Waltz, $treet! Perish, People!

SOCIETY DETERIORATING, PLUTOCRACY THRIVING

Abstract: According to The Economist, by the most important measure, money laundering and hiding profits, through shell companies,  the USA is the world’s most corrupt country.

Meanwhile life expectancy is dropping spectacularly for the poorest USA citizens. The plan? More of the same! In the USA, economic professors describing themselves as left wing democrats embrace printing money for the worst banks, the ones which have disconnected from civilization, while plutocrats feast and the poor starve. Yet I have long explained, as in 4% Inflation Best, that deep, planet saving reasons, exist to get inflation restarted. There are encouraging signs this way:

Inflation is pulling out of the deflationary channel from 1990

The Federal Reserve has joined my point of view that unemployment ought to be targeted, not inflation. (So now the Fed is engaging into QE3, to get money to the economy, no matter what!)

However the full reality is worrisome. We are not getting the right inflation. A careful study of this graph, (and other graphs!) show that it is oil and disasters which are pressing inflation up (although the two peaks of QE are clearly visible!). The deflationary channel itself is due to that uncontrolled colonization called globalization. 

What to do to get the right inflation? Massive governmental stimulus, impecably targetted (Saving GM, not investing in Solyandra!). Paradoxically rising world taxes, from Added Value, to taxing carbon and other pollutions, is (part of) the way to do it. Once Chinese goods will  cost what they really cost to the planet, and civilization, things will change. Not that it is China that is really at fault.

Apple’s iphone5 contains for $207 of components’ cost, while manufacturing (China) is only $8 (yes, eight dollars). The Chinese are excellent slaves. So far, so good. Yet most of the $400 that Apple then gets, per single iphone, are ferried through shell companies and tax heavens (see below). So, truly, the Chinese are exploited like slaves, while the plutocrats shelter most of their income from all taxation. All politicians know this, but the world’s political system is a pecking order that takes all its orders from The Blob in Washington (Blob is a technical term, see below).

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TELLING THE TRUTH: A RISK OBAMA CAN AFFORD:

Meanwhile Obama concentrates on what he knows, the tone in Washington. Banks, Obama likes, very much, but the tone in Washington, he does not like, and, like Jesus, wants to change. Obama gave a whole little speech during “60 minutes“, about the bad tone, complete with sad eyes. Surrealistic diversion. Does he crave to be called:”Your Majesty?” Would that improve “the tone” of the opposition? It has been tried before. Augustus was against it, but, three centuries later, emperor Diocletian imposed it. It was soon followed by evoking god all the time.

However Obama got hold of himself, and made a very good United Nations speech, contradicting the grotesque and debasing  Salafist supporting notions, of his own, despicable spokesman, the week before. I did not see an obvious lie in Obama’s speech, a significant improvement. That, telling the truth, in the USA, is a major risk for a politician to take. Not lying jingoistically is pretty heroic, in a country where 63% of registered republicans (and one democrat out of 6) believe that weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq. When lying is expected to be the truth, plutocratic propaganda dominates. Looking forward, no matter what, the best Obama can do is keep the spirit of his UN speech, and make a habit of telling the truth. (Of course he has to find out what that is first!) And Obama ought to leverage the electoral campaign he is sure to win, by dissecting the  financial corpses of insolently naked plutocrats such as the impudent Romney.

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PLUTOCRATIZATION AND SENILITY ARE US(A?):

The wizened 60 Minutes interviewer was blunt:“You [Obama] gave the banks a bail-out, the homeowners did not get one.” (Obama gave the usual canned red herring retort:“We helped, blah blah blah.” Since when is “helping” homeowners a quid pro quo for bailing out criminals?)

It is even worse than that. Under the Bush-Obama administration, the particular bankers who caused the greatest financial fraud ever, were treated more than well. Obama sang the praises of several of the fraudsters; still does. Obama was very close to Mr. Wolf, head of USA UBS, subsidiary of the largest Swiss Bank. UBS was convicted of massive criminal activities in the USA.

UBS, afraid of being accused of conspiracy with the government of the USA, fired Mr. Wolf. One of the worst of the worse, Warren Buffet, owner of everything and its opposite, the world’s plutocratic godfather, seems to have replaced his father in Obama’s fertile imagination. (See my “Sage Of Obama“.) Everybody wants a dad, and it’s tempting to go for the mightiest dad. Upon this flaw much of the aweful seduction of, and abandonment to, plutocracy and fascism rest.

The general principle was this: just like merchants give money to the mafia that steals them, government officials gave money to the largest mafia ever, that of the biggest banks. With two spicy new twists: what the officials gave was not their own money, but public money, and they get paid for these transfers, by joining the financial mafia. When giving money to the Sicilian mafia, merchants become victims. By giving money to the global financial mafia, politicians turn into criminals.

The biggest bankers were given money  publicly corresponding to what they had stolen privately. And not one string was attached to this gift of public money to compensate them for what they, and associates, had stolen. Basically the People paid for their mansions, jets and private islands. Twice. And then Obama goes around with the Gates to tell us, not that they are the gates of hell, but the gates to public education. Thanks to propaganda, this astounding transfer of public assets to the richest people was never discussed. History, someday, will discuss it. Meanwhile, Krugman and his kind sings on all roofs that doing it much more will save the economy.

What we are facing is something that happened to Rome before: as plutocratization, a form of collective brain sclerosis, a fruit of the propaganda of the richest, proceeds, the world is getting old.

Inflation, including food and energy shows that we seem to be entering an inflationary upswing, after a multi decadal disinflation. This is a gift, but a poisonous one. A gift, because it could foster more sustainable energy technologies (among other technologies).

As the collapse of life expectancy of less educated Americans shows (life expectancy for women in the USA is now the lowest of developed nations.) Russia went through a similar phenomenon, the same cause, the capture of the state by the few, having the same effect (people die).

The best reason for the reappearance of inflation would be a rise in median income. But that keeps on sinking. Inflation is reappearing for the worst reason imaginable.

The world is getting old (as the Romans used to say). Climate change and the finite nature of the ground make the prices of oil, energy and food enter a secular upswing.

So it is not reasonable to exclude food and energy from the computation of inflation. Food and energy are the two most important factors in sustaining life. After all the Arab spring started in Tunisia because of the exploding cost of winter wheat in the USA. (I am not trying to insinuate that was a bad thing, but lots of people died, and the miscreants who jumped the wheat price can do the same, anytime, and cause the failure of revolutions.)

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DROWNING GOLDMAN IN MONEY: KRUGMAN STYLE SOCIALISM!

Paul Krugman’s was aghast when a student at the London School of Economics asked him why he never, ever, mentioned the Fractional Reserve System (FRS). A livid, baffled, Krugman mumbled that serious economists did not question, nor worry about, FRS. It’s not something done among the worthy.

Yet, Fractional Reserve System is how money is created. It’s not a detail. And the particular FRS we have now is a particular choice, and the master director of all and any economic activity (for example, Switzerland operates with a significantly tweaked FRS from the rest of the West, and banks whoring to the People, were the main drivers of the crisis in the USA, Spain, Ireland). If one does NOT want to focus on the Fractional Reserve System, one cannot even pretend to be the most serious type of macro economist. Krugman suspects this, so he could not wait for the embarrassment to go away.

In the Fractional Reserve System, banks create money out of thin air, through the extension of credit. Notice that banks do not have to be private, for a FRS to work. The banks themselves get seed money (so called “monetary base“) from so called central banks. The nature of central banks varies considerably in various countries. All countries have a central banks, except for the Euro Zone countries, whose impotent central banks are dominated by a common, supra national central bank, the European Central Bank, ECB.

Central banks ought to make sure that enough money is provided to banks to run all the transactions the economy requires. But not so much that it would cause run-away inflation (that latter point ought to be secondary; however it is viewed as primary, especially in the ECB mandate).

As I explained, the Roman empire’s economy ran out of currency in the Third Century. What was needed was a Fiat Currency. This was done by debasing the coins. However, the emperors did not have enough military power, and law enforcement, inside the empire to impose the value of these coins (all the more as coinage was in competition with a bartering system imposed by the government, to preserve the essential part of the economy).

Later the Franks reintroduced Fiat coinage, successfully backed by the law that faux-moneyeurs were to be boiled alive, very slowly. Boiling those who made their own fake coins was essential to the soundness of Frankish Fiat money (similar severity was exerted in China, to impose Chinese Fiat Currency).

Printing money, and giving it to banks, is now called “Quantitative Easing”, QE. it’s the financial equivalent of shark baiting. The great advantage of these obscure semantics, “QE”, is that commoners do not know what “QE” is about. If it was described for what it is, feeding the sharks, people would ask:”What is the idea?”

Quantitative Easing is all what conventional economists have been thinking about. It’s their ubiquitous panacea. In the USA, the left is, weirdly, for it. It is weird, because, in a way, Krugman, supposedly a liberal (meaning left wing in the USA), is begging to send more money to the likes of Goldman Sachs.  It’s a bit as if a would be Karl Marx would beg us to send more money to Carnegie (the USA’s first mega billionaire). Except that Carnegie, a civilized man, had a social conscience, and Goldman, at any given time, a network of hundreds of plutocrats, does not. 

The right in the USA, is, even more curiously, against Quantitative Easing. Does that mean that the right is against bankers? Hardly. It’s just a question of identifying an issue where it could oppose Obama, and be right. (So now Romney can only attack Obama on his left, an impossible task, which makes him toast.)

Europe resisted QE, for the obvious reason that QE gives more ammunition (“monetary base”) to the serial killers, the private banks, that caused the 2008 crash. Finally it engaged in it at the last moment, to “save the Euro” (meaning some Euro Zone country had not enough money for their economy).

Also, whereas the USA engaged in a Federal economic stimulus, Federal European institutions did not do such a thing.

The combination of lack of QE and lack of Federal stimulus starved the European economy of money, and job creation (it’s mostly new small companies, which are credit dependent, that create new employment).

This threatened to explode the Euro Zone, and it brought a more severe downswing of GDP and employment in some countries that what happened in the so called “Great Depression” of the 1930s (examples are: Great Britain, Spain, Greece).  

Finally, Draghi, head of the ECB, supported by all on his board, but for a couple of obdurate Germans, engaged in Quantitative Easing (although probably just 20% of the one in the USA). That did not respect the charter of the ECB, but never mind.

The Fractional Reserve System is an indirect system, and therein its Achilles heel. The central banks print money, and give it to the banks. However the banks are private, and under the influence of the meta mood that greed knows best, they came to be motivated exclusively by the profit motive.
QE explained in 2010 in this (it has got a bit more twisted since).

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BIG PRIVATE BANKERS DECIDES WHO AND WHAT IS WORTHY, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

To make money available for the real economy, one has to force the biggest banks to lend to the real economy. Giving more and more money to the big banks, no strings attached, the Krugman plan, has been tried for more than a decade, and it’s only deepening this Greater Depression, because it augments wealth inequality.

The money is not getting to the real economy, because the banks are unwilling to lend. Reminder: what’s the size of the derivatives’ market? 750 trillion dollars. Remind me: what’s the size of world’s GDP? 50 trillion dollars, roughly 6% of the total derivatives’ market. Is it not then the case that banks are playing with money in a parallel universe, with each other, thus sure to win?

An example of this is the futures’ markets on food and its indexes. Founded by Goldman Sachs, the indexes have become a speculative toy geared to profits, and so hundreds of million people starve. The revolution in  Tunisia was directly caused by a speculative ramp up of the future market on winter wheat; it caused an explosion of the price of bread worldwide. There are no regulations, so organized crime, from the world’s largest corporations, mightier than most countries, is rampant.

The reason being that their careers were entangled, infused with the system that has created the planetary emergency. If you touch the system conceptually, you compromise their glory. People look for glory and righteousness, these are evolutionary values.

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WORLD NUMBER ONE SHELL GAME TAX HEAVEN? THE USA!

Cheating R US! Hiding profits in the USA is apparently of the essence: the USA is the best place for establishing shell companies:

Fewer Approaches = More Corrupt

Only ten out of 1,722 providers in America required notarized documents in line with the (International, mandated) FATF standard. This is just an indication that the number one generator of tax heavens in the world, in sheer volume, is the USA itself. That puts a singular light on Hillary Clinton’s statement about the rich (see below).

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THE “BLOB”, OMNIPOTENT INCESTUAL FINANCIAL CONSPIRACY IN WASHINGTON:

Obama is just a lawyer, by cognitive formation, he has to do what the economic elite and financial intelligentsia tell him to do… even if he suspected that the economic advice he got  is erroneous, he cannot go against it… Except of course if he engaged in a public debate about it, but would that admission of ignorance on the part of both Obama and the elites be viewed as cool? Time to remember Socrates’ main teaching: the person of wisdom, confronted to ignorance, is not afraid to admit it, first, to clear the air, and then debate it, to enrich and deepen the logic.

Fads such as “Occupy Waltz Street” failed because it had no theoretical leadership, but for waltzing in the streets. Basically, it made light of the situation. As Matt Taibbi puts it in A Rare Look At Why The Government Won’t Fight Wall Street:

“The great mystery story in American politics these days is why, over the course of two presidential administrations (one from each party), there’s been no serious federal criminal investigation of Wall Street during a period of what appears to be epic corruption. People on the outside have speculated and come up with dozens of possible reasons, some plausible, some tending toward the conspiratorial – but there have been very few who’ve come at the issue from the inside. We get one of those rare inside accounts in The Payoff: Why Wall Street Always Wins, a new book by Jeff Connaughton, the former aide to Senators Ted Kaufman and Joe Biden.”

Another “mystery” is why Rome got ever more corrupt for five centuries, until it imploded. Actually it’s no mystery at all, except for those who learned by rote plutocratic propaganda. The Roman Republic went down, for the same reason as we are going down: corruption, like gangrene, once deep down inside, is hard to stop.

And then the book Taibbi talks about explains it’s not JUST a conspiracy. It is more than a conspiracy. In a conspiracy, people together-breathe (con-spirare”). As  Matt Taibbi puts it: “There are some damning revelations in this book, and overall it’s not a flattering portrait of key Obama administration officials like SEC enforcement chief Robert Khuzami, Department of Justice honchos Eric Holder (who once worked at the same law firm, Covington and Burling, as Connaughton) and Lanny Breuer, and Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner.

Most damningly, Connaughton writes about something he calls “The Blob,” a kind of catchall term describing an oozy pile of Hill insiders who are all incestuously interconnected, sometimes by financial or political ties, sometimes by marriage, sometimes by all three. And what Connaughton and Kaufman found is that taking on Wall Street even with the aim of imposing simple, logical fixes often inspired immediate hostile responses from The Blob; you’d never know where it was coming from.”

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SO CALLED REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS NOT DEMOCRACY:

Politics, the way we have it in so called “representative democracy” now, tends to select those among the crabs who have the highest propensity to get to the top of the basket. Thus the crabs who pinch the most get to the top. It’s not about brains, or morality. Disingenuously, or idiotically (take your pick!), Obama keeps on saying he wants “to change the tone in Washington”. Of course, it cannot, ever, be done. Some individuals close to the Obama campaign have confessed that “it is just a matter of showing up, things fall in place, people applaud, it’s not about ideas.”

The very nature of Washington, by putting so much power, in the hands of so few, unsupervised by the People, thanks to lack of transparency, is anti-democratic. (The same holds for the system in other Republics, by the way; the less undemocratic republic is Switzerland. Even bankers are on a much tighter leash there, with enormous reserve rquirements: 20%!)

Let me explain this slowly to Obama: the present system vests giant powers in a few people, for inordinately long periods of time. It’s not democracy. To ask the crabs with the biggest pincers, and the greediest, to change tone, is beyond naive, it’s taking peopple for fools.

The mediocre Geithner, for example, has been in charge of the financial sector of the USA for more than 6 years. Nobody knows what he does, but for comforting an entanglement of the richest and most powerful individuals in the world, under the claim that he, the unelected, unexplained Geithner, somehow represents the People. The ancient Greeks would have screamed if proposed to be ruled that way. it’s completely clear, from his history and background, that Geithner is a (well paid, very obedient) puppet. He is where he is, because of the powers that be, Obama has litle to do with it.

Examples abound, and the story is always the same: a few oligarchs, closely entangled to plutocrats, take the most important decisions for 7 billion people. And that includes killing the biosphere. And the People is not privy to the decision process, just invited to watch some sort of Kabuki theater.

In the “60 Minutes” interview, Obama, said that, in the first two years, when he had a supermajority, he should have involved the People in his decisions. Yes, transparency was the plan, part of his electoral platform. But Obama had no idea what he was supposed to decide about, he could not even organize a debate. The only thing he knew is that all he talked about during his campaign was not a social contract, it was not pragmatic, except as a way to get elected. If he wanted to nationalize a bank for real, not just give it enough money to buy it ten times over, with public money, he was confronted with the likes of thousands Krugmans and crude men, who have never seen a bank or Wall Street they did not love beyond any examination.  

