and indeed they were: millions of young Americans directed their hostility against people on the other side of the planet, thus sparing those who really oppress them from any discomfort.

That is why professor Steven Pinker from Harvard is paid to tell you, or rather to hypnotize you into believing, that violence has decreased, because part of what he is paid for, is to tell you that the preceding did not happen, and, even if it did, it would be deprived of significance: who cares about 5 millions killed in the Middle Earth? And why to talk about them, as their statistically insignificant dismissal is intimately tied to what makes Harvard thrive?

To believe systematic systemic lies, it’s important that all the liars owned by the system say the same thing. It’s also important to convey a mood of crushing superiority. Because that convey a feel good sentiment that it would be an unpatriotic shame to dispel the illusion. Central has been the idea that the USA is the richest, the freest and a meritocracy second to none. In truth it is congealing into classes more impermeable than anywhere else.  

Even someone as joyfully critical as me feels a bit ashamed when Europeans visiting the USA tell me clinically that they are struck by the beggars in the streets, the crazies defecating, the general shabiness, and that it looks as if the USA is frozen with 1950s infrastructure and housing. And they don’t know about the primary schools closing all over. This even in some of the richest areas, such as the Silicon Valley, and New York. 

For years, American propagandists have been vociferating a number of important things about other countries which are enormous lies. And sometimes grotesque lies. Lying about Japan, Europe, China, Japan allows the Masters of America to persuade their subjects that they have by far the best economic, social and mental system. When all they preside over is the malignant subjugation of the many by the few.

For example the choir of plutocratic paid economists have howled for decades that European welfare states enjoy basically no growth; they call that “Eurosclerosis”. Japan has been gratified as suffering from “lost decades“. That has allowed them to heap spite on other economic systems, and promote instead transverse policies friendly to Wall Street and financial pirates.

Paul Krugman, for example, has conscientiously, and liberally, told us again and always, that much more money should be thrown at the enormously malevolent American financial system, to avoid the mythical horror of ”Japan’s Lost Decades“.

And of course, Europe is dying from being so united, Krugman persists, conscientiously and liberally informing us that the old continent would do much better by spending more time biting its own throat, to avoid Eurosclerosis, while reaching the nirvana of ever smaller salaries (yes, ever shrinking salaries is what Krugman preaches, at least for European countries in economic difficulty!)

Both concepts, Japan’s Lost Decades and Eurodevastation, rest on an official growth of the GDP of the USA valued, in the average over the last few decades at above 3%. Now, even subtracting a USA population growth of 1% a year, this gives an increase of GDP of 2% for the non recently immigrated population.

Over decades, the average growth rate of France, or Germany is, officially, according to them, not much more than 1%. Thus, if one compares official European statistics versus official American statistics, one gets an advantage for the USA of 1% a year. Over decades.

So how come this is not apparent to the commons? Everything indicates  that a country such as France, over the last few decades, became richer than the USA. French life expectancy has been growing, year after year, by a quarter, every year (in spite of too much smoking). Over what American economists call “Japan’s Lost decades”, life expectancy in Japan has been growing by 4.2 years (in spite of a western diet).

Meanwhile, recently, in a way reminiscent of the Soviet collapse, life expectancy in the USA had gone down, not up. And the proposed further subjugation of American citizens’ health to for-profit companies is not going to improve matters.

Statistics can vary from country to country. Basically, the GDP consists into adding the price of all transactions. In particular, in any country, the GDP computation depend up the CPI, the Consumer Price Index. The CPI has to be subtracted from the nominal GDP growth. If the CPI is underestimated, the GDP growth will be overestimated.

So what did the American plutocratic propaganda machine did? Underestimate the CPI.

That is directly useful, because the CPI is used for computing salaries of retirees and other low lives.  If the CPI is underestimated, the low lives will keep on going down ever lower, and cost less to the plutocrats and the government they dominate. Thus the government will be able to give ever more money to Wall Street and the Shadow Banking system. Or, as Krugman would say, augment the financiers “monetary base“. (By thinking euphemistically, one can go a long way in the Dark, as Nazis did with their “Final Solution“.)

How do the plutocracy serving economists underestimate the CPI? Well, they use “Hedonic adjustments“. They meant “hedonistic“, but apparently, they can’t spell. Or maybe they can spell, but they are clever enough to understand, after a few years that “hedonistic” sounded bad. It sounded like they got to live the good life by rolling average people in flour, to batter them into delicious morsels to gobble.

The idea of “hedonic adjustments” is weirdly, but efficiently contorted. Suppose you want a ride. In 1850 CE, the only thing you could do was to ride a horse. But, 150 years later you could ride in a 300 horsepower car. The hedonic economists then say:

“You ride has improved 300 times. But its price has not changed. Although it is 300 times better. So you pay the same for 300 times more. Thus the price you pay for 300 horses being the same as for one horse, the price of transportation has gone down 300 times.” So the hedonic economist enters in his books that transportation is 300 times cheaper than 150 years before.  

The result is that the real GDP of the USA has been severely overestimated, as Shadowstats.com shows. For decades. By more than 2%, a year. In 30 year, this means exponential (30) (1/50) = e^.6 = 1.8221188. In other words the Hedonistic  GDP allows to over-estimate the GDP of the USA by 82%.

[For some reason, my computer has refused to transfer pictures to WordPress, for months, so the graph can be consulted at the site where it comes from. But, in a way, it is good to not just look at the graph, but THINK CAREFULLY about what it means. What is important is its presence in the mind's eye, not just a quick glance, with the blue line, real, true GDP, well below the red line, plutocratically claimed GDP.]  

From the graph of true GDP, the blue line well below, one can see many things.

First, the “hedonic” cheating started in 1984, another gift from Reagan, a B actor with an aircraft carrier named after him, much admired by the recent vintage American (the 85% sort who thought that go out invade Iraq and kill Iraqis was an excellent idea).

Second, the vaunted Clinton’s economic miracle averaged less than 1% over his entire reign. (One has to keep in mind that, with an immigration of more than 1% a year, that means the average plight of the average American got worse.)

Even worse: by the end of said Clinton reign, the GDP collapsed to a minus 3% rate of decrease (or shall we say collapse?). Thus the Clinton-Rubin-Summers years ended in economic disaster, contrarily to what democratic party propagandist always claim. Why? These were the years of massive deregulation, not to say massive derangement.

Third, one can also see that there was no recovery under Bush, except for a few months with positive growth, real GDP kept on going down, all the way down to a minus 6% rate shortly after Obama took office (and of which he was not responsible, obviously).

Fourth, so now, here we are. Misled by the powers that be in the democratic party, Obama put in power the same team which caused the catastrophe to start with, under Clinton. The Goldman Sachs team of Rubin. Same team, same policies. Same old, same old, what happened under Clinton, made worse by Bush. Unsurprisingly, the real GDP kept on shrinking under Obama.

Is there hope? Well, the truth should come out. Maybe it will come out in time. In “The Myth Of Japan Failure” Eamonn Fingleton points out that:”Time and again, Americans are told to look to Japan as a warning of what the country might become if the right path is not followed…Here, for instance, is how the CNN analyst David Gergen has described Japan: “It’s now a very demoralized country and it has really been set back.”

But that presentation of Japan is a myth. By many measures, the Japanese economy has done very well during the so-called lost decades, which started with a stock market crash in January 1990. By some of the most important measures, it has done a lot better than the United States.

Japan has succeeded in delivering an increasingly affluent lifestyle to its people despite the financial crash. In the fullness of time, it is likely that this era will be viewed as an outstanding success story.

How can the reality and the image be so different? And can the United States learn from Japan’s experience?

It is true that Japanese housing prices have never returned to the ludicrous highs they briefly touched in the wild final stage of the boom. Neither has the Tokyo stock market.”

And that is why American economists, who measure everything by their own crooked financial markets, have deemed Japan a failure. A government, such as the Japanese one, which spends so much money building gigantic bridges, and enforcing the world’s stiffest anti-earthquake regulations, can only be seen as a failure from the perspective of the “world’s greatest city” (Krugman), and its greatest street, the one which drives mankind into the Wall, Wall Street.

We have seen insane slave regimes before, much supported by crooked statistics, and fawning pseudo intellectuals: the USSR was a case in point. It was described as a workers’ paradise, while 30% of the population (the “Zeks”) were directly enslaved, and one could see the direct, officious, and soon official alliance between Hitler and Stalin. What we are seeing right now is quite a bit the same. But, in a way, it’s worse. The crook who was heading the Swiss Central Bank just resigned. He was forced to resign, January 9, 2012, by public outrage. Just an hour before appearing in front of the Swiss Parliament, to answer some personal questions.

Why? This playboy, a rock star, a sport figure enriched himself not just on Wall Street, where he made his fortune, but with legal insider trading as the central banker of Switzerland (his American wife made $64,000 of profit by anticipating the pegging of the Swiss Franc on the European currency, the euro, in September 2011). It’s interesting how the plutocracy equips itself with handsome sport figures to interface with the People (much of the top bankers in the USA are very tall, often with a past of professional sports, such as ex secretary Paulson, etc.)

When one pulss the strings, it works better with pretty, impressive marionettes.

Don’t worry: in the USA, it’s not just legal for public figures to do insider trading. Most politicians have access to insider information, and trade on it. That’s how most Congress creatures end up millionaires. And this does not just happen in the USA, as the Swiss example just demonstrated.

The European Central Bank just chose as chief economist another trading pirate. This Belgian vulture scavenged the world economy for more than a decade, and, now having made his fortune, will be able to steer the world to ever more plutocracy, through ever more erroneous statistics. (The ECB is becoming little more than an appendage of the plutocracy ever since a senior partner at Goldman Sachs, Draghi, became its boss!)

But nobody, in the supine American media, ever ask how American leaders become so rich, by holding public office, let alone gets outraged by it. Closing American airspace over Princess Chelsea Clinton is routine.

Nobody ask: how come the USA is becoming so poor, while its GDP ever higher climbs? Maybe everybody knows, deep down inside, and is just too afraid to ask, out and loud.

***

Patrice Ayme

How can entire countries, or civilizations go so wrong, for so long? Because of vicious ideas that, instead of being condemned and vilified, become adulated and celebrated, sometimes under the respectability of religion. Then the Dark Side itself becomes the object of a cult. Here is an example, how Germany became deviant.

It is often said that Germanic fascism and genocidal proclivities started with Hitler. But this is not true at all.

Genocide was part of a system of thought, Lutheranism, that Prussians were conditioned to respect as the highest religion for more than 400 years (And, in my generosity, I did not go back to the heydays of the Teutonic Knights who fabricated Prussia to start with, because they found the Middle East too hot in more ways than one!)

France and her National Constituent Assembly had made the Declaration of Human Rights the basis of her constitution. It was duly signed by King Louis XVI in August 1789. All men were supposed equal, including equal for tax purposes. That drove the plutocrats into a lethal fury.

Paris in 1792 was officially threatened of the exact same sort of Final Solution deployed at Auschwitz, 150 years later. And the reasons were even flimsier.

OK, maybe not. After all plutocrats will go to great extremities to avoid paying taxes. Yes, some things don’t really change, as long as one has not exerted really great, deep, mental and civilizational efforts, followed by thorough legislation. The great age of Greece, or the glorious centuries of the rise of the Roman republic, were preceded by extensive anti-plutocratic revolutions, all over.

