WWII Details Worth Examining

MUCH OF UNEXAMINED WWII IS RELEVANT TODAY

[And It is Not An Accident That They Are Carefully Unexamined!]

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Abstract: World War Two, Nazism, everything, and everybody connected to them make for an unending source of lessons in many realms. Some of these truths are eternal, they were taught by history many times before. Nazism was made possible by not knowing, or deliberately ignoring, or, even, cynically exploiting, many of these lessons, with evil purpose.

Certainly Julius Caesar, happening on the scene in 1936, would have known what to do. He had seen even worse before. But Caesar was at the head of the Populares. He was both a plutocrat, if there ever was one, and somebody who wanted to rise above that condition, for the good of the People, not to say civilization (that’s why he was assassinated by plutocratic senators).

Why were the lessons of history forgotten, and new ones not guessed in time, to prevent World War Two? Well, the reason to forget is still in force nowadays.

The establishment breathes, sleeps, dines, or exchanges business, so close together, that it feels that it is better not to examine all the forces behind Hitler, lest they still feed it today.

To avoid talking about that reason, all those connected to the establishment go around, as if they were deaf, blind, mute, mental retards whining that the catastrophes (“Shoah” in Hebrew) of fascism, holocausts, Nazism, World War Two were incomprehensible.

Those connected to the establishment are (implicitly) paid, by their association with the powers which overlord, to claim that WWII viciousness cannot be understood.

But could it be as simple as… the fractional reserve system? OK, that’s not simple, and very obscure to the commons.

What is the establishment made of? Not just people, but of a whole mental universe. First of all the establishment of ideas and moods that allows the reign of the principle of plutocracy.

Certainly in a political system where public money creation, that is power, is privately controlled, while harnessing the power of the state, (that is what the fractional reserve system we have does), is a plutocracy, in the strictest, most classical sense of the term.

The secret never to be thoroughly examined in WWII is that the most prominent elements of the plutocracy were genitors and allies of the fascist powers (although both sides, plutocrats and fascists, claimed to be enemies, to hide their true nature from the mystified populace). For doing this, they exploited some tricks, and those tricks are still in use nowadays.

As long as that dirty secret stays buried, so does the true nature of plutocracy and how it relates to the present civilization: it’s not just about the rule of money, and money being the only power. Plutocracy is also about believing that hell is the only heaven worth having. 

I present here just a few of WWII unexpected avalanches of causes and connections. [This post is partly an answer to one of the commenters who contributes to this site, Old Geezer Pilot, and it does not have the pretention of being more than a jumble of little known facts.]

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CLEAR & PRESENT ABUSE FROM INCOMPLETE, OR FALSE HISTORY:

Wall Street glued six major German chemical companies to make IG Farben, a giant monopoly. Great profit would come from going around American anti-monopoly laws passed by Teddy Roosevelt. In general, most of the individuals and firms which became prominent in Germany after World War One were entangled with industrialists and financiers of the USA.

This was just an instance of the sort of interference in the German socio-economy that arose from the other side of the Atlantic. There many others.

For example Dr. Schacht (PhD, 1899) was a pawn of Mr. JP Morgan (founder of the bank JP Morgan, and so mighty he personally put an end to a Wall Street crash in 1907). Schacht became Germany’s most important finance official after WWI (although he had been sacked for corruption by his commanding general during the occupation of Belgium). Schacht engineered the German hyper inflation of 1923, as part of a devious campaign to not compensate for the enormous deliberate damage inflicted on France, from the flooding of mines to the dynamiting of the Coucy castle, the largest Middle Age castle, with the highest dungeon ( French volunteers are still rebuilding it, albeit they barely started to make a dent on that field of stones).

The First World War happened on French soil, invaded by the fascist Prussian army, and the destruction occurred there, but Germany somehow contrived to pose as a victim of big bad France, and the concept of repairing what it had broken. This (absurd)  lesson is taken for granted by many an Anglo-Saxon pseudo intellectual, and is an essential part of the anti-French sentiment in the USA. Even Hitler was not that anti-French.

Dr. H. Schacht later engineered, in the 1930s, the coming to power of Adolf Hitler.

Some, who don’t follow the news, will feel I am rehashing history long gone, and not worth studying.

However, in 2012, German opinion makers systematically warned against providing enough money for the European economy, by brandishing the threat of the hyperinflation that Germany experienced in the 1920s, and conflating it with the Great Depression of the 1930s. As Paul Krugman rightfully pointed out, that was mixing two completely different phenomena from two completely different decades.

The only thing in common between the 1920s, the 1930s and the 2010s has been a common lamentable success by the most influential German opinion makers to persuade the German people that black is white, cold is hot, and criminal insanity is the highest expression of wisdom.

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WHY THE NAZIS HATED FRANCE:

The First World War was a conspiracy from four German generals, dragging two admirals, the Kaiser (depending upon his highly variable mood), and the acolyte of USA president Wilson, House. Although traitors to civilization such as Bertrand Russell wanted Germany to win (something about the Anglo-Saxon race, same as Col. House), the British recovered their inner French, and allowed France to win.

At the battle of the Marne of early September 1914, multiple counterattacks by French army corps between or around German army corps, nearly cut-off the main German armies.

The BEF, British Expeditionary Force, ten divisions, was helpful to the more than 100 French divisions engaged (although the BEF had to whipped into shape, as it had started to flee way south of Paris). However, the BEF was not decisive. The Germans retreated desperately, and the front lines stayed blocked for four years afterwards, until the Second Battle of the Marne (when Germany tried all out, punched in a vacuum, as French intelligence had anticipated the blow, followed by a French artillery propped counterattack, which led Germany’s commander to inform the Kaiser that Germany had lost the war).

Hitler was in the midst of it all. His company got killed by the French. Ultimately he was gazed, by the French and suffered a nervous breakdown. Gas had been a German idea, but the French and British caught up on it. Thus Hitler’s hatred of France. After World War One, Germany was smarting from its defeat at the hands of the French Republic, half in size in population (when not counting the French empire).

Once, after the German defeat, a British general was having tea with the top German general, and the German complained they should not have lost the war, but for little problems like the insurrection in Germany, and the fact the treacherous French army had cut-off the food supply of Germany in the south. Amused, the British general struck an ironical tone:“In other words, you would not have lost the war, if you had not been stabbed in the back!”

Ludendorff ran away with the notion. He was one of the founders of the Nazi party (at the time when the Bavarian police was paying Hitler to… spy on the Nazi party!) Another thing the Nazis ran away with was Keynes’ outrageous paper, “The Economic Consequences Of Peace”, where Keynes argued that having liberated Eastern Europe from the German boot was a horrible thing, tied in with the deeply manipulative and nefarious French mentality, which put liberty above profit.

That Keynes is still admired by pseudo Jewish pseudo liberals such as Paul Krugman means that, even among the brightest, some are finding history too hard and complicated for their taste. (Not that I disagree with Keynes in all ways, far from it; but I find his influence on human events nefarious enough to avoid naming anything positive in his glory.)

In any case, the end result was that German fascism had been defeated, but not crushed. Clemenceau (much reviled by Keynes) declared in 1919:“Mark my words. Within twenty years, the Boches will attack us again.” Clemenceau was entirely right (but for the fact that it was the French republic which attacked that time; “Boches” is a derogative for Germans).

A consequence is that German fascists were obsessed by defeating France. Hitler starts “Mein Kampf” ranting against the French, the real enemy. Then, and only then, pages later, he criticizes the Jews. Observing a man dressed all in black, like a crow, Hitler observes:“I asked myself, is that a Jew? Then I realized that this was the wrong question. The right question was: ‘Is this a German?'”

[I am quoting from memory. Nobody can accuse me not to know the classics!]

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EVERYBODY HELPED GERMAN RACIAL FASCISM, BUT FOR THE HATED FRENCH:

France was the greatest military power after November 11, 1918. The French Republic to impose her views fully about what to do next. France insured the freedom of Eastern Europe, liberating several nations, but she was unable to insure her own safety in the West, as the USA opposed this in all sorts of ways (even promising to implement the French idea of the SDN, the Societe des Nations, and then sabotaging it later).

The natural frontier of France is exactly what it was under the Roman empire: the Rhine. The other natural limes was the Danube; in between there was a gap; that gap caused plenty of problem to the Roman army, an hemorrhage that lasted four centuries.

Another natural solution was to conquer “All Men” (Allemagne). That is exactly what the Franks under Clovis embarked on after defeating the Goths.

After Germany’s naked aggression in 1914, which killed more than ten million in Europe alone, the positioning of the French army on the Rhine would have been only natural. (After 1947, France would make to Germany an offer it could not resist: unify and salute; the euro is a means to further the unification).     

However, as far as the USA plutocracy was concerned, France and its enormous empire were juicy targets, as they had been in 1914 (when an alliance was proposed by “Colonel” Wilson, special envoy of USA president Wilson, to the Kaiser). And so were all European empires.

Fascist European regimes supported by American plutocrats were going to be the way the European democracies would be destroyed, and USA rule, after 1945, implemented. OK, there may not have been a central gnome committee underground, the way Obama has a death panel. But I do believe that equivalent ideas were broached in parties. After all, that’s what Manhattan is for. (What else?)

German fascists were fully cooperative, with the machinations of USA based plutocrats, because they did not take the USA seriously. After all, when Jews such as the Warburgs cooperated with Hitler, it could only be viewed as hilarious (certainly Texaco and its oil amused Hitler a lot).

France had limited the German army to 100,000 with the Versailles Treaty, and severely limited the size and nature of heavy German weapons, from tanks to submarines, to battleships. So the (fascist) Germans, to turn around the restrictions of the Treaty, secretly collaborated with a number of countries to develop such weapons. Sweden, Portugal, the USSR, Great Britain, and of course the USA, would be major collaborators in this effort.

The French government, in the late 1920s, warned the German Weimar government that, should this stealth rearmament go on, France would intervene severely.    

Amazingly, Churchill warned France that he would unleash the Royal Air Force on France, if France attacked Germany. That was in 1929. It was also a total violation of one century of entente cordiale, implicit or explicit.

This, meticulously ignored fact, puts a lot of matters in a different light:

1) Churchill was not what he built himself up to be, later. It’s not that Churchill was anti-French the way many USA citizens are nowadays. Far from it. Churchill was a francophile, and spoke excellent French, to the point he used it later during governmental functions. But Churchill also admired, and misunderstood, racial German fascism… Until 1939-1940 (a time when he gave bad advice about the Royal Air Force, which PM Chamberlain did not follow, thankfully). Churchill was also half American and had USA envy, and thus did not understand what American plutocracy was up to (he thought he belonged to that pantheon, and it was OK… Until the war told him it was not OK).

2) France failure to attack Nazi Germany before September 1, 1939 came precisely from the fact its main democratic allies, Great Britain and the USA, were deeply pro-fascism (and mainly pro-German fascism). Being anti-French was a convenient excuse, a seduction of greed (there were all these empires to grab). After January 1933, that pro racial fascism mood turned to a strong pro-Nazi sentiment in the UK and the USA. 

The UK was actively pro-Nazi until 1936. Great Britain allied itself with France firmly only in 1939, when the Spanish republic fell to Hitler, Mussolini and Franco. The USA was mostly pro-Nazi and anti French until 1940.

Although the French Republic got help through the USA “cash and carry” in 1940, pro-Nazi policies in the USA were still active until August 1942, when Prescott Bush was told to stop managing Hitler’s greatest military corporation; IBM’s Watson, among other USA plutocrats, did not stop, though, to help the Nazis, even then! The attitude of the USA varied according to the different actors, considerably. For example, subordinates of Eisenhower told him that the French armored thrust towards Paris was a “difficult task” and that he should help it, even if the French infuriated him (Ike consented to join the Fourth Infantry division).

Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, German generals and their tanks were training… in the Soviet Union. This explains why German generals were so confident, in 1941, that they would crush the USSR. (They were clearly six weeks short, at least to conquer Moscow, and that would have cut-off Leningrad too.)

In 1935, a complex treaty was signed between the United Kingdom and Hitler. The Third Reich could violate the Versailles treaty, the Brits agreed, and build much more capital ships than allowed under it. In counterpart, a complex trading system was implemented between the British empire and the Reich.

France was aghast. The German ambassador confided to his American colleague Dodd that he feared assassination. Both used to take strolls together in the Tiergarten (zoo), to avoid the omnipresent microphones and spies…inside their embassies (or even inside Dodd’s family!). Finally Roosevelt had the Nazi skeptic Dodd, a University of Chicago historian, replaced by a man friendlier to Nazis and American plutocrats. 

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WHY DID HITLER ATTACK RUSSIA?

Because it was his plan all along (as Old Geezer Pilot pointed out in the comments). Hitler had been conditioned by old Germanic lore, and at best, wanted to make slaves from the Slavs.

In the Middle Ages the Teutonic Knights judiciously found out that the Middle East was too hot for comfort, and that it would be smarter to pursue the work of extending the (Roman!) empire through Pagan lands, as Karl Der Grosse (Carlus magnus, Charlemagne) had done, a work actually started by the Franks a full millennium earlier.

Clovis’ dad, Childeric, was a Roman imperator, another little known fact: he was found buried in imperial purple in the 17C; unfortunately a fire in the Louvre museum around 1830  destroyed the Childeric’s ensigns of power; like Caesar, the Franks thought that the way to protect Gallia was by conquering all of Germania.

The Teutonic knights conquered East Prussia before being defeated, centuries later, by a Lithuanian-Polish coalition. Hence the old Prussian hatred against Poland.  

In 1914, the entire German army had been thrown through Belgium, against France. Eight divisions were supposed to hold Eastern Prussia. After a few weeks, a few reinforcements had to be sent. Ultimately, by 1917, the Germans had Russia on its knees, and the Soviets made an humiliating peace treaty which conceded a huge amount of land to Germany. One can, in a way, argue that Lenin was a German imperial agent! (He had been, with all his entourage, transported from Switzerland to Russia, through Germany, during the war.)

In the minds of all too many Germans, and cockroaches such as Hitler, the Russians were easy to defeat, that had been thoroughly established in WWI, and German generals coming back from the USSR confirmed its primitivism.

On the other hand, Hitler and all the Nazis expected defeat at the hands of France, Britain, and the USA, should those democracies unite again. That is why they were much encouraged by the hostility of the British and USA government against the French republic. Even then, the Nazis thought of attacking France no earlier than 1944. That’s how long the Nazis thought they needed to be ready.

Instead France attacked in 1939, and was defeated, momentarily, in 1940. Hitler found himself at war when he was not ready at all, and it quickly showed.

The defeat of France in May-June 1940 caused heavy Nazi losses, and the strategic disaster that Britain joined France in total war. In June 1940, a drafted French army sacrificing itself, allowed the British professional army to evacuate at Dunkirk (more than 300,000 soldiers escaped the encirclement).

Hitler, and Mussolini, depended upon the American plutocrats for oil, and that was as reassuring as being fed by sharks, I must admit. Hitler attacked Poland mostly for the oil (although he was screaming about Dantzig). Unfortunately the pernicious Stalin moved into Poland too, claiming he was helping his buddy Adolf… And grabbed the oil, first.