To parody Socrates’ point about life and examination, common people are finding out that the unexamined life means only the worthy have it.

So Obama decided to embark on a red herring expedition, something fundamentally apolitical, something political he could angle into, a mission from his god, a robbing of his electorate, namely making politicians polite (!). He whined about that a lot. But, on the important things, things he understood nothing about, Obama did not engage in any public debate. Too afraid to flaunt his ignorance, and that of the elite which made him.

For example Obama’s tripling of the force in Afghanistan was a giant blunder. Cancer research, let alone NASA, are paying for it. And the small detail of life expectancy. And it’s not Obamacare that will change the run down in life expectancy, because it will prove too onerous.

As I wrote at the time: “Afghanistan, No You Can’t“. Afghanistan was a blunder for most People, but it was heavens for the Military Industrial Complex, and for the plutocrats in general.

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RICH PEOPLE EVERYWHERE BUT THE POOR HAVE ONLY HILLARY!

Six years ago, I supported Obama, for personal reasons, but also because I detested what I viewed as Bill Clinton’s hypocritical and disastrous record, the fruit of putting Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs in command, and his henchmen, such as Summers, Larry. I was afraid Hillary would put them back in power. Obama though, did exactly that, in most part because the intelligentsia of the democratic party is roughly as efficient as the French High Command in May 1940.

It may have been unfair to paint faithful and wise Hillary with the same big brush as dishonorable, “I-don’t-know-that-woman” Bill (who is now doing his best to make amends from the top of his financial wealth)

However, here is Hillary now:

“There are rich people all over the world, in every country. And you know what? They don’t contribute to the growth of their own countries. “

What might have been?

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CATASTROPHES ARE OUR FRIENDS:

Plutocrats love war, because war calls onto the fascist instinct… That’s why they had their servants spent 200 times more on (otherwise useless) wars in the Middle East than they spent on cancer research, in 2008 alone.

Indeed the fascist instinct, in turn, calls to be ruled by the few. Naturally, the plutocrats are in the best position to be precisely those few… And in any case, the call of wanting, emotionally, to be ruled by the few justifies the principle of the rule of the plutocrats. That’s why Hitler himself was played like a violin by all sorts of plutocrats, such as Thyssen (remorseful author of: “I paid Hitler”) to Watson of IBM, and countless other influential rich USA citizens.

Thyssen even hedged, telling of his son to be pro-Hitler, inside Germany, while the other, in England, would pose as anti-Hitler. This way the Thyssen family was sure to win.

Hedge fund managers will recognize a “butterfly” strategy: if losses are bounded on the downside, and the up side, one can take opposite positions (properly leveraged puts and calls). Now, of course such investments, as a butterfly strategy don’t profit to the real economy, and depends, to be successful, upon catastrophe. So the existence of the possibility of such investments, by the individuals and institutions which have the most money, favor catastrophes, and robs the real economy.

This is exactly the sort of things we are enjoying nowadays, in this Greatest Depression. As potential catastrophes pile up, don’t forget: they are not really happening by accident. Some very powerful people know that they will profit, if they hedge themselves well.

In France, in the Middle Ages, the Devil was called “Le Malin” (“the crafty one”). The only way to defeat evil is thus not by imagining oneself to be good, and acting accordingly: most people do this already, and it does not work. What works for the best, is to be smarter than evil.

Economists have systematically minimized the gravity of the planetary emergency we are in. If he gets smarter, and should he accept the mission, Obama may start to understand that it is the real economy that counts, not what the present generation of completely corrupt financial types say about it. And that the economy also means research, of the fundamental type, the one with no probable short term profit, that no market agent can engage in. Research, for example on cancer, that is now increasingly starved from funding.  

Greed, the profit motive is not the noblest of emotions. Nor is it the most powerful. Thus not the one that brings the deepest insights. Nor is greed something that insures survival. Quite the opposite is true. So forget the banksters, and let’s have a world again.

It starts with banks that create enough money to run the economy at its full potential. While keeping in mind that thinking, studying, is the core activity of man. The free market, and, a fortiori finance, is just oil in an engine. It is not the engine. The primordial economic engine is the government. Always has been, always will be.

In a democracy, the government is by the People, for the People. Not by greed, for greed. Government by greed, for greed is what Rome increasingly got… Until it became so dysfunctional that it had to be replaced by the only army that was left, that of the Franks.

Government by greed, for greed, is what the servants of plutocracy, from Reagan to Romney have proposed always more of. Like clocks indicating the same time always.  Meanwhile, even life expectancy is crashing, as the health care system of the USA seems to be following that of the Soviet Union. And what’s the plan? Always more greed? Self declared “Conscience of a Liberal” Krugman, proposing always more money for Goldman Sachs and JP Morgan, in the apparent naivety that banksters will suddenly see civilization as a beacon?

Greed as panacea is also the mood Obama should try to get rid of in the next four years, starting with this electoral campaign. Should he desire to be more than the addendum to Bush he would otherwise become.

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Patrice Ayme

USA & France Do NOT Respect Religion

UNHOLY ALLIANCE OF ISLAMISM WITH DARK HOUSE CLUELESS ON FREEDOM, The Essence Of The West:

White House Press Secretary Jay Carney reading a prepared statement: “We are aware that a French magazine published cartoons featuring a figure resembling the prophet Muhammad, and obviously we have questions about the judgment of publishing something like this… We know these images will be deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory.”

Muha Bad, or Muha Mad? Neither! White House suggests ‘figure resembles prophet Muhammad’!

This is the cartoon that the (fanatically Islamist?) White House views as “deeply offensive“. What about deeply offending the USA Constitution and the Founding Fathers? [Caption translates as: The movie that inflames the Muslim World; then the “figure resembling the Prophet Muhammad” according to the White House, says: “And my buns, do you like my buns?”.] 

“Deeply offensive to many“? Many what? Grand inquisitors? Salafists? Did the White House see the picture of the burned ambassador, not quite completely dead? They have been shown in France. Atrocious pictures. That’s what “deeply offensive” means, burning alive innocent people, good people.

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“We are aware… we know… obviously…questions… judgment…figure resembling the prophet Muhammad…deeply offensive”. In any discourse, one can gather a lot by the context the key words describe. (Those knowing combinatorial topology will recognize keys words describe a simplicial complex the faces of which define higher concepts…)

The USA administration’s  hostility to the famous French magazine Charlie Hebdo follows the administration’s September 14 effort to persuade Google to take down a short, cheap satirical video on YouTube that also angered a few fanatical Islamists. Thank god, for once Google lived up to its slogan:”Don’t be evil!”

What basically the administration is doing is the following. Some Christian fundamentalists have killed doctors, because,  they said, they were offended by abortion. Suppose a cartoon came out, suggesting that the assassins are narcistic, and obsessed by whether they looked good. Would the White House have declared that such a cartoon was “deeply offensive to many and have the potential to be inflammatory“? So why the pandering to fanatic criminals? A few days after an American ambassador and three other employees of the State Department got assassinated?

The State Department has been incredibly incompetent: incapable of defending a “mission” against 70 guys armed with diesel fuel. The USA ambassador and another US citizen died in the fire. The attack was on 9/11. In a second attack, a bit later, some of the attackers were carrying weapons bigger than Obama himself. Two ex Navy seals got killed.

The video describing the major contents of the Qur’an, made by an Egyptian, had been out for 6 months. Accusing it was untenable. Still, that is what the White House did, following the discourse of Islamist fanatics. Who is better at determining what insults Islam than Islamist fanatics? Nobody in the world, proposes the White House! No doubt the majority of Muslims, who are deeply hostile to Islamist fanatics, will thus find a new reason to dislike the White House, and to suspect that it’s there mostly to add fuel (diesel or not) to the fire.

Did the administration read the Qur’an? What’s in that video that is not in the Qur’an? I read one and watched the other, and I fail to see in which sense the video is not deeply respctful of the Innocence of Muslims, as revealed by scripture.

By insisting that the attack was caused by “Innocence of Muslims“, the administration made a joint statement with Al Qaeda: trailer kills ambassador. Same thing about condemning Muhammad’s sketches; so doing, the White House is insisting that the Wahhabist interpretation of Islam is the correct one.

Finally the administration recognized the obvious. Yes, it was a terrorist attack. After all. Al Qaeda.

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USA DOES NOT RESPECT RELIGION, SAY CONSTITUTION, FOUNDING FATHERS:  

Does the administration know the Constitution? Apparently not. The First Amendment to the United States Constitution starts with: “Congress shall make no law RESPECTING an establishment of religion…

In an astounding contrast, the White House orders us to respect sketches of naked guys worrying about whether their buns look good, because, well, some crazed fanatics, somewhere, have it that’s against their superstition. Not just against their superstion, but their heavens high indignation gives them the right to kill whoever has displeased them. And the present White House approves? Why should we abhor sketches of naked guys? Why should we obsess about naked guys?

Jefferson, Third President of the USA, wrote, “I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ‘make no law RESPECTING an establishment of religion…thus building a wall of separation between Church & State.”

Calling the clowns in the white House “apes” (as the Qur’an does, speaking of Jews and Christians) would be too mild, because apes ape, and the White House boys can’t even do this.

In the Treaty Of Tripoli, worked on by all the Founding Fathers, and signed on by the first two presidents of the USA, George Washington, and John Adams we find this:

 As the Government of the United States of America is not, IN ANY SENSE, founded on the Christian religion,—as it has in itself no character of enmity against the laws, religion, or tranquility, of Mussulmen [Muslims],—and as the said States never entered into any war or act of hostility against any Mahometan [Muslim] nation, it is declared by the parties that no pretext arising from RELIGIOUS OPINIONS shall EVER produce an interruption of the harmony existing between the two countries.

“Not in any sense, no pretext ever from religious opinion“: get it, Obama? Learn. A corollary, obviously, is that the USA is not, in any sense, founded on the MUSLIM religion. So Muhammad’s buns, if any, are none of the USA’s official business.

Another corollary is that all the god stuff brandished since 1954 CE in the USA about Allah is unconstitutional. The present period will be viewed in history as the times when the presidents of the USA thought they were Caliphs!

On the whole planet, the total number of demonstrators against “Innocence of Muslims” and the French caricatures, so far, including government organized demonstrations in Sudan and Iran, is 150,000… out of 1.5 billion Muslims, that’s .1%. A tenth of one percent. Yet, when the White House, in the name of the American People, denounces free speech, as Carney did, that’s 310 million speaking, and a major democracy falling for the Dark Side of god.

The Administration insisted, initially that the lethal attack against the USA ambassador and other government officials, had everything to do with “Innocence of Muslims“. In other words, people  supposedly “denigrating” Islam caused the attack.

The White House and others kept on describing the trailer as “denigrating“, but they forgot to tell us why, and how, exactly. Wild accusations without explicit foundation are just devolutions of reason.

Here, watch me go explicit. The trailer was accused to represent Muhammad as a pedophile polygamist who got involved in combat with a bloody sword, and whose ideas came from a Christian monk, cousin to his wife. The trailer mostly follows impeccably the Qur’an and Hadith, as I explained in “Progress kills Killer Religions“.

Yes, Muhammad married a 6 year old girl. Yes he had many “wives” some from the battlefield, some Jewish, some from a irate subordinate. Yes, Muhammad was a raider of caravans, and led battles personally, resulting in the death of thousands. Including an entire Jewish tribe, annihilated. This is all in the sacred texts of Islam.

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FRANCE’S UNCOMPROMISING STANCE ON ISLAM:

In 721 CE, the greatest army Islam ever had, invaded “Francia”. The Franks of the Dux of Aquitania retreated, setting a trap for the charging Islamist horde, which was annihilated. Two further invasions followed, with the same result, bold Muslim penetrations, followed by encirclement, entrapment and annihilation, hammered by Charles Martel, a Carolingian, grandfather of Charlemagne. Militarily decapitated, the Arab caliphate fell by 750 CE, and was never seen again (other Islamized nations became dominant, such as Iranian, Mongols and Turks)  

The White house kept on debasing itself. A somewhat haggard Clinton read a statement on Friday claiming the USA had nothing to do with the “Innocence of Muslims”. Meanwhile, in the center of civilization, Charlie Hebdo made another massive printing of its Muhammad cartoons. Disingenuously, USA media claimed the French government had condemned the cartoons “swiftly”. It was not ‘swift”, and it did not happen.(The New York Times just misrepresented what French foreign minister Fabius (a “Jew”) had said.)

Quite the opposite. Several days before Charlie Hebdo went on the attack, the French president, Hollande, inaugurating the magnificent museum of Islamic Arts in the Louvres, Paris, condemned religious fanaticism: “Les meilleures armes pour lutter contre le fanatisme qui se reclame de l’Islam se trouve dans l’Islam lui meme. Quand le patrimoine est saccage’, ceux sont toutes les civilisations qui sont attaquees…[ce qu’il faut condamner c’est] L’insondable betise qui rend chaque civilisation vulnerable. “

(Best weapons against the Islamist fanaticism are found in Islam itself. When patrimony is devastated, it’s all of civilization which is attacked… What one needs to condemn is the unfathomable stupidity that makes each civilization vulnerable )

The issue of Charlie Hebdo condemned by the White House had only 2 or 3 cartoons that could be religiously interpreted out of 30 or so in the issue. The weekly comments on the events of the week, it comes out on Wednesday. However, it proved so successful that it quickly ran out, and it was reprinted exceptionally for Friday, the day of the great prayer. So much for the French being terrorized by Muhammad’s buns.

The director of publishing at Charlie Hebdo pointed out that the great religions live out of the fear they inspire. Instead, most people publishing Charlie Hebdo  don’t want to live in fear, they want to live in fun and good humor, lightly. 

One thing the White House should pay more attention to is that to live lightly has to do with light and the enlightenment. Why should those who want to live in the light, by the light, and lightly, care about what master terrorists expert in the mania of crowds claim to worry idiotically about?

***

Patrice Ayme

Duchesse of Hypocrisy.

NO QUEEN BUT QUEEN OF NAKED HYPOCRISY. KNEEL, RABBLE!

Hypocrisy the crew of spaceship Earth has to learn to do without.  Today, to relax the atmosphere, we evoke much Western hypocrisy attending to plutocracy, and how it thrives that way, drinking from an arriviste’s nipples (see picture at the end of this essay).

British press shows naked women routinely (page 3 of the SUN). But not Kate Middleton, the naked Princess. A French magazine was condemned for uncontrolled pictures of the exhibitionist Kate. Could the interdiction of representing Kate be related to the incapacity of observing much that is moronic, and exploitative throughout the West, commodities markets, banks, Qur’an, plutocracy, and the world order in general?

Tartuffe Kate: Hide This Breast That I Would Not Know How to See

[Picture taken a few hours after Muhammad Middleton sued for pictures of herself in too simple an apparel. Did they ask the brown woman about whether she agreed?]

Hypocrite: pretending that what is there, is not there, and what is not there, is there. Middleton, thereafter to be addressed in this essay as the Duchess of Hypocrisy.

Kate Middleton is from old English money, with hidden finances, even worse than the “sneering plutocrat” Romney (who claims to be a self made man, but is not). Kate owns a 1.5 million dollar apartment in Chelsea. A gift from her parents. She and her two siblings went to an elite private school where the tuition is at least $ 40,000 a year, per child. That’s more than three times the median British family income for the three children, per year, just for “education”.

The disinformation (aka propaganda) has it that her parents are self made millionaires. Actually the family fortune goes back more than 250 years, she is old plutocracy (an ancestor had a fortune of more than 50 million dollar). Middleton is also a media expert, like the rest of her family (she and her sis were nicknamed the “wisteria sisters“, an allusion to their social climbing ability, similar to that of this vine).

Notice the complicity of the British press: it’s all one solid establishment. Everybody respects the Duchess. She is a symbol of plutocracy. Accept the Kate, as an object a reverence, a sacred cow, a prophetess of what’s done, and what’s not done, you accept the rule of the few. Said establishment put the heat on another arriviste, Tony Blair, the PM, and persuaded him to attack Iraq (Murdoch, an Australian billionaire, did). Blair has been well rewarded since.

This apparently side issue, the cover-up of Kate’s mammaries, and related issues, denudes something worrisome: the naked urge of British media to please its masters and manipulate the public’s mind, by setting up the context of the debate. The plot has been unveiled in a particularly silly case: whatever the plutocrats say to hide, will be hidden. (One remembers the astounding insults the same British tabloid press directed to the French when those held that Hussein in Iraq did not have Weapons of Mass Destruction.)

10% of British GDP comes from the financial piracy complex. One can imagine how the British mind is expertly manipulated, so that the Brits can goose step behind ‘their‘ banks.

