ECONOMIC REVOLUTION

AWE FOR INDUSTRY
INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINES & MEASURES INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS

Some pontificate that we are experiencing the “third industrial revolution”.

This erroneous naivety, rich in lessons, beholds a lack of measure, and a lack of history. As I explain why, I will introduce the INDUSTRIAL INDEX, which rests on the concept of energy and AWE, ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY, which rests on humanly effective energy usage.

Together both energy related concepts allow to found rigorously the notions such as industry, progress, even revolution, and the dismal science, economy.

Athena Parthenos: lots of energy to build, metal therein.

Economy has been dismal, because it had no scientific foundation. Energy gives that foundation to economics. While generalizing… physics.

Verily, there have been many “industrial revolutions” before. Scholars of antiquity call them “ages”, instead of “revolutions”. A tradition.

Going from the Bronze Age to the age of (carbon reinforced) iron (steel) was a change of “age”. (Trojan War Greece fell to the iron equipped Dorians, launching the Greek Dark Ages.) To make bronze, one had to bring together copper and tin, sometimes from very far away. To make iron, one had to reach temperatures higher than any naturally occuring fire. Those new metals were all about new, and more intense, energy management.

One needs to define “industry” and one needs to define a measure for “revolution”. I will do both. Defining industry depends upon a measure of industry, and this is the same measure that defines revolution. So I will do the measure first. (See note on measure.)
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INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINED:
A woman, with her bare hands, can do only that much. But if she drives a bus, she can do much more. Much more what? Much more work, in the exact physical sense of “work”. In physics, work is force time the distance along which said force acts. It’s equivalent to energy. (See work note)

An obvious question is how would industry be defined? Very simple: by work. A human, au naturel, can do only that much work. Industry does much more.

The concept of industry comes, through the French from the Latin “industria” “diligence, activity, zeal” itself from the old Indo-European roots “in”, or “indu” and struere (building, giving structure).

A measure of industry is how much work a human can do, or does, or depends upon,
or commands, in the average. To evaluate the industrial measure of a society, one sums up energy potential or realized, over the entire society.

To get an index, divide that generalized energy by the total population.

This is intuitively satisfying: the index equates the increased mastery of energy with increased industry. As energy is the most important notion in modern physics, this new economic theory fits smoothly with modern physics.

We need a name. I will use II, for Industrial Index.

How to measure the II varies according to societies. A herdsman will a flock of sheep brought in more calorie than his colleague running after wild mountain goats. In this case the relevant II springs from the difference of how much calories is produced (including by milking the goats) versus how much is expended (including training dogs, building fences, or making arrow heads…)

The Neolithic revolutions of herding and agriculture brought tremendous jumps in II. The first dams were built apparently in present day Yemen, then solidly connected to the rest of Middle Earth by a wetter climate, and Jawa in Jordan, 3000 BCE. By irrigating vast lands, a dam does automatically what would be a lot of work for people carrying the water by hand, so it brings lots of energy (jump in II), and in the service of mankind (thus an equal jump in II(AWE) see below).

An industrial revolution occurs when II jumps. II will jump when significantly more powerful science or technology is introduced or deployed (for example the science of breeding less dangerous almond trees or boars). It took 2,000 years to deploy the technology of the steam engine, from the ancient Egyptians and Greeks to the Frenchman Papin (who made a steam powered boat, outright!).

The size of revolutions can be compared across the ages, using the ratio: II(before revolution)/II (after revolution).

For example the steam engine allowed to jump from the maximal power of a dozen horses to ten times that, an II jump of ten. Advanced coal based steam power plants reached at most 100,000 horsepower (around 100 megawatts). A nuclear fission U235 reactor ten times that. So going from fossil fuel to nuclear represented another II jump of ten. (But that jump has mostly failed because the military based nuclear technology partly deployed was found to be insuffiencently safe enough.)
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ABSOLUTE WORTH ENERGY INDUSTRIAL INDEX DEFINED:
An objection could be that this first order definition of II does not take into account, waste. However neither does GDP. GDP is notorious to augment with waste, so some countries have higher GDPs, just because they are tremendously more wasteful (what the Swiss and the French do does not differ much from what Canadians, or Americans do, under the same latitude; however Canadians and Americans need three times more CO2 to do it, a tremendous waste).

I have an answer to the problem of waste too. To remedy this, a notion, AWE, Absolute Worth Energy, does NOT consider the energy spent, but only the energy of the effect one is looking for by the activity that this energy deplyment intents to serve.

This II(AWE) is computed otherwise just as the II. A measure of the efficiency of a civilization is the quotient:
II(AWE)/II.

Examples: a traffic jam has zero AWE, but a Light Emitting Diode has an AWE close to 100% (as close to 100% of the LED output is used… as long as there is someone to enjoy the light of its energy output).
When a plane’s flight’s AWE is the energy of transporting people and goods, on that flight, NOT the energy spent to transport them (pretty much equal to fossil fuel spent + cost of training, flying, repairing, etc.)
It becomes a bit delicate when one determines the AWE of a PhD (but it can be done, using modern computers).
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INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS THROUGHOUT THE LAST 10,000 YEARS:
The Mayan civilization rested upon a tremendous irrigation system with reservoirs and canals. The largest canal, about 100 meter wide and more than 100 kilometers long, can be seen from space. So there was such a thing as Mayan industry. However, the American civilizations were violently destroyed, and contributed even less than East Eurasian civilizations to the present One world Civilization (the east’s greatest contribution, besides its very existence, may have been Chinese black powder).

Ultimately, civilization has been mostly the work of the Middle Earth. It makes civilization pretty much in one locale. The successive revolutions that articulated the civilizational mainstream all happened there, knew about each other, and are thus easy to compare.

The first industrial revolution was the invention of cities, the second one that of herding (or the other way around), the third one was intensive agriculture of engineered crops, the fourth revolution was writing (6,000 years ago). The fifth the political system (Sumer, 5,500 years ago), arriving simultaneously with copper-tin alloys, that is bronze. As tin and copper were often not found in the same place, they had to be transported by massive shipping (Crete, 4,000 years ago). Shipping was crucial for Western Eurasia, which, by the time of Carthage, enjoyed a trade system, shipping enabled, extending from the British isles to India, and even Black Africa; for example tin was shipped from Britain, and salted fish, from Black Africa).

There is no doubt that Rome had industry. The first Roman fleet, 200 warships copied from Carthage, was constructed in a few months, while the crews were trained in the dirt to move oars and obey commands (Carthage promptly sank that first attempt.) Rome had an enormous industry and economy.
But did Rome see an industrial revolution? Well the Industrial Index jumped. Roman dams are still in use today. Yet, the Greco-Roman empire mostly cheated. It split the population in two: the free, and the slaves. The Industrial Index and the II(AWE) applied mostly to the free.
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ARE THE INDUSTRIAL INDEX AND THE II(AWE) PERTINENT TODAY?
Extremely. There are, or ought to be, two industrial revolutions in full swing, one of intelligence, axed on II(AWE), the other of energy, axed on II. The first is still in infancy, the other, in trouble.

The present Artificial intelligence revolution is blossoming, but, like an infant learning to crawl, it is far from fully capable yet. Its potential to augment II(AWE) is very far from fulfilled. That will happen when all the tasks requiring NON CREATIVE and NON CONSCIOUS intelligence can be done by robots. No more driving; the car will do it for you. No more cooking; the kitchen will serve you what to eat. Etc.

What about the energy revolution? It’s somewhat in regress. Although so called “sustainable” energies are developed, they stay an epiphenomenon, and will stay so, as long as they cannot replace base energy. The USA has decided to go the other way, full blast, burning the planet for its own profit, encouraging China and India to do the same with coal.

The new energy source was, of course, nuclear energy which has energy density greater by a factor of one million. A succession of red herrings have mentally unbalanced civilization about nuclear energy, and this is having the disastrous consequence that the biosphere is in the process of quick irreversible destruction. Nuclear waste fades to nothing dangerous after a while. But not so for the poisoning by coal combustion, which permeates the biosphere with eternal contaminants such as arsenic and mercury. Or CO2, that will stick around for millennia.

The Industrial Index is actually in danger of collapse. How? Because the population is augmenting fast (II is obtained by dividing total energy commanded by the number of people), while the catastrophic consequences of fossil fuels burning have reached a tipping point. So energy production may have to shrink. Better AWE (such as more efficient planes, high speed electric trains, photovoltaic electricity) may compensate for this enough. Or not.
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SO WHAT TO DO? II AND II(AWE) NEED TO GO UP.
To get out of the deepening depression the world is entering, we need a jump in Industrial Index. Why? For the same reason as imperial Rome needed one: the resources accessible with deployed technology are getting exhausted (the case of Rome, and also our case). Solution: new technology, with a higher II, thus capable with greater energy to reach further resources (say bottom of the ocean nodules or Helium3 on the Moon).

Otherwise we can do like the Romans and wait until we don’t even have the resources to conduct war. By the way, India and China have understood this, and their policies are axed around augmenting the Industrial Index. Whereas, stupidly, in the West some have claimed we have reached the “post-industrial age”. Apparently that means that the factories are in China.

We are also experiencing a problem that Rome did not have, namely the collapse of the biosphere.

A greater II means a greater massive energy source. There is one, and only one. It’s energy intensity is a million times greater than fossil fuels.
So start a crash program to make high temperatures (hence high efficiency) thorium reactors (the radioactive waste of that energy type is neglectable). They would give massive amounts of clean base energy.
India and China have them, but the West has more capital and expertise at the ready. Maybe Japan can show the way? (Japan needs energy but not 1950 tech Uranium 235/Plutonium plants, which are too polluting and dangerous.)

By all means, pursue sustainable energy. But, as it is, for a huge variety of reasons, it stays a sideshow, or an invitation to disaster: watch Germany go coal crazy.
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THE USA THINKS IT’S CRAZY LIKE A FOX, TO OPT FOR CATASTROPHE, JUST AS IN 1939:
Already in 2008, and before, I explained that “Energy Is the Foundation Of Economy”, and I introduced AWE.