So what next? Hitler had persuaded the German generals he could be trusted, because Germany would never engage deliberately in a two front war, again. That is what Germany had done in 1914. So Hitler told his generals he would not attack the despised democracies. The Treaty of 1935 with Great Britain gave him a green light to attack to the east, he thought, and the wealthy Von Ribbentrop, with his large expensive apartment in London, assured him that British plutocrats were with him, and against the French Republic. 

Still the top German generals could see Hitler was nuts. In spite of their training as obedient dogs, they conspired to get rid of Hitler. They contacted the British government to ask it to say that, should Hitler pursue his aggressive antics, Britain would join France and declare war. Instead, traitors in the British government informed Hitler that his generals were plotting against him.

In 1939, France cut the Gordian knot, and declared war, and Hitlerland found itself in a war against Britain and France. In 1940, the German Air Force suffered enormous losses during the battles of France and Britain (thousands of planes and pilots). Earlier, the German fleet had been devastated during the Norwegian campaign against Norway, France and Britain (destroyed German capital ships can still be admired in fjords).

So Hitler told his generals that they had no choice. Britain, at this point, could not be defeated. They had to destroy the USSR first, precisely to avoid a two front war.

That was without counting on “Bomber Harris“, and the long range heavy bomber fleet that Britain had been using for more than six months already. Bomber Harris would quickly open a second front.

Hitler would end up, or rather, down, with three million men (only) fighting in Russia, while a full million manned the 88mm guns inside Germany to shoot at British bombers. Also an enormous part of the Luftwaffe was assigned to air defense over Germany. Part of the result was that, by November 1940, the Brits conducted raids on Berlin (following the earlier French example). By December 1941, Hitler would lose air supremacy in the Battle Of Moscow. It was so cold, only Russian planes were flying, and shooting at half frozen German troops in their summer attire.

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WHY DID THE NAZI INVASION OF RUSSIA FAIL?

Because, by June 23, 1941, fascism had plenty of enemies, and weakened by wounds.

Mussolini attacked Albania, and then Greece. Greece counterattacked magnificently, and was pushing the fascists back into the sea, through Albania. Mussolini high pitch screams to high heavens, like the sexist little girl he was, enticed the Nazis to intervene. They threatened Yugoslavia which was in the way (Yugoslavia was another product from the French liberation of the German slaves known as Slavs, another country that, according to Keynes, the French had created in their malevolence). Encouraged by the allies, the Slavs said no, and the Nazis invaded Yugoslavia, which would keep them busy with guerilla until 1945. So did Greece, their next target. Finally the Nazis got most of their paratroops to win, and die, in Crete.

The Nazis were idiots who did not know history. If they had, they would have heard of king Pyrrhus, who after winning yet another victory against the Roman army, concluded that “one more victory like that, and we will be completely defeated“.

The Nazi invasion of Russia happened six weeks late, and with smaller forces than anticipated (because of the enormous casualties in France, up to 200,000 there, added to what was lost in the Yugoslav-Greek-Crete campaign… plus all those shootings in the German sky against British Lancasters).

The gods of war, which had been so much on the Nazi side in the battle of France, were now against it. First, as general Guderian noticed, the Soviets had been learning the Nazi tactics of circling around. So the Nazi losses were heavy.

Record rains in October-November stopped the panzers, in the mud, which froze a few weeks after, in the coldest cold since Napoleon came that way. The panzer generals could see the gold bulbs of the Kremlin. Moscow had been evacuated, and its defense were tenuous. But Stalin had not fled, and the blocking sections of the NKVD, very active.

Yet Japan, ally to the Third Reich, decided to attack the USA, and target Indonesian oil, instead of attacking north, the USSR. Stalin immediately sent his 270,000 Siberian troop army to Moscow. It was expert at the coldest of cold. It counterattacked on skis among frozen Germans, by late December 1941.

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VICIOUS MOODS ARE ACCIDENTS WAITING TO HAPPEN:

Why did Germany attack again, twenty years after the entire world allied itself with France, and it had been completely vanquished? Mental inertia had a lot to do with it, plus lack of imagination. Why did it elect Hitler? Well, Hitler squeaked in electorally, he barely made it. But important people such as Schacht were pulling the strings, and the likes of countless racist plutocrats such as Henry Ford doing what it took (Ford had Hitler on payroll, just as the Bavarian police did).

As I said above, there were important manipulations of the public mind by the wealthiest. Moreover a vicious cultural mood had been created in Germany for generations. Nietzsche shouted about it ferociously, book after book. A mood of Deutschland Uber Alles rotted Germany. A mood that involved hubris. Hubris, called hybris by the Greeks, was the most reviled of moods. Moods have lots of inertia inside individuals and (thus) cultures. All the more since vicious moods are generally supported by thick mats of lies.

The hubristic mood of German superiority got wounded in 1914-1918. That angry bear bred with the racist attitude towards the Jews which Nietzsche had excoriated when it dawned. Germanoid madness received a severe blow in 1945. But only the full truth will vaporize it fully. As some declarations during the recent banking crisis showed, some of the infuriating Germanoid moods are still, unbelievably, alive.

The German Vice Chancellor, Roesler, racially a Vietnamese, declared many times in 2012 that Greece ought to be kicked out of the euro. On the face of it, it’s outrageous: a primate from another country, especially if endowed with a big title, does not have any right to declare that another independent country ought to be expelled from its own currency. Roesler wants to show to all that he is really a good German, the old fashion way, spiting Greece and the gifts it brought.

So it is often with politicians who do not truly belong: they want to show they are true patriots, and overdo it. The disaster known as Sarkozy is an example. The Corsican bandit Napoleon another. Even Louis XIV fits the bill (because of the Fronde). Hitler, an Austrian (and a… Jew, according to some other top Nazis). No, I will not say that a half Kenyan could not prosecute a white bankster, lest he not be admired as a true patriot…

The truth is that the average Greek nowadays has about as much to do with the European banking crisis than the average European Jew had to do with the Great Depression.

The rise of Nazism was endowed with a succession of satanic miracles. Many of them were engineered by worldwide plutocrats, others were pure accidents, especially since Nazi behavior was outside of the expected norms (something Hitler played as a violin). But the moods that enabled it were no accident.

The Greater Depression the world is presently facing is, deep down, a worse situation that the 1930s. In the 1930s, great powers were playing an imperial game. The USA, in particular, felt it ought to be the leader, and had the power to impose that. So it did, by letting its plutocrats run wild, and make their own international politics, supported by the Congress. Surely, if the USA had joined France and Great Britain in 1939, there would have been no Auschwitz. If nothing else, German generals would have implemented a coup, or even a strike against the Nazis. Instead the Ethyl Corporation of America sent lead tetraethyl in enough quantity (hundreds of tons) to keep Hitler’s Air Force flying, while France and Poland had more than 100 divisions engaged in combat. That was extremely high treason, not just of democracy, but civilization itself.

The Poles fought desperately, because they wanted to live. The Nazis wanted to kill them all, it was not just about killing the Jews. Not yet.  

There will be no justice about what happened with Nazism, as long as a full light is not brought to bear on these events, plus the cover-up ever since about who and what supported Nazism, and the impact they both had on the continuation of the plutocratic mood, we and the biosphere, are enjoying today.

The situation is worse nowadays, greatly because those nefarious mysteries of the past were not explored, but allowed to fester. A mood of unexamined civilization was allowed to thrive. If too many feel that it may not be worth living, much may happen all too soon.

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Patrice Ayme

REASON FROM UNREASON

Superior CRAZINESS For Superior LOGIC.

CALM IS OVERRATED, CRAZINESS A LOGICAL NECESSITY:

Abstract: Why do people go crazy? Is it fate, or is it evolution? Is it disease, or is it creativity?

 Two of the creators of modern mathematics and metamathematics, Georg Cantor and Kurt Godel, experienced some craziness. Nietzsche produced some of his best work before he went insane. Van Gogh experienced serious mental difficulties. Bolztman killed himself. All these cases were within a generation. Those may all be unrelated accidents, sure. 

 However I will show below that superior intelligence in a species can only come from an ability to engineer (productive) craziness. (Perhaps the reason why chimps and bears are so unpredictable: they are not just clever, but a bit crazy!)

 What president Roosevelt said of the bankers:”I welcome their hatred!” may sound crazy to some, and it is exactly the opposite of the praises the all too cool Obama bestow on bankers, every chance he gets. But Roosevelt domesticated the bankers, whereas Obama got domesticated by them. Of course the superior intelligent one was Roosevelt, who knew it was smart to go crazy on the bankers. It’s certainly crazy to cling to an appearance of sanity in an insane situation (Eichmann used Kant to justify his crimes, an appearance of philosophy to promote infamy.)

Thus insanity is hardwired in Homo Sapiens Sapiens. Perhaps Homo Wise Wise, Homo Sapiens Sapiens, should be renamed Homo Crazy Wise: Homo Sapiens Demens! 

This has some fascinating, but sinister implications for Artificial Intelligence. In his Turing Test for intelligence, Alan Turing forgot craziness. That was crazy.

 It also means that, as insanity will follow a normal distribution, some substantial part of any human population will be insanely dangerous. 

 As technological capability improves exponentially, the danger exists that this insanity will be also exponentially amplified (as happened with the death camps of WWII).

 Hence the necessity of counterbalancing it by augmenting truth, and thus transparency, just as exponentially, too. 

 If we want survival, we have to become truth fanatics. A new religion.

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 MADNESS AS THE SOLUTION TO LOGICAL INCOMPLETENESS:

[Advanced.]

 The Incompleteness Theorems in logic say that any logical system big enough to contain arithmetic is incomplete, in the sense that there is an infinite number of propositions, about natural numbers, which are true but that cannot be proven in that logical system.

 If it cannot be proven, it has to be assumed (and that, an infinite number of times! It’s a crazy world out there: it turns out that, if a logical system is complete, it’s inconsistent, etc. (If one supposes the usual properties of arithmetic to be true.) 

 These facts were demonstrated in the 20C, but they were true all along. I claim that there is a strict correspondence between brain circuitry and logical completeness. Thus, brain operations stumbled on circuitry incompleteness, all the time, ever since there are advanced brains, and they think. 

 The problem of logical incompleteness is solved in metalogic by making assumptions. The same holds with brain circuitry: logical incompleteness there is also solved by making assumptions. 

 How does the brain make assumptions? Well it just connects different neurons, or different parts of the brain with axons. In other words: Axons for axioms.

 How does the relationship work? Incompleteness in logic is caused by a confrontation between the finiteness of logic on a piece of paper (or in a Turing Machine), and the uncountable infinity it gives rise to (modulo some assumptions mathematicians classically do). Basically the finite axioms allow, modulo some infinite choice procedure (for example Cantor’s diagonalization), to build an infinite number of further axioms.

 The same happens with neuronal and neuroglial networks: they are finite. But, once given, it’s possible to build other neuronal and glial networks different from them. That’s the equivalent of the Godel proposition built from a Godel number. How does one build such a number? Well, with dendrites, etc. That in turn happens if and only if, some astrocytes get in high gear, andthat happens in case of high emotions. In other words, if the brain builds new assumptions through new emotions. And probably, the more different the assumptions, the more different the emotions.

 Hominids who practiced a bit of craziness were evolutionary advantaged, because they found more readily solutions to logical incompleteness at hand. Craziness allowed to find new, necessary axioms. Thus evolution learned to exploit logical incompleteness.

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 NO UNREASON, NO CREATION:

 An excellent example is geometry without the parallel postulate; it’s a logically incomplete system. For more than 2,000years mathematicians tried to prove that it could be made complete. 

 But the solution was very obvious, and very crazy: take a sphere, and try to do geometry on it. Take a saddle, and try to do geometry on it. 

 A modicum of craziness is intelligence’s friend.

 Hence a necessity, to make Creative Artificial Intelligence would be to contrive crazy robots.

 [I will deny all and any responsibility when Artificial Intelligence engineers use that idea to make more clever killer robots.] 

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 LYING AS THE WORST CRIME:

 So there is a hard core of badness out there. If one ignores it, it will grow: fascism, before and during World War Two is an excellent example. The more ignored fascism was, the bigger it got. 

 If one ignores the hard core of badness out there, one is lying, big time. Because one claims that something potentially lethal in giant proportions is of no consequence. That’s a lie, if there ever was one. Lying about nothing is not a lie. Lying about something that can turn into everything is a terrible lie.

 Look at the haggard, drugged out, half dead, passed out face of the cruel and crazed maniac who shot 71 people in a movie theater in Colorado. Or the other crazed maniac in Norway, killing 73 Norwegians to save them from impure blood, or to save Norwegian culture (whatever).

 Such people are bad, they are pathologically bad. Maybe they took too much drugs, maybe their neurohormones are all wrong from more natural causes. The basic fact, though, is that there will be pathologically bad people out there, always. 

 Or at least, there will be crazed out people as long as we do not have a thorough understanding of the human mind. And even then. Because when we understand why people become pathologically insane, some, the same as those who abuse drugs (starting with alcohol and psychoactive smoke), will decide to use their freedom (if they are left any) to become psychologically insane, deliberately so.

 Some will whine when they read this. But they understand neither evolution, nor the logical incompleteness theorems, and even less the fact that evolution has mastered both.

 It is even worse than that. It’s not just that there are bad actors out there. Power attracts bad actors, like flies are attracted by excrements.

 Those who rise up high in human hierarchies, all too often do so precisely because they are bad. This is the Achilles heel of representative democracy.

 Examples abound with dictatorships: there the worst do best. Hitler, Mussolini, Franco, Stalin, are recent cases. Stalin overcame Lenin (founder and theoretician of the Bolsheviks) and Trotsky (head of the Red Army, and also a theoretician), precisely because Stalin was so much worse. as a human being. That was his best qualification (he started by robbing banks…wait…). 

 However, Stalin’s extreme badness allowed him to out-Hitler Hitler himself: that made him laugh, according to Churchill. That Stalin’s horribleness was viewed as an advantage by those subordinate to him seems unlikely, but it’s thoroughly demonstrated by the facts. 

 Hitler attacked his ally the USSR by surprise. Stalin had been leading the rapprochement with Nazi Germany, so he expected his colleagues in the Politburo to punish him severely. After sulking for days, he finally showed up, expecting the chop, and was enthusiastically confirmed as great war leader. Why? Because all his comrades knew he was the very worst. And indeed Stalin put in place policies considering that anyone not respecting an order was subject to immediate execution. Any soldier knew that his captain could kill him any time, and so on, throughout the Red Army. 

 Thus in Stalingrad, workers built tanks while other drove them to engage the Nazis in combat, at the other end of the factory. 

 The Nazis, who thought of themselves as the meanest characters on the planet, and had demonstrated it with engineers doing suicide attacks with explosives on their backs against the French after crossing the Meuse, could not sustain that level of ferocity.

 Hence not just craziness, but criminal insanity can be an advantage to rise to the fore in society. Certainly, if Alexander so called the Great had not annihilated the cities of Thebes and Tyr (crucifying all the men there), he would have been less Great, because Athens would have taken him, and his general Antipater less seriously.

