No Vision, No Future.

MIND IS TOUGHER THAN DIAMOND.

There are many reasons why societies collapse. The plutocratic explanation works well most of the time, and explains a lot. In particular, it explains most of the defeat of Athens by Macedonia, and all of Rome’s degeneracy into theocratic despondency.

In a plutocratic collapse, propped up by the redoubtable power of the exponential function, an oligarchy monopolizes ever more riches and power, to the point the rest of society becomes weak and dumb, which is both an effect, and a way to achieve the rule of the plutocracy. Such a process is apparently engaged, once again, in some major countries of the heretofore triumphant West, and that is why the Western plutocracy prefers to put everybody to sleep, by accusing… China.

The plutocratic explanation was actually brandished by the Mongols to the Caliph in Baghdad, before killing him, his family, and about 800,000 Muslims in the capital (Christians were spared). The Mongols insolently claimed to their Muslim victims, that Muslim plutocrats had let the Caliphate degenerate, as demonstrated by the Mongol victory, and thus it belonged to them, Mongols, to put an end to this miserable lot.

Another reason for collapse is ecological devastation. It happened to Sumer, due to salination (agricultural abuse) and flooding (catastrophe at the hand of God). This is also what happened to the Mayas, victim of drastic drought (7C), in combination with abuse they had made of the resources (be they trees or water). Plutocratic strife did the rest, as the duopoly of the two leading cities was replaced by a generalized war.

Still another reason for collapse is determined invasion by bloody aliens (part of the reason for Athens’ collapse). Most societies and civilization go down that way. The case of the Mayas (internal implosion by civil war, down to the bitter end), is rare (and the drought made the difference).

Generally bad plutocracy, or bad ecology makes a society weak, and then it gets invaded. But the powerful Aztecs went down first because of an alien invasion of Conquistadores (having too many local edible enemies was also crucial).

The Incas were also defeated by astoundingly brazen and belligerent conquistadores, but only after the empire and its organization had been already wrecked by a smallpox epidemic (which preceded the European invaders that brought it). If Pizarro had come before the smallpox, he would have probably failed, as he would have encountered a united empire.

Love is a good motivator, but it does not lead armies. Facing the Mongols, the armies of the Chinese plutocracy were overwhelmed. China was very militaristic, but Genghis Khan’s army was much more efficient.

Not so for the Mongols with the Europeans: after a costly victory in Hungary, although they had defeated all European armies, but that of the kingdom of France, the Mongols remembered what had happened to their ancestors the Huns. Hence they wisely decided to not pursue further west beyond the Hungarian steppe. Instead they switched to cooperation with the Franks (they invaded Syria together). Islam survived only because the racist Pope excommunicated the collaborating Franks, and was not keen to cooperate with Nestorian Christians. Peeved, the Mongols became Muslim instead.

Ultimately the collapse of a society or civilization is caused by truth and consequences denying love and future to the people. It cannot be avoided when caused by a giant scientific and technological gap.

Reciprocally, when the Europeans did not succeed to invade durably, it is because the technological gap was not as great as it looked. This is clear with India, China, Thailand, Japan. The latter two could not even be bothered militarily.

Little known, this is even true with Black Africa. Africa was NOT neolithic. Africa resisted European colonization, in great part because it had indigenous steel technology. Thus, when the White Man was not yet dead or morbid from African diseases, steel arrowheads would do what was needed. So, for centuries, White Men, and that includes the Arabs in the East and the Moroccans in the Sahel, stayed on the periphery, unable to get inside the Black continent seriously. The Whites traded slaves with the Black potentates inside (who were busy making war on each other, as usual).

France ultimately "conquered" Senegal and most of West Africa with a dozen French officers, and 5,000 rifled armed Senegalese soldiers. If you can’t beat them, you join them.

In the Qur’an, or the Bible, God is depicted as "merciful". But otherwise, there is little nice about him. He is depicted as jealous, furious, forever vengeful, but also loving (New Testament), or practicing (very tough) love (Qur’an), between two torture sessions for miscreants.

No doubt those who wrote Bible and Qur’an took quite a bit of inspiration from the real universe out there. The Cosmic Comedy, la Divina Commedia, is quite a bit as mad, furious, and tender as classical gods. Nature even mercifully provides with endorphins, and the forgiveness of wisdom.

However, if we want to love the children, and their children’s children, we need to see far, and carry a big stick. Nothing less is moral.

***

Patrice Ayme

COSMIC MODESTY REQUIRED

 

THE UNIVERSE TEACHES AWE AND HUMILITY:

Theme: Is there extraterrestrial life? Extraterrestrial intelligence? A related question: how big is the universe? On all these subjects considerable and very surprising progress is in the making. I describe some of the new ideas and facts in plain language, from Plate Tectonics to Cosmic Inflation.

Facing the enormity of it all, honest minds will find honor and pleasure in telling the truth, and nothing but the truth (carefully distinguishing it from hope we can believe in). Some physicists, searching for the limelight, have presented some science fiction, or some science fantasy, or let’s say scientific working hypotheses, philosophically grounded, as real, established science. This is misleading and dangerous: science is truth, and that is why the public supports it. Let’s keep it that way.

Sometimes all that science does, but that is fundamental, is to find new uncertainties we did not previously suspect. A basic humility that needs to be taught to people and politicians is that knowledge is not just about learning what we know, but also about learning that there are new dimensions to what we don’t know.

One certainty: our Earth is rare and fragile. Earth was a primordial deity of the Greeks, Gaia, viewed as female, nourishing humankind. Gaia is an on-going miracle, of self regulation, with extremely complicated biology and physics entangled. The more we observe the cosmos, the more we see that’s hell out there. Gaia is a rare deity, Pluto is the rule. Here are some inklings.

***

ALIEN SOLAR SYSTEMS EVERYWHERE:

Many planets have been discovered around many stars. Solar systems (= several planets orbiting the same star) have also been discovered. In one of these systems three planets around a dwarf red star are all in the inhabitable zone (= neither too cold nor too hot, so that liquid water exists on a planet there). One of them is smack in the middle of the balmy zone. It seems clear that most stars will be found to have planets (we are above 30%, and our present detection methods are very crude).

Still there does not seem to be many civilizations out there. As Enrico Fermi put it:”Where is everybody?”

Far enough from the dangerous galactic center, with its zooming stars, high radiation, and gigantic black hole, but not far enough to miss the full wealth of the periodic table, with its many elements, there is a narrow band all around the galaxy, the inhabitable zone, with at least 50 billion suns (within the trillion suns of the Milky Way).

Everything indicates that there are billions of colonizable planets in the inhabitable zone of our galaxy: colonialism has a great future (once we find how to get there). Life could have started on many of these planets. But on most of these, it was quickly annihilated: hellish, incandescent “super-earths” (rocky planet with masses up to 10 times Earth) ready to fall into their star, abound.