***

LUTHER = HITLER?

Torturous, murderous anti-Judaism was fully written down by Luther. Luther was ever more inclined to utter criminal, lethal threats towards the Jews, the more famous he got.

Josel of Rosheim tried to help the Jews of Saxony. He wrote that their plight was “due to that priest whose name was Martin Luther — may his body and soul be bound up in hell!! — who wrote and issued many heretical books in which he said that whoever would help the Jews was doomed to perdition.”

Josel asked the city of Strasbourg to forbid the sale of Luther’s deadly anti-Jewish trash; the city did so after a Lutheran pastor in Hochfelden argued in a sermon that his parishioners should murder Jews.

Jews were the object of Luther hatred in his 65,000-word treatise Von den Juden und Ihren Lügen (On the Jews and Their Lies) and Vom Schem Hamphoras und vom Geschlecht Christi (Of the Unknowable Name and the Generations of Christ). It was reprinted five times within his lifetime.

As the (German) philosopher Karl Jaspers wrote regarding Luther’s treatise, On the Jews and Their Lies: “There you already have the whole Nazi program“. Everything is there indeed. And it’s there for all to see. How come does one not talk about it then? Has the Nazi program long been the program? 

According to Martin Luther the Jews are a “base, whoring people, that is, no people of God, and their boast of lineage, circumcision, and law must be accounted as filth”… They are full of the “devil’s feces … which they wallow in like swine.” The synagogue was a “defiled bride, yes, an incorrigible whore and an evil slut…”

Luther argued, or one should say, more pertinently, argues, because that system of thought is still alive and influential, the following. ”Synagogues and Jewish schools [should] be set on fire, sacred Jewish books destroyed, rabbis forbidden to preach, Jewish homes razed, so that Jews can live in ruins underground, moaning, and Jewish property and money confiscated.” Jews should be shown no mercy or kindness, afforded no legal protection, and these “poisonous envenomed worms” should be drafted into forced labor or expelled for all time.

Actually Luther preaches the Final Solution “We are at fault in not slaying them.” Hitler was never that loud and explicit. 

In modern France, such a hating creep would be repeatedly condemned to jail, and never see the light of the day. Since 1945, the French republic has rightly decided to punish some forms of hate crimes, and many countries have followed (for example Germany and the USA).

So can one equate Hitler and Luther? Sorry, that would be unfair. Unfair to Hitler. Luther came first. He was the teacher, he was the preacher. Hitler was imprinted on that venom.

And what of all those countless millions who admired Luther and produced his venom, for centuries? They, too came first. They too, advocated Lutheranism, that means, mass murdering anti-Judaism. Some will say:”Oh, no, there is much more to it than that!“

Whatever. When one has threatened to have people killed, just because of whom they were born from, what can one do for an encore? Suppose someone goes around preaching, and writing than some categories of children ought to be slayed. And then he claims he wants to take care, and he wants to offer icecream to children, out of love, he says. Is not that even more disturbing? 

Another thing: the top Nazis kept the Final Solution secret enough so that the average German could plausibly argue that he, or she, would never have suspected such a thing. But there was nothing secret about Luther’s writings and sermons.  

Still another thing: mass murdering anti-Judaism was made in the name of Christ, a non-entity (nobody of official governmental record had ever seen his face; so his age varied by at least 7 years and his birth changed to the winter solstice 400 years later: imagine that we did not know when Augustus was born!) Let alone the slight contradiction that Jesus himself, supposing generously that he existed, assuredly existed as a Jew. So why did Luther hate Jews murderously, while loving Jesus to death? The answer is obvious.

In other words, it’s not really about Jews, and Jesus, or god needing some help with the multiverse. It’s all about mass murdering frenzy on the slightest pretext. It’s all about accepting mass murdering frenzy as a great organizing principle. So no wonder the Communists, the Slavs, the Poles, the Gypsies, the French, etc. were next in line. Luther, and his enraged followers, were insane maniacs, and all the worse, as they successfully persuaded themselves that they were the lamb of god. The latter enabling the former.  

In truth they were raiding murdering chimps equipped with the printing press. Thus the mass murdering frenzy had a tribal character. Philosophers such as Kant and Herder only accentuated it. The former with the cult of obedience to his Lord and the associated social order, the latter with the cult of tribal spirit and the closed mind, the exact opposite of Pericles’ Open Society. By then, as France had taken Athens’ torch, the appropriately named Herder hated the appropriately named French, all the more since many German intellectuals looked up to the Closed Society and military order so much.

***

DARK SIDE UNLEASHED: THE GREAT GERMAN REICH, 1871-1945:

The Second Reich was created by Bismarck, in a succession of wars, starting with enormously dangerous Denmark. The wars stroked the nationalist and fascist fiber, which kept on growing until it devoured Bismarck himself in 1890.

Anti-Judaism was rabid by 1880 CE, all over Germany. Nietzsche had to give up on many friends, including Wagner, and his sister. He headed towards France and Bizet. Nietzsche had started as a German nationalist but the encroaching madness of the entire country turned him into a total enemy of the system of thought he saw rising there. He predicted that German hyper nationalism and racial hatred would cause the greatest wars, come the following century. This is all over Nietzsche’s later books, and thus demonstrate that the German catastrophe was thoroughly predictable, for anybody with an open mind.

Now, precisely because Luther, Kant and Herder had taught the closed mind, as a highest virtue, and precisely because those ideologies were now in power, throughout the Prussian university system, the average German was not programmed to understand what Nietzsche was talking about. To the point that the Nazis successfully turned Nietzsche’s message on its head, presenting him as their prophet, when he hated their sort to the greatest extent (something like that also happened to Muhammad’s message, his (ex) child bride Aisha herself had argued forcefully, around 660 CE) .  

Starting in Namibia, the Prussian army committed systematic, deliberate, premeditated and threatened mass murdering atrocities. Goering, the father of Hermann Goering, and other Prussian occupiers of Namibia conducted at least two genocides there.

The French and the British did not do so in the gigantic swathes of Africa they ruled over (although the British engaged in a de facto genocide against the Boers). The genocides in Namibia were official, deliberate, premeditated, and aimed at the complete extermination of the locals.

Prussian war atrocities occurred in World War One. They were not just committed. They were threatened first. So they were deliberate, premeditated, and justified by the mass murdering system of thought reigning over Prussia. The Prussian army declared that, if it was fired on, it would deliberately kill civilians. In Belgium (a neutral country it had just invaded, itself a war crime).

Whereas the British, French and Italian did not commit any atrocities we know of in World war One.

Where does all this come from? As, I said, Luther’s mass murdering frenzy preaching had left a deep imprint on the souls.

***

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU FORCE THE WELL ENTRENCHED 2% TO PAY TAX; WORLD WAR:

Once the metaprinciple of mass murdering has been accepted and made into a sacred religion (Lutheranism), one can apply the sacred principle of utter destruction all over.

Starting in August 1789, France had become a Constitutional Monarchy headed by King Louis XVI, who had been for 15 years prior the absolute, legitimate King of France. Thus the French Constitutional Monarchy was fully legitimate (if it pleased the French King and the French Parliaments to change the constitution, it should have been their business, and theirs alone!)

However the plutocrats outside were furious, because the Upper Ones, the top 2% (the Second Estate, the Nobility) was forced to pay taxes, like everybody else. In this new Constitutional Monarchy.

No, I am not making this up.

Never mind that the constitutional king in the Ancient Regime, Louis XVI himself, once again, had tried to make them pay tax, from day one. So not only the plutocrats were furious against the constitutional monarch, but against that monarch’s old program, same old, same old, which he had tried to impose, from day one, 15 years before the revolution of 1789. Of course that is what was going on, but they did not couch it that way in 1792

So the plutocrats and their emperors and kings declared war to France. To the Constitutional Monarchy of France. And how did it do that? By threatening France, the French People, with the modern definition of GENOCIDE. Here it is:

***

[Part Of] THE PROCLAMATION OF THE DUKE OF BRUNSWICK, July 1792.

“Their Majesties the emperor [of Austria] and the king of Prussia having entrusted to me the command of the united armies which they have collected on the frontiers of France, I desire to announce to the inhabitants of that kingdom the motives which have determined the policy of the two sovereigns and the purposes which they have in view.

After arbitrarily violating the rights of the German princes in Alsace and Lorraine, disturbing and overthrowing good order and legitimate government in the interior of the realm, committing against the sacred person of the king and his august family outrages and brutalities which continue to be renewed daily, those who have usurped the reins of government have at last completed their work…

His Majesty the king of Prussia, united with his Imperial Majesty by the bonds of a strict defensive alliance and himself a preponderant member of the Germanic body, would have felt it inexcusable to refuse to march to the help of his ally and fellow-member of the empire. . . .

To these important interests should be added another aim equally important and very close to the hearts of the two sovereigns, – namely, to put an end to the anarchy in the interior of France, to check the attacks upon the throne and the altar, to reestablish the legal power, to restore to the king the security and the liberty of which he is now deprived and to place him in a position to exercise once more the legitimate authority which belongs to him.

Convinced that the sane portion of the French nation abhors the excesses of the faction which dominates it, and that the majority of the people look forward with impatience to the time when they may declare themselves openly against the odious enterprises of their oppressors, his Majesty the emperor and his Majesty the king of Prussia call upon them and invite them to return without delay to the path of reason, justice, order, and peace. In accordance with these views, I, the undersigned, the commander in chief of the two armies, declare:

1. That, drawn into this war by irresistible circumstances, the two allied courts entertain no other aims than the welfare of France, and have no intention of enriching themselves by conquests.

2. That they do not propose to meddle in the internal government of France, and that they merely wish to deliver the king, the queen, and the royal family from their captivity, and procure for his Most Christian Majesty the necessary security to enable him, without danger or hindrance, to make such engagements as he shall see fit, and to work for the welfare of his subjects, according to his pledges.

3. That the allied armies will protect the towns and villages, and the persons and goods of those who shall submit to the king and who shall cooperate in the immediate reestablishment of order and the police power throughout France.

4. That, on the contrary, the members of the National Guard who shall fight against the troops of the two allied courts, and who shall be taken with arms in their hands, shall be treated as enemies and punished as rebels to their king and as disturbers of the public peace. . . .

7. That the inhabitants of the towns and villages who may dare to defend themselves against the troops of their Imperial and Royal Majesties and fire on them, either in the open country or through windows, doors, and openings in their houses, shall be punished immediately according to the most stringent laws of war, and their houses shall be burned or destroyed. . . .

8. The city of Paris and all its inhabitants without distinction shall be required to submit at once and without delay to the king, to place that prince in full and complete liberty, and to assure to him, as well as to the other royal personages, the inviolability and respect which the law of nature and of nations demands of subjects toward sovereigns. . .

Their said Majesties declare, on their word of honor as emperor and king, that if the chateau of the Tuileries is entered by force or attacked, if the least violence be offered to their Majesties the king, queen, and royal family, and if their safety and their liberty be not immediately assured, they will inflict an ever memorable vengeance by delivering over the CITY OF PARIS TO MILITARY EXECUTION and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION, and the rebels guilty of the said outrages to the punishment that they merit. . . .

