Welfare State Fares Well

WHEN THE STATE MANAGES WITH ALL EMOTIONS, IT’S A FULL HOUSE.

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

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Abstract: Eco-Nomy is House-Management. A house is ruled by emotions. Narrowing the emotions to only a few of them, such as fear and greed, shrinks the house’s mind, and makes it stupid and unqualified.

This apparent abstraction has very practical consequences, as the example of the German socio-economy shows. The German model rejects the model where Wall Street reigns supreme. In the Wall Street model, as it exists now, small shareholders have become irrelevant.  instead financial conspiracies, and the conspirators who animate them, are supposed to steer the economy for the best (as proven by the rise of financial profits to 40% of all profits, from a historical base of 8%).

Instead, the German model is more of an old fashion paternalistic capitalism by owner-entrepreneurs. American economists who believe only in giving ever more free money to banks which are too big to fail, or flail, ought to ponder German superiority.

A narrow, Fear & Greed, Wall Street interpretation of the economy (“Profits next week!“) has come to rule the USA, and much of the West. This may have originated from the faltering of Anti-Americanism, since the USSR croaked. The failure of the Soviet plutocracy was interpreted by the masses, erroneously, as an American success, as if the well deserved death of a plutocracy justified another.

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

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

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

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

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

The Costa Concordia leaned one way, then the other, making it impossible to lower many rescue boats. This sort of thing was not supposed to happen ever since the Titanic (which was less than half the mass of the Concordia).

Even the Titanic was better designed in the sense that it stayed upright, which allowed to lower the insufficient number of rescue boats: the contemporary cruise ships stand twenty stories tall over water, but have only a draught of 8 meters. So, whereas in the Second World War it was standard to flood the compartments of a ship such as the 32,000 ton aircraft carrier Enterprise (CV-6), to keep them from capsizing, one cannot do so with modern cruise ships.

The ship which sank was 114,000 tons. The world’s largest cruise ship, the (also) European made Allure of the Seas, is 240,000 tons, but has only a draught of 9 meters. If its water tight compartments are as well designed as the ones of the Costa Concordia, it’s a disaster waiting to happen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

During Obama State of the Union speech the Steve Jobs widow, a blonde parody, was next to the first lady (does that make her the second lady for a day?). The Steve Jobs widow is on countless boards, including Stanford, being Steve Jobs widow (that’s how plutocracy works: plutocrats get on all the boards, congratulating each other for their braininess, until there are only plutocrats on the boards, and then they take plutocratic decisions exclusively… very differently from Germany, where union representatives are on the boards of company, by law! In Europe, the lack of taste of plutocrats and their consorts parading at the head of the state as if they owned it, tends to be kept under wraps… ever since 1789… But American plutocrats are persuaded that no outrage is high enough to get the American People angry…).

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BAD APPLES, GOOD GERMANY:

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

This is confusing today’s Germany, and Hitler’s Germany. Hitler’s big companies were made in Wall Street: for example IG Farben a made in Wall Street monopoly devised by Wall Street to turn around the anti-monopoly laws passed under president Teddy Roosevelt (there is a cover-up about the theme of Hitler and Wall Street on the Internet; nowadays there are firms whose main business is to manipulate Internet rankings and data; actually the cover-up started in 1941-1942, when American inspectors brandishing the trading-with-the-enemy act found out that the rot was so deep, it was better to cover it up…).  

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

“Apple employs very few people in this country.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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INTELLIGENCE IS A SOCIAL PHENOMENON, GREED IS ASOCIAL:

Make no mistakes; a lot of American high tech success is due to the size of the American market, not the fact that Silicon Valley’s garage people are more clever than European engineers. The main problem of Europe, one that a crude man from New Jersey would deliberately refuse to understand, is that Europe is all too fragmented.

An example is the Patent System. Right now a European inventor has to apply to a patent in every country, so it takes a lot of time, and that is up to five times more expensive than applying to a patent in the USA. This allows the American venture capitalists to act like vultures and pick and chose whatever start-up tech they detect in Europe, and fly away with it, thanks to the big amplification system they can use in the USA (some cackled with satisfaction to my face about it).

That’s why the Facebook system is American, and not French. And why Obama kisses the COO of Facebook with photographers present, every three months at least.

But beware! Vultures can feast on monkeys, but that does not make them more intelligent.

(The Minitel and Skyrock were French predecessors to Google and Facebook. They were imitated by American products. The invention and use of the Internet by CERN did not translate in a commercial product, because American businessmen did it first: the fragmented and intellectual European market pales relative to the giant, profit oriented American one, and all the business conspiracies it has established, with the active complicity of the politicians. That is why Facebook moved from Boston to the Silicon Valley, center of the spider web; as Obama knows very well… Since he comes down there to milk the friendly plutocrats every few months with 38,500 dollar a plate dinners to make communion with the filthy rich.)

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

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INTELLIGENCE CAN DE DEVOURED BY GREED:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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KURZARBEIT MACHT FREI:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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THE RULE OF FEAR & GREED MAKES PEOPLE STUPID:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The welfare states fares well. Get a grip.

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Patrice Ayme

WILL TO VICE.