As I was putting forward these considerations on Facebook, a British citizen who worked in France and lives in Germany reacted the old fashion way:

Reaction of Chris Snuggs: “The publishing of these photos was disgusting. Women shown in “The Sun” agree to it and well paid for it. It doesn’t matter WHO is the victim. Would you like YOUR chest (flat or not) sprayed all over the world? Would you like photos of YOUR children playing naked around their paddling pool? This action is, I repeat, disgusting and shows the utter greed and tastelessness of so many people.”

To which I replied: I have a house on the Cote d’Azur. Everybody in the plush parts there can see professional photographers scurrying about, carrying enormous cameras with zoom lenses more than a meter long, and a foot across… One wonders how they carry them, it’s quite remarkable. Plutocrats showing off on yachts and mansions know well they are taken in pictures, and they play that game for whatever it’s worth. If they really do not want pictures to be taken, it’s easy to do: all plutocratic properties are in extremely exclusive areas, protected by high walls, security guarded private roads…  

As France (hypocritically) makes a business attending to the world’s plutocracy, no wonder a tribunal in working class Nanterre found out for the Duchess of Hypocrisy. The French have the world’s most severe privacy laws, short of North Korea, and know how to protect the mighty. Bongo, not a monkey in Africa, but the president of Gabon, had hundreds of millions of property stashed in full view of Nanterre. Finally the French authorities noticed, after a few decades, of being told so, that the immense wealth of Bongo did not seem coherent with his civil servant salary. Just an example that it’s not just the Duchess of Hypocrisy that cannot see what she does not know how to see.

In Switzerland, the daughter of the Uzbek president is involved in laundering money from women and children trafficking, some say (such as the previous city prosecutor in Geneva). But no worries: that other princess has diplomatic immunity as ambassador to the United Nations.

***

MONARCHY AS PLUTOCRACY’S FLAG:

But back to the plutocratic exhibitionist, one of many in the British Royal family. So, it it’s so disgusting, why did Kate strip, exhibiting herself on a yacht (see below), knowing full well she would be taken in a zoom lens? Why did she show off? because she knew a French tribunal would come to her rescue (they always do, all British celebrities know this).

Kate was trying to pose as if she were interesting, a victim. What else? Kate is not innocent, she playing the media like an expert: look at me, I am all harassed, hounded by the plebs! We are supposed to cry for her.

She is trying to show she can make a buck, like the rest of them, royal types, in the most outrageous way. After all, Prince Charles, the future king, got, for years, a personal subsidy of several million euros, a year, from the European Union… For his enormous farm. They say it’s because he is ecological. I say it’s extortion money. In exchange for his benign silence about the EU, the Prince rakes up the cash.

The debate on Facebook kept going:

Nathan Daniel Curry: “Oh when oh when will they get rid of the monarchy?! Peleeease!”

Chris Snuggs: “There are two aspects to this. A) The Monarchy is a feudal anachronism and an insult to all plebs (among whom I am proud to include myself) from whom the land was stolen by a succession of fascist lords and monarchs,

B) The present Royal Family did not CHOOSE to be born royal and most of them – in particular the Queen – are doing their best to fulfill with devotion and dignity what they see as their “duty”. The Monarchy is indeed silly. If it did not exist and you proposed setting up a Head of State by selecting a single family emerging from vicious fighting upon which to bestow immense wealth (your wealth) and power then they’d lock you up as a lunatic. However, it is a historical accident. As such – and given the nature of Man – it could be said to be the least worst of numerous other methods of selecting Heads of State, many of whom become extremely nasty dictators.

I personally desire the end of the Monarchy, but not until the Queen has died. And there has to be some sort of mechanism to prevent – for example – Blair or Brown or any other cretinous ex-politician from becoming President.”

This shows, on the part of the honorable British gentleman, a lack of understanding of what a head of state does. As the head, the head of state should take decisions, be a decider (to talk like George W. bin Bush). The argument that royalty was bestowed on the Royals, that they did not chose it, applies to all and any royalty in all places where royalty has been hereditary. For example the dictator of Syria, Bachar el Assad inherited his job, after his brother died in an accident, so, well, it was a historical accident. Does that excuse his presence and behavior? Same in North Korea, or Uzbekistan.

Nathan Daniel Curry, answering Mr. Snuggs: “No no no – get rid of them now. They are a pointless dinosaur. It won’t happen because of the intense jingoism of the British people. But anything is better than a constitutional monarchy. Please be gone!

This is from a comment I made about the Saudi Regime: It’s very difficult to introduce democratic principles into nations that are dominated by fiefdoms. So it’s very difficult for civilization to develop without those changes. And greed and oil and caring less often go together. Sadly. It could be repeated – with slight edits – for the Brits…”

I share Nathan’s opinion. European monarchies ought to be cancelled right away. Monarchies are the most outrageous symbol of plutocracy. Accepting them is to accept to be dominated by corruption and entrenched elites, and finding honor in it, while the rabble get their spinal cords conditioned to wave flags and be happy about having lords.

The heads of states of republican Rome, the Consuls, were elected just for a year. Two of them had to share the job and rotate the ultimate responsibility every month. When (very rarely) Rome elected a dictator (who had full power during a national emergency, overriding all other institutions of the republic, exactly as what would happen after the USA, or France had been hit by a nuclear strike), the dictator was often elected for only 6 months.

European monarchies ought to be cancelled. Precisely because they symbolize, and practice plutocracy. Accepting them is to accept to be dominated by corruption.

John Michael Gartland joins in: “Corruption and rampant nudity. They just can’t keep their clothing on.”

That’s an allusion to Prince Harry, playing around and swimming naked in Las Vegas. Hey, what are huge VIP suites for? Who is paying for that VIP suite already? British taxpayers? Or European taxpayers? Both? As Harry will inherit from his “dad”, I guess both. Now Harris is back to what plutocracy does best, harrying, and shooting at, the natives from a big armored helicopter (natives in Afghanistan, but that’s just a detail; the idea is to shoot the destitute, while using the resource of the state commandeered by plutocracy; he should paint little natives on the side of his chopper, each time he kills one). The implicit idea to burrow in the subconscious; we are the plutocrats, and we can shoot you. It’s not just a message for Afghans and other Muslims, but for us all, the plebs.

Not only have the emperors no clothes, but they are happy to flaunt the fact they can go around naked, and be complimented on their beautiful clothes. Literally, and figuratively.

***

HYPOCRISY, CRUCIAL TO BUILD AMERICA, OR IMPERIAL, RAVENOUS ROME:

Kate Middleton is the “Duchess of Cambridge“. This is entirely appropriate for an hypocrite. Cambridge University is where the Puritans who colonized America came from. They were so intolerant, so hypocritical, they left England for the Netherlands. Then discovered their children wanted to leave them, and go Dutch. So they migrated again, this time en masse to the USA, where they became instantaneously much richer than any European, by commandeering the resources of a virgin continent.

Yes, the forests, in much of Western Europe had not recovered from the Romans, let alone the Middle Ages.

It helped to massacre the pre-existing natives. The first two natives the “Pilgrims” met, spoke fluent English (they had lived in England!) In a major historical mistake from the Native American point of view, they taught the Pilgrims how to survive from the land, just when the Pilgrims were starving.  

Once in “New England”, the Puritans read the Bible to find in the mass homicidal Jewish God the inspiration they needed to kill all the natives.

It was all very hypocritical: finding in a religion supposedly about love, the precedents to justify holocausts. But that is both the central flaw of Christianity, and why the Latter Days Roman emperors imposed Christianity on the empire, as it allowed them to justify their bloody plutocratic rule.

Sometimes the Puritans sneaked in, and burned entire Indian fortified villages, in the midst of winter, with everybody inside: see the aptly named “Mystic Massacre“.

But that was not enough, to eradicate all Indians, so the Puritans soon invented a new method, not found in the Bible: scalps in exchange for money from American authorities. “Along with pious thoughts, I receive 165 pounds 3-3 . . . my part of scalp money,” reads the 1757 diary of a clergyman, the Rev. Thomas Smith of Falmouth, Maine, one of many men of Allah and his prophet Jesus, who supplied provisions and ammunition to a scalping party made up of his parishioners.

OK, these disparate considerations on hypocrisy would not be complete without a bout of Islamist hypocrisy, and hypocrisy about Islamist hypocrisy. But a separate essay maybe best.

Hypocrisy, is, as I explained implicitly, is driven by the global plutocracy.

Hypocrisy destroyed Rome. When Rome mistreated Carthage, it systematically used a mix of (faked) high mindedness, entangled with the basest motives.

That was highly lucrative. Quickly, thanks to its mighty army, amply rewarded, the Roman Republic turned into the world’s greatest kleptocracy, assisted by frequent holocausts. The hypocrisy allowed the Roman elite to feel morally justified.

The Republican Roman army had been, for centuries, a self defense army. It became a tool of plutocrats (as the Gracchi said, at the time). Under the Principate, by the Severian dynasty, 350 years after assassinating Carthage, the Roman army had become a plutocracy of its own, in conflict with the (even richer) Senatorial plutocracy based in Rome.

It was the logical conclusion of a mental process that the Gracchi were unable to stop.

***

PLUTOCRACY, OR ONLY THE PLEBS PAY TAXES:

We are at such a junction in history nowadays. Global plutocracy is imposing a mood of exploitation that knows no bounds: the Romney-Ryan proposals, to tax the hyper rich even less, can be viewed in this light.

The impudence is always growing:

So, in France, Taittinger (the champagne) just announced he had become Belgian. As a plutocrat, he will pay no taxes in Belgium. There was immediately a demonstration of 10,000 Belgian commoners, with their minuscule incomes, wondering why they are assassinated by taxes whereas super rich French plutocrats pay no taxes.

The upper management of corporations have organized the planet as a giant tax shelter. Take the case of Apple, while idiots are camping on the ground in Manhattan, three days before the release of a phone variant by Apple (‘the iphone 5’).

Apple makes most of its profits through a patent system of sort. 70% of Apple’s profits made in the USA transit through Ireland. Ireland, a very poor country a generation ago, taxes at not even one third what the USA charges (only 10%, a fraction of what France or Germany tax). This system is used by Apple and other corporations such as Google and Microsoft.

Most of the profits of apple in countries such as France, or Great Britain transit through Luxembourg. (Why are we waiting to send the Wehrmacht, there and in Belgium?)

Once the profits have been not taxed there, in Luxembourg, they are sent to the British Virgin islands, where 116 billion dollars of Apple profits were last seen landing. So it’s no wonder there is an Apple religion: each time one of the believer does an itune transaction, it connect to the British Virgin Island.

Once the plutocrats have reduced people to starvation, they come around, offer them crumbs, and have the same media who do not show them naked for what they are, dress them with the compliment “philanthropist”.

Meanwhile the plutocratic New York mayor, a financial billionaire, gloats that he commands the World’s seventh largest army (whose main function nowadays is to arrest Wall Street protesters)  

Hypocrisy is a mental property that allows plutocracy to grow, by under (hypo) criticizing it. Kate Middleton, dancing in Tuvalu sexily the next day, after learning the decision of the French tribunal of plutocratic servants, has something to celebrate: she did her class good. She belongs, she earned her keep.

***

RUIN THE SOUL, AND EVERYTHING ELSE WILL FOLLOW:

Bob Dylan says the stigma of slavery ruined America’s soul. He doubts the country can get rid of the shame because it was “founded on the backs of slaves.”

Dylan, the veteran musician tells Rolling Stone that in America “people (are) at each other’s throats just because they are of a different color… it will hold any nation back.” He also says blacks know that some whites “didn’t want to give up slavery.”

The deeper point is: can the USA get rid of the mood of exploitation that brought forward slavery, among other things?  (See Mystic massacre, scalps, Pequots, above). Or, more generally, can the West avoid the evolution that brought dictatorial, bloody, small minded imperial Rome?

Or the somewhat similar process that brought the feudal order in full oligarchic regime by the year 1100 CE? (When the first Crusade was launched.)

As it is the mood of exploitation of the many by the few, of the biosphere by the jet set, has spread.

So back to the Duchess, today’s example of how the People gets softly conditionned to the impudent oppression of its Lords. The titles of “Duc, Duchesse” (French), from the Latin “Dux“, that comes from ducere, to lead. The concept is more than 26 centuries old. So Kate Middleton is a leader, we are told. Are we supposed to kneel? And what does she leads towards? Hypocrisy supreme. Taxpayer financed. Here she is on a big yacht in France, no doubt taxpayer paid: 

Don’t Look At My Nipples, It’s Against The Law

Buckingham Palace has called photos’ of the woman above a “grotesque” invasion of privacy. And yet, if prince Harry puts bullets inside Afghan children, that’s heroic. Do the morons in the palace know what “grotesque” mean?

***

Patrice Ayme

Progress Kills Killer Religions

KILLING “UNBELIEVERS” IS PROFITABLE TO SOME.

Abstract: A religion is any set of ideas that again (re) binds (ligare) people together. Secularism, nationalism, superstitions form religions.

Some religions call for more blood than our civilization can give. The world has shrunk, we are all neighbors, mass destruction lurks in our midst.

Carthage was a superior, extremely innovative civilization. Carthage was annihilated because it indulged in too primitive a religion. Same for the Aztecs. If Carthage had not burned children, while playing music to cover their screams, Carthage would have survived, as Marseilles did.

550 BCE. Carthage, Magna Graecia & Massilia share the Western Med. Rome is an Etruscan dot. Celts all over the north.

Carthage, in red, has, by far, the largest empire. Not shown are her trading colonies, some several thousand kilometers off the map, down the African coast, or in Britain. Greek city states are in blue. Massilia, with her large empire along the north west Mediterranean coast, would be in conflict with Carthage for centuries. It resisted, helped by good relationships with the Celts. 

***

This perspective on religion from the point of view of survivability has direct applications to life threatening practices brandishing Fundamentalist Islam. In light of the ever easier access to weapons of mass destruction.

Contrarily to the mentally insipid and counterfactual legend, among all too numerous intellectual cowards in the West, who howl their simplicity in unison; the Qur’an is a book that, read literally, ORDERS to kill people on the basis of beliefs that are purely spiritual.

Let say that you insinuate that an analphabet dead 13 centuries ago was deluded, or that god is dog, spelled the wrong way. Millions of so called Muslims will tell everybody that it’s their sacred religious duty to kill you. Can we tolerate this? Can we not denigrate this? Can we afford, not to denigrate this? Who can deny that denigration of such behavior is needed? Denial is at the limit insane: we have the quotes below, and a more extensive version.

Intellectuals cowards don’t need to read. Emoting is their reasoning, howling is their calling, a sort of religion of their own. The way out of the Islamist threat is absolute rigor, putting such people in jail, at every turn, because what they say is that jokes give them a right, a moral duty, to kill, flaunted for all to see. All they say is that joking, or just thinking differently are the worse imaginable acts, worthy of the death penalty. Respecting such terrorists and would be murderers is accepting to submit to their terror. It is to violate the fundamental nature of man, the only hope of man, that is, to think differently.

Around 400 CE, Christianism had transformed the Roman empire into a fascist homicidal theocracy (only the Jews survived, and barely so). Catholic god madness brought military disasters, and the near total military collapse of civilization (Rome was sacked, and the Frankish army on the Rhine could not hold the Vandals, Alans and their allies, with catastrophic consequences for the provisioning of Italy).

So tyrannical Christianism led to the swift destruction of the world’s richest polity. Yet, the fact that Christianism inspired Islam is no excuse. Tyrannical Christianism lasted a bit more than a century (from 363 CE, killing of Julian, until the imperium of the Franks, in 486 CE).

The vilipended movie “The Innocence of Muslims” charges that a professional Christian, the cousin of Muhammad’s wife, created Islam… This enrages Muslims to no end, but it is closer to official Muslim doctrine than to the opposite! Muslims in the streets were just ignorant of that fact. They should read more than just one book.

By 460 CE, the bishops of Gauls had understood that they were not military men, and that they needed military men to fight the Goths. They accepted that the last Roman army left, that of the Pagan Franks, would take over.

After the Franks took control in 486 CE, with the full back up of the imperial government in Constantinople, Christianism became little more than a façade. The Franks extolled the good sides of Christianism, made plenty of little fables with local saints to illustrate the new philosophy of altruism and care, and ignored the rest, the Dark Side of Christianism (although they resurrected it to beat into submission the Anglo-Saxons of northern Germany).

In the following three centuries, the Franks domesticated the Popes in Rome, and brought them back to a sustainable civilization, the effort crowned with the Pope crowning Carlus Magnus as Roman emperor… with the furious accord of Roman authorities in Constantinople, then in a regency!

By 800 CE Jews and Muslims had rights equal to those of Christians and Pagans in the Carolingian empire. The tolerance of Republican Rome was back, reinforced, and extended. Notice that this notion of religious tolerance, most Muslims, in their superstitious monomania, cannot yet get. They do not understand that they are the first victims of their quasi universal lack of tolerance for people, ideas and feelings.