Given at the headquarters at Coblenz, July 25, 1792.

CHARLES WILLIAM FERDINAND,

Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg.

***

CRIME DOES NOT ALWAYS PAY:

The criminally inclined Brunswick captured the French city of Longwy, August 23 1792, and Verdun, September 2. Marching on Paris, he was cut from behind by general Dumouriez coming from the north, and general Kellermann coming from the east. Brunswick was sorely defeated at Valmy on September 20, in an artillery duel, where French artillery, using new technology, proved superior.

The King was deposed as head of state on September 21. The Austrian born and raised Queen had been sending secret messages to the plutocratic coalition about the deployment of the armies of France (made mostly of veteran professional royal troops…) The First French Republic was proclaimed the next day by the National Convention. Mr. and Mrs. Capet were condemned for high treason. 

***

DEFINE INFAMY, THEN CRUSH IT WITH HIGH TAXES:

Thus one sees that the will to mass murder out of tribal hatred passed from Luther to Brunswick, and from there all the way down to Hitler. Now Luther did not invent criminal anti-Judaism of the gory type. Famously, Saint Louis (IX) had written that nothing would please him more than to twist a knife around the belly of an unbeliever or Jew. But this is precisely the point: the words of Saint Louis, who was himself making a show of many of the principles Luther later adopted, were no doubt very well known to Luther. 

Thus Saint Louis was an earlier apologist of genocide purely to satisfy hatred, the Dark Side. And that system of thought was actually present even earlier in Saint Bernard, and the Roman emperors who invented it in the Later Roman empire. How did the same monstrous system of thought propagate from the Fourth Century to the Twentieth Century? Well, because nobody attacked it with the most substantial arguments. Mass murdering hatred progressed under the cover of Jesus and his pretended religion of love (many workers of Christ worked really for love, and only for love, but that does not include the mythical founder, and certainly not his most powerful advocates!)  

And, of course, much was about plutocracy all along. High time to raise their taxes sky high. If you don’t want the eagle to keep on eating you alive, just don’t wait for Heracles, clip its wings, now! At least that is what Prometheus would not doubt recommend.

Some things don’t really change, unless one exerts really great and thorough mental efforts. But the latter, by themselves, are the only god we need.

***

Patrice Ayme

This, (pre-)supposing Normal Distributions, allows to make predictions of a “scientific” character:

1) Suppose the phenomenon at hand satisfies a Bell Curve distribution law.

2) Identify, from know data, the inception of said curve, hence the curve itself.

3) Read out on the graph its extent and peak.

Thus geologist Marion King Hubbert predicted in the 1950s that the US oil production would peak out around 1970. His prediction was verified. He applied his model to world oil production. The model predicted peak oil around 1995.

However, as the cheap oil was depleted oil prices went up, making it economic, in appearance, to get oil from tar sands, and ever deeper underwater drilling. The cost to the companies did not reflect the true cost to the economy of society at large.

Hydraulic fracking was also used increasingly in the USA as Western oil companies got chased out of the developing world (to be replaced by national oil companies). Texas, and the Bakken formation of North Dakota became targets of extensive fracking.

Fracking in the USA for gas and oil is changing quickly the energy balance of the USA. It has been immensely profitable, for now, for the companies indulging in it, and the production of fossil fuels in the USA has augmented enormously.

Fracking, in the present state of technology, consists into injecting enormous quantities of water charged with various poisons and rock devouring bleach or acid. The poisonous water is injected again and again to break the rock, releasing gas, or oil. And also countless poisons held by Pluto down below, such as radioactive materials (checking for workers for radioactivity is standard when fracking).

Thanks to the personal intervention of Vice President Cheney, CEO and shareholder of Halliburton, in 2005 hydraulic fracturing was exempted by US Congress from any regulation under the Safe Drinking Water Act.

During the period November 2001 to November 2011, the general government inflation index in the USA, CPI-U, grew from 176.7 to 226.23, an increase of about 28%. But, during the same period, the CPI motor fuels index went from 96.1 to 294.049. The same volume of gasoline roughly tripled in price over the last decade. (In Europe, because of enormous energy taxes, and cheaper oil close at hand, the effect has been attenuated; whereas in the USA, my interpretation is that the oil spike played a role in the subprime crisis!)

People have debated whether we passed Peak Oil or not. Maybe not. Why not? Because we have cheated. The enormous exploitation philosophy in the USA, overruling anything else, such as, for example, common sense, has allowed to cheat.

It is likely that the cost of fracking on the environment is going to be catastrophic. It causes even earthquakes. Meanwhile, fossil fuel companies will make lots of money, and give off many campaign contributions to their pet politicians, in the country where these corrupt practices are legal, namely the USA.

France, followed now by South Africa, has outlawed fracking in its present state of technology, as they fear for their water table. We can have life without gas and oil, but not without water. At least so think the silly French, who should go back to drinking wine, so that they can reason like real Americans.

In any case, Canadian fossil fuel interests are firmly determined to frack and to heat up sands full of tar, to extract fuel. The cost in terms of CO2 pollution and energy is enormous. And it will get bigger: Canada has sold its soul to the fossil fuel burning Satan. But, when one has started with an ethnic cleansing of the French (!) and the Indian natives, one may be forgiven, to stupidly hope, to do the same to the entire planet…

The real currency of economy ought to be energy. As it was in prehistory. Peak CHEAP oil means that it costs more and more to extract fossil fuels, in terms of the only currency which really counts, energy (every word in this sentence was carefully considered).

The exploitation philosophy has been the ruling philosophy in many Anglo-Saxon lands, ever since it got pushed by the “West Country Men” (circa 1600, the Elizabethan Age) ). Historically the Anglo-Saxon colonies deeply believed that no exploitation of the land, or the peoples, was harsh enough. The assault of the USA against Afghanistan, since July 3, 1979, to jump on the gigantic minerals reserves found by the French there, is an example of this avoir plus grand yeux que grand ventre philosophy (having bigger eyes than stomach philosophy: in Afghanistan, the USA tried to swallow more than it could chew).

One can compare Australia with French held, nickel rich New Caledonia next door: the dumb French forgot to massacre the natives to the exacting Anglo-Saxon standards. Thus, they have had to face an independence movement.

The French ruled New Caledonia archipelago is made of half aboriginal descendants, while the natives were essentially extinguished from Australia. In Australia, up to the 1960s, methods now classified by the United nations as genocide were used.

In any case, the mentality that no exploitation of natural resources is harsh enough has to be thrown into the garbage of history, or reserved to the outer planets. It’s important to be able to diagnose all its ramifications.

In the case of the energy policies of the USA, that country, and the entire planet, is led into a trap. Subsidies to expensive fossil fuels make continuing with a very dangerous form of energy possible. What’s more dangerous than destroying the air we breathe, and the oceans we rule? When the subsidies will run out, the real cost of fossil fuels will show itself to be unbearable. But then new forms of energy will not have been deployed in a timely manner. The rats will be many, but the food short, the air unbreathable…

Historically, it has taken 50 years to fully deploy new energy systems. It is true that going all electric would spare a lot of energy (electric engines are much more efficient, as they do not depend upon a flow between a hot source and a cold sink). Making fossil fuels pay their true cost is another must. Some of the cost is to maintain enormous, and enormously expensive British, French and American military forces to be ready to keep forcefully open the Strait of Ormuz (say). 35% of the world oil passes below the noses of gasoline starved Iranians (don’t ask).

Another example:  Since ever and ever, fossil fuels for air transportation have not been taxed, worldwide. The European Union has decided to fix that, and its new taxation policy for air transportation is going into effect today, January 1, 2012, for all flights flying into Europe.

The USA has protested loudly, threatening economic sanctions. The USA, through Hilary Clinton’s voice box, called the correct pricing of air transportation an attack against the free market.

Apparently we are far from having reached peak impudence!

Patrice Ayme

Is Government Too Separated From The Authority That matters Most?

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Is a new age of connivance upon us?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Patrice Ayme

Europhobia  And Plutophilia Go Well Together. Why? Societies Pack Thought As A Weapon.

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Abstract: Ideas can kill. Why? Because societies can kill, and often do. Let’s put it slightly more pedagogically: sociobiology evolved most fundamentally, for the most violent reasons: defense and attack. And new ideas have an impact only when they become social (although seriously different ideas get born among the asocial). Thus, when ideas come around, there is a good probability that they are propagated for offensive reasons.

And please be it that nobody evoke the lethal hypocrite Gandhi (self described “friend” of Hitler, and cause of the Pakistan split) again! My model is Mandela. Mandela used bombs, with high explosives. (It’s not that I like bombs: I was bombed myself, by some fascists, and did not like it at all.)

Mandela, once jailed, switched to even more explosive ideas. (Mandela was viewed as a terrorist by the USA until 2008!) But the very power, the very violence, of Mandela’s ideas mangled the racist thought system South Africa was suffering from.  

A symbol of the intrinsic violence of societies is given by the most exclusive society of all, the UNSC. The five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council, the victors against murderously insane racist fascism in WWII, all have nuclear arsenals, and certified moods and means to strike with them. This threat of devastating violence has kept global peace for 66 years.

At the bottom of the social instinct, having evolved through the eons, is, fundamentally, the need to survive, a need relating to the ultimate forms of violence. Society is as important, and as violent, as life itself.  Hence, when a society produces ideas, it is not generally from sheer curiosity, but, rather, from aggressive mania.

Richard Feynman resigned from that society called the American Academy of Sciences, when he discovered that all what Academicians worried about was, not science, but rather, who was in, and who was to be kept out.

We have to keep in mind that societies are not made to be smart, whatever they say. Be it Harvard or American economists, societies defend first of all their bread and butter, their influence, not the intrinsic truth. That is why American economist prefer to talk about Europe’s bonds, rather than about failing American ethics, failing American school, failing American energy policy, and, generally a failure of American thinking. And the latter failure can be directly traced to American universities.

Plutophile intellectuals such as Pinker, Ferguson, or even Krugman, illustrate this with the multidimensional apologies of the established Wall Street order they eternally spew. Pinker does it by claiming mathematics have shown him we live in the best possible world, Ferguson by confusing Anglo-American plutocracy with civilization.

Krugman supports Wall Street by spewing absurdities about Europe, calling it “Orwellian“. Is that a trick to better forget the much more eerie American situation, and to keep on insisting that the big banks which caused the disaster should be sent as much money as they want?

(That’s called “Quantitative and Qualitative Easing“: so that guilty banks can keep on investing that the leverage they create from the so called “monetary base” with their equally hyper wealthy friends, especially in the universe of derivatives, which is hostile to the real world).

Krugman insists that Keynes taught him all that, but, since Keynes tried to prevent to have the dollar as reserve currency, in 1944, as the head of the monetary and currency commission at Bretton Woods, Krugman did not learn his lesson well.

In truth, and contrarily to what Paul Krugman brazenly preaches, Keynes believed that an international monetary system needed an international reserve synthetic asset, with components proportional to their output contribution.

By fighting a European currency, Krugman is fighting not just Keynes, but a point that Keynes viewed as the most important in the world trading system. Keynes was obsessed by trade imbalances, and righly so. Trade imbalances caused the Great Depression, and even worse problems, but Krugman will never tell any of this to his smitten readership! Instead the honorable Paul preaches according to the considerable needs of the biggest, dirtiest American bankers!

