DARK ENERGY DEMON

ASK NOT WHAT YOUR UNIVERSE CAN DO FOR YOU, ASK HOW BIG IT IS.

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Abstract: A spotted recapitulation of gravitation and basic cosmology is offered, as an historical progression, using the occasion to show that the history of ideas meanders, and why. Dark Energy is presented.

In combination with the non locality of Quantum Physics, Dark Energy leads us to believe that the universe we know could be animated (so to speak) by a universe we cannot see. (Whereas most of the essay is standard fare, its last few paragraphs constitute some new physics.)

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LET THERE BE DARK:

Dark Energy is a paradigm shattering discovery in physics. It’s blowing the universe apart, and that has various consequences.

What is the basic story? Dark Energy is a mysterious force, a form of anti-gravity, which pervades the universe. One has to go back a bit to understand the novelty of the situation. The ancients believed the universe was more or less fixed. Then, following Giordano Bruno, it was realized that the universe was full of distant stars.

The theocrats tortured and burned Bruno alive for this insight, because they wanted everybody to cling to the metaprinciple that all old beliefs and ways are correct… the safest way to insure that the masses would not suspect that Christianity was just a myth. Clinging to old beliefs, and old ways, as if they were always correct, always serves the oligarchies in power. (A picturesque manifestation of clinging to the past, hence of an oligarchic mental clamp down, is that the USA, is clinging to antique measuring units, that nobody else uses anymore, an indication that the USA is losing its grip on the cliff of reason.)

The French astronomer Ismaël Boulliau suggested that Kepler was wrong about the gravitational force. Kepler had declared that the gravitational force holding the planets in place decreased inversely to distance. Boulliau held instead that the force decreased as an inverse square law. He deduced this in analogy to light. This is interesting in two ways: Isaac Newton acknowledged Boulliau’s discovery of the inverse square law, using it as an argument that his adversary Hooke was lying, about having had the idea first. Thus Isaac was less chauvinistic than many to be born in centuries since, who have insisted Newton invented everything, including the principle of inertia (due to Buridan, circa 1320 CE), and the inverse square law.

I do not make such snide remarks out of base feelings. It is just the opposite. It is important to understand how ideas appear, grow, and morph. Or how they get suppressed. The body of knowledge gathered by Buridan was a victim of the an eruption of fascist theocracy, a full century after his death (which soon caused two centuries of religious wars and terror).

It is important to understand that intellectual fascism is frequent, a master driver of history, and thus a clear and present danger. When there are masters, and they decide that some knowledge is dangerous, they can, not only suppress it, but suppress loudly all and any knowledge beyond the task at hand their slaves are ordered to do.

 

This suppression of spontaneous intellectual activity, and general curiosity, often replaced by an obnubilation with team sports (as Juvenal smirked 19 centuries ago) makes “We The People” closer in intellectual temperament to sheep. It’s primordial to teach them to bleat and enjoy nothing more than herd mentality and being fleeced now and then. Thus, the insistence on the exceptionalism of the USA: “We Are The United States Of America”, a form of bleating. Right now some in the USA want to resurrect the espionage Act of 1917, which basically punished free speech (although, of course, the Supreme Court of the USA found that it did not.)

Another important point in exposing an accurate history of ideas is that really new ideas are hard to come by. Because of a weird seduction of the fascist instinct, the tendency to elevate heroes one can adulate, those who write history have the misleading habit to make it into mythology, a bit like Homer. They pile up most of the creation of ideas on a few characters, the super heroes. It is handy for hero worship, and it facilitates memory, but it does not reflect the real creative process, which is more diffuse and democratic.

To realize how new ideas truly arise, not from The One, but out of a more democratic process, has implications for the growth and maintenance of civilization: looking for a small elite of patented geniuses is not the way to do it. But then, of course, when power becomes fascist, it enjoys, and needs, to show to the masses, that superlative thinking is highly elitist, in a way fully compatible with the grandeur of the fascist leaders. Newton having invented it all was a perfect reason to trust the other geniuses leading the Anglo-Saxon empires.

Notice also that Boulliau made an analogy to light: that analogy is one of the main ingredients in Einstein’s gravitation. It is also one of the key ingredient of “Quantum Gravity”. This highly speculative theory argues that because light is made of particles, the photons, and they carry the electromagnetic force, so should gravity be carried by its own particles, the gravitons. Science does not exclude simplicity, in first approach.

The question of why the universe was not collapsing upon itself ought to have been already blatant in conventional astronomy, but nobody paid any attention to it. Instead stability of the universe was viewed as God-given, to the point that Einstein, the sacred genius, contrived an anti-gravity term in his gravitational equation, just so that the universe would stay suspended, like the rock islands of the planet Pandora in the movie “Avatar”. It was about as pretty, and as justified.

Unfortunately for Einstein, the American astronomer Edwin Hubble in Los Angeles discovered in the 1920’s, using what was then the world’s most powerful telescope, that galaxies receded from us the faster, the further they were (another astronomer had already discovered the Doppler shifts, in Arizona).

So the far universe was far from static. It was as if there had been a big explosion, and the debris were galaxies flying away from each other. When one looks at galaxies further and further away from us they move away faster and faster, closer and closer to the speed of light. From the Doppler effect, galaxies appear redder and redder (it’s called the cosmological redshift), until they fade away because they move too fast (the distance at which they disappear from sight is called the event horizon). Parts of the universe far enough from us could move away at more than the speed of light (at least if the expansion is everywhere true and we can’t see the whole universe). That the speed of light is constant in Relativity ought to be taken with a grain of salt, as Einstein himself pointed out. (Or he uttered words to that effect, more exactly.) More precisely, constancy of light speed is a local phenomenon in space, which puts no limit on the speed of space, a global phenomenon.

Einstein whined that he would have predicted the expansion of the universe, if not for that anti-gravity that he added on because he had believed, with all very serious people, in the universe’s stability (the anti gravity term that Einstein had added in his gravitational equation is known by honorable people as the “Cosmological Constant“).

Einstein called this failure of his guesswork his “greatest blunder”. Whatever. The instability of the universe ought to have been already clear, well before that. Any philosopher could have suggested it, let alone an astronomer. And maybe some thought about it. However, nobody had dared to suggest it before Hubble, and he came up with the proof. The hard work was done by Hubble.

As it is turning out, anti-gravity seems to exist, indeed, and it is Dark Energy.

Science is about indomitable facts, not just the flights of fancy that allows us to guess more facts than we already have. Einstein introduced, and then removed, his cosmological constant. Now it has been re-introduced, to describe what is seen. But it’s all about tweaking an equation so that it is not blatantly contradicted by the observed facts.

The initial discovery of anti-gravity, so called Dark Energy, came when it was observed that supernovae (and the local pieces of universe they were attached to) were accelerating away from each other faster than standard cosmology held to be true.

This has an interesting physical and philosophical consequence: in the fullness of time far away galaxies will recede away from our local group of galaxies (which are in tight orbits around each other). Hence, after dozens of billions of years, they will get out of sight. Of course, by then the sun will have exhausted its thermonuclear fuel, collapsed, blown apart as a red giant, and collapsed again, crushing itself into a white dwarf. But let’s suppose, for the sake of the argument, that a race of astronomers appear, 50 billion years in the future. They will observe that the universe reduces to the local galactic group. They will have no idea of its true size.

At least the little scenario above is conventional wisdom, as faithfully depicted by Brian Greene in the New York Times. Notwithstanding, watch it, because here I come… I am a specialist of hidden conspiracies, and how to detect them nevertheless. If the Nazis and their plutocratic collaborators in the USA did not escape, nor will the universe.

So I am going to focus on a conspiracy in physics, non-locality. Conventional physics assumed that the physical universe was made of points, and finite bits (atoms). The idea came from the Greco-Romans. Perhaps the main subtlety of Quantum Physics is that it is not so. Philosophically, it’s not too surprising: how to define points if physical objects are made of bits? If points are the ultimate bit of reality, what are they made of? Intimately related to this is the nature of space.

Quantum Physics changed the conceptual game completely, by acknowledging that these concepts are related. It remains to be seen whether they transmogrify into each other, as I believe.

After a quantum interaction (or, as Feynman put it, a “fundamental process“), the products of the interaction are ENTANGLED. (To be precise the probability waves representing the products have merged into a single probability wave; I prefer “Quantum Interaction”, because some fundamental processes, such as planets crashing into each other, have nothing Quantum about them, so Feynman’s semantics is imprecise.)

Where does this come from? OK, to simplify the discourse, to bring it to a higher level of abstraction, I will identify particles and the probability waves describing them to each other. That’s what abstraction does: identifying differences, from a common essence.

When propagating, particles are waves. When they crash somewhere, though, the whatever-was-propagating crash as a point, not as a wave. This is the mystery of so called “wave-particle duality“. There is no contradiction: propagation = waves, and end of propagation = particles. But there is a mystery: how does the wave becomes a particle, and conversely? This used to be called the “collapse of the wave packet“, and caused most geniuses of physics serious headaches. So now the expression has been replaced by the more nebulous wording of “decoherence“. However, this metamorphosis [wave <-> particle] is the central practical notion, and difficulty, in constructing a quantum computer, and also the deepest problem in physics.

So let’s suppose an interaction is such that it will give two particles, A & B, in the end (the most basic type of interaction, if we ignore the possibility of self interaction). After the interaction, when the products are in flight (so to speak), they are represented by one wave. Just one single wave. That wave has NO notion of physical distance. So this math, or, rather, this absence of math, tells us immediately that we are inside a physical point. (Warning: in my own theory, this is not exactly what happens; but this is what the standard formalism of Quantum Physics says, although most physicists are too afraid for their neurons, to contemplate the notion; another way to phrase the absence of distance is by saying that time is only a one parameter group of transformation.)

One says (loosely) that the “particles A and B” are entangled. Then if one interacts with A (say), one destroys that single wave which entangled A and B. Thus one destroys it for B too. Even if B is twenty galaxies away. That effect, known as the EPR (Einstein Podolski Rosen), frustrated Einstein deeply. He called it a “spooky interaction at a distance“. Einstein, following Newton, hated interactions at a distance. Faraday’s field theory, with a help from Maxwell, had removed that difficulty for electromagnetism, and Einstein’s gravitation theory tried to mimic it.

Entangled particles are common in classical physics, and they are no problem: two billiard balls which have hit each other are the arch typical example. In classical physics, if one knew the position and speed of the two balls before collision, and of one of them after the collision, one can tell what the position and speed of the other are, and that all along.

In Quantum physics, the situation is seriously different. This is related to the fact that one cannot know the position and moment of a (small enough) particle simultaneously. In that case, if one measures either, it affects the other. And it’s like that all over Quantum Physics. To make it worse, as Niels Bohr correctly insisted, in Quantum Physics, the experimental device changes what it measures. .

Now imagine again that interaction creating two entangled particles. If one measures A, one has to use experimental device X. For example we force A through a polarizer X. Results will differ according to which direction X is pointing.

Initially we had just one wave, Wave (A,B). Then we interact with A, using X. So what we have now is no more Wave (A,B), but [Wave (A,B) + Wave (A, X)]. The wave has changed! It has changed for B! And B maybe two million parsecs away! (That’s further than our sister giant galaxy, Andromeda.)

So let’s recapitulate. Entanglement is the greatest mystery of physics. After interacting, two particles, A and B, will often share properties as just one probability wave. Thus measuring one of these properties on A will immediately have an EPR effect on B (by the way, biology uses this EPR to transport energy cleverly and effortlessly! So although I talk galaxies here, to make some aspects of the situation more obvious, non-locality in Quantum physics is central to life itself… and obviously central to consciousness many of the apparent features of which it shares.)

Now let’s suppose A and B interacted, and billions of years passed by. Suppose they end up in different places in cosmological space which separated from each other according to Hubble, and even more so, according to Dark Energy. Then suppose finally, after all these eons, that a little green monkey interacts with A. It will have an effect on B, in a part of the universe, that little green monkey does not even know exist.

Physics progresses a lot by thought experiments. Aristarchus’ (320 BCE) and Buridan’s (1320 CE) speculations about the heliocentric theory are famous. More generally most of theoretical physics is a set of mathematically assisted thought experiments. Maxwell is famous (among other things) for “Maxwell Demon”, a tiny creature selecting fast particles, and thus creating a hot container (heat is speed). It’s a cute picture, and Maxwell wanted to use it to violate the Second Law of Thermodynamics That law says that entropy, that is disorder, always augments.

However, one had to be careful to consider the entire system… and to include the demon, though, who heats up, and generally blows up, so Maxwell’s idea was incorrect, although it has led, ever since, to a lot of refinement in thinking on the whole subject.

I have my own demon, and it’s not tiny, but cosmic, as the true devil of course is. So suppose a lot of Dark Energy operated for a long time, blowing the universe apart, and our galactic group is isolated in an apparently empty universe: nothing else can be seen. So we started from our present universe (call it U15, for 15 billion, a concession for Big Bang naivety). And now we are contemplating U100, the universe 100 billion years later, restricted, in appearance, to our local group.

Now suppose super intelligent little blue crabs starting from Neo Earth, have colonized the entire local galactic group. Could they tell their apparently isolated U100 universe is a small part of a much larger universe, for example U15, most of which is completely out of sight?

Enters Tyranosopher’s demon. That demon measures all the particles of the local group (how to do that? Ask Maxwell!). In the Quantum sense (so there are still indeterminacies). At that point the evolution of the local group is fully predictable (up to Quantum indeterminacies).

Meanwhile, let the little green monkey, who is out of sight, somewhere in the rest of U15, act on A. Then B, in turn, acts up. There is no limit on how much that could be scaled up: zillions of A and B pairs could be involved. So the green monkey could make zillions of Bs act up.

Would that be detectable? Yes. Once the Tyranosopher demon has catalogued the entire local group, if the action of green monkey is large enough, Tyranosopher demon will find more indeterminacy than normal physics would predict.

Bring that logic to bear on our present universe. Suppose that, however hard we tried, however meticulous our own demon was, cataloguing all the interactions leading to decoherence, we could not fully account for all the decoherence we observe. What would that tell us? That the part of the universe we cannot see is interacting with us. (Notice in passing that the situation is analogous with Black Holes, which are pretty much defined, conceptually speaking, by their event horizon.)

Can one apply the idea to Dark Energy? Yes. According to the (loose) philosophy of Quantum Field Theory, interaction are associated to particles. In the case of Dark energy we have an interaction out of nowhere, just space. Exactly what we would expect if EPR interactions were creating particles at a distance, from somewhere else in the universe.

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Patrice Ayme

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Technical note: Simplicio: “OK, so the demon catalogues everything, and then a particle shows up, call it C. How do you know that it comes from the action of the forever invisible Green Monkey, and is not simply due to a local entanglement, which, as such, would not have showed up in the prior classification by the demon?” Tyranosopher: “Because then the demon, during the classification which discovered C, would find a particle D, which was not there before (D is entangled with C).  Simplicio: “What if D has been taken away by Dark Energy too?” Tyranosopher:”Impossible if the demon cataloguing is frequent enough, as the particle D could not have escaped (it’s roughly limited by the speed of light, c). Simplicio: “And what of single particle diffracting?” Tyranosopher:”Well, this is a thought experiment. By waiting long enough for  light to cross the local group, one should be able to exclude those.”

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P/S: Out Of The Window with Causality, Light Speed, etc: It should be pretty obvious that the preceding has bearing on the various superstitions, and first order mistakes, surrounding relativity, in particular pertaining speed of light and causality (both independently, or as they relate with each other).

GLOBALIZING RIGHT

 

MASTERING GLOBALIZATION BY MASTERING NATURE & PLUTOCRACY.

Abstract: Misled by self serving economic ignoramuses, president Barack Obama, following Bush, Clinton and the domineering stupidity of the Reagan herd, engaged, twice, in an “economic stimulus” that let the hyper wealthy get more powerful. Even though the exorbitant power of the hyper wealthy was, and is, obviously, the proximal cause of the crisis that is undermining the West.

(That plutocracy keeps on splurging is examplified thus. Let’s look at Ireland. If Ireland is not doing so well, it’s not because Ireland uses the euro, or the grass is green. It is because Irish taxpayers have been forced to give money to hyper rich lenders who lent to rich private banks… whose relationship to taxpayers is that of the highway bandits to those they steal.

There would be no crisis if the Irish taxpayers told the hyper rich lenders to go drown themselves in a sea of their tears somewhere. But the EU and the USA have instituted welfare-for-plutocrats insuring that, come what may, plutocrats can stay plutocrats, the way they were before, even after they lost all their money, because taxpayers will give them back all the money they lost, otherwise the Earth would fall off its orbit, or something even worse.)

Next to American style “deregulation” (= no more rules), the main weapon of the plutocrats has been globalization. Deregulation removes laws. Globalization allows to escape local laws, even if they are still there, and to gut the core of democracy. This was in full evidence in the late Roman republic, and was denounced at the time eloquently. But of course, now the youth study Farcebook, instead of the classics. (I wonder what else they know. “Sit and stay!” is obviously high on the list…)

It is high time for the partisan of republican democracy to get the plutocracy back in that cage it should not have left, and master globalization the right way. It will be this, or it will be war. The first thing to do is to adopt the right philosophy.

The philosophical realm is where Rome failed first: the plutocrats embraced lupine behavior, such is their nature, but too much of those who opposed the torturers of man embraced stoicism rather than activism (and the same tendency is rising its ugly head today). One cannot be bipartisan, half plutocrat, half democrat, cooling in the dark. Democracy cannot be traded: it has to be won, and won again, red hot with passion (Nietzsche made related remarks about the greatness of the Greeks).

That is why the hyper aggressive Franks were better able to converge towards republic and democracy again, than any other sort of philosophical and political regime. Their very aggressivity built great foundations, as they burrowed deep in the human psyche, piercing through many bad habits of the Greco-Romans.

For example the Franks allowed Christianity to continue, as long as all and any Christian outfit rebuilt the world of learning and knowledge. It would take a month to copy a book, and a dozen specialized workers.

Meanwhile the top Franks lived richly, but not extravagantly. They believed more in the ardor of battle than the decadence of the spoils. Plutocracy was definitively out. Many of the richest gave all they had to the Church, that means to knowledge, and the new ethics. That allowed Charles Martel to treat Christianity as a piggy bank, and nationalize the entire religion, when he needed money to rise the biggest army since the heydays of Rome, to smash Islam, again and again.

So what to tell the plutocrats? Well, you will not win. Even if you call the Dark Ages a victory, as you did last time. This time, we know about the metastasis you represent, and this time, differently from last time, Greece-Europe has not been completely overrun by plutocrats yet (Macedonians, Hellenistic kingdoms and the Roman Senate crushed Greece so it could not be as strong as Rome last time; this time Europe is more powerful than Rome).

When the Roman republic failed, it was alone in a sea of plutocracies. This time, most regimes are republics, and most of the planet is under democratic control. It is rather plutocracy which is alone, in a democratic sea. Globalization has been its strength. It is to the People united in globalized outrage, to make a new form of globalization, that of awareness, its undoing.