Now, of course, the fundamental truth about the Franks was that they were secularists. They lived in their age, not inside a book of fables. (We know this from all the details; say, when the Viking showed up, the Franks, by then milder, negotiated settlements with them, driving the church crazy, as the church just wanted to exterminate the heathens right away; similarly, the Franks established a tradition of negotiation and co-existence with Muslim settlers.)

How has such a bloodthirsty book, obsessed by burning people, been in control of the minds of the multitude for so long? Well, just contemplate the dictators and theocrats where Islam reign. Where there is a profit, there is a way, such is the ambition of men. In the Middle East, that way to the profit of some was Islam. It fit well with meta traditions of subservience inherited from centuries of hydraulic dictatorships, made ever fiercer, as the area desiccated dramatically.

Some of the Dark operators in the USA believed that Islam could be made into a tool to get oil. It worked. So far. Yet, this is an entirely different subject. Plutocracy knows that theocracy is its most elegant tool. 9/11 was just a warning that such a policy brings drawbacks. Even to the USA.   

***

THE WEST AS THE BROADEST RELIGION:

When the Gauls were told their religion was outlawed, they shrugged. To the Gauls the Gallic shrug was a higher calling, a more important religion than the Celtic religion. Celtic civilization, with its many superior technologies, kept on going, unfazed.

This illustrates several important points:

1) civilization should not be identified with religion. “Civilization” allows the life of a city. Religion is any mental system interlaced with an emotional system tying (ligare) people together again (re). A religion can be anything, such as a mental scaffolding enabling cannibalism and mental sacrifices (the case of most passed religions). A civilization is much more constrained, because a city is a more complex machine than a cannibal band.

2) there are religions within religions. The Celtic religion was within greater themes which tied up the Gauls together, such as the Gallic shrug, and other characteristic behaviors that riled the Romans up (sometimes with admiration). The very word, “Gaul” comes from the Romans trying their best to ridicule the Celts by comparing them to roosters (Gallus Gallus), who are particularly noisy, colored and self assured volatile (Gallia). it’s fascinating that those traits traversed 30 centuries of history, and are still found in today’s French (who are glorifying in self mockery, as the rooster stays the French national symbol, a bit as if the Muslims took for symbol Muhammad with a bomb in his turban!).

The Roman civilization was a melting pot civilization. So was that of the Gauls. Together they united, making an even bigger melting pot, soon joined by a self conscious third melting pot, that of the Frankish confederation, a German melting pot.

The Franks themselves had proclaimed that they had a civilizational hyperlink to Troy.

The Catholic (“Universal” in Greek) religion was itself a melting pot (no choice, if it wanted to thrive under the roman umbrella).

Thus, by the time the Franks proclaimed the “Renovation” of the Roman empire, half a dozen melting pots were mixed together in a mighty brew. Inside that brew, ideas and emotions everywhere: let the best win!  

Human lives used to be brutish and short. They were put together by religions which were brutish and gross. Now lives are longer, sweeter and more complex. We have little choice: thermonuclear bombs, and other Damocles’ swords, keep us honest enough to not be at each others’ throat. Better being honest than dead.

Our religion is now secularism, truly listening to the gods within and the world outside. So what of yesterday’s fables? If they are brutish and gross, they have got to go. 99% of yesteryear’s religion had to go, because, typically, they called to kill people too readily (they also called to not kill them too much, be it only because one needs people to kill people.

***

ASTOUNDING CARTHAGE, AHEAD, IN SOME WAYS, BY 20 CENTURIES:

The Thera monster volcano exploded, flooding, burning and ruining the Minoan civilization centered on Crete. New civilizations arose to replace it. Foremost among them, the Phoenicians, based in Tyre. The Phoenicians put the efforts of Mesopotamians and Egyptians together, abstracting and simplifying them. The Phoenicians invented the alphabet. Variants (Tifinagh, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, Cyrillic, Arabic, Indic alphabets) constitute most scripts in use today. A Phoenician expedition commissioned by a Pharaoh to send an expedition around Africa (in 3 years, circa 650 BCE). Herodotus, who relates the fact, expresses some doubt, because he says that it is impossible that the sun would have been on the right of the Phoenicians ships… Little did the Greek historian understand that such was the case between Port Elizabeth and Cape town, when rounding Africa…  

Tyre founded a colony, Carthage. In some ways, Carthage was the new Crete, in other ways, it was terribly flawed, and died from it. An expedition led by Hanno, of no less than 60 ships, carrying 30,000 souls, passed an erupting Mount Cameron, and captured gorillas, further south. Africans exchanged gold, and other rare products, but also salted fish, against Carthaginian trinkets. Other expeditions went north.

Carthage set up colonies, all the way down the African coast. This trade organization lasted centuries, and influenced, no doubt, both west Black Africa, and the Mediterranean. Some democratic habits in West Africa may be traced to those mind opening times, in my opinion (such as the “Sufi” religion of Senegal, with its similarity to Carthaginian practice). Then the Carthaginians sold the goods throughout the Mediterranean. British and African tin, then a very important metal, was imported to the Med, allowing to make bronze (by mixing it with copper). The Carthaginian bred dogs in the Canary islands.

Rome would never fill such an extensive global role in Africa (although Rome traded with China). One had to wait after 1500 CE for enterprising Europeans to fill Carthage’s sails, using this time, Celtic ocean going technology.

Carthaginian ship technology was superb, the world’s best. Although the Celts had ocean going ships, the Carthaginian ships were much faster. Some Carthaginian coins struck in 350 BCE represents the entire Mediterranean, with a large land mass, far to the West in the Atlantic: America?

We know little about Carthage, because it shrouded its trading routes in secrecy and disinformation. But, mostly, we know little about Carthage, because her tormentor and assassin, Rome, did its best to even destroy her memory (memory destruction being a Roman specialty).

***

“CARTHAGO DELENDA EST“ [Carthage Is To Be Destroyed!]:

The plutocratic party in Rome finished its discourses, for years, about anything whatsoever with: ‘Ceterum censeo Carthaginem delendam esse’ (“Furthermore, (moreover) I consider that Carthage must be destroyed”). It went hand in hand with the nationalistic movement. Still, it does not explain the immense breach of ethics committed with Carthage. That was furnished by Carthage herself. In turn, the crime committed together, the holocaust of Carthage, annihilated by the fire she used to kill the innocent with, tied the Roman together again, in a sort of satanic religion, the triumph of the Dark Side, that devoured Rome itself.

Thus there is lots of morality and philosophy hidden in the sad story.

***

WHY & HOW DID ROME DESTROY CARTHAGE?

Carthage, like Rome, had a mixed constitution. Yet Carthage was destroyed by Rome.

Why, and how did that happen? Well, the traditional story is that the Romans were geniuses of engineering, and they copied Carthaginian tech massively and quasi-instantaneously (after they captured a Carthaginian ship, the Romans copied 120 ships in 2 months). In the end, the Romans won at sea, after losing several fleets with dozens of thousands on board of each.

But, mostly, the main reason for Carthage’s destruction was that Rome did not behave well with Carthage. The Romans hated Carthage. That hatred against Carthage was directed to no others, among the many nations Rome conquered.

The Romans stole from the Punic city Sicily, Sardinia, and Corsica. The latter two in direct violation of a peace treaty. Such a breach of honor and treaty was rare with Rome. In their next act the Romans declared war, again, because they just did not like Carthage’s empire in Spain.

In the end, Rome made a holocaust (general burning), of Carthage (146 BCE). Destroying entirely an extremely advanced civilization, all the way down to one book, which the Romans preserved, because that solitary book was an agricultural treaty on how to grow food in Africa. That book fed Rome for six centuries. This is what one reads in history books: a litany of war and destruction.

Why so much hatred on Rome’s part? And how could Rome destroy the senior civilization?

There was a third power left in the Western Mediterranean when this drama started. Massilia. Marseilles, had her own (Greek) mini empire, and, although incorporated by Caesar, Massilia was not destroyed. Rome tolerated other big cities. An example is Alexandria, with its hundreds of thousands of Jews (let alone Greeks and Egyptians): it was pretty much left alone.

Why was Carthage annihilated?

***

CARTHAGE LOST BECAUSE ITS RELIGION HAD BEEN TOO BLOODTHIRSTY:

Carthage was much older than Rome, and a great power when Rome was nothing. Carthage drove the Greeks out of the Western Mediterranean (except for it enemy Massilia). Carthage was the head civilization of Africa, its trade network, with colonies extended along much of the west coast of Africa, probably to the Gold Coast and Ivory Coast. The relationships from Morocco to Senegal were extensive.

On the other side of Africa, the Phoenicians’ commerce reached beyond Somalia. However the giant fascist Persian empire more or less enslaved the Phoenicians (as it did the Ionian Greeks). At the battle of Salamis, most of the “Persian” fleet was actually Ionian and Phoenician. This led to some bad blood with the Greeks and gave a pretext for Alexander later to mistreat Tyre (crucifying 2,000, selling 30,000 women and children survivors into slavery).

Carthage lost because of its religion, such is my thesis. The religion gave a pretext and excuse for Rome’s hatred, and it made Carthaginian allies undependable (coerced by Carthaginian cruelty in peacetime, they bolted at the first occasion given by a less bloodthirsty Rome).

The religion of Carthage was so bloodthirsty, that Carthage lost the most important high ground, the moral high ground. So bloodthirsty that, later, many came to doubt the descriptions the victors, the Romans and their associates, made about Carthage’s bloodthirstiness.

However, recent, incontrovertible archeological discoveries, reveal sinister machines. Therein, partially burned remnants of children, up to four year old. The inscriptions below were unequivocal. Yes, Carthage’s religions sacrificed young children.

A wantonly bloody religion loses the high moral ground. Rare are the armies which can lose the high moral ground, real, or perceived, and still win. Even the Mongols, when they built their giant empire, were careful to occupy (what they perceived as) the high moral ground.

Bloody religions have diverse gradations. They are more or less bloody. The Aztecs were more bloody than any other religion of the Americas (there too, there were nuances; the Aztecs were horrified by Spanish torture; however North American Indians held torture in high esteem!).

How does one lose because of a superstitious religion? Three ways contribute:

a) Lost of prestige. In the Bible the Jewish god fulminates that Carthaginians are killing children, but, he acts equivocally “I never asked them to do that!“. Good to know, goddie boy. Killing children did not look good, 23 centuries ago. So Carthage did not look good.

Equivalently, in today’s world, when Muslim sects kill children of other Muslim sects children, a form of human sacrifice, they also lose prestige (see Syria for illustration). Would one want them for neighbors? So why would one help them?

b) Reputation for cruelty. A religion who ask to kill innocent people, just because they are determined to “not believe” is obviously cruel. That is why Christianism was enslaved, fettered, domesticated in Occident. Both the Bible and the Qur’an have calls to kill unbelievers. That sure helped Charlemagne in empire building, and was central to Islam building the greatest empire ever, in a few years.

c) Loss of allies. During Hannibal’s long invasion of Italy, the Latium allies of Rome did not defect. They were satisfied of their contract with Rome. But the Spanish allies of Carthage did defect. In truth what Rome and the Latium had was a secular religion in common, republicanism.

***

EPITAPH FOR CARTHAGE:

In the end Carthage reformed, and became more democratic than Rome. Carthage was not militarily dangerous; it controlled nearly nothing anymore, the might of Roma was absolute, and extended from Portugal to Asia. Carthage had just become an idea, and a city full of history, and thus wisdom. And thus an even deadlier enemy of Roman plutocracy.

The Roman Senate fabricated reasons to attack Carthage a third and final time, with the official aim of destroying it. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous quote is in Obama’s office: “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.”

And it’s not true.

The arc of the moral universe is long, and, sometimes, with great efforts, it can be bent towards justice, and often, it’s too little, too late.

The crimes of Rome vis-à-vis Carthage started early on, when Rome grabbed Sardinia and Corsica, in violation of a Peace treaty.  They had to be bent back, but the moral universe has no more soul than the real one. all the soul it has, human beings put it there.

Those Roman crimes exacted a lethal price on Rome: they corrupted her soul, made her believe that Carthage was the problem, when the first problem of Rome was institutionalized inequality (plutocracy). That corruption, in the long run, led to the plutocratic phenomenon running amok, entangled in a fight with the headless military, soon to be appeased by the brainlessness of rabid theocracy.

Carthage’s bloodthirsty, child torturing religion gave Rome the excuse it needed to foster its Dark Side. Suppose a Pakistani made thermonuclear nuke exploded in New York’s harbor. What would happen to “democracy in America”? Dimwits would say:”What?” But, although Carthage existed for centuries before Rome was more than a village, ten miles south of the mighty Etruscan city of Veii, Pakistan, complete with nukes, and rabid Islamism, is pretty much an American creation, and the question is why?

And part of the answer is that assemblies of human minds have more mind that one can think.

***

WHEN SECULARISM OVERWHELMS RELIGION FOR ALL TO SEE:

The Spanish held in high esteem both torture and execution. Both concepts are united by the crucifix adorned with the squirming sadomasochist Jesus. Aztecs philosophers pointed out the contradiction: Christ’s was supposedly a religion of love, and human sacrifices were bad, and then the Spaniards  brandished torture to death during a human sacrifice, as if they were good things.  Spaniards could see the points, so they removed their squirming monkey and its nails, from the crucifix. Thereafter Christian crosses were bare in the New World.

Semites tend to be fanatical about religion, it’s a meta cultural trait (or maybe it’s due to the desert sun, as Camus had it, and a most recent scientific study asserts).

In any case, we see meta cultural Semitic fanaticism appear, when compared to others, say the Celts, and the ancient Greeks, Etruscans and republican Romans. The Romans did sacrifice four prisoners after the enormous defeat at Cannae (87,000 Roman elite soldiers, officers, senators, proconsuls and consuls  killed). They were ashamed of that human sacrifice later. Yet, in less desperate times, if Romans did not like what their superstitions told them, they would rough the silliness up.

Once sacred chicken refused to eat before a sea battle with Carthage. A very bad omen. The commanding admiral said: “if they will not eat, let them drink!” He ordered to throw the sacred volatiles overboard, in the sea. There were many such incidents, depicting a Roman pattern of scoffing at religion. Soon Rome was open to nearly all cults (compare with Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan or Pakistan).

After Rome took control of Gaul, the Celtic religion was purely, and simply, outlawed. An excellent occasion for the Gauls to flaunt a more important religious gesture, the bottom line of a deeper religion: the Gallic shrug. There was never a Celtic cult rebellion. Simply, after the Franks took military control of Gallia and Germania, all Pagan habits were declared to be everlasting Catholic traditions. (Even poor Jesus saw his birthday displaced six months to become part of the Winter Solstice feast, with their cut evergreens, and the Saturnials, with their gift exchange.)

By contrast, the Jews are still anal about their dubious fantasies (although Judaism was derivative, from Mesopotamian and Greek stories and more recent than the Celtic cult).

***

REALITIES OF CHRISTIANISM & RELATED ISLAMISM:

Thought crimes occur when texts presenting themselves as real, order to kill others for activities secular law does not recognize as criminal. (The notion of secular law is many millennia old, it goes back to antique Mesopotamia; more recently, it was made explicit by emperor Justinian when he ordered the refurbishing of Roman law, separating clearly the secular from the Christian considerations.)

Christ famously started the demand of killing unbelievers: ” Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

Islamism was invented as a war machine against Rome, and was heavily influenced by Coptic Christianity, at the time in quasi-war with Constantinople (that is, “Rome”).

***

WAS MUHAMMAD MORAL BY WESTERN STANDARDS?

Six centuries later an analphabet prone to epilepsy had some hallucinations in the desert, and He asked is a relative what that could mean. The relative was a professional Christian, a monk. The cousin of Muhammad’s wife. The cousin revealed to Muhammad that it was Archangel Gabriel who had been speaking to Muhammad. Thus Islam was born.

I have mentioned this episode, many times, years ago. All learned Muslim should know it. It is recounted in the trailer of the film “Innocence of the Muslims“. Then that movie is depicted as “Islamophobic”, meaning Islamic history, as taught by Muslim scholars, is Islamophobic.

That movie has caused great fury. The film has been presented, to great indignation, as portraying Muhammad as a rapist of little girls, an homosexual, and an assassin.

This maybe allusions to facts known by learned Muslims, among them:

When an assassination attempt was conducted against Muhammad, his relative, and son in law, Ali, got dressed as if he were Muhammad, and laid in Muhammad’s bed (as a decoy).

Muhammad married the daughter of his associate Bakr, Aisha, when she was 6. The marriage was “consummated” when she was 9 years old (9, as in, less than 10).

Thus we can say for the child (pedo) love (philia) Muhammad went all the way. If that drives Muslims crazy, no wonder. They feel, intuitively, that it is hard to justify by modern, that means, secularist, standards. 

Muhammad annihilated, among others, an entire Jewish tribe, and was a warrior and raider. He was directly involved in the death of well above 1,000 individuals, sword in hand. Once again, any seriously knowledgeable Muslim has a command of these facts.