 Ultimately, though, the criminal mood in the USSR was made possible by systematic lying on such an industrial scale that the connection with reality became increasingly tenuous. When enough truth was projected onto the system, the lying, and the political system that depended upon it collapsed.

 If craziness is so useful to augment those mental powers we need so much to survive as a civilization, how do we survive it? Precisely by augmenting the truth. Thus only craziness compatible with the truth will be able to survive. That is why I have not hesitated to tell various truths about Obama (whom I have intensely supported in all sorts of ways), or Hollande, whom I approved of, until he started to say lies about World War Two (details soon to come).

 Truth is my religion. A touch of craziness my sanity. (Latest demonstration: It’s not like I did not know of the danger in advance. I was slightly charged by a large bad mood moose with calf today on an Alaskan trail, where I was nonchalantly running with a bad ankle; after a high speed retreat, as a good predator, I circumvented the difficulty, and anxiety switched sides, the calf nearly spraining its own ankle in the process… . )

 There is no truth but the full truth, and a touch of craziness is its prophet.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Violence Breeds Violence, Until Wisdom Is Brought To Bear.

 

TO RELIEVE THE STRESS OF THE ANALYSIS, DON’T FORGET TO LAUGH!

Syria, Colorado, Guns, Fanaticism, Mutilated Babies, God, Assad, Putin: A Common Thread. Greedy, Manipulative Oligarchies.

***

Abstract: Just a relaxing essay before another heavy duty one on thinking. A running commentary on recent events. The squeamish and easily offended are invited to go read something else.

They may not appreciate the mix of current events, explained by an overall abusive violence with far reaching subconscience… Even the plutocrat in chief of New York City, Bloomberg, agrees with me that soothing words are little, and action is needed. It is a question of replacing a wholesome order of violence by something more civilized, in other words, more advanced. Enough with deliberate mental retardation, wrapped with a smile and a prayer.

One has to learn to laugh about the unbearable, or make it otherwise interesting, all the more since it is unbearable. Only through laughter does the unbearable become bearable.

Laughter and play blossomed to make interesting skills that it is necessary to muster. Empathy is not everything. Empathy works if and only if it is connected to reason, and that implies little tolerance for weapons, outside of law enforcement, be it local, or global.

Learning to make a religion from reason means learning not to tolerate superstition, except when it is completely, absolutely and definitively innocuous. It does not matter if the religion is supposed to be honorable. Of course, the Aztec religion was most honorable, and I would have been the first to bear witness, lest my chest be cut open by those priests from hell.

Horrific is horrific. Rational lesson number one. Reason rises from emotion, and innocence from a baby’s face.

Having empathy for babies means no tolerance for sexual mutilating them. Whereas having empathy for the Middle East means socially mutilating Allah. Don’t worry about Him: He is a big boy.

Lesson therein for Syria. Retrospective lesson for the Jews: did that self mutilation they swear by, make them more tolerant of Hitler’s abuse?

Yes, philosophy is war, and its armies will not rest. Only thus can civilization can push back plutocracy down the hell hole where it belongs (Pluto is also a big boy, related to the preceding one, as scripture attests; let them have a party together, where they belong.)

***

BETTER TO LOOK AT IT, AND LAUGH, THAN NOT TO WANT TO HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH IT:

Most look at sad, or tragic events around the world, and they feel negative emotions: sadness, fear, dejection, rejection. They feel the pain, and that’s great: empathy is important. However, dangers are entangled with this. One of them: becoming a parody of caring, to cover up one’s enormous corruption.

Bill Clinton’s enormous corruption does not have to be presented again. But when one sees Dr. Bernard Kouchner to be corrupt, one has to pinch oneself. Kouchner was a founder of Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders, an indisputably excellent organization providing free medical care for those who otherwise would not have any, worldwide.  Kouchner was famous for having landed once in Somali with a rice bag on his shoulder, media in attendance. A decade or so later, Clinton did the same in Haiti, for his own personal glory, rice bag on the shoulder, media in attendance.

The danger is that, once it becomes clear that many “charitable” organization are, first full of charity for themselves, everybody becomes all too cynical.

Another danger is that people either become indifferent to the input, the pain of others, or learn just not to care, be it only because walloping in misery is not something the brain likes to do too much of.

Hence the true humanist will learn to laugh. Not exactly laugh of the misery of others, but laugh of, say, the logic that leads to said misery. A logic of the unsaid, a logic of moods which thrive best, when they do not have a name.

***

DOES THE USA LOVE OF GUNS COME WITH HOLES?

Another flurry of death: 71 shot in Colorado in a movie theater. USA citizens love to say they need guns to protect themselves. OK, true, they have to protect themselves against other USA citizens, no small feat, apparently. What USA citizens obsession with guns is telling us, is that the citizens feel that no law nor reason will bring them safety, only shooting will. So they are ready to shoot, or be shot. And they kill, at a rate 15 times that of Japan, where guns are severely outlawed.

The USA: a sad case where sadism (shooting) is brought to bear, only through the acceptance of being shot (masochism.)

Guns are not really a debate in the USA: money rules, and, as long as the gun plutocrats want people to have guns, they will. The sheep is too busy bleating, to be thinking.

In all plutocratic matters, one plutocracy can hide another. As long as USA citizens will be terrified of each other, they will not take part in big demonstrations, as people do in Europe. So the ultimate plutocrats, at the very top, are happy to have a country where the rabble shoots each other. It gives the top plutocrats a pretext and excuse to do the same, and raise the level of overall violence, and injustice, be it legal, constitutional, or not.

(Since the decision “Citizens United” of the Supreme Court Of the US, plutocrats and their organizations, are pretty much free to give as much money as they want, under cover, to anybody they chose, hence giving a chance to their rich boy Romney. But that of course is violence, legal violence much more carefully directed.)

***

HARDER TO EAT PEOPLE WITHOUT WEAPONS:

Once there was a Japanese cannibal in Paris (supposedly a friend of Mick Jagger as related in “Too Much Blood“). He wanted to eat his Dutch girlfriend, so he pointed an old gun he had purchased from organized crime, to the back of her head, and pulled the trigger. The venerable equipment misfired. He tried again, a few days later, and this time the old, tired bullet kicked into action, just enough to pierce her skull and rebound all around inside her head, killing her instantly.

Morality? Sagawa was a tiny weak guy with an inferiority complex (but with a rich father who paid for top lawyers). He selected his victim for her “beauty and health“. Without the gun, he could never have killed her. Guns are enablers. It is harder to eat people, without weapons, in the sense that, before eating them, one has to capture or kill them, and man, without weapons, is pretty much not just defenseless, but rather innocuous.

Reality is stranger than fiction. Condemned to life imprisonment as criminally insane in France, the cannibal was later extradited to Japan, where he was found “sane but evil“, and released (!). He is now a successful author and artist in Japan. A media celebrity and authority on mass murders and cannibalism (even represented on TV engaged in mock cannibalism), he has suggested he may return to his culprit activities. However, he will have to find a gun first.

Second morality: In Japan (where cannibalism is not a crime, and some have advertized body parts recently, so they claimed), clearly, if cannibals have fun with women on TV, it’s not the intensity of Japanese prosecution that make criminals behave. What makes them behave, is the intensity of Japanese prevention. It’s no doubt harder to purchase a gun in Japan than in France (with millions of hunters, with big boar killing rifles, France is armed to the teeth as the Wehrmacht found out in 1941-1944).

***

DON’T CIRCUMCISE THE SUBJECT: SEXUALLY MUTILATING CHILDREN IS A NO-NO:

Speaking of amputating body parts… A court in Cologne, Deutschland, found that sexual mutilations of children were… sexual mutilations of children. Wow. Civilization, tell me, how long did that take? Wrote the German Court: “The operation does serious bodily harm and only males old enough to consent to it freely should undergo it.”

Some hospitals in Switzerland, appraising the Court’s wisdom, decided to order their doctors to stop mutilating their children, just because their parents want it. Break the cycle. The philosopher will not argue here that what starts with priests dressed fancy torturing children, ends in Auschwitz. Some other time. But violence justified against the innocent is the underlying principle. (And don’t forget those who target deliberately innocent families with drones: that too erects the principle of justifying the unjustifiable, and also leads to Auschwitz; the fact it does not do so right away is immaterial to the logic.)

It is funny that Judeo-Muslims, who profess total subjugation to their furious dad-in-the-sky, the original Yahweh (YHVH), or its clone Allah (2,000 years later), have the arrogance to believe that His creation was so imperfect that He needs to be corrected with the knife every day.

Either Yahweh-Allah is great, or he is so sorely mistaken that only knife play can set Him right. Figure it out. In the meantime, calm down, and drop the weapon, before you mutilate some more, sexually, or not.

***

IS ALL THE JEWISH-MUSLIM SOAP OPERA RELATED TO SEX MUTILATIONS?

It is well know that those who were abused will abuse in turn. The propensity to violence, intellectual, or physical, is inherited. Intellectual violence is proper to man, it means creatively thinking, it’s a good thing… If we define the best of humanity as good, as we should, because that’s what we are, at our best.

Physical violence can be good, or bad, depending. But certainly teaching it to babies, and calling it love and most sacred, with religious baboons dressed fancy and acting respectable, delivering it, is exactly what civilization does not want to do.

One could actually argue that German Jews were supine, in their vast majority, and as a body politics, when Hitler rose to power, because they had lost, with a body part, the ability to be outraged. How? When the ones one respects most visit gratuitous violence on oneself, and one gets conditioned to respect this the most, when the local Hitler comes to visit violence on oneself, one also religiously accept that.

This is psychologically related to SS officer training, which involved piercing kittens’ eyes with their fingers.

The same holds for Islam, war religion, if there ever was one, but one, more generally related to making military dictatorship optimal. To be sexually mutilated early, I would respectfully suggest, make Muslim more apt to live with grotesque dictates such as the following in the Qur’an:

“Allah wants us to obey whoever detains power: “O ye who believe! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and obey those of you who are in power.” (Quran’s fascist principle, Sura 4, verse 59).”

***

THEOCRACIES ARE PLUTOCRACIES, REMEMBER THAT IN SYRIA:

Modern technology is incompatible with too much power into too few hands. This is what Obama forgets, when he plays the brainy assassin and decides who, innocent or not, he is going to have killed, worldwide.

This is also the problem with all the shootings in the USA. And it’s no accident so many shootings happen in South West Denver, Colorado (Columbine high school, Aurora, etc.) Not again! says the LA Times.  

Why not? It’s a demonstration of reason: same causes, same effects. It’s full of guns, there, differently from Manhattan, where guns are outlawed. In Colorado, if you are 15, and you want a gun, you know where to find it, starting with your parents’ bedroom: cool, man. In Manhattan, tough luck.

South West Denver is also full of police. I resided there for a while, in the richest area, Cherry Hills. Once I got stopped there, just because the officer found my face, my hair or my necklace intriguing, not fitting the call of the local wealth. The police is good at enforcing racial profiling, but race don’t kill people, guns do. Once, after shopping, having to do something else I worried: the car was full of bags in full sight. My sister in law sneered:“Don’t worry, this is Colorado! People don’t break in cars, because they know they would be shot!” In Colorado carrying one hundred fully loaded guns in a car is completely legal. If I narrated all my potentially lethal bruises with Colorado society, it would take another page.

The mayor of New York, the plutocrat billionaire Bloomberg, asked instead of the two people – President Obama and Governor Romney – talking in broad things about they want to make the world a better place, okay, tell us how…Soothing words are nice, but maybe it’s time that the two people who want to be president of the United States stand up and tell us what they are going to do about it, because this is obviously a problem across the country…I mean, there are so many murders with guns every day, it’s just got to stop…. 34 people get killed by unlawful guns, every day…This is killing people every day, and it’s growing and it’s not just an inner-city, east coast, west coast, big city phenomenon.”

[Quoting a plutocrat approvingly, a proof of open mindedness!]

More than 100,000 citizens get shot with guns every year in the USA. This level of violence presumably make the average USA citizen more inclined to shoot back (starting with Iraqis and Yemenites).

It also inure the population of the USA to violence, and so it cares not what happens to the climate and biosphere. (Although the USA produces directly only 25% of the world CO2 production, it controls much more, through its worldwide plutocratic networks, as when Clinton became hysterical about the European Carbon Tax, and threatened to ally herself with Putin and other goons to do something violent about it.)

***

VIOLENCE IS A GLOBAL MOOD:

There are tipping points in global psychology: see how the Arab Spring progressed after an illegal street vendor was allegedly slapped by a police woman in Tunisia (she denies it). But it can also go the other way: after the Nazis, fueled by oil men from Texas, launched the Second World War in Spain, in 1936, one thing led to another, and violence erupted everywhere (for example plutocratic, militarized Japan invaded China, and the giant fascist USSR attacked tiny democratic Finland).

In any case, it’s impossible to tolerate arbitrary weapons and arbitrary levels of violence, if one cares about one’s survival, even if one lives on the other side of the Earth.

This is the sense of the anguish about the “Islamist republic of Iran” having nuclear weapons: Israel crammed with nukes is bad enough, we don’t need two.  (OK, I am perfidious, Iran calls itself “Islamic”, not “Islamist”… but still praying to Qur’an S4, v59.)

All the Muslim dictators, have, since the Qur’an was written down well after Muhammad’s death, used the Muslim Fascist Principle. It is the milk of dictators, and as long as Arab Spring People have not thoroughly understood this, they bark to a sand storm.

Thus, if the aim is progress, it is crucial that the regime that will succeed the rebellion in Syria be secular. Dictators including the assassin Assad, have been riding for 13 centuries Islam’s fascist principle, that all good Muslims obey all dictators. Enough. Unfortunately, what we have now in Syria is an army fighting an army. A secular, democratic minded authority is not as much behind the rebellion as it should be.

Western Europe got rid of the Middle Ages God-Is-great theocracy, truly a plutocracy masquerading as a theocracy (while still claiming to obey Roman republican law). Time for the Eastern Mediterranean to do the same.

While circumcising Allah’s work with a knife, all the time, his self proclaimed fanatics seem definitively to underestimate His capabilities. Allah can handle been thrown out of politics and society. Yet, I am sure Allah, should he exist, can take care of himself. I am a believer in Allah’s self reliance!

***

YOUR SURVIVAL IS MY BUSINESS:

Some will whine that it’s not the business of the West, what the Orient does. Well the world now is smaller, much smaller, than France in 1800. From now on, all wars are civil wars, whether one likes it, or not. Damascus is in our neighborhood, not just Aurora, and the problems are related: in both cases, oligarchies have been (mis)leading people by the nose.

The Roman empire, spread for centuries, from Portugal to Iran, and Scotland to Southern Egypt. During that age, the average Roman citizen had a level of creatures’ comfort not equated until the end of the European Middle Ages, a millennium later.

The present day Middle East was the richest part of the empire, it was called its “Oriental Part“. The Islamist invasion ruined it (not right away, but in the fullness of time). Now from the Occident to the Orient of the (ex) empire, a catapult  (so to speak) can send an object in a few minutes. One world.