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INFLUENTIAL AMERICANS THINK WRONG DELIBERATELY:

Influential Americans keep on obsessing about other countries’ currencies. Thus the fox hides its tracks with its own tail. So when they talk of China, influential Americans talk about its undervalued currency. They don’t talk about China’s efficient banks. When they talk of Europe, they deplore the existence of its currency, something, they claim, parroting Milton Friedman, a defunct, diminutive plutocratic servant, which can’t work (because Europe is all about fighting Europe, say American ignoramuses).

In a way, by obsessing with other people’s currencies, American leaders show the correctness of what Valery Giscard d’Estaing, the French president called the “exorbitant privilege” of having imposed the dollar as world currency (that outrage allows Americans to borrow at much lower interest rates than the economic performance of the USA would otherwise allow, and to borrow in their own currency, thus avoiding the Argentinean syndrome).

American leaders don’t talk about European productivity, its better employment picture (when the quality of employment is considered), and the refusal, by the European core, to de-industrialize (Britain has recognized that France and Germany were right all along on this subject). American economists and ignorant American politicians call Europe a welfare state (when they know that Europe exists: many don’t know Britain is in Europe!). If they were more honest, they would focus on the fact that one American out of seven survives on scraps of food from the government of the USA. From trickle down economics, to crumbs for the doggies economics. May be the fare is better in prison, where the world’s largest archipelago of the gullible enjoys three solid meals a day?

Main Stream American economists throw lots of red herrings in the air, confusing everybody, justifying no serious reform. They know their paymasters will be pleased, and reward them well.

There are two reasons for this decadence of honesty: 1) the influence of wealth on American politics has increased considerably in the last decade or so, as the effective tax on the rich went from 71% in the beginning of Reagans’ s reign to 17% now. 2) There are more billionaires in the USA:

And this is not because the USA is richer than the EU. Actually there are more top 50 European companies than USA companies. Simply, for all their preferred talk of “philanthropy” the American wealthy keep more for themselves. More than twice more the chart above shows.

European opinion makers do not have the luxury of spiting the poor: their paymasters are less mighty, less numerous, and more worried by insurrection. The revolutionary spirit of July 14, 1789 is alive and well, all over Europe now. European leaders know they may have to drink with the enraged People, a tradition started by Louis XVI and his queen, when they had to toast with 20,000 enraged Parisians who had invited themselves at the Tuileries. So the European leaders have been more serious at reforming: some bankrupted banks were nationalized (Britain), the bonuses of financial manipulators have been considerably abated (all of EU), etc. However, this does not go one iota towards resolving the major problem.

In truth, there is, economically speaking, one crisis which towers above all other: GLOBALIZATION. Really serious economists should worry about that, and suggest solutions, as I do here.

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USA PLUTOCRATIC PROPAGANDA VERSUS EUROPEAN REALITY:

When battle is joined, lures are deployed. At Cannae, Hannibal installed himself at the head of his Gallic allies, to steady them, and attract the main Roman shock, while his Carthaginian troops were streaming to the sides. Obnubilated by Hannibal’s striking robes perched on a big horse, Rome’s elite rushed in, and soon 50,000 were dead, as Carthaginians slammed them from the sides and back.

For centuries skirmishers, ahead of the main troops, have set smoke screens to hide the reality of what was really going on. This reached new heights in the last century of naval or aerial battles. Well, the same happens in sociology, politics, and economics. Hitler claimed to be a nationalist and a socialist, but he was neither. Similarly right now in the USA, many howl deliberately at the foot of the wrong trees, pointing alarmingly to small little problems, thus ignoring the big ones.

Why do American economists worry so much about Ireland, a country of 4 million with a GDP per head higher than the USA, and an overall growth rate in the last two decades only second to China? Because worrying about Ireland is a red herring, that’s why. And they don’t even worry about the right thing, an extravagant welfare for plutocrats and the established order, which is what is really impacting Irish (and American!) taxpayers. Instead American economists worry, abstractly, about Europe. They know their pay masters like Europe only as a place for yachts and palaces. They know their pay masters fear Europe as a place of revolutions, rebellions, justifications, reflections, and especially explanations. American economists have conveniently forgotten that, fundamentally, the USA is an emanation of European civilization, not the other way around.

Revealingly, the reigning economic theory of the USA is called “Austrian”, because it was actually invented by Austrian economists who emigrated to the USA, to preach economic fascism. In other words, American economic theory is not even indigenous, and even the two president Roosevelts are made to sound as if they were communist on a rampage. The rich socio-economic history of the USA is less forgotten in Europe than where it happened (an excellent example being May First: few Americans know what it is about, or that richly paid manipulators put Labor Day as far from it as they could, deliberately; worse: if you explained all that to common Americans, they would not care).

While Americans were worrying about Ireland, by July 2010, the number of citizens of the USA on food stamps reached 42 millions, ten times the total population of Ireland. Ah, yes, there are no food stamps in Ireland, Mr. Krugman. At some point, Krugman claimed that Nevada was Ireland, but there was more welfare in Nevada, so Nevada was OK, not Ireland.

American economists accuse the euro, of having caused the Irish problem. However the Irish government decided to make its tax payers pay all the private lenders to all private banks investing in Ireland. The correct solution was instead to make those who lent erroneously pay the price, and when there was corruption in it, make them go to jail, and seize their assets (as ought to have been done, planet-wide). Neither the tax payers, nor the euro, have anything to do with governments doing what plutocrats order them to do.

Another red herring has been unemployment in Europe. Here I am going to quote directly from Krugman, because he is suddenly seeing the light, and well. Krugman points out that the job picture has changed in Europe, and he focuses on what American leaders ought to focus on, namely France. The EU is just a big France; it’s not a big Britain, nor a big Germany; and this comes from historical reasons going at least 25 centuries: see Hannibal and his Gallic allies, above; actually the greatest Roman defeat was in France, in 105 BCE, at Arausio (Orange, Vaucluse), when 120,000 Roman soldiers died. This strange importance of France is in great part due to the fact that this country is exactly at the crossroads of Europe, and most hospitable (second agricultural food exporter, after millennia). Thus cultural selection is more refined there: most of the serious upheavals in the Roman empire came from Gaul. Here is Krugman:

One simple indicator is the fraction of prime-working-age adults — that is, 25-54 — that are, in fact, employed. Why focus on that age group? Because employment rates for the young are strongly affected by things like student aid policy, while those for the over-55 set are strongly affected by retirement policy; so if you want to know how many of the people who really should be working are managing to find jobs, the 25-54 sample is useful. Here’s America versus the cheese-eaters over the years:

OECD

In the 90s, with US employment surging while France (and much of Europe) was having trouble creating jobs, there was a lot of talk about the European employment problem. By the eve of the current crisis, however, the European job picture had changed a lot for the better, while even a business-cycle recovery didn’t seem to do much for US jobs.

Many Americans, even those who imagine themselves well-informed, don’t realize that there has been a big change here; my sense is that the US elite picture of Europe is stuck in a sort of time warp, in which it’s always 1997, and we have the Internet and they don’t. But things have moved on a lot since then.

(The French had an ancestor of the Internet, the Minitel, long before the 1990s; nowadays France is scoring number one in telecommunication, with technologies I will not describe, because they are still unknown in the USA.)

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WANT TO HAVE A GOOD ECONOMY? GET A GOOD DEMOCRACY FIRST.

France has a better employment picture without indigenous coal, oil, and gas. An important point for better employment is job quality: the French rarely flip hamburgers… If they flip meat for a living, it tends to be because they are restaurant owners. And they flip steaks… There are many owners in little French restaurants all over, because food chains are severely restricted. This sort of interventionism of the society is important, and key to the debate on globalization.

The French (and now most of Europe) want a higher quality of life. So they don’t go stupid and feed Germans dioxin. Let me explain: food is cheaper in Germany than in France, or anywhere in Europe. Why? Because it’s highly industrialized. So German chicken were fed oil unsafe for animal consumption, to save money.

French society is clinging to its small family restaurants, no plutocratic organization attached. That is how they decided to manage their house. Typical hellish economist a la Milton Friedman would howl that this interferes with the free market. But Friedman obviously did not know the definition of the concept “economy” (house-manage). That is why Friedman was given a Nobel Prize, so that he could teach his absurdities with more poise. Nor could Friedman conceive the true definition of a really free market: I have a Tenochtitlan remedy for that sort of ignorance (namely, if our market was really completely free we could have done to some “economists” what the Aztecs did to some conquistadores, and cut them into pieces while alive, and then sell the bits! One has to be that explicit because free markets adulators are strong, and much more gross.)

So there are not so many Mc Donald employees around France. (And French McDonalds, because of the competition from family restaurants, are much higher quality than the American McDonalds, I have been told… as I would obviously not stoop to refuel at either.)

Slaves were employed too. employment is no panacea. The raw numbers on employment do not look at is the higher value added, higher quality job created in France. If one wants to make it in France, nothing beats engineering. The “Grandes Ecoles”, which are mostly engineering schools with extremely difficult admissions on double blind competitive examinations are the ticket to the best careers (having the dad at Harvard, as Barack did, or the brother playing ball in the ivy League, as Michelle did, will not help; no legacy admissions in France!) No wonder that the Boeing 787 has so many state of the art equipments made in Europe (including its difficult plastic tail cone, made by EADS, i.e., Airbus, which is more than ironical…)

The basic drive of the French is this: they want to live as well as possible. That is their number one priority. So they want good, nice, fulfilling jobs. But they were not born yesterday. As I said the culture is a complex mix, more than 3,000 year old (Marseilles was funded by immigration from the Middle East, even before the Greeks showed up).

So the French are suspicious. History shows them that conspiracies and invasions are the most adverse factors to a good life. If the French don’t keep or get good jobs, they suspect conspiracy, exploitation, or invasion. So they search for such, and when they find enough indications to suspect a gathering conspiracy of exploiters, they go berserk. Rightly so. This has proven most profitable, so the French spend a lot of time suspiciously looking for conspiracies. Any abusive company management in France know that they are at the mercy of physical violence, even sequestration. And that French police and justice will try to just calm everybody down (instead of following the letter of the law).

This rebellious spirit now pervades Europe. and beyond. On present trends, the French have to worry about being out-French by the Greeks, the rampaging citizens of Iceland, and even now the Tunisians. In a way, it is more than normal: centuries before Tunisia got invaded by, and fell into the grip of fascist Islam, it was the land of Augustine, and, for a millennium, the amazing Carthage.

Look at Islam as a trick plutocrats have found to reign for 13 centuries. In Tunisia, the police is now demonstrating, saying they were abused by the plutocrats (Ben Ali). In old countries such as France, police and justice are well aware, intuitively, of the plutocratic problem. Orders are valid, if, and only if, they sound like just orders. Otherwise police and justice have a tradition to not follow orders. Same for the army. and that is how the Ben Ali plutocracy is falling in Tunisia: the army disobeyed orders, and, instead, went out to submit, and kill, the armed valets of the dictatorship.

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GLOBALIZED PLUTOCRACY VERSUS LOCALIZED LAW:

To get away from the nefarious obsessions of American economists, it may be a good idea to try to write a classification of the various problematic economic and social policies, worldwide. From the worst of the worse, to not so bad… A terrible problem is no doubt the very principle of the public-private fractional reserve system which allows too big to be fallible bankers to create most of the money in the world, through a conspiracy of hidden plutocrats with the public faces of democratic governments.

A related anti-democratic horror is the derivatives’ problem, which allows the bankers to claim inexistent profits by trading inexistent products. They do not have those in Chinese style banking, which is just like the old style banking Marx knew, and which built the West. Conclusion: many western firms, including state of the art tech companies, move to China, so that the Chinese bankers can finance them! It is really the world upside down.

It is not too hard to solve these two, financial, problems, in first approximation with an arsenal of regulations. For banks, president FDR showed the way: separate financial speculation from banking: otherwise it can do like a typical destructive feedback. And most derivatives should go to hell, where they belong (they should be authorized if and only if they can be demonstrated to dampen oscillations in all the systems they impact). The only reason they were not thoroughly fixed is that plutocracy and democracy are presently entangled. The EU limited bank bonuses, the USA claims derivatives will be traded in exchanges for all to see. Small reforms, so that the same suspects can keep on feeding at the trough…

Piketty and Saez

GLOBALIZATION AS REVERSE COLONIALISM:

But then there is the globalization problem. Globalization itself is up high on the list of serious problems, and it is entangled with the rising seas. Globalization has no easy fix. In a way, what we see is the effective rise of a world government. But it is, mostly, a plutocratic world government. (Although there are international institutions not too adverse to democracy, sort of, like the WTO, the IMF, the World Bank, and, of course first of all, the United Nations

Globalization first means world free trade of goods, services…and employment. It means that Chinese mountain peasants will have the same opportunity for employment as Wisconsin denizens. However, the Chinese can be paid a twentieth of an American citizen, and still feel rich. So, of course companies will flock to China to employ the Chinese.

Currency manipulation makes this flight of employment worse. But so does the subventions to transportation, which are part of a more general problem, namely neglecting all the indirect costs of producing massively in China (ship fuel is very polluting, Chinese fuel and factories are very polluting, and the violations of human rights in China are themselves very polluting to human rights in general, as the Chinese president Hu just basically admitted).

Anybody in the world can understand that the salary differences are of the order of ten, or twenty times cannot be reconciled. Changing a currency by 100% will not change the enormity of that gap.

It is good that people, worldwide, can find meaningful employment. This was already happening as colonialism waned. The abrupt yanking of the colonialist system replaced it by a plutocratic system, which is even more abusive. Thus the powerful anti-colonialist feeling was manipulated into more, and worse. another description for globalization is colonialism in reverse. The exploited natives are now in the West, too. Not just in the South.

So, how do we handle globalization before gutting the West completely?

Let me explain. Let me explain what history says. The West is not going to sit there, and let itself be gutted quietly. The West is not going to wait until all Western jobs have gone to India and China. This why all the major western powers are led by conservatives (sorry Barack, for telling the truth). This is why the extreme right is pushing up in Austria, the Netherlands, Belgium, France, the USA. People are getting exasperated, and the left has nothing deep and coherent to say.

Fundamentally, the left wants to help the small, and weak, but where is the small and weak? In Detroit or Liverpool, or in Dacca and Lagos? We need a global solution, but all we have is a global plutocracy which calls itself philanthropic.

Losing all Western jobs to emerging economies would be colonialism in reverse, and would not be any more acceptable than the original. Verily, it would be worse, because civilization (whatever that means) would flow the wrong way. Whatever one says, the original colonialism was civilization flowing in, now what we have is civilization flowing out.

The same problem has led to the same solution. It all dates back to around 140 BCE, when the roman plutocracy went for its successful world grab (it was successful in the sense that the plutocrats brought down the republic and transmogrified it in the feudal system; the counter measures taken by the Franks led to a re-establishment of the universal right republic around 1789 CE, both in the America and Europe; so what we are contemplating here is nearly 2,ooo years of devolution).

Roman plutocratic politicians, having just crushed democracy in Africa (!), Greece (!) and Spain (!), devised a plan in 140 BCE to crush it at home too. To win the votes of the poor they got the poor to obsess about cheap food and entertainment, “bread and circuses”, would be the most effective way to rise to power. They did not have FARCEBOOK yet.

As the famous Roman thinker Juvenal said in satire X, “panem et circenses” (“Bread and games”, bread and circuses) were indeed key:

… “Already long ago, from when we sold our vote to no man, the People have abdicated our duties; for the People who once upon a time handed out military command, high civil office, legions — everything, now restrains itself and anxiously hopes for just two things: bread and circuses.”

If that sounds as the description of the USA, complete with the restraining, it is not my fault: same problem for the plutocrats, same solution.
 

What Juvenal does not say, because he did not have the notion, is that the first globalization happened at the time: Roman plutocrats quickly gutted Roman employment, so that there would be no revolution. Another way to drown the fish is through massive immigration, especially in the army. And this is happening on the USA too. The number of first- generation immigrants living in the United States has quadrupled, from 9.6 million in 1970 to about 38 million in 2007… just as the plutocrats took power with their puppet, Reagan. In other words, just as Rome stopped being Rome, as plutocracy took power, same for the USA. (By comparison the population of the USA in 1941 was 133 million: a different country, with a different culture!)

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GLOBALIZE MILITARY PRODUCTION IN THE WEST:

The plutocrats have organized the world economy to service them. An example is the military industrial complex. There is one in the USA, and one in Europe. I am not against the military industrial complex, per se. Democracy needs to be defended. If not defended, it will be destroyed.

But democracy cannot afford to be exploited by its own military. That is exactly what happened in the Roman empire, as the military and the plutocracy fought like dogs to gulp as much of the flesh of the people as they could. It is also what happened in the late middle Ages, as the military ran rampant and tore the flesh of the Imperium Francorum (wars between, and within various aristocratic families in England, France and Germany… which went on until 1918, since the Kaiser was the grandson of queen Victoria).

Now the USA based American military-industrial complex has been very good at exploiting American nationalism to further its profits. For example the Europeans have some superlative military systems without American equivalents. But the Americans want to develop their own (although they don’t have the money).

Do we need about 9 front lines types of different fighter jets between Europe, the USA, France… and Sweden? Let me give the names: F16 (USA), F 15 (USA), F18 Super Hornet (USA), F22 Raptor (USA), F35 Lightning (USA + Europe a bit), Eurofighter Typhoon (Europe), Mirage (France), Rafale (France), Grippen (Sweden). In truth one ought to focus on the best. France in 1940 had several types of superiority fighters, and that caused fatal problems with parts and equipment. The Nazis had just one type, the Me 109. Conclusion; hundreds of superior French fighters, missing armory, were not engaged in combat 9if they had been, France would have recovered air supremacy in mid June 1940).

Mock combat was organized in the Middle East, and the Rafale proved superior even to the F22 (only one Rafale got shot down, and that was a dismal performance for the F22. All the more since the Rafales are not endowed yet with their full equipment, including the long range Mach 5 Meteor missiles, and Rafales can bomb, as they have demonstrated in Afghanistan; the F22 cannot bomb, nor carry anything much.

Airbus, at enormous cost, is developing the A400M, a transport plane. So what does the American military-industrial want to do? Just the same. They want their own, and will get the money to make it out of teachers and schools.

Same with air refueling: Airbus has its own state of the art plane, so the Americans want their own (but don’t have it). British and French air forces refueled with American air tankers for 50 years, and did not die. When a French paratroop division dropped over Rwanda to stop the civil war there, the French did not die because they got considerable American help to transport their army.

On the other hand, if we kill the economy, everybody will die.

Enormous money would be saved by global military cooperation throughout the West. It is just an example.

***

WANT A GOOD DEMOCRACY? GET A GOOD ECONOMY:

So how do we avoid the fate of the Roman republic? How do we keep plutocrats at bay? Out of their main base in the USA, the plutocrats have organized a worldwide network to circumvent local laws, and buy local potentates. The esteemed dictator of Tunisia, Ben Ali, is just one example out of many. All of Africa and the Middle East is covered with dictators in the pockets of world plutocracy.

So a first countermeasure is to establish a maximum of international laws restraining their operations, just as international laws put an end to piracy in the Caribbean in the 18C. This is not a new problem: piracy was nearly paralyzing the Mediterranean, for decades, until the Roman senate decided to do something about it. Then it took three months to get rid of it.