How do we want Obama to take the right decisions, when the left wing, the self declared liberal intellectuals, the technocrats, are so much at the service of Wall Street, that they cannot even imagine the outside of the Wall Street box? Franco-German leaders are getting slightly better advice, and that is why they are getting down rated by that most influential society, Wall Street. Under covers, a war is brewing between Franco-Germania, and Wall Street.

War between societies? What is more natural? The sun and the stars?

***

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INTELLECTUALS ARE NO BETTER THAN THE SOCIETIES THEY ARE FROM:

 Obama has officially discovered that his roots are much more from Kansas rather than Kenya, and that Teddy Roosevelt was right to attack the plutocracy. Better belated truth than dreams from an absent father, indeed!

If Obama keeps on discovering truths, there may be hope.

Speaking of truth, the United Nations created a Palestinian state and Israel simultaneously in the late 1940s. And now the Palestinian flag officially flies at the UNESCO in Paris. Washington reaction? Cutting the contribution of the USA to UNESCO, 22% of its budget. The 22% correspond to a smidgen higher than the relative GDP of the USA. No doubt, though, that, if the USA keeps taking ethically stupid decisions, it will keep impoverishing itself. And in more ways than just spiritual. Ethics, after all, is the bottom line.

We have individuals such as Krugman going around the world, teaching their ideas, the same old bigoted ideas, we have seen for centuries before. In the case of Krugman, his grand socioeconomic idea is that every European nation should be armed with its own money, to make war on its European neighbors. Is Krugman teaching war and devaluation? What if he is wrong? Is he responsible of the ensuing war because of his influence as a Very Serious Person?

Notice that the sovereign debt crisis is about credit rating agencies. Those private for profit societies have suddenly decided to view economically magnificent Germany with more suspicion than this den of financial piracy called London (with a 12% British deficit, and two million people in the streets, now that the riots have abated).

We have individuals such as Corzine, one the biggest politicians in the USA, ever, senator, governor, whatever. And who became such, because he was one of the biggest bankers, head of the arch-villain, Goldman Sachs. And what was Corzine doing? Buying billions of Italian sovereign debt with American farmers money. Playing with the retirements of millions. Why is that legal?

Does one become idiotic by worrying too much about what worries idiots? Naturally. In general, all thinking is social. If the society is stupid, it will produce stupid thinking.

Intellectuals belong  to, evolve, and thrive, in societies. When most intellectuals worried about angels on a pin, it was impossible to do otherwise, if one wanted to be taken seriously.

Nowadays, plutocracy supporting economists (so called “Anglo-Saxon economists“) support the New York, Manhattan, Wall Street cause. That is why Krugman proclaims New York City to be the “greatest city in the world” (meaning, implicitly, with the most beautiful  street in the world, the one which is driving the planet into a wall, hence its name: Wall Street; no need for lousy jokes such as New Pork City, the street itself is descriptive enough!)

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EVEN IN MATHEMATICS, MOBS (TRY TO) RULE:

Ideas are implemented by societies of intellectuals. But they are rarely discovered by them. Really new ideas are produced by lone wolves, not by those who howl together with the packs. This has to do with the fact that the emotional complex supporting groupthink is transverse to the one supporting true creativity: be loved by one’s peers is antagonist to going beyond their feeble mental capability.

Those true geniuses, the real originators of ideas, are generally ignored during their lifetime, when they are not the object of active hostility. Others, the professional opportunists, steal their ideas and run away with them. The most honest of them joke about it. Hence Einstein’s contemptible gloating:”The Secret of creativity is to hide one’s sources“.

Einstein had stolen  “borrowed” the theory of Relativity from an impressive Areopagus of famous…non-German physicists and mathematicians, and, first of all, Poincare’. This sort of theft has consequences, as lesser minds give lesser colors, or the wrong ones, to what they atole and did not really understand. Einstein did not understand Poincare”s subtle objections to his approach to Relativity, he just reacted like a child, aggressively. To this day, Einstein and his simplistic, dubious ideas rule in Relativity, and the choir sings, attributing to itself many Nobel Prizes. But, someday, the time will come to pay the interest on this “loan” Einstein made on behalf of the choir.

An example of the rabid behavior of packs was exhibited when the Poincare’ conjecture was solved by the Russian mathematician Perelman. A famously greedy mathematician (who I personally know all too well) who controlled access to math journals, and a pack of his followers claimed that it was them who proved it.

As Perelman put it: … “I was dismayed by the discipline’s lax ethics... It is not people who break ethical standards who are regarded as aliens, it is people like me who are isolated… there are many mathematicians who are more or less honest. But almost all of them are conformists. They are more or less honest, but they tolerate those who are not honest.”

They have to tolerate the dishonest: all too often, they were their advisers. I personally think that, among the mathematicians I knew best, precisely the group Perelman was involved with, the lack of ethics was so pathological that it was enough to cause massive violations of human rights. The only safe behavior was to not see their faces again, and leave the field, as Perelman did. 

Well, much of the same can be said throughout science, and there is no doubt that rising the ethical level would rise the science too, as it would protect the real creators, and hinder the opportunists, more than now.

Read more:

http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2006/08/28/060828fa_fact2#ixzz1gOvWg0Gn

I know several of the actors involved, and I was dismayed by their disgusting (lack of) ethics before. They would make anybody decent want to leave mathematics. The problem, looking forward, being that the most decent are the deepest. Yau, not to name him, had been immensely rewarded in the past, in no small reason because he was the student of Chern. In math too, it’s who you know, and how much they love you.

Notice that mathematics will suffer, going forward, because somebody of the depth of Perelman left mathematics (and he is not the only one to have done so). So what’s left? Great thinkers can always meet on the Internet, and let the likes of Yau plot with the Chinese “president”…

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BAD ETHICS, BAD THINKING:

Low ethics of course create low thinking. Those who put so much effort into an abysmal lack of ethics cannot occupy their brains with maximal mental depth.

This is why German nationalism, by putting the German Einstein forward, put on the backburner subtle objections (ironically, lots of Germans later condemned Einstein’s “Jewish science”…And there is indeed something biblical in Einstein way of thinking!)

More towering creators, those interested primarily by maximal mental performance, can only turn away from greedy insects, lest they be eaten alive, or turned into “pets” as Perelman puts it (and I personally experienced). This is why so many of the deepest thinkers turn away from the crowd, and any association of would be “peers”. Thus Spinoza refused a university professorship, and preferred to go on with his daily grind (from which he soon died).

The preceding is a fortiori true in physics, economics or philosophy (and why Nietzsche retired from his full university professorship at the grand old age of 30, having suffered fools and their follies all too long, in a Germany which was already going nuts, he said!)

Conversely, that vermin of Heidegger taught Nazism, in Nazi uniform, and, having thus associated himself with a pretty mighty society, the Nazi Party, sees his reputation thrive to this day. (The same is a fortiori true for the Bush family!)

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WALL STREET, .1% GROUPTHINK:

Anyway back to the global civilization we have now, led by a few prominently noisy nations, among them, our formerly great leader, the USA. That the USA is increasingly dominated by morons is pretty clear from the panel of republican candidates. The thoroughly corrupt, nutty Gingrich (Gang-rich?) looks like a genius relative to the rest of the field.

Citizens of the USA, contrarily to the opinion they have of themselves, are more like pack members, than lone wolves. That has long been the strength of the USA: it allowed to neglect ethical objections, and occupy an entire continent with an exploitative culture, no questions asked. Indeed pack mentality comes in handy when invading foreign lands.

Even Tocqueville had noticed, long ago, the tendency of Americans to stand in societies obsessed by the concept of peers.

Tocqueville had considered American public opinion to be based on respect for sheer mass (rather than the respect for sheer intellect). The biggest pack was always perceived as correct. He saw in the respect for crowds as intellectual authorities, a threat to independence of thought: “In America, the majority raises formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion” (Democracy in America, 1835 CE, page 117)…“I am not the more disposed to pass beneath the yoke because it is held out to me by the arms of a million men” (ibid., p. 149).

But of course, the oligarchic American universities have interest to raise formidable barriers around the liberty of opinion. They are paid for that, after all, by their rich sponsors.

Conversely, the same richly endowed universities have never produced an Einstein intellectuals of the very highest caliber (as I explained above, a caliber higher than Einstein: Europe has produced dozens; when Yau was asked why he tried to steal Perelman’s discoveries, he justified that by saying he wanted to show to the world that China, too, could produce intellectuals of the highest caliber… Just like Europe; hmm, it rather backfired…) And it is no coincidence: money does not make a bird fly above the commons. Frantic competition is not conducive to deep meditation. 

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TICKLE ME PINK:

Being a Wall Street groupie is why Pinker (Harvard) tells us in “Our Better Angels” that we are the less violent society, ever. So Wall street is not violent, not at all. You are hallucinating, you the 99%.

Professor Pinker does not see, he cannot see, he is paid not to see, he is paid to tell you that  the millions of dead his defense department, defending Harvard, caused in the last 30 years did not happen. Those five million dead or so (Iraq + Afghanistan), caused by various American master operations simply did not happen. According to the statistics Pinker uses.

Why killing millions dead? In part to keep an aura of terror around the world (the USA attacked the Socialist Republic of Afghanistan in July 1979. To get to the billions in oil in Iraq, and the billions in minerals in Afghanistan. Let’s dig a bit in the later.

Funny story here: the billions in rare minerals in Afghanistan were found by a French campaign (my father collaborated with it). The French geologist Lapparent, and his colleagues (including my dad), prospected under French and Afghan government mandates, until the savage intervention ordered by American Eternal Peace president Carter. Carter’s lethal violence destroyed socialist and republican hopes in Afghanistan. It also helped remind France that the USA owns the world, and, in particular, all minerals. 

According to Pinker, is this peace exploding? Oh no: he simply does not see that war which killed, over more than 32 years, at least two million (maybe three million) Afghans. It simply does not exist. For Pinker, and Pinker wants all Americans to know, as Obama never fails to remind us, that the Afghan war started the day the towers fell. But of course the towers fell because the USA had organized mayhem by in Afghanistan, for 22 years, killing millions.

In other words Pinker worships the same sort of mental ability which allowed not to see Nazism for what it was until after France fell in 1940. He would of course change his music if a few more towers fell in New York. Ferguson author of another Harvard book, “Civilization”, tells us that Britain invented civilization, and he recommends to read great Western books such as the Bible and Locke’s celebration of slavery (that’s on the last page of his book).

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NOT ENOUGH HEAT FOR THE USA YET:

Wonderful climate conference in South Africa: the USA, with 17.5 tons of CO2 emitted per year and per person, got its way: no efforts, at the earliest, before 2020 CE. This means that the foreseeable heating of the planet will be 4 degrees Celsius. Within a generation. Overall. But most of the heating will happen at the poles, melting the icecaps, and rising sea levels enormously. Within a few decades.

The Europeans, distracted by internal banking and sovereign problems, did not dare rise the heat on the USA at Durban. 

The attitude of Americans is, at first sight, baffling: the supposedly left wings economic commentators there kept on talking obsessively about Europe, as if Europe were a more important problem to the USA than it is for Europe itself. And thus, implicitly, the discourse of American left wing economists was that the fact the USA produces so much hot air and CO2 is not a problem at all.