Relevant anecdote: Rome was founded greatly on the reign of reason and tolerance (meaning that reason tolerated what was innocent). However, Jewish fanatics rebelled against Roman order in the famous Judean war. During the siege of Jerusalem, Roman artillery bombarded the city with thousands of pig heads. 2,000 years ago, the Romans already found the Jewish fanatics ridiculous. (Now I have neighbors, and, although very nice and modern, they obsess about pigs… although they don’t even like Jews, as an ethnic group… both notions are crazy… and intimately related!)

In the end, all what the Jewish fanatics achieved, after the insane war of 70 CE, and a similar revolt later, was the dispersion of Israel. (Although the Non-Christian emperor Julian allowed again the construction of the temple in Jerusalem, shortly before his assassination (363 CE), the hostility of the Roman state to the Jews would be amplified in Christianity.)

One can compare with the situation in Gaul: the populations there were even more rebellious than the Jews. But they did not cling fanatically to their old superstition. Instead revolts tried to out-Rome the Romans, by outsmarting them with more reason, and more progress. So the Romans did not massacre and disperse Gaul (after the initial rebellions crushed by Caesar). After five centuries of ever more insistent revolts, coups, “Gallic empire”, etc. the Gallo-Romans allied with the Franks, creating the West as we know it, the official successor state of Rome.

***

WHEN THE GANGES IS THE NEW RHINE: HOW SMALL THE WORLD HAS BECOME:

A nuclear exchange between Pakistan and India would be, automatically, a war between fascism and democracy. Democracy would have to intervene. So democracy intervenes now. Lest some in China got fancy ideas.

And this is why the French republic is such a strong ally of India. The new French socialist government decided that, besides German and British delegates, Indians will sit on the French defense steering committee. One world, democracy elaborating future weapon systems and strategies.

Whereas the French republic frontier used to be on the Rhine, now it’s from the Falklands to Malaysia. it goes without saying that Great Britain and the USA are fully aware of this (even if Merkel aligned herself on Putin about Libya: all that gas…)

***

SUPERSTITION FOR BREAKFAST, OR HOW TO NOURISH CIVILIZATION WELL:

Neither Islam, nor Christianity are civilizations. Never were, never will, God willing. they are just superstitions, thinking of themselves as civilizations. They were the cover-ups military aristocracies used to claim they were exactly the opposite of what they truly were (read Nietzsche on this angle, about Chrsitianity).

Some fear that, as the West comes all out against Wahhabism (the Saudi religion often described by primitives as “Islam” by an abuse of language), a clash of civilization would ensue. However a clash between a superstition and civilization, is not a clash of civilizations. It is the clash between an elephant, and a swine.

Civilization is used to do away with primitive beliefs. The tradition was not invented yesterday. Once a Roman general, under the republic, actually a supreme commander, an imperator, charging at the head of his troops during D Day, stumbled out the surf, and fell face first on the beach. That was definitively a bad omen. And not just in the old Roman religion,

However the general laughed, grabbed the sand in both hands, and loudly exclaimed: “Africa, I hold you!”

The campaign was highly successful (the exact opposite story had happened to Athens a few centuries earlier, causing the annihilation of her fleet and army in Syracuse. Superstition can be costly!)

The story of the republican West, overall, is not that of the reign of superstition (yes, republican, in the sense that Frankish kings were elected, and that the republic never formally died under the Roman empire). In the West, the pope was always viewed as independent and separate from political power. And sometimes the relationships between both were really bad, for very long, such as when the Franks let the popes macerate with the hated Lombards (“long beards”) for 150 years.

The secret of the West is in plain sight: the triumph of intelligence and reason, (partly under the cover of crucifixion,) for more than a millennium. Intelligence and reason are best served by democracy. Crucifixion had a double meaning, of course: a reminder that the world is not about circumcising difficulties, and that, sometimes, nothing beats full frontal horror. Charlemagne let his underlings use the cross as a terror weapon.

***

PLUTOCRACY ROSE & FELL BEFORE. TIME FOR CIVILIZATION TO ERADICATE IT AGAIN:

When Christianity was useless, the Franks did not use it. So Christianity was used to spread Franco-Roman civilization, far ahead of the limes (as the Romans had done). Yet, inside the Imperium Francorum (soon to be “renovated” as the Imperium Romanum again), Christianity was not imposed anymore than Judaism, Islam, Paganism, or Charlemagne’s style polytheism.

Things degenerated into feudalism for military reasons: in the Eighth, Ninth and Tenth Century, the Imperium Romanum of the Franks was simultaneously invaded by savages from the North, The South, and the East. Charles Martel’s trick of endowing the empire with a very heavy cavalry evolved into a caste of professional killers, born and raised. Charlemagne used the heavy cavalry to conquer swiftly where Romans legions had floundered, and Caesar only dreamed of.

A knight, his decades of training, his special giant, huge but swift horse, his squires, his special weapons, and heavy armor, the world’s best steel, represented a colossal spending (that no other power in the world could ever afford; Iran for a few centuries had heavy armored cavalry. but they were not a caste). Thus that European aristocracy (rule of the best) grew, propped in no small fashion by much lower, or exemption from, taxes.

All I can say is that there was a good reason for this. The Nord Men, the Avars, the Magyar, and the Sarah Sons (“Saracens“) were defeated and domesticated. However, that was mostly done by 1,000 CE. Although the reconquista had a long way to go in Italy, Greece, and Spain, in Northern Europe, the aristocracy had lost its reason for existing in the first place. But it kept going. How?

The old aristocracy, truly a plutocracy, oppressed Europe for more than a millennium, its power resting on lower tax rates than the commons, just like it is the case now.

In the USA the tax rates paid by the hyper rich are incredibly low, and many are actually able to pay none at all (with many tricks, such as borrowing against shares). All other industries pay tax, when a transaction happens, it’s only normal that the Lords of Finance would pay one too. The reasoning why they should not are well known: they were held to justify the prerogatives of the so called “nobles”, the plutocrats, for more than a millennium.

However the French republic just passed a financial transaction tax. It becomes effective August 1, 2012.

Plutocracy is an emerging property. Out the many, and the much, comes out something completely different. The financial plutocracy, we learned in recent weeks, is committing fraud on a scale never seen before. From money laundering drug money for murderous Mexican drug mafias, Jihadists or Iranian Islamists, to cheating on 350 trillion dollars of deposits (yes, 350, 000 billions).

My bombing runs over theocracy do not imply that there was never something grand and right about past religions. If nothing else the violence in Christianism and Islamism are unequalled. Therein their utility to the military aristocracies plutocracies. Jokes aside, the civilizational aspects connected to Judeo-Christo-Islamism can be the most inspiring as works of man: just visit stupendous Isfahan. It will nearly turn you Shiah for a day. Certainly Shah Abbas, who built Isfahan into a magnificent capital, did more architecturally than even the so called “Sun King” of France (besides Abbas was even worse of a superstitious fanatic: he had the Georgian queen Kelevan tortured to death for eight years to force her to become a Muslim).

And it’s not just savasges from the desert in a past far away. In Russia three girls are threatened with seven years in jail for singing an anti-Putin prayer in a cathedral. A smart white Russian came onTV, and declared that, in an Islamist country, their heads would have already been cut. So why can Christians do the same? After Assad, may be the West should do Putin?  

The past justifications for fanatical variations on the Jewish god have become obsolete and counter effective. Civilization, ever more formidable, has moved on. Civilization, even more than the Devil, is in the mental details, not just in the grand flow of transgalactic intelligence with its transluminal vision.

Plutocracy is to civilization what cancer is to individuals. It proliferates, becomes metastatic, and corrupts all tissues (for example religion in the Islamist area) . It’s a real war: just watch what is going on with Syrian plutocracy. A regime of patented assassins, conspiratorially connected to the best Western banks, is not just fighting Jihadists, but also thousands of warriors for democracy and liberty. The dictatorships in China and the USSR Russia have seen the danger, and feel the empathy.

The plutocratic phenomenon has ruined many a civilization, now it’s ravaging ours. Nothing really new. Same old, same old. History teaches how to fix it: don’t hesitate to go to war, and chose your targets well. And, yes, it is first a philosophical war.

***

Patrice Ayme

I AM, & SOMETIMES I THINK

SUM ERGO COGITO:

Abstract: Thinking is what defines us. Agreed.

Yet, from most perspectives, Descartes’ famous “Cogito Ergo Sum“, “I Think Therefore I Am” is (grotesquely) counterfactual, as I show below, from the nature of logic, from science, and from introspection. No, the soul does not come before and independently of the body, Messieurs Descartes and Havel. The reality is the exact opposite.  

Thinking emerges from the rough and tough, it is something that rises only from very complex, very organized matter. It may be the face of god, but it is first an act of human will. Last, and not least, the self extends well beyond conscious thought.

***

LOGIC IS (NEUROLOGICAL) RULES, DATA ARE (NEUROLOGICAL) INPUT; EXISTENCE FIRST:

It often happens, in the course of human debates, that, by manipulating standard concepts from fresh, and sometimes opposite perspectives, one is perceived to say the exact opposite of what one is trying to say. Why? Because much of what passes for thinking is actually perfunctory checking for the presence of a few known facts, in an ancient mood.

(This is not really a failure of the logical system; it turns out perception itself works in the same perfunctory way: 90% of input in the visual system consists of reentrant fibers…)

One consequence of my essay “I Mood Therefore I Think” is the exact opposite conclusion of Descartes’ most famous statement, from a multi pronged attack.

Yet, Paul Handover, the excellent gentleman and versatile thinker who founded the excellent site “Learning From Dogs“, in what I fear could be a standard critique, suggested that I complicated matters about thinking, by trying to deviate from Descartes’s “I think therefore I am“. Said he:

“Cogito ergo sum, or as the French would say, “Je pense donc je suis”…surely all you are saying is that famous phrase, “I think, therefore I am”?

Ergo, writing so extensively about moods is complicating something basic to man. Some humans think and some don’t!”

Well, surely not. (Paul later understood what I meant, as the comment section made clear.) I agree that moods, paying attention to moods, considerably complicates the analysis of thinking, as I tried to show, for example, with Socrates’ obsession with pathetic little logic. That itty-bitty logic was just a transparent way to change the conversation from what was really wrong with Athens, namely that it was a slave society… Instead Socrates lived as a hanger-on of the golden youth of Athens, those whose descendants would ultimately collaborate with Macedonian plutocracy (Antipater, and his goons, 322 BCE). About that most grievious logical flaw, he had nothing to say; it was a question of moods.

Living, worldwide, among various natives, all endowed with very varied moods, about the same things, from Silicon Valley to Iran, Black Africa to the Latin Quarter, has taught me that moods dominate logic. Maybe not locally, in a mind, but certainly, globally, throughout a mind.

Recently I was talking to a Silicon (Valley) mini titan, and he asked me how my writing was doing, feigning polite interest, while barely hiding his considerable irritation, hostility and contempt (to all I represented, the Cogito). The mood he projected was clearly not the mood I would have enjoyed at the Café de Flore in Paris. Nor, of course, with such a mood in place, the debate could reach any depth. Silicon Valley does not want depth, just profits and market share, enabled by financial plots, and as little government as possible (while entertaining and financing the president). That’s the mood.

The first thinker to dare criticize Descartes directly was the (ultra-rich) Ludwig Wittgenstein, who went to Cambridge to study with Russell, and taught there, between bouts of building a cabin with his hands in Norway, and renouncing his plutocratic prerogatives. (Although it can be said Sartre & Al. made a covert critique of Descartes, see below.)

Wittgenstein thought Descartes’ famous slogan was pointless. Ludwig used to make fun of Descartes in his Cambridge seminar by loudly remarking:”I think, therefore it rains!” Or: “I think, therefore the sky is blue!” He did not elaborate more than that, I will.

All humans think. Simply some refuse to do it creatively, or have been conditioned, by a special mood, to avoid all and any creative thinking.

On the face of it, Descartes’ “Cogito” statement is ridiculous, as it uses an emerging property to define existence itself. But emergence pre-supposes existence. (And see what Existentialism hinted about the subject below.) And yet we will see the story is a bit more subtle.

***

THE BRAIN EMBODIES LOGIC, PHYSICS, MATHEMATICS:

When one looks at an implication: a > b, one is looking at a piece of neurology. Most mathematicians not only do not understand that, but refuse to understand it, are highly offended by it, and would rather leave the room screaming (they already have). However, so it is.

The wolf can howl to the moon, call it divine, still it is the moon. A physical object. Just like the mathematician can howl to mathematics, call it divine, still, like the moon, it’s just out there. That makes it even more important, but nothing physics did not invent first. 

Mathematicians want to call mathematics divine, for the same reason dogs want to call the moon divine: because, having discovered their object of adoration to be out of this world makes them feel divine about themselves (something very obvious in mathematicians). Descartes, creating the world just from his own thinking, is a typical case.

Reality is much more prosaic, not to say vulgar.

It is well known that a dog trying to get at a ball thrown in the water, will run along the beach just so, and jump in the water according to the optimal trajectory confirmed by electronic computers and 7,000 years of intense human efforts to write down the rules of calculus, so that they could be installed inside said computers.

How do mathematicians think wolves know calculus? (And so do lions, I have seen it.) Because they got the Fields Medal, the Abel Prize? How come the dog takes a year to learn what takes the mathematician 15? Because they read it in books, like human mathematicians?

No, it’s much simpler than that. Wolves have neurobiology which embodies (the) calculus (they need). This is the reason for what Wigner called “the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics“. The mind is built from the existence of histories experienced. Yes, even in wolves. They make this spiritual construction when they play as puppies.

The puppies play with a lot of possibilities, their minds memorize those that work the best. It’s not building the cathedrals, but it leads there.

(The basic principles of cathedral construction were also found by trial and error, then culturally transmitted… so was calculus, now culturally hammered in, so that young human mathematicians, differently from those poor dogs, do not have to invent it!)

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THINKING, CONSCIOUSNESS, EMERGE AFTER PLENTY:

Logic is made of (neurological) rules, data consist in (neurological) input (most internally generated). Those exist first. Thinking comes later, it is what is called an Emerging Property.

What is an emerging property? An enormous system is put in place, with an enormous number of interactions, and, as it becomes dynamic, it builds an order, an order that emerges progressively. Even plate tectonic is an emerging property. Crystallization is an example. pain, physical or psychological, another. All societies, even those of ants, are emerging properties.

Clearly, whatever thinking is, it’s an emerging property, because thinking requires a bunch of neurons to come together, first.

Moods and sensations are the indispensable background to any logical system.

It’s not just my opinion, and it’s not just neurological. Open any treatise in logic. OK, it’s easy to get lost within logic, as a quick peek at Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy shows . Logic is a universe of its own. Most mathematicians know nothing about it, and don’t want to know (lest they feel beaten at their own game, logical arrogance). To simplify, as usual, I go hard core, by sticking to hard core pragmatism (as found in the best hard science and mathematics).

Judicious simplification leads to better abstraction. I am going to simplify what logic is.

