Archive for December, 2009

Changing Iran For the Best.

December 31, 2009

 

THROWING OUT IRAN’S REIGNING FASCIST THOUGHT SYSTEM.

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Protesters in Iran have started to ask for a "Republic Of Iran" instead of an "Islamist Republic of Iran". Excellent.

The Shah of Iran was made into a dictator (instead of the constitutional monarch he initially was) by the CIA and the Shiites the CIA supported, financed, and excited. So, in a way, those Shiites being initially the arm of the CIA, can be suspected of being American agents in a contrived, extremely Machiavellian way.

Before I get accused to be delirious, notice that, in a long winded sort of way, the Islamist revolution in Iran allowed the West to incite (some will say manipulate) Iraq into attacking Iran (with the help of the West), later on facilitating the invasion and occupation of Iraq, which has much greater reserves of oil than Iran. Those who do not believe in "conspiracies theories" can check "Iran Contra", when Reagan secretly armed the Shiites dictators of Iran, to fight Iraq that he was arming simultaneously, in the extremely deadly Iran-Iraq war (one million dead). Profits know no bounds.

All these oily manipulations would break down if, at last, Iran would become a genuine democracy. The time has come, all the more since oil is on its way out.

Secularism is the religion of the age ("age", as a period of 120 years, is what "seculum" means in Latin). Secularism means that one lives in one’s age, and not in one’s past.

Secularism can tolerate one superstition, or many superstitions, but just that way: as tolerance. Toleration and tolerance come from the Latin tolerationem (nom. toleratio) "a bearing, supporting, enduring".

Secularism has never been more important: the world has never been changing so fast. The sea level rise has augmented by 50% in the last three years, as the ice shields in Antarctica and Greenland are finally giving way. What has Allah or Jehovah, Molloch, Belzebuth, or Huitzilopochtli, to do with it? Nothing.

The disaster visiting the Earth is all the making of man, or more exactly of a few particular nations, chief of them, the USA. So, instead of evoking the non existent Allah, evoke the all too existing United States of America, and what ought to be their obligations.

What we have in Iran, instead of the reign of reason and what can be done today, is a superstition masquerading as a republic. But the public ought to be free to think about whatever, in whichever way, and conduct its life accordingly, after democratic debate. Whereas the superstition, or, more exactly the oligarchy promoting it, orders the People to believe in its arbitrary credo.

Moreover, that castle in the air of a self serving credo is so incredibly primitive, so tribal, so sectarian, so obscurantist, so sexist and so anti-intellectual that it makes the European Middle Ages seem more enlightened in all too many ways. Thus, there can be no compromise between secularism and the superstition.

In particular, the Qur’an contains some horribly fascist orders, upon which the principle of Ali Khamenei’s dictatorship in the name of Allah, rests.

Indeed, Allah, according to the Qur’an, wants us to obey whoever detains power: "O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER." (Quran’s fascist principle, Sura 4; v. 59).

"YOU" meaning, YOU, the Muslims. The Qur’an makes clear that, although anybody, after the appropriate incantations and a few meek rituals, can proclaim himself or herself to be a Muslim, renouncing Islam afterwards is then subject to the death penalty. But, then, it is up to others to decide whether you are indeed a Muslim, or not. Thus Islam is the ideal mechanism for a dictatorship to eliminate physically its opponents. It is a "great religion" that way.

This superstitious mechanism to eliminate opponents was not invented by Muslim dictators at all, but by those who inspired them, the Roman "Catholic Orthodox" imperial dictators in Constantinople (and later Rome). An atrocious, bottomless Christian dictatorship had firmly established its grip on the Roman empire for more than three centuries, when it inspired the Muslim would-be dictators in the desert. The Christian dictatorship had caused many holocausts, and weakened the empire so much that it got into a very nasty war with Sassanid Persia, in part about Roman intellectuals and their books, who Persia succeeded to protect to enough of an extent to save a lot of the mental work of Greco-Roman antiquity.

OK, back to the present situation in Persia, which is inverted relative to the Sixth century: it’s now the West that protects the intellectuals and their works, and the theocratic dictatorship in Persia which is at fault.

Application of the Qur’an Sura 4, verse 59: Ahmadinejad has power, he is a Muslim, so he has to be obeyed. Khamenei has power, he is a Muslim, so he has to be obeyed. By that token, were Barack Obama a Muslim, since he is in power, he would have to be obeyed indefinitively, if he reigned over Muslims. That’s how Islam fabricates dictators, from Saddam Hussein, to Ibn Saud, to Hosni Mubbarack.

And that will keep on happening, as long as the Qur’an has a grip on the Iranian public. Or the Egyptian public. Or any Muslim public (this does not mean that any place which has a majority of Muslims will be a dictatorship, but that so it will be, if the Qur’an is the Constitution, which is the case in Pakistan or Afghanistan, but not in Kazakhstan or Indonesia.)

Once the Qur’an has been kicked out of the Iranian Constitution, or on its way out, France, and, or, the USA, or, better, both together, should formally guarantee the secular Iranian republic its security, with a formal defense treaty, including the nuclear weapons umbrella.

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Patrice Ayme

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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Annex 1: Why not to guarantee Iran with other nuclear powers? Well, Russia and Britain have a history of imperial interference in Iran, and the Iranians will probably reject their mediation with horror. (The USA too, interfered in Iran, but to a lesser extent; in 1953, the CIA messed up, organizing the professional Quranists against the secular democracy, true, but it was a lot in the name of British and American oil companies, which had decided they owned Iran as a major profit source. Those devils are less powerful nowadays, and resented in the West too.) I will not bother mentioning China as a guarantor power, since it has no history of being able to do that, and its behavior in Africa leaves a lot to be desired.

France, though, has more than a millennium of experience in going to war to guarantee other powers’ existence. The last most significant case being 1939, when France went to war against Hitler, Stalin’s Soviet Union, and American plutocrats, to guarantee Poland’s existence. France (and Britain) also unilaterally and voluntarily guaranteed Bosnia, going to war against Serbia, in the name of human rights, and against fascism. (Clinton’s USA followed later, driving the final nail into Serbian fascism.)

 

Annex 2: Apostasy in the Qur’an. It is condemned, and is to be punished in the next world mostly. But, because of Sura such as 5, verse 33, Muslim scholars made it a capital crime in the Hadith, an ensemble of texts illuminating the Qur’an by providing a supposed context to it, and which was passed orally for more than a century after Muhammad’s death. It is all a question of the mood imparted by robust, not to say severely abominable, verses in the Qur’an.

The Qur’an in Sura 5:33 says:

5:33 Those who wage war against God and His Messenger and strive to spread corruption in the land should be punished by death, crucifixion, the amputation of an alternate hand and foot or banishment from the land: a disgrace for them in this world, and then a terrible punishment in the Hereafter . . . . (MAS Abdel Haleem, The Qur’an, Oxford UP, 2004).

Poor little Muslim God, so weak, frail, that it needs to be defended with the strongest atrocities…

In any case, it is important to realize that this verse defines a legal context: Muhammad is laying down the law of the land. Enough said. I won’t get in the story of the old woman who was split in two, alive and screaming, by camels, just because she belonged to the wrong tribe… (Tabari.) The just diseased Grand Ayatollah Montazeri tried to make all kinds of reasoning and excuses about why Islam required death for quitting the faith, historically speaking… Montazeri claimed that apostasy was only punishable under restricted circumstances, but these minority opinions have not found acceptance among the majority of Islamic scholars. Khomeiny condemned people to death when he viewed them as having left Islam.

Exploding Sphincters Ahoy.

December 28, 2009

 

So another Muslim fanatic tried to explode a plane. Supposedly with pendrite.

But that’s unlikely: 100 grams of pendrite is enough to explode a pressurized plane, true. That’s 30 sugar cubes. But there is no need for an adjuvant (the fanatical criminal used a syringe to inject a liquid).

And pendrite can be detected with a trace detector. Can be. With a well trained agent. Trace detectors are used haphazardly, and not systematically on Muslim looking young men: that would not be politically correct.

To bring a plane down, criminals could set up several fires simultaneously: then the plane would surely be lost. Pat downs don’t work well enough to find flammable liquids. Millimetric body scan do work splendidly (they are sorts of "stripping" X rays, except they use longer, non dangerous wavelengths, with only 1/10,000 the power of a cell phone, which rebound off human skin).

It could help to stimulate the economy a bit to use systematically body scans. All airports should have enough of them. (But they will not be enough, see below.)

Of course the attack by the young hyper rich Nigerian with the hyper rich banker dad was amateurish. But it’s exactly what Al Qaeda was after. Reestablish psychosis, and in particular that against all black men, to confuse further mentally challenged Americans.

Thus it would seems that Barack’s "Salaam Aleikoum", and  celebration of Islam in Cairo, was not potent enough a medicine to cure from the lethal spell of the Qur’an.

From Hawai’i, Obama evoked our "open society". This is the notion of "open society" extolled by Karl Popper who wrote the famous book:"The Open Society And Its Enemies", a book against Plato and Stalin. However, the first reaction of said "open" society was to ask US citizens to keep their sphincters closed during the last hour before landing. Even Plato and Stalin did not forbid to use bathrooms. So much for the open society.

It’s a symbolic recourse to an old technique, well known of all scared animals. The next level of alert will probably be to let the sphincters go.

This sort of action of unreasoned terror, closing symbolically all sphincters, amplifies what Al Qaeda is trying to do. It is exactly what one should do, though, if one were an ally of Al Qaeda.

The watch list of the USA has 500,000 persons in it, but only 14,000 are on the "No Fly" list. Obama wisely said he would look into this. Personally I think that anybody having allegedly uttered fanatically Islamist opinions, or associated with such, should "No Fly", or, at least be subjected to extreme examination, even maybe including X rays (see below). Well, too bad if they can’t be frequent fliers. Maybe they should just fly in Islamist airspace among Islamist airports…

When the Huns were going around, they used terror, enormous terror, because there were few of them. Early Muslims were Arabs, and their army was just minuscule, around 40,000. Still, in a few months, they defeated the enormous Persian and then Roman armies. They just did not defeat them, they exterminated them. The wounded were finished on the battlefield by Arab women, and defeated soldiers were hunted like game. In the beginning of their occupation of Spain, Muslim authorities crucified dedicated Christians upside down. The Qur’an makes plenty clear that terror makes the world go around. And it can work. But physical terror can be blocked by a greater civilizational terror.

Jihadism is a fact of the Qur’an. The Qur’an is a war book (among other things). Of course Islamist propagandists would say it is not so. But anybody who has read the full unadulterated Qur’an, can see for themselves that they are lying.

For plenty of violent bits of the very short Qur’an can consult this:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

Let me say in passing that the head of the Paris mosque would agree with me. In the past, in Islam, many centuries ago, literalism, believing the Qur’an word for word, sura per sura, was viewed as a very serious crime. The Qur’an is a suspect text: it was written well after Muhammad death, by a bunch of generals of the dictator Uthman. The closest people to Muhammad disagreed with it so much, they went to war, and paid with their lives.

Terrorism is a global problem, because efficient weapons are getting easier to use and make. A terrorist can swallow high explosives in balloons, or stuff them in body cavities. Then it is enough to have a tiny device, and a cell phone. The system was used to try to kill the top anti-terrorist prince in Saudi Arabia, a few months ago. The terrorist blew himself up in 74 main pieces, but the prince miraculously survived. Such a terrorist weapon is completely undetectable by airport security. Except with X rays. That is why some on the watch list should be X rayed. Alternatively, they could stay where they are, saving CO2.