Plutocracies love wars. Macedonia loved war and empire more than the Greek city-states. So Macedonia grew according to the imperialist-plutocratic principle; submit and exploit. In the 20C, plutocracy unchained caused both the first and second world wars. The Second World War was an outlandish unsavory international plutocratic conspiracy (now mislabeled as “appeasement”).

If the progressives, socialists, leftists, democrats, etc. do not fix the globalization trick of international plutocracy, the solution history will present is simple: fascism, and war. The rise of the right, in the USA or the EU is nothing else but a legitimate defense mechanism against abuse (and it’s independent of the parties; it’s a rise of the ideas of the right).

Japan, China and now India and Brazil have leaped forward economically, and that is excellent. They did so by adopting the best ways of the West. Those ways originated from the decision of the leadership of the Franks (and sympathetic Roman generals history has not kept the names of) over a duration of more than 11 centuries (300 CE-1400 CE). The leaders of the Franks decided to deliberately advantage the best in the human spirit. Thus they tried several coups and civil wars in the name of secularism against Christianity. Finally they won over the bishops directly.

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KNOWLEDGE AND THE LEVERAGE IT GIVES ON NATURE IS THE CORE DRIVE OF HUMANITY.

 

The Franks adapted this by making knowledge and the leverage it gives on nature is the core drive of civilization, and making Christianity its servant.

That was in radical opposition to the abominable theocratic Roman plutocracy that is also known as the Dark Ages. Plutocracy has gone all the way into madness, destroying civilization, since their mad mythological hero, Christ, had promised to come back after the apocalypse. That was as good a pretext as the plutocrats to destroy their ultimate enemy, common sense. after all, common sense is common, and the principle of plutocracy is to abuse the commons, to forget their own inferiority.

Once again, the late Roman theocracy and its holocaust of people, books, scholars and philosophers (only a few Jews were left, to represent diversity) was the fruit of a process engaged generations before the end of the Roman republic, as plutocracy wrestled control. We are at a similar stage. We can see those creeps who stole trillions of dollars pose at the white House as if they were Hollywood stars, basking in the glory of their triumphant horror. Even the Chinese president was reflective and apologetic about human rights in China, but the banksters cannot even stoop at reflecting to their massive violation of human rights. Individuals who steal most of the money, and reduce others to misery, are human rights violators.

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MAKING GLOBALIZATION DEMOCRATIC:

Democracy and economics rise and fall together. Gutting the economy of the core allows those who get their kicks from the Dark Side to rule. That is why plutocrats and the corporations they lead will tend to gut the core, if they are not taking their orders from the People. Right now, they obviously are not: China is used for leverage just as Nazi Germany was used for leverage.

How to solve the globalization challenge? Well, we have to prevent plutocracy from gutting the core of democracy, as it did in Rome, all the way, and it has started to do presently. Law has to be globalized. The West, if it wants to stay at the top of the world pyramid, has to have employment that nobody else has, and that means, because nobody knows as much (this is what Germany has done deliberately in recent decade, as it used the slumps to educate its workers further, so they could use the latest technologies).

Some of the Buddhist, or some of the Stoic persuasion, will whine that the West could decide to just fade away, and submit to fate. In practice that would mean submitting to plutocrats.

To answer this reality has several slaps at the ready:

1) go tell that to Tunisians.

2) you will not persuade most Europeans (who would rather go in the streets and burn a few banks… even if there are people inside.)

3) this has been tried already. Well before the abominable fascist anti-intellectual Christian theocracy took over the Greco-Roman empire, and set it on fire, as a cover for feudal plutocracy, a first error had been committed by the thinking elite. That first error was the reign of cool, of bipartisanship: half democratic, half plutocratic. How did it come to be?

Well, the Roman could be rather stoic. On top of that the imposition on the entire Greek world of the Hellenistic kingdoms’ fascism also made the Greeks, who used to be full of passion for life and principle, rather stoic. Thus stoic philosophy came to reign, and reigned for five centuries among the elites. Stoicism is Buddhism without the mango tree. A slave religion, by any other name. To block infamy, one needs passion. For one Martin Luther dreaming away in public, one needed at least 110,000 Union soldiers killed in action.

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DOG EAT DOG IS THE WRONG DIRECTION FOR CIVILIZATION:

Some have suggested to increase competitiveness. According to Krugman, Obama will talk about competitiveness in his State Of The Union (of the States of America). But, as Krugman basically points out, competitiveness is a zero sum game. All countries can increase competitiveness. Increasing competitiveness among countries is social Darwinism on a planetary scale. Making the increase of competitiveness into a virtue is making into a virtue what precisely has been the undoing of the American economy since Reagan. 

Goliath was strong, and competitive. And he is remembered. But was he civilized? Is he remembered for his smarts? Did Goliath bring us something good? Besides a bad and dumb example that smarts win over bullies? 

Did the Cretans and the Greeks build a better civilization because they were competitive, and beat up the other guy? No. They reached beyond yesterday’s brutishness, and went where no mind had gone before. That is what they brought, who made them better.

 To confuse civilization and competition is just an abomination.  

Civilization is an effort to harmonize the ethology of man, with the multitude of cities. It has to increase as technology and population increase, and as the ecology changes. Recently the number of people was decupled, and their needs, per person, multiplied by a hundred, or more. We need a new civilization to harmonize these enormous needs (a planet and a half, and increasing fast) with our planet. The West in particular, and the planet in general, need us to reinvent civilization. Competiveness is not the way. And work does not make free, either. What will make us as free as we need to survive, is a higher civilization.

 Thus, what I suggest here is not an increase in competitiveness per se, but an increase in effective wisdom.

SIMULATE NOT, STIMULATE, INSTEAD:

An economy is a particular management of a house. One can draw all the fancy diagrams one wants, they are as many swastikas on reality: neither here nor there (the Swastika is an Indian reference).

The fundamental questions in economics are not answered by diagrams, indeed. The fundamental question are: what is the house? Who is inside the house? How do we want to manage the house?

Which brings up to the reality of what Obama has been trying to do economically, so far. As far as I am concerned Obama, so far, was indoctrinated into believing that to save the world, he had to save the hyper rich. So now the plutocrats pose at the White House as if they were Hollywood stars. They are the saviors.

Well, I am still waiting for Obama to follow my advice and push for a real stimulus, a la Henri IV, or Colbert (the French super minister of the 17C). A stimulus just like what China means by stimulus. China is literally covering Asia (not just China) with high speed train lines (all the way down to Thailand). American companies move to China, because China has real banks… investing in the real economy, even if that real economy ic created by an American company with American management and engineers. American banks are interested mostly at leveraging their leverage some more with derivatives, and are mostly interested in viewing themselves as masters of the universe.

Thus most American economists, well aware of whom give them their power, have been advising the president and other politicians, to make the hyper wealthy thrive ever more. Cutting useful spending by cutting taxes on the hyper rich is the modern equivalent of using bloodletting to treat anemia. This Reagan style bloodletting draining the nation of its vital strength by allowing the hyper rich and plutocrats to pay ever less taxes is not just voodoo, it is anti-sense.

Build stuff, Mr. Obama! Leave at least one bridge behind! But it will take more than that.

Finance, a mean, has been made into an end, thus an abomination into a domination. The meritocracy has to be reoriented towards doing real things in the real world. To solve the globalization challenge, the West has to engage in a massive technological leap forward, fueled by massive re-industrialization, massive investment in knowledge, science and education, helped by drastic cooperation of the Western powers and ferocious enforcement of intellectual property laws. Once again, it’s this, or fascism, and a fight to death for dwindling resources.

***

Patrice Ayme

Some Stupidities Which Rule

EXPOSING WHY ABSURDITIES ABOUT GUNS AND FRANCE THRIVE IN THE USA:

(A Week In The History Of Ideas And Stupidities.)

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Abstract: The American People is manipulated into despising France and loving guns. Another two cognitive strategies contrived by plutocracy to capture not just hearts and minds, but shrivel them into the hellish context, impotence and mental retardation, that evil and wealth are made to dominate. Comparing with the reality of history and what is happening in Tunisia, helps to put this sort of mental conspiracy into perspective… and suggests that awareness itself would be most of the needed remedy.

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TWO TRUTHS FROM THE PRESIDENT Of THE USA MOST AMERICANS DON’T CONNECT WITH:

Nice philosophy from Barack Obama in Arizona during the memorial for the latest senseless shooting there. "We should do everything we can to make sure this country lives up to our children’s expectations." He said even better than that

Obama has to be extremely careful. He could not talk about handguns directly, and why selling them freely ought to be outlawed. If he had, he would have been called a progressive, a socialist, or, may be the right wing nuts would have hurled against him the worst insult they know, and call him French. So Obama has to go around, and from behind, by resetting the basic emotionality of the USA, which is not working right. And he did an excellent job as father of the nation, a role that no American president has done well since Kennedy.

Obama caused already great turmoil this week for saying an obvious truth that American plutocracy hates. Said Obama: “We don’t have a stronger friend and stronger ally than Nicolas Sarkozy, and the French people.” (I removed the bold on Sarkozy, because Sarkozy, in this context, is only a detail of history.)

More pro-American than Sarkozy, indeed, is hard to do. Except for myself and I, your humble servant, of course. But there are several versions of America; just ask Abe Lincoln.

This is an essay about guns in the USA, however it relates to the super rich, the plutocracy, and the frantic anti-French propaganda of the media of the USA. These are all aspects of the same system of thought, or, shall we say, exploitation.

***

WE LOVE SHOOTING EACH OTHER AND HATING THE FRENCH:

The anti-French mood in the USA uses continual misinformation that stops nowhere, and apparently all Americans are asked to memorize. Here is, during the last week, in what passes as serious commentary, Argus Hamilton, the host comedian at The Comedy Store in Hollywood. He dissembled ( a form of lying) thus:"Barack Obama angered people in both Britain and the U.S. Wednesday when he told Nicolas Sarkozy that the U.S. has no better friend than France. Britain fights with us in Afghanistan but France needs our help with their food prices. The reason Obama`s a Democrat is because he only likes people who need, not people who fight."

Thunders "The Telegraph", apparently consumed by the anxiety that London will not be chosen to make Wall Street’s dirty work anymore: “To suggest that Paris and not London is Washington’s strongest partner is simply ludicrous.” Right, London helped to refurbish the White House by burning it to an empty shell in 1814. And London boosted further the American GDP by rampaging around the USA during the war of 1812-1815. Is that why it’s called the "Special Relationship"? And more special than France’s? As I said, the specialitude, not to say speciousness of the relationship, has more to do with Wall Street, and its conspiracies. Example: AIG (American International Group) went to London to lose 182 billions of US taxpayer money, because it was an ocean away from the SEC of the USA.

“The Telegraph” is distorting what Obama was saying, and ought to know better, because France and Britain are unifying militarily, creating what is clearly a military superpower. And by the way, French GDP and population are bigger than Britain.

Now to answer vaguely the other fool, who represents some of the latest anti-French buzz. Food prices? France? France is the second agricultural exporter in the world. (With roughly two-thirds of the total revenue in agricultural exports of the USA.) In spite of a significantly overvalued currency.

France? Not fighting? Is it not that cute… Is not that cutely insolent: the French are crazed rugby players. Rugby is the original, hard root of that soft degeneracy known as American football. Rugby is played without all these artificial gimmicks and aids such as helmets, comfort pads, steroids, and constant suspensions to play commercials, so that the plutocrats can entice the People to give them more money. Equipment for American football does not serve ice cream and French fries yet, to be even more fat and comfortable, but it’s coming. that would allow to take even longer commercial breaks to serve Mammon

Average Americans, who have studied all too little history at school, and do not know that France is engaged in heavy fighting against Salafists in more countries than the USA, as we speak, and has done so for decades (France and the USA cooperate in several of these, not even discreetly) like to say this sort of things. Why? Because they are paid to, if they are part of the media, it’s as simple as that, and the people who pay them are the same that make propaganda for guns… or financial derivatives, or banks.

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A FEW TRUTHS ABOUT FRANCE: MAY 1940 AND HITLER’S DEVIOUS MIND:

Hating France is of the utmost importance to the plutocracy of the USA. Even loving guns pale in insignificance. The war against the fellow republic, has to lay heavily on all American minds, lest they notice that some things, are done better there, precisely because the search for financial profit, at all cost, is kept away, sometimes.

To call the French non combative, is beyond grotesque. The French are so combative, they made the Nazis look like cows trembling with bovine encephalitis. France declared war to the Nazis, after all. However, one can sometimes get too aggressive for one’s comfort.

French aggressivity was very well known to Hitler (all his comrades had died at French hands in WWI). Astutely, Hitler attacked the neutral Netherlands to exploit that French characteristic. Hitler correctly guessed that the Dutch would whine to high heavens, and beg the French to come to rescue them from the big bad Nazis. There Hitler would set his trap for the overconfident, romantic French, dashing in shining, formidable armor, in the best tradition of Agincourt. (Amusingly, the stupid overconfidence of French knights charging English archers in the mud during the Middle Ages is well known. But what happened in May 1940, when the French charged into the Netherlands with their armored reserve, was a much greater battle, the stupidity was infinitely greater, and the consequences were much more astronomically catastrophic: 50 million dead. At least. The holocaust of WWII would not have happened if the French had kept their mobile armored reserve, in reserve. But French armor was superior in quality and quantity to Nazi armor, that was happened was never considered possible. And it was precisely knowing all this, and that his situation was desperate to start with, that Hitler, used as he was to bar fighting and street fighting, let alone years in the trenches of WWI, devised his far-fetched strategy.

Moved to the core by Dutch wailing, in one the most absurd feats of military history, the French high Command threw their rapid deployment force of seven armored divisions, the French reserve, the Seventh French army, to link with the Dutch, who had already retreated when it got there, and without air support. Tanks, at the time, could not go back and forth 800 kilometers in 3 days, and the French reserve got destroyed.

Several things: 1) Hitler could be a good psychologist, and he ascertained well the French character. 2) The move was so stupid that a trial of high treason of the French high Command was undertaken (under the occupation!). 3) The Nazis had only ten armored divisions. If the seventh army had been kept in reserve, it would have cut the Nazis from behind. De Gaulle with just one heavy armored division, the Quatrieme Division Cuirassee, half cut the Nazis’sickle thrust , and nearly killed their generals. 4) The French love to go in the streets to fight their government, just for fun, and to insure that free speech is alive and well. Reciprocally, how supine are those who never protest?

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MORE TRUTH ABOUT FRANCE; AGGRESSIVE SECOND TO NONE:

Of course France has been in Afghanistan since day one. Out of 26 allies fighting with the USA there which suffered fatalities, France is in third position in the number of soldiers killed. For Americans who think not enough French soldiers are getting killed in Afghanistan, they should realize that France has been fighting terrorists in the many countries of the Sahel and Sahara, non-stop, for decades, something Canada and Britain do not do.

Anybody who has studied a bit of world history knows that no country has a more aggressive military past than France. None. Even Rome pales in comparison. The Franks sent spies as soon as Muhammad became prominent, and tricked the invading Muslim army at Toulouse in 721 CE, inflicting Islam its first disaster in a land battle. And it was a terrible disaster. It would take 11 years for the Arab Caliphate to try again. It was just as disastrous (Poitier, 732).

Just last week in Niger an al Qaeda commando captured two young Frenchmen in the middle of the capital of Niger. French planes tracked the Al Qaeda’s SUV convoy, and French special forces attacked in Mali, killing many terrorists, capturing others (the hostages were assassinated at some point to be determined). Among those the French caught were some army personnel of a pretended ally…

French aggressivity is not restricted to the military domain. The intellect and romance are preferred fields of combat, and even the abominable Napoleon thought he had to demonstrate his superiority in these domains. In many ways the French and the Americans are very similar, and it is not by accident.
***

SUCCESORS REGIMES OF THE FRANKS UNITE:

The relationship between France and the USA is unique, because without France, there would have been very probably no successful American "revolution", and, perhaps, without the creation of the USA, no French revolution. They are co-dependent in rebellion.

Naturally, the relationship is much deeper than that, because France and the USA (and also Britain) are all successor regimes of the empire of the Franks. This is not just an historical fact, but a set philosophical initial conditions. There were several important philosophical differences between Franks and Romans. Basically the Franks re-established sanity, and humanity, while grabbing from rome what they viewed as superior (they started with the law, written in Latin, and the next acquisition was… fascism).

The Franks loved riches and capital, but spread it around. They esteemed Jesus, but had a definitively secular approach to god. Told how Jesus suffered death on the cross, Clovis grasped his double headed battle-ax fiercely and exclaimed: "If I had been there with my Franks I would have avenged him!" They forced the Catholics to accept schooling as their mission, and Jews and Muslim (civilians) as their brothers.

A giant philosophical difference between the Franks and the Greco-Romans was slavery. Outlawing slavery forced the Franks to establish a socio-economy that entangled progress, technology, and fostering human rights in a non self contradictory way.

All of this rested on an amazing aggressivity which extended to Frankish clothing, multicolored and flamboyant.

Differently from the Romans, who could not handle the Germans alone, the Franks around the Tenth Century beat back simultaneous invasions by Viking, Danes, Mongols and Muslims. The Scandinavians were submitted and integrated, the Muslims thrown out of Rome. And Hungary was conquered again (next time the Mongols invaded it, in the 13C, their loses were such that they then wisely decided to ally with the Franks).

In any case, the Franks decided to reconquer the Roman empire, invaded as it had been by the followers of Sarah ("Sarasins"). After a little, but more profitable diversion, founding new Europes all over the planet, the mopping up of the degenerated, long suffering half of the Roman empire is now back on the front burner. Any questions about lack of aggressivity?

***

WAS LOUIS XVI A REVOLUTIONARY?

Even before France officially declared war to Britain, more than 90% of American cartridges were made in France, and even before that French agents had pushed Americans to sedition. At the time France was a super power, 11 times the population of 2.5 million English American colony.

The hyper costly American war of liberation broke French finances, to the point the American war budget was hidden in secret books, as it caused a super giant deficit.

Why was the France of Louis XVI so pro-American? Well, there was a whole mystique about the New World in France, in more ways than one. Losing Canada, and the freedom it breathed of, had been bitter. The enlightenment needed an outlet, and a world had been stolen.

Louis XVI was a study in contrasts. Louis was very much pro-enlightenment, pro-science, pro-progress, and also personally courageous. An idealist. Not only did he chose state of the art philosophers as top ministers, but he pushed the American liberation project beyond the reasonable. It could be said, in a way, that the greatest revolutionary of the time was Louis XVI himself. His reforms inside France, although attempted, came to nought, because he faltered and completely melted down each time the plutocracy gave him its marching orders (instead, a la Philippe Le Bel, or even Louis XIV, he should have sent some top plutocrats into the fire, or in prison).

Thereafter the American and French republic were completely entangled. The USA proclaimed itself a republic first. Then, in 1789, the USA wrote down a Constitution, and France decided to have a revolution, so she could do the same. The two constitutions came out within weeks of each other. France was still guided by the revolutionary (as I just said, contrarily to received wisdom), Louis XVI, and would have to wait another two years before becoming a republic (after Louis, misguided by his spy of a wife, tried to jump ship)..