Power Is One Thing, Cruelty Another. Willing Them, Human All The Way. Something Civilization Cannot Ignore Anymore.

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 Questions: Nietzsche made the “Will To Power” famous. Is it enough to explain the Dark Side? I claim it’s not.

 Indeed, why is there a “Will To Power”? Is it because there is, in human minds, a natural state of tranquility, and power is not a low hanging fruit, but it has to be willed? People have to decide to acquire power, first?

 Why not a “Will To Love”? Then? Does not the fact that there is a need for a Will To Power, but no need for a Will To Love, show that Love is more primordial than Power?

 And is the “Will to Power” enough to explain all the vice found in history, or is there something even more terrible, something the great religions all guessed? Yes, there is! So roll over Nietzsche!

 And I say: What about The Will To Vice? (In French: Volonte’ de Nuire, which is actually better because more encompassing.) Power gives the ability to deploy force, thus to act. Vice is the desire to hurt. And, if there is such a thing as striving to inflict pain, why is vice so alluring?

 We have to dig deep in the psychobiology of the genus Homo to answer these questions.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

THE WILL TO CRUELTY:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

 Patrice Ayme

***

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

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

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

Aphorism January 2012

***

Species Shifting North, Intelligence Left Behind:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Where is everybody?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

If You Want To Save the Biosphere, Push Tech:

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

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

***

Wind Fall-Out:

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

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

***

Institutionalized insanity Versus Thinking Right:

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

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

***

(More) Direct Democratic Keeps Bankers At Bay:

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

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

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

***

The Plutocrats Cash Out And Shame Does Not Count:

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Why Do We Want To Always Support Winners?

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

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

***

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

Pe Romaneste: So happiness must be an accident.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

***

Plutocrats Love Death Indeed:

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

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

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

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

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

***

Hormuz Crisis Versus Suez Crisis: Spot The Difference!

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

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

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

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

***

No Change, No Life!

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

***

Cool Is Not Cool:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

France anti-genocide law denounced by Turkey:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

We Are Truth Machines.

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

***

 Patrice Ayme

GDP Liars

HOW PLUTOCRACY FOSTERING XENOPHOBIA IS SUPPORTED BY CROOKED STATISTICS. 

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

HOW GENOCIDE STARTS

FROM LUTHER TO HELL:

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

LUTHER = HITLER?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

No, I am not making this up.

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

CHARLES WILLIAM FERDINAND,

Duke of Brunswick-Luneburg.

***

How genocide as a cultural habit starts, indeed….

“CITY OF PARIS TO MILITARY EXECUTION and COMPLETE DESTRUCTION”

Get it? That was a year before the “Terreur”. Hence the terror was INITIATED and caused by the plutocrats, those self-declared “sovereigns” attacking France in July 1792… And, as I said, in this light, the monstrous crimes against humanity of 1914 and Auschwitz are put in the different light of blatant cultural habit of Germanic “sovereigns”….

***

CRIME DOES NOT ALWAYS PAY:

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

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

***

DEFINE INFAMY, THEN CRUSH IT WITH HIGH TAXES:

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

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

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

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

***

Patrice Ayme

Peak Cheap Oil Passed.

Expensive Oil Means No Oil.

January 1, 2012

By Patrice Ayme

In nature, for reasons not clear to me, distribution laws often follow “Normal Distributions” (aka “Bell Curves“, because they look like bells cut in half). Henri Poincare’ himself, admitted that he found Normal Distributions mysterious, and that experimentalists believed theorists had established them, whereas theorists believed experimentalists had done so… Poincare’ contributed to probability theory as he did in so many subjects, with his characteristic honesty.

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

1. Suppose the phenomenon at hand satisfies a Bell Curve distribution law.
2. Identify, from know data, the inception of said curve, hence the curve itself.
3. Read out on the graph its extent and peak.

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

Due to deep off shores discoveries, a new technology, the peak was displaced to 2005 (as it turned out). However, as the cheap oil was depleted oil prices went up, making it economic, in appearance, to get oil from tar sands, and ever deeper underwater drilling. The cost to the companies did not reflect the true cost to the economy of society at large.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Actually there is such a notion as EROEI (Energy Return On Energy Invested). An energy source is exploitable when the EROEI is well above 1. Nuclear energy gets a very positive EROEI (even with any waste disposal!) because its energy density is a million times higher than that of fossil fuels.

Oil production is meeting a ceiling. The most recent graph from the USA government, which I have been unable to copy, as my computer system plus WordPress refuses now to copy any picture (!), and will erase my posts if i try (!!!) shows a pronounced production dip.

It is found in the Nature article (published weeks after the initial version of this essay): “Climate policy: Oil’s tipping point has passed: There is less fossil-fuel production available to us than many people believe. From 2005 onwards, conventional crude-oil production has not risen to match increasing demand. We argue that the oil market has tipped into a new state, similar to a phase transition in physics: production is now ‘inelastic’, unable to respond to rising demand, and this is leading to wild price swings. Other fossil-fuel resources don’t seem capable of making up the difference.”

The reason for this is that fracking’s production falls off quickly, so it’s no long term solution, just a flash in the pan..

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Apparently we are far from having reached peak impudence!