I have studied various logical systems, long and hard, even including Girard’s Linear Logic (invented very recently, in 1987). I have also studied, long and hard, before it became fashionable, Category Theory. Category Theory is literally a rigorous structuralism, a bunch of rules of manifest interest. (Nobody knows if it can replace Set Theory as a Foundation of Mathematics; practitioners don’t care, it’s too useful to give them time for deep meditation.)

My rough (philosophical) conclusion from all this esoterica: any logical system (including categories) consists, at the very minimum of:

1) a set of rules (it could be diagram chasing in a category). Call that the ‘logic‘.

2) a universe of symbols to which these rules apply. Call that the ‘universe‘ (in which that logic operates).

The way I look at it, this corresponds to the way the brain is organized:

 1) corresponds neurologically to an axonal system (including dentrites).

 2) corresponds to the regions (in the brain) the logic starts from (it will varied places, as inputs internal, or external, vary).

Sensation, moods, emotion, neurohormonal regimes act as meta-controllers, upon both the logic and the universe. For example in case of hyper stress, automatic meta controllers acting on gateway neurons will shut down parts of the brain by starving them of oxygen, and redirect oxygen and fuel towards areas indispensable for survival. So the brain’s logic is controlled by moods, as meta.

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FALLING OFF A MOUNTAIN, TOO BUSY FOR THINKING:

Once I was delicately crossing a famous and notorious ice gully equipped just with an ice axe and rock climbing slippers. At the worst moment, I looked up, and saw a cloud of rock silently forming up in the sky, 600 meters higher. I started to run, in the hope of reaching the rock on the other side first. However, the avalanche from the partial collapse of said mountain hit my ropes just as I made it to a vertical slab. (The shoulder of that mountain entirely collapsed later, a famous case in Chamonix).

Torn off rock holds, I fell off, facing certain long and painful demise down the mile high gully of death (and the death of my partner, who had a lousy belay. From cracks in the one and only mineral block in that ice gully). I had a last thought: not only was I airborne, but I was dead, that was it, survival probability was strictly zero.

However my brain, in a miraculous feat I cannot not believe, to this day, succeeded to block me between vertical walls, one of ice, the other of granite, in a chimney position. All the more remarkable as I had only rock slippers (not mountain boots). The amount of unbelievable precision and giant neuronal power to unleash colossal force to stop the already long fall was only possible because all my brainpower was applied only where it mattered.

There was no thinking whatsoever. Actually it’s clear that after I had the thought that I was going to die, fir sure, the brain shut down all and any thinking. Consciousness was useless, it just stood in the way, so there was none. Pain and fear did not exist: they were irrelevant.

Thinking, consciousness, pain and fear were obviously completely shut down. All that was left was tremendous will power, enormous mathematical power and the capability to generate an enormous action potential in millions of motor neurons to create gigantic force.

After I stopped in other inhuman feats, I jumped out of the chimney position, grabbed rock and solo climbed ten  meters up to a terrace. It felt like jumping up. When I got to the terrace, and looked at lots of abraded arms, I just could not believe what had happened.  I still do not.

“Cogito, ergo sum“, said Descartes. But where does cogito, ergo and sum fit in this gory scene? Nowhere.

Superstitious people who love slogans would just say that “God” took over. Whatever kicks their simplicity.

Clearly what happened has been related many times in similar incident: all my brain’s energy got concentrated exactly where it could make a difference, in a particular application of elementary mechanics, with maximum motor neuron power. Completely extinguishing the rest of brain activity.

Many years ago, a famous solo French sailor, Alain Colas, was in a race in the middle of the ocean. A loop of rope suddenly snapped around his ankle, and nearly completely severed his foot, causing severe blood loss. He had to make a tourniquet to save his life, administer first aid, then bring down his sails, on his giant boat, also to save his life, then try to give the alert. All of this while dragging foot and nerves on the deck. But he did not feel the pain, and he did not go into shock. That happened only when he was done with the essentials.

Anybody who is real hard and has experienced the grand outdoors hundreds of time, will have a similar story to relate.

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MINIMUM INTROSPECTION SHOWS EXISTENCE, & FEELING COME FIRST:

Waking up from total exhaustion one has first the sensation of existing (“I am!”, or: “I seem to be!”) , well before one starts thinking anything remotely organized, or logical. That could certainly be proven by e-m brain studies, BTW.

Somebody in very deep coma demonstrably exists, while often not being in thought, deep or not.

Actually anybody familiar with heavy exercise knows they can reach points where he or she is, but do not too well what anything, including themselves, is all about. They are, but they don’t really think. So being precedes thinking, elaborated or not. When I run uphill at 3,000 meters for more than fifteen minutes, it tends to do this to me, for example.

Moods provide (part of) the context that a logic needs. How does a baby learn the meaning of words? Not from a dictionary, but from emotions. Emotions come first, they provide the semantics of the world, for any growing human mind. I should go back in the essay and point that out, so thank you Paul!

Thus, at first sight, it’s amazing Descartes, an army captain, could make such a mistake. Did he have an agenda? He did.

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DESCARTES, OR MACHIAVELLISM SERVING EXISTENTIALISM?

I am tough on “Cogito Ergo Sum”, but I should not be so on his author. Indeed there are twists in this story.

Three centuries after Descartes, Sartre, raising the flag of so called French Existentialism, claimed that existence precedes essence (“l’existence précède l’essence”). That reverted the philosophical view that the essence nature of something is more fundamental and immutable than its existence (Aquinas defined god as the thing where existence = essence…). So, if one thinks of the essence of man, as one should, to be thinking, then Sartre was (unwittingly?) saying that thinking was emergent.

Descartes was a genius, if there ever was one: he invented analytic geometry, making calculus possible. So why did he say something as absurd? Well, if man existed just from his thinking, it was not because of God.

Descartes’reasons were grounded in anti-theocracy, subtlety and the advancement of civilization. His new aphorism, “Cogito Ergo Sum“, was iconoclastic.

But iconoclasm yesterday, doctrine tomorrow. Compare the way Descartes broke new ground with his aphorism to the return to primitive theocracy of a modern celebrity such as Václav Havel advocates. Said that otherwise very honorable one: “… one great certainty: Consciousness precedes Being, and not the other way around, as Marxists claim…”. Havel would go oncondemning ours as “the first atheist civilization“, which “has lost its connection with the infinite and with eternity“.

Descartes’ mood was to go where no mind had gone before. Neo-conservatives are rather in the mood of going back again where the logic has thoroughly proved not to be sustainable. No wonder the birth rate is collapsing in such parts.

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Patrice Ayme

I Mood Therefore I Think

SYSTEMS OF MOOD ARE CRUCIALLY ENTANGLED WITH IDEAS:

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MOODS COME BEFORE IDEAS:

  The philosopher Foucault became professor at the most prestigious Collège de France in 1970 as a “Historian of Systems of Thought“. That was an admission, by the power that be, that there are such things as Systems of Thought, and that they are most important. I don’t know if Foucault did that much of a good job (I find his analysis of the Franks extensive but rather superficial, and worst, rather conventional; but, at least Foucault had the merit to think that the founders of the West were worth studying).

  The idea the Collège de France had,  of studying Systems of Thought, is crucial. (By the way the CdF was founded in 1530 CE, all its lectures are free, and the professors the foremost world experts.) All comes from there. Even the hardest sciences.

  Just as one studies arithmetic, or organic chemistry, one could, or should study any system of thought, from fly fishing to Islam. They have lots in common.

  Foucault’s “genealogy of knowledge“, was similar to Nietzsche‘s “genealogy of morals“. A colleague of Foucault was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His phrase: “No preconceived notions, but the idea of free thought” is burned in golden letters above the main hall of the building of Collège de France. But is free thinking an idea, or a mood?

  Ideas are central to logic, but what do they do? They connect notions, that’s all what logic is, and that’s the job of axons in the brain, basically. Yet, the axonal network is only part and parcel of the brain.

  In a related effort at understanding, David Hume held that reason alone cannot move us to action. Action come from passion. Reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., reason pursues abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and that reason provides no impulse of its own. (Treatise Of Human Nature.)

  My opinion is more extreme. Just as in Quantum Physics, particle and wave are entangled concepts, logic and passion are also entangled in Brain Physics, at any single moment, or during each other’s blossoming.

 Not only are moods involved in thinking, but moods have to be attributed to entities involved in logic, for conceiving better what is going on. If nothing else, I observed this with top mathematicians and physicists, who I had the good fortune to observe in their natural environment for quite a while.

  These creators view themselves as the most rational people in the world, but they are pretty much dominated by passions, not just as a motivations, but also as a way, the way, of thinking. When addressing terms in equations, Fields medal level mathematicians will talk about, “these guys”. Top mathematicians need to make mathematics into an anthropological milieu, with mathematical terms running around in their heads like little beings, with moods of their own… I would even venture to say that it is this animation of mathematics that makes the top mathematicians: they are at the zoo, herding terms from equations.

  Modern brain imagery and studies show that neurons and neuroglia are entangled deeply together. Clearly neurons embody logical connections, and glias partake in entangled emotional support. Both make (their won, but entangled) networks.

  The mood behind Damasio’s  Somatic Markers Hypothesis, and similar work, supports all this. Damasio pointed out that Descartes made an error by concentrating just on logic, and forgetting emotions in the scaffolding of logic. But I go much further, be it only because I point out that, on (meta)logical grounds alone, emotion, and only emotion, can provide logics with the universes they need to exist.

  Thus we need to dig deeper. To study thought, we need to study the passions, which often come as culturally imprinted Systems Of Mood.

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AMERICAN ROBOTS DREAM OF FINANCIAL SHEEP; USA WEALTH ADMIRATION MOOD:

  Systems of mood are all over civilization. For centuries, Christians and Muslims screamed:”God Is Great!” Often while slicing each other up. They were both expressing, and reinforcing, a mood. A large part of this mood was apparently that slicing each other up, was the best of all possible worlds. (A more careful consideration shows that the most enthusiastic God Is Great screamers were part of military aristocracies which profited handsomely from the political systems that God Is Great served so well… Thus God/Allah was part of a mutually reinforcing triangle of oppression)

  When Obama became president, he arrived with the mood that financiers were most admirable: his “friend” Jamie Dimon, he much “admired for his gigantic portfolio, which he [Obama] could certainly not manage“.  It’s not just that Obama wants apparently a lucrative job of consultant at JP Morgan. It’s worse than that: he is sincere.

  Dimon was born and raised a financial plutocrat, third generation (at least). Dimon made his most important financial investment in a plot with the central bank of the USA, which was so famous, among banksters, that it got its own name, the “Jamie deal” (buying Bear-Stearns for peanuts, thanks to his always so generous friends, Ms and Mr. American Taxpayers!)

  Obama is still deep in his mood of admiring Lord Dimon.

  On May 15, 2012, episode of ABC’s The View, Obama responded to JPMorgan Chase’s recent $5 billion (or is it 9 billions?) trading losses by defending Dimon against allegations of irresponsibility, saying, “first of all, JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we’ve got”.

  Notice the imparted mood: Dimon is not just the “first of all“, but “we” all own Dimon as a sort of national treasure… Dimon got the treasury, the Fed, and apparently the president, by the balls (if any), but Dimon “we’ve got”! He is ours! Lucky us: we owned Dimon all along, we just did not notice. Dimon is our man, he works for us. Soon we will dreaming we sleep in the 17 rooms mansion he had in Chicago …It reminds me of the song of the Temptations: “Just my imagination![running away from me]“…

  Well, “best managed” is not the “first of all” of Dimon. On the face of it, very few banks, worldwide, have been as badly managed as JP Morgan. How many banks, worldwide, may have got maybe 100 billion of subsidies from taxpayers? Very few. Out of 8,000 USA banks, or so, nearly none needed taxpayer help. Same in Europe with more than another 10,000 banks. And certainly at most a handful of banks, worldwide got help on the scale of JP Morgan (OK, Dimon, a screamer, screamed that he did not need the help; watch what they do, not what they scream about).

  Obama should, please try to get out of his bankster admiration mood. Dimon is using taxpayer money. That’s the “first of all“, about Dimon, for those who approach the situation with the right mood, the objective mood. 

  Let’s Paul Krugman say it. Dimon is “the point man in Wall Street’s fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading”, basically speculating with depositors’ money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control. Apparently not.”

  The key point, notes Krugman, “is not that the bet[s] went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees”.

  And, a fortiori, when those plutocrats’ heavens use taxpayer money directly, which is exactly what expanding the “monetary base” or “quantitative easing” amounts to. (Krugman did not mention these, because he is partial to them… He has to. But he knows…)

  Someone like Obama is desperately into the mood of believing Warren Buffet is his father, or something like that. Dreams of his father.

  Yes, fathers are important, in the plutocratic universe: Dimon got a gold plated career from the start; his father, a stockbroker, executive VP at American Express helped… Although the fact that Obama’s father was at Harvard, also helped him, no doubt, Harvard having instituted the prerogative of inheritance as part of its global reach of plotting pseudo intellectuals.

  I documented in “Sage of Obama” Obama’s mood of embarrassing adulation of riches. That deep desire to confuse financial wealth and wisdom, shared by all too many Americans (millions of whom partake in calling Buffet, a miserable financial conspirator, who, in a just world, would be the object of a warrant of arrest from Interpol, the “Sage of Omaha“).

  In Mexico, by the same token, we have Carlos Slim, plutocrat, son of plutocrat, and made much richer, as all real plutocrats, by being serviced by the state. Slim bought Telmex, Telecommunication Mexico, from the state, for not much, allowing him now to control now 90% of telecoms there, while charging some of the highest rates in the world. A conspiracy theorist may believe that happened because many politicians and bureaucrats got paid under the table. That is why conspiracy theorists are the enemies of philanthropists.

  Indeed, there again, the only reason Slim is not in jail is that the mood has been carefully sown that he is a “philanthropist“, and that such titans can only be admired (and they could never have conspired to buy Telmex because, just because, we told you, everybody knows, that conspiracy theorists are crazy.)

  Obama tasted of wealth enough when he was a child, to want much more. Something about having four in-house servants… That put him in the mood of respecting wealth. A mood that became much more extensive in the USA after Ronald Reagan was elected king.

  Being a prisoner of such a mood of adulation of the richest, one could not expect Obama to prosecute banksters with the vigor presidents Reagan and Bush Senior had shown with the Saving & Loans conspiracy.

  Contrarily to its ill repute of being cool and remote, science is completely entangled with systems of mood. Examples are found in fundamental physics (Big Bang, Foundations Quantum). reciprocally, science can be brought to bear on Systems of Mood. OGMs and the attitude relative to nuclear energy are two obvious examples.

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THE NEOLITHIC OUGHT TO BE FELT AS THE REIGN OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS:

  A tale of two moods. Some are going around, hysterically decrying GMOs, feeling very progressive (the headquarters of the anti-GMO agitation being France, although that may change now that the Socialists are in power). I personally think that any GMO that could potentially, and plausibly, gravely threaten the environment should be outlawed. That’s a good mood to have, indeed.

  And yet, another, even better mood to have, is to realize that, without GMOs we would still be in a pre-Neolithic state. And that Earth could carry, optimistically, only a few million people (and they would be eating each other a lot).