***

INGREDIENTS FOR LIFE: MAGNETOSPHERE, TECTONICS, MOON…

The obvious candidate for the start of life is next door. It is Mars (Venus may have qualified too, the early Sun being 25% weaker; but Venus has long turned into hell, destroying all biological remnants). Everything indicates that life started on Mars. It would be very surprising that it did not.

Probably even OUR life started there. Impacts of asteroids and comets would have thrown living material from Mars to Earth. Mars meteorites have been found in Antarctica, lying on the ice. It has been observed that the temperatures within a Mars meteorite could stay very low: no more than around 40 Celsius, during the entire Mars-Earth transfer.

The Earth stayed too hot for life much longer than Mars, due to its much greater thermal inertia, large, intense radioactive core, greater number of impacts, and having thoroughly melted after the giant impact which created our life fostering Moon.

But then, after an auspicious start, Mars lost most of most of its atmosphere (probably within a billion years or so). Why? Mars is a bit small, its gravitational attraction is weaker than Earth (it’s only 40%). But, mostly, Mars has not enough a magnetic field. During Coronal Mass Ejections, CMEs, the Sun can throw out billions of tons of material at speeds up to and above 3200 kilometers per seconds. It’s mostly electrons and protons, but helium, oxygen and even iron can be in the mix.

The worst CME known happened during the Nineteenth Century, before the rise of the electromagnetic civilization we presently enjoy. Should one such ejection reoccur now, the electromagnetic aspect of our civilization would be wiped out. It goes without saying that we are totally unprepared, and would be very surprised. Among other things, all transformers would blow up, and they take months to rebuild. we would be left with old books in paper, the old fashion way. A CME can rush to Earth in just one day. (Fortunately the Sun seems to be quieting down presently, a bit as it did during the Little Ice Age.)

When a CME strikes a planet, the upper atmosphere is hit by a giant shotgun blast. Except a shotgun blast goes around 300 meters per second, 10,000 times slower than a CME. So, per unit of mass, the kinetic energy of a powerful CME is at least ten billion times more powerful than a shotgun blast. Since the liberation speed is going to be around ten kilometers per second, on an average life supporting planet, to be hit by projectiles going at 3,000 kilometers per second is going to knock all too much of the upper air atoms into space. That’s how Mars lost most of its atmosphere. And thus its ocean and much of its greenhouse. So now Mars is desperately airless, dry, and cold.

A cluster of new stars forming in the Serpens South cloud

*

Both Mars and Venus are at the limit of the inhabitable zone. But Venus does not have a magnetic field worth this name. Thus Venus lost a lot of its hydrogen (hence water; the rest is tied up in sulfuric acid, H2SO4).

It is known that the Earth’s strong magnetic field originates from the motion of huge masses of liquid metal within.

So a solar wind shield, a magnetosphere, is tied to the plate tectonic of a very dynamical planet with a powerful nuclear reactor deep inside. Whereas Venus and Mars are tectonically inert, at least, most of the time; maybe they wake up every half a billion years or so, for a big eruption. If Mars and Venus had been very tectonically active planets, may be they would be teeming with life (but that depends upon the distribution of heavy radioactive nuclei in a gathering solar system, an unknown subject, obviously non trivial, since Earth got them, and not the other two).

In any case the Earth’s magnetic shield protects life from the worst abuse of the Sun, as it deflects most of the CMEs out and around (they sneak back meekly as Aurora Borealis).

Another factor in the stable environment Earth provides for life is the Moon. The Earth-Moon system divides its angular momentum, between each other and the orbital motion of the Moon. This prevents the Earth to lay its rotation axis on its side: such a wobbling could not be compensated by the rest of the system. So it does not happen.

Mars, though, not being so impaired, wobbles between 15 and 35 degrees (causing weird, pronounced super-seasonal variations).

In any case, everything indicates that extremely primitive life appears quickly. But complex life needs time, lots of time, to evolve. Animal life and intelligence needs even more time. However, what strikes me in the new solar systems discovered so far, is how alien and unstable they are (this is partly a bias of the present detection methods).

Many of these systems have huge Jupiter styles planets in low orbit around their stars. It’s pretty clear that they fell down there, destroying the entire inner system in their path.

Other notions threaten life; gamma ray explosions, supernovas, and simply passing next to another star, throwing a solar system into chaos, and some Jupiters down into a fatal spiral. Our Sun, though, is pretty much cruising far from any star, in a cosmic void right now, perhaps left by a supernova explosion. Maybe we have been lucky for 4 billion years.

***

COSMIC GRANDEUR VERSUS MONKEY BUSINESS:

Many a physicist, or cosmologist, talks about the beginning of time, and other various notions pertaining to the grandest imagined machinery of the universe, as if they had found God, and it was themselves they were looking for (as Obama would put it). They claim to know their garden, the universe, pretty well (having apparently being there, at the moment of creation).

Verily, what we know for sure is what we see in pictures, and that’s plenty:

Hubble Ultra Deep Field: 10,000 galaxies. How many men?

Notions such as the “edge of the universe” are much less scientifically robust than some scientists claim. When some talk about the “First Three Minutes”, one can only laugh, even if countless Nobel Prizes in physics subscribe to the notion. Physics is relative, the search for glory, absolute. At least so do monkeys behave.

The concept of time in Quantum Mechanics and Relativity are in complete contradiction. One is absolute, the other relative. So nobody knows for sure what time is, and what is truly its relation to space (nor do we know what space is, much beyond the pretty pictures given by the telescopes). Speaking of the history of time is completely meaningless, except as poetry. Or scientific sounding poetry. Too many holes in the logic.

Even using standard science to buttress one’s reflection, the size of the universe could well be at least a 1,000 bigger than the 14 billion light year piece that we presently observe. In truth, we have literally no idea. Even when sticking to conventional theory, which predicts only one thing in that respect, namely that the universe is bigger than what we see (it predicts it by requiring it actually, see below).

Another thing is sure: it’s incredibly immense out there, and not just in physical size, but also in conceptual size. We know lower bounds for the universe in size and complexity, but have no idea whatsoever about the upper bounds. Dark Energy is a perfect example. Fifteen years ago, Dark Energy was unknown. Now it makes up 74% of the mass of the universe.

***

PRESENTING SCIENTIFIC PHILOSOPHY AS SCIENCE IS NOT WISE:

It is not a good thing when highly uncertain science is presented as certain, just as much as really true parts of science. It is not just immodest. It undermines, and threatens, science deeply.

Because presenting as certain what is not so is just a lie. But science is truth, and that is why society supports it.

To present as true what is not so ridiculizes the notion of certainty. When, ultimately, the ineluctable collapse of immodest pseudo-certainty occurs, all of science gets slashed with doubt. American witches can run as republican candidates for the US Senate on completely crazed platforms, mumbling about mice with human brains (this happened in the last USA election). Scientists ought not to make craziness respectable by leveraging it themselves. Crazy is crazy, especially when a scientist does it. It’s craziness squared.