The European banking crisis is not that much of a crisis: officially, the federal spending on the banking crisis in Europe so far is 2% of GDP, whereas it has been 13% in the USA and the UK. This difference in numbers (the blaring Anglo-Americans spent about eight times more so far on the banking crisis, as behooves their plutocratic status; but that also means they are much vulnerable, and would like to make the Europeans pay, even if they owe nothing, in the grand tradition of piracy!)

As far as pollution is concerned, a power such as France, with, a much better health care, Human Development Index and equality (as measured by GINI), and arguably a higher effective GDP per median person, makes do with only 6.1 ton of CO2 per year. And it’s not just France: Italy emits only 7.5 tons, Japan and Germany around 9.5 tons.

It is significant that Australia and Canada emits about as much as the USA: these are all vast empires whose implantation went according to an exploitation model (for example the Americans deliberately exterminated 60 million bison to weaken the Plains Indians into eradication). In other words, when one has founded one’s riches on over-exploitation and holocausts, applied of the entire continents, it’s entirely normal to extend the concept to the entire planet. Canada actually just decided to quit the Kyoto CO2 pollution treaty, as its egregious violations invited fines.

In general the greatest polluters are all (literally) bloody empires!  This is of course not a coincidence. First one massacres people, then the environment. Actually massacring the environment has often been the best way to massacre people.

***

WHEN THRIVING FROM HOLOCAUSTS BECOMES A HABIT:

Indeed, one may wonder what the USA’s collective consnciousness is exactly after? Making New York and Washington into polders? The final solution to the problem of right wingers in Florida or Texas? By drowning them?

Why does the USA want a climate catastrophe? Why? Because the very rise of the English colony in North America (or Australia, or Canada) rested on cataclysmic change (the French model in Canada was about the Mission Civilisatrice, instructing the Indians, but not massacring them; the English model consisted in first deporting the French out of half of the territory they occupied in Canada).

To this day, about half of the population of New Caledonia descend from the original inhabitants, whereas the same cannot be said in Australia. True, Maoris survived in New Zealand, but, precisely, because of the efforts of the courageous governor Fitz Roy. If Fitz Roy had been like Jefferson or Jackson, Maoris would only be a few thousands, at best, in a few reservations on the worst lands of the micro continent.

Deep American strategists close to the Dark Side can only make the same computation as the Prussian generals who planned, plotted, and  launched World War One: if there is a world war pretty soon, the USA could come on top. Later on, not so sure. It is pretty sure that, when sea level will have risen 5 meters, some sort of world war will be on, as probably more than a billion people will have to move, from desiccation and inundations.

A civilization can get stuck in a mood. China was stuck in Confucianism (until Mao), Japan in a form of militarism (until 1945). Russia is (still) stuck in Czarism (= Caesarism). Or at least Putin is. For Rome the mood was slavery, which blossomed into theocratic plutocracy. In the end, Rome had to be shut down. This said, the USA destroyed its slave system, in a monster civil war. A successful reaction against plutocracy would be a generalization of that.

***

TAX ME PLUTOCRATS NOT:

So the biosphere is exploding, and what do American economists talk about? Europe. Why? Because the Franco-Germans want to tax financial transactions, and refuse to write a blank check to banks. Thus the Franco-Germans threaten the financial pirates in Wall Street on both counts. Franco-Germania does not occupy Wall Street yet, but the assault is on the way. The Franco-Germans are also assaulting the so called “City” (of London). Said PM Cameron.

Krugman, is for the war of all against all, at least in Europe: his opinion is that each European country should have its own currency, and devalue, as needed. When they have all devaluated, and they have no value, only the USA will have value, order will have been re-established. One does not expect anything else from an economic adviser of Ronald Reagan in international economy (as Krugman was, although he is not too keen to explain, so I will: by today’s standards, Reagan was a left wing politician, so Krugman was always on the left!)

Krugman, of course, loves to quote fellow professors from the universities at the service of the hyper wealthy. (Except for Niall Ferguson, who is too obviously right wing, and is considered by Harvard to be not just an historian, but an economist, so he wallops in Krugman’s garden, claiming greater depth of analysis, infuriating Krugman.)

Krugman thus quotes approvingly a Oxford professor, O’Rourke, who wrote a “Summit To The Death” where a colossal number of naïve assertions are made. O’Rourke starts with: “As many feared and most expected, the just-concluded European summit left much to be desired.” But desire is precisely needed to integrate Europe. So desire is actually nothing to fear, but something to, precisely, desire.

And then professor O’Rourke goes on, ranting against the monetary union. The best answer to these europhobic clowns from England, is to have Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland secede from London, and join the Schengen customs free union, and the Euro. Maybe Northumbria ought to do the same too!

One can also look at Professor O’Rourke’s discourse as suggesting that much more federalization of Europe is needed. Sure. But it takes time. We have to pile up the desire high.

***

ENRICH MY BANKS, I FEEL WEALTHIER ALREADY:

O’Rourke also suggest to follow the Quantitative Easing path of the USA promoted by, say, Krugman. what’s Quantitative Easing? The buying, by the Central Bank, of worthless financial assets from the biggest banks As I have pointed out, Quantitative Easing has been the main driver of plutocratization in the last three years. It just enriches the banks, and they invest in derivatives (several hundred trillions of Credit Default Swaps, for example). Why would Europe strive to enrich Wall Street too?

Because Europe lives near to, and from Wall Street (as all hyper rich American universities do, since their venom is basic to the plutocratic propaganda)?

Instead the ECB will lend to banks as needed, at 1%. That’s much better; not a blank check to invest in yachts and derivatives, obviously.

Krugman made another ill informed, europhobic commentary on O’Rourke’s article. Europhobia, and Germanophobia have long been staples of the media of the USA. Thus the erroneous can build on others’ errors.

Among other things, Krugman neglected the fact that the 3% deficit rule limit before prosecution, could be overruled by a qualified majority (instead of the present qualified unanimity). Also miscreants will be referred to the European Court of Justice, meaning that only willful  cheating will be punished.

***

USA:  CENTER IS NOT HOLDING, BABY AS UNREAD AS THE BATH:

Professor O’Rourke claims that, if the gumbo shrimp industry ran in trouble in Louisiana, the Federal government would help. This is the redistribution argument which all europhobic Americans repeat, claiming they have it, and Europe does not. Never mind the evidence screaming in their face, the preferred insult from plutophile economists, that Europe is made of “welfare states”.

Then O’Rourke claimed that Germany should have been helped in the 1990s, after reunification, by the European Union, but was not. Right, it should have been helped. And that is why it was. Is O’Rourke paid to blare falsehoods?

Generally Anglo-Saxon Wall Street .1% propagandists say giant lies, because they can get away with them, and the more they say them, the more crucial to, thus rewarded by, Wall Street financial mafia, they are.

Because mafias exist, and they are entangled with the politicians who enable them. Just a few days after Berlusconi was ejected from the Italian Premiership by his good friend Merkozy, the head of the Camorra was arrested in Naples. His name has been known for decades, but, obviously, under Berlusconi, the order had been given to not arrest him.

The entire European budget is about aid. Development aid, or aid to agriculture. There are even food programs attached to the Eurozone. If the periphery of Ireland, Portugal, Spain, Greece was able to develop so much so fast, it was because a Northern European tax gun showering them with money for decades. True, after countries such as Ireland became much richer, per capita, than France or Germany, the money was redirected to prospective and new EU members in Eastern Europe. Ireland is still richer, per capita, than its generous donators (just as Greece is richer than Slovakia, which helps it, in a redistribution program!) Now some development aid is even directed towards North Africa (as it should).

Professor O’Rourke is actually either monstrously ill informed, or a deliberate liar, and his prophet Krugman is, thus, not doing much better.

Let me explain: O’Rourke shrimp example is fishy, complete utopia, denied by reality.

***

REDISTRIBUTION IN THE USA: SCHOOL BUDGETS ARE OFFERED TO THE HYPER RICH:

It is well known that the Gates, who head both one of the greatest personal fortunes in the world, and personally the richest foundation, pose with the president of the USA to say they are going to save the school. So all Americans are supposed to go on their knees, and thank the hyper rich for taking care of them. Such are the Gates of hell: enticing in the moment, seducers posing in wealth and taste, calling you to abandon all dignity, so they can exert their might on your behalf.

What is real is that the school system, from primary schools to universities is collapsing in the USA.

Does professor O’Rourke knows this? Apparently not. He professes to not know it. He is a professional professing denial. For example it costs $31,000 to attend first year college at the University of California this year, a supposedly PUBLIC university. At Stanford University it is more like $70,000 (the supreme outrage being that those called “private” universities get plenty of public funds to support the hyper rich and the ideas that sustain their stranglehold on society). Public primary schools are closing all over the USA.

And what does the government of the USA do? Make sure General Electric and the like pays no taxes. When Obama controlled all, he made sure that the hyper rich individuals would keep paying the lowest tax rate, 15%. In other words the government of the USA is impotent, on its own accord.

All these rich professors from the richest universities in their rich mansions compare favorably a country, the USA, which looks like the Titanic, an hour after the iceberg, with Europe.

Is the school system collapsing in Europe? Are our children learning? As Bush, the preceding moron-in-chief used to say?

Well, Europe is not sinking, but thinking. And European federal debt is basically zero. The American federal debt is  more than GDP of the USA, and overall American debt levels, about four times GDP, are higher than Greece.

***

RATTING ON THE RATERS:

Last year the American and British deficits were around 12%. Did the richest, biggest banks and their hedge funds drive up the interest rates there? By down rating their sovereign credit rating? No. Why? Because they do not want to saw the branch on which they are sitting.

Example of branch on which oligarchs are sitting, and they won’t criticize: the so called rating “agencies” are central actors in the Wall Street system to extract money from the Public. Employees of these conceptual monstrosities rat on states, which do not pay them, but they have interest to be kind to private companies (members of the plutocracy), for two reasons: they get paid by them, and they move to them. Consult for example the Wall Street Journal article: “Credit Raters Join The Rated“.

It is highly significant that so called credit agencies threatened France and Germany with down rates on credit. While not threatening Great Britain. As the head of the Banque de France (French central bank), Christian Noyer, pointed out:”… a downgrade should come first for the U.K., which has a greater deficit, as much debt, more inflation, and less growth than us, France and Germany. Moreover Great Britain has collapsing credit.”

The British deficit last year was higher than Greece more than thrice Germany’s. This year the U.K. deficit is forecast to be nearly 10%, nearly twice France’s. 10% of Britain GDP is financial piracy, and France and Germany have the means, and intent, to greatly shut those criminal activities down. So Britain’s future is distinctly gloomier than that of France and Germany.

But Wall Street and its credit agencies have identified France and Germany as their enemies, and Great Britain as their friend. Pirates help pirates, and those who pirates help help pirates. It’s the same idea as the Wall Street prosecutor putting the French director of the International Monetary fund in high security jail for days, while knowing that his accuser was gloating with a jailed former boyfriend on the phone that she would make a lot of money from her accusations. Let alone the fact, known to the police, that the IMF’s director highly secured Blackberry had stopped functioning well before the alleged rape was announced to anyone (that clearly meant that DSK had been victimof an aggression).