That the USA has chosen a catastrophic energy policy goes according to American historical know-how. War has been good to the American Anglo-Saxon colony. Four centuries of war have brought unending success. The bigger the war, the bigger the success.

India, China, Japan, Europe and even Iran know differently. They know that there are wars that bring extermination rather than satisfaction. The Mongols hesitated to destroy China, and replace it by a steppe (Genghis Khan’s generals had the souls of geoengineers!). Just like Sparta saved Athens at the last moment, so did Genghis with Northern China. Iran and Iraq were not that lucky.

The present leadership of USA believes it will always be lucky, and war is a friend, so the more CO2, mercury, arsenic, coal, oil, gas, and rising, acid, lifeless seas, the better. Well, the Greco-Romans went down that road before. All the way down. In the end, they licked obsequiously the toes of the Franks for the next 15 centuries. That was not so bad, but this time is different; the planet is at stake.

If the USA were truly wise, it would opt to increase the Industrial Index instead of military know-how. The former implies the latter, but not conversely.

This is so true that even the U.S. Navy got it, and tried to conduct war exercises in 2012, using algae fuel. That fuel augments the II, because it produces energy from sun and air. It also sucks the CO2 out of said air (so plants making algae fuel could be fossil fuel plants’ best friend! algae fuel is basically the only method of Carbon Capture that could work significantly). The U.S. Congress, more controlled by plutocracy than the U.S. Navy is, was furious, and tried to block the Navy’s efforts. Funny how everything connects.

The military has long been partial to a higher Industrial Index. The first ‘automobiles’, in the Eighteenth Century, were commissioned by the French military. Earlier than that Middle Ages gunners found that Aristotelitian ballistics were false (physicists abstracted that generations later).

Even earlier Constantinople was saved “Gregian Fire” a long range flame throwing system based on fossil fuels. Gregian Fire allowed the Greco-Romans to beat back Muslim fleets for three centuries, sometimes burning up to 2,000 ships in one battle below Constantinople’s fortifications.
Meanwhile in France three full scale Muslim Arab, Berber and Syrian invasions were beaten back in 30 years, because the Franks succeeded to establish a slight industrial edge, using a number of techniques, from better steel to gigantic war horses, to a nationalization of the Church (to pay for the largest and better trained army since the heydays of Rome).

Plutocracy does not like revolutions, industrial, economic or political: they are all related, all having to do with ideas. All what the plutocrats want is to rule. And the way for them to do that, 2,000 years ago, or now, is by paying no taxes. That the world needs an industrial revolution and a paradigm breaking jump in II(AWE) is of no use to them, just the opposite. What’s good for the world, is not good to those who find their call in other people’s misery.

Ultimately, the industrious disposition of a society depends upon the psychology of its leadership. In a real democracy, that should be that of the People, but “representative” “democracy” often represents the People in name only. And industry is not the call of plutocracy, quite the opposite.

Carnegie himself, the USA’s first billionaire, pointed that out, and advocated, in writing, 50% tax on the rich’s income. Carnegie said that it was so that the rich pay back the society that allowed them to become rich in the first place. Carnegie also advocated confiscatory taxes on inheriting wealth, because, he said, the children of the hyper rich, per their psychological upbringing, are adverse to industry.

So why can’t “democrats” in the USA at least preach the way Carnegie did? Because they are “democrats” in name only?

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Patrice Ayme
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Work Note: apparently more sophisticated definitions just integrate work, as defined as above exactly, but infinitesimally, along paths.

Measure Note: I am using the word measure in the mathematical analysis sense. So I have equipped civilization, progress, industry and even technology with two measures: II and the more sophisticated II(AWE).
(I chose Industrial Index II, and not Industrial Coefficient to avoid a confusion with IC, Integrated Circuits, a good example of jumping II; besides, II is indeed an index, not a coefficient.)

Violence Ends Worlds

PLUTOCRACY & MAN RUINED WORLDS BEFORE:
Mass destruction everywhere, all over, is how plutocracy makes the public violent and stupid, thus in synch with its rule.
Violence against people readily extends to violence against the environment, and reciprocally.
After all, one of the main reason to not hurt the environment is because, by doing so, people would be hurt. If one is willing to hurt people, one has one less reason to protect the environment. So ecologists should be concerned about the attitude to violence that people have.

VIOLENCE AGAINST THE ENVIRONMENT DID NOT START YESTERDAY, IT’S THE HUMAN THING TO DO. 50,000 years ago, Neanderthal applied the final solution to the Cave Bear problem. Cave bears and Neanderthals competed for the best real estate in Europe, caves. When Cave Bears had to do without caves, against their better instincts, they degenerated, and died off. There was even more a bear of a problem in North America.

Arctodus Simus: Guardian Of The Americas?

The largest Polar Bear (Ursus Maritimus) ever was 1,002 kilograms (killed circa 1800). During the Pleistocene, which ended with the glaciation, 11,700 years ago, there were three gigantic bears: Arctotherium Angustidens in South America, Arctodus Simus in North America and the Cave Bear Ursus Spelaeus (the largest Ursus species) in Europe (that one was eliminated by 27,000 BCE). These bears are among the largest terrestrial mammalian carnivores that ever lived. The first two were dedicated meat eaters, and could reach up to two metric tons.

Arctodus Simus, long limbed, made for running, cruised as fast as 70 kilometers an hour. It could fight off Saber Tooth cats for the kills. Those giant bears specialized in terror supremacy. Those bears, and other terrible predators guarded the Americas (North America had more than half a dozen species of huge predators). That profusion of man eating monsters is why Australia, much harder to reach by sea, was invaded 40,000 years before the Americas. Those bears had only one thing to fear, man. They kept man off the Americas until man invented weapons advanced enough to kill them, and go south from Behringia, under the cover of climate change.

Why those ursine species did not invade Eurasia, whereas the European Brown Bears (“Grizzlies”) did invade the Americas seems rather mysterious, until one realizes that Neanderthals and their colleagues had long modified, and controlled, the Eurasiatic ecosystem. Grizzlies were compatible with man (and are delicious to eat), whereas the giant meat eating bears were not.
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HUMAN INDUCED CLIMATE CHANGE: 11,700 YEAR OLD, EXPLODING NOW
After bioengineering many domestic animals, and creating new “cultivars”, or plant species (best example: corn), our ancestors had to cut trees… And kill lions. Studies have shown, and logic imposes, that lions and the like used to dominate the megafauna in total biomass, as a lion could survive on anything, from rabbit to elephant. American, and European lions were larger than the large North African lion (extinct for a century).

The end result was millions of cattle making methane, millions more than there would have been otherwise, and the climate warmed up relative to what it should have been (some specialists say that this Neolithic methane prevented a return of the glaciers to a great extent). More methane meant less glaciers, in turn more CO2 released through melting permafrost, etc.
This may explain why the CO2 density has been long out of control:

Homo Explodes CO2 Chart: We Are Now ~ 450 ppm!

When people got to Australia, it was a massacre: the megafauna was quickly eliminated, leaving only kangaroos behind.
Conclusion: man has been violently modifying the environment for a very long time, we are in the Anthropocene.
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WITHOUT PROGRESS, DELIBERATE, MEANINGFUL CHANGE, THE WORLD GETS OLD:
However, people did not get necessarily get away with it: in many places of the Middle Earth (Whatever can be reached from the Middle East within a few months of travel by Neolithic means, i.e. from Britain to India) cutting the trees accelerated, or even created desertification. Egypt is case in point (!). This was well known by the times of the Romans.
The Romans could see the mines getting exhausted, so they ran out of metals for their currency (currency crisis of the Third Century), and even for their weapons (metal crisis of the Seventh Century). After the Muslim attack, the Roman emperor came to Rome one summer to supervise the removal of metal from all the roofs of Rome to melt it, and make weapons of massive Muslim destruction.
Romanitas survived thanks to the metallic flame throwers of the Romans. Once, up to 2,000 Muslim ships were burned, as they sieged Constantinople. As late as the Tenth Century, a flame throwing Roman fleet coming from Constantinople, destroyed a Muslim fleet in the gulf of Saint Tropez, as a Frankish army, in a well coordinated pincer, eliminated the emirate Muslims had perfidiously established in Provence, so as to raid and ransom, all the way to Switzerland.

Meanwhile the Franks had invaded Eastern Europe, Rome’s unrealized dream. There the Franks got enough silver for making a currency again (China, having had drastic inflation & counterfeit from paper money would get silver for its own currency from Potosi, Bolivia, through the Philippines’ Spaniards, eight centuries later; paradoxically, by then the greatest European powers had reintroduced paper money for centuries, as their states were as strong as the 7C Tangs, who did use paper money!).