  Indeed nearly all we eat, plants, nuts, fruits, animals, are Genetically Modified Organisms. So we should feel gratified to enjoy GMOs. (The most correct and deepest mood in that arena of thought.)

  Considering that civilization would never have appeared without GMOs, a meta-mood ought to be called upon: to be against GMOs is uncivilized.

  So in connection with GMOs, three moods are justified:

1) Potentially dangerous GMOs ought to be outlawed. (Caution!)

2) No GMOs, no civilization. (Gratitude!)

3) Throwing all and any GMOs out with rage is inhuman, the royal road to total destruction. (Defiance Against Chimps On A Rampage!)

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FUNDAMENTAL MOOD BEHIND SCIENCE: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

  Science has been distinctively unpopular under tyrants. Examples abound: Imperial Rome, which was crafty enough to cover its anti-intellectual mien with extravagant generosity to philosophers obsequious to the plutocratic system. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Stalin, Hitler, were also great enemies of science…

  Science and technologies are often the butt of fierce moods. Some people have written to me of their hatred for the LHC at CERN (which just discovered the Higgs field). Some even identified CERN (a French acronym) with Hitler’s weapon programs, in the vain hope to ruffle me in the wall street Journal comments.

  I will explain in a future essay that the mood against nuclear energy is actually a mood that contradicts the reality that our planet is life giving because Earth is the largest fission nuclear reactor in the universe we know of.

  Once this fact gets to be well known and understood by the world’s masses, no doubt the mood about nuclear energy will change, from revulsion to adoration. Nuclear energy! Our savior! Our creator! Our shield! Our continent churner! Our CO2 storage device!

  Why so much hatred against new knowledge? Because new ideas threaten the established order, which is, first of all, a mental order. The mood that what we know leaves much to be desired, is intrinsically threatening to all and any established authority. If we know more than the authority why is it not us the authority? If we do not ask this question, the authorities certainly will, thus suspect and dislike us.

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STRANGE MOODS EVERYWHERE, ONE, OR MORE, PER TRIBE:

  The Big Bang is another mood. Never has so much rested on so little. It just, feels good. Just like Genesis. Same mood, Fiat Lux.

  As far as I am concerned, established observations are compatible with a 100 billion years old universe. (Not 13.7 billions! They get to 13.7 billion by macerating the data with a special Big Bang sauce) But of course, the mood among the Very Serious Scientists is that, if you say such a thing, you are ignorant. The VSS are not known for condescending to be fully honest with the public.

  Never mind that Big Bang theory necessitates the Inflationary Universe, zillions of new universes everywhere, all the time. On the face of it, that’s the most insane idea, ever. Well, if you think so, you are just not in the right mood, and we know of no conference nor seminar you will ever be invited to. VSS are not in the mood to talk to you.

  Once I gave a seminar (at Stanford) on Black Holes (in a joint math-physics seminar), and I explained that the theory crucially depended up hypothetical Quantum effects, that I made explicit, and which were usually ignored. Thus the logic had unexamined bifurcations, and the standard Black Hole theory could not be viewed as conclusive. A (future) Fields Medal accused me of “meditation“. He was in the mood of embracing only what it was fashionable to embrace (sure it helped him to get the Fields Medal).

  The Big Bang has a great advantage: precisely because it rests on a great mystery (universes out of nothing, everywhere!) that deep revelation is impenetrable to the masses, and thus unites, and empowers the priesthood.

Along similar lines, the Nicean version of Christianism insisted that 1 = 3 (the mystery of the “Trinity”, justly derided by Arians, Copts, and, later, Muslims).

  The more absurd the belief, the more mysterious, the more distinguishing, unifying and empowering to the oligarchy that holds it. Such is the mystification mood.

  And I do say such a thing, because I lived in many cultures, and I have seen many, where dozens of millions of people are very much into the mood of deliberately believing into something stupid. They are in the mood of imposing upon themselves a crazy mood.

  Why?

  Simply because distinctively outrageous moods define, enforce and encourage an even more rewarding mood, the tribal mood. Tribes made humanity possible. They made the many into a super organism. The tribal instinct is tied to deep psychobiology to make it not just irresistible, but something to crave for.

  This why there are these insane moods supporting the local sport team (whatever sport, whatever team, whatever locale it is).

  The tribal mood is why the British view themselves as living in democracy, while refusing to live in republic, or with a written constitution, and call “Glorious Revolution“, the ignominious invasion that gave rise to the present rather plutocratic regime. Britain: not a thing public (res publica), but public rule (demokratia)? There again we find the mood of the absurdity that binds.

  On a less quaint note, an Israeli commission of eminent jurists suggested to validate all West Bank settlements, even the wildest, and less authorized. In other words, the ancient Israeli jurists are trying their best to make Israel hated worldwide. Why? Because hatred is a mood that reinforces the tribe. Moods within moods. 

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MORE NUCLEAR MOODS:

  General Electric and Hitachi have applied for a licence to make a Uranium laser enrichment plant, a new technique that would allow to make nuclear bombs cheaper and more discreetly. There was great anxiety about releasing the details. An expert pointed out in the journal Nature, though that the main secret was already out: namely that Uranium laser enrichment worked. The details are less important than the mood: it can be done.

  Similarly, in World War Two, the top Nazi physicists were not in the mood of believing that one could make nuclear bombs, so they did not push for such a program. Whereas the French war Ministry was sure, as early as January 1938, in great part because of (Nobel laureate) Irene Joliot-Curie’s fierce temperament, that a nuclear bomb could be made.

  Similarly, Japanese scientists conveyed to their fascist government the mood that nuclear bombs were possible, and the Japanese military started no less than three different nuclear bomb programs, in an effort to nuke before being nuked.

  And of course, in the USA, Einstein wrote to president FDR, in the summer 1940, conveying his certainty that a bomb could be made (now that the French nuclear scientists had escaped to England). After the war, Churchill, suspecting French nuclear scientists were commies, eager to tell all to Stalin, wanted to jail them all (another funny mood; instead the PM was defeated in elections). In truth, French intellectuals, led, once again by Irene Joliot-Curie, confirmed to their dismay that, after all, Stalin was just another fascist, and were not in the mood of collaborating in any further bomb program, now that the Nazis had been defeated. The French military cooperated with Israeli scientists instead, to develop bombs. Israelis, for some reason, were in the mood…

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THOROUGH THOUGHTFULNESS STARTS WITH HONEST MOODS:  

  Some will say: “Wait a minute! are you not regressing? Did not Socrates say that the correct way of thinking was by piling up little reasonings such as: ‘Socrates Is A Man, All Men Are Mortal, Therefore Socrates Is Mortal’?

  All I can say is that I have seen lions hunting, and their reasonings, on the fly, were much more clever than that. (The antelopes were pretty smart too.) This sort of reasonings a la Socrates were amusements. A 2 year old can understand them (I enjoy a two year old). The obsessions with these infantile reasoning covered up the truth. Athens’ truth. The truth of the plutocratic friends Socrates lived from, as Rousseau would later live off rich women.

  The truth was that Socrates was a man, because he was not a slave. That was the real mood of Athens, and, to be obsessive about: [(a>b>c)>(a>c)] was just a way to change the conversation, from the mature, to the infantile.

  Fundamentally a contradiction of moods stabbed through the heart all of Athens’ logical systems, just as it would with the Roman republic later, with the same result: collapse. Athens’ principal mood, the mood of the rule of a free people resting upon the mood enforcing the massive enslavement of others, for no good reason, but happenstance, was itself a happenstance waiting for no good.

  Everybody is dominated by moods, but nobody with contradictory moods goes very far. And the same holds for societies. No logic in the world will change that. Why? Because logic always needs a universe in which to unfold. And that is provided by moods (the Incompleteness Theorems in metamathematics say nothing else).  

  Those who want to think better will work on their moods first. It’s harder than to work on ideas. Philosophers will view any, all packaged, already prepared mood, with even more suspicion than an unexamined idea. The unexamined mood is not worth having. Yes, I always lived that way. Early on in life, I acquired the mood of respecting, somewhat, but not trusting, at all, the naïve way the natives felt about their perception of their universe.

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Patrice Ayme

IMMORAL CO2 Curve

CO2: A NON LINEAR PATHOGENIC IMMORALITY: CRUSH THE INFAMY!

The Other Side Of God.

Abstract: Both the financial plutocracy and the biosphere catastrophe from CO2 poisoning are self feeding exponential phenomena (as Nazism was). CO2 poisoning is with no historical precedent since there were dinosaurs, and they died.

Any exponential phenomena affecting humanity is, by definition, immoral (I explain why, and what it means). The CO2 curve is not just immoral but also pathological. Only extreme force can be called upon crushing such spiralling towards destruction. In such cases,  violence, the usage of extreme force, has to rise to the ultimate occasion. That is moral. Appeasement is immoral.

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Introduction: Most of the worst civilization destroying calamities are self feeding, vicious spirals down the abyss. Rarely, the disaster is purely launched by nature.

This happened with Crete, which was devastated by the eruption of Thera (Santorini) volcano. The generated huge tsunamis, formidable ash fall, and devastation of the economy of the Orient. Crete did not recover. A more subtle case was Sumerian civilization, even earlier, destroyed by man-made salination and, supernatural flooding. The latter, I would venture to suggest, may have been caused by ecological man-made devastation, upstream.

Famous examples of man induced calamities are tied to the plutocratic phenomenon as happened in Rome and for the Mayas (the Yucatan drought was probably human engineered, and massive wars failed to improve the situation, until the population crashed, and stayed crashed, just as happened with the collapse of Rome, but even worse). “Pluto” is pretty much synonymous to “Dark Side” and “evil”. In all cases the inclination to view elimination as the ultimate solution.

In my view of meta morality, the Dark Side pretty much arose as the ultimate safety mechanism, the one that sacrifices Homo to save Gaia.

Voltaire recommended to “crush infamy“: he was talking about crushing the most outrageous aspects of plutocracy (the doubled headed hydra of the aristocracy and the theocracy). He was certainly not talking about crushing nascent international finance (because the roue’ Arouet was an extremely rich, not to say dishonest, international financial speculator himself).

Now the many headed calamity hydra is clearly graced with a globalized financial front (with a picturesque touch, we just learned that Bank of America was used massively by Mexican drug cartels for laundering), but also, worst of all, it sports the greatest disaster in dozens of millions of years: a man made CO2 rampage. We must speak more harshly than Voltaire to save civilization and its supporting biosphere (that’s why I call on the powers of the son of his friend Sade: only Pluto can fight Pluto). 

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A TALE OF TWO MORALITIES: Reality Versus Superstition (Plutocracy):

Dostoyevsky has one of his characters proclaims that:“If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”

Now, of course, God cannot be defined, so it does not exist, thus everything is permitted to the members of the plutocracy. This is, so to speak, the other side of god, the one rarely talked about (although obsessing about this is one of Nietzsche’s fortés).

The other side of God was the huge reality of the Middle Ages. The top members of the plutocracy at the time believed fervently in God, especially when it was highly convenient to them. Otherwise, they made fun of god, sometimes in the cruelest manner, as when they went to the Middle East, supposedly to free the house of Christ, while eating and roasting the local children (when it was expedient to do so).

Faced with thousands of prisoners, only some of them heretics, the following declaration was attributed to the Pope’s legate: “Cædite eos. Novit enim Dominus qui sunt eius:”  (“Tuez les tous, Dieu reconnaitra les siens!”, “Kill them all, Dominator will recognize who is his own.” The same concept, and word, dominate, was used for emperor, and god…)

Although the attribution is dubious in that particular case, it symbolizes well the mentality of the Middle Age plutocracy while it reigned. Amaury, the legate, had trespassed the Pope’s instructions by invading the giant, republican minded Toulouse County (this hints that Amaury was conspiring with the secular plutocrats in Paris, led by the king there, and the heresy was just a pretext, so what they were after was truly finding cause to kill as many citizens of the county as possible: no plutocrats love a republic, when they can kill it.)

Augustine famously said that there were two cities, one built by greed (civilization), the other by love (for god, the elusive notion nobody sane can define). Instead what Augustine made possible was a tale of two moralities. That of the slave (Christianism), and that of the masters. This is what Nietzsche found while analyzing scripture, and what the historical record makes plain. I would add it made possible a tale of two mentalities: those who care about reality, and those who hate it. Unsurprisingly, at least in the USA, those who love CO2, love Augustine, that is, fundamentalist Christianity, and hate reality. The reality being that, with what they want not to do, Florida will soon be underwater.

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WHEN CIVILIZATION EXISTS, FEW THINGS ARE PERMITTED:

Sartre said that all of French existentialism held in ‘If God does not exist, everything is permitted.’ That of course makes existentialism into a big nothing, because only Nazis and the like believed in such a thing, that “everything is permitted“. It is precisely because Nazis felt thus, that everything was permitted, that they did what they did.

As Nietzsche had guessed, nihilism was a rising scourge. So, the same mood that infected the Nazis, that everything was permitted extended much further, including in places which opposed the Nazis. Nowadays, many of the Internet stupid out there have erected as a nihilistic moral principle, at the grass root level of their subjection, that one has lost the argument, each time one mentions Hitler and company.

In other words, every time one rises an objection to “everything is permitted”, their minds leave the room, and, moreover, they insult you.

In any case, if “everything is permitted” is the definition of French existentialism, one arrives to the apparently paradoxical conclusion that the Nazis were actually French existentialists… It’s paradoxical until one realizes that many of the French existentialists were partial to Nazi like theories… Before, during, and well after the occupation of France by the Nazis.

Some of these Nazi fellow travellers, such as Beauvoir, deliberately collaborated with the Nazis! Sartre proved that aplenty later, with his hysterical support for various Nazi like movements (“of liberation“, instead of deliberation), all the way to Mao’s senile “Cultural Revolution”.

But maybe all what Sartre meant was that everything was permitted to Sartre…

Contrarily to what Sartre and company affected to believe, ever since there are civilizations, there has been interdictions springing out of morality.

An army is crucial for establishing a civilization, as is a treasury and a government (learn Europa, learn…). But morality holds all of it together. “Civilization is repression.” As Freud more or less said, in his Civilization and Its Discontents.

More generally civilization provides the context that individual human logics need to operate. In other words, civilization, all civilizations, determine what minds are going to be, and decree that, out of this arena, immorality reigns.

This fundamental precondition, a common experience, in that case, of (fascist) disaster, all of Europe (more or less) shares. That is why it was part of a healthy debate for the Greeks to remind the Germans what the old reigning German mentality, circa 1941 did to them, and that one should take a wide berth from a repeat performance.

And that is why there is good hope for Europe, and, why, paradoxically, any hard times presently encountered ought to forge some more, with fire and beating, of that common hard steel of moral resolve which forges the hardest, and hardiest civilization.

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CO2 DENIERS ARE DELIBERATELY TEACHING INSANITY:

The Nazis’ teachings were deliberately insane, they thought that was very smart. They despised those who could not be as insane as them, such as democracies (the fly in the ointment was that the French republic was much crazier than the Nazis had anticipated, and went right ahead to make war to the Great 1,000 years Reich).