Make no mistake: speculation is central to science and even more to philosophy. Just speculation ought to be labeled as such. When I talk about my own TOW theory, I do not present it as fact and certitude.

Most of recent (last 120 years) physics was totally unexpected. A lot of it is true, no doubt, in some sense. Some of it is completely false, too, most probably, in the most fundamental sense. The more fundamental science gets, the more it gets subjected to representations which can be misleading. Thus when some physiology or solid state physics gets established, it will not be shattered. Not so for Quantum Field Theory (most of which being an extrapolation over an energy domain where it has not been tested).

Science, like philosophy, is not just a body of knowledge, but also a method. Both have to use common sense as much as possible. Philosophy uses the external edge of knowledge, the first inklings, the first warnings, the smallest indices, the irreproducible experiments. Thus any scientist searching for really shattering new science will pass through the philosophical method, as a mandatory passage to greater certainty.

When science is proclaimed, it has to be certain. Science is truth in which one can have faith. A lot of the most glitzy cosmology comes short of that. (Thus the adventures of the alleged Big Bang should not be used as an argument to fund expensive accelerators: there are enough good reasons to fund them, not to use the bad ones!) The surest part of cosmology is actually its pretty pictures.

***

INFLATE OUR CLAIMS, IF THE OLD ONES DID NOT WORK OUT:

All of recent conventional cosmology’s biggest and noisiest concepts rest on something called the Inflaton Field. One could say that it is just as much a rabbit out of a hat as in the best circus acts. There is no justification for it, except to explain what we see: something very big, very homogeneous, apparently contradicting relativity. The universe in its entirity.

The mystery that Cosmic Inflation tries to explain was this: as new regions of the universe come into view (at the speed of light!), it is observed that the new regions are exactly as the region we already know; same aspect, same background temperature, etc. How did they know how to look the same? They could not have talked to each other! Light did not have time to go from one to the other!

According to standard Einsteinian relativity, our region, and those regions, some on the opposite side of the universe from each other, have no common history! (Those new regions which appear are NOT within our past light cone… To use relativity lingo.)

In the USSR, Einstein’s work was criticized in minutia, for ideological reasons (Note1). So the great astrophysicist Zeldovitch came up in 1965 with the idea of inflation (the discovery is attributed to Guth, 1980, in the USA, because the USA buried the USSR, and America is a super power blessed by God, as the resident of the White House reminds his flock every day).

Einstein’s Relativity speaks of the speed of light within space, but not of the speed of space (so to speak). Speed of light is limited within space, speed of space is not limited. So it was breezingly supposed space had inflated at a gigantic speed, before slowing down. So the new regions coming into view had a sort of common history, after all.

From a philosophical perspective, to invent an explanation to explain a specific effect is called an ad hoc hypothesis. It can be a correct way to advance science, if it has predictive power (But differently from the neutrino, or the W, or the Higgs, how do you check for it? Finding the Inflaton particle? The Inflaton is supposed to have given birth to most other particles). In the meantime, it provides some hand waving to explai away an otherwise obvious contradiction with Relativity.

But it is not enough that some of the best theories in physics are weird, with the logical consistency of gruyere.

The apparent discovery of Dark Matter and especially Dark Energy, have brought a new twist. Dark Energy is completely unexplainable.

Dark Energy attracted attention to the fact that Quantum field theory is both the most precise and the most false theory ever contemplated (QFT is off in its prediction of vacuum energy by a factor of ten to the power 120, or so, the greatest mistake in theory, in the entire history of hominids… it would make even baboons scream in dismay.)

Billions of galaxies can be seen when we look as far as we can see. Here is a tiny detail, as far as we can see, without using a gravitational lens. [NASA-ESA Hubble]. Baffling. We are going to need a bigger imagination.

It’s hard for me to escape the feeling that the universe is much older than what standard cosmology believes, as I look at these very ancient, but very diverse galaxies in a piece of sky (Note 2).

Dark energy was discovered when it was realized, in super novae studies, that the universe’s expansion was accelerating (so energy is injected).

A natural question, though is this:”If, as it turned out, the expansion is accelerating now, maybe it was at standstill much earlier?” Then the universe, even the small piece we can see, would be older and bigger than we have imagined so far. Don’t be afraid of the simple questions. Einstein asked himself at 16 what would happen if he looked at a mirror when going at the speed of light (Note 1).

Time will tell, as long as astronomy gets massively funded. Astronomy (astrophysics, cosmology, etc.) is one of the fields of science where fabulous progress is certain if it gets funded enough (the breakthroughs it made and will make in basic technology, to design the new instruments are very useful to the rest of society too).

In any case, the national debt is secure: it has a long way to go, before it can fill up the entire universe…

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: Einstein’s views on space and time came under the label “Theory of Relativity”. That incorporated Lorentz’s work on the correct space-time transformation group compatible with Maxwell equations.

That is why looking at a mirror will not work, at the speed of light, if the conventional addition of speed used by Galileo was really true, because light could not catch up: light could not be seen at the speed of light (just as sound cannot be heard if one goes away from it at the speed of sound). So Galilean Relativity did not work (the first scientists who pointed that out were not Einstein, but Lorentz, Fitzgerald, and Poincare’, among others; Lorentz got the Nobel Prize for it).

Soviet scientists were irritated by the exaggeratedly sounding “Relativity” (since only Marx was absolute). They pointed out that the “Theory of General Relativity” should be called the “Theory of Gravitation”, and then they made more pointed critiques.

Ideology is important in science. The “multiverse” theory, a support of string theory, is a case in point. The multiverse ideology exists, because string theory has nothing to say about the measurement process, so it sweeps that inconvenient truth below an infinity of rugs. The multiverse cannot be fought scientifically, because it is not science. But it is philosophically grotesque, since it consists in claiming that all lies are true, somewhere else.

***

Note 2: The oldest galaxy was detected by Europeans at the Very Large Telescope in the high Chilean desert, in 2004, using a galactic super cluster as a lens (giving the VLT an aperture between 40 and 80 meters), had a redshift of 10, with an apparent age of more than 13 billion years.

***

Note on the notes: What did Einstein do in Relativity? He used an axiomatic method, with two axioms only (Principle of modern Relativity and Constancy of Light Speed).

Both axioms had been proclaimed by Poincare’, as Einstein knew, but Poincare’ had not realized that, with these two axioms only, all the known formulas could be derived in a few pages, as Einstein did (after doing away with the “Ether”, the substance in which waves were supposed to be waving). Einstein said he was influenced by empiricist philosophy from Hume and Mach.

The final story has not been written yet: and if the waves made the space? (TOW.)

UNREAL

THOSE WHO DENY WHAT THEY DID CANNOT FACE WHAT THEY ARE.

(By "those" I mean, in particular, institutions.)