To quote from the article on the raters from the Wall Street Journal: ” More than 100 analysts at credit-rating firms have left over the past five years to work for financial companies they once helped to rate… Lawmakers work in an environment where there is a revolving door and they posit that must have also occurred” at the rating firms.”

Now notice that the Wall Street Journal is revealing itself to be left of Krugman. Krugman criticize the European for not sending trillions to banks, and screams about the euro, the malaise of which is caused by the credit rating agencies.

But Krugman has nothing to say about the lack of vital transfer payments from government to public schools in the USA.

Is it stupidity, or is it corruption? Or is it just that the fattest wolves howl from inside the largest packs? In any case, howling is not deep, nor the noblest conquest of humanity.

Perelman, who finished the proof of the Poincare’ conjecture, would consider my attitude offensive.

***
 The diversity of species is much greater in the tropics. How come? The main reason is obvious: species get periodically vacuumed in the high latitude regions, by ice and cold. This has various notable consequences. Especially in the cultural domain.

 One has to remember how speciation happens. Speciation is a discovery that Darwin made explicit in the Galapagos archipelago, far from the South American continent. Species of the local birds had evolved from a common ancestor, a kind of South American finch. More than a generation before, Lamarck has studied various invertebrates (a word he coined), and their fossils, to show that the species had evolved over the eons, and thus that the Earth was immensely old (something that made a huge scandal at the times, at it was more in tune with Indian than Christian thinking). 

 (The theory of evolution itself, and especially evolution by natural selection was old, and its original authors were Maupertuis, of the Least Action Principle, writing 120 years before Darwin, and Lamarck, who, as a research professor in biology, another word that he also coined, could lay it thick; Darwin’s refining observations were decisive in the Anglo-American empire, though. Just as French physicists developed Newtonian mechanics in the 18 C, English evolutionists, especially Wallace and Darwin, developed the French breakthrough work of the preceding generations in biological evolution!)

 The following became clear: once introduced to a new ecological niche, a species will evolve anew. Biological species tend to be optimal for their inheritance in symbiosis with the environment they also inherited. That is why species such as oysters, sharks, turtles or crocodiles, did not change much in more than 100 million years: they were optimal, and their environment did not change. Crocodilians are the picture of perfection: not only they munched on the last dinosaurs, but recent discoveries have shown that, in some dinosaurian environments, crocs were already the top predators.

 Change the environment they are made for, and by, and suddenly species are not optimal anymore. They are forced into the survival mode. Then naturally occurring variations present an advantage or disadvantage relative to the new environment, and evolution happens again. And it happens all the faster, the greater the difference with the previous environment is. 

 Hence environments with many new ecological niches will create many new species. So the question becomes: why are there more niches in the tropics than in the cold regions? Well, one has to realize that the question is asked in space-time. History matters. When a niche changes, a species can resist through mini adaptation, while, simultaneously, the throttle of evolution is open to the max. But nothing can force all individuals of the suddenly inadequate species to evolve fast and far. Some will just make do. Thus outright new species can evolve, while versions of the old still cling around.

 In Australia, a lone, extremely ancient eucalyptus was found in the mountains. Some suggested it was the oldest individual plant in the world. That plant was, and it is, the oldest, and unique, representative of its species. The species had evolved when the climate was much colder (during or before the last glaciation). Somewhere else in Australia, in an isolated, secret canyon, in the Blue Mountains another species of pine trees, long disappeared elsewhere in the world, was also found (now they are for sale worldwide). Those plants survived to the disappearance of the niches in which they evolved long ago, through luck or happenstance (a particular canyon with special circumstances throughout history).

 Australia did not have a very cold climate, even during the worst glaciations, due to its overall location (and it drifted there from the polar region while Earth climate was much warmer). If Australia were a subpolar island, all its trees and animals would have been wiped out during great glaciations (as they were in Antarctica, which used to be joined to Australia). Under milder conditions, Australia would have been recolonized by distant trees from tropical areas: genuine Australian trees would have disappeared during a cold episode.

 Another example: trees grow again in Greenland. Trees have grown in Greenland for dozens of millions of years, but all the species of Greenland trees were eliminated when Greenland was covered by ice. If Greenland had been located next to New Guinea, it would have maybe even more species than the land of Birds of Paradise (I say “maybe” because, although Greenland is bigger, New Guinea, the wrinkled forefront of the Australian plate, has higher and larger highlands, which creates a lot more environmental niches than one would expect from a place of that size; there are isolated sky islands in New Guinea, surrounded by steaming jungle, with, of course, their own species).

 So it is in all regions that icecaps and glaciers could trample in the last four million years: cold hostile to life wiped biological evolution out clean, periodically. For example sequoias were eliminated from Europe: the slow moving trees (trees move as a species), got blocked by glaciers, and destroyed. This because mountain ranges are mostly east-west barriers in Europe. In California, they survived because the ranges are mostly north-south.

 This is nothing new: many dinosaur species evolved in very high latitudes, where their adaptation allowed them to enjoy the polar night. That was when what are now subpolar regions enjoyed a tropical climate (when crocodilians thrived in Greenland). The distant ancestors of mammals, the mammalian reptiles, evolved in very cold climate, so they evolved strong thermoregulation. This came in handy when drastic changes occurred 65 million years ago. Said change has long been viewed as an asteroid strike. But it is unlikely that an asteroid strike would have struck all dinosaurs, and all dinosaur-like sea reptiles, while leaving mysteriously mammalian and bird alone.

 Whereas, obviously, episodes of intense cold and heat could have had that effect. Dinosaurs had poor thermal regulation, but also high metabolism (differently from birds, which evolved from them; birds have higher temperatures than mammals). Crocodilians, turtles and sea snakes could survive, as they have lower metabolism: when it gets cold, they just stop moving, a luxury dinosaurs did not have. Of course, the colossal Dekkan Traps eruptions, by covering entirely the planet with clouds, while poisoning air and seas with CO2, fit the crime perfectly.

 So what I propose is simply that, as glaciations fluctuated dramatically, conditions in the tropics also fluctuated dramatically: for example the Amazon suffered droughts. This created niches (however transient, they were long enough for species to evolve). However the conditions never fluctuated so much as to lead to complete extinctions, in the tropics. As conditions changed, species tended to adapt, and new ones evolved, thus leaving a patchwork of diversity behind… At least in species which can exist in great numbers, such as insects.

 Not so in subpolar regions. In subpolar regions, intense cold periods happen, and during intense cold episodes, all species get killed (at least among plants and insects). When conditions become mild again, the regions are reconquered by survivors from the tropics (much of which became a temperate zone during glacial maxima). A similar mechanism could have demographically flood Neanderthals in suddenly warm interglacials.

*** 

EXTINCTIONS AS A DRIVERS OF EVOLUTION:

 If an extinction occurs, it is probably because all the ecological niches were changed at once. So all species are not optimally adapted anymore. Some will resist in micro niches (as crocodilians, turtles, etc. did), some will evolve drastically (as birds and mammals did after the Cretaceous). In the end more species will be created, and they will compete with the old ones, so, in a sense, in the average, they will be improved, or at least the adaptability of the entire ecosystem will be greater (some of the old will be around, some of the new too).

 It is not excluded that the dinosaurs disappeared through such complicated mechanism: after an initial ecological shift, the competitivity of small mammals, or birds, may have been improved (as their personal dinosaur predators went away, say), and they may have been free to eat larger dinosaurs’ eggs, etc.

***

WHY EUROPE BECAME SO SUPERIOR INTELLECTUALLY:

Europe is assuredly the largest expanse of greatly interconnected peninsulas, islands, mountain ranges, lakes and seas in the world. An enormous set of potential ecological niches. Some could brandish the Arctic archipelago of Northern Canada, but first, well, it’s frozen, and was completely covered by an ice cap for most of the last three million years, not a situation conducive to any sort of biology.

 Indeed, European geography is at mid-latitude, with an oceanic climate rendered mild by the Gulf Stream (which has transported tropical water towards Europe, for millions of years, since the Americas became one, and the currents changed). During the worst glacial maxima, Southern Europe was still ice-free. With mountain ranges and flowing waters everywhere, this labyrinth of ecological niches was excellent for evolving many species.

 And so it was with evolving many cultures later. The many environments in Europe allowed for evolving many cultural species. That was helped by trade, of goods or ideas, using the ubiquitous waterways. Some of the old stuff survived and transmogrified. For example, many ideas of Zoroastrianism have become part of the mental skeleton of the Enlightenment. The ideas went west by 3,500 kilometers, and in time by 3,500 years.

 (Europe is geographically defined, linguistically, humanly, commercially and physically, as roughly the Western part of Eurasia, west of the Himalayas and the Urals; India is also part of that ensemble, consecutively to conquest and colonization, about 3,500 years ago, and subsequent continual and extensive exchanges. Yes a vast steppe corridor starting in Hungary, goes all the way to Mongolia, and was always there, hence the many visits of various Mongols to Western Europe, all the way to Orleans…) 

 Compare with the entire African coast, North and West, which has only a handful of natural ports, on maybe more than ten thousands kilometers. Whereas the European coast is covered with possible ports, each ready to serve the local ecological and cultural niches with trade. Look at the Croatian coast: from far away, rather short. However, from close by, a length of nearly 6,000 kilometers, and thousands of islands. Similarly Greece or the British isles each have nearly 15,000 kilometers of coastline. And Norway, with all its fjords, more than 100,000 kilometers! This sort of extremely detailed geography and imbrications with water, allowed for extreme diversity and exchanges of very differentiated goods. Compare with the Sahara desert, with a handful of oases on an area greater than the USA (full disclosure: my first memories are from one of them, the amazing Gardahia). 

 Just an example: a small part of the Italian coast, facing the island of Elba, and endowed with natural ports, was rich in extravagant ore deposits. Especially iron. This attracted, among others, the Etruscans.

 Thus, without the wealth of iron, Rome may never have been. Verily, the long standing half joke is that the Roman peasants learned all what they knew from the Etruscans… And, later the Greeks. By the way, that grafting of a higher culture on the more simple minded may explain why Rome evolved down the blind alley of over-exploiting others, instead of developing its own deep ideas… As the Franks did, when they took over in 486 CE. 

 Some will scoff about claims of European superiority and diversity. But little known are the basic facts. For example the Celts had developed technology which was in some ways superior to Rome (and in 399 CE, the Roman republic did not get annihilated, just because the Celts condescended to be paid to go away from the Latin capital that they were occupying; the superiority of the Romans laid in the institutions of that republic). The Celts were probably the first to make fleets of thousands of boats to conduct intense systematic trade, and a polity of sorts, over an ocean (the Atlantic). 

 European diversity was a strength, as long as it did not explode into devastating conflict. After the Celts subdued the Romans in 399 CE, some marched on to present day Anatolia. They refused to submit to Alexander later. Notice that it  would have been a much poorer world if the Celts had destroyed Rome in 399 CE (as they probably could have, had they been meaner). True, the Romans conquered the Celts, but they did not destroy them: in 400 CE, the bishop of Lyon (Lugdunum, capital of the Gauls, just supplanted by the Parisian capital of the Franks), preached in Celtic. Thus a Gallo-Roman mental ecology had established itself, where many of the best ideas of both had thrived, while terrible ones (such as Celtic sacrifices) had been snuffed.