The French constitution was more advanced as it had the world "universal" and "human rights" in it, differently from the American constitution’s "We The People" which could be, and was given, for a while, a tribal interpretation. Thus many an American racist has hated France ever since, as she is correctly seen as the enemy of slavery and racism (many famous historical French are of mixed blood, but nobody knows anything of it, as befits a non racist country; an amusing case is Alexandre Dumas, the quintessential French writer).

But let’s go back to the gun craze in the USA, and how it connects with banksters.

***

I SHOOT THEREFORE I AMERICAN:

All politicians have to be very careful about guns in the USA. Even talking of them is dangerous. The National Rifle association has been going around imprinting all Americans will the fabulously stupid slogan:"Guns don’t kill people, people kill people." In other words, guns are innocent, but Americans are guilty. When an American sees another American, it should start shooting, then, according to the gun lobby, and Main Stream Media in the USA, since people kill people. This is exactly what happens. Advantage? As people are busy shooting people, no shooting at the plutocracy, behind its high walls, in its distant enclaves.

What about even more stupid slogans? Idiots don’t kill guns, idiots kill with guns?

This is why Barack was celebrating the central human tenet of rising up to the expectations of children and their magic belief for goodness…

Instead of condemning that an obviously deranged maniac could legally buy a European gun with 31 shots bullets’ magazine, hiding it below his clothing (just as legally). A Eurozone gun which private citizens cannot buy in the European Union. (By the way, France makes nuclear warheads, maybe they want to buy some too?)

A little grandmother grabbed the maniac’s next 31 shots magazine, when, apparently following Sarah Palin’s advice for lunatics, "not to retreat, but to reload".

In "Helpless in the Face of Madness", the NYT’s Bob Herbert made an observation that had also struck me:

"… a photo and a headline on the front page of The New York Times this week gave us some insight into just how sick our society has become. The photo showed 11-year-old Dallas Green weeping and using his left arm to wipe his eyes during the funeral for his sister, Christina-Taylor Green, who was 9 years old and was killed in the attack in Tucson that took the lives of five other people and left Representative Gabrielle Giffords gravely wounded.

Beneath the photo was the headline: “Sadness Aside, No Shift Seen On Gun Laws.”

What is the matter with us? Are we really helpless in the face of the astounding toll that guns take on this society? More than 30,000 people die from gunfire every year. Another 66,000 or so are wounded, which means that nearly 100,000 men, women and children are shot in the United States annually. Have we really become so impotent as a society, so pathetically fearful in the face of the extremists, that we can’t even take the most modest of steps to begin curbing this horror?

Where is the leadership? We know who’s on the side of the gun crazies. Where is the leadership on the side of sanity?

For starters, assault weapons should be banned. Their raison d’être is to kill the maximum number of people — people, not animals — in the shortest amount of time."

Similarly the Euro-American magazine, "The Economist" made its cover, and leading editorial on the gun problem in the USA. It noticed gun control was going in the wrong direction, that 31 shots magazine were unlawful until very recently, etc. The Supreme Court decided in 2010 that cities did not have the right to make anti-gun-to-kill-people laws, etc… We may have to wait for another maniac to shoot the entire Supreme Court, before it changes its mind.

What is the matter? Why so much regression? Why, whereas the rest of the world progress enthusiastically, do the USA regress rabidly? Is it because Fox News, the hyper powerful TV channel, has turned "progressive" into the worst word in American English? (The talking heads at Fox have campaigned against "progressive" for years, mentioning the word in derogatory contexts at least 100 times a day, as if it was part of their lucrative contract with Murderoch the Great).

Herbert and "The Economist" do not explain what the mechanism of American regression could be. So I sent a version of the following to the NYT, which had the kindness to publish it:

***

GRAND UNIFIED TERROR USA:

Societies drifting into insanity are not infrequent in history, especially when they think obsessively of themselves as "exceptional". (Not believing in American exceptionalism is akin to an un-American activity in the USA.)

A century ago, we had the plutocracy known as the "Second German empire" drifting that way. Germany had the fastest growing economy, the biggest army, the biggest population, the highest literacy, etc.

What Germany did not have, though, was a minimum of introspection. After Britain massacred Boers in South Africa, it reconsidered. Why? Democratic introspection (OK, the Boers were also white…). That was helped by a free press.

However, next door, in Namibia, the German empire proceeded to effect a holocaust, as blatantly as possible, copying the methods of the Massachusetts’ colonists, 250 years earlier (paying for scalps). The broad idea, co-opted by the Nazis later, was that, if the Americans could have make holocausts work, so could the much smarter and educated Germans. (Along these lines, the "special commandos" exterminating Jews were mostly made of lawyers and PhDs.)

This, by the way, show that bad examples, and bad ideas once they have been made honorable, can be tried again under the metaprinciple that if it worked once, and was made honorable it could happen again: NOTHING IS AS MORAL AS SUCCESS. Right, But the American success with ethnic cleansing was mostly due to; 1) facing early Neolithics. 2) using immorality of such a high level that it proved unsustainable in Europe.

As the attitude relative to guns demonstrate, the incapacity to hold the most basic reasoning and to hold the standards of basic human decency is now blatant in the USA.

As it was blatant in Germany when Nietzsche flourished. Nietzsche found a few points in German popular behavior which showed him Germany had gone unhinged. Anti-Judaism, "mob mentality", "victorious" mentality, lack of refinement in thought and taste, and "incapacity to digest" contradictions, to celebrate differences, and whatever was superior were prominent German defects, of the most alarming nature according to Nietzsche. He was right: Germany was suffering moral and mental collapse, even before Hitler’s birth.

The point is this: when a country, a political class, a leader, or, for that matter an individual, go mad, it does not take too many facts, if they are crazy enough, to determine that insanity is setting in.

Fortunately, insanity in the USA has not yet reached the heights it reached in Germany before a mental Rubicon was crossed there on August 1, 1914 (although one could argue that mental Rubicon was crossed earlier in the German colony of Namibia).

The diversity of the USA has kept, so far, the madness in check (but the diversity could backfire: discrimination against Jews in Germany went up and down, before their holocaust; after WWI, the Kaiser’s "Jewish" advisers were made into scapegoats! For example if "black" Obama could be described as having failed big time, the white supremacists would come back with a vengeance, arguing that a "black" man did the worst job with America). However, the gun madness is all over the land. After the shooting in Arizona, gun sales augmented. apparently, killing a nine year old girls, the chief Federal judge and putting a bullet in the brain of representative Sarah Palin had put a rifle sight on, was excellent advertizing for the merit of guns.

Consider the stupidity of it all; the judge and the US representative boasted that they were pretty good shots. However, as Sun Tzu already said, most of the success of an attack consists into surprise. And this at a time when weapons were much less deadly than now. Nowadays, who can fire the first shot has killed. Except if all civilians, including nine year girls, are going to walk around carrying the armor of French soldiers in Afghanistan, at all times, in all places.

And you know what? This gun madness is all a red herring. The media, in the USA, is controlled by the plutocracy. So is the political leadership. The USA is not Tunisia. In Tunisia, the plutocracy did not control the media, so the dictatorial plutocracy had to close and harass the media all the time, for all to see. The media tried to say a lot that the plutocracy did not want the People to learn. But the plutocracy could not close the Internet.

In the USA the situation is different, because the plutocracy owns the media. There is no opposition, no contradiction. So all Americans know guns are good for them, a Constitutional right. never mind that the Constitution states that:"A well regulated militia being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the People to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed." the debate leading to the final amendment made clear that this was in the context of a military service (conscientious objectors were exempted). The National Guard is that militia.

In Pittsburgh, January 2010, a survey in urban neighborhoods found that 80% of young people knew someone who got shot. A study showed that, for three felons who avoided to commit a crime once because of a weapon, two were drawn to the challenge of confronting an armed victim. In other words, guns are criminogenic. As Wikipedia puts it: "Research and statistics have shown that guns intensify crime situations, and increase the likelihood of a more violent or lethal outcome."

***

PLUTOCRACY LOVE IDIOTS WHO SHOT EACH OTHER:

So why the increase in guns, pro-gun laws, and gun propaganda? Because the media has decided so (including the notorious radio savages). In other another word; because the owners of the media , the plutocracy, want Americans to shoot each other.

There are three main reasons:

1) Justify The Private Use Of Force; That gives the plutocracy a pretext to be armed, and better. (That also means living in rich enclaves, a modern version of the castles of the Middle Ages, with private police: police, like schools, depend upon local taxes in the USA, differently from Europe.)

2) Promote Stupidity By Denying Causality; As I said in passing, the pro-handguns theoretical arsenal is incredibly stupid, self contradictory. Gabrielle Giffords boasted that she was a good shot with the Glocks gun that drove hot metal through her frontal lobe, in the direction of her speech area. Good shot? Come again? Palin, condemned by Giffords, for putting Giffords in cross hairs, now compares herself to a persecuted Jew during the depth of the European Middle Ages. Anti-Palinism as anti-Judaism.

These asinine debates may sound innocent, but, in truth, they make stupidity honorable, by having to worry decades after decades about how many ways idiots can split hair with their shaking brains. Such respect for stupidity "ought utterly rejected with cold contempt by every sensible mind" (to borrow a sentence of Nietzsche). But, in a country ruled by wealth and privilege, the higher ups want precisely to make the entire society below them as stupid as can be safely accomplished. Having unending debates about stupid things generate mental retardation, an intrinsic good in the many, for the few who dominate them. Thus, debating whether shooting guns through people save lives will be encouraged, to accompany the increasing presence of shooting metaphors, and an obsession with sport scores.

3) Shoot And Divide; As common Americans get shot by common Americans, they come to view their fellow citizens as the enemy. And thus cannot conceive of their real enemy, plutocracy, let alone organize against it. after all, the plutocracy is not shooting at them. They have no time for subtle exploitation; they have to return fire.

Release The Crazies; A related strategy was the cutting of mental health spending by Ronald Reagan. From the plutocratic point of view, that was excellent. Not only did it make society meaner, an intrinsic good, as a meaner society is friendlier to Hades. But, mostly, it augmented the shooting of innocent for not good reasons, thus increasing the general paranoia, fears, and divisions. Many of these crazies have been going around, and local authorities, who are unqualified, have been trying to detect them (which should truly be the work of police and government psychiatry).

If crazy is frequent, crazy will be viewed as normal, and that opens new possibilities to the crazed plutocracy; derivatives with your salad, anyone? And of course, whatever alienates reason is welcome.

***

SALAFISM DIVIDES EVEN BETTER THAN GUNS:

Tunisians in revolt used solidarity networks, including on the Internet, to organize themselves against what the ambassador of the USA called "a quasi mafia" (WikiLeaks dixit). Solidarity is the key to revolution. The People is strong if, and only if, it can make one out of the many. (That was the long standing motto of the USA, before plutocracy found it dangerous to its rule, and tried to sweep it below the carpet.)

If the many are busy shooting each other, they will not stand as one. But the plutocracy, the CEO class, the hedge fund wolf packs, the banksters, stand as one. Divided the People get subjugated, idiotic the People submit. So let more bullets fly, and France get vilipended for whatever: thus the rule of Pluto hopes to proceed in the USA.

In many countries around the Middle East the plutocracy has long placed its faith in Salafist interpretations of Islam. That too allows to foster stupidity and divisiveness. Shooting those who don’t agree and calling them Al Qaeda also helps. Notice that bin Laden was on the very top of the Saudi Arabian plutocracy. Not to say that he planned it all as a deliberate agent of said plutocracy. But the rest of the Saudi Arabian plutocracy has found most convenient to justify its violent existence by calling anybody else evil. In Tunisia, Ben Ali justified its 23 year old kleptocratic dictatorship, as a rampart against Salafism, and being called Mr President by the leaders of democracies such as France and the USA. It is not just that the Ben Ali family used Tunisia as a private property. It prevented the average Tunisian to think as well as they could, wanted, and should. Not just for Tunisia’s sake, but for the sake of the entire planet.

And now to reiterate one of our little refrains. We need brains, ever more brains, as the world tumbles towards various catastrophes never heard of before. Otherwise said, we need full democracy. Plutocracy fosters stupidity, ignorance and erroneous logic, getting rid of it, worldwide, so we can think better, will be the essence of survival.

***

Patrice Ayme

Aphorisms Mid January 2011

***

Violence And All That Blah Blah Blah: When Is The Law Not The Law? And Is Not A Government Which Ignores The Law Committing Violence Of The Highest Order? An editorial in the New York Times enjoined all Americans to act according to the law, in light of a shooting in Arizona by a crazed maniac who bought his weapon legally.

Obama talked well, at the memorial service, true. But did he act well, as non violently as possible in his quality of president? Out of magnanimity, we will momentarily ignore the dark angel of Afghanistan flying by, on automatic, its wings dripping with blood…

Is Obama part of this disrespect for law and decency he himself deplores? It is a trick question. One million Americans were killed by firearms since 1970. Sanctimoniously, the "left" is asking the right to tone down the political debate to respect the … law (see Krugman: "A tale of two moralities").

But did the Obama administration prosecute those who incited, advocated, ordered and practiced torture? No. Obviously some citizens are above the law. Some citizens are too big to fail. But that is doing violence to the law.

Did the Obama administration prosecute those who incited, advocated, organized, ordered and practiced financial malfeasance, in the greatest financial conspiracy ever known? No. Obviously some citizens are above any suspicion. More violence to the law. Granted a law that allows people to go around with concealed war weapons is itself violent, so this is getting a bit too much for logical processing.

The Roman republic lasted five centuries, because the Romans implemented ferociously their metaprinciple of putting the law above anything else: Dura Lex, Sed Lex! "The law is hard, but it’s the law!"

When the Roman republic deviated from this, a strict, constant, relentless application of the law, the richest and noblest of the rich stopped obeying the law. The republic became a violent mess, where money reigned, and then a tyranny, where Pluto ruled.

By refusing to apply the law on a massive scale, the Obama administration has done violence to the law, hence to the republic, hence encouraged the very atmosphere of violence it now condemns so eloquently.

***

My Baby Learns Through Emotions, And Emotions Money Can’t Buy:

The language of emotions comes first to baby. It is a continuous, multidimensional medium (dimensions through facial expressions, eyebrows, frowning, mouth and eye geometry, or tone of voice, and body language). That way emotional language resembles the mathematical set-up of quantum physics; the Quantum waves evolve continuously in often high dimensional "configuration space". Notice the word: con-figuration. It is not there figuratively speaking. Physics has logical poetry in its semantics.

Emotional communication with babies is more important than anything else, as it directs the rest of the mental development of a baby. Including speech. Let those who pay for care be forewarned. ***

President Obama Suggested That Americans Could Question Each Other’s Ideas Without Questioning Their Love Of Country.

And the New York Times to add:"We hope all Americans take that to heart." And then what? Which kind of heart is that? What if it is a heart of stone? The heart needs to be educated in the ways, and taste, of reason. As I just said, it cannot be purchased and provided in exchange for money.

The heart has its own mind, but it needs to go to school too. learning the multiplication table is not learning the calculus of emotions.

Learning to think well is done by learning to debate, and learning what a correct argument is. A correct argument deploys elaborated logic and vast, relevant knowledge. One learns to detect what is relevant. A correct argument is far removed from those crudest of analogies known as insults, and those violent remedies known as threats.

Learning to debate correctly is not only a body of knowledge. It requires more. The heart has to be engaged.

Learning to debate is also a body of appreciation, with sophisticated feelings to accompany it with the passion that good thinking needs as hope and propellant. There is work to do, to rearrange neuronal circuitry into the general love for arguments, and it ought to start by primary school. Read a complicated, explain the main points, learn to answer questions about it. I went through this kind of schooling. I continually come across Americans who obviously did not.

Instead, in the USA, an "argument" is known, by the common heart, as a dispute. It is high time to reorganize  the semantics seriously. How does one want to love debates if what debates are made of, arguments, are viewed and confused with aggressions?

The USA has a lot of work to do with the heart. Especially when one sees its incapacity to switch to the metric system (like the rest of the planet), its incapacity to chase money out of politics (as all other democracies are trying much harder to do), its incapacity to remove dangerous weapons from the public space, or going to a health care system which does not mix employment and insurance.

The incapacity to switch to a more rational mode is fundamentally a manifestation of an inability to think satisfactorily. For example, guns are first used to kill people the murderers are familiar with. What is the logic in that? Owning guns so one can use family for shooting practice?

Time to go back to school, big time.

***

Teleprompt Me Not:

Barack’s speech at the Arizona memorial was excellent. Very good ideas therein, and, for once, he talked with his heart. Why the heart suddenly? Why for once? Because, for once, Obama used NOTES, not a stupid teleprompter. So he immediately became much more intelligent. If he keeps at it, talking without doing the teleprompter robot, if he keeps at it, talking with its heart as his copilot, he will elevate the debate in the country. Americans will be reminded to talk with their hearts.

Notes are used just to recall what one wants to talk about (except if one is an old, mentally diseased Stalinist). After a glance at the notes, the reader uses internal memory recall. Then one lifts one’s eyes from the notes, and reconstitute the train of thought the notes pointed at. A good reader of notes has to reconstitute, and even relive with his or her heart, and that is much more than what is showing up on the teleprompter screen.

Why? The reader who has consulted notes remembers a few hard facts, animated together by software heavily depending upon emotional recall. Thus, the reader re-creates the discourse, reliving the entire logic of the discourse, including the emotional context it was communicated with initially. This is much more human; see the example of the baby above.

***

In the series about increasing American insanity…

Some US representatives announced that they will carry concealed firearms when meeting with their constituents. Don’t campaign, reload! A few constituents are still alive and kicking…

***

Getting To Know People Is Getting To Know Minds, Hence The Importance Of Table And Landscape.

To get to know people, you have got to converse with them (or then live with them through extraordinary events, psychologically revealing… and harder to come by, by the definition of "extraordinary").

Ordinary conversation has diverse meanings in diverse countries. In the USA, in the traditional, male dominated culture, it’s all about exchanging sport scores, sport opinions, and sport prognostications. Obsessing about sport teams instead of politics is the way the Demos was kept quiet in the Roman empire. It has been taught to Americans, fostering the reign of their exploiters, because it is a heavy diversion from what is really interesting.

Proper conversation has both to be polite, nice, and deep. To allow depth, and the effort it necessitates, or the pain it causes, polite pleasure has to be traded in for the effort, pain and inconvenience of thinking. Hence the importance of proper manners, a good table, good hike, a good adventure.

Thus filling the minds best goes with filling the stomachs best, and sharing earthly pleasures.

***

Why Philosophy Matters Most:

Philosophy is first of all a method: how to reason best with fewer sure facts than science uses. Then, in second order, philosophy is a body of knowledge. Then, in third order, a history, then… in fourth order, a consolation.

Its first order definition, how to reason best on fumes, makes philosophy the most important human activity, and everybody has to master it more, the more civilization progresses.

Homo makes theories, and the first method to make a theory is the imaginary, tempered by philosophy.

***

It is not because one can say it, and it bites, that one ought to say it. Something for those who read too much Sade or Nietzsche to remember.

***

Obamacare, or Machiavelliancare?