Thus, to explode planes is easy for Al Qaeda, even if passengers were without hand luggage, naked, and forbidden to go the rest room. A solution would be chained passengers, naked, except for adult diapers. Al Qaeda does not want American authorities to order such a measure, because people in the West would then get very angry, and Al Qaeda does not want the West too angry. It just want the Americans angry enough, and stupid enough, to keep on weakening themselves in "Afpak" (Afghanistan-Pakistan).

Some say that, in France one invests 550 million of Euros in passive detection of terrorists, but only 50 millions on the usage of James Bonds to detect terrorists. Of course that should be inverted. Terrorists have to be struck at the head.

And then, of course, one would have to knock some senses in the politics of the West. Exploitation has to morph into cooperation. Solar plants in the desert could bring plenty of clean electricity and even, locally, water, from electric desalination. (There is such a European project to produce electricity in the Sahara. This, however, will require the prior extermination of Al Qaeda.)

Nevertheless, in 2050, Nigeria is anticipated to have 280 million people. There is a good probability its only industry will be terrorism. It is time to reestablish adult supervision of Africa (it could come from Africans, in some places, but Nigeria gives all indications to not be one of them).

And it is also time to remember the fact that literature which is much less violent than the Qur’an is outlawed in many countries, and even on the Internet. Not that I approve of this, and nor do I want to forbid, or modify the Qur’an. No, I am against censorship. I strongly distinguish between the world of ideas and possibilities, and the world of facts. The problem, though, is that those who are naive enough believe their religions to be the truth, and nothing but the truth, and they do not believe orders from God are fictional.

Catholicism was long ago confronted with this problem, because so much of the Bible consists in horrifically bloody orders. The Church decided the Bible was allegorical. The same, as I said above, was done with Islam, for a while. Well, it is time to do it again. Then, and only then, will "jihad" just mean an effort…

Patrice Ayme

Too Big To Fault

December 27, 2009

WHERE FRACTIONAL RESERVE GOUGING COMES FROM. From Physiocrats, To The Usual Suspects…

“I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street,” Mr. Obama said.

But still, as Sherry Jarrell points out (Dec 27, 2009): "Now, the Federal Reserve is paying banks to hold excess reserves.  They are paying banks to not lend, while President Obama scolds them for not lending!  Either he doesn’t know about the Fed’s new policy, doesn’t care, or doesn’t understand. I frankly don’t know which is worst."

Sherry, a finance professor, usually loves profits, for her profits define the economy, she sings on every hilltop, and profits banks are making, thanks to various devices that have nothing to do with the real economy. So why so upset?

Why should the private banks lend to private individuals, indeed? As I pointed many times before, getting money at 0% from the Fed and then putting it back with the Fed to earn 3.5% beats anything: zero work, zero risk, potentially enormous profit if the Fed send trillions. As it seems it did. But we don’t know all the details.

Secrecy and discretion are of the essence among the mighty. Ever since the central bank of central banks, the Bank Of International Settlements (BIS), founded in 1930 by the plan Young, did very dirty business with the Nazis, it is safe and traditional to not ask too many questions to central banks.

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Nazi Architecture (picture by Richard Janssen). BIS building, Basel.

The BIS building above (one of two in Basel) is complete with hospital and nuclear bomb shelter. Initially the BIS had been funded to reorganize Germany financially, in May 1930. Hence its weird name. In January 1933, Adolf Hitler was made Chancellor. It is the BIS that has organized the archipelago of tax heavens for the world plutocracy, so precious to the rich, famous and arrogant.

The BIS was not audited in 1945. That would have been interesting. All top financiers know this, and thus know that really big banks are not just too big to fail, they are too big to fault. Top financiers are great wizards, they can get away with holocausts. Thus, today’s top financiers act accordingly.

That is why it would be a democratic progress to audit the central banks. It is even a democratic necessity. If central banks and their associated private banks could get away with financing Hitler, and this is never even questioned, we have a serious problem with our democratic facade.

As it is, with a reserve requirement of 10%, the private banks can expand the monetary supply from the monetary base (what the central bank gave) through the multiplier, ten times over. That money they are supposed to lend to the real economy. Such is their fiduciary duty, because, really, private banks operate at the behest of the government, through the central banks.

Except that, apparently US private banks have decided now that they are the government, with the help of, um, the government, as described above.

Another "socially useless" way banks use the money they are allowed to create, is by investing in derivatives. (The expression “socially useless” was used by the British finance minister, December 2009.)

This derivation of the money supply through derivatives is not a small problem. The private bank JP Morgan, let by Jamie Dimon, that Obama called "his friend" has a 80 trillion dollars derivative portfolio. World GDP is about 50 billions, namely, less.

All together the derivative market is at least 16 times world GDP. That is as much money supply that will not make it to the average entrepreneur, worker, retired person, or sick, uninsured patient, or renewable industry, high speed train networks, universities, and other activities to provide good handsomely paying jobs in developed countries rather than China.

An even more ominous possibility is that the derivative trading is rigged, as the government, and its pet, the Fed, could easily telegraph the correct trades to their friends (see the use of the concept of friend, above.) Another reason to audit the activities of the central banks. Obviously since many at the White House, or in Congress, have been, and will be feeding at the trough of private banks, their motivation for violating the sacred trust of the People is obvious.

It was risky of government to engage in fractional reserve banking. The theory was actually started in France, in the eighteenth century, by the physiocrats (the teachers of Adam Smith). It is high time for the French to denounce their own baby. (Ironically, Great Britain used private bankers and the multiplier , through the house of Rothschild, to finance its wars against France, winning the first and third, but losing the second, the one that gave birth to the USA.)

Profits do not just an economy make. Profits are just rewards for what an economy does not really need. To make an economy requires heart, mind, and wisdom. If profits have devoured those, you can kiss your civilization goodbye.

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Patrice Ayme

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Annex: Incriminating order: Release Date: October 6, 2008, 8:15 a.m. EDT:

The Federal Reserve Board on Monday announced that it will begin to pay interest on depository institutions’ required and excess reserve balances. The payment of interest on excess reserve balances will give the Federal Reserve greater scope to use its lending programs to address conditions in credit markets while also maintaining the federal funds rate close to the target established by the Federal Open Market Committee.

How And Why Christmas Was Fabricated

December 25, 2009

 

FORGET THE CRUCIFIED, ON DECEMBER 25, SOL INVICTUS IS BACK!

In republican Rome, the Winter Solstice period was the occasion to celebrate Saturn. These two week long Saturnalia vacations became so extravagant, Princeps Augustus tried to limit their extent by law. Rather in vain. In the following centuries, Saturn saw Himself pushed around by "Sol Invictus". It was natural enough to view December 25, the day days started to get longer, the celebration of the invincible sun. December 25 was also the most important celebration of Mithra, the Zoroastrian born God of the sun and contracts, of the Ahuric trinity, most popular in the Roman army, who Jesus the Crucified parrots faithfully (most of the story of Jesus is word for word the story of Mithra. The Winter Solstice celebrations were enormous under non Christian Rome.

So a Christian bishop in 353 CE, under the fanatically Christian emperor Constantius II, decided that The Crucified was born December 25, too. The Evangels said that the sexually mutilated Jesus ("circumcised") was born in Summer. The bishop also decided he was born on year zero.

By 300 CE a lot of what would later characterize Christianity (semi divinization of the living emperor, heavy symbolism) was in place. The quasi military imperial system of the Christian churches was also in place.

The Christian churches had constituted a state within the State. Apparently, one emperor was a secret Christian during the unhappy part of Roman history known as "the barrack emperors". Shortly afterwards, after outlawing and destroying the religion known as Manichaeism, the one and only severe persecution of Christians occurred. Maybe 3,000 died, all together; the Christians still whine about it, thus having something else to whine about rather than the millions of Christians, and others, that Christianism in its majesty would later destroy.

Diocletian-Galerius’ persecution of Christians had been sparked by blatant Christian civil disobedience, and what "Dominus" (lord) emperor Diocletian, and his colleague Galerius viewed as "arrogance" from top Christians. Dying in horrible suffering, Galerius reverted himself.

The next absolute Roman emperor, Constantine, observing how nicely the intrinsic fascism of the Christian church fit with his personal frantic fascism and familial extermination, made Christianity as de facto state religion.

Old divinities and celebrations were then systematically integrated into Christianism, anything else being forbidden under penalty of death, except for the Jews, who never got quite exterminated to the last (due to Christ being a Jew). Under the very "Catholic Orthodox" Christian emperor Justinian alone (in the sixth century), millions died, in Anatolia alone, from religious persecutions, of Christians by Christians. this is how Islam was born: out of the ashes of rabid Christianity

A nice approach to Jesus, and other illuminati, is to filter out all their bad stuff.

Never mind that many statements of Jesus are of the type: Matthews 24:39 "And knew not until the flood came, and took them all away; so shall also the coming of the Son of man be." For those not in the know, the "Son of man" is Jesus. So, when he comes back, Jesus drowns everybody.

Jesus was devious. Here are two extracts of Mark:

4:11 And he said unto them, Unto you it is given to know the mystery of the kingdom of God: but unto them that are without, all these things are done in parables:

4:12 That seeing they may see, and not perceive; and hearing they may hear, and not understand; lest at any time they should be converted, and their sins should be forgiven them.

In plain English: Jesus explains that he speaks in parables to confuse people so that they will go to hell. The same exact observation is parroted by Allah in the Qur’an.

Indeed, it’s too bad that the Crucified is not as nice as his legend has it. Reading carefully the Evangels reveals horrors. A lot of the bad stuff that happened next with Christianity and Islam can, in my opinion, be attributed directly to evil statements attributed to Jesus. Now, just as for Muhammad, one can always just have faith that his worst statements he never made… But the fact remains that the worse of the worst was integrated inside both heresies of Judaism, inside the sacred texts. Bible, Evangels and Qur’an teem with hyper violence of the worst type.

The danger of the filtering approach, of refusing to look at abominable orders, and looking only at the sunny side, the peaceful and divine side, is that one ends up doing exactly what the Germans who followed Hitler did. Hitler too, talked of peace all the time, and had "God With US!" as motto ("Gott Mit Uns!). Learning to tolerate the evocation of the abominable leads to holocausts.

And what of Christmas trees? Well, the Germans and Celts (they were roughly the same thing) venerated the trees. They had one for each month. Naturally the one for the Winter Solstice was associated to eternal life, an evergreen coniferous tree. By 1500s the old custom was reintroduced in Latvia, and spread, though Prussia, to Alsace…

So let’s enjoy the return of the sun, and forget about Constantine’s fascist dream…

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Patrice Ayme

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Annex: The Mithra religion reigned for more than 1,000 years over the Middle East before the alleged Jesus the Crucified showed up in Saint Paul’s head, and he wrote about it. Let’s have some fun:

Mithra was born of a virgin on December 25th, in a cave, attended by shepherds and magi.
Was considered a great traveling teacher and master
Had 12 companions or disciples
Promised his followers immortality
Performed miracles
Sacrificed himself for peace
Was buried in a tomb and after three days rose again
Was celebrated each year at the time of His resurrection
(later to become Easter)
Was called "the Good Shepherd"
Was identified with both the Lamb and the Lion
Was considered to be the "Way, the Truth and the Light," and the "Logos," "Redeemer," "Savior" and "Messiah."
Celebrated Sunday as His sacred day (also known as the "Lord’s Day,")
Celebrated a Eucharist or "Lord’s Supper"

In the catacombs at Rome was preserved a relic of the old Mithraic worship. It was a picture of the infant Mithra seated in the lap of his virgin mother, while on their knees before him were Persian Magi adoring him and offering gifts.

Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Gravitation, etc.

December 24, 2009

MYSTERIES GALORE…

Abstract: A few basic considerations on Dark Matter, Dark Energy, Gravitation, and how science proceeds. For once, nearly no statement here is in any way controversial… (OK, except a few snide remarks on the motivations of some revered physicists, and some tenets of physics requiring experimental proof, rather than blind acceptance…)

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Deep mine experiments look for WIMPs (Weakly Interacting Massive Particles). In Europe and the USA, the world’s two largest elementary particle accelerators have targeted their beams towards detectors in said mines, through hundreds of Kilometers of Earth’s mantle. Claims have been made for tentative events. It’s all very tentative, although tantalizing.

The idea for the WIMP search is a bit the same as with neutrino detection: bury deep underground, so that only WIMPs should be left.

Neutrinos are traditionally supposed to have mass zero (neutrino means the small neutral one, an Italian neologism invented by Enrico Fermi, Nobel prize winner, refugee from Mussolini, and scientific head of the nuclear bomb project in the USA; the concept was from Wolfgang Pauli, to explain the continuous spectrum of beta decay). But it turns out that neutrinos have mass, and they oscillate between types. A whole slew of experiments will try to know more soon. So neutrinos are a type of WIMPs, except that they are very light.

It has been known since 1933 (by the Swiss astronomer Zwicky, a supernova specialist, discoverer of the concept of neutron star) that galaxies and clusters of galaxies are missing mass by a factor of at least ten, if one uses straight Newtonian gravity on the observed motions of galaxies or their disks.

Now Newtonian gravity is the first order of the modern ("Einstein’s") theory of gravitation. Both theories differ only at very high speeds or fields. Hence the observed discrepancy would mean that our theory of gravitation is false. A class of modification of Newtonian theory was proposed (MOND = MOdified Newton Dynamics, where the gravitational attraction is the same for high acceleration, proportional to the inverse of the square of the distance, but slips into simply the inverse of the distance for weak accelerations).

But the way science proceeds is to milk a theory to death, until it dies. The Newton-Einstein theory of gravitation is correct in the Earth’s neighborhood, as far as we can see. So the reflex of experimentalists was to look for missing mass under the form of WIMPs. The search was on well before it became obvious neutrino had mass. Now that later fact is a game changer, since supernovas emit copious quantities of neutrinos. Indeed there is less of a missing mass now (maybe only a factor of five instead of ten…)

The apparent Dark Matter is concentrated in strange ways: halos, lobes…

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Apparent Dark Matter Ring. Located in the "Fish" galactic cluster, 5 billion light-years away, and 2,6 million light-years across. Gravitational lensing can be seen (by looking carefully) and exhibits the enormous mass of the Dark Matter halo.

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Please remark that in today’s physics, photons have mass zero. All other particles have some mass. The mass zero of the photon has been turned into religion by Relativity theory, but, ultimately, it ought to be considered an experimental fact, to be continually verified. If photons did have a mass, that would be much more of a game changer. It would most probably imply that gravitons have mass too, so gravity would have to be recomputed…

However, for reasons of logical completeness, Pauli (again!) noticed that Quantum Field Theory would work well if and only if each particle had a symmetric partner across the fermion-boson line. This is called SUSY ("SUperSYmmetry"). That would give plenty of WIMPs. So the search is on. 2010 will bring on line plenty of experiments worldwide, and the LHC in Geneva will ramp up in power.

As the preceding indicates, Dark Matter could be something radically new (new WIMPs), or simply explained: say by massive neutrinos (?).

Or then may be gravity was not as we extrapolated it to be, from around our little blue and white spaceship.

But the real mystery is DARK ENERGY. That, if confirmed, is way out of imagined physics (although it could be claimed that the ad hoc "cosmological inflation" used to explain the homogeneity of the Big Bang was just such a possible prediction!). The universe is expanding, as if there was out there a mysterious anti-gravity. There is no mechanism to explain this (although it can be written down in Einstein’s gravitation equation by re-introducing a scalar term, the cosmological constant, Einstein had introduced to make the universe static, before Hubble discovered the expansion, leading an opportunistic Einstein to declare the cosmological constant was "his greatest mistake").

In conclusion, we are extremely far from a final "theory of everything", contrarily to what some physicists have claimed with profit motivated outrageous naivety (there is great profit in books and fame). Profit is most often a bad adviser to the sharpest thinking (something profit obsessed American regressive economists fail to integrate).

Verily, in 25 centuries or so of official physics history, I do not know of one period when so much has been officially not known, and blatantly darkly mysterious. Anything could happen. For example, there is not one force theory, but two, and they do not agree conceptually. The explanatory scheme in gravitation (no force, just inertia), is completely different from the explanatory scheme for forces in Quantum Field Theory (whatever that mystery wrapped in an enigma, shrouded by immense Lagrangians, renormalized by reality turns out to want to say).

Patrice Ayme

Fractional Reserve Gouging

December 23, 2009

 

FRACTIONAL RESERVE WITHOUT LEGAL DEONTOLOGY IS THEFT.

People have been going around, suffering, not knowing what truly ails them economically, but being told it had to do with sick banks. Unfortunately, few people know about the real culprit practice, fractional reserve banking (I talked about it exhaustively several times already in the distant past). This is a very serious and deep problem, and it cannot be fixed by just taxing bank bonuses 99%.

The present so called "capitalist free market economies" are not free at all, because most of capital is created as a state mandate, by private individuals profiteering without any democratic supervision. Those exploiters use an artifact called the fractional reserve system (see Annex). The fact bonus bankers are surprised by the outrage they behavior has caused is a revealing slip: bonus bankers are so used to steal through fractional reserve, that they cannot understand that taxpayers have some reservations about paying bonuses directly from taxes.

The most important point about the fractional reserve system is that it allows banks to create most of the money. However weird that sounds…

Indeed are not bankers private individuals operating for profit? So why do they create what everybody uses?

Creating the public’s money ought to be a strict prerogative of the state, because money is a public utility, and it cannot be the reserve of a few unelected, unsupervised private individuals, (be they motivated by their personal profit, or not). Indeed nobody elects bankers. Not only this but they claim to be self regulating (although their old chief, Greenspan, belatedly admitted that this did not work, after the crisis of 2008…).

In 2008, the multiplier reached 50 for some banks, which basically means they could create 50 times the money given to them by the central bank. And who did they give this money to, besides themselves? Well, their friends, of course. And they always have some in the White House.

Conclusion: a strict functional ethic in accord with a deontology and a ferocious supervision and penal system should be created to oversee bankers, because bonus bankers are just, in truth, officers of the state, thus making their present activities akin to corruption (because they use for private profit money that was created for everybody, or then create money out of thin air.)

Really private banking should have a multiplier of one: you invest what you have, not a dime more. (The notion really exists, and is called full reserve banking.)

If it has a multiplier more than one, some of the created money is public money, so the banker is a civil servant, and ought to be treated as such: tough bosses, small salary, strict supervision.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Annex: Fractional-reserve banking is the practice in which banks keep only a fraction of the money deposited with them in and lend out the remainder, while maintaining simultaneously, and unrealistically the obligation to redeem all these deposits upon demand.

By its nature, the practice of fractional reserve banking expands money supply beyond what it would otherwise be. Because of the prevalence of fractional reserve banking, the broad money supply is a multiple larger than the amount of base money created by the central bank. That multiple (called the money multiplier) is determined by the reserve requirement or other financial ratio requirements imposed by financial regulators.

Derivative World Sucks Real World Dry.

December 21, 2009

 

THERE OUGHT TO BE A FUNCTIONAL ETHICS IN FINANCE. HERE IS WHY.

***

Abstract: the leaders of the USA have diverted, through otherworldly derivatives and exaggerated compensation for themselves, so much capital in a socially and economically useless way, that the economy could only falter. Larry Summers, the plutocratic genius, has been in command of the wrecking of the ship of state for 30 years.

***

"I did not run for office to be helping out a bunch of fat cat bankers on Wall Street." says Obama. So far, though, it’s exactly what has happened. If you run for office and then eat poison, of your own volition, it means you ran for office to eat poison.

Obama and his little helpers HAD to save the banks, and even the bank holding companies. As institutions. They did not have to help the individuals who created the problem, but that is what they have done so far. Actually saving those who caused the problem, some of whom belong in prison, is the one thing the administration should not have done. (Since those who promoted and encouraged torture are not under investigation, but still role models or professors of the American justice system, this goes with the territory, namely poor actors are left in place, as sacred icons).

More than G. W. Bush, and arguably, more than anybody else, it is Larry Summers who created the problem. After all, he was on the scene before Rubin. (See Annex on Summers.)

Summers was internal economic affair advisor at the WHITE HOUSE under Feldstein, chair of Reagan’s economic advisers. He was twenty something, then Harvard made him a full professor at 28 years of age. Of these things American genius is made. Ten percent short term unemployment rate, a stalled economy, a disappearing middle class, the rich so rich that they get money from the poor: this is Summers for you.

"What’s really frustrating me right now is that you’ve got these same banks who benefited from taxpayer assistance who are fighting tooth and nail with their lobbyists up on Capitol Hill, fighting against financial regulatory control" Obama added. The word "bank" has to be considered carefully here. What Obama means is actually the upper management of said banks.

The bottom line is that finance is supposed to be the link between savers and entrepreneurs. Savers save, producing capital. Then entrepreneurs are lent said capital. In the 1920s, this failed: banks invested in Wall street, then lost a lot of money, as Wall Street crashed due to overproduction, and the rise of tariffs by 50%, which collapsed international trade. The Banking Act of 1933 was passed to outlaw the practice of having banks play at the casino of Wall Street.

Why? Because there is actually a limited quantity of capital. Capital is produced, through the fractional reserve system, as a multiplier of how much banks are allowed to lend, relative to the reserves they keep. The looser the regulation, the greater the multiplier, the more capital is created, true. But still, in the end, the capital is finite.

Notice that THE VERY EXISTENCE OF THE REGULATION OF THE MULTIPLIER BY THE STATE MAKE BANKS INTO AN ARM OF THE STATE. So, basically BANKERS ARE CIVIL SERVANTS. Banks are given a fiduciary prerogative, and duty, that of creating money, a function the state used to have, for a few millennia, and nobody else had, under the penalty of death. Modern bankers investing in derivatives are basically counterfeiters. The fact is they don’t really own that money, they were entrusted in creating it, they have no right to lose it all, especially after paying themselves bonuses, and profits for a few individuals at hedge funds and the upper class attached to them exclusively.

Indeed finance became, thanks to the deregulation work of Rubin, Summers and Greenspan, under Clinton, not just as bad as in the 1920s, but much worse. In the 1920s, banks could just invest in stocks, which are ownerships in companies, something real. Financial derivatives did not exist .

The craziness of the 1920s was outlawed by the Banking Act of 1933 ("Glass-Steagall"). Rubin, Greenspan, Summers repelled the Banking Act. clip_image002

It was actually the committee to sink the world. Or more exactly the committee to make the world irrelevant. The committee to derivate the world. Indeed, the difference with the 1920s is that an extra worldly concept, that of financial derivatives, had blossomed and disconnected with all economic justification, although it connected with completely fraudulent contracts, that all top bonus bankers knew very well were fraudulent.

Derivatives are bets on the evolution of the price of whatever. Derivatives, thus, can be whatever. Differently from a real casino, which is regulated, and where one knows what one is betting about, Summers (see his inspiring face higher up and lower down), was adamant that derivatives ought not to be regulated.