 Europe may want to remember all this, the richness of diversity, as it tries to resist homogenizing plutocracy, be from Russia (where filthy rich strongman plutocrat Putin accused Hillary Clinton to have caused the arrest of thousands of Russians, by giving a mysterious “signal” which made thousands of Russians whine in unisson), or with the so called market (intent on berating France and Germany, while lauding financially much worse, Greece like Great Britain, because the latter’s government is plutophile, thus a friend of the slave market).

*** 

SUPERIOR MINDS, HOW THEY EVOLVE, WHAT THEY FEAR:

 Thus one will acquire a mind endowed with more, and superior ideas by varying one’s environment: the more mental niches, the more ideas can adapt to them, the greater the chance to develop superior ones.

 I guess that is the idea behind having scientists travel all over the world to conferences where they meet each other. Although, of course, this may lead to homogenization, not speciation! To have speciation, one needs time to evolve separately, otherwise one will be thrown back with the blob, as one more undifferentiated piece of the blob.

 Speciation in the realm of ideas is why greatly original thinkers go to the desert, to avoid too much mental entanglement with the commons. That is why Montaigne called attention to the necessity of the Ivory Tower, to think deeply, quietly, and from above. Great minds cannot blossom, if they mix too much with the stupidity of what was long viewed as true by common invertebrates.

 Thus, in these times of budgetary restrictions, and considering the existence of the Internet, I would suggest that scientific conference budgets be reassigned to the rescue of scientific experiments (which are threatened, especially in astronomy, the part of physics which has brought most of the spectacular experimental results of the last 50 years). In general, the requirements of scientific careers are little conducive to originality, and groupthink is to be feared. 

 To pursue the analogy further, if ideas evolve in mental niches, what would be the equivalent of life killing cold? Well, intellectual fascism, glacially crushing all in the way. 

 Intellectual fascism could be the Roman attitude to slavery (the foundation of the economy, with the large slave enterprises of the empire, such as agribusinesses). Or it could be the social and economical devastating Christian philosophy (for example Roman Catholic Christians believed it was wrong to kill highway men, so highway robbery, being unpunished, exploded to the point that Roman roads could not be used anymore, and public order collapsed). Mao and company made the point that Confucianism was a form of intellectual fascism which had paralyzed China for millennia. And indeed they introduced communist forms of thinking which had evolved in the French niche. The French communist, not to say Communard niche. 

 The most famous intellectual fascism is Islam, a superstition which has the arrogance to claim the entire public sphere for itself (which is what Christian bishops did in the West around 400 CE; however, as Christ had very loudly ordered to separate Caesar from God, and thus soon the bishops, after trying their hand at dictatorship for a while, decided to outsource government to the Roman army, by then reduced to Imperator Clovis’ Franks). 

 Groupthink was not our ancestors’ forte. After all, our very distant ancestors were lizards who colonized subpolar areas: they were not held back by the prospect of a career among the multitudes, quite the opposite. To be different, and go where no lizard had been before, urged them on.

 And so it did, even before that, for the first fishes which followed plants on land. We live on a planet where life itself is teleonomic: it looks forward, at a distance (tele) and finds out what can be changed, or, at least, managed (nomos), to invade further. This goes against the philosophical grain of Jacques Monod’s “Chance and Necessity”, which makes a big deal that life is not teleonomic. But, just as in physics there is something called “Effective Quantum Field Theory”, so should it be in philosophy: if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, flies like a duck… It should be a duck. Life is an adaptation machine. 

 That is why probes to Mars are carefully sterilized; experiences have shown that some bacteria can survive in space. Of course, space is not a niche where bacteria evolved, but some can survive there. So it is with ecological diversity (bacteria may find harder to survive a glaciation than interplanetary space). Evolved in a particular niche, a species can survive independently, as long as a big bad glacier does not come its way, crushing all in the way.

***

LIFE DOES NOT JUST ADAPT, IT CREATES, EXTINGUISHING SOMETIMES ALL IN THE WAY:

Minds and lives were made by wasting the environment, and make it more complicated, make it at their service ever more. 

 Life changed the atmosphere of the planet by replacing its reducing atmosphere into oxygen laden air. Many suspect that this biological change brought “Snowball Earth” episodes, by knocking off greenhouse gases and replacing them by a nitrogen and oxygen mix (around 700 to 600 million years ago). The fist evidence for Snowball Earth were traces of glaciers in the tropics, at sea level. Later life adjusted itself to provide itself with a more comfortable environment (yes, adjustment does not necessitate consciousness). 

 Biological complexity has inertia. And biological complexity represents immense riches, because life forms have evolved many systems to handle the environment, countless environments, past and present. As the plutocrats ravage the planet, and biological diversity, we thus see that riches is not what they are truly after, whatever they claim. 

 What Pluto, the Dark Side of man, is after, is the illusion of the domineering self, because it has not embraced diversity. So it is with those who rule according to him, and his principles. When I speak about the illusion, I know what I mean: John Corzine, past head of Goldman-Sachs, past Senator of the USA, past governor of one of the richest states in the USA, New Jersey, has lost one billion, two hundred miilion dollars: Corzine went in front of Congress, to “apologize, I simply do not know where the money is”. He was playing with Italian debt. 700 trillions of credit swaps out there. Or maybe more, or maybe less. It’s all about illusions. Except for the Italians or American farmers whose money Corzine and his accomplices have devoured.

 The USA is under the illusion of energy independence, because frantic fracking is quickly augmenting the fossil fuel and gas production of the country. Damn the water table. Damn the CO2. Full fuel ahead! The oil crats of the USA are in heavens. So the USA has been blocking progress towards an effort to mitigate climate change (in a disingenuous ping pong with China, for the third climate conference in a row, one more illustration of the collaboration of the American and Chinese plutocracies). Hey, once again, never mind that the EPA has found what everybody knew, that fracking devastates the “vital groundwater” (with CH4 at saturation, benzene at 50 times maximum, and the Ph of bleach). OK, that’s in Wyoming, who cares?

 We may not want to indulge in near extinction, as during the Snowball Earth, before we can adjust to our new found powers (some of them powers of illusion). After all, some of us are conscious, endowed with our own personalities, even our own ideas, and we may be teleonomic enough to manage at a distance what is ahead without getting crushed by it…

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Abstract: Obama did not do much in his first three years, perhaps mostly because the left has no coherent, or even cogent, discourse. Not to say worse. An example arises with the debt crisis. In particular, with the attitude to Europe.

Wall Street seems to have given talking points: 1) Call the debt crisis a “Euro Crisis”. 2) Faced by failure of credit… propose only the lending of more money. (See FDR below.) And those talking points, the decerebrated, or corrupt left repeats at nauseam (so it’s more than a bit unfair to accuse Obambi, standing in the headlights of history).

The most well known example of completely confused pseudo left thinking emanates from the honorable Paul Krugman, Nobel and luminary from Princeton perched on the New York Times and all over TV and the world all the time (Krugman was just revealing that he was at the G30, now presided by his friend Trichet, who just stepped down as ECB chair; Krugman has much accused Trichet of being a deflating idiot, even hours before the G30 meeting, so some tensity among the suits may have been in order).

Before we can chop off the invisible hand of the conspirators of international financial piracy, we have to see where it lurks around the cookie jar (that’s us). As this essay will reveal, the “Euro Crisis” is one more Wall Street crisis, disguised this time as a Euro crisis. Everything bad used to be France’s fault, but now the Fourth Reich looms in the distance: the Bundesbank, armed with Rafale stealth bombers.

Krugman ought to know this, that it is truly another Wall Street crisis in Euro disguise. But he wants to save what he calls the “greatest city in the world” (where he was born, and lives, New York, you know, the place where Wall Street makes sure that IMF directors are treated as the worst criminals, once one has stolen their secure electronics). As Krugman professes not to read the Wall Street Journal anymore, we will condemn him to read it. And learn.

So according to Wall Street and presidential parrots, this time Germans, French and the like are asked to pay (that is, extent credit)… For Manhattan’s high rollers.  Why? Because not only it’s better when others pay, but the USA is running out of money, not to say that the American middle class is showing signs of impatience with the gruesome occupation of the country’s resources by Pluto’s forces.

However Angela Merkel was trained for, and practiced, research in hard science. She is going to go for the facts, and for the hard solutions, as president Roosevelt did, long before she was born (FDR had been trained as de facto head of the U.S. Navy in WWI, also a hard science!)

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December 2011. The official report of the World Meteorological Organization is out. It is catastrophic. 13 of the warmest years in the last 15 years. Including the warmest, 2010, and the second warmest, 1998. We have got close to the point where rising temperatures in the Arctic will provoke massive release of so far frozen CO2 and CH4 (methane).

And what can we read in official editorial after official editorial of the Wall Street Journal? That believing in Anthropogenic Greenhouse Warming (AGW) was a religion of the past. It is important that New Yorkers think in a way compatible with their sponsors’ riches.

Wall Street has not yet been occupied by the ocean, human or aquatic, as it deserves. Yet. Although it is sure to become a polder. Meanwhile, it occupies the minds of its victims.

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WHY THE AMERICAN HYSTERIA ABOUT THE EURO?

I monitor a lot of international press. It is striking that the British, and even more the American media, are more hysterical about the “Euro Crisis” than the media of the Eurozone itself. It seems that the French press has generally much more important things to deal with, such as Syria (France is sending military equipment to the Syrian rebellion, now that the number of the assassinated is officially above 4,000).

Why is France so keen to take out one dictatorship after the other? Well, Europa needs democratic Lebensraum, as Hitler did not say. One should not forget that the USSR Russia just north, with not even two-third of French GDP, takes itself for a nuclear hyper power, when, in truth, it’s just a plutocracy (the people leading Russia, Gorbachev said on Swiss TV are not just plutocrats, but have dozens of billions stashed in places such as Switzerland).

OK, the USA is also a plutocracy, and people vote there, just as in Russia (which has its parliamentary elections on December 4). How does Putin control Russia? How does wall Street control the USA? Well, simply by controlling what people know, think, and feel.

The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, in particular have led the hysteria, editorial after editorial, urging the European Central Bank to indulge in “Quantitative Easing”. The NYT even mobilized its philosophy editor to write an absurdly uninformed article about the ineptitude of the Europeans, and urge them to Quantitatively Ease. See: Opinionator | The Stone: Euro Blind (November 21, 2011).

“Euro Blind“, really? Or is it you, Mr. paid-to-”philosophize” who is Dollar Obsessed? An absurdly ignorant, and arrogant, professional philosopher, urges Europeans to have the ECB print lots of money, and give it to the profligate banksters. Hey, does not New York thrive from banking, thus the New York Times, thus its “philosophy” editors? Does not the love of money primes the love of wisdom? (As we will show below, it’s complete self interest because it turns out it’s all about New York banks, indeed!)

Obama pointed out that the Europeans “had not done the work we did here in the last few years“. Namely to give all the American public money one could find to the banks, without anything in exchange. That is quite a “work“, indeed. I give to my friends and financiers, therefore I work, says the high class escort.

Because that is what was done, and not done, in the USA: giving public money to one’s sponsors and friends, without any quid pro quo, whatsoever. That is neither socialist nor capitalistic, just kleptocratic and conspiratorial. In many an empire or state of the past, such plotting would have been viewed as high treason. But we are apparently in a new paradigm. So it always is: a new paradigm, until the heads roll, as they did before. Abusing People works, until they have had enough, rise, and destroy all in the way.