Obamacare is probably unconstitutional: you cannot force the People to purchase private services. Does it matter, in the fullness of time? No.

First for the unconstitutionality: As early as 16 centuries ago, Augustine proclaimed all of Christianity was a "Respublica". Respublica Christiana. Even Augustine, the Christian fanatic, used "Christian" as a qualifier. The memory of the full Roman republic, 450 years earlier, was still fresh. Even under the "Principate" (= "Empire"), the main concept was still the Republic, the Public Thing. Obamacare instead says the main thing is the for profit institution, and the People shall serve it, by being forced, by law, to pay for the profits of the rich health care industry.

I know this was not, supposedly, according to the nice little fable for children, the aim of the law. The crafty aim was to entangle the private companies in a maze of regulations that will force them to behave decently, after offering them enough incentives to do so.

Actually it is argued that the plan will cost one trillion dollars, in spite of a 500 billion cut in Medicare. Obama, in his progressive version, could hope for the following: people get used to expect the advantages of Obamacare. Everybody is covered, pre-conditions get insured, coverage cannot be discontinued, children are protected, etc. By the time people are addicted to what the Europeans have long taken for granted, it will turn out that Obamacare under the private system is not financially workable (and that is already transpiring as premiums escalate). Something will have to give, and it will not be the addiction.

Then a public health system, Medicare For All, will be the only solution. Actually Obama, a few years back, had announced such a Machiavellian plan.

The same Machiavellian approach to financial regulation is entirely possible. A good fisherman lets the fish swallow the bait.

Somebody who ought to know told me Obama was not that clever. Well I am not so sure. And even if he is not, he may have no choice than to become really clever.

***

It’s Spelled Banksters, Not Bankers:

The public-private fractional reserve banking system is intrinsically unjust, incompatible with democracy. Some (Simon Johnson) propose to institute a size cap on it. The present banking system would still be unjust, and incompatible with democracy, though.

It seems Obama is stuck too, even if he detests the system, there is not much he can do. The revolt has to come from the street. Common people have to understand the problem first. Somebody has to teach them. Probably not somebody from a top American university.

The European Union has put caps on bankers short term bonuses. They have to wait five years before getting their bonuses, which are transmogrified into stock in their bank holding companies. That is an independent solution from limiting bank size.

***

The Truth Often Sounds Shrill...Why? Because it often starts as an alarm call, and only great passion can overcome the exhaustion of establishing new neural connections, refurbished neurons, and, overall, genuinely new neurobiology.

That’s why Planck observed that the best way for the truth to come out was for old people to die and new ones to be born. But of course he said that before the Hitlerjugend became a mass phenomenon.

Truth always come out shrill, thus people who are too cool cannot generate really new thoughts: they just don’t have enough passion, hence enough energy to build inside themselves new structures. Show me a famous thinker, I will show you a passion. Show me a sheep, I will show you the munching. And the general jejune attitude.

We think, not because we are too cool to care, but because we are too passionate to stay indifferent.

***

Patrice Ayme

VIOLENCE IS A HUMANISM

MORALITY RESIDES NOT IN AVOIDING VIOLENCE, BUT IN USING IT CORRECTLY. 

***

Abstract: “Violence Is A Humanism” is a mischievous twist on Sartre’s famous essay:”Existentialism Is A Humanism” (1946). In which Sartre lamely observes that:”The essential charge laid against us is, of course, that of over-emphasis upon the evil side of human life.” However, the deepest human cultures are brimming with sterner stuff than Sartre. The Roman and French symbol of the ax, and the American eagle brandishing all its arrows, show that the republics have long understood the importance of violence.

Many a fable for children, the Bible and the Qur’an, the Vedas or the Upanishads, were not as affected with pusillanimous bourgeois fears about violence, as Sartre was. The deeper trains of thought all embrace violence readily. Rightly so. They looked at the universe, and observed that violence was a most prominent fact. In a way, they were doing physics, as fundamentally as can be. Physics is God, and violence is its prophet. And not just that. Whereas sheep practice existentialism readily, doing nothing much about everything, just munching out there, violence is a much more specifically human thing to do. Not that sheep are completely non violent. Far from it.

Violence is not all too human. This is the conventional approach. It misses the point. Human beings have adapted to physics. They were born from physics. Violence is what humans do, lest they would not be able to do anything at all. That Buddha understood nothing of this does not make it any less true.

Many who just eat grass, and make a spectacle of themselves by their submission and temperance, miss the point. Humans do not just exert violence directly to themselves, they do it also to the environment. In some important sense, there was never a human engineered catastrophe as violent as ice shields melting. And, paradoxically, it is human peace and contentment which is bringing that evil.

Direct violence against humans, or direct violence against the environment, often boil down to the same. Vegetarianism is no refuge (contemplate the sanctimonious Hitler). We need to get more subtle, and compute with the calculus of violence. It has been observed countless times that violence is even the way to goodness. (As Obama pointed out while getting his Nobel prize in the futures’ market.)

Some say: think of love only. But love is harder to measure than violence. And violence, energy, is how even love is measured, ultimately. Let me explain a few elements related to these themes:

***  

WHEN NON VIOLENCE IS A TRAVESTY:

Before frightening the masses with unconventional points of view, let me hide behind authority. As Obama put it during his Nobel Peace Prize speech: “Martin Luther King said in this same ceremony years ago – “Violence never brings permanent peace. It solves no social problem: it merely creates new and more complicated ones.” As someone who stands here as a direct consequence of Dr. King’s life’s work, I am living testimony to the moral force of non-violence. I know there is nothing weak -nothing passive – nothing naïve – in the creed and lives of Gandhi and King.  

But as a head of state sworn to protect and defend my nation, I cannot be guided by their examples alone.I face the world as it is, and cannot stand idle in the face of threats to the American people. For make no mistake: evil does exist in the world. A non-violent movement could not have halted Hitler’s armies. Negotiations cannot convince al Qaeda’s leaders to lay down their arms. To say that force is sometimes necessary is not a call to cynicism – it is a recognition of history; the imperfections of man and the limits of reason.” 

Well, force is sometimes necessary for even more reasons than that. Force is the essence of man, and some pacifists can think otherwise only because the lions have been forcefully removed, and species of plants were forcefully invented to feed them. Not to feed the lions: those are dead. To feed the pacifists, watch for their SUVs, they eat the planet.

***

THE VIOLENCE OF NON VIOLENCE:

I will not harp again on the theme of “appeasement” when many did business and comforted the Nazis, instead of punching them. When the many behave like sheep, the poodles themselves turn into lions. If the sheep, in their sheepishness, create lions, they are responsible of the existence of lions. Violent demonstrations in the European Union against solutions to the financial crisis involving taxpayers and citizens probably brought the crack-down on banks observed there. Whereas in the USA nobody demonstrated seriously against banks (meaning no riot police had to be dispatched). The Americans view that as wisdom: conclusion: their giant banks rule the country even more than in 2008, and their grip is getting tighter (the new presidential chief of staff is a top big banker; the top 6 banks assets are now two third of US GDP higher than in 2008, and rising, and so is their exposure to derivatives).

Thus, when the forces of evil provoke the forces of goodness, the later better punch back, lest evil get even bolder, and more energetic.

Speaking of the devil, or, more exactly, speaking of Gandhi, when one steps away from fantasy land, it is hard to say anything positive about him. Gandhi was non violent to death. Hades in rags.  He promoted Hinduism to the point the Muslims got totally enraged, and, rightly so, and then Gandhi boy sabotaged the war effort against Hitler, as much as he could.

Hitler was Gandhi’s “sincere friend“. On 24 December 1940, apparently to celebrate Christmas, Gandhi wrote a lengthy second love letter to his Hitler.”We have no doubt about your bravery or devotion to your fatherland, nor do we believe that you are the monster described by your opponents…We resist British imperialism no less than Nazism.” That buffoon was writing this after Hitler had invaded most of Europe, and assassinated millions of civilians. In a related story, Gandhi wanted the British empire to get out of India, because he claimed that made Japan invade Asia. Gandhi was not just a sheep, but a rabid sheep, talking softly. Sheepishness is so much respected, though, that it’s Gandhi right or wrong, all the way.

It is true that some aspects of British rule in India were obnoxious. But they were arguably way worse in Canada, where entire French speaking populations were thrown out of their homeland. However, Canada is doing just fine. Britain administered the Raj superbly, with sometimes less than 2,000 British born officials. In the end, Gandhi has brought to us Pakistan, millions killed, and the perspective of a thermonuclear jihad. Gandhi looked superficially non violent. But in truth Gandhi embraced national religionism of the worst type, long the bearer of the worst holocausts. Gandhi was as non violent as a sanctimonious viper: very cool, except when it bites. Hitler, too, was obsessed by nationalism and religion, and claimed to be a man of peace.

Obama concluded in Oslo that “The non-violence practiced by men like Gandhi and King may not have been practical or possible in every circumstance, but the love that they preached – their faith in human progress – must always be the North Star that guides us on our journey.” The sheep shall befriend Hitler with Gandhi, dream with King, and fall in love with its own placidity. Non-violence is mostly taught to sheep in their pen, by those who fleece them.

Enough with this childish situation awareness. Real men finds something worthy to fight about. Spend some energy making a positive difference, and not a long term negative like Gandhi. The world is all about energy, says physics, and morality is all about directing it well, says humanity.

***

VIOLENCE VERSUS VIOLENCE:

There was just another mass shooting in the USA, at least 6 killed, 19 wounded. Some will wonder how do I dare to defend violence? Well, first, I am not defending violence, just describing its importance. Among those killed was the chief Federal judge for Arizona, and a nine year old girl. Thankfully the congresswoman shot was a partisan of Americans shooting Americans, alleluia.

Before I get called cold hearted and slightly demented, let’s meditate this. Gabrielle Giffords once boasted: “I have a Glock 9 mm and I’m a pretty good shot.” Now doubt. Who did she intend to shoot? Did she believe that someone intending to shoot her would call her to a duel?

Interestingly, Giffords can now boast of having been on both side of the trigger, and of being a good shot in more ways than one. That is, if she still capable of boasting, now that her brain has been further re-arranged with a Glock 9 mm.

Obviously what is at work here is a weak, and self contradictory culture of cultural retards, and I will be forgiven for taking a shot at it, by those who have some brains left inside. Giffords was  intelligent, nice, but all too nice to guns. Now she is paying the price. It is weak, not to oppose guns to kill people in a civil society (the argument that those guns are needed to oppose the government of the U.S.A. is beneath contempt, and perfectly unrealistic, so will not be adressed!)

Representative Giffords was on Sarah Palin famous “crosshairs” list (since then removed from the Internet). Giffords herself had eloquently condemned the “implications”.

In general the complexity of issues in USA politics has been blown away by the empty violence of the discourse (and that starts in the general society with such violent notions such as “firing” employees… which was used against the representative above, Giffords, by the head of the republican party to claim that she was in the “firing line”… as if she was going to be executed; when does voodoo speech become an incitation to murder? Clearly Giffords had been shot at symbolically, in a very effective voodoo, before being shot for real; incitation to murder is a crime, by the way… and that ought to be enforced.)

There is little control of firearms in the USA. But this violence thrives not out of strength, but out of weakness. Americans just don’t have the force to crack down on the irrationality out there, or inside their own heads. This is related to the incapacity to switch to the metric system, or the incapacity of the democratic party to crack down on the fraud, deregulation and vast concentration of wealth that paralyzes the West in general, and the USA most of all. What is needed is creative destruction of some mental strucutres which are inappropriate, or obsolete.

There is something as creative destruction. And some creation which cannot happen without destruction. In such cases, the violence of anger is needed to remove the intolerable, when calm, deliberate discourse has come short, again, again, and again.

Indeed evil and violence do exist. Obama is very correct on this. However he sits pretty in the White House not because enough of the non violent ones did nothing, but because so many people gave their life to fight for racial equality. Even that woman who refused to sit at the back of the bus used, and not so passively provoked, a lot of violence. A lot of violence which was needed. She risked a lot. She had a lot of mental energy.

So the statement of Dr. King, taken in isolation, is completely false (Obama mentioned it to show that he was aware of the counterpoint, lest he be accused of ignorance, or bias). Hundreds of thousands of the rightful ones, died, just in the Secession War, so that Dr. King would not be sold at the market, and whipped whenever he behaved mischievously.

Dr. King’s statement, out of a careful, very restricted context, is an insult to history, and millions of most courageous heroes. (In the particular context in which he was, that of finishing touches against racism, Dr. King’s best course was non-violence, indeed: he, and his contemporaries, could afford it. And he wanted to steer people away from Black Power, Black Muslims, Black Panthers, Malcom X, etc… So I understand, and approve, what he did. The cases of King, and Mandela, are pretty much opposed to that of Gandhi!)

Violence brought permanent peace, and progress to the Aztecs, Assyrians, white slave owners, and many others who stood in the way of civilization (OK, it would have been better if 90% or more of the Aztecs had not died!)

The (violent) decisions of the Supreme Court and Eisenhower to send the troops to destroy apartheid were much more important that Dr. King’s belated dream. It’s not because racist America was a nightmare, that having a dream was such a big progress. As Stalin quipped: “The pope? How many divisions?”

***  

 

USING ENERGY IS WHAT HUMANS DO, BUT ENERGY IS ANOTHER NAME FOR VIOLENCE:

Violence is an interesting problem, which is often a solution. Violence is the application of force. It may not have to with human beings: a violent storm. But then the storm may have to do with humans: a bad greenhouse. Progress has consisted in humanizing nature, and this has required ever more energy.

Violence can be a solution. One can only say this, watching riots in the semi dictatorships of Tunisia and Algeria. It is unlikely that without some mighty pushing from the youth, wrecking havoc, Tunisia and Algeria will get out of their mild terror, intellectual fascism, corruption, unemployment, reign of the military, perfidious stupidification known as Islamization, etc. When evolution will not happen, revolution has to take its place (and it can go fast; there was basically a decade between taxation without representation and the American rebellion of 1776).

The advocacy of violent revolution, when nothing else will promote equality and freedom, has been a fundamental theme of the West, at least since the old oligarchs and plutocrats, in Athens and Rome, were assassinated, thrown out, and at the very least cut in small conceptual slices. (I am talking here of the revolutions on the Sixth Century BCE, when the grossest of plutocrats were culled, allowing the rise of republican Athens and Rome… The case of Athens is very interesting: not only was a lot of violence used, but even a foreign intervention which is rarely evoked, but explains a lot of what happened in the following century, with the war between Sparta and Athens.)

Truly, sometimes only violence is the solution, or the solution goes through violence. Even Jesus admitted to this. To the violence of the merchants of the temple, Jesus opposed his own. Then Jesus multiplied the warnings about the fact he was bringing not peace, but “a sword”. What will He have done, or recommended to do, with the banksters, who are in the process of stealing civilization itself?

The USA and the EU exist because thousands of military victories, extending over 4,000 years, which have promoted the right philosophy of freedom and equality instead of that philosophy of the likes of Alexander, so called the Great. (I was searching through tyrants of old such as Biblical Babylon’s Nebuchadnezzar II or Assyria’s Tiglath-Pileser III, but they pale in badness and violence relative to Alexander, who, among untold holocausts, and rampaging, started the drive towards making the ruler into God, or closely associated to God.)

Violence is the application of force. It could be the force of a power station, or of a jumbo jet. Or simply the force of a discourse. The power of man ultimately always originates in discourse. The brain is mightier than the hand.

Fascist religions (Judeo-Christo-Islamism and the Aztecs’ religion, Moloch, are famous examples, etc.) were invented to provide with a violent metaphysical context. Those metaphysics excuse and justify the violence of the political systems which set them up. When God is as insane maniac, oligarchs get excused for being similarly inspired. One could say even more: if the Christian and Muslim Gods want to destroy all, as they claim they do, at the end of their sacred books, why not give God a hand, here, now? So say the oligarchs, and they pray, piously. Praying to themselves, so they can prey, even more.

History abounds with violent metaphysics coming to the rescue of bloody oligarchies. Pakistan is a recent example (as it went from British democracy to typical Salafist indigence). In general, fascist regimes in the Middle East have found convenient to promote the violence of Salafism (in full cooperation with the USA, which found it convenient for the same oily reason, during the last few decades…until 9/11: now that is backfiring, big time, and the USA is thoroughly confused… As Europe has long been on the question of “multiculturalism”.)

The evolution of the genus Homo started with a greater efficiency and craft at using energy. That meant applying force, hence violence, in powerful, but subtle ways. It could be as drastic as setting fire to the jungle.

Homo is all about the ability to direct greater and greater force. That is how Homo navigated in a maze of hostile species, until making them sparse, and intelligence metastatic over the planet.

***

VIOLENCE HERE, GOODNESS THERE. VIOLENCE IS ABOVE IT ALL:

Now some will say that “violence” means, implicitly, a bad usage of force. But thinking so leads to immediate contradictions.

From the point of view of those who defined patriotism as being part of the United Kingdom, the American Revolutionary War was bad. But from the American Revolutionary point of view, it was good. And so it is in any human conflict. Bad on one side, good on the other. Muslims long called their trashing at Poitiers, in the middle of France, which they had just invaded twice with giant armies, the “avenue of the Martyrs”. From the Franks’ point of view, these predatory, superstitious invaders were not martyrs, but garbage. They let their bones rot in the sun in the company of vultures, to make that very clear.

Hence violence is violence, the application of directed energy. It is beyond morality. Beyond good and evil, for real. Morality needs it, but cannot be judged by it.

The moral problem is in directing violence well. And foreseeing what will happen from any particular application of force, in the fullness of time. Whether it will good for what matters to those directing it, in the longest term. Or not.

Directing energy can be obtained through smarts. It is always maximally obtained through maximal smarts. By 1000 CE, the Franks had the maximal usage of energy per person, worldwide. A lot of it from inventing well crafted breeds of pigs, cattle and horses. Outlawing slavery was a big part of it, because it forced people to use animals and power machines (wind and water wheels).

Of course, outlawing slavery was making violence on civilization. After the Franks landed, and beat the regime in England (1066 CE), the Franks freed the 20% of the population which were slaves. The Anglo lords fought back, and the armed resistance to the Frankish revolution lasted nearly 20 years.

The establishment of a Frankish regime in England was no recent conflict. it had been simmering ever since (self described) “Roman” power had been knocked out by Anglo-Saxon invaders in the 6C.

And it was a philosophical conflict: Alcuin, Charlemagne’s philosophical advisor, was English born, and had tried to persuade, in vain, the Anglo king to become more civilized, 275 years earlier.

But that did not happen, the Anglo-Saxons clang to savagery. Alcuinus, disgusted, went back to Charlemagne’s more receptive ears. One could go even further back, when the British army fled to Francia, establishing the county of Brittany.

Philosophy has long been a driver of violence… And rightly so. Ultimately, the Franks defeated the Angles and Saxons’ savagery, from Germany to England (and they had to, as the savages were not sitting on their hands, but raiding southern Europe, each time they felt strong enough to do so).

***

THINKING IS NOT JUST PAINFUL, BUT VIOLENT:

Violence can be a civilizing force. Civilization without violence is actually a contradiction. Civilization is pretty much about carefully directed violence. Some may scoff, and sneer that this is a strange, not to say alarming, contrast with my condemnation of the (way the) Afghan war (has been conducted).