The theory behind this was explained thoroughly by Hitler. Stalin made similar declarations.

The general idea was: “Nobody is as crazy as us, so we will win” and… Stalin was right, as its Soviet organization proved even more ready to kill anybody in the way than the Nazis themselves…. Nazis never had “blocking sections“, killing any soldier seen retreating. The Nazis found that method inhuman, and were unwilling to apply it to their Alte Kameraden!

In 2003, as the USA invaded Iraq, clever conservative commentators argued that none of the reasons for invading Iraq made much sense, but for one, that was in no way official. That was that, if the USA invaded Iraq, other countries would believe the USA was crazy, drunk on its power, thus dangerously unpredictable, hence to be left alone, and treated with the respect extended to an unpredictable predator, such as a grizzly bear.

The same ones are now supporting the CO2 built up in the atmosphere. One can see their crafty reasoning from here: climate catastrophe will bring a world war, so we will win the big enchilada (again). As happened in 1945, when the American plutocratic support for the fascists (mostly pre-1942) was determinant to destroy the supremacy of European democracies and other (not so democratic) states.

That strategy of insanity is, of course, nothing new: besides Hitler and Stalin, many brutes, throughout the ages, have argued just the same. If we act really crazy, people will make way.

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WHEN THE HELVETES WENT DELIBERATELY CRAZY:

A famous example: when the Swiss, the 380,000 Helvetii, a race of Celts, surrounded as they were, by mountains, decided that they would prefer to control a greater territory than Switzerland, they marched West, something they had long planned. They had defeated the Romans two generations earlier, they were unafraid.

So that everybody would understand that the Helvetii meant business, they destroyed all their grain, but for what they could carry, and burned all their cities, villages and houses. There was no going back. That was crazy. That craziness was the point, entirely. Caesar, who knew how to think, was impressed enough to do what it took to stop them. (After Caesar killed all of them but for 110,000, mostly in one tremendous battle, the imperator forced the survivors to rebuild their nation, lest the Germans invade Helvetia, and he obliged the Allobroges to the south to feed the dishevelled tribe.) 

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EXPECTING REASON FROM BRUTES IS UNCIVILIZED: 

Thus, how can one argue intelligently and politely with Nazis, and the like, when they are often using insanity as a tool, or weapon? This is the question exquisitely civilized people had in 1930s. Following the letter, but not the practice, of great Christian monarchs (the archetypes being Constantine, Justinian, Charlemagne) they embraced a sort of policy of “turning the other cheek, until brutes are ashamed, or their hands tired”. Those naive critters felt they would solve, if not dissolve, the brutes, by being ever more refined. Hence the strategy of “appeasement”. (To call off appeasement, the French republic overwhelmed her distaste, and pushed for a military alliance with the Polish colonels, dragging Britain in the small letters of the appendix; Hitler reacted by making official his long military alliance with Stalin, in the hope of scaring away the French… But France declared war nevertheless, to Hitler, Stalin, and their American plutocrats in attendance… and their snivelling allies in the U.S. congress.)

When facing real brutes, and humoring them, one may as well go to a swamp and read Homer to hungry crocodiles. Ultimately, the only civilized way to handle crocs or crooks basking in the greatest physical violence is according to what they are the most competent at: brute force. It is actually immoral for moral people to expect angry crocodiles to behave. Being moral does not mean to just turn the other cheek, but to know how to draw a line.

Some will notice that my drift tends to justify Obama’s execution policy. Sort of. What I contest with the execution policy is the details of how it is carried out (in particular targeting for death innocent families is not acceptable to me, although carpet bombing was in WWII. Why? Because Obama has other means at his disposal, patience being one of them; that was not available in WWII; in the present case, legal precedent is more important than just winning on the ground, because the battle is all in the minds now (forgetting 9/11), and has already been won on the ground).

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WHEN CROCS & CROOKS LIVE FROM OTHERS’ DEATHS:

Which brings us to those who deny the immorality of the steep CO2 curve. CO2 and associated, even worse, man-made industrial gases, cannot be denied. However, some still deny them, called them insignificant, or even life giving. Those self fascinated crooks are denying the significance of the steep rise in these atmospheric poisons. They are having martinis, and the good life (because they get paid for broadcasting their absurdities) while the biosphere tumbles towards catastrophe.

The phenomenon is exactly the same as with the crooked financiers. They get paid for their criminal absurdities, and the more absurd, the more criminal, the more money they get, a form of compensation for being immoral fools for all to see. Only brute force, jailing them, will solve the …. exponentiating problem they are creating. If one does nothing, just as with Hitler, the situation becomes quickly worse, and for the same reason: it’s self feeding.

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CO2 & GREED ARE EXPONENTIAL:

Both financial destruction of the economy and greenhouse heating of the planet are self feeding mechanisms. The evil blooming of the financial plutocracy and of the biosphere catastrophe are two illustrations of the exponential. Below the incapacity to do anything about both, lays a deep ignorance of the mathematical nature of that most important piece of mathematics, the exponential.

As Martin Lack, from “Lack Of Environment” points out: “Hi Patrice. You talk of the “immorality of the steep CO2 curve”, which reminds me of a point… If people look at the graph of atmospheric CO2 (with its annual peaks and troughs reflecting variations in photosynthesis by plants) they may notice that the long term-trend is not linear – it is accelerating slowly. However, what many fail to appreciate is that, if you look at the data in the context of CO2 levels over the last few hundred years, we are now in the near vertical part of a J-curve. As someone once said, the main reason Hockey Stick graphs seem to appear whenever you look at climate-related data is because they are there; and we are causing them:
See page 6 of the Introduction to David Mackay’s book Sustainable Energy – Without Hot Air.”

One would expect the CO2 curve to be non linear, because heating the planet is highly non linear. When there is such a thing as no more snow in August, the ground starts to warm up, the CO2 and methane in the permafrost bubble up, the dark ocean absorbs more heat, the tropical ocean makes more haze, steam (itself a most efficient greenhouse gas)… then there is no going back, and the climate will yo-yo, as happened many times in the past. Simply, this time, if we do not do something dramatic, we know that the yo-yo will beat anything viewed in at least 20 million years. And that means the yo-yo will break: no more glaciers. At all. (Smarty pants will point out that we will be able to put a planetary sized sunshade in orbit, someday. Maybe, but not before several billions dead, and not before we design safe and reliable nuclear rockets, or something like that!)

Thus I employ the adjective “immoral” deliberately, when referring to the CO2 curve, knowing full well that it is provocative. But it’s much more than that; it is correct. Morally correct. It goes at the heart of my theory of morality. It’s very simple: morality comes from “mores” the long term , thus sustainable, habits a civilization has.

That exponentiating CO2 curve is obviously not sustainable, thus it is immoral. And it is lethally immoral: CO2 is not just innocuous, life sustaining, growing big trees. It’s also lethal at very low concentrations: it became the major problem for the survival of the crew of Apollo XIII, after their fuel cell exploded.

Greed, itself exponential, feeds the CO2 curve. Exponentials feeding other exponential: a gory mathematical spectacle.

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EVIL ARTS BRING THE DEMON OUT:

And why is greed exponential? Because the more greed brings, the more one wants more, from a phenomenon of habituation, the same one which makes addicts augment the dose. The exact same brain phenomenon is at play: desensitization, and thus frantic augmentation of the stimulation. That is why Larry Ellison, after refusing to pay tax to schools, and buying huge properties everywhere, has now bought an entire Hawaiian island. He was getting habituated to all these outrages: he needed more, to get the same spice, with spitting into civilization’s face.

And that is why the balanced life, long sung by ancient philosophers, is so important, and, ultimately moral: it prevents this neurological desensitization, from an overuse of some peculiar neuronal circuitry. It is also why to be ruled by wealth, by greed, Pluto, is to be ruled by addicts. 

One may also wonder if the same effect is not at work among those who are obsessed by power (on others). it is already known that animals who are dominant, or dominated, suffer important neurohormonal changes. In some fishes, the need for an all fascist, all dominant leader brings enormous physiological changes, from male to super male, and if, there is no male left, from female, to super male.

Thus representative democracy, by its need for super leaders, may lead not just to select for the rather psychopathic, but even to turn the mild ones into physiological psychopaths.

As the astoundingly naïve Obama recently declared:“I did not know that my job’s description required to kill people.” Well, I have other news for him: his job is changing him neurohormonally, transforming him indeed, into a super killer (if not a super leader)… supposing he did not have it in him all along.

Gandhi called Hitler “his friend“, and tried to prevent India to declare war to “his friend“. What Gandhi did not understand is that utmost morality requires using maximal force against maximal calamities. There are no ifs and buts, and appeals to pacifism when facing a lion’s jaw (the morality Obama has been all too enthusiastic to use against Muslim terrorists, perhaps to compensate not using it against banksters!)

Let me truncate and add some sting to a quote of Sade:“Nature put us all to be equal born; if fate is pleased to intervene, and upset the primary order of things, it is up to us to correct its caprices and, through our own skill, to repair the usurpations of the strongest… So long as our good faith and patience serve only to double the weight of our chains…” Our virtues will be as crimes. (What Sade said at this point was the obverse: “our crimes would be as virtues“, also a valid point, sometimes, such as when Obama feels virtuous when killing innocent families of dedicated terrorists…)

As long as we sit quietly in our corner as the CO2 keeps on climbing, our virtues are as crimes.

What to do right away, besides getting more informed? Well the USA should follow Europe, and put heavy taxes on energy and carbon (it would also help the deficit while broadening the tax base). Even Australia just did this (more exactly on mining and carbon, to the applause of even “The Economist“).

Next the EU and USA could plot together, and squeeze the rest of the planet into clean energy. If Obama were re-elected, and not just listening to clever crocs such as Messieurs Summers, Rubin, Dimon, and countless others, he could put such a plan in action within days. It would even bolster employment (see Germany, which has created 300,000 jobs in clean energies).

The statu quo has become immoral. Time to do triage among the mores, and move on boldly where no minds have been before, same as ever was.

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Patrice Ayme

Independence From What?

INDEPENDENCE FROM THE TRIBAL INSTINCT WOULD BE A GOOD THING!

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July 4th, anniversary of the Declaration Of Independence of the USA from the UK in 1776. Much change then, a slow sinking now. Deep thinking would be the way out, but that would require some effort.

Some deplore that the trust in the political system is gone. But that the trust is gone is actually a good thing. We cannot trust a system where a few lead hundreds of millions, if not billions. It was bound to lead to disaster. It did. And what we have seen so far is small potatoes. The best is yet to come. I am watching Actic ice everyday. Still tracking lower than the previous lowest.

Even if and when the few leaders come from the People, and especially if they come from the People, one should not trust. Because the less power where they come from, the greedier they are, and thus, the more eager to be bought. Watch Clinton, Bill: obviously in need of wider recognition always, as those who started so small, they feel small always, and so need to pile up the hundreds of millions, just to feel OK about themselves.

Within two weeks of the lifting of his presidential immunity, an armada of police, bailiffs and no less than three judges, descended on three places of residence and work of Nicholas Sarkozy. A good thing. Whereas Obama begs the hyper wealthy for money in full sight of the uncomprehending American people, it would be impossible anywhere else.

In France financing by the hyper wealthy under the table is frowned upon by the law. Judges suspect that Sarkozy got, under the table, what Obama gets in two hours every time he shows up in the mansions of Silicon Valley, to sit at the tables for all to see, and sleep in all beds… As long as the owner of the mansion forks the money, and brings all her, or his friends, and all these fork the money, too.

Two thousand years ago, any grouping of a few thousands Germans got enraged when someone would proclaim himself a king. Now people venerate a handfull who talk as if they could do all the thinking by themselves, and better, than billions.

Hence we are facing in the American (or French) revolution the reality of a vastly incomplete revolution: Athens, at her apex, had direct democracy (OK, no women, no slaves…). We don’t. Even the Roman republic, in spite of its mixed system, was more directly democratic than we presently are (this is not a poetic opinion: it can be quantified, according to how many people were represented by whom, how, and how long…)

Still, after 5 centuries, the Roman republic fell, to be replaced by the Roman plutocracy (aka ‘the empire”, or “Principate” as Augustus preferred to say…)

We have democratic institutions to help, true (such as a humanized, republicanized, and constitutionalized army). And these democratic institutions, missing in Athens, do, indeed, help. But they are not enough. Actually, it’s good to remember that these institutions started in Rome, with a very efficient administration, but that, once again, they were not enough.

The incapacity to stop the devastation of the biosphere, or the devastation caused by the rampaging financial sector, are proof enough that Pluto is taking over.

How bad is it? Very bad. We are experiencing a Greater Depression. Only appearances are doing better than in the 1930s, but some of the most important statistics are worse. See: Greater Depression.

The Greater Depression in Europe is so severe that the birth rate is severely collapsing. As a French thinker put it in the 19C: ‘demography is destiny’.

Therein the American Declaration Of Independence: “He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages, whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.” Well, as it turned out, the frontier was soon extended to the ocean, and the “merciless Indian Savages” are now probably destroying the sea, with all its ages, genders, conditions…

This snippet of the declaration of independence is deeply disturbing, because it exhibits colossal insensitivity to Peoples who were just trying to survive to the destruction of their own world, while outrageously turning the tables on them, by claiming that they were undistinguished destroyers (while presumably the authors of the declaration were the distinguished destroyers). After all, it is cities such as Boston which paid money for scalps. A pattern was set in stone: accuse them of what you do, and call them savages. That mood has been much amplified today.

The Declaration of Independence of 1776 was just a rebellion, not a Revolution. The Revolution, that is the new Constitution of the republic, was established in 1789, within months of its French equivalent (that was to establish a constitutional monarchy headed by that great revolutionary, Louis XVI). The French constitution gave the right of vote to all (men), and outlawed slavery. it went further than anything Antiquity had known. Not so clearly in the American one (which refused the right of vote to individuals without enough property, contrarily to Rome).

It is only from the astounding agitation, encouragement, and giant financial and military support of Louis XVI that the American rebellion succeeded. Otherwise, the USA would have been the southern extension of Canada… That would have had advantages: France and Britain would have stayed masters of the planet (together, as it was, they defeated both China and Russia in the 19C).

Fascism, Prussian style, with its racist component would not have had a chance to rise in a world dominated by France and Britain (be it only because the Rothschilds had a firm grip on both sides, let alone Germany, ha ha ha). There would have been no “French revolutionary” and “Napoleonic” wars. No WWI, no Auschwitz (as the enormous resources of UK + Canadized USA +France + Louisiana would have crushed fascism outright. A non racist Austro-Hungary would have been an example of multi-national state, etc…

The British Parliament narrowly approved the expulsion of France out of Canada, although at the time many in the Parliament screamed to high heavens that was a terrible mistake, that would lead to the creation of the USA. Indeed France quickly returned the favor with the creation of the USA. So now what? Everybody should urgently recap the foundations of civilization…

Civilization is not founded on the market as some of the deranged economists whose thoughts presently reign have tried to make us believe. Watch Obama setting up free market exchanges to solve the health care problem, as if it were the job of markets to care about care! But Obama learned by rote that markets solve all, so he has now profit for solving care. What’s next? Selling babies to those who pay more, because that’s got to mean that, since they profit more, they care more?