The cities of Sumer, at the root of (“Western”) civilization, were ecologically devastated. First there was salination (from too much sweet water usage), then deforestation in the Zagros and in the mountains around the Fertile Crescent caused an apocalyptic flood (the famous flood in the Bible). What had been civilization got covered by water, horizon to horizon.
Another famous (mostly) manmade disaster is the drought that put an end to the Mayan civilization. We now know that there was enormous environmental stress. The Mayans had run out of their preferred tree for construction: they used less and less mature specimen, until they had to switch to species that were not as good. The Mayans’ agricultural system depended upon the high technology of an enormous network of artificial lakes and canals. As the drought proceeded, that system failed, while war took over.
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DARK FUTURE WITH COAL, THUS PERFECT FOR THE DARK SIDE:
Clearly a similar mechanism threatens us today: we need, desperately, more advanced technology. The only thing that can save the seven billions is more advanced technology, massively deployed. Thorium reactors are an obvious opportunity.
Right now, we do NOT have to proceed with coal. Anymore. British leaders were debating getting out of coal, exactly a century ago. Now leaders, everywhere, and especially the developing world, have decided to develop coal big time. In a few years, it will become, again, humanity ‘s main source of energy! Thus we will carry the sins of the Kyoto accord.
So what is going on? These leaders are actually plutocrats. They are not just leaders. They are rich, powerful, and nasty. They develop coal because they find natural to be nasty, as nastiness is the most distinctive quality that fostered their ascent. But it goes further than that. More nastiness deployed even makes them feel good about themselves, and the most developed quality they have, nastiness, showing them that nastiness is the force that moves the world.
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THE DARK SIDE TOOK OVER ROME, PERFIDIOUSLY:
The fascist Roman empire imposed himself in a sneaky fashion. First there was a genocide against Carthage, one of the worst genocides known. It put an end to a civilization that was, in several ways, the world’s most advanced (in navigation and agriculture). Then the republican Greek city-states were exterminated (Corinth), or terrorized into abject obedience, after losing their independence. At that point, the plutocrats had to destroy the republic in Rome itself, and that is what happened in the following 130 years.
After this, the republic was not formally gone. Augustus did not make the mistake of his great Uncle Caesar, of violating tradition too far by making himself dictator for life (a notion all too close to the kings that Caesar had imposed all over Gaul, to the rage of the local Gallic Senates, causing in turn the great revolt against Caesar). Augustus called himself Princeps (First Man). First man in the Senate (and thus Rome).

Augustus’successors could only survive by augmenting the fascism, and the plutocratic index. The plutocrats around the emperor played a central role, and are always found in all tyrannies. Cultivating a small clique of “grands du royaume” buttressed the Princeps ( “grands”,as they were called in France: the Greats of the kingdom = plutocrats). These were of course the barons in England (with whom William conquered England, and their descendants) and the retinue of the “electors” in Germany (as the Frankish emperor was elected).

This was particularly obvious in the case of emperor Domitian (circa 80 CE), when we have actually reports of major conversations of the plutocrats around a dinner table, one of them the emperor, and they waxed lyrically that any of them could be the ultimate boss, and that those of their colleagues they had killed before, due to some conspiracies, had they not killed them, would naturally find their place again, and enjoy that meal with them.
The philosopher in chief, under Domitian, was Domitian himself, though. Those who disagreed with him, were, obviously, very bad, even dangerous, philosophers, and the sanction was death. Domitian exaggerated a bit, though. He rewarded some for their philosophy, and then eliminated them. Domitian progressively lost touch with his fellow plutocrats, so they send a professional assassin to have a picturesque fight to death with him in his bedroom.
Under the Antonine emperors that Gibbon admired so much, philosophers reached a pinnacle of power never seen before, or since. Most of them were Greek, some were billionaires, all said what the emperors, and the fascist-plutocratic structure supporting them, wanted to hear.
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ROME & ATHENS CONTRADICTED THEIR RISE’S PHILOSOPHY, SO CRASHED:
A central tenet of the philosophy of fascist-imperial Rome was the exact opposite of what had allowed Rome to rise.
The rise of Rome was technological. Rome was first a melting pot, founded on equal opportunity. that equal opportunity made it an irresistible army, of citizens-soldiers, and that army, in turn, very pragmatically, favored technological innovation, by whatever means.
An example: Rome found itself at war with the greatest power in the western Mediterranean, Carthage. Carthage ruled the sea, her navigators had gone around Africa, and she brought, by sea all kinds of goods, from Black Africa, Gaul, Britain. Carthage ruled the seas, with the world’s most advanced ships.
The Romans captured one of them, and copied it . Within a few months, unbelievably, they built a fleet. The sailors were trained on the rocky soil, in fake triremes. They were declared sailors, and the Consul who had built the fleet, was declared to be an admiral. They sailed away. A Carthaginian fleet sank them all.
Never mind. The Romans built another fleet, paying more attention to detail. Soon they invented a device, the Corvus (=Crow), that could rotate around, and allowed to disgorge the redoubtable, hyper trained legionaries on the decks of the enemy. Carthage sank.
Amusing exploits. Demosthenes had incited Athens to engage in a private-public program to build a war fleet to fight Persia. That was done, and brought the tremendous victory of Salamis, just off the shore in Athens that ended up the efforts of the savage orient to conquer the West for 2,000 years. However, doing so, all the magnificent primary forest of Attica was razed, and never grew back, modifying irreversibly the climate, and making Athens even more vulnerably dependent upon Black Sea wheat. That is, Athenian food supply came from a very great distance, the kind of vulnerability many countries have nowadays. It forced Athens to conduct an aggressive military policy, constructing an empire that extended from Egypt to Byzantium and beyond.
In turn, that empire made Athens increasingly nasty. Within two generations, that nasty spirit, and its fragile far flung extent, became Athens undoing. Athens collapsed morally first, as she engaged in a pattern of war crimes (among them: attacking Syracuse out of the blue, annihilating an island’s population, etc.).
Here to define war crimes, I use Nuremberg, 1945. Some will say that I make an anachronism. However, not so. The roots of Nuremberg 1945 were planted 2,550 years earlier. Reading many texts of the period, and a century earlier, when republican, democratic Athens was created, is revealing. The Nazi like mood that seized Athens around 450 BCE, would have looked horrendous to some of the creators of its democracy (such as Solon), a century earlier, around 550 BCE (Solon was so disgusted by Athens after installing its democracy that he left for ten years to get better ideas, and visited Egypt, among other places).
Thus we see that, not paying attention to the ecology, even for the best reason (wasting Attica to build a war fleet to defend against fascist Persia), can lead to ill conceived, unsustainable empire (the Athenian empire rested on too small a population of Athenians), and then survived just by amplification of nastiness. When a besieged, starving Athens had to surrender to the coalition of Greek city-states, it’s (Persian financed) Sparta that saved it from the vengeance the other cities wanted to visit it with; some of its own medicine, annihilation.
That is why the moral drift in the USA leadership, ever since navy brass, and the dying Roosevelt became best friend with Ibn Saud, or blatant even earlier, when the USA declared Britain and France to be “belligerent” in 1939, and sanctioned them, is so dangerous. That’s how civilization dies.
Athens recovered, but not enough before the goons from the north, the Macedonians, the lovers of horse, Philippe and his son, with their own retinue of major plutocrats (Antipater, for example) could take over all of Greece.
Athens, and the other Greek city-states, ultimately rose successfully against Macedonia. But that was the help of Roman legions. By then the plutocrats were too powerful in the Roman Senate, and they made sure that the Social Revolution in Corinth was crushed. The new philosophy was sustainable fascism, plutocracy desired.
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ROME COLLAPSED MORALLY FIRST, ECOLOGY FOLLOWED LATER:
So what happened under the Antonine emperors? The philosophers, and other Romans observed, as they said, that “the world was getting old”. Namely there were ecological disasters all over. The economy was becoming more difficult to operate, and command and control would be imposed within 150 years, as precious metals ran out. 300 years later, after the Franks had been unable to stop them, the vandals would seized North Africa, and so doing, starved all of Italy.
Could have Rome been spared that ominous fate? Well, yes, by more advanced technology, which could have been deployed (primitive steam engines existed, and Papin made a steam engine boat, in the 17th Century, using roughly the same metallurgical expertise; there is no doubt that the Romans could have made the same). But the Roman emperors deliberately blocked advanced tech.
The emperors, ill advised, thought that higher technology would increase unemployment.
That myth is entertained to this day. See Krugman’s December 9, 2012, editorial in The New York Times: Robots and Robber Barons. technology has taken a turn that places labor at a disadvantage… About the robots: there’s no question that in some high-profile industries, technology is displacing workers of all, or almost all, kinds. can innovation and progress really hurt large numbers of workers, maybe even workers in general? I often encounter assertions that this can’t happen. But the truth is that it can, and serious economists have been aware of this possibility for almost two centuries. The early-19th-century economist David Ricardo is best known for the theory of comparative advantage, which makes the case for free trade; but the same 1817 book in which he presented that theory also included a chapter on how the new, capital-intensive technologies of the Industrial Revolution could actually make workers worse off, at least for a while — which modern scholarship suggests may indeed have happened for several decades.
The debate is nothing new: Aristotle argued that, having no robots, civilization needed slaves, to do the work. The entire Greco-Roman civilization operated upon the bedrock of this completely idiotic assumption. And died from it.
So the emperors argued that, unemployment being a chronic Roman catastrophe, and people needing to work, the machines had could have alleviated work should not be constructed. That sorts of logic looks good, but it’s wrong at every turn. Unfortunately variants thereof presided to the making of the Kyoto Treaty.
All what happened was that Parthian arrows, fired from powerful double curvature composite Mongol bows, started to go through Roman armor, and that cataphracts terrorized the Roman army. Pathetically, in the end, the Romans adopted those military techniques… more than five centuries after suffering the devastating defeat of Carrhae from them.
What was the truth?
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UNEMPLOYMENT AS A PLUTOCRATIC DEVICE:
In truth, unemployment was caused directly by the plutocracy that ruled Rome, it was a deliberate strategy. Unemployment empowers plutocracy. An unemployed man is impotent, and feels completely unworthy: after all, he is no use whatsoever. How could he be trusted to make a revolution? Let alone to vote? Another advantage is that unemployment means that the plutocracy lives off globalization, distant workers, who do the job, but can be cut off anytime, and replaced by others safely. That is why Rome, and then Italy got increasingly deprived of employment and even army under the fascist empire, culminating with the removal of the capital to Byzantium, by Constantine, to make Constantine-polis, Constantinople. To make sure, Constantine also removed the entire Roman metaphysics and tradition, by imposing Christianity.
When the Franks took control, they decreased the fascist index (the kings were elected, and the function was not hereditary, and women could reign), and they decreased the plutocratic index (sons were supposed to inherit equally and daughters would do, if there were no sons). Then the Franks formally outlawed slavery (~650 CE).
Outlawing slavery, that is, cheap labor, meant technology and science had to advance. It did. Countless tech advances occurred within a few centuries: heavy draught horse, bioengineered protein rich beans, water and wind mills all over. Frankish architecture (now known as “Gothic”), hydraulic presses, gravitational and spring clocks soon followed.
***