The ambassador of the USA, a young and enthusiastic Arab (and French) speaking friend of Libya, was killed by Muslims, for, they claim religious reason. You see, someone else had made a movie. Let me explain the logic therein with two quotes of the Qur’an, two of many, which may be viewed as relevant, even by the dimwitted:

“2:39. But they who disbelieve, and deny Our revelations, such are rightful Companions to the Fire. They will abide therein.” [Qur’an Sura 2, The Cow, Verse 39]

(The quote was copied from the most prominent Muslim website.) Statements such as these are all over the Qur’an, a very short book. Here is another verse, and a few are pasted later, so that readers can penetrate themselves with how much they should respect the Qur’an and those who abide by it.

“4: 89. Have no unbelieving friends. Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them.” [Qur’an S4: v89]

Now Bernard Henry Levy, the billionaire “New philosopher“, knew the US ambassador, and called the assassins “imbeciles”.

Two questions:

a) Are people acting according to the Qur’an, “imbeciles“? It seems to be what BHL is saying. The Qur’an is clearly saying that those who disbelieve and deny Islamist Revelations should be put in a fire. The ambassador of the USA may have been judged to be denying the Revelations, and so was put in a fire. What is wrong with that?

b) is it imbecilitic to kill people to become the boss? Are mafiosi imbeciles? Were Stalin, and countless successful tyrants throughout history imbeciles? Was Alexander the Great an imbecile, because he annihilated Thebes and Tyre?

For that matter, Muhammad himself killed well above 1,000 people as he became the Prophet, does that make him an “imbecile”, according to BHL?

Pseudo sophisticated people, and the USA State Department have widely condemned “inflammatory content on the Internet” about Islam, the religion of (eternal) peace. It is a testimony to the powers of ideas, that the State department would complain about virtual flames on the Internet, a few hours after its ambassador in Libya was set aflame by real Muslims firing real rocket propelled grenades. Or is just the government of the USA terrified of enraged Muslims? Many are afraid, so they want to agree desperately with those who terrorize them. They call that wise.

In the eighteenth Century Voltaire, wrote a play “Fanaticism, Or Mahomet  the Prophet“. The play was forbidden in Switzerland in 1993, more than two centuries after it was played there. Thus, in a sense religious fundamentalist terror reigns over Switzerland more in the Twenty-First Century than it did, even well before the French revolution.

And so it is, all over.

As to why the world may feel like denigrating the Qur’an, readers are welcome to read it. You read, you judge. You don’t read, you don’t judge. I have read the Qur’an, cover to cover, many times. And in my goodness, in an argument with Muslim Fundamentalists, I complied the violent orders in the Qur’an. They can be consulted at:

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

That essay contains 7,300 words of verses calling to violence, much of it, lethal. And these 7,300 words are revered by Fundamentalist Muslims of the Wahabi type, as orders from god.

Some will say:”Well, that’s racist, you can’t just discriminate on the basis of what’s in a book.” Well, if it were truly a book, it could be burned, no? Truly, it is an embodied superstition.

Secondly criticizing a superstition is not racist. I have no racism against Mexicans, and celebrate the Aztecs, Toltecs, Mayas, and their great achievements. But civilized people, nowadays despise their religion… Although some understand its origins. Similarly, I adore Isfahan, a religious city of incomparable beauty.

We can condemn, on the basis of a book, the beliefs attached to that book. Anybody reasonably literate should. Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” is a book that enabled the killing of 80 millions, although it’s nowhere as explicitly violent as the Qur’an. In “Mein Kampf” Adolf mostly claim that all the problems of Germany come from the French and the Jews. And that the end, unified Germany, justifies the means. If it were,

The Mufti of Jerusalem, a sort of Muslim pope, was violently anti-Jewish, and pro-Nazi. Not only did he meet with Hitler, he gave him troops. Thousands were incorporated in the SS.

The Qur’an, with its unending violent ranting against the Jews, is clearly full of hate crime, and that’s a fact, not an opinion. I complied 7,300 words of hate quotes in the Qur’an, that’s about 10% of the entire book. And the hatred is not just about Jews and Christians. Here is a sample towards the end of it:

Those who consider the Qur’an to be “mere fables” will be branded on the nose. [Qur’an sura 68:verse 15-16.]

Those who do not believe in Allah will be chained up and cast into hell-fire where they will eat filth. 69:30-35

“Lo! it is the fire of hell Eager to roast.” 70:15

Doom is about to fall on all disbelievers. Only worshippers (Muslims) and those who preserve their chastity (except with their wives and slave girls) will be spared from “the fires of hell” that are “eager to roast.” 70:1-30

“Lo! the doom of their Lord is that before which none can feel secure” (except for maybe those who are fearful of it). 70:27-28

Disbelievers will enter hell with frantic with fear, knowing they will be tortured forever by Allah. 70:36, 44

Allah sent Noah to warn people about the painful doom he was planning to send. (It didn’t work out well; Allah sent it anyway.) 71:1

Those that Allah drowned in Noah’s flood were then tortured forever in the Fire. 71:25

Noah asked Allah to drown all the disbelievers. 71:26

The fires of hell will be fueled with the bodies of idolators and unbelievers. They will experience an ever-greater torment. 72:15-17

Those who disobey Allah and his messenger will dwell forever in the fire of hell. 72:23

Allah will take care of the deniers. He will tie them up, burn them in a raging fire, and feed them food that chokes them. 73:11-13

The last day will be a day of anguish for disbelievers. 74:9-10

Those who are stubborn to Allah’s revelations will face a fearful doom. 74:16-17

The fire of hell shrivels humans and spares nothing. 74:27-29

Allah has appointed angels to tend the Fire and has prepared stumbling blocks for those who disbelieve. He sends some people (whoever he wants) astray. 74:31

Those who pay attention to this life and ignore the Hereafter will suffer forever in hell. 75:20-29

The doom is coming soon. 75:35

Allah has prepared chains, manacles, and a raging fire for the disbelievers. 76:4

Non-Muslim who pretend to believe (so they won’t be killed by Muslims) are unclean and will go to hell. 9:95.

After agreeing to send down a table of food from heaven, Jesus warns his disciples that will catch holy hell if they ever stop believing. 5:115

Christians will be burned in the Fire. 5:72

Christians are wrong about the Trinity. For that they will have a painful doom. 5:73

Have no unbelieving friends. Kill the unbelievers wherever you find them. 4:89

“Disbelievers will be burned with fire.” [Koran, S. 2:39, v. 90]

“Jews are the greediest of all humankind. They’d like to live 1000 years. But they are going to hell.” [Koran, s. 2: v.96]

“Allah will leave the disbelievers alone for a while, but then he will compel them to the doom of Fire.” [Koran, s. 2:v. 126]

“Kill disbelievers wherever you find them. If they attack you, then kill them. Such is the reward of disbelievers. (But if they desist in their unbelief, then don’t kill them.) [Qur’an s.2:v. 191-2]

So you see, unbelievers, if you die, that’s your fault, you did not “desist“.

***

Conclusions and recommendations:

MADNESS, IN GODS AND DOGS ALIKE, HAS NO TREATMENT, BUT ERADICATION:

“I have made it clear that the United States has a profound respect for people of all faiths,” said Obama, September 15, 2012. Well, maybe the USA does, but the civilization does not. 99.99% of faiths have been annihilated, as understanding progressed. Who wants yesterday’s papers? Only people in the desert their minds try to inhabit. A desert of knowledge, perspectives, wisdom.

Faith can become not just suicidal, but as murderous as imaginable (hundreds of thousands of Nazis prefered deaths to life in a non Nazi world, the most famous example being Goebbels, who assassinated her 6 children; yes, Nazism was a religion!)

Group selection between tribes has driven evolution. Man is unique, becasuse he killed all species that ressembled him. Fascism is an instinct, that makes the tribe as one. And it’s driven by the activity that fascism provides to pleasure centers, in a mechanism honed by 50 million years.

Eradication of a religion, evolution of a civilization. That one treatment, was used so many times before, it’s how civilizations breathe. Christianism in Europe is arguably more alive today with its best values than in the Middle Ages. But the abject terror exerted by the Crucified during the times of the inquisition, and the Crusades, is now not just gone, but viewed as the highest crime.

It’s not because a particular job was not finished, that it can never be finished. Maybe the Middle East could finally imitate what Europe did. That’s what Ataturk did, in turkey, and also Pahlavi, in Iran (the father of the Pahlavi who became a CIA instrument).

Or, for that matter, Peter the Great in Russia. Peter the Great decided to decapitate the obscurantist, funadmentalist church that blocked his reforms and tried coups. Decapitation being too nice, he tore with pincers, and broke on wheels, some of the haughty men of god, pitching in some effort, as one of the excutioneers. Peter heard their pleas to let them live, even after they were all broken up. Sweet music to Peter’s ears. Funny how men of god, given the occasion to duplicate their Lord’s suffering and ascent, are not that keen… Is it all hogwash, even to them?

A few years later, having modernized Russia extensively, Peter the Great pulverized the Swedish army at the battle of Poltava.  he marched out of the fortified camp and led the crucial part of the combat himself.

If we want to survive the catastrophes we are heading towards imminently, men of such immense courage and determination s Peter the Great, battling in the name of progress, men who are not afraid of yesterday’s faiths will be needed. 

Whether some enjoy murder as they make a fortune that way, be they plutocrats, or theocrats, is irrelevant. The law ought to set society right, by force. Force for the good, is why law exists. law, secular law, ought to apply to theocrats, just as it ought to apply for plutocrats, and other mayhem obsessed sadists. That it does not apply to them too much of the problem nowadays. if larry elison, a californioa plutocrat decideds to save himself a few million of dollars in taxes, he gets away with it. If a local boy steals a pizza slice, he goes to the slammer, for life. And then some are surprised that there is a Greater Depression? Similarly, crazies of god can be seen on TV, threatening to kill people because, well, you read the quotes. Why are they not arrested? Or, at least, fined? Is not threatening to kill someone for no good reason a crime?

Secularism is the default religion. The word “superstition” should be used systematically for those religions which rest on obvious fables.

In the times of weapons of mass destruction, while the biosphere totters on the verge of mass evaporation, from other human activities, God madness ought to be treated more resolutely than madness in dogs. After all, Gods have nukes, dogs don’t.

The preceding ought not to be construed as Islamophobia. There is no fear, no phobia, of Islam, and the main criticism against Islam is made of materials found in the Qur’an. Those who have Islamophobia are those who are afraid to say there are ideas which are not kosher in the Qur’an. And those who are afraid that discussing a book of Islam is racist, as if discussing the dubious fables in the Bible was racist.

Saint Augustine (whom I detest) was aware of some of the critique above, the craziness, the bloodthirstiness in Christianism. Thus Saint Augustine said, wrote for the title of his Book III, Chapter 5 of his City of God: “— It Is A Wretched Slavery Which Takes The Figurative Expressions of Scripture in A Literal Sense. “

Thus, according to Augustine, writing 250 years before the invention of Islam, by some generals and dictators, the hysterical characters we see screaming on TV that they are going to save a prophet and his dog from insult, are living in “A Wretched Slavery”.

In other words, don’t take the sacred texts too seriously. Many Muslim thinkers have followed the same logical drift (but they are less followed, because they are not connected to oil and Wall $treet plutocracy).

The Qur’an was written decades after Muhammad’s death, when written Arabic was not even a complete language (so there is ambiguity about what was exactly meant, all too often). A fanatical war between some in the Prophet’s family and others started just then about whether the Qur’an faithfully respected what Muhammad believed. Aisha, whom Muhammad married at six years of age, and Ali, cousin and son in law, violently disagreed, and went to war. They sort-of-lost. But the hot war is still going on: look at, Syria, Bahrain…

Following the drift of Saint Augustine, many parts of the middle East and Africa “Sufi” variants of Islam were created, precisely to circumvent the fanaticism in the dominant Sunni cult, and the explicit contradictions of Islam with secularism. The Alawites, the Druze, the Assassins, the Ishmaelites, are examples (there are dozens of others). For their own safety most have historically refused to say what they exactly believed in… As the Qur’an has it that unbelievers ought to be killed. This is why one has to be very careful with the situation in Syria. Assad is no doubt terrible, just as there is no doubt much worse waiting in the wings. Just look at what’s in the book they brandish (see above).

The largest Sufi movement comprises the one created in Senegal, somewhat tweaked by the French Republic (after the French secularists and their military realized that those Muslims were precious for their side against racial fascism, the religion embraced by the Prussians). It has now much more than ten million followers, and I approve of it.

So here we are. Some reasonable and influential people, say in Israel, know much of what was written above, for the simple reason that it is the truth. At some point, if Iran persists in the same collision course, Israel will have to try to decapitate the nuclear bomb effort in Iran (as it did in Iraq, the French having had the great idea of embarking in the building a Plutonium reactor there!). It will not be easy, but it is inevitable. And Pakistan is next. That, too, is inevitable. Pakistan actually engaged in a mini war against India recently, while boasting that India would not globalize the conflict as India was afraid of Pakistani nukes (a dumb strategy is there ever was one!)

9/11 was a prick on an elephant, and the elephant got so furious, it gored Iraq, which was, actually… a secularist friend. If and when the tremendous light of man-made thermonuclear fusion is lighted in the name of whom the sacred texts tell us was a mass homicidal pedophile, billions will be enlightened; yes, some religions are not made to share the planet with survival, let alone, progress.

24 centuries ago, the Cynics funded a philosophical movement that assimilated humans to dogs. They would have been amazed by fanatics who claimed to know so much that they spend all the time, killing in the name of god, as if god needed defending, and protecting a long gone analphabetic epileptic (it is known lots of sun has an effect on such people, and that has been traced to genes). Want a better slogan?

There is no dog but dog, and stupidity is its prophet.

This being said dogs, when hungry, and in a pack, are very dangerous. Fighting in Tunisia started after the price of wheat, driven by Goldman Sachs (main instigator), Barclays, JP Morgan and the like, became unaffordable. Such trading, as it is presently done, trades hunger against extreme profits of the few. (There are ways to fix it, starting with lowering leverage and showing the names… As in the past.)

Inside all of us are simple primates who want simple things we need. Around those simple notions we should bind together again: re-ligare. As we can, today, in this age. Such is the wisdom of the ages. Secularism. Secularism: what even baboons understand. Per Omnia Secula Seculorum: for all ages of ages.

I was brought up in the desert, in a sacred city. My first memories are of the local oasis. The beauty of the sparkling stars in the desert as the red dusk sinks in the bluest night still seize my heart. I can never wait to go back.

The important traditions of the desert are deeper, older, and much more respectable than Islam. They do not normalize deviance (to use a NASA concept). Some are congealed into proverbs. Here is a famous one, that rocked my childhood: “Dogs bark, the caravan passes on through.” The crazed men of god are nothing more, and ought to be treated as nothing more, than barking dogs. Except when they bite. Of course. Then they should be disposed off. It seems Obama does this very well. Yet, dogs are not a case where the Dark Side is required. So don’t bomb the children, whatever you do. make no mistake: roasting the children, when there clearly was another way, is what did Carthage in.

***

Patrice Ayme

Great Extermination, Big Nation, Little Minds?

SUPERIOR MILITARY BIG EMPIRE MAKES, BUT NOT CIVILIZATION:

  It’s 9/11, so we should celebrate, I mean commemorate, right? It’s not as if someone like me did not see it coming. I don’t have to commemorate in silence, because I have lots to say that is relevant, to avoid much greater horrors, looking forward (concentrate on Fundamentalist thermonuclear USA sponsored Pakistan for a hint).

 Thus I commemorate by telling the truth about the aggression of Washington DC against the Republic of Afghanistan, starting in the mid 1970s and related, more fundamental, conflict generating issues, such as foaming at the mouth nationalism, as made pathetically manifest in the deluded 2012 democratic and republican conventions.

  When nationalism blinds understanding, it’s evil. The plutocrats, and the corporations they own, irresistibly attracted by the minerals of Afghanistan, have first operated discreetly to create mayhem in central Asia, and then played USA nationalism as a violin, to get what they want; the greedy terror state they own and pay for.

  By coincidence, a day after I criticized Obama for fantasizing about the “USA is the greatest nation” Robert Kaplan published the major article in the weekend Wall Street Journal about why the USA is such a great nation. One would expect the Wall $treet Journal to extoll furiously the grandeur of the USA, and the glory of capitalism, and its armies, as Obama and Biden did last week, in an orgy of imperial self satisfaction. Well, think again. Most people don’t become rich by being idiots 24/7.

  Kaplan says that the pre-eminence of the USA is a lot about occupying a big, wonderful, special place. So make a note of this: while democrats, supposedly on the left, are screaming their heads out that the USA is a great, incomparable Reich, thanks to the intrinsic genius of its great race and its plutocratic ways, the Wall Street Journal, yes the journal of Wall $treet, more humbly conclude that it is all about enjoying the pleasures of treasure island. Kaplan observes:

  ” The U.S. itself is no exception to this sort of [geographical] analysis. Why are we the world’s pre-eminent power? Americans tend to think that it is because of who we are. I would suggest that it is also because of where we live: in the last resource-rich part of the temperate zone settled by Europeans at the time of the Enlightenment, with more miles of navigable, inland waterways than the rest of the world combined, and protected by oceans and the Canadian Arctic.”