***

Abstract: The role played by the plutocracy of the USA and the state that serves it, in the creation, rise, and momentary triumph of the Nazis has been considerable. But it is ignored to this day. Worse: victims, such as the French state railways, which had nearly as many executed by the Nazis, as died in New York, on 9/11, get accused, to create a diversion from the sad reality of the role the power of the USA played in Nazism. The USA will not progress, as long as it does not face its truth, be it only because of its direct effect on the architecture of power in the USA, and the world, to this day.

Example: In 1921, it’s not Germans who put Hitler on a personal $50,000 stipend. It is the grotesquely racist Henry Ford, an American plutocrat. Nor is it Germans who created IG Farben, but Wall Street. IG Farben the chemical Uber-monopoly, was the mastermind of Auschwitz. IBM had the monopoly of computing in the Third Reich, managed from New York, throughout the entire war. Many top American plutocrats gave Hitler the means to wage war, and he rewarded them with money and fame. Prescott Bush was Hitler’s right hand man. And the airport in Washington is named after another top Nazi.

Yes, some weasels will claim that Bush and Dulles, and hundreds of other American plutocrats and servants were not official members of the Nazi party. As Hitler was the first to point out, it was better that way.

Without cognition, there cannot be contrition. No cognition, and no contrition invites retribution. The USA ought to keep that in mind, as the rest of the world will increasingly ask questions on how exactly the USA leveraged World War Two to create a world empire, in three years.

***

Found in American media:

PARIS (AFP) – France’s state-owned rail company SNCF has expressed remorse for hauling thousands of Jews to their deaths in Nazi camps, after US lawmakers threatened its chances of winning lucrative contracts.

Until recently, the company insisted it had been forced by France’s World War II German occupiers to help deport 75,000 French Jews to the gas chambers, and noted that 2,000 of its own rail workers were executed.

But, with SNCF and its main train-builder Alstom seeking work in the United States, the company’s chairman Guillaume Pepy earlier this month met in Florida with elected representatives and Jewish community groups to express his regret.

Pepy told them he wished to express "his profound pain and regret for the consequences of acts … carried out under order".

Lie. This a serious distortion of the truth: the AFP did not say this. Not all deportees were French. Of the 75,000 deported Jews, 55,000 were non French refugees. Also hundreds of thousands of non Jewish French were deported, and DIED. Why are non Jews never mentioned? Are they, somehow, less human?

Imprecision: SNCF is not a state company (it was in 1940 property of the French state, but the French state arguably stopped existing on June 17, 1940, because of a coup against the Third French republic; the reality is that, after that German Nazis were giving the orders in France).

***

Nazi hunter Serge Klarsfeld, an historian, from the most famous Nazi hunting family, and a Jew, is indignant: SNCF got a requisition order from government authorities, and had no choice. In occupied France, the Nazis ruled. And not only were they not respecting the law, but they made a point, after the first Nazi soldiers got killed during the occupation by the resistance, to instill an ambiance of terror. Directly resisting Nazi orders was not an option.

Let’s be direct: the SS generally used Zonderkommando (special commandos), often made of Jews, to execute their victims (themselves often made of Jews). The Jews executing Jews executed the SS orders not because they were Nazis, but because they were victims, and they had no choice. Either they obeyed, or they were tortured. The same applied to SNCF workers, with further twists in the horror: if they obeyed orders, they had a quasi normal life. If not, they were arrested, brutalized, and they were threatened with execution, and their own families with "deportation", and more of the same. Fools who don’t know history but have opinions about it often think that only Jews ended in extermination or concentration camps. But this is not true: more than two-thirds of the civilians exterminated by the Nazis in camps were not Jews in any sense.

The "Holocaust" of the Second World War killed more than 50 million people in Europe alone. Between 4.5 million and 6 million were Jews. Poland lost 6 million (a lot of them were Jews, but the Nazis started the Pole extermination program in October 1939, following with a Jew extermination program only in July 1941). In any case, those who think that the "Holocaust" of WWII had to do only with killing Jews are themselves racist and accomplices of the real, full holocaust, because they are asserting that only Jewish deaths count, and they ignore another 45 million or more victims. It is philosophically and ethically unacceptable.

The position of the USA in WWII was also long philosophically and ethically unacceptable. Arguably no country played as much a role in the rise and power of Hitler as the USA. This is the dirtiest secret of the Second World War. It keeps informing today’s American politics, economy and society, and thus, the world. If Americans act weird, worldwide, it is because they did not come to grip with the role of Janus that American power played with Nazism.

***

ALL AMERICAN HERO:

Hitler was declared "Person of the Year" by TIME Magazine in 1938

. Why was the USA not at Munich in 1938? Too busy celebrating Hitler.

***

"A clique of U.S. industrialists is hell-bent to bring a fascist state to supplant our democratic government and is working closely with the fascist regime in Germany and Italy. I have had plenty of opportunity in my post in Berlin to witness how close some of our AMERICAN RULING FAMILIES are to the Nazi regime. . . .

"Certain American industrialists had a GREAT DEAL TO DO WITH BRINGING FASCIST REGIMES INTO BEING IN BOTH GERMANY AND ITALY. THEY EXTENDED AID TO HELP FASCISM OCCUPY THE SEAT OF POWER, AND THEY ARE HELPING TO KEEP IT THERE." – William E. Dodd, U.S. Ambassador to Germany, 1937.

The American industrialists gave not only various weapons and means (trucks, magnesium bombs, automatic pilots, armor, etc.) but also secret industrial processes (synthetic oil, rubber, and lead tetraethyl, crucial for military engines). The accords with the Nazis often stipulated that the secret processes would not be revealed to British or American military.

With all due respect to Ambassador Dodd, another type of American plutocrat, the bankers and Wall Street, played as important a role as the industrialists.

***

WHEN THE USA STABBED DEMOCRACY IN THE BACK:

The USA, its president and Congress declared in Fall 1939 that the French republic was a "belligerent country" because it had declared war to Nazi Germany. Sanctions were taken by the USA against France because France fought Hitler: it was unlawful for an American citizen to set foot on a French ship. It goes without saying that this was stabbing in the back of democracy by American plutocracy.

Canada, Australia, India, among others declared war to Nazi Germany, following France and Great Britain in September 1939. The Canadians landed troops in France in June 1940. But the USA was not in the war: too busy doing business with Hitler (example: Prescott Bush, Hitler’s right hand man, father and grandfather to American presidents, was busy managing Hitler’s greatest defense concern, while using Auschwitz’s slave labor).

Meanwhile, various American corporations rendered operations of the Nazis possible by shipping diverse goods, including oil and anti-knock compound for military aircraft and various other necessities and weapons. American tankers were fueling Nazi ships and submarines in the Atlantic while France and Britain were struggling for survival. More stabbing in the back of democracy by American plutocracy. And very significant: as the Poles fought desperately and 45 French divisions attacked on the narrow, difficult, very fortified front they had in the west, between Luxembourg and the Rhine, the fact that Hitler’s Luftwaffe stayed in the air only thanks to American power, was, what Obama would call a "game changer".