PLUTOCRACY IS BACK! IT HAPPENS ALL THE TIME:
We are in a very similar situation nowadays, to the decay that corrupted Rome.
The plutocratic phenomenon has blossomed again. The banking sector has been taken over by bandits. This is very grave: in the Roman, Frankish, Tang, and other various Chinese empires, it was the state that created money. In the modern state, starting with the Italian republics of the Middle Ages, it has been the bankers that the state mandated to create money, through credit. So now the money creating system is corrupt, and the political, and even judicial class attached to them, is also corrupt.
Proof? All over the papers, everyday. Even inside the Wall Street Journal, December 20, 2012, the most incredible dialogues among plutocrats and crooks, about manipulating interest rates, and meeting back on their yachts to laugh it off, while exchanging 6 figures gifts.
***
LARGEST PLUTO CRACTY EVER, LARGEST CRIME SYNDICATE, EVER:
Then there was the case of drug laundering by HSBC, a British based world bank. It showed the drug war is a very bad joke played upon the gullible public. Assistant Attorney General and longtime Bill Clinton pal Breuer is another of these plutocratic enabler who obviously expect to be well rewarded some more.
“Breuer this week signed off on a settlement deal with the British banking giant HSBC that is the ultimate insult to every ordinary person who’s ever had his life altered by a narcotics charge. Despite the fact that HSBC admitted to laundering billions of dollars for Colombian and Mexican drug cartels (among others) and violating a host of important banking laws (from the Bank Secrecy Act to the Trading With the Enemy Act), Breuer and his Justice Department elected not to pursue criminal prosecutions of the bank…”
This is another case of international plutocracy at work, the largest criminal enterprise ever.
I say this after considering very carefully the involvement of JP Morgan, Henry Ford and company with various fascist movements, some of them genocidal, in the period 1920 to 1945; although the extent of genocide is lower, by an order of magnitude, so far, with WWII, with only a bit more than six millions or so assassinated in Africa, the intricacy, extent and penetration of world financial, economic, political and informational systems is unprecedented. (I have said this long ago.)
***
IGNORING NUCLEAR ENERGY IS BEYOND GROTESQUE:
Nuclear energy is around one million times more energetic than any other energy source. So it’s the future, and it will allow to conquer the solar system, and go the stars.
Nuclear energy is intrinsically clean. It exploits decay, so its waste disappear quickly: nuclear waste becomes less radioactive over time. After 50 years, 99.1% of radiation is gone. This is in sharp contrast with coal. Arsenic, mercury and other chemicals that are stable, forever poisonous are released burning coal: under our eyes, the oceans and the Arctic are made too poisonous for life, and all what idiotic environmental NGOs can talk about is how bad nuclear is!
Well, if the Plutonium based 1950s nuclear tech is so bad, push for other nuclear technologies! Thorium comes to mind. But the first giant Thorium reactor will be ready in a decade or so. it will be made in China, of course.
***
KYOTO, AN ERROR IGNORING THE MIGHTIEST ENERGY SOURCE:
The Kyoto accord decided that emissions of CO2 would be reduced after a while to 1990 levels. So far, so good. But then it was decided that the most developed countries, in other words, the West, would bear the burden, all the burden. On the ground that they caused the mess. In other words, those who set the fire would extinguish it, while those who did not could go right ahead with a new conflagration. The USA refused to ratify that unwise injustice. The Europeans, who have a long history of self flagellation, ever since they roasted most of the Jews, signed on greedily, and, glutton for punishment as they are, are suffering indigestion ever since. Now China emits three times more CO2 than all of Europe. And many times that in arsenic, mercury, etc.
Denmark gives renewable lessons to all, and depends more crucially on burning carbon than basically any other country. New burn factories are under construction. (On the positive side, this is self limiting, as most of Denmark will soon go below water, including all the Do-goodism.)
Why all the burning fires? Because of Kyoto’s most vicious flaw. Kyoto, and a later annex, Marrakesh, held that nuclear energy was an enemy. The Marrakesh Accords state:”Recognizing that Parties included in Annex I are to refrain from using credits…generated from nuclear facilities to meet their commitments under Article 3, paragraph 1″ .
However, this all hogwash. Out of say 100 different potential nuclear energy methods, the only one used is the military one, the U235-Plutonium cycle.
Conclusion? The do-gooders fanatically anti-nuclear ecologists are bringing back coal. Within a few years, after an eclipse of a 100 years, COAL WILL AGAIN BE the world’s main energy source. Most of the ecologists who were influential in the last quarter century should get their heads examined, because the return of coal is their work.
***
NO PROGRESS, NO LIFE:
Fascist imperial Rome refuted technology. Thus progress. However any human society, since the Pleistocene is as if on a bike: it cannot stand still without crashing. Why? Because resources get exhausted, they always have, they always will (Malthus wrote nearly 5,000 years after Sumer flooded, from deforestation, so Malthus was right, but his were old news).
Technological progress is an ecological stabilizer.
Intelligence evolved because it enables to manipulate the world in a self serving way. In the war against the plutocratic phenomenon, what is in play is the meaning of self. And intelligence itself: the selfishness of the plutocrats is not just self serving, is afflicted with lethal shortermism. Why? because more is different.
Plutocracy is related to fascism, in particular intellectual fascism, where only a few ideas, a few moods, and a few people lead. That’s why Rome got increasingly stupid: any new intelligent discourse is specialized, it’s a techno (special)- logy (discourse). By refuting technology, Rome did not just refute progress, it refuted intelligence.
Nietzsche famously founded his philosophy on the “eternal return of the same”. Nothing could be more false; everywhere we look, however far in the past, long ago, in galaxies further than we can see, there is change, tremendous dynamics at works. We cannot go back to the past, we can only forge a sustainable future. And that means using force, and we have more force at our disposal than ever before, but, paradoxically, not enough yet to put the world on the right track.
Shooting at each other all day long to see who the good guys are, as the NRA and its fellow plutocrats are suggesting, is certainly not the way. Nor is the return to coal, more devastating than anything but outright thermonuclear war.
We are facing the greatest ecological and energy crisis ever, just when plutocracy is heating up. What to do? Full speed ahead with new technology, based in the deepest new science, and that goes all the way to throttle up in more advanced philosophy.
***
Patrice Ayme

Guns Kill (The details)

THEREIN ALL THESES BUT STRICT REGULATION ARE SHOT DOWN:
Since I wrote the original essay on USA Gunning For Guns, things changed. The adversary is mutating, now claiming the gun problem is mostly about mental health. Right, the mental health of an entire civilization, not individuals.

So I decided to separate the more technical part of the previous essay from its main thesis.

My main thesis is that a society where citizens are killing each other is the ideal universe to establish plutocracy, plutocracy being vigilantism writ large. Thus guns are pushed by plutocracy, as they constitute the ideal ecology of it to thrive.

Here I shoot down all the alternatives.
***
MILITIA DESIRED, BUT GUNS KILL:
The question of guns is all about REGULATION, and was framed by the USA Constitution that way, right from the start. Look at the Second Amendment. It starts with: “A well regulated militia”… (1791). At the time the USA had no police, and no standing army (a few years later appeared a very small, but very bold Navy and Marines).
Where is there such a well regulated militia? All over! Not just the French Gendarmerie. The Swiss army is a good example. Switzerland has an extremely high rate of semi-automatic guns, but it’s only a third as deadly as the USA.
However Suisse is thirteen times firearm deadlier as Great Britain, where guns are very regulated. The comparison between Britain and Switzerland makes it clear. So the best regulation is eradication.
Comparing between European countries is instructive, as always. France has millions of (registered) boar hunting rifles (boars are very big, very tough, and very numerous in France, a pretty wild country where they cause quite a bit of destruction). Occasionally such a gun is use for mass murder, but it’s very rare, because boar riffles shoot only twice (typically).
***
ANGRY PEOPLE ARE MAD, THUS MASS DESTRUCTION GUNS, VERY BAD:
I had myself suggest that, the more guns, the more the insane would have a chance to get their hands on them.
All the more as there are no controls on resale, possession, and no license, registration, age control or fee is needed to purchase ammunition (all obvious areas to target for regulation).
However the experts, and, even more, the numbers, disagree:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/18/health/a-misguided-focus-on-mental-illness-in-gun-control-debate.html?ref=science
The connection between mental illness and guns is weak.
As the author, a MD, expert in this field, has it: “All the focus on the small number of people with mental illness who are violent serves to make us feel safer by displacing and limiting the threat of violence to a small, well-defined group. But the sad and frightening truth is that the vast majority of homicides are carried out by outwardly normal people in the grip of all too ordinary human aggression to whom we provide nearly unfettered access to deadly force.”
In other words, everybody gets mad, sometimes. It’s a mad civilization that overlooks this. On top of this, alcohol and other drugs abuses are generally involved in murder.
There are probably as many crazies in Europe as in the USA, but mass murders are rarer there by an order of magnitude, at least. The maniac in Norway (77 killed) was not much more maniacal than the 900,000 who voluntarily entered the Himmler’s SS. At least that is what experts found in Norway.

Mentally sick ideas are much worse than mentally sick people, because they affect otherwise healthy individuals.

Thinking all and any normal people should have semi-automatic gun in hand, bearing hundreds of rounds, each and any time when they may happen to very angry, is insane. That is, not sane. It’s that idea, fabricated by the NRA and its plutocratic masters that is insane, not so much the trigger men (the Bushmaster 223 used for the school massacre, is made by a company owned by Freedom Group, owned by Cerberus, a conspiracy of billionaires).