  The resources of the USA have indeed proven, so far, practically infinite. No doubt, the wasteful habits of the culture of the USA come from that. And no doubt wasting resources has proven a profitable multiplier. Such as when wasting the buffalo, which, in turn, starved the well armed Plains Indians, a helpful factor in their genocide, that movie goers who watched “Dancing With Wolves” may remember.

  For most of the age of oil, the USA was the world’s primary oil producer. Not because USA citizens are geniuses, but because there is oil in the USA from the North-East, to the Los Angeles Basin in the extreme South-West. It’s something about the ground, not the hogs.

  This generosity with oil was most useful to clients of the USA plutocrats and corporations, such as Adolf Hitler, and his thousands of tanks and planes. Hitler started his invasions propelled by Texas oil…(Sold to him in spite of the Neutrality Acts. ) That was crucial to the self described “French-haters“. In geography is not just reality, but the impact of past and present philosophy:

***

WORLD LARGEST COUNTRIES BY LAND AREA:

1 Russia: 17 million square kilometers.

2 Canada: 10 million sq kms

3 USA: 9.6 sq kms

4 China: 9.6 sq kms

5 Brazil: 8.5 sq kms

6 Australia: 7.7 sq kms

7 European Union: 4.3 sq kms

  The first six largest countries are all recent empires established by military power (whereas the EU was established by debate). About two-thirds of Chinese territory was conquered over people who have fought the Han (most of the PRC’s population), for millennia. The Tibetans, for example, controlled much, or most of “China” for centuries. So did the Mongols and the Manchu. No wonder the Chinese government is not open to minority rights, self determination, and floods the exterior regions with Hans.

  The case of China is not the one where military invasion is the most conspicuous, because, after all, the Chinese have been fighting over China for as long as Rome existed.

  Russia was bottled west of the Urals until 1700 or so. Now Russia controls a land area four times larger than the entire European Union. Russia will be able to hold onto this immensity either by becoming part of the EU, or by deploying (extremely) excessive military force indefinitively (in other words, fascism at home).

  Let’s look at the other four. If one goes back 250 years, one notices that the ethnic composition of the land masses above changed completely over these centuries. The original inhabitants were (mostly) wiped out. Compare French New Caledonia, half made of descendants of the original population, and Australia next door, where the aborigines are mostly gone and the object of genocidal policies even in the 1960s or 1970s. By the official definition of genocide, which applies when one separates children from their parents. Canada used the same genocidal policies, just as recently. The USA had physically eliminated the Indians much earlier.

  One can classify the large empires in three groups. One, made of China, is actively oppressive. that means China did not yet exterminate the 100 or so ethnic groups that cramp the acts and empire of the dominant Han. Another, group, Russia, Brazil, is a mix of invasion and elimination (remember Stalin’s massive, murderous deportations). There are still natives left, and a tension in the air. The rest, made of Canada, USA, Australia has, in practice, eliminated the natives (except in a few zones, where they are shown as counter-examples of little consequence). Ethnic cleansing, at its most thorough.

Some will say that’s instant history. But yesterday’s history makes today’s philosophy. 

***

IF WE KILL THEM, THEY WILL GIVE US WHAT WE WANT: 

  How do we abstract that? Holocausts work. Can we propose a more general abstract from this? FORCE WORKS. That’s not surprising, but the fundamental fact of human evolution.

  Some who know basic classical mechanics will shrug that such is the definition of work: the application of force over an extent of space. This is an example where the categories found by deep thinking in the hard fact sciences can be readily used in the “soft” sciences.

  People on the “left”, would be “progressives” and similar types, do not like to be reminded of this principle, that force works, nowadays. Their excuse is that the fascist, Bolshevik style revolutions, which naturally abused force, being fascist proved to be, well, fascist, and abusive. To the point that they made a bad situation worse: it’s unlikely that the Czar’s regime would have been as bad as what Lenin put in place. By a very long shot. Indeed, fundamentally, it’s the Prussians who attacked Russia on August 1, 1914, who ended up putting Stalin in place. It would never have happened otherwise.

  But the truth is otherwise. In truth, they have learned to be happy to be pawns. Forgetting to apply force is inhuman. One does not have to go bloody in the streets, Lenin style. The most important revolutions are spiritual, mental, brainy.

  Thus the Indignes (Indignados, reduced semantically to “Occupy Wall Street” in the USA) movement is (was?) a good thing. Do we need president Romney to resuscitate it? Well, except for a severe degradation of the economy, there will be no president Romney. just singing the praises of Obama whatever he does not only will not bring progress, but an ever deepening regression down the hell of plutocracy. opening up like a giant, civilization devouring caldera.

  And just as the idiocy and jingoism of the Athenian People brought the defeat of Athens, and ultimately democracy, so it would be again.

  Mental force can be as quiet. A teen age French physicist made sparks in his father’s lab, and observed carefully how an electric circuit reacted. Thus, in 1839, less than 200 years ago, Alexandre-Edmond Becquerel discovered the Photo Voltaic effect. So is real innovation: a deep affair of the mind.

  In 2012, the USA will install about 2,500 Mega Watts of Photo Voltaic panels, more than two nuclear reactors. Solar power is now 20 times cheaper than it was when Jimmy Carter put solar panels on top of the White House (Reagan had them removed, because he hated the sun, as pertains those who love the Dark).

  Thanks to Monsieur. Becquerel’s innovation.

***

MENTAL FORCE IS THE GREATEST FORCE:

  Human beings are spiritual creatures. Most of what they do, they do, thanks to their minds. Obama, for whatever reason, some tied to his inexperienced, babe-in-the-woods, background, advantaged the banksters, the Military Industrial Complex and other dark forces in his first four years.

  Some will scoff, they will sneer that the Military Industrial Complexes are what allowed the creation of the world’s largest empires (exposed above), so the MICs are important creative forces (for good, or evil). They create facts on the ground. Those who disagree are just enemies to be, at best, ignored and despised.

  Empires create facts on the ground, thus in the minds.

  Indeed, it is important to realize that force can be applied to spiritual structures, not just material ones (the connection between both notions has to do with the fact that the spiritual world is actually brain based, that means, based in physical structures in the brain).

  Just as force can be applied on mental structures, so can inertia. The main problem of the Obama presidency, so far, has been that, instead of impelling momentum towards the forces of progress, it has, wittingly or not, imparted momentum towards the forces of Darkness. (And his debates about health care and banks, or Afghanistan, were shrouded in fog, mirrror, smoke and impenetrable committees. For example, what’s the name of the Death Panel at the White House? And if it kills citizens, it clearly has turned the executive branch into the executor branch, and overlaps another branch of government, Justice…)

  In all this I am not faulting necessarily Obama. After all, he was just parachuted into the presidency. But where is the rest of the progressive troops? Who is pushing Obama to the left? The Tea Party elected many representatives (Ryan an example). Where are the representatives representing “Occupy Wall $treet“?

***

WE’RE HYPER NATIONALISTIC & IGNORANT, WHAT COULD GO WRONG?

  A typical  pseudo progressive commented on my preceding essay:

  “…corporations are behind everything this writer [Patrice Ayme] says is happening. This is one big worldwide mob at work. Obama is just a tool of corporations, as have Presidents been before him. My husband & I have made scathing remarks about Obama and how he didn’t deliver on many things he claimed he would. But the level of scathing remarks of this person [Patrice Ayme] clearly shows a bias and hatred. …even though people are lulled by the rhetoric of positive speech, it’s still positive speech that people need to hear to jerk us out of fear, hopelessness and apathy. Our thought processes need to be elevated. …America is both the greatest nation on earth, from the standpoint of innovation, technology, and conveniences. At the same time, we are also the most corrupt and damaging force in the world. You cannot have one without the other in this world of opposites unfortunately. “

  Pseudo progressives tend to confuse “bias and hatred”, for what is simply… extremely firm advice to my good friend Obama (one voice against a mob of banksters and sycophants!). The text above is typical: after calling Obama a mobster, I am pilloried in the name of… an orgasm of wishful thinking and crazed jingoism.

***

USA AS INNOVATION GREATEST? THINK AGAIN!

  In truth, the USA has not been as innovative as the leading Western European nations. As far as the key breakthroughs. It’s mostly the huge USA market that makes USA products successful. Germany and Britain flew jets before the USA.

  It’s only by distorting reality that the USA is made to look more intellectual that it really is. A lot of USA superiority is not just from dominating a big virgin continent, but also, simply, by having a big market. For example the neon tube was invented in France, but even the French visiting Vegas do not know this, and the French inventors did not win the patent battle with the USA exploiters.

  At least Steve Jobs had the honor of thieves: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”—PBS Documentary, Triumph of the Nerds, 1996. I have met Venture Capitalists-engineers, in the Silicon Valley who told me the same, smiling that most of their jobs was to go to Europe and steal ideas in the smaller markets there.

  OK, some major innovations arrived too early, for the USA to play a role. Such as French Hugenot and doctor Papin, inventing the piston steam engine, and the first heat engine powered vehicle.

  Papin’s inventions the English stole for their greater renown, so we measure power in Watts and not Paps (17 C). This is all the more spectacular as it is a French lady  Gabrielle Émilie Le Tonnelier de Breteuil, marquise du Châtelet, who definitively demonstrated the concept of energy (the core of modern physics). Even Newton did not find anything that important.

  As her lover Voltaire said to Fredrick II of Prussia, du Châtelet was “a great man whose only fault was being a woman”. Also French. So the Anglo-Saxons are on their knees singing the praises of Newton, they don’t even know why, just that it is civilized to do so. A man. White. English. Master of the Mint (he switched England to the gold standard).

  So the France played the crucial role in the domestication of energy. The first cars (truly steam tanks commissioned by the French royal army), were followed by the first balloons (in Versailles) and a century later, the first motorized airplanes (Avion I, II, and III, of Ader, also a military program).  Irène Joliot-Curie, Chemistry Nobel Prize winner (1935), for the transmutation of elements followed this by discovering the nuclear chain reaction, that is nuclear energy, in 1937.

  Once again, for reason of quasi rabid anti-French bias, the discovery of nuclear energy is attributed by the dominant Anglo-Saxon plot, eager to make the French pass for simpletons, to those to whom Irène Joliot-Curie taught the reaction (although with lots of difficulty, because Hahn and Meitner were not as bright, and the former’s relation with Nazism far from klar).

  The French nuclear bomb program, started in January 1938, had to migrate to England and then Manhattan (Manhattan Project), for obvious reasons.   Later Anglo-Saxon political leaders (Churchill, etc.) thought about caging all French top physicists, because, in their anti-French rage, they thought they would tell Stalin how to make nuclear bombs. The scientific leader of the project was Italian Enrico Fermi, another non USA, anti-fascist Nobel Physics winner.

  And so it is for a lot of innovations. Photography, both black and white, and color was invented in France (the French government bought the patents, and put the discovery at the disposition of mankind”). 

  Basically all the basic ideas in cars were developed in France and Germany, from the internal combustion engine (Swiss with hydrogen, then French with gasoline, and then patented to Daimler) to front wheel drive (Citroen) and radial tires (Michelin).

  Same with planes (and that’s why much of the aircraft vocabulary is French)

  The same extent to science. And it’s not just about the Nicolas Léonard Sadi Carnot engine and the basics of thermodynamics.

  Let me say in passing that it is astounding how much the French did for energy, practically, conceptually, and mathematically, I discovered when writing this! If one adds the discovery by Laplace of the Laplacian, core of modern physics’ manipulations, the French pretty much discovered everything important about energy.

  Most of the ideas having brought the big physics breakthroughs (Relativity, Quantum), came from France (Relativity principle, Quantum principle), Germany (Quantum of Light, Gravitation as curvature), Britain (Atom model, QED), with important Irish (Equations of Relativity) and Dutch (Lorentz) contributions. The significant USA contributions were Michelson-Morley (no ether drag, although that was known from French Fizeau too) and the (accidental) confirmation of De Broglie’s deep inspiration.

  USA propaganda twists reality badly. During WWII Nazi cruise missiles sank even Allied battleships. Why? Germans had discovered Germanium (I am not making this up) transistors in the 1930s… So even the transistor was as much an invented in the USA as apple pie.

  What’s left for a great Americano-American innovation? The laser. But there again, it turns out Europeans did the heavy lifting, and USA citizens put up the last decorations. Thanks to Einstein’s discovery of optical pumping, on paper, and its practical invention, with directed stimulation of radiation by light, in Paris, rue d’Ulm, by Alfred Kastler, and his group.

  Kastler got a solitary Physics Nobel in 1966 for that key invention, which made the laser quasi obvious (although that near trivial consequence, the laser, got discovered at Columbia U in New York, and a Nobel was attributed, there was a legal fight, and the one who did not get the Nobel got the judgment in his favor!)  

  I do not want to denigrate the USA as all too many in the USA view as a mission from god (that would be Wall $treet) to denigrate France, but the USA is a society less carried away by deep thinking. Some will scoff, and point at all the Nobels and the classification of universities, from Shanghai University. But those notions are related, big time and non linearly, to plutocracy.

The Nobels are not just given by Sweden, a nation that collaborated with Hitler and its Anglo-Saxon plutocratic sponsors as early as the 1930s (see the Assange affair for how low Sweden can sink, although the collaboration with Hitler was so great that France and Britain had decided to invade Sweden in 1940). The Nobel committee in Physics, for example, is mostly made of USA physicists. Same in economics. And all intellectuals dream of being paid by the hyper rich USA plutocratic universities, so they are anxious to please those potential clients for their wares.

The process is self feeding and vastly overestimate the intellectual prowess of plutocratically managed countries.
 ***

GEOGRAPHY IS NOT JUST PHYSICAL, BUT HUMAN:

  As Kaplan puts is in the Wall $treet Journal:

“As a way of explaining world politics, geography has supposedly been eclipsed by economics, globalization and electronic communications. It has a decidedly musty aura, like a one-room schoolhouse. Indeed, those who think of foreign policy as an opportunity to transform the world for the better tend to equate any consideration of geography with fatalism, a failure of imagination.

But this is nonsense. Elite molders of public opinion may be able to dash across oceans and continents in hours, allowing them to talk glibly of the “flat” world below. But while cyberspace and financial markets know no boundaries, the Carpathian Mountains still separate Central Europe from the Balkans, helping to create two vastly different patterns of development, and the Himalayas still stand between India and China, a towering reminder of two vastly different civilizations.

Technology has collapsed distance, but it has hardly negated geography. Rather, it has increased the preciousness of disputed territory. As the Yale scholar Paul Bracken observes, the “finite size of the earth” is now itself a force for instability: The Eurasian land mass has become a string of overlapping missile ranges, with crowds in megacities inflamed by mass media about patches of ground in Palestine and Kashmir…”

  That, to make it clear, is an allusion to 200 millions fanatical, thermonuclear armed Pakistani, and their best friends have been the plutocrats of the USA. USA plutocrats brought with them immensely greater gifts. than the Greeks could ever imagine. (Ironically, it’s USA plutocrats, Goldman-Sachs, who brought gifts to Greek crooks. Curiously enough the eurocrats, so good at making European People suffer, have forgotten to visit pain onto Goldman-Sachs. Actually Goldman got rewarded, as two super Marios, Monti and Draghi, are now piloting Europe, among other Goldman alumni.

  Pursues Kaplan: “Even so seemingly modern a crisis as Europe’s financial woes is an expression of timeless geography. It is no accident that the capital cities of today’s European Union (Brussels, Maastricht, Strasbourg, The Hague) helped to form the heart of Charlemagne’s ninth-century empire. With the end of the classical world of Greece and Rome, history moved north. There, in the rich soils of protected forest clearings and along a shattered coastline open to the Atlantic, medieval Europe developed the informal power relations of feudalism and learned to take advantage of technologies like movable type.”

  It was also technology. The mastery of steel of the Gauls (and thus the Franks) was such that the very heavy ploughs necessary to dig in that heavy soil could be constructed , pulled by bio engineered oxen and giant draught horses, harnessed in new ways.

***

CIVILIZATION IS SUSTAINED, LONG TERM, BY, AND ONLY BY, CORRECT PHILOSOPHY:

  An area where the USA lags increasingly is anything touching to the philosophical. This area, of course is, by far, the most important to allow the continuation of civilization. For example, as the Maya went down, because of drought and ecological devastation, instead of thinking deep, they went to each other’s throats.

  And we have counter examples. When Rome fell to the Gauls, the entire Senate put on its most magnificent clothes, ivory staff by the side. All the Senators sat on ceremonial seats, in a vast courtyard. They took the thinkers’ pose, pinching their chins in their right hands. They stood standing completely still.