Why did Summers think that? Well, why does the crocodile thinks the way it does? Well, Summers does not hide rotten carcasses up the river bank; he is way more sophisticated than that, but, otherwise, just the same. Same morality: I eat you, therefore I am. A genius, plutocratic style.

Summers lives on top of the world, he owns mansions, made at least eight million dollar income in 2008, the American oligarchs think he is a genius, and the president of the USAs eats in his hand and coos. Summers would say what Obama did say:"Look where I am!" (Namely you are nothing, I am everything, the mark of someone who has decided the measure of man is the measure of power, on other men, thus forsaking all what makes the genus Homo special; hence the comparison with crocodiles above; crocs don’t a civilization make, they just eat their way through it).

Derivatives are only justified if and only if they play the role they were originally made for as they evolved around Chicago, long ago: as insurance for commercial operators. ALL AND ANY OTHER USAGE OF DERIVATIVES OUGHT TO BE OUTLAWED. Or regulated away, whatever.

As I said, capital is limited. Big banks have been investing most of the world’s capital in bets not connected to the physical world, and did so while it was not justified as insurance. Total world yearly GDP is about 50,000 billion dollars. Before the crash of 2008, the total derivatives market was about 600,000 billion dollars. Now it has been reflated, and it is about 800,000 billion dollars. Yes, about 16 times world’s GDP. In other words, the world has become hostage to something that does not exist. Any small negative fluctuation of that world that does not exist, that world of derivatives, will, and did crash completely the real economy. Moreover, if there is no negative outcome but further "profits" in the derivative world, it means that more capital will be diverted there, starving further the real world.

The situation, as it is, is grotesque: the collaborators of Roosevelt who outlawed the violation of its fiduciary duty by the banking industry in 1933, would have found the present situation not just way worse than what they outlawed, but completely demented.

For example American International Group, AIG, sold derivatives posing at insurance, without making anything resembling sufficient provisions. Nor could it have. Those private engagements were honored by poor people in the USA , because so decided the Wall Street operators at the White House.

In particular, 12.9 billion dollars went given to Goldman Sachs, in the name of the American People. Goldman then called that a profit, and used all of it for bonuses (total government gifts to Goldman Sachs were several times that). Goldman Sachs is not a poor homeowner, incapable of paying his debt, but, it, and its kind, are the future paymaster of a lot of the individuals leading the American government.

Ethics was not invented to please philosophers. Ethics did not come out of God. Ethics comes out of what is customary (its etymology says). In other words, it has got to be sustainable. WHAT WE HAVE NOW, THE ENTIRE MONEY OF THE WORLD SENT BY CORRUPT CIVIL SERVANTS (ALL WHAT BONUS BANKERS ARE) TO A DERIVATIVE WORLD IS NOT SUSTAINABLE, SO IT CAN’T EVER BECOME CUSTOMARY, SO IT IS NOT ETHICAL.

If Obama wants bankers to finance the real economy, as they are supposed to do, it’s no use begging them to do so. Instead, it’s time to become ethical.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Annex 1: DERIVATIVES RUIN THE ECONOMY, SO DO EXAGGERATED TOP EXECUTIVES’ COMPENSATIONS:

The US pay czar limits the pay of executives at companies receiving a bailout. Without undercutting the ability of the firm to secure talented management.  ”It’s a delicate balance!  Very difficult indeed.”  To which Sherry Jarrell replies: "Well, Mr. Czar, difficult for you, maybe, but a piece of cake for the labor market.  That’s exactly what the labor market does, day in and day out, quite naturally.

Compensation should not be the purview of an appointed administrator serving at the pleasure of the executive branch of the U.S. Government."

But I say:

1) Self referential loops have proven a problem in logic. Should not they be a problem in the market, or is it that the market has nothing to do with logic?

The CEO class, in the USA, is self referential.

2) Europe has now more big companies than the USA. Still, big European executives are paid at least ten times less than their USA equivalents. How come the market is so different in Europe? Is the fact that more compensation in Europe goes to talent located on lower rungs of companies, related to the higher performance of European companies in the last decade? After all, the total compensation being finite, paying more for talent at the CEO level means paying less for talent just below.

An interesting aside is that CEO in the USA are much taller than average. Are size and compensation the only way they can dominate their subjects?

A few years ago, Renault was all set to buy General Motors. At the last minute, though, Renault executives learned that GM executives intended to pay themselves more than ten times what Renault-Nissan executives were paid. So Renault scuttled the deal. US taxpayers are left with the bill: more than 60 billion dollars, no? (And GM will fail within a year or two.)

It is true there are markets, and they can deal. But they are more or less free.

There are not just markets. There are also classes too, and they can dominate, with extra market mechanisms. The CEO class in the USA sits on each others’ boards, determining each others’ compensations. In some other countries, this sort of incest is more limited (in others, it’s worse: China). In Germany, union representatives sit on boards.

Generally those who really love their jobs will do them for free. Too much compensation is actually a distraction. And bad markets, thus exists. They are not just bear markets, they can lead to captive markets, and oligarchies…

***

Annex 2: In crocs we trust:

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Why He Falters

A plutocratic genius, Summers has long been considered by the reigning oligarchy a top U.S. economic brain. As head of the National Economic Council (NEC), Summers exerts maximum sway over U.S. economic policy as the top White House economic adviser during the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression. That was a long time coming, since Summers and company worked hard dismantling the USA as Reagan economic advisers.

The former Clinton Treasury secretary’s name topped the list for a return trip to head the Treasury department in 2009. Instead, that slot went to a Summers’ protégé: New York Fed Chairman Geithner.

Constitutionally Weak USA?

December 18, 2009

 

IS WHAT WAS NOT FORMALLY CONSTITUTED REALLY THERE?

A lot of the famed “Constitution” of the USA is not really a “Constitution” at all. It is actually tradition, not constitution.

In democracies, “Constitutions” are established by Constituting Assemblies elected by the People. In other words, the People rules what Constitution it wants, through a process in which it is represented.

France and the USA did this in 1789, a few weeks apart. The difference is that the Constitution of the French republic was found grossly inadequate, in the meantime, and has been extensively modified since, and is modified, to this day. In the USA, a few amendments were passed, the rest was changed informally. Imagine the Wright brothers’ airplane, with a few new pieces, here and there, now flying 310 millions.

A lot of the machinery of the USA is extra Constitutional. For example, the most important activity of the US Supreme Court, to act as a sort of Constitutional Court, was not formally instated by the Constitution of the USA. This role was just informally grabbed by enterprising judges, in some way, at some point, in the nineteenth century. Thus that Constitutional watchdog role is not really there. Hence oftentimes, Supreme Court justices grandly declare that they cannot “legislate from the bench”. In other words, no organization is defending the Constitution, in the USA.

The filibuster rule in the Senate is an example of another of these ad hoc rules. 60 votes, out of 100, are needed to pass anything. Why not 99 votes? Why not, indeed: the filibuster rule is not in the Constitution. Why is it there? Well, because there is not much of a separation between Money and State in the USA.

Wyoming has 570,000 inhabitants, California more than 37 millions. Each has two senators. This has become a living dream for the plutocracy, which can easily purchase a few otherwise impoverished senators, and control everything at little relative cost.

Overall, the USA has the oldest, most obsolete Constitution, probably adequate only for the tentative state with a few hundred of thousands voters it started with, 200 years ago, when the aim of the USA was to conquer vast swathes of the Americas. Now the age of conquest is over, and the age of wisdom calls for a more regulated republic, differently constituted.

By contrast, the European Union has a sort of rolling constitution, continually morphing. Also European citizens are protected by a variety of fully endowed Constitutional and Supreme Courts. Thus, in Europe, those high courts can defend individuals to the point of forcing the states to change their ways. They have the constitutional backbone to do it.

Most countries change their constitutions, fast, because the world is changing, fast. Not that the USA is not changing. It is. But the Constitutional stasis forces most of these changes to be extra-Constitutional

An example: Bush institutes torture, Obama forbids it: the monarch decides of all, according to his good pleasure. But what happened to the rule of law, and the rule of the People? What happened to the Constitution? Was torture legal, or was it unlawful? Was it Constitutional? Is Obama’s Bagram black prison in Afghanistan, and its equivalent in Iraq, Constitutional? Who, or rather, what, is defending the Constitution?

***

AN HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE; LOUIS XI AND THE USA:

Bush institutes torture, Obama forbids it: the monarch decides of all, according to his good pleasure.

France had such a practice of government for centuries, in Medieval times. The king would say: “I decided this and the other thing, car tel est mon bon plaisir!” (…because such is my good pleasure!)

In truth, there were strong limits to the power of kings, at least in France and its ex-vassal England. The king in England, the Duke of Normandy, ruled in the name of a direct covenant with the People, and strong French kings always used that same argument. (After claiming, for six centuries or so, that they were elected).

Both English and French kings were ruled by the Salic law, Roman law, the principle of the state of law (coming from a Roman Augusta), besides a few add-ons in England, and the entire contraption under the watchful eye of Parliaments and the councils of the kingdoms. This is not just a picturesque perspective: Louis IX (“Saint Louis”), hated Jews and unbelievers, and wanted “to plant swords in their bellies” (as he poetically put it). But he could not do anything much, practically, because he was blocked by the law (Hitler, later, changed the law).

By 1700 though, torture was forbidden in England, and could not have been instituted by the monarch. Even earlier, the French monarch could not have decided to torture on his own: judges, and parliaments decided of such things. The latest French monarch to use forms of torture on his own volition, by putting some of his enemies, who were serious enemies of the state, into cages, acquired a bad reputation, to this day.

This king, Louis XI, the “Prudent and Universal Spider” weakened the great lords, with the support of the People. So he was an excellent king, who, among other things, protected the Protestants from the rabid Catholics who harassed them. Louis XI, though earned a lot of disrepute because of a few cages.

Louis XI the Prudent

King of France
clip_image001
Louis XI wearing his Order of Saint Michael

The point is that Louis XI died on 30 August, 1483. And that no king of France behaved that way since (and it was with just a handful of convicts of the most dangerous type, dangerous enemies of the state, not little criminals, rogue CIA agents, such as Osama bin Laden). That American presidents, with little apparent reason, would behave the same, without a Constitutional framework, is troubling, and a testimony of the weakness of the present Constitution of the USA.

***

Patrice Ayme

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com

***

P/S: Is the Constitution of the USA only adequate for a small city? 38,818 individuals voted in the first presidential election of the USA, in 1788. Yes, less than 40,000 voters. In 2008, Los Angeles had 200 times more denizens.

***

Nazism, A Consequence Of Vibrant Plutocracy

December 14, 2009

 

THE UNDERLYING CAUSE OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN THE USA AND EUROPE.

Abstract: A more or less latent conflict has existed between the French republic and the republic of the USA since 1934, relative to the help fascist circles got from (part of) the (partly American) plutocratic class. This conflict has not been resolved yet. In other words, the causes of Nazism have not been made explicit. My claim, of course, is that the same forces are at work now. However they are more visible than ever before.

To believe that Nazism was part of a giant plutocratic conspiracy would have been too much in the past for the bleating sheep, as they rested, fat and content. But now that they have been made to serve the wolves of finance in bed with the government for all to see, they may be more amenable to this part of history.

***

DERIDING THE ENEMY, FRANCE:

I informed a friend back in the USA that: “I heard wolves howling in the forest, a formidable sound that brings shivers, and seems addressed to the heavens. Nothing like it. In the distance, the French army was firing 155 mm gun 25 miles from Savoy (I had a chat with some of them). With live ammunition, and combat helicopters picking up recalcitrant skiers (an area as big as half of Yosemite was locked off). Heavy explosions thundering in the distance, wolves howling. What a world.”