***

JEWS LIKE FRANCE:

In 1940, France counted 330,000 official and declared Jews including 140,000 Jewish refugees from Nazism who had been refused entry to the anti-Semitic USA.

Right now the number of persons in France who, according to the law of Israel have the right to return to Israel is at least 1.5 million. The French presidential couple, Sarkozy-Bruni had at least one Jewish grandparent on each side. Arguably around half the French population (including de Gaulle) has some Jewish ancestry (a lot of them have also Arab and Berber ancestry, due to commerce and invasion in the first millennium).

So why the witch hunt of Americans against French entities on the ground of anti-Judaism? Because of basic American racism and plutocratic cover. Because Americans do not want to question their own history. They cover up their own history by accusing others loudly, and playing holier than thou. And putting the debate in other people’s courts.

What happened around 17 June 1940 is that after an enormous battle since May 10, more than 5,000 aircraft had been destroyed, and more than 185,000 soldiers killed. The French republic formally requested the USA to warn Hitler, and the USA refused to say anything against Hitler, let alone come to the rescue of democracy, or France and Britain. Around mid June, the French Air Force could plausibly have recovered air supremacy over France, but the Wehrmacht was in Bordeaux. Churchill, his government, the British Parliament and the plenipotentiary representative of the French government (De Gaulle) decided to unify France and Great Britain. This would have protected French citizens from Nazi vengeance as French forces would have kept on fighting the Nazis.

However a few adventurers and old generals met, on June 17, and highjacked the French state, creating the Vichy regime, ordering a CEASE-FIRE with the Nazis. The USA, Hitler’s best friend, after Stalin, immediately recognized the Vichy junta. De Gaulle declared the Free French would keep on fighting on 18 June, and Churchill made a discourse, in French, on 22 June, declaring Britain was not ceasing fire, and "Hitler sera pendu" (Hitler will be hanged).

American corporations and American plutocrats and their employees kept on helping the Nazis. Dulles, after whom the airport in Washington is named, American Peace Be Upon Him, represented about 100 Nazi companies. Ford and General Motors trucks had conquered France. IBM had the monopoly of computation in Nazi occupied Europe.

So why don’t American corporations do not present excuses and disgorge their fortunes as they profited from Hitler? The Bush family got 13 million dollars in 1953 for having managed enormous defense concerns using Auschwitz detainees. Why don’t they present excuses and get to reimburse their victims… Including SNCF?

The USA will not progress as long as it does not face the particularly sordid history of its plutocracy before, during and after World War Two.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: Coincidentally, 15 hours after the preceding was written and published on this blog, the New York Times revealed that:

“WASHINGTON — A secret history of the United States government’s Nazi-hunting operation concludes that American intelligence officials created a “safe haven” in the United States for Nazis and their collaborators after World War II, and it details decades of clashes, often hidden, with other nations over war criminals here and abroad.

Dave Dieter/The Huntsville Times, via Associated Press

Arthur Rudolph, in 1990, was a rocket scientist for Nazi Germany and NASA. He was one of one hundred top Nazi engineers and war criminals (Nazi rockets were built in tunnels by slave labor worked to death).

The 600-page report, which the Justice Department has tried to keep secret for four years, provides new evidence about more than two dozen of the most notorious Nazi cases of the last three decades….”

***

Note 2: It is tiring to have to talk only about Jews killed in France by the Nazis. It is not just tiring, it is taking part, being de facto accomplices, in a racist enterprise. Are only the Jews human? Those who obsess only about Jewish deaths surely talk like it. The French empire lost two million dead in World War Two. 25,000 of these were deported Jews. Do not the other two million count as human? What about 28 million dead Soviets?

Most Jews arrested in France for being Jews, were surprised in France by the French defeat. Of those who died, 55,000 were foreign refugees in France, unable to flee to the USA, because the USA refused to accept them (not enough space, I guess…). In the 25,000 French Jews sent to Germany, 8,000 were French because they were born in France from foreign parents (right of the soil), 8,000 had acquired French citizenship.

More details in French below.

***

The (at the time hardware) company IBM was the company which provided Hitler with the technical means to do a lot of things, including where Jews were hiding to enable the “Final Solution”, the killing of millions of people [http://news.cnet.com/2009-1082-269157.html]. Read more on that in the book "IBM and the Holocaust" by writer Edwin Black (2001).

The GM and Ford companies had subsidiaries and conducted business with the Third Reich well before the Second World War started. US motor companies had factories in German soil and utilized forced labor to produce vehicles that they were sold to Nazi army. GM’s participation in Germany’s preparation for war began in 1935.

***

25.000 Juifs étaient de nationalité française et 55.000 de nationalités étrangères. Parmi les ressortissants français, 8.000 enfants étaient nés de parents étrangers mais étaient français par déclaration à la naissance en application du droit du sol, 8.000 étrangers avaient obtenu leur naturalisation. Le nombre de Juifs français de souche déportés s’élève par conséquent à une dizaine de milliers.
75.000 juifs ont été déportés, soit 25% de l’ensemble des juifs en France, nationaux ou apatrides ;
50.000 juifs on été arrêtés dans le Zone Nord occupée ;
38.000 juifs ont été arrêtés à Paris ;
25.000 sont des Juifs nationaux
50.000 sont des Juifs non nationaux: Polonais, Allemands, Russes, Roumains, Grecs, Turcs, Hongrois…
42.800 sont des hommes ;
32.200 sont des femmes.
Lieux de déportation :
69.000 à Auschwitz
2.000 à Maïdaneck
2.000 à Sobibor
1.000 à Kaunas
1.000 à Buchenwald et Bergen Belsen
3.000 ont survécu.

Aphorisms November 2010

 

NATURALLY INSPIRED:

A man is gored by a so called "Mountain Goat", which then stands guard over the bleeding man, while timid hikers cannot chase off the ferocious herbivore (that particular horned individual had been known for its bellicosity). The man dies, bleeding there, undeterred a few feeble stones from the goat fearing, probably God fearing tourists.

I had to throw rocks on hungry and angry bears on two continents, in the total wilderness, even hitting them. Bears and other predators like unresisting food, but they fear stones. Mountain bears are particularly cognizant of stones. A little bit of knowledge can go a long way, when a stone is thrown precisely enough. (A noisy hit on the side is often best.)

The afore mentioned goring happened in 2010 in the Olympic national park (USA’s Washington state). In Africa, gazelles are well known to be very dangerous, as they pierce bellies readily with their sharp horns. They make nice pets, until that day comes.

An editorialist of the New York Times sanctimoniously concluded that: "The goats were introduced to give humans something to hunt. A sport. A game. A chase. For almost 100 years, we never feared them. Now, they’ve stopped fearing us, and are even pursuing us. Playing God has its consequences."

So? What are we supposed to play instead? Dead? Sheep? Impotent, as these hikers played, unable to chase off the mountain goat, that arrogant herbivore? (Actually Mountain Goats hid below their huge long haired white coats the morphology of antelopes.)