But it is not. Before I fight my guerilla war into the Hindu Kutch again, Alexander style, let me explain why two important aspects of violence are extremely civilizing, and they are tightly related: verbal and intellectual violence.

Deleterious verbal violence can exist (“fighting words”, “hate speech”), and is legitimately repressed by law. However, any idea is transmitted with words, and genuinely new ideas always hurt. Why? Because it costs a lot energy to rebuild neurocircuitry, it may even be impossible, and, or, it may lead to painful contradiction. Thus mental, intellectual, or civilizational progress cannot proceed without pain. So thinking anew, and communicating new culture, wisdom or science is an act of violence. Since it is violence, it has to be protected by the principle of free speech.

No free speech, no civilization, not even any new ideas, or even any survival for the old ones. Free speech is one of the basic commandments of the secular religion. But if well done it will always hurt, and that is why emotional and even physical violence, as a consequence of free speech, cannot be avoided.

To impose non violence as an absolute meta principle therefore would overwhelms free speech. True free speech requires new brain structures, thus, it always reuires a lot of energy (in other words, violence) to be accepted.

Hence the principle of free speech has to overrule emotional comfort. Imposing systematic non violence would subjugate free speech. Really good free speech will always hurt. That is why really innovative thinkers have always been hated throughout history, just because of that. We are talking beyond the Nobel Prize class here. Top thinkers have to be able to say, with president F. D. Roosevelt talking about banksters: “I welcome their hatred.”

***

AFGHANISTAN: MORAL UNCERTAINTY IN, DEFEAT OUT:

In the Afghan war, the West is supporting one side of a Muslim civil war. This is weak. And it is in contradiction with the secular civilization of the West, started by Clovis in 481 CE (the new regime instituted by Clovis made the church an instrument of the secular state, in opposition to the Roman Catholic theocracy that had ruled the “Occident” for 118 years, since 363 CE).

(In Libya, the West and allies support an oppressed people against a despot and his mercenary army: religion is not a factor.)

One has to go all the way back to Charlemagne to see a mighty Western emperor so naive as to ally himself with a Muslim regime in a civil war. It did not turn out too well for Charlemagne. He lost his nephew Roland  and his rear guard (OK, apparently to the Basques, but the Muslims had betrayed previously).  The reasons are multiple. A bare bone analysis of the genesis of the Qur’an and Muhammad’s career shows that he intended his religion as a war machine directed against the Greco-Roman world (attacking Persia had not been anticipated).

If anything, the Occident has not used its shock doctrine enough when dealing with Salafism. And the force should first, be intellectual. When the Romans met with the Gauls, a philosophical debate ensued, and the Romans won. They won enough to persuade most Gauls to side with them (without that preliminary philosophical win, they would have lost to the gauls again, as they did in 399 BCE). Cortez met with Aztecs, a philosophical debate ensued. War was much later, and, as far as they were concerned, the Spaniards had already scored (without their Indian allies, “Malinche” and his men would have lost). The first shock doctrine of the West was always philosophical.

In particular alliance with regimes which execute for blasphemy ought to be terminated (or, at the very least, “blasphemers” ought to be extended loud occidental protection). Inasmuch as NATO is supporting Salafism in Afghanistan, or wherever else, it is working against itself. A case of violence going crazy by attacking itself.

But the West knows subconsciously that it was not in Afghanistan to be really good to the locals, or to win anything it talked about. That would be nation building, another word for colonialism. Remember Gandhi? Colonialism, or even administration at a distance, is supposed to worse than Nazism. So the west, which has never examined seriously its bringing of civilization to the deprived ones, and is still devoured by misconceptions about what happened when doing so, cannot use shock, maximal violence. Because it knows it is not morally right, in the particular case of Afghanistan. It was initially messing up the area, in 1979, just to mess up the area, annoying the Soviets.

Violence is a tough master, when applied by democracy, it requires moral rectitude. Notice that this makes violence, properly applied, successful violence, to be an ally of moral rectitude, since it requires it, or, at the very least, does better with it. (This is implictly recognized in the west, as the army is, nearly always, and always when the society works well, revered.)

***

 

VIOLENCE MAY ORIGINATE FROM SUBTLE ENTANGLEMENT WITH ECOLOGY:

It could be argued (and has been argued) that there are two types of violence, just as there are two types of evil. If mother nature drops a rock on a passerby, that’s one thing, but if the Taliban does it, that’s something else. However, in either case, we are dead.

Two Types Of Violence? Not So Fast! Purely natural evil and purely human evil are two extremes of the same bell curve, which has everything to do with how things are. In practice, most avoidable evil, most avoidable violence, results from interactions between physics, and Homo transmogrifying the environment in such a way that catastrophe ensues. As man goes on a joy ride on top of the environment, the beast, answering only the laws of physics, tumbles and crashes, and man with it.

An example is what happened with metals in the Roman empire. Mines in Hispania had been exploited to exhaustion for centuries of apocalyptic fires, hiding the sun, by armies of slaves with very short lifespans, digging deep, extracting and melting the ores. In the end, though, Roman technology could not keep up with the overexploitation of the underworld, and the mines had to close. More advanced technology would allow to reopen Rio Tinto mines, but only16 centuries later or so.

The resulting impoverishment in metals had a severe impact on the Roman empire. The overexploitation of natural resources in ancient Athens or by the Romans on the environment was spectacular. Attica lost its fabulous forests. To this day, French forests bear the marks of Roman depradations (there were lots of mines in the Alps). That devastation, in turn pushed both Athenians and Romans to fetch the commodities they needed further afield (Athens in the Black Sea, Rome in North Africa). That led to more wars.

When the Muslims invaded, the (Greco-) Roman emperor had to visit Rome, from Constantinople, and oversee the removal of all metallic roofs of the imperial city, to melt enough metal for war machinery. The Franks’ strategy was less passive; in the good old imperialist fashion, they went east, and conquered the mines they needed. What was more evil? Sitting on one’s hands, as the Romans did, waiting passively as “the world got old“, as they said. Or doing violence, and conquering central and eastern Europe, as the Franks did, to get what they needed (and the Romans never got?) .

When a very dangerous ecological crisis developed in the middle of the European Middle Ages, only the “evil” ways of the authorities were able to reestablish a path to sustainability: the ways to goodness can be circuitous. God without Evil is only ruin of the ecology…

In any case, the evil of nature is entangled with that of man. It is not just that man is evil, but that nature has been made into man’s image, or according to man’s convenience, and thus a lot of the evil it dispenses are related to man, nature, and their shared munificence.

“Mad Max” scenarios are a well known class of examples: oil runs out, civilization collapses, man eats man. Equivalent scenarios happened in the past already. It is an obvious way how the old culinary traditions of Pacific islands came to be. Never let a good enemy go to waste.

But there have been other scenarios: Genghis Khan’s invasion of the world happened only after he redirected Mongolian mayhem away from other Mongols (a manner of controlling the overall population of Mongolia) towards the big wide world, by making the united tribes into an army of 20 “Tumens” (200,000 men and a million horses). So the basic situation was that considering that Mongols were going to die, one way or another, but Mongols could do so while killing Chinese to the south, or Christo-Muslims to the West, they would die less from violence of Mongols upon Mongols, while indulging in tourism, becoming richer, and more powerful. So invading the world was a better outcome (from the Mongol point of view).

Hence the Mongol invasions, from Hungary to Indonesia, and Egypt to Japan were not just caused by the Mongols being evil. Quite the opposite from the Mongol point of view. Fundamentally the invasions were caused by having too many Mongols to go peacefully around, on a vast, but harsh land, deprived of resources. One could annihilate entire Mongol tribes, as Genghis Khan did early on, and then redirect the energy outwards, as Genghis also did.

A similar analysis can be made about the Anglo empire which straddles the planet. British subjects were pretty miserable, and proliferating, so the Crown sent them all around the Earth. Whereas in France, peasants owned land, however miserable they were, and tried to limit their own proliferation. Thus the badness of Britain made for the goodness of its empire, and, conversely, the relative goodness of France made for the poverty of her empire.

(Voltaire did not improve the situation, as he despised imperial expansion… thus, having scoffed about Canada, and told his friend Louis XV to forget about it, Voltaire’s ideas are less well known than they would have been otherwise, had France not lost the “7 years” war… Great philosophy is great, but it’s better spread at the end of a sword, as Jesus nailed it down.)

Since ever, the human population was not controlled by the environment but by other humans, or actions of other humans resulting from human effects on the environment. Thus human violence on the environment is a form of violence onto other humans, and one form of violence that dominates the Earth, since there are species, and Homo makes them disappear.

The rise of human impact on the environment has been very beneficial for the sheer number of humans. It was rendered possible by a marginal decrease of inter human violence, measured relatively (not absolutely, because when all of France had 20,000 Cro-Magnons, it was impossible to kill millions therein (as Caesar, Napoleon, or WWI and WWII could do later). To compensate for the enormous populations, the usage of violence, or force, or directed energy on the environment, has augmented considerably.

Some scientists have made models which show that the rise of methane, thanks to human Neolithic cattle, prevented a fallback under another ice age. Was that good, or bad? Not having an ice age forced the rise of civilization in the Middle East. Not having civilization rising in the Middle East would have meant no massive cattle rising, and thus the human protein Aztec procurement model prevailing (OK, maybe not: the Andes and Mexico highlands may have been too cold…)

***

NO ENERGY, NO FREEDOM:

Violence, energy, is the Western way. 300 Spartans decided to block the Persian army, hundreds of thousands strong, coming from all around, just to show that the principle of freedom was superior to any other. Both freedom and putting it above anything else, require great energy, not to say violence. And the Spartans self consciously affirmed both spectacularly by trampling over diplomacy, and throwing the Persians envoys down that well. And the 300 did not surrender. Undefeated, they were pierced by avalanches of missiles. The same spirit, burnished at Thermopylae, prevailed at Salamis, or at Plataea (crushing Greek victories in the following year).

To use violence, without remorse, to use mental violence, proudly, explicitly and rationally, one needs to be morally right (which, ultimately, means sustainably right… over generations of sustainable populations, not just the individual lifetime of a greedy bankster).

So, curiously, as i already pointed out, violence understood as the engine of freedom is also a moral engine. It is the solution to dispensing enough energy to sustain life. This was long clear to the Western intellectual tradition. That is why it is so violent. No violence, no progress: but that does not mean that violence, by itself is enough to foster progress. It means that slavery was ended by force, not because somebody with a mike had the dream that he made a big difference. It’s Lincoln who made a big difference, and Eisenhower, and they made a difference because they commanded armies in the name of more advanced philosophies. Both took great personal risk (so did the dreamer, it turned out).

Britain and France have democratically progressed through a succession of wars, takeovers, coups, rebellions and revolutions, ever since Clovis (and that is the way both the Athenian democracy and the Roman republic were born, too). Progress cannot be distinguished from strife, in the European tradition, and the USA may have to join, if it wants to progress again (as it used to).

Massive force and violence is not just a twisted over-emphasis of mine: military tactics in the West, the frontal shock doctrine, and fighting for destroying the enemy, are demonstrably opposite to most military traditions, which respected the enemy warrior class (this can be shown by contrasting the Greeks’ way of fighting versus the Persian way of fighting, or the Conquistadores versus the Aztecs’ “Flower Wars” tradition).[See the excellent book of Victor Davis Hanson, “Carnage and Culture“, Doubleday, 2001… Yes, the same Victor Davis I severely criticized recently, December 28, 2009!]

***

The Mike shot, first man made thermonuclear fusion. A pacific island is thrown 40 kilometers (25 miles) up in the air, never to be seen again. High time to become even more intelligent. That is what it is the symbol of.

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BUDDHISM IS AN ILLUSION, THINKING IS EXPENSIVE, THUS VIOLENT:

It’s true that some Buddhists (there are many types) would totally disagree that violence is necessary for progress. It is a misreading they have made of the universe, as a tactic to advance themselves, or their masters. (An argument that the People Republic of China has been making, somewhat disingenuously.)

This is not surprising. After all Buddhism depends upon the insight of some primitive sitting below a banyan tree, 22 centuries before Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, figured out the importance of the concept of energy. And 24 centuries before Ramon y Cajal and Camillo Golgi discovered a first outline of neurobiology.

Says Buddha: “The Noble Truth of Suffering (dukkha) is this: Birth is suffering; aging is suffering; sickness is suffering; death is suffering; sorrow and lamentation, pain, grief, and despair are suffering; association with the unpleasant is suffering; dissociation from the pleasant is suffering; not to get what one wants is suffering – in brief, the five aggregates of attachment are suffering.”  (Samyutta Nikaya 56,11).

Well, I suffer when I read that, but still I read it: I like to suffer, because it makes me stronger. So is my genetics anyway. That’s why I climb walls, dive in the sea, and run mountains. All what some of the Buddhist do is to ask for a bowl of rice, a rice they did not plant, harvest or transport. Upon the suffering of others, they rest, as leeches do. A further point: leeches put the flesh to sleep, to draw the blood in peace. And still another: they can be used medically. At least the leeches.

What the genus Homo has been doing is to redirect ever more greater amounts of energy, and this is intrinsically violent. Even when done inside one’s skull. Thinkers are often unpopular, as they urge to reorganize the energy of the universe, starting with the neurobiology of their not so innocent victims.

Some of the wise ones sitting up in the Himalayas are capable of advanced neurological control (as are apnea divers capable of holding their breath, without damage, for longer than it takes to smother the average person).

But the monks and the divers have to WORK (= energy = violence) at it for years, if not decades, before getting there. As they sit, meditating, lesser ones work the rice fields hard to feed the worthy meditators… The work of the meditators is about configurating their brain geometry to a reality they wish. The geometry of the brain is not the geometry of the Versailles palace; it requires more skill, the plans are not known, and brains have to work more than hands. Because hands depend only upon part of the brain (take that Heidegger).

Thinkers don’t meditate at the top of the Ivory Tower for no good reason. Throughout history, philosophy has progressed only when she was treated as a queen. And that has to do with the energy, the violence necessary to elaborate new brain circuitry.

Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, Demosthenes (just to focus on a short lifetime rich in philosophers, in just one place, Athens!), where immensely rich, and, or, influential and respected (Demosthenes swallowed poison before the Macedonian SS could grab him, precisely because he was so important). Nine centuries later, Boethius, consoled by philosophy, was horribly tortured to death, but he had been one of the highest nobles, president of the Roman Senate, and long the second most important power in Italy.

The examples could be multiplied. Top thinking, top new philosophy, top new science or new poetry, or new engineering rest on colossal, or very crafty NEW energy expenditures (may be not in absolute energy spent, but in the crafty way it is used; intelligent energy ought to be the new currency.)

The brain exists to harness energy, and the more advanced the brain, the more energy is harnessed as desired. To be Frank: the more violence. More performing brains have greater curiosity. Curiosity is expensive. Over the decades, CERN, the European elementary particle research center, has cost more than the yearly GDP of nearly all countries. We will not get to Alpha Centauri without astounding energy production, many times what civilization uses now, or great violence made to spacetime. Yes, violence, that is the point.

Some argued that CERN’s latest accelerator, the LHC, would make such violence, that it would destroy spacetime. That was over the top: the alarmists knew some, but not know enough, physics. However, humankind is destroying its own house. Melting the ice shields is as violent as it comes: soon hundreds of millions will trample property, searching for high ground. a very bad violence that could only be prevented by doing violence, now, against entrenched habits, industry, vested interests, and obsolete neurobiology.

Hard core Buddhists will scoff that the world as it is does not matter and only annihilation (“nirvana“) is a worthy objective. That makes them converge with the Christians and their book of the apocalypse, and Allah and his threats to burn and boil everybody. OK, I am unfair, the Buddhists came first. They are the first nihilists. Intellectuals such as Philip Short, a specialist of Cambodia, believe that the thorough holocaust there was greatly caused by Buddhist induced indifference to human suffering. After all the best way to avoid pain is by falling asleep. But those who sleep have no energy, and don’t deliver.

Instead passion, the violence of emotions, is the energetic core of the West’s secular belief system. Why? Because the West searches primarily for reason, not for the lessening of violence or pain. Picture a fighter plane and a fighter pilot. Violence is the thrust of the engine, pain is what happens when you blackout at 12 g. Western philosophy is the pilot.

***

NO BRAINS, NO PAINS:

Sheepishness itself is a sin. Making oneself violence is how the sheep gets out of it. Violence is like the knife, or the first stone ax. It is something we need, because energetic is what we are, but how we will use it is what matters, and the more energetic, the more refined the usage we make of violence has to be. Thus the proper usage of power, of violence, is all about intelligence. One does not go without the other. It is neither sad, nor shocking. it just is. It is not just about history, imperfection or the limits of reason, as Obama politely put it. It is about the principle of man, who walks the valley of the shadow of death.

The shock doctrine of Occidental armies, European organization and European thinking about passion as the core, was derived from the following, which sums it all up. Intelligence was evolved to be shocking, and because it was shocking. Sharks can do what they do, because they are very intelligent, and only because they are very intelligent.

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Patrice Ayme

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P/S 1:  Feedback on this essay, especially if violent, is welcome!

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P/S2: The Qur’an is pretty much a war manual giving precepts for the garrison. Deceit is foremost. Here is the famous Hadith Bukhari:4.268 “Allah’s Apostle said, ‘War is deceit.’ Besides, Allah teaches by example: Qur’an’s Sura 3:54 “Allah deceived and Allah is the best of deceivers”

WHY EUROPE, Why The Euro.

Plutocratic Lie #2: The Euro Is A Problem.

(Well, OK, Not Really A Lie In The Sense That Europe Is A Problem For American Plutocrats And Their Servile Academics).

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Abstract: The word and concept of "Europe" was employed in opposition to the giant plutocratic dictatorships to the south (Egypt) and to the east (Babylon, Assyria, Achaemenids, etc.) Thus it is more than 3,000 years old (4,700 years old if one includes the oldest Minoan civilization, as one should).

 Europe: since ever calling for democracy, secularism and progress, in the grandest scheme of ideas. (A lot of “Europe” originated in a triangle embracing Crete, Troy, Phoenicia, Egypt, so straddled the Romans’ “Asia”, and the full myth of Europe incorporates that fact: In the Cretan story, Europe was a Phoenician princess abducted by Zeus; so indeed, Europe is a global, transcultural idea.)

The European Union’s construction is the most important historical event since the flawed Greco-Roman empire lost its "feet of clay" (844 CE, see below). Roman feet were indeed made of philosophical clay, and that is why Rome fell, but not Europe. The European Union embodies ever more, in a persuasive way, the advanced philosophical and political principles established since the fall of the Greek and Roman People’s republics. Which fell because of their erroneous philosophical architectures. The collapse of Rome allowed the rebirth of Europe, solidly planted in human reality (technology had allowed the Greco-Romans to forget that reality, as Heidegger would have liked to say clearly).

It sounds grandiloquent, and it is: Europe is a grand locution to overwhelm history with reason.