The trigger men are, mad, true, but, mostly only momentarily, mad. Guns turn that momentary madness into something eternally evil.
Human anger is cathartic, it helps mental phase changes. It’s a good thing for the evolution of ideas, and the promotion of fairness. But, mass murdering gun in hand, anger makes massacres. And a society continually terrified.
***
MODERN WEAPONS ARE OBVIOUSLY SATANIC: WHY TO EMBRACE THEM?
Well, the answer is obvious, depending upon who is truly organizing society…

Who originated the programming of run of the mill Americans into killer robots? Why so many middle age blonde American women, all over the TV, teaching their (underage!) children to use guns? Are “guns” a new form of racism? Who made it so that the media of the USA is continually telling people that the answer to violence is even greater violence, using brute force instead of solidarity?

Well, obviously those who live by violence, from violence, in private enclaves, even private cities, guarded by private armies. What’s their name, the name of their class? The sort of people who go to dinner in Sao Paulo by helicopter, because the streets are not safe. (The situation in Mexico and Brazil is similar to that in the USA, sometimes even worse.)

Thus, plutocracy, obviously, profits from violence as it creates a society in its own image. Solving problems by wanting to shoot holes into people, psychologically encourage the mightiest to go further, and shoot holes in the Constitution.

The exact same scheme, making an unsafe society, a dog eat dog society, was used in the Late Roman empire to destroy whatever was left of the republic and civil society, as citizens got increasingly terrified of each other until they ran for lords to protect them.

Trust the 70% who cannot wait to shoot their fellow citizen to understand nothing of this, and just below their rage by repeating word for word the lessons their powerful masters taught them.
***
SHOOTING CHILDREN IN THE NAME OF FREEDOM?
Freedom of madness? Is madness a form of freedom?

Another shooting in a school of the USA. A primary school. Obama was deeply hurt by it. He did not hide his tears. All what these small children were going to be, all these children had the right to be. Right. Notice that word: right. And now, after suffering horror, each shot multiple times like vermin, they were not. Is it because, behind its soothing words and hypocritical mien, the USA is organized by the brutes, for the brutes, and their bestial ways?

The shooter used a semi-automatic rifle similar to those used by the U.S. army in Afghanistan, to shoot Taliban. A powerful gun the lunatic used to shoot down plate glass and get into the school.
The immediate reaction of the gun lobby, all over the media was to say that, if the staff at the school had been armed with an arsenal the shooter could have been killed earlier, and so the anti-gun people caused the massacre. Thus, making guns more readily available in schools is the answer to preventing violence with guns in schools. If we take this further, then giving everyone nuclear weapons will insure peace.

One would also have to walk in 30 pounds of body armor too. All day long, every day.

It was a very good thing, the president showing what the shooting meant, the pain, the cost that American violence extracts from love. The president has to educate and that does not mean just conveying ideas, but also emotions.

What is the madness about? Academic studies have shown that having a gun in a home nearly triples the probability of being shot and killed.

Still idiots keep on repeating the slogan that they have a right to have mass murdering guns, to defend themselves. Assuredly, it’s not to defend themselves against bullets as those are three times more likely to penetrate the gun totters than others. So what is their true reason?

What are they defending against? Well, reason. Reason. Yes, reason and reasoning. Facts and statistics. And anything telling them, the bleating sheep, that they are not gods, the principal compensation in their mediocre existence.

Americans have war guns at home precisely so that they can go on a rampage, and feel like gods for a moment. It’s all in the moment, like buying on credit. The potentiality for (mass) murders is precisely what they are after.

The shooter at the primary school, 20 year old, had been propagandized into guns by his own mother, a gun totting enthusiast, who, small justice, was the first one to be shot. Ms Lanza idiotically thought she needed a vast gun collection to defend herself during what she described as the coming economic collapse of the USA. She lived in a large colonial home. She had been a stockbroker, and her divorced husband is an executive at GE, the tax dodging oldest company in the Dow Jones Industrial average. So, if she was not part of the plutocracy, she had been quite close to it.

The USA has not been more pro-gun than it has been in decades. Guess what? The USA has never been more plutocratic, ever. Are both facts related? Are guns and plutocracy related? I will argue that they are, and in multiple ways.

The gun lobby gives millions to gun advocates in elections, and millions more in indirect campaigns. The media makes a continual campaign for half a dozen false and idiotic ideas about guns. The idiots, all over repeat these stupidities in a sort of collective black mass. It’s hard to reason with ants.
***

THE SECOND AMENDMENT OF THE USA CONSTITUTION SAYS:
“A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.”

Notice the phrasing. There is logic in the order in which concepts are presented. The Second Amendment means FIRST that one should have a “well regulated militia”. “Keeping and bearing Arms” is only in the context of a well regulated Militia. It does not mean that a deranged child should bear as many huge guns as he can carry.

At the time, 1791 CE, armies were armed with muskets. If the killer had only a musket, he could not even have got in the school (as he used his rifle to demolish plate glass). If he had, it would have been difficult to kill more than one or two children. (There was a similar attack in China against a primary school, the same week, 22 children got injured by knife, none died.)

Gun advocates feign to view every single citizen of the USA as a “well regulated militia”. That’s sheer lunacy. Wait. What? Lunacy? What to do? Outlaw the usage not of guns, but of the concept of lunacy… “the continued use of this pejorative term has no place in the U.S. Code,” legislated the (democratically controlled) Senate of the USA in May 2012. “Pejorative” means: making worse, from Latin peoir, worse. Using guns is viewed as ameliorative.
***

GUNS IS A CIVIL RIGHTS ISSUE:
Obama looked at his notes for the longest time, silently, at loss for words, overwhelmed by the inadequacy what he had to say, wanting to say something else, not politically smart. He had to deplore the loss, but he wanted to outlaw the guns. However he does not write the laws, the Tea Party “republican” Congress does. (Something Europeans tend NOT to understand about the presidency of the USA.)

The civil right that Americans, in their confusion, seem the most attached to, at this point, is that of shooting each other. But that right, the right to kill, is a civil right that denies all others. And this, my friends, come to think of it, is exactly what plutocracy wants.
Obama has to pick his fights. So Obama grimly said what he was expected to say.
***

GUNS: NOT JUST A HEALTH ISSUE, BUT A MENTAL HEALTH ISSUE:
An approach to guns is to declare them a public health issue. Indeed, at the present rate, over someone’s average lifetime, eight million citizens of the USA will get killed or wounded by guns. And 300 millions, terrorized.

But this approach has not worked, because it has been barred by a wall of money.
This, by the way, proves my thesis: if the plutocratically controlled media is all about the pro-gun slogan, it is precisely because the gun psychosis is crucial to keep enough violence in society to justify a thriving plutocracy: guns are related to the elite not paying taxes… And activities such as the war in Iraq. The demented violence against Iraq was using the same sort of argument that the gun lobby uses all the time, transposed to a foreign country.

As the soft approach did not work, it is time for heavy philosophical gunfire. Firing guns, totting guns, training with guns goes well with fracking and denying that the biosphere will explode from too much heat trapping industrial gases and carbonic acid. It’s the same general idea:”We kill, therefore we are.”
The threat of guns, of being shot, especially with more and more concealed weapons “laws”, has an impact on the mental health of all citizens of the USA. This is a hidden form of abuse, and insanity.
***

GUN TERRORISM AS THE MOST BASIC CIVIL RIGHT VIOLATION:
To want to kill people is very American: extremely violent imagery (“I’m going to kill her/him”, “I am going to fire him/her”) is routinely used. After, all, they killed Indians, did not they? And, it worked well, did not it? Without killing the Indians, what would the alternative have been? No USA? Shooting bad people is the essential American creation saga. The Indians were very bad, but, thanks to the gun and the right of Americans to defend themselves, the Indians are now in the care of the All Almighty, Amen.

Thus, philosophically speaking, using guns (and that means the perspective, training and psychological readiness to fire or purchase guns, and general excitement about guns blatant in gun enthusiasts orgasming when they evoke the shooting of their heavy load) is part of the exploitative and extractive mentality.

The whole idea about killing somebody, is depriving someone else of the most basic human right. Thus the attachment of Americans to that right is an attachment to the greatest tradition of the Anglo-Saxon American colony, namely violating civil and human rights, of everybody who shows up, down the barrel of a gun.

How long will it take for Americans to realize that the Civil Rights movement is not over, as long as there are small children, and they get shot?

But is this Civil Right aspect the whole story? No. There is the overall reason for this entire mess, for this weakness of character, disposition, and intellectual faculties.
***
PLUTOCRACY: OF VIOLENCE, BY VIOLENCE, FOR VIOLENCE:
The propaganda of the NRA is highly reinforcing of plutocracy (NRA = National Rifle Association, aka Nihilistic Rats Atrocity).

According to some, the Plutocrats’ greatest fear must surely be that one day the plebs will wake up to their crimes and rise up against them, so the last thing they would wish is for the plebs to be armed. That’s a crafty anti-idea.
For example that the People needs semi-automatic guns to prevent the (plutocratic or not) government to take over. But that’s as ridiculous as claiming that the sheep will avoid the slaughter by bearing arms. A sheep is a sheep. Sheep is controlled with the mind, not at the point of a gun.

Citizens of the USA have been brainwashed into believing that the key to their safety resides not in firing bankers and plutocrats, but in shooting each other. This they do with great enthusiasm: 100,000 get killed or wounded by gunfire, each year. The USA is in a chronic civil war (which kills nearly as much as the one in Syria! In absolute numbers, except, it never ends…).
I have had “friends” who stridently defended their right to have the trunk of their cars full of war weapons. I put “friend” in quotation, because how can I be friend with the deeply deranged?
Talking to them I was exposed to non sensical arguments about how well defended their arsenal made them. Never mind that most gun deaths are from a gun in the home!