Verily there is God indeed, and it is us (we even wrote the books, did we not?) And godliness includes the usual partnership with Satan. Never forget it, on the other side of Obama’s huge smile. Actually Obama ought to be the first one to remember that. Sometimes the most moral being to be had is a very dark, very angry man, with very black thoughts.

At least such a man could chase away goats with their fake virgin white coats. An eye for an eye, maybe not. But a ferocity for a ferocity, certainly yes.

Nature was dangerous to man and its fundamental ancestors for hundreds of millions of years. That’s the balance and the poetry of the wild, and of the universe. Learn about it not, and be diminished.

Nature in its wild state is a necessary humility to learn, and earn, as deep as it gets. In this spirit, I have been through immense wilderness, unassisted, on three or four continents (and a few islands), precisely because there is no better place to learn humility and responsibility. Make a serious mistake, in the absolute wilderness, it is easy to make one, and you may die. One is far from the comfort of cities. One is far from the routine of conventional thinking living robots need, and they call themselves civilized, because they know nothing else.

***

BUSHWACKING CHRISTIANITY:

The mentally challenged G.W. Bush is going around, selling his book. Spewing lies, absurdities and stupidities, as much as he could, same as he always did. This is not just the past: immense forces, the same as those who were behind Bush, are still active.

They still want to attack Iran.

The irony with G. W. Bush, aka "Shrub", is that his Christian God told him to attack Iraq, but his attack and devastation of Iraq is leading to the extermination of the Iraqi Christian community there. In that sense, Bush is worse than the Mongols.

The Mongols killed most Muslims in Baghdad, but not the Christians; the Frank-Mongol alliance conquered Syria, but the racist, sectarian pope saved the Muslims by excommunicating the Franks. So working against one’s own camp is nothing new.

A massacre in a Christian church in Baghdad, by a bunch of foreign Arab mercenaries: 56 dead. France organized the treatment in France of 150 wounded. Oh, where is the great indignation some primitives had when the bearded one was drawn, just drawn, just imagined, with a bomb in his turban? To the criminally superstitious, the myth has become sacred, and the most dreadful reality, nothing worth mentioning.

***

OBAMA’S PRESIDENCY IN A NUTSHELL:

Well, Captain Obama has put the plane in a valley with very high walls, and it can’t fly out. Obama has led as a bipartisan, although he was elected as a democrat. That was his sin. Obama calls his reforms historical. They are nothing of the sort. They are just back room deals with the plutocracy.

And that was completely deliberate: for many months, democrats had total control of the Congress, the Senate (with a super majority of 60 votes), and the Presidency. What did they do? Sign useless pieces of paper about Guantanamo, and send 30,000 more professionally trained killers to Afghanistan (to create more of a problem where there was already enough of one). Otherwise, kill time until they could claim they had not the votes to do anything, but compose with the plutocracy.

Health care and financial re-regulation could have been done in one morning, by expanding Medicare, and re-establishing by decree the separation of bank and speculation (which had been put in place by president Franklin Delano Roosevelt).

So Obama has collaborated with the plutocracy, a six headed hydra. Now that he will have to compose with a Republican Congress, it’s going to be in the open. With republicans everywhere, Obama may have to play democrat. Ultimately, a war, an expanded war, albeit expensive, could be an excellent distraction. By coincidence, Obama has tripled the war in Afghanistan, a good start, in this cynical view of the politics of the USA.

***

A PASSAGE TO INDIA: To celebrate the great victory of bipartisanship in the election, the great democratic leader goes overseas, with a giant retinue, as befits the "Leader Of the Free World". Free of what? Jobs, of course. So the Great Leader goes where the jobs are: India, Indonesia, Korea, etc. To tell the foreigners, it’s the fault of China if it supports the US financial system, and emulates the currency policy of the USA. 

Who needs jobs, when one has Wall Street?

***

BIOSPHERE, NOT ANGLOSPHERE:

Lamarck unrecognized: Anglo-Saxons know only Charles Darwin, because Darwin demonstrates the greatness of the Anglo-Saxon, and more particularly American, empire. Wallace accused Darwin to his face, and in writing, to be just Lamarck’s parrot, in spite of Darwin’s daughter exasperation that her dad would do nothing about it.

Amusingly, the Nobel prize was given in the 1960s for experiences on mice "proving" there was no Lamarckism. Verily, casual observations of rodents, and cats’ coats, showed that the laws of genetics, as understood then, were clearly coming short. Now epigenetics is official science. Why did it take so long?

Selection of the fittest characteristics was a concept invented and published by Maupertuis, the inventor of "Least Action". 114 years before Darwin’s "Origin of the Species".

***

CROSSROADS:

Some conservative New York Times editorialist (David Brooks) picked up on Woody Allen by declaring that the USA was at a crossroads. Mr. Allen said that: “More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.” Some republican outfit also calls itself "American crossroads".

The whole planet is at a crossroads. Not just the USA.

The only nation still using the Roman imperial system of units is obviously also at those same crossroads, but stuck in reverse.

The New York Times writer vaunts "German engineering", as the wave of the future, whereas" for fashion, you go to Paris". As a good "conservative" American, Brooks nurtures profusely the feeling and idea that France is irrelevant: thus there is only one serious republic, the one located in Washington, with its 14,400 officially registered ‘lobbyists" (competing for the 535 representatives of the people).

Once one has dismissed France, the rest of the world is easy to discard: China is a dictatorship, Russia is Stalinist, Great Britain has a queen, Germany is a recovering Nazi addict, Japan has lost its decades, and the other countries are not serious.

As a good red blooded conservative, the editorialist does not know, or refuses to know that there is no more border between France and Germany, and that trying to distinguish between French and German engineering when their top engineering is entangled is completely silly: is Airbus British, Spanish, French or German? All the preceding, and more. Airbus is European. Is Arianespace, which launches most of the serious commercial satellites, worldwide, German? No, it’s mostly French led, but still, overall European (it launches so much American sensitive satellites, that the Americans are carefully listened to, though). Is Eurocopter mostly French? No. It’s mostly located in Provence, but as a mostly Franco-German entity.

Europe, finally, after 1, 000 years of benign alienation which turned progressively to murderous silliness, is integrating the right way. And the world is better for it. One thing is sure: in the future, countries which reward stupidity and mental frigidity, as the USA in recent decades, will not make it on top.

***

RECYCLE GREENPEACE:

Anti-nuclear activists tried to block a train carrying nuclear waste from Normandie to Northern Germany. The giant La Hague recycling plant takes exhausted nuclear fuel for German power plants, and makes new fuel with it, using 96% of the old stuff to make new fuel. After accumulating the remaining 4% over a period of years, that waste is piled up and put on a well guarded train, to be stored in a deep salt mine (with the idea of using it some day when new technology becomes available).

So Greenpeace goes berserk, as usual, and tries to block the train, over the 1,000 kilometers of its trajectory. is Greenpeace worried about Pakistani nuclear weapons? Perhaps, but it does not show. Is Greenpeace worried about the hundreds of thousands of people killed directly every year by fossil fuels? Perhaps, but it does not show.