The USA is nearly the opposite story. From the start, it has been more about overwhelming history the easy way. And it has gone worse recently. The USA has been betrayed by its plutocracy, which is trying a repeat, on an even larger scale, of what it did with Hitler in the period 1920-1945. This time China, the "Middle Kingdom", has replaced the "Third Kingdom".

The maneuver worked well last time, with Hitler. This time it will not work so well, if all the potential victims pay attention, in a timely manner, instead of just belated blood, sweat, tears. Besides, the People’s Republic of China is not necessarily as amenable to manipulation as the Nazis were. China has embraced the fundamental elements of the Western European philosophical tradition, by embracing Marx and the French Communist Party (at its birth, on location!) Thus China has entangled 26 centuries of local philosophy with some of the most modern philosophy (and China’s Colbertism is in full evidence).

Meanwhile, the USA has regressed with Reaganism, a classical return to the jungle and its voodoo. Reaganism has weakened the USA, just when the bill came due for the alliance of big oil with Salafism. Europe is now clearly threatening American supremacy (China, when reasonable, follows the EU rather than the USA). So the attacks against the Euro emanating from the USA have reached the level of classic war propaganda. As the French president pointed out on New Year’s Eve: "The end of the Euro would be the end of Europe." Please weight the meaning: even Hitler did not end Europe.

The propaganda coming from some unwittingly demonic Nobel Prizes so used to rub elbows with the plutocrats, is akin to an attempted elimination of Europe. There is a fine line not to be crossed where calling for the destruction of other people is beyond uncivilized. Insults and distortions become a preliminary to war. Before the Jews got destroyed, they were insulted, and misrepresented. Some of the context the likes of Krugman is trying to make us take for granted is outright lying (mostly, the EU, and the Euro, have been an immense GDP success, even with the recent slump; but reading Krugman, the opposite feeling is conveyed!)

The USA should not assume that European citizens will go on their knees to adore their plutocratic masters. This time, Europe will fight, as a common whole.

It is not because they know no history that ignorant miscreants are excused by history. The Nazis thought they knew history, but what they knew were only a few shards. Pleading ignorance later was no excuse. When the claims are great, so should the justifications be.

Another approach is found below to teach 3,000 years of European history, as demanded by the subject at hand, and in reverse.

Never forget that the word "Europe", in its modern meaning, was used, 13 centuries ago, to describe those who destroyed the Damascus Caliphate, in a series of battles in France (720 to 750 CE, in the first phase of a war which is still going on). And its earlier meaning was just the same, in nearly identical circumstances: democracy fighting tyranny.

At this level of the civilizational debate, it’s all about war. American plutocracy wants to destroy the European Union, because the Union has cracked down on bank bonuses, and the little crowd of vampires within 50 miles of Wall Street cannot stand that outrage against their way of sucking the rest of the universe dry. It’s no accident that Paul Krugman, all inflamed about Europe, is from around that den of thieves.

Krugman knows little about Europe (he just discovered Robert Schuman, see below). So, as Wittgenstein would point out, why does he talk? Well, because the environment that Krugman swims in is all about hating Europe (I use the word after much debate and consideration; no other fits as well, it seems to me, however sad that is).

When the senior Senator of New York made Obama tour the plutocrats of Wall Street, supposedly to raise funds, Obama changed, from a man to a servant. Plutocracy does that. And has always done that. And that is why the Spartans breached diplomatic protocol by throwing the plutocratic envoys down a well: because they wanted to cross a mental and philosophical Rubicon. It was going to be war to hell. That, too, is a European tradition. And it lived strong at Bir Hakeim, in 1942.

Charles Martel ("The Hammer") repeatedly hammered, indeed, the Salafist armies (732-737 CE). That was truly making philosophy into a hammer (Nietzsche borrowed the expression). Well, we live in even grander times, and our weapons, conceptual or not, are even more formidable. Fusion philosophy, here we come…

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PROGRESS AND DEMOCRACY VERSUS PLUTOCRACY AND FASCISM:

"The Economist" itself, the Anglo-American pro-business, pro-Wall Street magazine, pointed out that the Americans ought to stop confusing the European Union and NATO, as it observed that Obama himself, in an editorial to the New York Times, blurred both notions. Obama may be simply ignorant, but as usual, I prefer the more sinister explanation. Indeed, whereas ignorance is bad enough, conspiracy is worse. The wisest prepares for the worst. (Many philosophers have harped exaggeratedly on this theme, claiming the philosophy was only about death.).

Plutocracy is the eternal return of the capture of most by the few, using massively the exponential, which multiplies power (because one lends to power, and power lends, against interest).

As plutocracy is the rule of the few who have all the money-power, it is intrinsically an exploiter of the fascist instinct. That incites the many to follow their leaders in all ways, as long as there is war around. That is why plutocratic leaders always call war to help them out. (This explains in part why the USA is at war in Afghanistan since August 1979.) Fascist government is well adapted to combat, but a disaster for long term intelligence. Thus plutocracy and its associated fascism are intrinsic enemies of the essence of homo, which is intelligence. And always ends up losing to real men, those who know more than golf.

In other words, plutocracy, intrinsically philosophically regressing back to the jungle at war, is the absolute enemy of the European Union, which has to embody philosophical progressivism, because it was, and it is, its essence and its salvation. Philosophy has to progress, because so does technology, the later imprinting and adapting an ever changing ecology. (It’s a bit more complicated than Heidegger comprehended.)

The European colony in America was founded on the principle of Biblical exploitation. Hence the entanglement of the Bible, its holocausts, and the principle of American "exceptionalism" as foremost American objects of superstition (exceptionalism of the Elected People, as found in the Bible, helped by handy holocausts).

Exceptionalism is the fundamental enemy of democratic universalism. Whereas the European Union is trying to overwhelm history with reason, the American union has, historically speaking, solved ethnic rights with annihilation, hypocritically hidden below a pompous discourse to the contrary (a method that the Nazis consciously duplicated in Europe while forgetting that the French and the British were not Indians).

This is a major civilizational difference.

"The Economist" is observing a split between the ways the USA and the EU are solving the unfolding crisis. Below are some more of the reasons why.

Meanwhile Paul Krugman, the Nobel Prize intellectual, revered in Europe, keeps on in the forefront of the struggle against the European Union. (Thus revering Krugman is somewhat self defeating for Europeans; however, I used myself to revere Barack Obama… even the best can slip on greasy hope!) Mr. Krugman, apparently suddenly aware of the historical dimension of Europe, is now trying to say something about this dimension he previously ignored. His feeble attempt, reproduced extensively below, is smashed as the defense of Europe calls for.

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WHEN KRUGMAN DISCOVERS SCHUMAN:

Paul Krugman, the most astounding intellectual the readers of "Social Europe" have ever heard of, is still firing on all cylinders against Europe. But now it has been pointed out to him that there was an historical dimension to making the European economy into what it is.

The notion that the house-management (eco-nomy) is subjugated to what we want the house to be about, has finally trickled down to Mr. Krugman. Mr. Krugman was apparently not aware of it. So he is trying to be more subtle. Here is in its entirety a recent blog post of his (January 2, 2011). It is mostly a quote from Schuman, one of contemporary Europe’s founding fathers. Not that Schuman was advocating a really new train of thought. Similar pro-European discourses were also held in the 1920s, and at a higher level.

The strong push towards European unification of the 1920s got an answer from Wall Street: Adolf Hitler. So I claim (and there is proof). But let’s read the mild mannered Krugman first, as he discovers the European dream, and is anxious to replace it by what he knows and lives best by, the American nightmare:

January 2, 2011, 8:18 am: Krugman’s Long Schuman Quote:

Coal, Steel, and the Euro

The road to the euro began with coal and steel. Here’s Robert Schuman, the French foreign minister, in 1950, proposing the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community:

"Europe will not be made all at once, or according to a single plan. It will be built through concrete achievements which first create a de facto solidarity. The coming together of the nations of Europe requires the elimination of the age-old opposition of France and Germany. Any action taken must in the first place concern these two countries.

With this aim in view, the French Government proposes that action be taken immediately on one limited but decisive point.

It proposes that Franco-German production of coal and steel as a whole be placed under a common High Authority, within the framework of an organization open to the participation of the other countries of Europe. The pooling of coal and steel production should immediately provide for the setting up of common foundations for economic development as a first step in the federation of Europe, and will change the destinies of those regions which have long been devoted to the manufacture of munitions of war, of which they have been the most constant victims.

The solidarity in production thus established will make it plain that any war between France and Germany becomes not merely unthinkable, but materially impossible. The setting up of this powerful productive unit, open to all countries willing to take part and bound ultimately to provide all the member countries with the basic elements of industrial production on the same terms, will lay a true foundation for their economic unification."

And Krugman to gloat: "It’s all there. Economic integration is supposed to serve a dual purpose: development, but also the creation of “de facto solidarity”, leading over time to a “European federation” — which is necessary because of the continent’s history of war."

And Krugman to hammer his Americano-American plutocratic point: "Unfortunately, the euro — unlike the coal and steel pact, the Common Market, the Eurosausage, and all that — was a questionable idea in terms of the underlying economics. And so the long European project is in trouble …"

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AMERICAN PLUTOCRACY ON ANOTHER PLANET?

Which planet has Krugman been on? In terms of human development, in terms of political development, since they have integrated the European Union and its monetary project (the EMU, predecessor of the Euro), Greece, Portugal and Spain have gone from impoverished American engineered dictatorships, to full wealthy democracies. Thanks to the EU, not thanks to the USA.

GDP growth, in Ireland, Greece, Spain, Portugal, has been enormous since those countries entered the European Monetary Union (and it is directly related). And GDP is a small part of the story. (GDP is what plutocrats love, because where they make their profits, all what matters to them.)

Even the CIA site recognizes that Ireland went from a largely agricultural backwater, to a modern technological society, several times richer. And Cameron, the young, wealthy, conservative British PM, was the first and strongest to come to the rescue of Ireland, by proposing a 100 billion dollar lifeline of credit. (Britain is not in the Eurozone, but one of three most industrially important EU countries; Britain was in the EMU before a plutocratic conspiracy knocked it out; then the plutocrats tried the same dirty trick with France, but they broke their fangs, another reason they got to hate the French republic, to add to the 70,000,000 other reasons.)

Notice Krugman’s propaganda method: "Unfortunately, the euro… was a questionable idea in terms of the underlying economics." Krugman presents as a fact something which is an anti-fact.

It is pretty clear that it would make no economic sense if New York and New Jersey, separated only by the Hudson river, used different currencies. So why should France and Germany, separated only by the Rhine, use different currencies? Krugman does not explain. Well, he does not, because he cannot. Nobody could.

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EURO TRUTH: FRANCIA + GERMANIA = SUPERPOWER:

The equation above is the fly in Krugman’s reasoning. France and Germany are unifying, the others can’t beat them, so they have to join them. All the more since Britain, France’s alter ego, after suffering a kind of Stockholm syndrome with the USA, will never be very far from France, and, in particular, no further than Germany is. (Whatever all transatlantic ignoramuses are bellowing in their wilderness.)

Krugman grew up in Long Island, east of Manhattan, and now lives in New Jersey, south of Manhattan. Will that make economic sense that those places would use three different currencies? Krugman says yes…on the other side of the Atlantic.

On his side of the Atlantic, as he explains by comparing Ireland and… Nevada, it makes no sense, because, basically, he says in his simplicity, the USA is an empire, and Europe is not.

It is a vicious logical loop: we, the USA, are an empire, so we can, Europe is not an empire, so it can’t (and we will make sure of it stays that way). Never mind that Ireland is closer to France than Georgia to New Jersey (president Jackson and his Supreme Court annihilated the "Five Civilized Tribes" from Georgia, but nobody eliminated the Irish, this is the only major difference I see; which civilized bit did I miss?)

Using a common currency is all the more important since France and Germany not just sell to each other, but build a lot of important things together, such as nuclear power plants, planes, helicopters and rockets. EADS is the world largest defense contractor, and it’s mostly a Franco-German company.

Krugman knows he would reveal his anti-European agenda too brutally if he declared pompously that France and Germany ought to be monetarily separated. So he prefers to attack Spain, which, with only 45 million inhabitants and 1.5 trillion dollars GDP (USA GDP is 14 trillion), seems like a weak link.

And should also mention Britain and Italy, lands that the Franks freed long ago from their oppressors and impress with their more advanced philosophy (Lombards, Byzantines and Muslims in the case of Italy; let alone Austria that France beat so that the duke of Savoy could be made king of a unified Italy…).

Britain and France are pretty much doing their military in common. Together their military capability is considerable. Just an example; there is a military missile company called MBDA, a European company, a giant in this field. They make the Meteor air to air ramjet interceptor, capable of sustained Mach 4 flight (over 100 kilometers; the engine is German, the guidance French). The Americans tried desperately to prevent the launch of MBDA in the 1990s, with Clinton writing a lot of personal letters to various Brits. Another missile of MBDA is the mostly Franco-Italian Aster 30 (used by the British, French and Italian navies). The Aster family of missiles can move at enormous lateral acceleration, with fins and mid-body rockets (so as not to break up), as you can see:

The Aster 30 can also move at nearly a mile per second. Over 100 kilometers. That gives it anti-ballistic missile capability. Anti ballistic missile capability, the US Navy does not have, and its aircraft carriers are sitting ducks, since the Chinese have developed a ballistic anti-carrier killer, and are gloating on TV shows about it, and also in cartoons visible on the web… Europe is no sitting duck, and the good old USA better understand that fast. Otherwise I have to show them a nuclear submarine that the French are helping Brazil to build.

So what was Krugman talking about already? Optimal currency area? What about optimal defensive area?

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BULLET IN THE HEAD BANKING:

Why is Krugman obsessive about the Euro? Is it because, by talking obsessively about something unrelated he then does not have to worry about the banks? And how unfair the present system of creating riches and power for banks, by impoverishing everybody else is?

So Krugman talks about the Euro, or the Yuan, because that makes his life more comfortable. Also it serves his masters, located in the Greater New York area, making life even more comfortable. Obsessing about the Chinese currency allows American leaders to not explain to us that China’s economic expansion is financed by its giant banks, the world’s largest. Chinese bankers cannot speculate with the People’s money, except to build real things. Otherwise, a bullet is waiting for them.

The engineers and scientist who lead China make sure of that. In the West, instead, the bankers have been able to get away with threatening the economy with a bullet in the head, lest the People serves them on their knees. On one side the People’s republic of china, on the other, the Union of Servants of America. In the middle, the European Union, operating an in between system, which has confiscated most of the banksters’ bonuses.

But let’s go back to Krugman’s relentless campaign. it seems as if he was paid to destroy Europe. I am not paid to defend Europe, but I will, in the best traditions of the knights with shining armor.

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EUROPEAN UNIFICATION FROM THE NAZIS’ PYRRHUS VICTORY OVER FRANCE:

But let me congratulate belatedly the esteemed Paul, for going back to the sources, and trying to acquire some historical gravitas. Now he dates back the creation of Europe to Schuman. Well, there is more than 2,000 years of history weighting on the subject. The Franks had learned, early on, from the mistakes of Augustus.

Mistakes are a funny thing: the Merovingians and Carolingians learned from Augustus’ folly, but the lesson was forgotten later, and this for 1,000 years. But let’s retrace history in reverse.

Let’s go further back, just before Schuman. In 1945, everybody was very angry against Germany, which lost a third of its territory, and suffered 17 million refugees, 2 million of which died. But that was in the east. France, instead, exerted restraint. She did not try to integrate the left bank of the Rhine (although it was the core of the Salian Franks’ territory, known as "Austrasia").

By 1945 the French leadership (from politicians, to generals and academics) had progressed so much intellectually that it had realized unification with Germany was the only solution. Unification had existed earlier. The last case of willing unification was in 1812, when Napoleon’s Grand Army integrated hundreds of thousands of German soldiers (total size of the Grand Army was nearly 700,000).

The folly of the separation of France and Germany was demonstrated when the French hater in chief, Adolf Hitler, took control of France in 1940. Adolf wanted to destroy France completely, and was happy with holding six million French prisoners inside Germany, after annexing vast swathes of France, submitting the rest to terror, deporting here and there to their death, hundreds of thousands of French civilians.

Why so much rage? The Nazis had suffered enormous losses of some of their more idealistic soldiers and officers in the Battle of France (maybe above 100,000 dead, although they tried their best to keep the number secret). Also Hitler was not ready to fight a world war. His preparations would have been complete by 1945. Because of France, the way he looked at it, he found himself in the world war, six years too early. Instead of spending these six years preparing for war, he would spend them, losing the war. He could well see that he had no chance to defeat France’s not so tender half, Britain, and he had to attack his old ally Stalin, to make sure he won’t fight on two fronts (!). At least, that’s what he explained to his generals (who were not amused).

Armaments and Industry Minister Albert Speer bluntly told Hitler that he would never win the war without some French industrial help, so he had to allow the revival of French industry. That enraged Hitler to high heavens… But Adolf himself had to agree that Speer was right. After the defeat of the Afrika Korps at Bir Hakeim in 1942 by a French army, in a modern version of Thermopylae, that was a particularly bitter pill to swallow. After the Axis disaster at Bir Hakiem, Hitler had explained to its cabinet that, once again, there was a proof that the French were the best soldiers, and so France was very dangerous, and thus had to be annihilated. (See Note.)

Speer won the argument. Later Hitler sent his most fanatical Nazi general to destroy Paris, but, instead, the general, known as the "Butcher of Sevastopol", negotiated an armistice with the French resistance, and surrendered to the famous French Second Armored division. World War Two proved to thoughtful French and Germans that fighting each other was not just hopeless, but self defeating. Nor was staying apart a valid proposition either. As a further look back deep in history shows:

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FRANCO-GERMAN APARTHEID FROM FRENCH HAUGHTINESS:

The Franks had spent four centuries extending their Franco-Roman empire. After the Treaty Of Verdun (843 CE). Paris stayed capital in some sense, but the Imperium Francorum , the empire of the Franks, was divided in three.

Divisions often happened, and the Franks had always reunited in the past four centuries. The reason was that the Imperium Francorum was more a philosophical union than a dynastic one. In theory, there were no dynasties among Germans (although that was certainly not true in practice). Meanwhile, Western Franks (capital Paris) were supposed to propose the candidate who would reign over the Eastern part (Germania-Italia). And they did this for a century or so.

However, the western part had its own worries (tremendous invasions by Danes, and Vikings, which they empire was initially defenseless from, all the more since some sort of Mongols, the Avars, were attacking in the east).

The west was busy electing its own kings, while looking down on the uncouth easterners. So, although the French king was emperor ("in His own kingdom"), candidates for the top job in Germania-Italia were not proposed anymore. And two-thirds of the Frankish kingdom got in the habit of electing their own emperor for the "Holy Roman Empire" (which was neither of these qualifiers, as Voltaire pointed out). And the haughty French stayed out, except when they invading, or being invaded a bit.

Progressive estrangement followed. Only 11 centuries later did it become perfectly clear that estrangement was unsustainable. as I just said, even Hitler had to admit to that apartheid with France was self defeating.

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EUROPA AS RESPUBLICA CHRISTIANA:

Since I am going in reverse, I may as well go all the way. Everybody has misunderstood and mislabeled the Dark Ages. The darkness was really about Christian theocratic terror, the metaphysical context of Late Roman fascism.