To which my American friend soberly replied: “Soooo…French Army preparing to fight the Germans? Third time is the charm.”

How come US citizens have such a wrong and demeaning view of France?

***

DEMOCRACY WON, FASCISM LOST:

What is that sort of derision, common in the USA, supposed to mean? What is that supposed to mean EMOTIONALLY? Is it not known that France and Germany had three wars already between 1870 and 1945? That third time was indeed the charm? Is it not known that there was nothing charming about it? Is it not known that more than 100 million people died in these wars?

The French dead, by themselves, were more than 3 million (around 7% of the population), the German dead, by themselves, in excess of ten millions (so violent were the conflicts that the French number can vary by one million, the German one by two million; a related mystery is how many Jews were assassinated by the Nazis: from 4.5 millions to 6 millions, no one knows for sure: perpetrators destroyed files, not just bodies; official total death vary between 62 and 78 millions for WWII alone). The USA had about 525,000 dead between WWI and WWII on all theaters of operations.

Let’s recapitulate.

***

NO JOKE:

The war of 1870-1945 between France and Germany is no laughing matter in Europe. There was a lot that was wrong there, as Nietzsche had mightily denounced as it started to happen. Nietzsche pointed out some elements of the thought system setting itself up in Germany at the time. One of them being anti-Semitism. Nietzsche suggested that the anti-Semites ought to be kicked out of Germany, since they were obviously an inferior sort. Nietzsche also suggested terrible wars would happen because of the thought system gathering strength in Germany. Or more exactly, as he had it, lack of thought and cattle spirit.

This strident denunciation of the new Germany by Nietzsche was all the more remarkable since the philosopher had fought in the 1870-71 Franco-Prussian war, as a German patriot and volunteer. That war was won by Prussia, which proclaimed the Second German Reich in Versailles, France. Germany seized giant portions of French territory (Alsace and Lorraine), where most of French heavy industry was located. France was required to pay huge “reparations” (a funny concept since the war was entirely fought on French territory; but Bismarck, with a fake courier, had enticed France to formally declare war). The “reparations” were actually set up to destroy what was left of the French economy, allowing the Prussian empire to swallow the rest of it during the next round. or so Bismarck hoped. We know this, because Bismarck said so.

France’s losses in the war of 1870-71 were considerable. Paris was sieged, and saw heavy combat. In Paris alone the dead amounted to more than 20,000.

Something happened next: the Prussian military and various industrialists and plutocrats who were on the plan to establish THEIR personal hegemony onto ALL of Europe, cranked up the fascism to the maximum, in the preparation of the final battle with the French republic. It was to be the final battle against democracy, the way they saw it.

Another patriot all gung ho against France and pro-German empire, had been King Louis II of Bavaria. But as fascism got cranked up to the max, such patriots came to the conclusion that, under the guise of fighting the French, fascism, racism, plutocracy and other evils were rising, plain and simple, crushing all humanity in the way. Nietzsche and Louis II saw the light, and they turned violently against the fascist militarization of Germany. They became loudly pro-French. Within a few years, Bismarck himself had enough of fascism unchained. He understood that he had played apprentice sorcerer. It was too late. He was fired from his job of Chancellor by the young crazy Kaiser.

***

WORLD WAR ONE AS A FASCIST EXCURSION:

The Kaiser himself lost control to the Prussian military which, in full accord with the plutocracy, and to stop socialism in its tracks inside Germany, declared war on the world, August 1, 1914. It had been planned for decades, and the Prussian Army High Command had decided that it was now, or never (unbelievably, the aide of US president Wilson paid a visit in May, and gave an emotional green light of sort: attacking France was OK).

But for 8 divisions holding the front against Russia, to which it had just declared war, the entire Prussian-German army was thrown against the French republic, through Belgium. The French army retreated for 5 weeks, losing its heavy weapons, But then it counterattacked at the Marne (with the help of the just arrived eight divisions of the British Expeditionary Force), nearly destroying the imperial army, in a quick succession of enveloping maneuvers which exploited gaps between the German armies.

In the end, the USA remembered that it was a republic, a democracy, and the progeny of France and Britain, and finally decided to come to the help of its family. It was important to rescue victory, if one wanted to prevent France and Britain, assisted with Belgium and Italy, to establish a world according to them.

The desperate Prussian fascists cobbled together a last formidable offensive at the Marne, straight towards a bombarded Paris. But French special operation teams (led by a future traitor) had broken through German lines just before the offensive, and knew German plans. The imperial army punched through empty space, and then was rolled back by French artillery, in a pincer counterattack. Engaged for the first time, American divisions got to know what war was: they melted away in a few hours. Fighting next to a Senegalese division, the Americans saw that no prisoner were made. They made just one or two themselves, as they lost several thousand men in a few hours of the most brutal fighting imaginable.

***

NO WINNER, BUT PLUTOCRACY:

Unfortunately, at the end of the war, the heavy presence of American plutocrats at the table prevented to establish the clear principle of aggression of August 1, 1914. Moreover American plutocrats got heavily involved with the reconstruction of Germany, their way, for their own profit. The result was Hitler (probably heavily financed by Ford as early as 1922; the case of Ford, or that of Hitler, are extremely complicated; Ford, at the least, not content with being a plutocrat, was also a sincere socialist, and Jew hater, because, so he said… he hated Wall Street…)

In any case, heavy support of a gigantic number of powerful plutocrats and industrialists in Britain and especially the USA, contributed crucially to the instauration of Nazism, and its quick rise to formidable power.

The French republic was in quandary. In a first stage, Hitler lined up nearly everybody behind him, from the Polish colonels (1934) to Stalin (a fellow dictator in love and fear), to Britain (which signed with Hitler a treaty violating Versailles in 1935). The relationship between the French and the American government got frankly hostile, starting in 1934, in no small measure because American plutocrats wanted it so.

Finally, after the invasion of Spain by a fascist rebel army propped and armed by Hitler, fueled by Texas oil, Britain started to see the light, and threw her pro-Nazi king out (1936). By 1939, Britain was solidly allied to France, and declared war to Hitler. Hitler knew he had been misled, and had probably lost the war, just then. So he desperately fled, ahead, always making a bad situation worse. He got lucky many times, from escaping the wrath of his generals (who were betrayed by their friends in Britain) to defeating France (which had a very low probability of happening, as war games have shown since).

***

THE RISE OF THE EUROPEAN SPIRIT IN THE FIRE MAELSTROM OF WWII:

Soon after occupying France, Germany, or more exactly, Germany’s top soldiers started the long and painful process of finding out what was wrong, and then, what went wrong. In the end, many of the top Nazis betrayed Hitler, and, unbelievably, sided with the French. As Albert Speer explained to his friend and mentor Hitler, he could not win without France. Hitler’s cabinet was forced to agree, and to be human enough with the hated French. Later, top Nazi marshals and generals got to the logical end of the process, and outright rebelled against their crazy boss.

Why was Hitler so crazy? Because his initial plan was friendly to his friends the plutocrats. Hitler, again and again pointed out that fascism was more powerful than democracy. Although this is generally interpreted at face value, what Hitler believed in his heart of hearts was that PLUTOCRACY was more powerful than democracy. He could not say this publicly, since, officially Hitler’s Reich was actually… socialist and anti-plutocratic.

Similarly, Hitler was not going to inform the Volk how much help American plutocrats were providing him with. Hitler did tell the American Nazi party to shut up, though, because he informed his subordinates that no country in the world was more favorable to Nazism than the USA, and that it was just a matter of time before the USA would side very officially with the Reich.

Of course the Franco-British declaration of war to Hitler threw the whole approach out of the window. Moreover Churchill went all out, proposing Franco-British unification (long time coming again), and absolute, total war, irrespective of all and any convention, but for victory (to make his point clear to all, he ordered under penalty of death, his admirals to fire on their French colleagues and dear friends, at Mers El Kebir, and they very reluctantly did so). Soon the outrageously pro-fascist and pro-Hitler US ambassador in the UK, Kennedy, was fired by Roosevelt, and Hitler was a walking dead man.

***

WORLD WAR TWO WAS FOUGHT IN TWO UNIVERSES, AND ONLY ONE REACHED AN OUTCOME:

World War Two was a bizarre universe. It was two universes battling each others. As American GIs were fighting on the beaches, American direct investment from American plutocrats was firing back at them from Nazi weapons (Ford and General Motors, among others, provided most of some categories of Nazi vehicles; American technology created the very oil and rubber Nazi machinery used).

Indeed, many American plutocrats supported Hitler throughout the war, in many more ways than are even known to this day (for obvious reasons, this was all shrouded in secrecy). This means that American plutocrats supported massively Hitler’s production of weapons and secret technology transfers. They had ideological, material and imperial interest to do so. Hence Hitler’s crazy hope that once Roosevelt, who he called a “Jew lover” was dead, all would be fine.

Many plutocrats, even German plutocrats, practiced during World War Two what is known in hedging as a “butterfly” strategy; they simultaneously leveraged themselves heavily both for, and against Nazism. Whatever happened at the end of the war, they would be winners. For example, Thyssen, who wrote the famous book “I paid Hitler”, ordered one of his sons to become strongly anti-Nazi, and the other, strongly pro-Nazi. Whatever happened, his family was sure to win big time, and it did. He himself switched from the later to the former. As he sat in jail after the war, he gloated that “the Americans are rebuilding my company for me”.

Countless American corporations who were helping the Nazi war effort presented themselves as intrinsic liberators, as soon as allied flags displaced the Swastika. But their collaboration with their Nazi colleagues kept on going. Some notorious Nazi mass murderers slave killers, such as Werner von Braun, and his many Nazi collaborating engineers, made NASA all it could be. (That was swept under the rug, as was the blossoming collaboration with the worst of the worst, such as the SS Klaus Barbie.)

It is clear that the victory of 1945 did not mean all that it ought to have meant. It was an incomplete victory. Defeating Nazism was a victory on a consequence, not the victory on all the causes that led to Nazism. Those were not an abstract form of banal evil, as Hannah Arendt tried to impress us with. Those forces behind Hitler were in no way abstract, and in no way banal. To some extent, as long as the forces behind Hitler are not brought out in the open, and defeated, the victory of 1945 will not be complete.

In France, Germany, Austria, Belgium, and many other countries, “holocaust denial” was made into a crime. This means, basically, denying that Nazism was a very bad thing. But what about denying what the deepest causes of Nazism were? Should not that be holocaust denial too?

***

EUROPE IS NOW UNITED:

The Americans, often, and even the European themselves, do not realize the extent to which Europe is now united. The first successful unification of the European core was, of course under Charlemagne, who succeeded where Rome had failed (because he changed tactics, and Christianity, the weapon of ideological destruction he used, was superior to any the Romans had used before). The second, transient unification between France and Germany was Napoleon, and his various contradictions. The third was under the Nazis, and, just as Napoleon ended up using a giant German army (more than 200,000 soldiers of his Grande Armee were German), Hitler ended up trying to use as much of French industrial might as he could. In the end, many a top Nazi deduced that the French were not inferior, and that it was a mistake to fight them (Hitler even held a weird cabinet lecture on the subject, after French general Koenig broke the advance of the Afrika Korps at Bir Hakiem). Many Nazis embraced the French well before 1945.