Instead, the civilian nuclear industry in the West arguably killed nobody, ever. The worst incident, "Three Mile Island", caused by an amazing pile-up of incompetence, mostly killed hundreds of microscopic insects, drowned inside the containment building. The grave accidents in Russia have more to do with Stalinism unchained than nuclear science properly applied. Russia had all sorts of accidents, as it did all sorts of things wrong; on land, in the sea, in reactors, in deposits, etc. it has to do with Russia being as big a nuclear power as the USA in spite of its tiny GDP, so doing everything on the cheap, using quick dirty and extremely dangerous methods (although the concept of "method" may too exalted here).

Back to European Greenpeace, edition 2010. Asked by a French journalist what Greenpeace proposes instead of nuclear energy, the pretty Greenpeace spokething was ready with her talking points: renewables, she said, and look at Brazil, with its tremendous hydropower. We have to do like Brazil; dams not nuclear plants.

Funny; they call it "Greenpeace". "Mudpeace" would be more like it. Indeed the giant Brazilian dams turn into mud provinces several times a year, and fast plants grow there, soon drowned, killed and converted in… methane, which has up to 25 times the greenhouse power of CO2. The giant dams have turned an absolutely enormous part of the Amazon into a muddy moon.

The Greenpeace idiots are not aware of this, or the fact that hydro potential has been completely tapped out in a country such as France. Even although using the nuclear plants to refill the dams in the wee hours of the morning.

Could France do more in hydro power, although the mountains and natural streams are tapped out? Sure. An idea is to use offshore wind to fill up elevated artificial lagoons, with their own hydro plants. Otherwise, one could bar the giant mount Saint Michel bay, with the world’s highest tides. It is feasible. it would be as powerful as several nuclear reactors. The project was barred for obvious ecological and esthetic reasons.

Being pretty is not all there is. Being clever is more important when taking decisions. Greenpeace ought to show the importance of cleverness, by putting it forward, rather than the importance of the superficially cute, and trying to out-fox Fox News with pretty broadcasters.

It is true that nuclear war is a huge threat, but it has nothing to do with civilian nuclear power. The argument can actually be made that civilian nuclear devour the stockpiles of military Plutonium… Because so it does. Pushing nuclear through Thorium (as India is doing) is rich in clean energy possibilities, without plausible military threats attached.

In "Greenpeace" there is "green’, and there is "peace". Greenpeace should carry the agenda of its name.

***

CHANGE OF METAPHYSICAL PERSPECTIVE:

"I think, therefore I kill": such is the motto of man, de facto, since there are men, and they think. (Note: Pascal did not think of that one!)

That is why Christo-Islamism, the planet most popular religion, is led by an homicidal god, full of indignation. God’s adulators are supposed to find Him "merciful", as He may torture you, unless if you do exactly what He wants, whatever it is. In the original, Roman imperial Christianity, and in the Qur’an, the admirers of God whine on their knees, praying that they will get to prey ("jihad").

Too bad there are nukes now, and other Weapons of Mass Destruction, which put the survival of mankind into question in case of all out war. (The nuclear war between democratic India and Fasco-Islamist Pakistan, within a decade or two, will have worldwide ecological consequences, as thermonuclear detonations over huge cities will rise stratospheric clouds of radioactive ashes.)

The whole idea of good old fashion mass cruelty and destruction was the exact opposite: to insure the survival of humankind, by pruning it just right. Thus killing is not appropriate anymore, ecologically speaking, in the grandest scheme of things.

Thus now we have to leave it at thinking: "I think, therefore I am not threatening to kill". A huge subtlety is now imposed. And it is imposed on nations. By the force of necessity.

***  Patrice Ayme

Comic Relief?

 

AGAINST MEDIOCRITY, THE PHILOSOPHERS THEMSELVES CONTEND IN VAIN:

We hear everywhere that Barack Obama is a very smart man, an intellectual, and that makes him aloof, and misunderstood by the "folks".

And then there is what we hear, from the horse’s, or shall we say, the ass’ mouth (the ass being, appropriately enough, the symbol of the "democratic" party in the USA). Obama gave a long interview on "60 minutes" [November 7, 2010]. Here is a sizable extract, for people to appreciate the astounding mental meandering of Obama’s flabbergasting rambling:

"60 minutes" Interviewer: People have made the argument you lost control of the narrative. You’ve let other people define you. That you haven’t sold your successes well enough.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I think that’s a fair argument. I think that over the course of two years — and I mentioned this during the press conference — we were so busy and so focused on getting a bunch of stuff done that we stopped paying attention to the fact that we yeah, leadership isn’t just legislation. That it’s a matter of persuading people. And giving them confidence and bringing them together. And setting a tone. And making an argument that people can understand. And I think that we haven’t always been successful at that. And I take personal responsibility for that. And it’s something that I’ve got to examine carefully as I go forward.
You know, now I will say that when it comes to some of my supporters, some of my Democratic supporters who express some frustration, part of it, I think, is the belief that if I just communicated things better, that I’d be able to persuade that half of the country that voted for John McCain that we were right and they were wrong.
And, you know, one of the things that I think is important for people to remember is that, you know, this country doesn’t just agree with The New York Times editorial page. And, you know, I can make some really good arguments defending the Democratic position, and there are gonna be some people who just don’t agree with me. And that’s okay. And then we’ve got to figure out a way to compromise. But even as we acknowledge that, this is a big country. And that, you know, there are conservatives who are good people, who feel very strongly about their ideas. That I’m never gonna persuade on some issues.
I think what’s still fair to say is that I can do better than I’ve done in painting a picture for people about where we need to go. That pulls people together as opposed to drives them apart. And that’s one of my central tasks over the next couple of years."

What did the great man say? He said he did not make an argument that people understand. That, indeed is hard, to make an argument that people can understand, when there is no argument at all.

Asked why he did not nationalize the banks, as Scandinavian countries did in the 1990s, Obama laughed, and gave Summers’ talking point: Sweden had only 4 or 5 banks. So Obama called on a basic racist argument: let’s make fun of the foreigners. A xenophobic slur replaced a serious financial and economic debate.

Conclusion: 5 trillion dollars, for the banks, and counting. and an economy thrown to the plutocratic wolves, among which the Wall Street types (unjustifiably rescued with people’s money in 2008 and 2009) gave themselves about 300 billion dollars in bonuses, in two years, from, ultimately, people’s money.

The truth: Sweden had 147 banks, and the rest of Scandinavia, much more. Sweden nationalized only two large banks (and made hefty profits selling them much later). Great Britain nationalized much more giant financial institutions in the last 3 years. The USA nationalized around 2,000 banks during the Saving and Loans crisis two decades ago, and that inspired the Scandinavians to follow suit, when their own bust, also caused by a housing crisis, happened a bit later.