It mainly failed in the West, because the "FEDERATED" German tribes which constituted, by 450 CE, most of the Roman army in the "Pars Occidentalis" agreed neither with the fascism, nor the unequal society (at least not with them on the bottom), nor with the sexism. On top of that, the Franks, who had helped Constantine conquer the empire, had a vision of the Church in the old Roman republican way, namely infeodated to the state.

That was the crucial twist on (Saint) Augustine’s declaration that:"Omnium Christianorum una respublica est ( Civitate Dei, XXV. 1). The Franks saw themselves as re-establishing the "Respublica Christiana". Respublica first, Christiana an adjective.

"He who ordains the fate of kingdoms and the march of the centuries, the all-powerful Disposer of events, having destroyed one extraordinary image, that of the Romans, which had, it was true, feet of iron, or even feet of clay, then raised up, among the Franks, the golden head of a second image, equally remarkable, in the person of the illustrious Charlemagne." (Notker the Stammerer, monk of Saint Gall, 844 CE).

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HARD EURO CORE IS AT LEAST 220 MILLION PEOPLE STRONG:

So France and Germany, after aborted attempts under the fascist Napoleon (and, to some extent the demoniac Hitler), and in the 1920s, have decided to re-unite. It is as simple as that. Having a common currency is a necessary part of the re-unification. It makes zero sense that France and Germany would use different currencies. True, France is less austere, but, even more than Britain, she has a strong birth rate (the highest of the white race, with tiny Ireland).

Then economics of power play in. France and Germany together is a super power. It’s bigger than Japan in all ways, and its population is growing. stuck between france and Germany are some historical debris.

The Netherlands (where the Salian Franks came from), was known to the Roman as "Germania Inferior", and Belgium was the most ferocious of the Germano-Celtic nations.

In other words, the Benelux (population 30 millions) is an integral part of the Franco-German ensemble (population 150 millions). Separating Austria and Northern Italy is impossible too (the historical ties are that strong). So we observe one nation, in the middle of Europe with 220 million people. It is only natural that it would use just one currency.

Obviously the outliers (Spain, etc.) cannot stay out. Be it only because the economic ties are so great. It’s as simple as that. Spain is 0 kilometer away from France. whereas California is 4,000 kilometers away from Washington DC. In the fullness of history, zero distance, such as between Spain and France, demands unification.

In the past, even as recently as three centuries ago, a country like France was full of internal borders, every few leagues. People regretted the Roman empire, and the empire of the Franks, and their free circulation of goods and people (no borders!) Well the Greco-Roman empire is back. Just better. Now it incorporates Estonia and Finland.

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AMERICAN NATIONALISM WANTS TO KEEP EUROPE SUBJUGATED:

The voice of Paul Krugman is, unfortunately that, of nationalism. And not any nationalism. American nationalism. To keep California close to Washington, nationalist Americans know the cheapest way is to put some distance between Spain and France. They know that super power in Europe means less power in the USA.

Then a modern equivalent of Texaco could put back in power a modern equivalent of Franco (without too much intervention from the French and other European democrats).

Well, it’s not going to happen: Europeans have been learning their history. Although they would profit even more by studying the role of the USA as a double faced Janus in the rise of Hitler. Something my sites cover lyrically.

Verily, there is no big Euro crisis (except in American minds). France and Germany are going to unite fiscally (subjugating Switzerland fiscally was just warm-up). The Europeans are not building Europe by falling asleep at the wheel, and getting nothing done, except war overseas and plutocrats all over. The US governmental system does not work. It has two president: the one in the White House, who says he is black, and Congress, which is not even a person. And now the Supreme Court has decided corporations were private persons capable of secret political donations.

Most European government have real power, so they can reform and change, and they change even their constitutions continually, because of the European construction.

What the Europeans do, since they are great political athletes, is to pose themselves challenges, and then solve them. The Euro is one of these challenges. And there is one rule, one very important rule: the problem should be solved "par le haut" 9through the top). That means that only higher philosophical solutions are acceptable. Going back down to the jungle, as the Nazis did, was a solution through the bottom, and solutions through the bottom are unacceptable.

The Europeans observed that there was a banking crisis. And that it was caused by bonuses, and the "moral hazard" associated to them. So the Europeans cracked down on bonuses. And now American academics are howling to the winds. Many on them are (secretly) on the payroll of major financial “institutions” (there are no disclosure rules for economists).

Well, we will see. The American banks are getting deeper into their mess, since Bushama gave them the capital to do again what they did before. They will do it again, they are already doing it again. I guess American academics ought to howl about Europe even louder…Their masters need cover.

Europe is as broad a tapestry of history.  I did not even get into Augustus’ mistake, and Caesar’s strategy about Europe

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Patrice Ayme

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Welcome Estonia!

ESTONIA JOINS EUROPE, AMERICAN LEFT COMPLAINS.

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Wonderful news for Europeans: the Baltic republic of Estonia is joining the Eurozone. The Eurozone is the set of 17 countries, where the Euro is officially authorized by the European Central Bank as currency (other countries have been using the Euro without official authorization). Many American economists, even some who are considered left wing, are enraged.

One could only expect Americans of the monetary type, to be exasperated. American monetarism is intrinsically nationalistic, just as European monetarism is intrinsically transnational.

The invasion of Estonia by the Euro is a further encroachment of Europe into Europe. This undermining of the American empire by the European imperialists invading Europe has got to stop! If American easy money (easy for American bankers that is: hard for others) cannot reign in Estonia anymore, what’s next? A European crack down on bank bonuses? Who is going to pay for American politicians’ souls?

The fascist hydra has many heads, and some in unexpected places, on the left. It is true that, as long as Estonia is in Euros, Americans can forget about buying there. And if the dollar eases further into nothingness, it will be only more so, thus undermining a cheap trick the USA has used a lot.

“Social Europe” journal readers found Paul Krugman the most influential left wing thinker. This is really pathetic. What is next? Will “socialist” Hitler’s nationalistic conceptions for Europe be celebrated?

Let me explain. I respect and appreciate Krugman. He is good to me personally, and I am grateful.

However, Krugman wants European countries to devaluate when they are in trouble, so that they can take advantage of other European countries, a stone’s throw away. Don’t ask on which neighbor the stone falls, it falls for thee, says Krugman, and he smirks, claiming to be unaware of the double meaning. Europeans fighting each other with competitive devaluations has been done hundreds of times before. Europeans know where it leads, because they have studied history.

Just ask the Germans. They can be lyrical on devaluation, since they saw it brought by Dr. Schacht, a friend of JP Morgan, the American super banker, who later brought that other gift of the cheap type, Hitler.

Krugman’s love for Europe is fundamentally not that much different from Stalin’s. The more independent little European countries there were, fighting each other, the happier Stalin was. And the happier Paul Krugman advocates one should be. This new trade theory Krugman is famous for is strangely reminiscent of the Nazis’ “New Order”. Let the strongest win over the jungle, by eating others.

To help Ireland, the way Krugman sees it, it would be best that Ireland devaluate its currency and declare war on Europe, economically speaking (and economic war is a preliminary for the real thing). Same for Spain, Portugal, Greece, Belgium… Let them all leave the Eurozone and cheapen their currencies, and soon the USA will come and tell them which leaders they should have, as in the old times. American order will have been re-established. Uncle Barack will be reigning again, and Krugman, his prophet, may become just as rich.

It is sad that Paul does not seem to understand why the terrible wars of the twentieth century happened, and killed about 100 million Europeans. That holocaust was caused by this exact same desire to find specious nationalistic solutions with the neighbors all around, to their detriment. Instead of finding the solutions inside, war outside was the way. The way to hell. And make no mistake: devaluation is war.

Krugman himself argues frantically that China is making war on the USA with its undervalued currency, but then he advocates that Spain ought to make war on France by devaluating its currency. War across the Pacific becomes salvation across the Pyrenees. Incoherence can be funny, but brings a question: who is Krugman really working for? The Comedy Channel or the War Department?

I am not making this up: many times Paul Krugman explained that it was easier and faster to stick it to the neighbors, through a devaluation. What about just nuking the neighbor, and taking over its territory? Would not that be even faster?

Krugman explained that the problem with internal re-adjustment (by opposition to an instantaneous devaluation) was the duration of the pain. By that obsessive krude-man measure, nothing would beat a French strategic nuclear submarine unleashing 50 thermonuclear warheads on Spain, and then there would be no more Spain, hence no more Spanish pain.

Would that devaluation make Spain more worthy? Or would it make Spain more worthy for American plutocrats, and then they could pay uncle Barack and professor Krugman even more? Worthy for whom, that is the question…

 Contrarily to the Spain of Krugman’s competitive nightmares, the real Spain just inaugurated still another very high speed (400km/h, 250 mph) train line, this one between Madrid and Valencia. Should Spain devaluate so that American plutocrats can buy that very high speed train line for pennies on the dollar? Is that what Krugman really wants? Is it not what was done in Argentina, buying a big part of Patagonia with dollars, when the natives’ currency had conveniently collapsed?

I know, I know, the busy Barack makes all his money writing children books while president, because he has time on his hands, since everybody attends on him, and he just has to read that teleprompter which was obligingly put in his line of sight. It’s not like the plutocrats give him money directly for all to see. He is just gifted, very smart, and if he gets the Nobel Prize in physics, and lots of money from lots of patents, that would prove my point even more.

All of us who do not support plutocracy can appreciate the errors of our ways, every day that Pluto makes, giving us a harder time, and we brought this on us, because we did not navigate well.

Krugman always insist upon the expediency of devaluations: it’s the economic equivalent of a bullet in the head, so it’s good. Once upon a time, Hitler was fond to explain that, thanks to the monarchy he had established (“Drittes Reich”), instantaneous decisions could be taken, including breaking contracts and reversing alliances. Hitler had just to decide what he wanted that day. And it could be done that day. The way Krugman claims to like it. Just like a devaluation.

Example: after running an electoral campaign foaming at the mouth about Poland occupying Germany, within a year Hitler had concluded a non aggression pact with Poland. Hitler’s Germany, in total violation of the spirit of his electoral campaigning recognized Poland’s borders and ended a decade old economically damaging customs war.

Having Hitler as “Guide” was very expedient. For a while. Fundamentally this is what Krugman also proposes, as he puts expediency above all and any other political principle.

Speaking of expediency, since the nationalistic spirit of Hitler is extolled once again in these political matters, let’s remember that Adolf found expedient to steal from the Jews, to create a Nazi economical miracle for his supporters.

This is not an obsolete example. Reaganomics is another example of Hitleronomics, just a bit more subtle, and much more patient. Reaganomics creates an economic miracle for its most ardent supporters, in the USA, and abroad, by redistributing riches to the hyper rich who then mesmerize the population into following them, thanks to their ownership of all and any media. In other words, Reagan do to most what Hitler did to the Jews… but Reagan and his followers, do it in all legality. (The extermination of civilians in the “Third Kingdom” was not legal, according to the laws of said kingdom: the Nazi leadership hid what they were doing… even to most Nazis.)

To given even more to their hyper rich supporters, the Reaganosaurs just borrow, in the name of the American People to their accomplices the Chinese. (Dangerous accomplices, sure, just as Hitler was, but it turned out well, for the American century.) They don’t have one very high speed train lines to show for it. They use the money strictly to make more billionaires (see note).

Krugman’s little proposal that every little tribe ought to go its little way is a long story gone stale. In May 1945, the perfidious Irish regime, still full of hatred for the Anglo-Saxons, sent condolences to the Third Reich for the death of its esteemed Chancellor and President, Adolf Hitler. Is this what Krugman wants to go back to? Should Auschwitz have its own currency, as we are at it? The free slave, as managed by Prescott Bush? Just asking.

The way to do modern politics in Europe was, instead to welcome Ireland. As it is to welcome Estonia.

After joining the European Union in 1973, Ireland (Éire), then a very poor country, transformed itself from a largely agricultural society into a modern, technologically advanced “Celtic Tiger” economy. But European Union help, direct or indirect, was the foremost factor in this transformation, as it was for Greece, Portugal, or Spain. Europe is an Union, and it is strong because it is an Union. It helps, but then it should be helped too.

Unsurprisingly the word “Union”, long proud and mighty, is not far from becoming a dirty word in the unfolding USA. Krugman says it would be better if Europe was a disunion. That is what the plutocrats say. Their banksters don’t like that Europe is now preventing them to get bonuses, the way they used to have them. You know, by ruining the companies they then ordered the states to pay for, so they can do it again. And again. That is what is ruining Ireland. Paying for the plutocrats. Ireland’s problems are not about the Euro, as Paul Krugman would like us to believe. As the plutocrats would like us to believe. That’s a red herring.

Since we now all know that Paul Krugman is revered in Europe, it is time for him to understand that somebody in the position of mental authority that he enjoys presently should not encourage the sort of nationalism, especially when combined with pop socialism, which brought such a terrible outcome as the war of 1914-1945.

What mood carried a lot of Europe from bad to worse, from 1918 to 1933? Nationalism. The thing Krugman wants more of, because it is so expedient.

In the post 1918 era, the deepest divide between nationalists and genuine internationalist Europeans. It was not between fascism and communism, as those two liked us to think. Even the French communists, as they sang the “Internationale” abided by it, since they took their orders from hyper nationalist Moscow. Their fellow fascists from Italy and Germany were even worse, as nationalism, they claimed, was their guiding light.

In truth, Western European fascists were taking their orders from plutocrats, the richest bankers and industrialists, many of them American. Those who think that Benito Mussolini was hung from an ESSO (= EXXON) gas station in Milan, for no good reason, should study history a bit more. The Italians knew well who owned that puppet, that Mussolini, and it was duly returned to its master. Uncle Barack will cry us a river about “Anti-Americanism“. Look: that river is so big, it can be sailed on.

Estonia is pulling away from its oppressor to the east. In the early onset of World War Two, the USSR, then allied with German national-socialists, invaded the Baltic republics. The Finns fought back, and very hard, mauling the Russian bear. That is why Finland is in the Eurozone. It is not about the context Krugman worries about.

Little known by those who remade history in a way that suits them, in 1940, the democracies, France and Britain, intended to crush the perfidious Nazi collaborating state, Sweden. Sweden, hiding behind “neutrality”, was busy arming Hitler in more ways than one.

Sweden is not presently in the Eurozone, although it is bound by law to integrate it at some point. After occupying Hitler’s loving and caring Sweden, France and Britain planned to cross the Baltic sea, and rescue Finland from Stalin’s monstrous USSR, Hitler’s ally. The war was going according to plans, when France suddenly fell (and the dispersion of the French Air Force was a factor in that fall, since only half of the French Air Force was in metropolitan France at the time).

Europeans have had enough of big powers manipulating small states, because they have small armies, small populations, small currencies. So now they are grouping together, overcoming their little differences, to resist the likes of the USA and the USSR (well, OK, maybe Uncle Vladimir will make nice now that he is confronted with irresistible force).

Giant banks which have harnessed the fractional reserve system to create as much money as they need to invest in derivatives, are the proximal problem the West is having at this point. We don’t hear too much on that subject from the esteemed Paul Krugman. Actually we don’t hear him at all on this subject. He prefers GDP, and stimulating by de-taxing..

The common currency of the common European People is not the problem of the west, at this point. It is just made to look so, by relentless propaganda. Time to grow up out of subjugation. At the same moment when the European Union cracked down on bank bonuses, all what Paul Krugman could do was to address condolences to poor Estonia, which he presents as a victim of those lying Europeans.

Although Krugman’s economic blog is number one in the USA, he has forgotten the big picture… except if one considers that the big picture is the USA, and everything else is a small and nasty critter.

It is actually telling that the European Union has cracked down on banks bonuses, whereas the USA has not. Even though the Congress, the Senate, and the presidency of the USA were controlled by supposedly progressive democrats. Clearly, they did not want to progress. Why? Because the truth is that they have a vested interest in the abusive financial system, as it is. So they made it so, that it would keep on going, same as it ever was.

This persistence in financially abusive behavior does not just say that the USA is subjugated to banksters. It also say that the American and international banking system as it presently exists, is an instrument of subjugation of American plutocracy on the rest of the world, and, in particular, Europe. And American leaders know that well. (But don’t wait with bated breath that they will tell you so: it is not on Barack’s teleprompter.)

Paul’s object of admiration, the British citizen known as Keynes, objected strongly to the dollar as world currency. Keynes was head of the relevant commission at Bretton Woods, in 1944, charged with setting up a world currency (first by pegging all currencies together within 1%, a system later used for construction of the Euro).

The Americans insisted that the US dollar ought to be the world reserve currency. Keynes blocked the world dollar take-over. But the Americans cheated on the documents to be signed, substituting what they wanted at the last moment, without Keynes knowing. Paul Krugman talks about Keynes all the times, in glowing terms. But he never mentions that story. That’s steering the context to calmer and misleading waters.

It may be time to stop cheating on the logic. Expediency in economics, apparently Krugman’s preferred tactic, is only advantageous to the plutocrats, because they can run away from the law, let alone ethics, and People’s economics. By the time stupor has been replaced by regulations and laws, the plutocrats have already move to greener pastures. This will go on, until no pastures are left, and they have stolen the entire world. This sort of things has happened before, that is how so called aristocracies arise.

Paul would say: no, it’s not like that, I am looking at GDP. Well, look, instead at what a devaluation does to GDP, in, well, dollars. And, as I said already with buying Spain on the cheap, that is the whole point. Just as Americans can still buy oil cheap, because of their world reserve currency, each time a new country joins the Eurozone, the time of reckoning comes closer, and American supremacists tremble ever more. Hence the rage about Estonia.

And what does GDP measure anyway? It should be called Gross Demonic Product, for all I know. GDP measures whatever American plutocracy thinks is important, because it makes a lot of money with it. Then it tries to persuade American sheep that they ought to buy more of whatever makes GDP shine.

With tremendous traffic jams and tremendously expensive health care, GDP can go to the moon in the USA, while common people go down to hell. GDP has just become an instrument to indoctrinate Americans. Seriously, if a doctor’s visit and the prescribed drugs cost nada in Europe, how much is contributed to European GDP? Nada. But the same purchases could easily contribute thousands of dollars to the USA’s GDP, before people crawl into a hole and die (USA life expectancy went down significantly in 2009).

Europeans don’t need to be as obsessed by GDP as American economists are: they have other, much higher values, and their societies and lack of noxious GDP shows it.

Estonian austerity is no fallacy, as many American left wing economists would like us to believe. The hydra of cheap imperial fascism shall be defeated by proper thinking, and gravitas, independently applied.

Congratulations Estonia, and welcome!

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Patrice Ayme

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Note on welfare for the rich, Reagan style: Obama taxes the hyper richest 400 incomes at a rate of (no more than) 17%. They make an average of 340 million dollars income. A normal European taxation rate on these critters would be 50%. Thus each critter saves 120 million dollars relative to its European equivalent. Cost: 50 billion dollars, borrowed directly to foreigners (who get paid in return by American jobs). And this is only part of the support for the hyper rich. The self serving  belief of American leadership in serving the rich has sucked the economy of the USA dry of much profitable investments: the money is created inside the USA by borrowing from abroad, and then sent back abroad.