  The Gallic warriors , shock troops, armed to the teeth, covered with fine  steel mail, and light steel helmets, with their giant steel swords, the world’s best, invaded the courtyard and with their horses clinging with the brand new tech of Celtic iron shoes. The Gallic shock troops were stunned. All of Rome had been open, and evacuated, except for the fortress of the Capitol hill, symbolically held by a garrison.

  Why were all the Senators there? Why is this courtyard? What did they want to prove? And why this ridiculous pose, anticipating Rodin’s thinker by 23 centuries? What were all this most prestigious leaders of Rome thinking? Striking a pose? What were those past consuls trying to show to the finest Gallic warriors?

  The eldest Senators of Rome were trying to show to themselves, to all of Rome, that they had failed, that they had collectively failed, that the mental system, the strategies that they had advocated, for decades, were drastically erroneous. a global re-think was in order. The top mental leadership of Rome had got to be decapitated.

  They were there to offer their lives, to sacrifice them to the cognitive failure that they had committed. The Gallic warriors milled around, astounded, feeling. deep down that something immense was in evidence.

***

9/11: FRUIT OF THE DELIBERATELY ERRONEOUS WAYS OF USA PLUTOCRACY:

  The increasing imbalance is demonstrated by the rising inequity and inequality in the USA, all over the place, not just wealth and income, but also in health, justice, and education.

  This is not just a USA story, as USA clout is such, and the control its plutocracy exerts on allied plutocracies, all over the world, is such, that the cancer started in the USA has become globally metastatic.

  Hey, it’s 9/11, so we should celebrate, I mean commemorate, right? So I commemorate 37 years of the war of the USA against the republic of Afghanistan, with a particular thought for Prince Harry who is keen to demonstrate that it is a patriotic duty for a plutocratic Brit to shoot Afghans to death from his big armored helicopter, while occupying Afghanistan.

  2,700 died on 9/11, whereas more than a thousand times as many Afghans were killed since the beginning of the armed USA intervention in Afghanistan. USA plutocrats and their agents are poised to recolt trillions in minerals, as long as the USA military stay in Afghanistan, after NATO much advertized departure in 2014 (The French, disgusted, are already removing their attack army, they will leave only advisers).  

  As Obama put it: “We work harder and smarter than anybody else.”

  Error for the many, profits for the few.

***

MILITARY MEANS ARE ULTIMATE  TO DOMINATE GEOGRAPHY:

  Here is Kaplan again:

  “If you want to know what Russia, China or Iran will do next, don’t read their newspapers or ask what our spies have dug up—consult a map. Geography can reveal as much about a government’s aims as its secret councils. More than ideology or domestic politics, what fundamentally defines a state is its place on the globe. Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources.

  Maps capture the key facts of history, culture and natural resources…

  In this very brief survey of the world as seen from the standpoint of geography, I don’t wish to be misunderstood: Geography is common sense, but it is not fate. Individual choice operates within a certain geographical and historical context, which affects decisions but leaves many possibilities open. The French philosopher Raymond Aron captured this spirit with his notion of “probabilistic determinism,” which leaves ample room for human agency.

  But before geography can be overcome, it must be respected. Our own foreign-policy elites are too enamored of beautiful ideas and too dismissive of physical facts-on-the-ground and the cultural differences that emanate from them. Successfully navigating today’s world demands that we focus first on constraints, and that means paying attention to maps. Only then can noble solutions follow. The art of statesmanship is about working just at the edge of what is possible, without ever stepping over the brink.”

  Well, we are going over the brink.

The human engineered poisoning of the atmosphere with CO2 and other, even more vicious greenhouse gases, has a superexponential character to itself, that will become very obvious, all too soon. The Military Industrial Complexes have a great future, coming up.

And another thing. All too many, especially on the supposedly progressive left, but also on the self satisfied right, behave as if caring what’s all it takes. Yet, to really care, means to be aware. And of the harsh realities, first of all. If one wants to act well, one needs the facts good.

***

Patrice Ayme

“Greatest Nation On Earth”? Really?

YES WE CAN, MURDER WHOEVER WE WANT:

What Else? Not Much. 

The Higher The Assassin Climbs, The More It Shows Its Bottom.

***

[Those who spurn critical thinking can take the blue pill offered by Krugman, trying desperately to mumble vaguely positive about who history may abstract as the assassin in chief! Uncritical thinking: what mussels do.]

***

“We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” 

Thus boasted Obama at the democratic convention. If a politician in France proffered such a lie, voters would think he was not just deranged, but nationalistically crazed. What’s true instead? We are much less employed:

Employment Ratio Prime Age Population

If one had an ethical graph, it would crash through the floor. Obama stood on its head 25 centuries of Ius Belli (see below). Assassination without due process is the only category where Obama unquestionably surpassed G. W. Bush (Bush had implemented free drugs for seniors, effective immediately, so, in a sense, Bush beat up Obama at the health care game: Bush really did something major, and positive, while president).

The naive may object that the collapse of employment was not Obama’s making. But the opposite is pretty much true. Obama approved, with the republican presidential candidate, John McCain, in a showy way, the decisions of the Bush administration. Obama even left the main engineer in charge, tax avoiding New York Fed chief Tim Geithner. Geithner is still in place, having presided over a collapse of employment.

Plutocrats, starting in ancient Rome, have always loved unemployment, because it transforms the People into hungry pigeons who eat in their hands, humbly. Nothing makes Pluto happier that this daily humiliation.

Moreover Obama resurrected Larry Summers, and took him as economic guru, starting in August 2008. This is exactly when unemployment rolled over, big time. The obvious causal relationship is that, at the time Summers gave a presentation to Obama about the importance to save the criminals, the banksters, and re-establish their wealth. that, in turn, gave the Bush administration a green light to do just that. So, instead of playing FDR, that means, stimulator to the economy, Obama played stimulator to banks.

A the time Bush was lost, his dreams smouldering, and checked out (and not just out of Iraq). Geithner, Summers, and the Mc Cain advisers were all in agreement to save the banksters, and damn the real economy. So here we are. Worldwide.  

Instead what had to be done, ALL OVER, was what was done to save the car industry. Obama did it, but just for the car industry (I gave explicit recommendations on how to do it in other industries, so it was possible to do so, obviously… Trillions were spent on the banks, for the banks, by the taxpayers, order of Obabush.)

Mr. Summers was the architect of the sustainable crushing of the economy by an unregulated bubble of financial derivatives and activities, under money hungry resident Clinton. It made the economy red hot under Clinton, and after that, it imploded. For this, people are much grateful to Clinton.

People are mesmerized by Clinton, like birds by a mamba. Something about bird brains, that even mambas understand.

Verily, the much despised Greeks work 2,100 hours a year (that’s because Greece is the country with the most family owned businesses). Koreans work 2,200 hours, and USA citizens work “only” 1778 hours. At least 15 nations work more per hour than the USA… In the OECD alone.

These numbers are known by all serious people. So why is Obama seriously lying to the thunderously applauding multitude? Why is the pseudo left multitude applauding those serious lies? So that they can better forget that their great leader is busy reverting 25 centuries of civilization, replacing justice by assassinations, in the best tyrant style?

It is revealing to compare the French and USA presidential elections. Raw nationalism is very strong, all too strong, in the USA. Nationalism is even viewed as a moral duty, in the USA. In France, among other European countries, nationalism is viewed with intense suspicion, so one does NOT go shrill that way, there. In France, nationalism reeks of insufferable bad manners (except in the despised National Front, despised precisely because of its nationalist rhetoric). 

After all, when the Nazi tanks rolled in, the most important mental force in plain view was nationalism. Nationalism is the “Na” in Nazism.

So no wonder nationalism is not hot in Germany anymore, either. And that’s very gut.

Civilization is not made just of things one does, but also of things one does not do anymore. Lying about other countries is a very bad habit to have. Just as it is a rather bad habit not to reveal that the USA attacked the Republic of Afghanistan, with the help of its henchmen in Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, more than 35 years ago. Attacking people, killing millions, for no good reasons, has consequences. In the fullness of time.

True, Rome killed and enslaved millions in Gaul; but there were good reasons, said Caesar, although the Senate stridently disagreed. The judgement of history, and of most of the Celts themselves, at the time, and even more afterwards, was that Caesar was right. So killing millions is not necessarily bad. (Anyway, conflicts cascaded in Celto-Germania, and Caesar did not start the war, the Helvetes did.)

Killing more than ten million Germans was the price to get rid of Nazism; there was an excellent reason. In Afghanistan, all the reasons of the USA, to sow religious war there in the 1970s, were terrible, anti-civilizational, and part of the price is the unravelling of the constitution of the American Anglo Republic into an unprincipled Principate.

The official story about how 9/11 came about, is an enormous lie. In truth, the USA attacked civilians on the other side of the Earth, and that was followed by a counter-attack, more than a quarter of a century later, after the primeval action of the USA led to the death of several millions in Afghanistan.

The truth is mean, but it is the truth. And even so called “god” cannot do anything about it.

“We are endowed by our creator… we are the greatest engine of growth and prosperity that the world has ever known…” We we we we… Is that a mutation of the self satisfied he he  he he of G. W. Bush?

We, we, we, we have a president who is personally acquainted with his “creator“. Was that creator UBS, or Wall Street? Those were the only creators in plain sight, for the objective observers (except for the millions of suckers like me, all the little tini tiny creators who helped decisively Obama come to power, last time, of course. But then he forgot us all, because we were not banksters!).

Speaking of that great other USA president, G. W. Bush, his CIA tortured those it captured for Qaddafi first. Hey, what are friends for? “We work harder and smarter than anyone else.” Indeed, some world records may have been shattered. Torture records and cover-ups records are piling up. For the whole world to contemplate.

Some victims were left dangling from manacles around their wrists and feet for four months straight (interview on French TV from a famous survivor captured in Asia by the CIA). This assuredly demonstrates that USA torturers can get lazy: leaving a guy to hang around for four months does not smack of hard work. Besides those CIA goons are not that smart, because they forgot to kill all those they tortured, so now they speak (at least to non USA media).

People will say: “Oh, that was Bush, that was before”. Right. Things have become much worse, as a policy of systematic assassination by robots is being conducted worldwide, even on USA citizens, even on some of those who are still children. People should meditate this carefully: do they want a world where a so called “commander in chief” selected by some tribe with 4% of mankind go around the world, assassinating people without judicial process?

The Roman Republic leaders, 25 centuries ago, found such a notion atrocious, repulsive, uncivilized. Some of Rome worse terrorist adversaries received a sort of legal process (for example, Jugurtha, Vercingetorix, Simon bar Giora and John of Giscala; the former three were judged and executed, the latter, condemned to life imprisonment). These events were, in order of people killed, relative to the population then, and the danger they represented to Rome, greater, by orders of magnitude, to relatively puny 9/11. Still the Romans kept their constitutional cool, they applied due process to the criminals.

Formidable adversaries such as Josephus, the top Jewish general in the (treacherous Judea war) in the end was adopted by emperor Vespasian, and inherited his mansion, in Rome.

And the Romans kept their constitution intact, whereas Obama considers he has right of life and death on anybody, worldwide, without a semblance of due process. Definitively a violation of Ius Belli and international law. Say the millennia.

The Romans knew that “Ius Belli“, the Law of War, killing the adversary philosophically, was more important than killing the adversary physically. Obama confuses looking cool as a chap, and cold blooded assassination. Worse: goose stepping behind, cheering and applauding Obama’s exhibitionist love for his family, a circus for little children, USA citizens are carefully arranging their forgetfullness about what the Romans knew, 25 centuries ago. Namely that it matters when one goes and kill people, that everybody understand why, and that the cause be just.

The main axis of France’s foreign policy, since May 8, 1945, has been to re-educate the Germans in the way of peace and love. Franco-German reconciliation has been number one top priority. This was not compatible with nationalism, and that is why France did not seize one square kilometer of German territory after the Nazi defeat.

I turned the TV on, to watch the democratic convention, and here were sexy girls speaking like they knew it all, telling the USA what to think. They were movie actresses, and the crowd just loved them. With a teleprompter, any mental retard who knows how to read can work harder and smarter than anyone else.

Talking about plastic surgery, here was Vice President Jo Biden. All excited, and delivering a pretty good speech. He celebrated, (for want of a better word),  the death of more than 6,000 soldiers, and 50,000 wounded some so very severely, he marvelled with exorbited eyes. The RESOURCE WAR, aka “war against terrorism“, brought a tear eyed evocation. Biden finished on :”God bless you, God bless you!”

God bless you for what? Destroying Afghanistan since 1978, just because “yes, we can”

What struck me, beyond Joe’s predictable rhetoric, was how Biden had suffered from plastic surgery. His eyebrows were angling up, then came down hard on the side. His eyelids were wide open, as if he had been immensely struck by the incongruity of it all, after been hit on the head. What did that creature remind me of? It felt familiar. Yes. Those Batman movies, with the Joker. OK, I am not a specialist of Batman, and I have not really seen the movie, just extracts, so I cannot explore further what Biden has been trying to say by being a real life imitation of the joker incarnated by Jack Nicholson. Is it all a joke? Is that what he wants to say?

Another contrast with France was the so called “First Lady” that introduced “the love of my life“. Nobody of importance in the USA is aware that the “First Man” semantics was invented by Augustus, Rome’s first life long tyrant. But, even Augustus, did not introduce the ridiculous notion of “First Lady“. Who are the Last Ladies?

And why is the First Lady’s sex life so important? Sorry, I meant romantic. Hey, go easy on the steroids, by the way, those shoulders… And why does the resident instrumentalize his daughters? “Malia, Sasha, we are so proud of you… and tomorrow you have to go to school.” Why is that national news? Why does the president’s official business includes telling his daughters he is proud of them? It’s not obvious? He did not think of it before? He needs a teleprompter to communicate with his family? 

And why are taxpayers paying 100 million dollars for this pathetic, clownish circus?

Are USA citizens so deprived of these things they need to see them on TV? I was amused when Michelle made a huge smile off sync while telling the story of someone who could not afford health care. It was meant to express compassion, but the timing and intensity were off. With these little things sincerity, or lack thereof, shines through. Can one work the appearance of a heart harder and smarter than anyone else? A question much of the world has for the USA.

“Michelle…I love you so much” Thus Obama does not just love to coolly assassinate citizens, worldwide. His love is all encompassing. And the other clown who smiles, immensely touched by this apparent revelation, just made to her, watched by hundreds of millions. And they embrace, and embrace… Why don’t they go all the way? Would not that augment the audience? Worldwide exhibitionism. What happens when it turns out that the president was sleeping around with the hordes, as happened so many times in the past, with many other presidents? Maybe all these drugs they are given to perform 24/7, like circus animals who would never, ever, rest in a cage.

For that matter, how come ex-resident Clinton, now filthy rich, is immensely popular while everybody should know, by now, that he planted, with his gardener, Larry Summers, the seeds of the financial disaster? Namely plutocratically engineered derivatives to the horizon, devouring the world economy? Is WE THE PEOPLE dominated by masochism?

So why the exhibitionism? Because when there is enough style, it can displace substance. And when the substance is banksterism as far as the eye can see, it’s best hidden in plain sight.

The best joke was Obama’s content empty discourse. He even forgot to mention “Obamacare” also known as the “Affordable Care Act”. His sycophants used to call that monstrosity his “signature achievement“. And here he was, refusing to sign his achievement again! Tell us it’s not true, Barry-Barack, tell us that you do not just say what the polls tell you to say.

Health care is much improved, just wait for the bill. Apparently Obamacare has become better not talked about. (True the ACA is supposed to increase how much most people are supposed to spend in health care: the act may be affordable, but is it care? The Republicans have noticed that Obama proposed to reduce the funding of Medicare by $750 billion… So naturally they pounced on that, while proposing to transform Medicare into Vouchercare. Democrats are screaming it ain’t fair, as if that were not predictable. Either they are lying, or they really have puny brains)

In truth, Obama and his Pelosi plutocrat carefully wasted time when they had total control with a health care plan that will not work (because it does not have a sustainable mechanism for cost control). They agitated the ACA as the red flag it was, thus distracting the attention of the People away from the banksters (neither jailed nor even prosecuted), and from Quantitative Easing (print money for the banks that caused the crisis), and from allowing banks to use loans as rents for over-valued properties (over-valued by the banks themselves), while they, those Pelosi plutocrats, were keeping the taxes on the hyper rich at rock bottom, more than ever, and closing their eyes on giant loopholes in taxation (such as billionaires borrowing instead of spending).

Did I mention the tripling of troops in Afghanistan? (The Iraq withdrawal was pre-set by Bush the torturer, but that did not prevent Obarack to claim success for it, whereas, in truth, he was kicked out by the Iraqis, after trying to stay.)