They just faithfully repeated the inanities of the extreme right-wing media.
I know differently. I came within millimeters of violent death a few times, and, each time, surprise was the main enabling factor in my near demise. All military treaties, Chinese or Western, say the same: surprise enables aggression as much as all other factors combined. Thus, to prevent aggression, of individuals or civilization, one has to reduce the surprise factor. Having weapons of mass destruction around is one such risk. And certainly a modern military gun is such a weapon.
***

THOSE WHO THINK GOOD GUYS SHOOT FIRST ARE IDIOTS:
The bad guys know that the first thing to do is to shoot first. A Congress Representative, who was shot through the brain, and a judge who was killed in the same shooting, both loud gun advocates, had claimed, loud and clear, throughout the media, that they were excellent shooters. They trained at the same gun club. With gun in hand, they could protect all and any. They both owned Glocks, and, in a form of justice the great god has at the ready, they were both shot by a Glock.
Unsurprisingly, when the time came, those two fools were surprised, and before they could draw like at OK Corral, their topology got irreversibly modified. Maybe thankfully, otherwise probably more would have died in the crossfire.
The bad ones know the most basic thing about war: that the first thing to do is to shoot first.
Glocks’ magazines for sale in the USA can carry up to 33 bullets. In the rest of the world, only police and the military use such weapons (and rarely!). But, in the USA, the 70% who love guns are apparently police or military at heart.
***

GUNS MAKE PEOPLE AS STUPID:
The deepest aspect of it all is that citizens of the USA have been brainwashed into violating common sense. And it goes further than that: as they live in a society where they get increasingly violated, they displace their self esteem into believing that they can take others out, and that they are omnipotent that way.

What to do when the leading nation is losing its mind because it is goose stepping behind the corporations that have seized control of its common sense?

Not much. This is no accident. The masters of the USA have persuaded common people that they, the common people, are the problem, and it would just be solved if they all could shoot those among them who are bad.

Plutocracy is intrinsically not compatible with a civil society. So plutocracy taught citizens of the USA to shoot each other, to be sure that there would be no civil society. And that’s something they do very well, as the eager servants of their masters. If one wants plutocracy, one needs to insure that society is not civil. Shooting each other, and expecting to be shot is a good first step that way. Bad health care, bad justice, expensive education are complementary ways to achieve an uncivil society.

Plutocracy is not just about wealth, it’s not just about the Dark Side, it’s also about hell. Not just about living through hell, organizing hell, but also about having a taste for it. Taxing the rich, not carbon burning the planet anymore, removing the guns from holier-than-thou mental retards are various aspects of the same problem. Fighting plutocracy encroaching upon civilization.
***

SOLUTION?
What could the president do practically? Exposing the mechanism above is difficult. It basically boils down to telling gun fanatics that they are deluded, hateful sheep living in a fantasy world, due to their lack of cognitive and logical abilities. Moreover that mood they enjoy to wallop in contributes to making the USA far short of its human, educative and economic potential, and it hurts the entire planet, when they insist to burn, or sell, ever more carbon to consume.

However, a well chosen gun task force, similar to the one Ronald Reagan has called after the space shuttle Challenger disaster, but with more and quicker powers, could make the necessary educational work, pointing out, for example, that guns nearly triple the probability of homicide inside a home (and certainly 10 times more in a societal context: the USA has 50 times more firearms murders as Great Britain, per 100,000 people!).

Unfortunately, Richard Feynman is dead, but a number of smart scientist, psychologists, philosophers, etc could certainly be put together, to arrive to the obvious conclusions anybody really smart would arrive at. After all, emperor Justinian instituted something similar for law, 15 centuries ago, when he set up a commission headed by an esteemed atheist (!) law professor. Now Justinian reigned 40 years, and Obama does not have that sort of time. So things have to move fast.

I am pleased to report did this right after the first version of this essay came out.
The first thing to do is to try to renew the ban on assault rifles, which expired in 2004, under the mandate of the invader and torturer of Iraq, G.W. Bush (not a coincidence). Executive orders could be used. Even they fail, they will have the advantage of exposing those who offer children in sacrifice to Pluto, as the Carthaginians did to Moloch.
In the USA, a child is 13 times more likely to be shot by a firearm than in any other country in the world. Public opinion, and the NRA may be somewhat surprised by the primary school massacre. They are surprised, so they have to be attacked vigorously, now. Assaulting with the right ideas in the name of justice is how goodness imposes itself.
Of course the plutocrats and the darkest mood they foster are mighty. It makes fighting them all the more interesting.
The most sold brand of Assault Rifle in the USA, Bushmaster Firearms International, is part of the Freedom Group, owned by Cerberus Capital Management, itself the property of a number of billionaires, some of them gun fanatics. Cerberus is the triple headed dog guarding Hades, and it apparently thrives in Manhattan nowadays. (Thanks to Allexi Helligar for reminding me of this.)

Time to throw the gauntlet to the partisans of brute violence, the fanatics of shooting and murder as freedom. If nobody will throw the gaunlet to infamy, how is infamy going to feel bad about itself? Time to persuade swing states voters that they were morally decrepit all along, and their redemption lays into turning to other ideas, instead of pushing that trigger spastically, again and again and again, because they know of nothing better to do with their brains.
***
Patrice Ayme
***
Note 1: Tale of two constitutions: The obsession with France, is obvious in the outlawing of French cheeses. One is forced to have when studying the subject, because the constitutional debates in France and the USA have always been entangled. That comes from the entangled Franco-American Revolutions, culminating with those diverging, but related, constitutions the two countries ratified within a few weeks in 1789. One constitution choose human rights, the other, mild plutocracy and implicit slavery; Lincoln and Martin Luther King found very costly to rectify the constitution from 1789; but not all that ought to be clarified has been clarified yet, such as the 2nd Amendment from 1791.

Note 2: The usual well paid idiots came up with the argument that if the courageous principal had been armed, she would have killed the murderer, and protect the children. And true, the principal gave her life, without a weapon, to protect the children. However the killings had apparently already started (remember the surprise effect). In the general case, the logic is flawed. The density of lunatics is whatever it is, and the mass killings occur when a lunatic and a mass destruction weapon find themselves in the same neighborhood. This is proportional to the product of the density of lunatics by the density of weapons. Only the later can be controlled, and be brought down to zero.

Note 3: The last of five massacres in 12 years, killed 35 people in Tasmania. The Australian government instituted a buy-back program of 600,000 semi-automatic guns (which fired every time the trigger is pulled). Regulations brought the murders down by 60%.

Why USA Is Gunning For Guns

Abstract: DOES THE USA HAVE HUMANITY AT THE POINT OF A GUN? The obsession 70% of Americans have with shooting other Americans is the most violent violation of Civil Rights imaginable. That’s why they want it. The will to shoot others is worse than the will to enslave them. Who would profit from such a mentality? How did it come about? Why is the pro-gun obsession progressing in the USA, in parallel with the progression of plutocracy?

This essay explains why plutocracy pushes guns onto society. It opens new perspectives sure to make the nasty scream, and reveal who, among us, deep down inside, overflow with nastiness at heart. It may shame the majority whose action enables child killers (see teachers financing Assault Rifles makers).

Guns in the USA against all and any reason, but the most abject, is not just an Americano-American problem. Life at the point of a gun imposes, in the world’s leading nation, a mentality of privileging violence over reason, and hatred over empathy. That mentality, in turn, is forced onto the rest of the planet (say from movies, universities, opinion, diplomacy).

The Grossest Propaganda Works the Best

Most legislators in the USA are millionaires, and that’s not from their salary! But by doing exactly what their plutocratic masters want them to do. And one fundamental lesson to legislate is: France Bad, Guns Good.
[See note.]
The gun mentality plays the central role in the greenhouse-acid seas disaster: no nation has been so keen to block meaningful action as the USA. The most influential right fanatics who insist upon making the USA into a gun society are those who want plutocracy and maximal fossil fuel burning. Everybody is afraid of them. Letting them shoot their way through civilization, the most basic humanity, and common sense, is not how matters will improve on this planet. (But, of course, making things worse is exactly what they want, and that’s why they caress their warm guns.)

Those who have little time can read my main thesis immediately following (the rest of the 5,000 words of the essay just buttress that main thesis by going into the nitty-gritty, including the direct implication of plutocrats):
***

Main Thesis:
GUNS ARE NOT JUST ABOUT SHOOTING PEOPLE, BUT ALSO ABOUT SHOOTING DOWN LOVE, REASON, By, And While Embracing The Very Mood That Enables Cruel & Violent Masters To Reign:

Possessing guns to kill people with, is about imposing one’s own violence as the ultimate arbitrage. Many Americans claim to view this as the ultimate expression of the American sense of freedom. Call it the freedom to inflict carnage.
The mood dominating the present USA depends upon commoners accepting violence as an overriding principle, and guns symbolize that. Instead of trying to understand things, the way Europeans have learned to do, not knowing enough to know any better is erected as definitive, glorious, all-American.
So right from the start gun advocates are tied in to the worst of man, the Darkest Side, when thoughts are only directed towards murder. Getting them out of that spiral of horror means giving them the courage, and knowledge to recognize that they have made a pact with the devil: their souls, against the orgasmic feeling a warm gun give them. They represent, they have made into an idolatry, the worst of man.

Moreover, gun fanatics succumb that way, not because they are free, but precisely because they are slaves, not because they are courageous, but because they are cowards.
The preceding is not insulting, but objectively descriptive. Insults claim what is not. An accurate depiction is not an insult.
If I describe a garbage pile, that I am contemplating, it’s not an insult. If I describe an angel as a garbage pile, it’s an insult, to the angel, and to reason.
By turning innocent little children regularly into garbage, the gun advocates of America are insulting humanity, as they claim to have the freedom to make holes into children. All the more as gun fanatics cover it all by holier than thou inanities. This essay will come up will plenty of reasons to justify the preceding, turning what precedes not into insults, but into faithful representation of what is.

A plutocracy is not a civil society. Thus, to have a plutocracy, one needs, first, to have a society that is not civil. Guns help to achieve this lack of civility indispensable to plutocracy. This is why the plutocracy insures, through the mass media enough mind control to make sure that, in the USA, people attack each other like rats in cage, with the biggest weapons they can find.

Through its control of mass media, and unending repetition, of the same lies and idiocies, the plutocrats have made the citizens of the USA believe half a dozen absurdities about gun ownership. The result is exactly what the plutocrats wanted: a society where everybody is afraid of everybody, and where the most basic human right, the right to life, is violated. Once the most basic civil and human right is violated, other violations shall easily follow. Such as having the richest and nastiest pay no, or very little taxes. Yes, my point is that the gun problem is just one aspect, part and parcel, one more way to help enable plutocracy.