Now Obama would like Europeans to do the same in the EU as what was done under Bush and Obama in the USA. A problem, of course, is that the European Union is made of an union of democracies. And that Union has put in its constitution that the central bank is not like the central bank of the USA, as Merkel pointed out. The directors of the Fed of the USA are mostly private bankers from the realm’s largest banks. For example Jamie Dimon, head of Morgan-Chase, and a love boy of the government of the USA (which made him offerings in the past, such as Bear-Sterns), sits on the Fed. A proud fox in the hen house. Obama used to call him his friend: could not hurt, until it did!

In the USA, the rescue package for banks, shadow banks, insurance companies and hedge funds was decided by a handful of employees of the plutocracy, such as Paulson and Geithner. There was no democratic consultation whatsoever (no referendum, no vote in Congress). So  much for “Democracy In America” Tocqueville was so toqué  about.

By contrast, the 17 Eurozone countries all democratically voted on the rescue package for Greece, Germany and France first. Slovakia resisted for a while, pointing out Greece was much richer, much lazier and more corrupt. Everybody listened to these Slovak objections carefully, and no doubt they have been incorporated in the thinking of all and the stiffening of the Franco-German spine about what to do next. Even the Greeks had to listen to what the Slovaks said (as the Slovaks could have blocked the rescue and default package). So the Greeks learn about themselves, and the error of their ways.

Then, after the government fell, the Slovak Parliament voted for rescuing Hellas. But, fortunately for Hellas, it is been rescued under some conditions. Hélas, those may not be strict enough: why do the richest in Greece pay no taxes? Why do Greek MPs get large brand new Mercedes sedans, on the public dime? (And now that mean on the dime of Slovaks, among others!)

But let’s go back to the American hysteria about the “euro”. What’s behind it? Wall Street, of course, as I have tried to explain forever. Well I need allies. I find them where I can. Nothing like going into the lion’s den to find out about the lion. Wall Street Journal, December 2, 2011:

“So Who Is Too Big to Fail Now?”

“Here’s an irony Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman can probably live without.

In early October, Morgan came under extreme pressure, largely due to questions about the firm’s exposure to French banks. Although that has since eased, especially in the wake of Wednesday’s central-bank-induced markets rally, the cost of insuring against default by Morgan is still elevated—and remains higher than the cost of protection on big French banks themselves.

 Morgan Stanley’s cost of insuring against default is higher than the cost of protection on big French banks, Heard on the Street columnist David Reilly reports on Markets Hub.

It cost about $446,000 Thursday to insure $10 million of Morgan debt, according to Markit. This compared with $335,000 for Société Générale. On average, Morgan’s CDS cost is about $154,000 higher than that of the big three French banks—BNP Paribas, Crédit Agricole and SocGen—more than three times the average premium in 2011.

In this, Morgan isn’t alone. The cost of insuring against default at Goldman Sachs is also higher than that of the French banks. That in part may reflect that the two U.S. firms are brokers, rather than more diversified commercial banks. But credit-default swaps for Bank of America are also more expensive, while the cost of protection for Citigroup is almost equal to that of BNP.

That is somewhat curious given French banks have more exposure to France and troubled euro-zone countries.”

And the Wall Street Journal to argue that the big French banks are too big to fail, whereas not so for the big American banks:

“…the higher cost of CDS for the U.S. brokers hints that markets may no longer think they are firmly in the too-big-to-fail club. Although they were essentially bailed out in 2008, both firms today face a far different, and more hostile, political climate, stoked by both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street.

Additionally, the Dodd-Frank Act has made it more difficult for the U.S. government to inject capital into struggling firms. For their part, regulators are focused on mechanisms to allow for the orderly wind-down of a troubled institution.

Granted, hedge funds and other traders may feel a greater need to hedge their business links with Goldman and Morgan—meaning more demand for CDS. BofA, meanwhile, is contending with a raft of U.S. legal issues. And the French banks have higher credit ratings. So, too, does France, which is still triple-A, unlike the U.S.”

So here it is, from Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal. Murdoch, not Marx.

The USA money machine, the USA plutocracy is on the ropes. Why? Because both the Tea Party people (by opposition to their sponsors, such as the Koch brothers, super billionaire heirs much vested in traditional polluting industries), and Occupy Wall Street have understood that the government of the USA is little more than a tool of the plutocracy.

As a European official pointed out, the Eurozone has spent only so far 2% of its GDP supporting the financial pirates banks, whereas Britain and the USA spent 13% of GDP doing so. So the Eurozone has actually still a lot of firepower left.

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IS KRUGMAN PAID TO GUSH ABSURDITIES?

I like Krugman, because, not only he is very intelligent, but, when called to order, he can think openly and constructively. However his primal “Keynesianism” (throw money to banks, and everything will turn good) has been invaded by Europhobia (not to say Germanophobia). Here he goes in “Killing The Euro?” (December 2, 2011):

“Can the euro be saved? Not long ago we were told that the worst possible outcome was a Greek default. Now a much wider disaster seems all too likely.

True, market pressure lifted a bit on Wednesday after central banks made a splashy announcement about expanded credit lines (which will, in fact, make hardly any real difference). But even optimists now see Europe as headed for recession, while pessimists warn that the euro may become the epicenter of another global financial crisis.

How did things go so wrong? The answer you hear all the time is that the euro crisis was caused by fiscal irresponsibility. Turn on your TV and you’re very likely to find some pundit declaring that if America doesn’t slash spending we’ll end up like Greece. Greeeeeece!

But the truth is nearly the opposite. Although Europe’s leaders continue to insist that the problem is too much spending in debtor nations, the real problem is too little spending in Europe as a whole. And their efforts to fix matters by demanding ever harsher austerity have played a major role in making the situation worse.”

OK, I will let pass the usual confusion Krugman is affected by between a currency, the euro, and a banking crisis doubled with a sovereign and private debt crisis. If anything, the euro is too strong, not too weak!

That is what Krugman claims: “Too little spending in Europe as a whole… harsher austerity have played a major role in making the situation worse.“

One can use president Roosevelt to answer Krugman. Roosevelt used to make fun of the speculators and “money changers” who proposed to borrow more after borrowing too much. How does the honorable Paul Krugman’s proposal differ from that?
Well, it does not.
FDR came with an investment plan. Then he spent. Oh, president FDR had started by closing the banks, whereas most of what Krugman has proposed is to do the exact opposite, send more money to the same corrupt banks, no conditions imposed, a la Geithner (“Quantitative easing”).

Obama tini tiny real stimulus was drowned in a much larger pseudo stimulus. The USA need a real stimulus, but no detailed proposal exist. I have long ago proposed to mimic what advanced European countries do (and what China has tried to duplicate on an emergency, nearly comical basis): augment the energetic efficiency of the economy (this includes weatherization, micro energy generation, high speed trains, etc.)

Here is (part of) what our hero (just for this) F. D. Roosevelt said in his First Inaugural Address:

“Nature still offers her bounty and human efforts have multiplied it. Plenty is at our doorstep, but a generous use of it languishes in the very sight of the supply.

Primarily this is because the rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed, through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence.

They know only the rules of a generation of self-seekers. They have no vision, and when there is no vision the people perish. The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.”

“Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money?” This is exactly what Quantitative Easing is all about. How does that differ from what Krugman, the voice of the economic left in the USA, keeps on proposing?

Another point which thoroughly escapes Krugman: “harsher austerity have played a major role in making the situation worse.” True, to a great extent, if one ignores international airports built in the middle of nowhere in Spain, and the like.

Everybody in Europe knows that Germany, after re-unification, applied ferocious austerity, until she strayed, hand in hand with France, and went above the 3% deficit limit imposed by the Eurozone rule (as Merkel observed loudly).

German austerity was shared by all in German society, including the plutocratic class. Having union representatives on the boards of company helped. The pressure was relentless, and lasted two decades (and counting!) Two decades in which German real estate prices went down ever more, slowly, and steadily (that means German workers could afford better housing, not the cheap thrill of owning enormous debts).

And it is possible to compare: France played unfortunate partner in a doubly blind experiment. As Germany plunged in austerity, re-industrializing, teaching her workers to become more knowledgeable, and thus efficient, instead of just firing them, France splurged, introducing the “35 hour work week“, which was a distraction catastrophic to French GDP, while de-industrializing according to the hallucinogenic doctrine of the New Age familiar to Americans (industry is passé). French real estate bubbled up, just short of the extravagant London propelled bubble in Britain. Parisians cannot afford Paris.

Meanwhile the German state(s) extracted concessions from German companies (various advantages, as long as they invested in Germany). Also Germany had a massive renewable energy program (in spite of being as north as Canada, Germany is the world number one solar power, and now a German dominated firm, Desert Tech, will install 5,000 megawatt solar south of the Atlas mountains in Morocco).

Last but not least: Germany played several times with massive monetary expansion in the past. In the early 1920s, under Schacht (a corrupt banker with a 1899 CE PhD who was JP Morgan’s friend and creature), Germany tried to avoid paying reparations to France, Britain and Belgium which its army had deliberately devastated, by igniting  massive inflation. That turned out rather self defeating.

The following is completely obvious, and even Niall Ferguson has presented the argument (in the Pity of War, 1998). German inflation in the 1920s was not caused by reparations, but rather was a deliberate political decision on the part of the German government (Schacht, who then headed the nominally independent central bank) to employ it to extinguish World War I debts and reparations.

In the 1930s Nazi Germany opted for a massive spending as it scrambled to make war, not love. The same Schacht as before, the creature of unoccupied Wall Street, told his boss Hitler that would not do. Schacht had himself, with his Wall Street friends, had made it so that Hitler became Kanzler, so his clout with Hitler was enormous.

Hitler told Schacht not to worry: there was plenty of money to be found among his opponents, Jews, and various countries (cooperative, like the USA, Sweden, or Switzerland, or uncooperative countries that would be pillaged). So there is a direct relationship between massive deficit spending, and “The Holocaust”. Germans remember all this, even if they do not masterly sing about it on all rooftops of Nuremberg.

Meanwhile France opted for austerity and proper social policies (now copied worldwide, such as mandatorily paid vacations). Too much austerity by half, as France ought to have gone to war to save the Spanish republic. But then of course, the American propaganda machine from Wall Street, would have accused France to be blood thirsty and to have broken its wonderful Third Reich toy!

Germany, and France, have had the motivation to meditate all this carefully. They deduce that blindly giving more money to financiers, the ones who caused the crisis, will not work, just as it did not work in the 1920s and 1930s.

France, and Britain, also remember very well that they made a huge blunder to have not gone to war against dictators early on in the 1930s. Hence their tough line in Libya, Syria, Iran… Keeping in mind that Afghanistan is a completely different thing, just indulged in to humor the unreasonable Americans: not only did the USA attack first, but Karzai is a Sharia wielding corrupt strongman. OK, maybe strong is not the right word.

In the last few days, Iranian “students” attacked the British embassy. The embassies of the Netherlands, Germany, France  have been discreetly evacuated…

Live, learn, and act accordingly. May we now restore the temple of civilization to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.

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Patrice Ayme

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