The Pelosi plutocrat has long posed as a leftist, while owning Sugar Bowl, among other things. Never mind that Sugar Bowl had plotted with Royal Gorge LLC to destroy a huge amount of wilderness to extent both resorts (now an ad hoc conservation group has saved the wilderness from the claws of Pelosi plutocrat and her kind).

“Hope has been tested“. Obama has switched from being the candidate of hope to the candidate of “hopeful“. So cars will go twice further “in the middle of next decade” (news: they already do, in Europe, and they will anyway, even in the USA, when oil hits $200 a barrel). OK, could have been worse: Obama could have passed a law to improve cars in the middle of next century, and improve health care by selling body parts. Small favors are better than no favors. Four more years of empty promises, and love of my life celebrations. In the Roman Republic the two Consuls were elected for a year, and rotated supreme authority every month. OK, Romans did not have plastic surgery honey babies to tell them what to think.

Obama finally left the stage, after bellowing about the “greatest nation on earth“. A god nut, Timothy Cardinal Dolan, archbishop of New York, took the stage to deliver a general blessing. May this land of the free never lack those willing to grab guns, and kill others, said the holly man in substance, as he circled several times around the notions pertaining to “men in uniform“.

‘One nation under god, so dear god, bless the USA.’

The old fat man of god was a nice contrast with the young sexy actresses who had warmed up the scene before. Sex and the City of God. Even more weird was the gun fanatic who got shot in the head (with many others) and came to be rolled out as a great hero, whereas all she proves is that, even before being pierced by a bullet, she did not think right.

But 73% of USA citizens attach the greatest importance to shooting other USA citizens. A problem when crazies get crazier: craziness is viewed as heroism (for further reference, see our historical guinea pigs, the Nazis: the deeper they got in their madness, the madder they got).

So what is Obama proposing to do, by the way? Change you can’t believe in! Obama is mostly proposing to do what he did not do when he was in total control, namely rising taxes on the rich, and imposing a minimum tax of 30% on the hyper rich. It’s safe to propose it now, his masters have determined: he is not in control anymore (the Republicans are). So his masters told him: OK, go ahead, tell them what they want to hear, the Dream, the American Dream.

We work harder and smarter than anyone else. Who is that “we” who haunts us? The plutocrats?

Raising taxes on the rich is also insufficient, in any case: it won’t solve the deficit, right now augmenting at one trillion a year, for a grand total of 16 trillion dollars, nearly as much as the 17,6 trillion GDP of the European Union.. . And certainly higher than the 15 trillion dollars USA GDP. (European countries have an Added Value Tax of at least 15%, by law, 17.5% in France and Germany, up to 20% in Great Britain, 23% in Greece. That reduces deficits, but Obama does not know what it is, although I wrote extensively about it, and offered him a book, where it is, black on white.)

Partisans such as Krugman speak only of a USA deficit of around 10 trillion dollars, allowing the USA to look slightly better than France or Germany. How do they do it? How do they cheat? Partisans of USA greatness omit what the USA government borrowed from USA government funds whose spending in the future is mandated by law.

By the way, recent graphs show the USA GDP going up by leaps and bounds, whereas the EU’s stagnates (with Germany not enough to compensate Britain rolling over, lower, while Italy and Spain sink, and France is going nowhere). This looks good, for the USA, but it means nothing. Inefficiencies, waste, jams, and the intrusion of pay services in what ought to be free (like school and care) augment GDP artificially, or, let’s say in ways that cannot be compared!

Obama crowed that he had signed free trade agreements that allowed to sell lots of products stamped “Made in America”. Never mind that “America” is not an official country.

Never mind that the free trade agreements with Panama, Columbia, South Korea, were long stalled, because of the fear for USA jobs, and passed… by the Republican Congress in October 2011. The democratic crowd roared its approval, of the great Obama victory, grabbing his pen to sign on Republican policy, I guess. I am also for free trade… But only if and when everything else been equal. Actually the USA administration (and also Europe) are claiming that China dumps solar panels. Among other things.

Obama forgot to put a carbon tax, so his ‘5 millions‘ renewable energy jobs did not materialize. (By comparison Sweden passed a carbon tax in 1990, to great success for employment and CO2, let alone energy independence.)

Nationalist frenzy, and plutocratization, are hard to reverse. Citizens of the USA view as a self evident truth that they got attacked on 9/11 by a country they had nothing to do with, as they were careful, and still are careful, to NOT learn what really happen. Namely they do not want to read that the USA was engaged in a war of aggression in Afghanistan as early as 1978. (Shortly after three government sponsored Franco-Afghan geological missions under Dr. Laparent, found great mineral wealth. Is the Afghan war just a Franco-american conflict?)     

Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s National Security Adviser, stated in 1998, to the French “According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujaheddin began… after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan… But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise:

Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.… We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.” [Le Nouvel Observateur (Paris), 1/15/1998] After Brzezinski’s confession, other US officials who denied US involvement prior to the Soviet invasion, also changed their story. (For instance, Charles Cogan, head of the CIA covert aid program to Afghanistan at this time.)

For a fuller quote and a more comprehensive story see: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/

By the way, it’s really hard to search the web, in the USA, only in the USA, about the Pelosi plutocrat‘s plutocracy, or Carter’s henchmen terrorizing Afghanistan. It’s not just the People Republic of China which manipulates the search engines.

But it works: the professional killer who was leader of the section who killed Bin Laden, although increasingly cynical in all sorts of ways, really believed that the USA was treacherously attacked on 9/11. Attacked, sure. Treacherous? Not so fast. That soldier had no idea that USA henchmen instructed the Islamist Fundamentalists to attack civilian objectives in Afghanistan, and, preferably school for little girls, a full generation earlier. (No, I will not bother to make a search for this from the USA; I would come empty. But, overseas, the documentation is plentiful.) 

Obama also strokes the dream of the unprovoked 9/11 attack.

Whatever happens, plutocracy will soon elect its next USA president. It would be funnier, if it were Biden. With his distorted face, he looks the part. Joker.

Obama has accomplished his role, that of a vaccine against change. You can read through his face his great interrogation: are they, my rich friends, replacing me with one that they would like more? So he mouthed the change-y thing unconvincingly. He took the left for granted, giving it only pittance. All the horrors inaugurated by G W Bush were left in place, more, even more terrible, were added. Worst: the left took Obama for granted Brown skin, lofty rhetoric, what could go wrong?

Fact is, although the assassination program and its death panel is going strong, the economy is going, at best, nowhere (in France, EU, or the USA) once population change is factored out. See the fawning Krugman, September 7, admitting in a burp of honesty, speaking of employment:“A plunge and a stabilization at a depressed level, which has now gone on for almost three years. Everything else is just noise.” (By the way, Krugman is now looking at the employment ratio, which I long advocated as more pertinent than the U numbers.)

Systems of minds are dynamic. As they go on, they become their own initial conditions. Plutocratization is hard to stop. In Rome it got unfettered after Hannibal’s forever wandering cataclysm. The situation got ever worse. 160 years later, the Republic had fallen. Augustus, of course re-established the Republic, formally speaking, so he claimed. With a caveat: he was to be known as the “First Man In Rome.” Princeps. Or as the French, always inclined to abstraction, put it: prince.

Whatever that was, whatever that is, it’s not democracy. Certainly not democracy as the Greeks understood it, and not even democracy as the Romans understood it. An abomination looking for a catastrophe is more like it. In the fullness of time, sometimes the present itself turns into a golden legend, as the floor disappears below a civilization.

Yes we can! Yes we can! Yes we can! Chanted Obama and his helpers four years ago (me among them). Yes, he could. Asssasinate whoever the death panel Obama instituted at the White House wants. This has been Obama’s presidency greatest breakthrough, its true signature achievement. Not fighting climate change. Not bringing jobs. Not rolling back metastatic kleptocratic finance. No. It’s all the way back to the jungle. Yes We Can! Assassinate. Whoever we want. For whatever they do.

And yet ethics was invented for economics, not just survival. When the god fearing Carter sent his assassins to Afghanistan, he set the groundwork for 9/11… And probably much worse to come (the USA has helped Pakistan’s Islamist regime make thermonuclear weapons, thus enabling a potential thermonuclear 9/11).

Nastiness does not just propagates, it feeds on itself. Not that the plutocrats mind. In hell, all fired up, ready to go, their lord dwell. When plutocracy turns into an avalanche, civilization is swept away.

***

Patrice Ayme

Obama: Right Of Nixon.

PLUTOCRACY: GLOBAL GIANT, DEMOCRACY: LOCAL MICROBE.

***

Many web sites just scavenge other people’s ideas, or, and, write short and superficial. The danger is that human brains degenerate into those of tweeting birdies: flashy, but all too light. I will appear to do this today, but not really. An article in The New York Times “G.O.P. Shift Moves Center Far to Right” exposes in concise form many of the themes I have rehashed for years. For example that Nixon, compared to Obama, was a leftist. So I will extensively quote the article (who invents the ideas first owns them).

All that article says can be found in essays of mine in the last 8 years, so I am quoting myself in a sense. I am not complaining: I wish the NYT, and the democratic party, had expressed themselves along these lines at the beginning of Obama’s residency.

Krugman had already done so a year ago (while quoting another pundit from the punditocracy, of course!). Krugman and company were all for mild measures when Obama was deciding and implementing such watered down measures, on their advice, while I was screaming that Obama was governing on the right of Nixon! Later, crude men and their kind admitted that they gave the wrong advice to Obama as they claim to have believed that there was time to correct things later… (As if they had never heard of elections, and throwing the incompetents out!)

My interpretation is much more cynical: they gave the wrong advice because they has interest to do so. After all, the chief of the democrats in Congress since 2006, is owner of a ski resort and her family in a famous political dynasty.

Obama has been a terrible disappointment, for an ardent supporter of change such as me. It happened in no small part because all too many were all too happy with the color of his skin, and other shallow, not to say racist, considerations. They forgot to look at what was really going on. If voters decide to throw out who does not matter, Obama, and replace him by someone else, who they may be led to believe (thanks to PACs, Super PACS, C4, etc.) may matter, they will have only themselves to blame.

So here is the business section of the New York Times, September 4, 2012:

To hear Republicans on the campaign trail, the United States could not have elected a more left-wing president than Barack Obama, one more hostile to business or more eager to expand government power. Left-wing Democrats, I’m sure, would disagree. If they had their druthers, they would probably make a more liberal, more pro-big government choice. Somebody, perhaps, like Richard Nixon.

That’s right. The Nixon administration not only supported the Clean Air Act and affirmative action, it also gave us the Environmental Protection Agency, one of the agencies the business community most detests, and the Occupational Safety and Health Administration to police working conditions. Herbert Stein, chief economic adviser during the administrations of Nixon and Gerald Ford, once remarked: “Probably more new regulation was imposed on the economy during the Nixon administration than in any other presidency since the New Deal.”

Nixon bolstered Social Security benefits. He introduced a minimum tax on the wealthy and championed a guaranteed minimum income for the poor. He even proposed health reform that would require employers to buy health insurance for all their employees and subsidize those who couldn’t afford it. That failed because of Democratic opposition. Today, Republicans would probably shoot it down.

So compare the achievements of Obama with those of Nixon (by the way, I used to dislike and despise Nixon). The New York Times’ Porter pursues:

“The difference between then and now is that Nixon — like most mainstream Republicans — accepted that government had a role to play guaranteeing Americans’ economic well-being. That consensus cracked around the time of Ronald Reagan’s inaugural speech in 1981. “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem,” the president intoned. And the country’s political center set off on a long rightward migration.

Interestingly, Americans say their political ideology has changed little since the late 1970s. The share of voters who defined themselves as liberal was 20 percent in 2010, up slightly from 19 percent in 1980, according to polls by The New York Times and CBS News. The conservative share over the same time rose to 35 percent, from 30 percent.

But these polls ignore how much the meanings of the terms have changed. The rightward drift in economic thinking becomes apparent in surveys asking about specific issues. In surveys 25 years ago, 71 percent of Americans believed it was the government’s job to take care of those who couldn’t care for themselves, according the Pew Research Center. This year the share is down to 59 percent. And most of the shift reflects a decline among Republicans.

Republicans’ support for labor unions has fallen sharply since the late 1980s, according to Pew’s research, as has their support for protecting the environment. Their drift fits the position of Congressional Republicans, whose views on the economy have been shifting right for the last quarter-century while Democrats’ views have remained roughly still. And as Republicans have moved to the right, economic policy has followed. “

It’s all of course, about what I call plutocratic propaganda. But Mr. Porter, writing for the business section of the NYT, would not dare say such a thing. Instead he opts for the anything-but-plutocratic propaganda explanation:

Conservatives will say their ideas won simply because they are better. Social scientists have some alternative hypotheses of our great conservative shift.

The big government strategy from the 1940s through the 1970s produced a spectacular improvement in living standards. But many economists now say they believe the focus on full employment and income redistribution at the expense of everything else also contributed to the strategy’s demise, removing the fear of joblessness and encouraging excessive wage increases.

Combined with cheap money printed by the Federal Reserve, it produced a burst of high inflation and high unemployment that bedeviled the 1970s — discrediting government as an economic steward and letting a new belief take hold: the economy should be left to the market, which always knows best. The end of the cold war, which discredited central planning and other left-wing economic theories, probably helped solidify this stance.

I do not claim that what the factors Mr. Porter exhibits did not occur. They did. But the true full picture is much bigger, and not restricted to technicalities. First he forgot the giant waste of the Vietnam war, which exploded the entire economy. One can see that Mr. Porter does not believe that the picture he just drew is dominant, as he abstracts it in a completely different way, in a Freudian slip of sorts:

Economic philosophies could shift again, of course. Just as the big government policies of the New Deal emerged from the Great Depression and World War II, the financial crisis and recession just past might again persuade Americans of the perils of unfettered capitalism and cause the pendulum to swing back.

So, after all, it was all about the perils of unfettered capitalism, and not just the fact that living standards augmented spectacularly… Another problem has been “globalization“:

… a kinder, gentler economy in which American companies faced much less competition than they do today. Eastman Kodak could run a mini-welfare state through much of the 20th century —with profit-sharing, health benefits and pension plans — because it had fat monopoly-type profits. Detroit’s Big Three amounted to a cozy oligopoly.

Globalization and its attendant burst of competition put an end to the fairy tale. Companies squeezed costs to stay in the game, zeroing in on wages and working conditions. Unions, once politically powerful institutions fighting for workers’ share, became weaker and weaker.

Half a century ago, American employers might have accepted a higher minimum wage on the ground that they needed American consumers to be able to afford their products. They might have supported public education on the ground that they needed an educated American work force. They might have accepted financial oversight because they raised money from small investors in American markets.

But globalization freed businesses from the limitations of one nation and the clutches of the nation state. As businesses’ footprints extended around the world, these objectives became less important than assuring low taxes. Free to jump borders, businesses became much more difficult to tax or regulate. And in the current dismal economy, they don’t seem too eager for a return of the big government days.

The United States is in ideological flux. The Great Recession has given us both the Tea Party and the Occupy Wall Street movement, and produced perhaps the most polarized government of the modern era. Liberal-leaning Democrats, often disappointed at the president’s compromises, will pine for a more aggressive champion of workers’ rights. But they may want to count their blessings. Americans today might not elect somebody as liberal as Richard Nixon.

Well, and why would not “Americans today not elect somebody as liberal as Richard Nixon”? Because Americans enjoy the suffering of Americans? Or is it because a herd votes with its hoofs? Wherever the cow boys wants it to go?

Frightened little minds need to be led by masters. Led by the nose. This is how fascism works. Thus, the instinct says, force comes. The oldest instinct of social animals: E Pluribus Unum. Out of the many small frightened ones, one big monster.

Democracy is local, and has become a microbe. Can it become virulent enough to master the global plutocratic giant? Maybe, but that is ever less obvious as the USA succumbs to the Dark Side of secret political financing.

Notice that we have seen that movie before: as the tiny Greek city states kept on fighting with each other, a plutocratic giant rose in the north: Macedonia. Macedonia was led by an oligarchy of wealthy horse owners. Macedonia organized itself as a plutocracy of lords.

Macedonia spoke Greek, and understood many of Greece’s greatest ideas (or at least Aristotle and his student Alexander did). But some of Alexander’s generals, who succeeded him, missed the biggest ethical ideas. Or, at least so did Antipater (who came to crush and rule Greece). In Egypt, it was different as Ptolemy, another senior general of the rebellious Alexander youth, made himself Pharaoh, and went for the promotion of thinking.    

Overall, ethics is there to allow the weakest thing, the mind, to triumph above force, including the force of the multitude.

Obama did not understand that the minds had to be fed. Or, he was unable to feed with what he did not have. More probably, as someone who knew him well 40 years told me: “You know, Barry was just a regular guy.” Regular guys don’t lead the minds of the many up the right road.

And the pathetic comparison with that rabid anti-communist, Nixon, makes it all the clearer.

***

Patrice Ayme