More subtle, the trite idiot thoughts supporting massive gun usage have made people deeply stupid. The cowards blurt:”We have to defend ourselves!” and grab a gun. Never mind if children get killed. It sounds good to them, so they believe in it, all the more since the rest of them also bleat that way. However, statistics and observations contradict the argument that they have guns to defend themselves. Actually they have guns to kill themselves. Not only are they sadists, but they are also suicidal narcissistic masochists. (The lunatic at the primary school still had hundreds of rounds, but as the police closed in, he killed himself, proving the point that his fundamental mission was to take out his despicably low life. This is typical.)

In the USA, keeping a gun in the home carries a murder risk 2.7 times greater than not keeping one. Never mind! They believe in it! It’s all about faith! Gun and God! Gun is god, and bullets make the only points they can understand.
Gun ownership is not about reason, it’s all about the opposite. Gun ownership is about violating reason: the more one says guns are for defense, and the less true it is, the better! Thus the little minds learn that reason is irrelevant, that what their masters, the plutocrats they venerate, told them, is dominant.

Thus, symbolically, Civil and Human Rights, and reason itself, are exhibited as secondary to what gun fanatics have been told to believe in, namely their right to murder. And they have been told that, again and again and again, by big money, all over the media they control, by the wealthy ones who devise the American discourse. That is all what the plutocrats want their commoners to believe.

Conclusion: A guns totting society is scared, divided, prone to violence against itself, stupid, and, having no time or inclination to establish a class consciousness, cannot organize itself against cruel abuse, as it is too busy dodging bullets. What a better place to establish plutocracy, which is vigilantism writ enormous, for the benefit of the few? And if small people are small vigilantes, is not it natural that the plutocrats employ armies of lobbyists and politicians, let alone body guards and private enclaves, to, well, defend themselves, too?
It goes without saying that the internal violence of the USA comes out externally, and that is why the USA has sabotaged all efforts against heat trapping industrial gases, in the last 30 years.

Interestingly, the same situation exactly, of violence unchained, brought down the Late Roman empire, when plutocracy mutated into the feudal order. Not a coincidence.
Now for the details.
***
Patrice Ayme

No Rice, No Lice, No Dice

Unexpected happenings all over. UN Ambassador Susan Rice, reportedly involved with genocide and corruption for twenty years, is considered for Secretary of State. Does that beat Obama outlawing the European Carbon Tax? Reality is always spicier than fiction.

Transparency International produced a classification of countries according to (SELF) “perceived” corruption. Netherlands, Switzerland, Belgium, Luxembourg, Singapore, Hong Kong, are six tax havens (some with triads!) proclaimed to be less corrupt than France, or the USA. Tax havens are, like corruptocrats, parasites. Parasitism can kill a civilization.

There are 3,000 species of lice. Parasites can’t create civilization. We should not look up to them.

Trying to evaluate corruption, worldwide, and to attract attention to corruption is a good thing. If done honestly. Transparency International says that Finland is one of the three less corrupt countries in the world.  In reality, the Finnish director of Transparency International, himself the director of the Confederation of Finnish Industries, decided that.   

One can only conclude, in turn, that Transparency International is itself corrupt. Or at least mentally corrupt, like an old fish left out too long rotting in the sun. TI is another of these international pretentions, which international finance, and its globalized media, are keen to advertize for, as they serve them well.

The drive is always the same: the big states, the pillars of democracy, are bad, small states, where plutocrats can reign supreme, and lovely tax havens, are good. If the small state is the window of a big bad plutocracy, China, full of triads, as Hong Kong is, that ‘s even better! It’s not corrupt at all!

Just as tax havens are the best places to be born (said The Economist), tax havens are also the less corrupt, as far as international plutocrats are concerned. Similarly rotten rich plutocratic universities, propagandizing watered down values, are the best in the world, and the French ones the worst (hey, is not the Islamophobic Voltaire taught there?).

Corruption tends to be in the eye of the beholder. Transparency International, just as countless elite private universities, “liberal”‘ or “left wing” “think tanks”, are just plain tanks that the plutocrats finance to roll over the People, starting with their minds.

If Transparency International were serious, it would use objective criterions. The Gini Index, which measures inequality inside countries, would be a main ingredient. It’s obvious that any country where an extremely rich elite reigns over an uneducated rabble is intrinsically corrupt.

New indexes need to be created to judge corruption objectively. The Gini index is objective. We need more objective indexes, rather than to depend upon crooks to inform us on how corrupt they are.

One learns best through explicit examples. Here we will mention two cases, one that of an American politician who is a professional democratic party apparatchik. Starting from nothing, on government salary, the lady built a fortune… and part of this fortune is psychologically incrusted in the most determined pollutocratic corporations. (Yes, pollutocratic and pollutocrats are neologisms we will, unfortunately, find useful, looking forward, as the influence of those such as Ms Rice, and her puppet masters, seems to know no bounds.)  

One such index would rest upon how rich politicians become (the Pure Corruption Index). Presumably, the acquisition of otherwise unexplainable awesome riches comes from plutocrats paying them under, or over, the table.

Just add how rich those politicians (and their families!) have become, and divide by how much they officially earned, during their official tenure. Then integrate over all politicians of that country, to get a global index. So my proposed index can be used both individually, and globally. It seems that Susan Rice, Obama’s friend, UN ambassador with cabinet rank, and potential Secretary of State scores very high that way, on the Pure Corruption Index. That Obama defends her ardently tells volumes on the sort of state that we are supposed to admire, as we are supposed to admire Ms Rice’s political-financial genius. Such is the main axe of this essay.

Nietzsche used to crow that he “made philosophy with a hammer“. But the planet needs to be defended with a battle axe.

Another index would take into account how rich politicians are (Pure Plutocratic Index). The Pure Plutocratic Index is not as bad as a criterion to chose our Lords. For example, Senator Kerry, who would make a much better Secretary of State than Ms. Rice, is very rich. But it’s clear how he became rich: he married an extremely rich woman, from Mozambique, herself heir to the Heinz fortune. Kerry does not owe anything to pollutocrats, or plutocrats. It’s unlikely he would pass laws to construct ketchup pipelines across the world, to please his sponsor (namely his wife). Whereas as we will see, what dirty Rice proposes for her pipelines is hard to swallow.

Much of the American deficit (in the last four years, it was a trillion dollars a year) comes from legal, or tolerated tax evasion (the home mortgage interest deduction comes to mind, and the 975 employees at GE in charge of tax evasion, who allowed GE to avoid taxes all together more than once).

Amazon has a multi-billion dollar business in each of France, Britain, and other countries, and it pays basically no tax, while the local bookstores it is killing do. France presented Amazon with a tax bill of $252 million, for unpaid taxes, 2006 to 2010. France presented Google with a tax bill of a billion dollars (I use Google for search rarely, as there are many alternatives).

Massive tax evasion undermines the French welfare system. And also the French military, the world’s most interventionist. It is France who made war in Ivory Coast recently re-establishing democracy, and it is France which is putting the heat on the Islamists who conquered half of Mali (roughly the size of California), and may go to war there soon. This French war activities, in defense of civilization, in the end also protect the tax havens (example: if France had not declared war to Hitler in summer 1939, Switzerland, ultimately, just like Austria next door, would have been conquered by the Nazis).

I have not been following closely the fumbling about Ms Rice as Sec. Of State to replace Hillary Clinton. I knew nothing much about Ms. Rice, except that she is a professional politician, her career having started under Bill Clinton.  I don’t trust professional politicians. They are parasites within a tyrannical system, representative democracy. OK, some are sincere (Chavez, Gov. Brown of California, Hollande and Merkel come to mind; some may be sincere, although slightly deranged; Putin comes to mind.) However, in general politicians thrive from corruption, and thus politics attract those who want to thrive from corruption.

Nobody can accuse me not to be cynical. However, I was stunned to learn that Susan Rice, 48, holds between 300,000 and 600,000 dollars of TransCanada. Reality is indeed much more crazy than fiction.

TransCanada wants to build a pipeline across the USA to find a buyer to the horrendously polluting Tar Sand Oil (British Columbia has refused such a pipe). This fact, by itself, clearly disqualifies her as a potential Sec. Of State. Even if she divested herself, it would remain that she took side against the biosphere, and that she had to be violently separated from an investment who brought her $25,000 last year. And, to top it all of, she has so little judgment that, although she knew her good friend Obama would try to nominate her, she clang to her monstrous money maker. 

It gets better:  Ms. Rice and her husband, an ABC News producer, own at least $1.5 million worth of holdings in Enbridge, a Canadian company that transport Tar Sand oil across the USA. In other words, Ms. Rice will be viewed by dedicated ecologist as satanic. (Ecologists do not seem to worry Mr. Obama very much.)

Where do these people get that kind of money? A quick scan of Ms Rice’s career shows that she was employed a bit in (fake) “liberal” institution such as Brookings, and something called Intellibridge. Intellibridge was a front for selected investors, financial organizations and other corporations, a conduit for plutocratic money, to pay off the servants (and an outshoot from Kissinger Associates, the extreme right wing organization).  Ms Rice’s father was a governor of the Fed, the private-public device to funnel public money to private banks. 

So now Ms Rice is rich, filthy rich, she is fully blossoming as a servant plutocracy can trust. A full time leader of the democratic party. Filthy rich, literally, as Tar Sand oil, which is twice cooked, is very dirty.

So ecological organizations have meekly suggested Rice should divest from her polluting investments. It’s a human equivalent of grabbing a piece of meat from a lion: Rice may give up her reward, but she will resent those who forced her to do so. and the fact is, she was rewarded, enormously, by those who wanted to reward her, and will go on defending them, if she has any sense of decency.