The democracy of the French republic won against fascism the last two times. And now Germany is identical to France: a republic, and a democracy. One can see combat helicopters land in France, hundreds of kilometers from the German border, proudly displaying the Iron Cross. And no French citizen in good standing pay any attention. One of the three bases of the German School of Army Aviation is actually in Le Luc-Le Cannet des Maures, close to Saint Tropez and Toulon, in Provence.

Merkel and Sarkozy talk actually the same sentences, like two parrots in love. Most German and French armed systems are integrated and build together, from the Tiger combat helicopter to the Euro fighter, to, whatever.

The French army is in Afghanistan, where it has been holding Kabul and the region east of Kabul, crucial to NATO effort there (supplies come through it).

So France, and the rest of Europe, including Norway dear to Obama, are helping the USA in its self inflicted quest for a diabolical mirror in Afghanistan. Sometimes it is best to mitigate, even with evil. Better to keep the USA in.

Third time was indeed the charm. The philosopher Rene Girard, professor at Stanford and member of the French Academy says that the relationship between Europe and the USA is starting to remind him of what the relationship between Germany and France used to be. He sees in it a terrible danger. I see in it a common cause. Plutocracy unchained.

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Patrice Ayme

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

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Annex:

I was summarily banished from both the European Tribune and the Daily Kos, in one case very explicitly by Jerome The Bonus Banker “from Paris”, for exposing some of the ideas above. Bonus bankers hate the facts above. They insist international financiers could not possibly have financed the Nazis, they scream it is defamatory to so assert. Jerome loves to claim he is a Bonus Banker, publicly, on the Daily Kos. The point Jerome and his loud and rich friends want to make is that Bonus Bankers are still the future of the world. They break wind for you (so they gloat).

For me, bankers, the way the fractional reserve banking system work, are just civil servants, agents of the state. Civil servants who claim to be in private practice, and claim they deserve most of the world’s capital. Call it corruption, institutionalized.

The essential argument about Nazism is whether it was financed by a variety of plutocrats, including a number of industrialists and bankers. That is strongly denied by plutocrats, whereas I identify such a denial as a form of holocaust denial. Call it the master denial.

As it turned out, as luck had it, I was aware of the whole problem as a small child. An uncle of mine was married in a (if not the) top fascist family in Germany (that of the general who pulled the trigger in WWI). My Uncle knew a lot about the inside scoop. He told me early on about the financial supports Hitler got, even from Britain and the USA. My uncle never made it to the USA, although he was a top astronomer. His entire life, he was barred to enter the USA because of his ideas.

I was aghast, in the debate with the not so gentle men at the European Tribune, on how carefully ignorant they were of the dark side of European history. They also belong to this new sort which apparently believe that if they can link to something, they proved their point, and are very scholarly. But being scholarly is about being right, not having a lot of dogs howling all the same way in a kennel.

In any case, those bankers’ dishonesty became blatant when I got summarily banished. No reason was given, nor was any reason given at the Daily Kos, except that as I tried to respond, in the Daily Kos, to one piece of Mr. Jerome The Bonus Banker’s self serving propaganda, I was prevented to do so (later they told me I had been banned, “Cheers!”). As I then learned to my dismay, the founder of the Daily Kos created it when he was in contact with the CIA, and apparently he makes no mystery that: 1) money should drive politics, especially in the USA. 2) conspiracies have never existed. Especially, I guess, not from the CIA, which would never create a fake leftist web site.

In particular, of course, the bonus bankers, and other obsequious servants of plutocracy, want us to believe that Nazism was never a conspiracy, and that JP Morgan, and dozens of other big American bankers and major industrialists never financed it, helped to manage it, gave it technological secrets and oil, etc… That is what they want us to believe, because their commanding position in society today depends upon it.

What I say instead is that there is a cover-up of what brought Nazism to us. Big finance is not the whole story of the causation of Nazism, of course. But to deny that it was part of it is a higher form of holocaust denial. A very dangerous form, because it will allow for a repeat.

As far as making claims without evidence, the fact is Mr. Jerome the Bonus Banker told me to shut up, or else, and then banned me in the same instant. His elocution could actually be interpreted as physical menace.

There is increasing documentation gathered on how plutocracy gave rise to Nazism. But of course it is actively fought by Bonus Bankers.

My Uncle’s name was Daniel Chalonge (he founded the Observatoire de Provence and the Institut d’ Astrophysique in Paris, among other things). The fact that intellectuals of that caliber were prevented from entering the mighty USA speaks volumes about the intensity and baseness of the plutocratic machine, and its burning desire to misinform about the history of fascism in Europe.

There are no hyperlink to the true, full history of Nazism, and there is not the big, and serious book it deserves because the CIA was founded by people as closely associated to Nazism as imaginable (the Dulles brothers were lawyers to more than 100 Nazi companies). Ever since to talk about that foundation of the power of the plutocracy has not been cool, in the great circles of power… (There are partial works, including on my sites, and the books of Black “IBM and the Holocaust”, or Professor Sutton.)

A PROFITABLE, LIFE SAVING TRUTH

December 10, 2009

 

WHEN ALL YOU DO IS WASTE, ALL YOU GET IS HATE.

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Abstract: Not content with pulling the strings of many disasters in the past, the American plutocracy seems determined to stay on a collision course with civilization. This time it wants to gas us all. I explain why, and how.

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PLUTOCRATS CLAP AND TREAD:

Short version of the essay below: We are facing a CO2 induced holocaust. Methane has started to bubble up in the Arctic. Methane has 100 times the greenhouse power of CO2 over 20 years. More than 1000 billion frozen tons of it are in shallow waters in the Arctic alone, ready to thaw.

The CO2 induced holocaust around the corner has been greatly orchestrated by those who were behind many of the disasters of the twentieth century, the USA based plutocrats. Those malevolent, profit obsessed creatures, brought us many evils from their early support for Hitler to the Great Depression, and exuberant support for Stalin or Muslim fundamentalism all the way to derivatives and the financial crisis of 2008. (Yes, you will not read this in conventional history books, they control that too!)

The USA is still the number one CO2 causing problem (when counting the USA production based in China). Its malevolent oligarchy has been dismissive of world opinion, foreigners, scientists, and the mother of all holocausts to come.

American financial traders propose to remedy all that hot air by, surprise, surprise, "Cap and Trade", a scheme concocted by Goldman Sachs and friends, nowadays at the very core of a worldwide exploitation scheme which predated upon the world throughout the twentieth century. We will show that it is definitively a -bad- joke, a determined effort towards the Nobel Prize in Impudence.

Indeed, "Cap and Trade" depends upon "Cap". Europe, remembering that the world war of 1939-1945 was in part caused by Hitler’s gyrations to get at Polish, Romanian and Caucasian oil, has long self flagellated with high taxes on energy which "capped" energy waste. Even then, the "Cap" in European "Cap and Trade" did not make much of a dent when "Cap and Trade" was finally introduced in Europe. Arguably it worked the other way, all too long (how is explained below).

If the "Cap" is too low, the carbon price will be too low too (as it is presently the case in Europe, hence worldwide). There is every reason to believe that Americans, who are unwilling to submit to the slightest self restraint so far about capping their CO2 extravagance, will not allow a significant "Cap" on CO2, since they are trained to get their flagellation from their financiers, only. However, it will cost them, because their financiers will make sure of that. So "Cap and Trade’ will be another tax from the poor to the hyper rich.

Americans ought to have a good look in the mirror. It is time to get serious. Goldman Sachs and its associates lead them to a "DOOM LOOP" (as the Bank Of England just said).

The USA was the nation of carbon burning, and got to the pinnacle that way (even helping the so called "Holocaust" along, see below). Time to let go, because the next holocaust is on the way, and it will not be a matter of just 100 million dead. This time the USA may be on the receiving end, too.

Time to let go, and it’s not just about CO2. All over, old, obsolete, unsustainable technologies, have to be scuttled ASAP to switch to renewable and sustainable technologies. Fortunately for the USA, this creation and deployment of appropriate, much more advanced technologies, could turn out to be HIGHLY PROFITABLE for the most advanced countries (including the USA).

Advanced technology is exactly what the doctor ordered economically. And it will introduce an element of dynamic stability… Because the root of the crisis is that obsolete technologies (including in finance) are all the way down to hell on the bell curve of their utility.

The oligarchy of the USA thinks the CO2 catastrophe is American business as usual: 1) cause a big disaster, 2) reap the juicy fruits of enormous evil unchained (I know Obama went to Oslo to say it ain’t so; we will partly address this below with facts which are usually carefully silenced). That catastrophic method has always worked in the past, it is hard to let go. But this time is not business as usual. What is being prepared is not your garden variety, habitual holocaust. We are not talking about exterminating a few tribes. Business as usual is terminated. Billions of us may get terminated.

It would be better if the USA did absolutely nothing about "Cap and Trade", rather than to try to institute another huge subsidy to Wall Street, while talking as if it fought CO2 production. It is time for the USA to face squarely the responsibility of its own plutocracy in the collapse of the entire biosphere its ineptitude is leading to.

***

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AMERICAN SELF DELUSIONS:

The truth is that the government of the USA has endangered the biosphere, ever since the senate of the USA voted 95 to 0 AGAINST the Kyoto Treaty (under Clinton). US Senators have to look at themselves in the mirror: they have been destroying the biosphere. We are a fraction from a holocaust, because of their hubristic ignorance.

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(From The Economist, December 2009)

So the average American citizen produces 24 tons of CO2 per year. By comparison, France pollutes with only six tons of CO2 per person, per year. And France does only that, with a welfare state, and a lower unemployment than the USA. So Americans cannot say they pollute more because they are richer. All evidence is that Americans pollute more, so they are poorer. We will explain why below… Yes, the Australians, and the Canadians, have no excuses either (but at least Australia has recently operated a U turn, since G. W. Bush’s Australian shepherd was voted out of office)…

As "The Economist" puts it, speaking about saving the planet: "It is all about politics. Climate change is the hardest political problem the world has ever had to deal with. It is a prisoner’s dilemma, a free-rider problem and the tragedy of the commons all rolled into one. At issue is the difficulty of allocating the cost of collective action and trusting other parties to bear their share of the burden…

The closest parallel is the world trading system. This has many achievements to its name, but it is not an encouraging model. Not only is the latest round of negotiations mired in difficulty, but the World Trade Organisation’s task is child’s play compared with climate change. The benefits of concluding trade deals are certain and accrue in the short term. The benefits of mitigating climate change are uncertain, since scientists are unsure of the scale and consequences of global warming, and will mostly accrue many years hence. The need for action, by contrast, is urgent."

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AMERICA WILL ALWAYS FIND A MARKET TO SELL YOU TO:

Since the US Senate voted for climate heating, and ocean acidification, under Clinton, a colossal part of the industry of the USA has been sent to China, allowing the American oligarchs to claim that they are not the world number one polluters. But they are just hiding behind smoke screens.

After long denying that there was something as a CO2 problem, the American oligarchs have now invented a new red herring that they hope to turn into a new "market" device to enrich themselves further. "Cap and Trade". Ever since America traded slaves, markets have been a sure way for American oligarchs to enrich themselves. They used to trade human flesh, now they trade hot air. They do what they can, as their freedom is always encroached upon.

James Hansen, the famous NASA scientist, has fired a well thought out broadside against "Cap and Trade". In an unfortunate, school yard spirited reply, Paul Krugman, an ex adviser of Ronald Reagan, took him on personally, arguing that Hansen "really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control."

Well, that’s arrogant and beyond silly: Krugman means Hansen is dismissive of the politics of emissions control, not its economics. Hansen actually proposed a detailed method to curb carbon burning. Krugman does not explain why future American style "Cap and Trade", led by the competent pirates at Goldman Sachs, will succumb less to the corruption that affected European "Cap and Trade".