The truth: the economy of the USA is stuck, because all the money is going to 19 giant banks and their hyper wealthy co-conspirators (the other 8,000 banks are too small to profit from the largesse of the Fed). The support for these financial vultures is on-going, and about 5 trillion dollars so far, as I said (more than a third of GDP, about 7 times TARP, which is used as a lying decoy). Obama paid for nationalizations, many times over, and keeps on paying. Or, more exactly, the American people does. And, in a sense, the entire planet (as the US payments to giant private American banks create global financial imbalances more responsible countries have to work hard to counteract).

What did the great intellectual say? He said that his supporters are "frustrated" (Obama’s preferred emotion) because Obama did not "persuade that half of the country that voted for John McCain that we were right and they were wrong".

Why would Obama’s supporters want Obama to persuade those who did not vote for him "that we were right and they were wrong"? Why would the supporters want that? Does Obama think his supporters are crazy? Obama thinks his supporters voted for him because they hoped that, once elected, he would persuade those who did not vote for him that they were wrong??

What does Obama think a leader is supposed to do once elected? Persuade those who did not vote for him that they should have voted for him? Does not Obama know that the election actually happened, and is over with?

The truth: People who voted for Obama hoped that Obama would rescind many of the policies of Bush.

In truth, Obama’s only serious deviation from Bush was about Afghanistan, where Obama more than tripled the war, while extending it clumsily to Pakistan. Even Bush was not that dumb. On the rest, be it the giant bank holding companies, or Wall Street, or Iraq, Obama followed Bush’s policies.

The truth: Obama is not the only one culprit: in four years of controlling Congress, the democratic asses have proven unwilling to augment the extravagantly low taxes of the top financial manipulators (those low taxes for plutocrats are around 10% on their highest rate, using technicalities such as "carry interest" and converting all their incomes into long term capital gains). This is not just unfair, their activities, in conspiracy with the banks, monopolize the money creation process, starving the rest of the economy.

The truth: Nancy Pelosi is a socialite, not a socialist. Among other things, she owns a ski resort in California, and has known money, politics and privilege all her life (she was a wealth riser for politics before running for office herself). The top democrats never wanted to change the system. Whereas the basic Tea Party and Obama supporters do; they have nothing to lose. But of course, both the Tea party (Koch brothers) and Obama had major plutocratic supporters. And the agenda of the later is generally at odds with the base.

The great man is completely obnubilated by compromising with "conservatives who are good people, who feel very strongly about their ideas. That I’m never gonna persuade on some issues…there are gonna be some people who just don’t agree with me. And that’s okay. And then we’ve got to figure out a way to compromise."

And there is the air, and that’s OK, and I will compromise, and breathe water, and that’s okay too.

You want more platitudes? The great man never runs out of them: "But even as we acknowledge that, this is a big country. And that, you know, there are conservatives…"

I can say even worse; and there is the universe, it’s a big country, and we will compromise, the folks will be frustrated, but you know, there are conservatives.

Obama was elected by his supporters, obviously, so that Obama could only think about the "conservatives". Or, at least, that is what Obama thinks. Thinking may be too strong a word. I will have to take heed from the great man, and become more conservative in the way I express myself, looking forward.

The truth? What is needed is someone who knows what ideals to fight for, and loves combat. The greatest beliefs, and the right ones, and the greatest fights.

Health care could have been done in 5 minutes: just sign an executive order expanding and opening Medicare. That would have killed four birds with one stone (financing Medicare, separating health insurance from employment, converging towards making healthcare universal and cheaper, weakening the healthcare plutocracy).

From the point of view of a seducer of the conservatives, a drawback, naturally, would have been the ire of the plutocracy, as it would have seen some of its income vanish.

The financial reform could have been done in five minutes too: just sign an executive order to separate BANKS FROM SPECULATION. That is called an IDEA. President Roosevelt had it in 1933.

Summers demolished that idea during his great career as the ultimate plutocratic agent, under presidential puppets and actors, starting with his boss Ronald Reagan (oh yes, because Summers, as Reagan’s demonic adviser, also collapsed the Saving and Loans, through his usual trick of deregulating. Interest? It served Summers’ master, Rubin, head of Goldman Sachs, creator of Citigroup, treasurer of Clinton, one of Obama’s puppet masters).

Generations of religiosity worshipping plutocracy, decerebration and castration have resulted in producing a timid "leader", obsessed by not appearing to be an "angry black man". A leader of the sheep, anxious to extend kindly his little hoof to the really dark plutocratic wolves, in the hope that accommodating them is the essence of wisdom.

Obama has been surrounded with sycophants who thrived at his expense. Obama really believes Summers "in all fairness, did a heckuva job", and that his health care bill (to be reversed in a few weeks) is "historical" (although it cut Medicare).

In the same "60 minutes" interview, Obama proudly informed everybody, that the little austerity the Tea Party wants is nothing. Obama intends to out Tea Party the Tea Party, by being more austere, and "cutting entitlements".

So Obama intends to be more conservative than the craziest conservatives themselves. Maybe he could get a job at Goldman Sachs (Goldman, although not a bank, was rescued as if it were a bank, because Goldman has a lot of friends; cut Medicare, by 550 billion over ten years, but don’t cut the Goldman bonuses, which, over ten years, are, unbelievably, of the same magnitude… Medicare, Obama can do less of it, Goldman, never enough).

So what does the great leader do? He goes to Los Angeles to play to see Jay Leno, a xenophobic humorist, but he has nothing to show, except that he is a "black" man with an enormous smile. Then Obama flies back in Air Force One, watching five hours of basket ball… Straight. With the CIA Afghanistan specialist watching too. Obama hid the CIA guy inside the plane so that the generals at the Pentagon would not know he wished to form his own opinion about the war. But, in the end, the generals needed not to worry: to a boy, basketball is more interesting.

Does Obama know who is the boss?

The entire scene reminds me of Louis XVI of France, a simple man fascinated by locks. A simple man who meant well, and bankrupted France. A simple man who had the courage to make great economists such as Turgot and Necker finance ministers. The philosophers applauded.

Once they were appraised of the unfolding economic catastrophe, both Turgot and Necker opposed the American war, because it was ruinous. But Louis XVI was also a simple man who did not have the intellectual courage, or comprehension, to oppose the plutocracy, or to show the real cost of the American war (which was kept secret, hidden in secret books, for ten years, because France would have been bankrupted the next day, had the real cost been revealed). So Louis XVI preferred to sack Turgot, Necker, and the truth, rather than reform, and oppose the conservatives!

Louis XVI kept on compromising with the conservatives, and not engaging in the needed reforms to repair the catastrophic deficit (by rising taxes on said conservatives and plutocrats). In the end, pleasing the conservatives led the simple man to high treason of the new constitutional monarchy he himself headed. The simple man climbed the scaffold very courageously, though. He meant well. He was just in well above his head. It’s all about the head.

Against mediocrity, the philosophers themselves clamor in vain.

Patrice Ayme