Civilization is not just founded on the free market profit motive. Look at the Higgs particle, the discovery of which was announced today in Geneva, at CERN.

CERN was founded, and persists, as one of these typically French gigantic state institutions to foster human understanding with lots of taxes. CERN the Centre Européen pour la Recherche Nucléaire has been a gigantic success, discovering a lot of new science, while establishing new technology.

The free market does not do it all! Brains are deeper!

The idea of such democratic institutions, as I said, directly spring from a mood inherited from Rome. But a difference is that Rome did not do research. Rome knew one had to have a society motivated by more than the profit motive. The republican and democratic motives were viewed as more important, and that is why Rome set a powerful army and administration.

But Rome had forgotten curiosity and to institutionalize the Will to Knowledge. Europe did not. There is only so much tribalism can do.

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Patrice Ayme

Microbes Also Make History

BAD LEADERS CAN RUIN A CIVILIZATION.

Sarkozy Made Merkel Crucially Bad. Most Big Powers Despise The Biosphere Officially. Obama Loves Fire.

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Abstract: Three Italians named Marios have put Merkel on the ropes. It turns out, as the head of the German Socialists pointed out in parliament, six weeks after the presidency went to a socialist in France, conservative Merkel changed her music completely. She signed on measures she had insisted were against the German constitution. Such as the mutualization of the cost of defaulting banks (why should that be will be made clear below).

Not just that, but, having fallen in a trap the French socialists set for her, Merkel has already modified the German CONSTITUTION, to please them. Overnight, literally. (As I had predicted would happen.)

Americans don’t even remember when their constitution was changed last. Actually the USA does not change its constitution, just details, by “amending” it. The lack of change is built-in as the USA has NO constitutional court (strictly speaking, thus explaining SCOTUS‘ fear to be seen playing with the constitution). France and Germany, having learned from the past, have constitutional courts, and that is helpful as European construction requires continual constitutional changes.

There are broader lessons in this. If just one man, a small man who ran all the time, after his own legs, the French Nicholas Sarkozy, could, all by himself, put Europe and even the world, in a huge financial crisis, how many of these dangerous mongrels are out there?

If one lover of private bankers, Sarkozy, arrogant in his rabid stupidity, could, all by himself, keep hundreds of millions oppressed throughout Europe, how come more people are not waking up to throw similar rascals out?

It is interesting to observe that the dividing line is not so much between left and right, but between those who think the state should serve the richest folks for all to see, and those who aspire to more subtlety. The fact that the French socialists conspired instantaneously with the conservatives in Spain and Italy shows this.

What Sarkozy and Merkel did, was to enable further ruin of national states in Europe. As there is no European Federal state, that came down to transferring ever more power to those who manage the globally corrupt financial system and those who profit from it, the global plutocracy and its servants.

Similarly, the contempt of the most influential leaders for the biosphere, evident from their absence at the Rio United Nations Conference On Sustainable Development, is exemplary of their contempt for life. So what do they admire? As my essay “Sage of Obama” demonstrated, they admire the creatures who have sustainable power, even if based on criminal practice, upon most of the People (see also PM Cameron below for insufferable hypocrisy). This is another drawback of representative “democracy”: it selects the leadership of those who crave for power, amutually admiring society. 

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THOSE WHO ADMIRE CRIME SHALL LIVE AS SERFS:

As long as one insists that mafiosi are good fellows, one will not get rid of the Mafia. So it was in the USA: the mafia was flourishing, until a  number of movies (Including the aptly named “The Godfather“, and “Good Fellows“) demonstrated to the vast public that mafiosi, although charming in many ways, and craving for honor, were not just pillars of society, but disgusting criminals perverting all of society.

That new found revulsion gave justice and law enforcement the necessary context and encouraging mood to treat the criminals, as the criminals they were.

The same job remains to be done in global finance. As long as one insists that global finance mafiosi are good fellows, one will not get rid of the global finance Mafia. Justice will come, only after a mood of revulsion will set in.

The criminal problem posed by global finance is of course not of the same order of magnitude as the Mafia. The Mafia never brought the entire world economy to a halt, and never threatened the biosphere as we know it, with extinction. Global finance and its allies do. The danger they present is immensely greater. (I have also argued forcefully that global plutocracy was behind the various fascisms of the 1930s, including Stalinism, as Lenin himself foresaw!)

Some have made the additions, and found that the 2008 banking crash (which is still unfolding) was 100 times greater than the Savings and Loans banking crash in the USA under Reagan and Bush I. However in the latter case, more than 10,000 prosecutions and 1,000 condemnations against bank managers were obtained.

Under Obama, so far, none. Where there is a will, there is a way. However, microbes don’t even need a will to find a way.

Just watch most of the global finance loving leaders: they did not even bother to go to the Rio de Janeiro world ecological summit. Of the important world leaders, only the French socialist president Hollande showed up. The other permanent members of the UN Security Council do not worry about the security threat presented by the rising of the seas. Germany’s Merkel, anxious to build another 26 new coal plants, of course did not show up either. Fossil fuel Merkel will be fondly remember when Hamburg fights the rising ocean.

Thousands of the most important men in global finance should not be lionized as Obama did with Warren Buffet, or Dimon, or Rubin, Summers (See “Sage of Obama”). The mood of blind admiration for financial pirates has to be changed. By the way, such  a change of mood happened with piracy, four or three centuries ago.

Piracy had started honorably (lettres de marque, corsairs). Francis Drake, who discovered the San Francisco Bay and beat off the Spanish Armada, was, with his colleagues, a corsair, a type of pirate. 150 years later the mood changed, because the pirates had gone too far, taking over entire island, making trade difficult for everybody. Then the states actively suppressed piracy. It did not take long, once Britain and France took the decision to do so: pirates were found, and hanged, from the Carribean, to the Indian ocean.

We are in a similar situation with financial piracy today: if the states cracked down, it would be over in a matter of weeks.

Actually, come to think of it, there was an even more spectacular precedent. Under the late Roman republic, preoccupied by civil war between the Populares and the plutocrats, piracy grew in the Mediterranean, to the point that there were pirate cities, pirate islands, and trade was being extinguished. When finally the distracted Roman government was forced to focus on the problem, it gave full powers to a young Pompeius Magnus to clean the Mediterranean of the pirates. It took him only three months, to everybody’s amazement.

Something similar happened in the Mediterranean, again, when France and Britain, shamed by the Navy of the USA, also took action against the pirates in Algiers and Tripoli. It is important to remember that what the naive and ignorant describe as simple colonial adventures did not start that way at all, but instead as military operations against imperialism (Napoleon in Egypt!), or against piracy (US Navy against Libya, then, decades later, Royal Navy against Algiers’pirates, followed, finally, another decade later, by French invasion… Or counter-invasion, as the French argued they represented Rome, which had been chased out by the Arab invasion of the late 7C). 

So mankind has to learn to view financial plutocrats as the criminals they are. Common people do not know that global finance has set-up a machine to divert all of the world money to itself. Instead, in their naivety, they attribute what is criminal to a form of genius. One is reminded of the Bible, where the people chose to save the king of the bandits rather than the righteous Christ.

Common folks are mystified by global finance, as practiced today. They cannot know that it is just organized crime, because the machine is hidden behind non linear mathematics, and common people don’t know mathematics, even much simpler than that.

The Godfather, as incarnated by Marlon Brando or Warren Buffet has undeniable charm, the fascist instinct in man wants such a grandfatherly leader, but that’s exactly what the state of law is not.

The huge and prestigious banks Barclays, which has its own skyscraper in London, was found to have manipulated interest rates to its own interest, illegally. It was condemned to a fine of more than 360 million Euros. But its chairman stayed in place.  

Curiously the daemons at the head of JP Morgan and Barclays, are named Dimon and Diamond. The former went to the USA House and Senate with giant presidential cuff links. The questions were polite: the senators and Congresspersons are on his payroll. And the other daemon, Diamond, in Britain, made sure to give to charity, for schools, millions.

They steal billions from taxpayers, and then give millions, and get to be called “philanthropists”. Singer Bono, for example, is a philanthropist; he makes billions from facebook, while singing about the poor, to enrich himself, and showing off with the president and other friendly plutocrats and their obsequious servants.

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WITHOUT SARKOZY THE DISSEMBLER, MERKEL CRUMBLES:

Meanwhile the plutophile Merkel suffered a heavy defeat at the hands of the coalition led by Socialist France. Let me explain.

Mario Draghi was for six years a partner at Goldman Sachs. Goldman Sachs has been in the habit of making partners in its lucrative organization Europeans with high responsibilities (such as EC commissioners, some German, or central bankers, such as Draghi). This way they can be paid, for their attention while serving Goldman as apparently independent agents. Goldman thus rewards those who had its interests at heart.

The drawback for global finance, is that such officials, should they betray the criminals, know the method of the global financial Mafia, and where some the bodies are buried.

Draghi is now head of the ECB, the European Central Bank, and he suggested in June 2012 that a European Banking Union was needed. As it is now, when a bank fails the state the bank nominally belongs to, is supposed to step in. This is unrealistic, as the banks in Europe straddle borders heavily.

For example Italian banks owe more than 310 billion euros to French banks. German banks owe more than 200 billions to French banks, about what British banks owe to French banks, and French banks owe more than 125 billion euros to German banks. meanwhile British banks owe nearly 400 billions euros to German banks. Those who want to amuse themselves with these numbers can consult the BBC website (with its apparently misleading title, “Eurozone debt“, or is it a Freudian slip that, after all, to tell the real truth, Britain is in the Eurozone?).

Financial markets responded favorably to the June 28-29 maneuver, with Irish borrowing costs for 10 years dropping to their lowest level since the month before the November 2010 EU-IMF bailout.

The maneuver consisted into creating, soon, a European equivalent of TARP. So in the future, when a bank will fail, a common European fund will europeanize it (in contrast with nationalizing it).

“It is a first step to break the vicious circle between banks and sovereigns,” said European Council president Herman Van Rompuy.

Verily this circle is worldwide, even the Chinese Premier admitted that much… About supposedly communist China: he explained banks too big to fail, even in China, got their way, and that had to change.

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MERKEL’S HUMILIATION:

The evening started badly for Merkel, who had hysterically celebrated the victory of Germany over Greece the week before (in the soccer cup). An Italian named Mario, black like charcoal, scored twice against Germany. Then he rushed to kiss his (white) mama, who had adopted him from Ghana at age two. Very touching.

Under Hitler, Germans whose fathers had been black French army soldiers, were forcibly sterilized to the German population’s rabid applause, characteristic of scared rodents. There were several thousands of those unfortunate mixed race Germans (as manly French soldiers occupied Germany a bit after the later refused to pay for its wanton and deliberate destruction of France and Belgium in 1914-1918).

Many Germans will say;”Oh, this was then, this is now, we Germans don’t revisit the past, and think guilt is passe'”. Well, now came from then. Some of what German officials said in recent weeks proved this again. Bundesbank official talked about the Greeks as if they were dogs. Just like then. Germans do not own the Greek currency anymore in 2012 than they did in 1941.

1941 was the year when Germany invaded Greece to extricate the army of the fascist Mussolini from its invasion of Greece in 1940, which had backfired. The Greeks were defeated by Hitler, but, just as the Battle of France a year earlier, the Battle of Greece caused enormous losses to the German armed forces. So, a few weeks later, it was a much diminished German army that attacked the USSR. For example the German paratroop corps was eliminated while taking over Crete, and would reappear, much diminished, only during the Vercors Battle of Spring 1944, the diversion insurrection that allowed D Day in Normandy to proceed (by diverting 20,000 elite German troops, including SS paratroopers).

There are human rights abuses in Germany now, some major ones, such as no minimum wage. One cannot claim to be superior when one uses slave labor, same as then. Does our children ever learn, as G.W. Bush, grandson of one of Hitler’s most famous collaborator, Prescott Bush, would say.

So back to Merkel. After the terrible black Mario had scored twice against the Mannschaft (“the team”), there she was meeting with the 26 other leaders of Europe. What an evening!

Suddenly, the conservatives in Spain and Italy made a united front. At 11pm, they said they were not signing the document they had in front of them. For all the talk of Germany’s crushing superiority, Spain’s Rajoy and Italy’s Mario Monti represent more than 100 million people, and more GDP than Germany.

At that point, unheard of in a European Union summit, ever, a leader rose and left. French president Hollande stepped out, in an implicit support to Spain and Italy. Merkel could not call on her mighty ally. She was all alone. where was Sarkozy the plutophile, when she needed him?

Several hours later, Merkel, and the plutocrats she represents, capitulated. Banks in need will henceforth be Europeanized, getting money directly from the ECB (thus not increasing the debts of states such as Italy or Spain anymore). Hollande came back, and signed. Merkel looked haggard. Two defeat at the hands of “super Marios” in 12 hours…

When Merkel went back to her Parliament to get the two thirds majority she needs to change the German Constitution, the (physically large) chief of the Socialists (she needed to sign on) ironically observed that what she declared, two weeks earlier, to be anti-Constitutional, now that the French socialist controlled the National Assembly, she pushed to make it into law.

Evil men can hide behind regulations, or lack thereof, but they can’t escape the justice of history.

To tell us there are no banksters does not help. One cannot stop the Mafia, if one call Mafiosi, good fellows.

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WE CONSPIRE & HATE THE BIOSPHERE, What’s Your Problem?

If just Sarkozy could prevent progress on a banking union, what can a conspiracy of anti-ecological leaders do? At the Rio ecological summit, where the subject was saving the biosphere, none of the most major leaders were present, except, once again, France’s socialist president Hollande.

Dr. Merkel went back to Germany, busy, as she is, to build 26 new giant coal plants. Australian leaders did not show up: after all Australia lives off coal sold to Asia. Putin runs a petro-gas state. China breathes coal and the mercury vapor burning coal provides with, perfumes the atmosphere, forgive our mental retardation. Obama beams from fracking and the plutocrats he feeds, just as they feed him.

British PM Cameron is beyond any decent description: he now fights what he calls a “culture of entitlement“, by removing subsidies to those who cannot afford lodging. I guess, he fights himself, as he was born with ten gold spoon in his mouth. PM Cameron inherited a considerable entitlement, he is in the know. And see: he does not need help, this is the proper culture of entitlement.

Cameron’s father was a stock broker and then an off shore fund manager, presumably not to pay more taxes; an ancestor was king; the Sunday Times Rich List compiler Philip Beresford, said: “I put the combined family wealth of David and Samantha Cameron at £30 million plus. Both sides of the family are extremely wealthy.” Yes, let’s fight the entitled, Camie boy!

Meanwhile the USA is experiencing record high temperatures, fires are burning, Obama shows off with the muscular firefighters among the smoldering ruins. No need for a carbon tax, we are already burning. Pathogens make history. The Arctic icepack is tracking at record lows. The poles are melting, the plutocrats are reigning, what could go wrong?

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Patrice Ayme