Moreover, "Cap and Trade" is viewed in Europe, as a third order mechanism. First order are regulations (such as mandatory efficiency requirements, or the worldwide interdiction of some chlorofluorocarbons). Then in Europe come, in second order, behavior modifying taxes (such as high energy taxes, or carbon taxes). Last, and least, come in the carbon market. Based in Paris.

"Cap and Trade" should be viewed skeptically, especially in light of the fact that European "Cap and Trade" was, and is, managed by the carbon hating French, from Paris, whereas Goldman Sachs is supposed to dominate the American "Cap and Trade", from Chicago, the city of Al Capone, Jamie Dimon, and the notorious center of "Academics" Nobel Prize economics understood as man eat man, for profits, and for the best (the University of Chicago). That from the same Kafkaesque country where Nobel "Peace" Prizes bestow eternal peace with flying robots which kill all extremists, without any semblance of due process (also based at the University of Chicago law department).

Krugman wrote "An Affordable Truth" an editorial in the New York Times, purporting to claim that "History shows that cap and trade, a system specifically designed to bring the power of market incentives to bear on environmental problems, does work."

Here, too, we get no proof, no example. (Although Krugman shows that green building may come out of it; but, in all of Europe, there maybe two green buildings, one in London, one in Grenoble, in spite of all this Euro "Cap and Trade"). The power of some American economists’ naivety seems to know no bounds.

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"CAP AND TRADE": AN AMUSEMENT FOR FINANCIERS.

Krugman curiously, does not provide the one and only example of CO2 "Cap and Trade". Why is that? I will tell you. "Cap and Trade" finally works, supposedly, in Europe, after many years trying. It works a teeny tiny bit. It’s an amusement. But for several years it worked mightily, the other way, augmenting pollution: the polluters had claimed they polluted more than they actually did, when the "Cap" was fixed, so, when "Cap and Trade" started, they could pollute even more, while claiming they polluted less. Thus, joining insult to injury, they earned massive subsidies (for example a French giant chemical company such as Rhodia was able to do this, getting subsidies, by setting up a factory in… (North) Vietnam).

So "Cap and Trade" works: elementary, my dear Watson. But not the way Krugman claims it does.

One can say much more. Most of the European carbon burning reductions are due to massive taxes, and increasingly stiffer regulations. The pet politicians of the American oligarchs want "Cap and Trade" because, as NASA’s James Hansen put it in his own essay, "Cap And Fade", "Wall Street is poised to make billions of dollars in the “trade” part of cap-and-trade. The market for trading permits to emit carbon appears likely to be loosely regulated, to be open to speculators and to include derivatives." Yes, it’s the usual dog and pony show of the American snake oil vendors, so thrilling to American corruptocrats. There is no God but money, and Wall Street is its prophet.

This is so incredibly obvious that even "The Economist" recognizes it, insolently calling America’s approach "Cap and Tirade". Says "The Economist": "Much depends on the president. If he puts his back behind Waxman-Markey ["Cap and Trade"], America may get a weakened version of a second-best policy. If he doesn’t, America may get something worse—or nothing at all."

Well I say: let’s put Americans in front of their responsibilities. As the top polluters who ever were, it is high time for them to understand this. Maybe, then, they will do something about it.

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HIGHEST TEMPERATURES IN MILLENNIA, HIGHEST GREENHOUSE IN MILLIONS OF YEARS:

For motivation, here are global temperatures, and this is less than 50% of the CO2 problem (part of the rest being acidification):

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The New York Times

In case you want to know how the cooling that oiligarchs have claimed is happening, please learn that the 2000-2009 decade is the warmest ever. The CO2 EQUIVALENT GASES are at 430 ppm (of CO2 equivalence), although they never durably exceeded 300 ppm in the last 15 million years.

(By the way, I am fully aware that a recent article in Science claimed that some of Antarctica’s ice survived a transient excursion at 750 ppm or so. I am also aware that some geophysicists and climate scientists, even some of the world’s best, are financed by the carbon burning industry, hence their sometimes curiously convoluted utterances about climate change; Allegre and Courtillot in Paris being the worst examples that way.)

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Thank you USA! Big effort for you!

As the Economist Magazine puts it: "Forty years is a long time. Governments can agree to meet distant targets in the comfortable knowledge that they will not be held responsible for failing to do so. Shorter-term targets are therefore more important. The IPCC’s figures suggest the developed world should aim to cut by 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020…

The European Union is committed to a 20% cut, rising to 30% if the rest of the world promises significant cuts. It has a detailed plan for getting there, including lower country caps in its Emissions-Trading Scheme and regulations on car emissions. Japan’s new government has promised a reduction of 25% on 1990, but has revealed little about how it might manage that. Australia’s government struggled trying to get its legislation Canada’s emissions continue to grow.

Two weeks before the Copenhagen conference, Mr. Obama announced that America would offer a 17% cut on 2005 emissions by 2020—the figure in the Waxman-Markey bill. That’s around 4% below 1990 levels—well below the figure of 25-40% that is expected of developed countries…"

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AMERICAN CONTRADICTIONS. PRISONER OF THE PAST, AND OLIGARCHS:

It is mystifying, at first sight, that the USA has resisted so much to do anything about carbon burning. From its technological edge, to its abundance of sun over more than half of its territory, it would seem that the USA ought to lead in non carbon technologies. But that would be to forget how the present oligarchy of the USA got in its commanding position.

The USA was the original, proverbial "Saudi Arabia" of oil. Massive oil production started in the USA during the nineteenth century, not far from the East Coast, and in the Middle West. That is one of the main s why the USA gained comparative economic advantage on Europe (except for a few fields in Poland and Romania, grabbed by Hitler, and the Caucasus, European oil and gas has been deep under water in the North Sea). American strategists often loudly gloat about the USA being the Saudi Arabia of coal.

However, a point deliberately ignored by most US strategists, is that the USA is also the Saudi Arabia of sun and, also, of wind. So the USA would gain comparative advantage by developing renewables. So Krugman’s editorial, if it had addressed larger issues, should have been called "A PROFITABLE TRUTH". Verily, Gore did a disservice by calling the Carbon Burning Catastrophe an "Inconvenient Truth". If the USA reacted correctly to the Carbon Burning Catastrophe, it would turn into a "PROFITABLE TRUTH".

So why, then, if it is so profitable, is the USA so opposed to taking measures against carbon burning?

First, of course, carbon burning was the greatest advantage the USA had on Europe, it’s hard to let it go. The USA had oil, Europe had only depleted, obsolete coal. As the two largest navies in the world, the British and the French, switched to oil, they became dependent on overseas oil (when the USA was the number one producer of oil, by far, followed by the Caucasus, in the Russian empire).

Meanwhile, American plutocrats were free to arm Hitler with Texas oil, thus extending their wealth and influence. Hitler became their instrument. Using Texaco oil, Hitler conquered Spain. The same unashamed American plutocrats made a gala dinner in New York to celebrate France’s defeat in June 1940. (The American plutocracy’s hatred for France is long running.) Ah, such fond memories of the days of glory, it’s so hard to let go…

Secondly, if the USA is forced to let go of oil and coal, those who have dominated American politics for more than a century, will see they influenced capped and fading. Of course, it is hard for them to tolerate. So they finance the status quo as much as they can.

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THE USA WILL SUBMIT:

American politicians, and the error of their ways, are not all powerful. They only look so from inside the USA. Thanks to Obama, the Taliban will dispel that notion in the next few years, as the USA and NATO know an ominous defeat there that they were so anxious to demonstrate they could never suffer.

American politicians and their entangled oligarchs look all powerful to the likes of Krugman who laments that:"when economists deal with physical scientists, the hard-science guys tend to assume that we’re witch doctors with nothing to tell them, so they can’t be bothered to listen at all to what the economists have to say, and the result is that they end up reinventing old errors in the belief that they’re deep insights. Most of the time not much harm is done. But this time is different.

For here’s the way it is: we have a real chance of getting a serious cap and trade program in place within a year or two. We have no chance of getting a carbon tax for the foreseeable future. It’s just destructive to denounce the program we can actually get…"

OK, Krugman, Goldman Sachs has given you the program, it’s all you can get, let’s not be destructive… Well, sorry, the political system as presently found in the USA is destroying the planet, so we have to choose what we want to destroy: the planet, or corrupt American politics, as presently enacted.

The bottom line about "Cap and Trade" is that it puts a cap on pollution, maybe way higher than what the present pollution is. But in no way inferior. That is what happened in Europe. Otherwise there would be screaming, "Cap and Trade" would be a tax. (To tell the whole truth, "Cap and Trade" works a bit in Europe, precisely because there are all sorts of taxes and regulations there; but it is not the case in the USA; only Goldman Sachs there, and they are experts at paying no taxes, and getting money for nothing, including from the US government.)

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THE CATASTROPHE, OR WHY WE CAN’T SUBMIT TO AMERICAN PLUTOCRATS ANYMORE:

There is evidence, in the last two years, that the augmentation of sea level caused by the melting of continental icecaps went from .40 millimeter to .75 millimeter, a year (this is only part of sea level rise, which is now accelerating to 3.5 millimeters, per year).

It may not sound like much, but: 1) those icecaps in Greenland and Antarctica were not supposed to melt appreciably for decades, if not millennia. 2) it’s a quasi instantaneous doubling of the rate of melting of said supposedly forever frozen icecaps. it seems we are dealing with an exponential.

As I have argued before in "2 C IS TOO MUCH! (To Claim 2 degree Celsius Global Rise Is Safe Is Bad Science!)", the refrigeration system of the planet is the poles, or more exactly, the ice, congregating at the poles.

The rate of melting is at least (4 Celsius/.75 Celsius) higher there, so 5 or 6 times higher. One and a half degree up overall in global earth temperature would then mean (1.5 Celsius) (4/.75) ~ eight degrees Celsius of warming at the poles.

Nothing like a pretty picture:

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This the average temperature in Antarctica over the entire summer presently. The melt depends upon the summer temperature (how cold it gets in winter is irrelevant, this is the heart of the modern glaciation orbital theory of Milankowitch, which has been found correct through computer simulations).

From this picture, it is clear that a rise of eight degrees Celsius over the whole summer, from a global rise of 1.5 degrees Celsius, globally, would lead to the melting of the entire West Antarctica Ice Shield (WAIS) and the Antarctica peninsula. Sea level would go up at least six meters (at least 3 meters from the WAIS, 2 meters from Greenland, etc…)

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Figure 2: Time series of ice mass changes for the Antarctic ice sheet estimated from GRACE satellite data monthly mass solutions for the period from April 2002 to February 2009. Unfiltered data are blue crosses. Data filtered for the seasonal dependence using a 13-month moving average are shown as red crosses. The best-fitting quadratic trend is shown (green line). Let me spell it: it’s accelerating down to hell.

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IS AMERICA A WASTING PETRO REGIME?

Bottom line: the USA seems to be a lazy place, in the sense that Iraq or Saudi Arabia and various petro economies are lazy places. The USA, long the world’s top oil producer, and still the world’s top carbon producer (with its Chinese factories), has the oil country syndrome of having it all, and people there don’t try too hard: they let their sheiks do the heavy lift. By sheiks, read the Gold Man who Sacks, and the like. Those over lording exploiters get rich from the situation, rather than through the power of the People. At least so they hope. That’s why they send all the jobs to China.

The same class of exploiters who had a gala in New York when the Nazis invaded France, knew full well their reign was insured for decades to come. And it has been. Well, now, their time is up, because they have been sawing the branch on which they are sitting, namely the USA itself. Sawing the branch, and selling it to China.

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ONLY MORE ADVANCED TECHNOLOGY BECOMES US:

Heidegger, what used to pass for a philosopher among Nazis, bemoaned the role of technology. According to this blighted one, technology had hidden "being". The Nazis hated technology, and especially the Jews, who brought to them the science and the tech. They wanted to return to the trees, and various primitive superstitions Charlemagne had crushed (by cutting the sacred giant trees, precisely, just as Caesar had done in Gaul). When the Nazis understood that technology was the only thing that could save them, they reverted course, but it was too late (we were lucky they were so stupid: if they had mass produced the Me 263 earlier, only the atom bombs could have tempered their fascist enthusiasm…)

In truth, Heidegger had understood strictly nothing about the relationship of man and technology. In truth, it’s a symbiosis. The savage in the Amazon forest that Heidegger, as a Nazi, despised so much, should have planted his neurotoxin arrow into Heidegger, using forest high technology to subdue the dysfunctional tribal Nazi eradicator.

There is now plenty of evidence that man is intrinsically technological. Man evolved as a user, and creator of technology. MAN IS NOT HOMO SAPIENS, IT’S HOMO TECHNOLOGICUS. Indeed man is not always wise, but, when man is trying to be anti-technological (as the Nazis tried to), he is forced to run back to technology to save him.

It is a mathematical theorem. Many animals use tools, but man makes special discourses (techno-logy) about them. Man thinks, speaks, dreams and obsesses about technology. Man made technology, and technology made man. The great break in evolution, is not about sentience, it’s about becoming the creator of special discourses ("technologies"), whatever the special environments are. Even the hobbits found on Flores island, separated from the main Homo line for at least three million years, were highly technological.

And our present technology is running out of runway, it will never get enough speed to take off. And it will not change enough, and thus get enough speed to take off, except if helped by the governments. And it cannot brake either, and stop before the runway runs out. It’s too late. Einstein used to say that the Fourth World war would be fought with sticks and stones, but that was way too optimistic. It may just be fought with reverse transcriptase.

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WHAT TO DO? FULL TECH AHEAD, AND LET’S CAP AND TRADE BANKSTERS!

Most importantly, eco-nomy is house-management. The economy is depressed, because it has been mismanaged. The house has been mismanaged. To move towards efficiency is the exact prescription needed. Why? Because the present technology we have is unsustainable.

The planet cannot support us, at this rate, in this way. We need a lighter footprint. Even agriculture, per se, as we have it, is unsustainable. (Agriculture uses too much phosphate, polluting the oceans, and will soon run out of phosphate, anyway.)

Our usage of the oceans is completely unsustainable. For example, fisheries are collapsing worldwide, because of overfishing and pollution, and in many countries, it is already a catastrophe.

Another example: groundwater, which is simultaneously depleted and poisoned. In a country such as France, where agriculture has been intensely practiced for more than 3,000 years, for the first time, the industrial agricultural methods, have caused ground and stream pollution, to such an extent that lethal algae are growing in the sea. The solution here, and mostly everywhere, is to deploy much more advanced technology, which often does not even exist on the drawing boards. Such invention and deployment will insure great economic activity.

For example, Hawai’i could not doubt produce electricity without burning carbon (as it does presently, all Hawaiian electricity comes from burning fuel.) The deep sea and surface waters temperature differences are so high in Hawai’i that it ought to be simple to build a natural Carnot engine exploiting that (a problem is barnacles, but new materials can solve this, in ships, and in pumps and tubes). Deploying such technology would insure great economic activity.

Still another example: the average jet right now uses 4 liters (a "gallon") per 100 kilometers, per passenger, Airbus superjumbo uses only 3 liters, and for the soon to be assembled Airbus 350 XWB, Airbus is targeting 2 liters per 100 kms per passenger. This depends upon new carbon composite materials, lighter and stronger, than the existing ones, which are already much lighter and stronger than steel. The first such large pieces were produced. Aerospace directly employs half a million people in France alone, constantly developing new technology that will change the entire economy. (Be it only because ever stronger and lighter materials can be used absolutely everywhere, from school buses to bridges.)

Ultimately, jet fuel will have to be made from algae, instead of fossil fuel. Fossil fuel creates CO2, algae absorbs CO2. The former is evil, the later is the excellent remedy the doctor ordered.

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GOLD MAN SAYS: CLAP AND TREAD. OFF WITH ITS HEAD!

Obama’s USA, right now, intends to reduce emissions only with a "Cap and Trade" system. "Cap and Trade" was used, supposedly successfully, in the USA, to reduce acid rain. However, Europe controlled its acid problem without "Cap and Trade". Regulations can work better. After all, there are just regulations for toys, cars, house appliances and medical drugs. One does not do "Cap and Trade" with carcinogens. Why to do it with something even more dangerous?

Oh, we shall cap the number of slaves to one million, and then trade them? No, we shall not. Why? Because trading slaves is bad, that’s why. This is what happened in Europe: too many free pollution permits were given, well, for free. That was embarrassing. Europe was saved by its enormous pre-existing energy taxes and regulations.

The great advantage of "Cap and Trade", in the USA, is that it is a subsidy to the usual suspects, led, of course, by Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs, revealingly known as "Government Sachs", is the true government of the USA, motivated not by what the American people wants, but by the profit motive. "Cap and Trade" will make Gold Man richer, so Gold Man is all for it, so it will happen. What should progressives do? Well, denounce loudly but support meekly, because a bit of progress is better than none. At least, that is what Krugman advocates.

SELLING OUT:

Among many raging American "conservatives" Krugman has an extreme leftist reputation, but many of the policies he has advocated recently, or opinions he has presented, the elected leaders of the European right would reject with horror as intolerably right wing. An example is the zero interest rate policy, a lamentable give away to banks. Krugman supports it, in spite of its disastrous effects on the saving rate, American seniors, the dollar, stable currency rates, and the unfair cheapening of the USA.

So now Krugman, however unwittingly, has turned into a herald for Goldman Sachs (See the annex below on Gold Man Sacks and Cap & Trade). In "Unhelpful Hansen", a regrettable essay, Krugman opines that:

"James Hansen is a great climate scientist. He was the first to warn about the climate crisis; I take what he says about coal, in particular, very seriously.

Unfortunately, while I defer to him on all matters climate, today’s op-ed article suggests that he really hasn’t made any effort to understand the economics of emissions control. And that’s not a small matter, because he’s now engaged in a misguided crusade against cap and trade, which is — let’s face it — the only form of action against greenhouse gas emissions we have any chance of taking before catastrophe becomes inevitable."

Krugman insists that: "We have no chance of getting a carbon tax for the foreseeable future". Who is "we"? The USA or its delirious Senate? Or is it, as it should be, the planet itself? WE, all of us, have just one planet, one biosphere, and the USA, or more exactly the American oligarchs and plutocrats and their factories in China, are polluting it to death. The USA needs a carbon tax, and to delay the debate on such a tax is to delay the inevitable, and morally correct.

***

THE PSYCHOLOGICAL ROOT OF AMERICAN EVIL:

In September 1939, Britain and France had enough with Hitler, so they declared war to him. The USA never did. The USA never declared war to Hitler. On December 11, 1941, Hitler declared war TO the USA. Why was America so supine? Because American plutocrats were collaborating with Hitler. Roosevelt was talking the other way, true: one calls that a cover-up. The reality this was covering up was massive collaboration of American plutocracy with Hitler. (An astute GM, owner of Opel, and a Jew hating Ford worked for Hitler, producing most of some of the types of vehicles Hitler’s armed forces used, while financially naïve American GIs battled them on the ground…)

When the French republic asked Roosevelt for help, the American president did not even send one bullet, but rushed in his recognition of the illegal Vichy regime.

What is happening now is something similar. A united Europe has declared war to the destruction of the biosphere by CO2 emissions. The USA did not. Instead, American plutocrats are collaborators in the destruction of the biosphere by CO2 emissions. Just as their plutocratic grand parents had interest, and found profit in collaborating with Hitler, they have interest, and find profit, in collaborating with the destruction of the biosphere. As usual in the American unconscious, they assume that destruction will bring profusion. This time, they are wrong.

Europe has found the hard way that destruction is not a friend. Europe has found that destruction of civilization has only negative outcomes. (Germany and Russia found this most recently, two generations ago.) Unfortunately, that destruction of civilization has only negative outcomes is not yet felt in the USA as the central and fundamental truth it is (that is why the USA supported Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and Pakistani thermonuclear weapons).

Destruction has been the friend of the American English speaking colony, for 400 years, and even well before it was born. Indeed it is the French protestants who founded the first European colonies in the present day USA territory. Fort Caroline (the "Carolinas") were founded, and named, by the French (~ 1580). But then the Catholic fascist Philippe II sent an armada, with the order of killing the French down to the last baby. A hurricane prevented the arrival of a French relief fleet, and the American French colonies were destroyed, down to the last French baby.

Ever since, destruction has been the friend of English speaking America. Call that a lucky streak. But luck does not last forever.

The average American produces 24 tons of CO2 per person, the average French produces 6 tons. The French don’t live four times better, but close. It’s directly related. When all you do is waste, all you get is hate.

The rest of the world has implemented plenty of various taxes, for example on gasoline, etc. Even China has augmented enormously its gasoline tax in the last 18 months. Moreover, China has increasingly made its own stringent European laws on carbon emissions (although an electric car in China will emit 231 grams of CO2 per kilometer, whereas it would emit only 21 grams in France; American cars emit, in the average 333 grams, and the latest European regulations that have been decided will implement120 grams…)

France, not content with its formidable taxes on energy, is introducing a carbon tax, on top of them, January 1, 2010, in 2 weeks. If the USA will not listen to reason, it goes without saying that carbon taxation on imports could be used as a way to demolish the industry of the USA, or whatever is left of it. In any case, it will self demolish, because the longer it takes to adapt to a carbon free future, the more of a dinosaur it will be.

Praying at the feet of Goldman Sachs does not help. The rest of the world is increasingly fed up with the American attitude of doing as plutocrats tell them to do. And more importantly, so is the planet.

***

Patrice Ayme

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

***

Annex: Gold Man Sacks wants to Cap and Trade You:

After his money rising campaign to the naïve sheep known as the people, Obama’s greatest private contributor was Goldman Sachs, as a so called "moral person" (greater still was the collective gift of University of California employees, a public institution having social utility).

Via Green Hell (but using well known public facts):

Senators Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) and Olympia Snow (R-ME) have introduced a bill to make the Commodity Futures Trading Commission the sole regulator of the carbon market created by cap-and-trade legislation.
So does this mean that freebooting Goldman Sachs could be the de facto regulator of the carbon market?
Consider that:

  • The current chairman of the CFTC is Gary Gensler, formerly of Goldman Sachs.
  • Goldman Sachs is a part owner of the exchanges where carbon allowances would be traded.
  • Goldman Sachs has spent millions of dollars lobbying for cap-and-trade legislation in anticipation of making billions of dollars at the expense taxpayers and consumers.
  • Goldman has a special exemption from the CFTC to exceed the trading limits normally placed on commodity speculators. Not only was this exemption secret for 17 years, the CFTC recently had to ask Goldman for permission to release the letter to Congress!
  • Goldman Sachs employees are heavy contributors to the Democratic Party giving it over $4.4. million in the last election. Barack Obama received more than $997,000, Feinstein received $24,250, and Snowe received $17,000 from Goldman. All-in-all, this could result in a pretty decent return-on-investment for Goldman.

***


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