Decency among scoundrels is part of the tribal instinct. Fundamentally, killing is a social activity (as killing en masse requires allies) so, paradoxically the more the killing, the higher the team spirit. Even among Nazis, decency to each other was high: they called each other “Kameraden” (“comrades”), spoke of “we” all the time.   

Rice has made clear, with her obscene investments, who her team is: the team of those who, literally, want to burn the Earth.

On September 16, 2012, Rice went on five major news channels to pontificate about the attack in Benghazi:

“our assessment is as of the present is in fact what began spontaneously in Benghazi as a reaction to what had transpired some hours earlier in Cairo where, of course, as you know, there was a violent protest outside of our embassy–sparked by this hateful video. But soon after that spontaneous protest began outside of our consulate in Benghazi, we believe that it looks like extremist elements, individuals, joined in that– in that effort with heavy weapons…We do not– we do not have information at present that leads us to conclude that this was premeditated or preplanned…”

in other words Rice says that it is free expression, the First Amendment, that is culprit in causing the Benghazi attack. Nowhere does she mention that an enormous Salafist base was tolerated, or known to be, close by.

This is wrong in several ways. First the concept that a “hateful video” can “spark” deadly protest.

Second and more importantly, it is wrong to believe that there was such a thing as a “hateful video“. There was a grotesque video, the “Innocence of Muslims“, true. But the pathetic video just faithfully illustrated what is, incredibly, said about Muhammad in the Qur’an, and the most sacred Muslim texts. To wit:

Muhammad married a girl, Aischa, who was 6 years old, and had sex with her when she was 9. Yes, Muhammad killed much more than a thousand men, yes, he did not know how to read and write (differently from his first wife, a rich business woman), yes, the cousin of his wife was a professional Christian monk, and he told Muhammad that it’s Archangel Gabriel that met him in the desert, yes, God had allowed Muhammad to marry as many women as he pleased, and that pleased him a lot, including with Jewesses (and a furious friends’ wives). More can be said that is highly distressing, and the short video did not say.

OK, the video represented a sexual practice that is not alleged in the sacred Muslim texts. Thus one can only conclude that those who protest about the “hateful video” protest about a precise sexual practice, benign between consenting adults. Curious that they do, as they find completely normal that the great Prophet Muhammad had sex with nine year old girls. The only conclusion is that they are sexually obsessed (one way, they love pedophilia, at least when the Prophet does it, and another, they find licking bushes so abhorent, they call it hateful, denigrating of Islam, surely the prophet of child molesting  would not do such a thing!)

It remains that when Rice, and those excited Muslims in Pakistan, call the video “hateful“, they call the Qur’an “hateful”. Outrageous company between Al Qaeda’s theses and a member of the cabinet? Not that much. The USA has long instrumentalized Islam, because Islam, thanks to its Fascist Principle (Qur’an Sura 4, v 59), is friendly to dictators and dictators can be made friendly to those who own the USA. Result? Lots of oil trading is controlled by the USA and its associated plutocrats (many based in Switzerland!), and the profits get recycled through New York and London.

So what is it with Rice? She is rich, and Rice was obviously made rich by the likes of those who want pipelines carrying the most polluting oil to be built, and Tar Sands to be exploited.

The battle about Rice is a small symbolic and pragmatic move in a vast picture.

The essential strategy of the USA in matter of energy used to be that it did not matter how dirty one got, as long as one provided the USA with cheap oil. That was the sense of the pact between F. D. Roosevelt and Ibn Saud in 1945. It was the time of dirty dirty: the USA had left France and Britain fight Hitler alone in 1939, while helping the later not so discreetly. Then at Yalta, the USA had given half of Europe to Stalin, knowing perfectly well that Stalin had massacred at least 22,000 of the Polish elite at Katyn (that the USA knew was revealed very recently). In the end, Europe was hopefully lethally wounded and certainly half crushed.

Thus the Uncle Sam was in better position to free the Middle East, and the Arabic countries, from Franco-British control. It needed an ally, and that ally was Muslim Fundamentalism. Carthage used to do this kind of things, with mercenaries. It famously backfired, as the mercenaries rebelled. Similarly, the USA has been facing a rebellion of Al Qaeda, a formation it basically created to wage war in Afghanistan against republican socialism, starting in the 1970s.

Co-existing with the likes of bin Laden has proven an embarrassment. Although the American people still seems unawares that Bin Laden was a product of the CIA (and its Saudi alter ego), the war against Al Qaeda has spread ever more, leading to Al Qaeda like formations all over, from Mali to Indonesia. OK, right it’s good for the military-industrial complex. However the deficit is too big to support the latter any longer, that extravagantly.

Way out? Well, the USA could have done like Europe, and chose the road of higher energy prices, deploying more advanced technology. But it did not, as it refused to take part in the Kyoto Protocol. Now in Doha, Qatar, Kyoto was just extended. It boils down to 15% of humanity doing all the efforts. 15%, yes. Mostly made of Europe, a heavy burden.

If Europe wants to let itself be exploited, that’s fine with the USA.

Europe was ruled by various philosophies, with the liberal-let’s-throw-money-to-the-rabble-and-especially banks presently in power. The USA itself is ruled by several philosophies, but the hierarchy of those is easier to figure out. Long mercantilist (a technical term), as a practical governmental policy, it has now become increasingly, since Reagan, plutocratic max. The magically rich Rice is another symbol of that choice: if the plutocrats have chosen Rice, it does not matter if Rice is obviously corrupt for all to see.

It’s actually even better, that one can see that Rice is on the take. It flaunts that the way to get ahead, is to become lice. Because Rice becomes the symbol that money rules, and so it can, assuredly, buy itself ambassadors, cabinet ministers and Secretary of State. It can buy the highest government officials, and then flaunt that fact, and people have to kneel and submit. As Sec. of State is the third authority of the state, in the USA, to contemplate something more absurd than that, one would have to observe the president of the USA invest with several of the world’s top pollutocrats.

Hence the American rush to fracking: it brings energy and autarky, yes, but it’s also symbolic of the rule of the exploitative philosophy. Ten years ago, the USA was planning to import Liquid Natural Gas. Now, in a sudden reversal of fortunes, it’s planning to export it. The USA has so much gas, from fracking, that the USA price of the stuff has collapsed 80% below world prices (the gas is hard to transport, although a desperate Japan had the Ob River inaugurate the North East passage, in winter, to bring in at least ten Hiroshimas worth of semi clean gas energy in).

USA oil production is supposed to pass Saudi Arabia within 7 years. A resource, energy and food independent country with state of the art tech does not have to worry about its currency. It could live in autarky. In this light, the will to appoint Rice can be viewed as the will to make still another pact with the Devil. For those who are real dirty, the fact that Rice is dirty, makes her clean.

After World War Two, many people who should have known claimed they had no idea the Nazis were so dirty. And how could have anybody guessed. Well, that’s why it’s called guessing, I guess. How dirty could Rice be?

During the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, Rice, a well connected arrogant know-nothing, hungry to serve powerful, crushing masters, leveraged her dad, well connected as he was, in plutocratic finance. She is, like Geithner, a princeling (same idea as in China). Ms. Rice advised the Clinton White House to stay silent about the genocide in Rwanda. She claimed to be afraid that doing so would have an electoral impact. How come a girl who knew nothing about Africa, could advise to let millions of Africans die? (I have been raised in Africa, mostly Black Africa, so I care more about that subject!)

The dirty business of the USA in the region, involves high tech minerals such as Coltan. It is still going on. The resulting wars have killed at least 6 million. (If six million Africans die in a forest, does that make any noise in Washington?)

And Rice is directly implicated. Ms Rice may have had deeper motives than electoral ones in 1994, such as helping along Mr. Kagame (master mind of the guerilla that triggered the holocaust in Rwanda twenty five years ago, now dictator of Rwanda, and also master mind of the Coltan war that killed five millions, while feeding with weapons and money the M23 force invading Kivu, in Congo!) 

As the United States’ representative to the United Nations, Susan Rice worked hard last year to block the release of a U.N. experts report detailing Rwandan atrocities in the Congo. To go around Rice, the report was leaked. Question: did Ms Rice get money from high tech companies or African “new leaders“? It certainly looks like it. She certainly did not get all this money from her government salary.

In September, Rice paid fervent tribute at the funeral of the late Ethiopian dictator, Meles Zenawi (who died unexpectedly at a relative young age). She praised the bloodthirsty plutocrat unreservedly as “uncommonly wise, able to see the big picture and the long game“. “Long game“, really? By long game, she apparently made a distinguished reference to all the dissidents and journalists who disappeared after being hunted down. In Polynesia human game was pudically called “long pig“.

We are very far from a proximal, global solution such as a worldwide, global carbon tax, right away. Instead the world has been put on a somewhat similar strategy to the one the USA followed in the 1920s and 1930s: have the USA pose as neutral, isolationist, while making a bad situation ever worse, in the hope that the ultimate cataclysm, just as in the 1940s, would turn to the advantage of the USA. Dream on.

For the sake of civilization, it is better not to nominate as Secretary of State someone with genocidal connections. If nothing else, it just looks so bad, that it boosts the prospects of Pluto. Indeed the more satanic behavior is in full view, fully rewarded, the more “We The People” gets used to be led by Satan. So it would be, by making the apparent queen of genocide the third in succession to the throne. Now, of course, this is exactly what plutocrats want, it would be another important step in habituating the commons to be overlorded by the Dark Side. 

Many Tibetans feel, and it is arguable, that China is conducting a genocide in Tibet (there is a technical definition of “genocide” that seems to fit very well). The pain is so great that, this year alone, dozens of young Tibetans have killed themselves by fire, burning alive. How could China take seriously a Secretary of State that was, herself, involved with genocide? How could any other nation?

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Practical conclusion: Senator Kerry who is superbly qualified, and would have been elected president in 2004, but for G.W. Bush’s dirty tricks, should be nominated Secretary of State. BTW, differently from the conniving, conspiring Rice, Kerry was elected many times, and is senior senator of Massachuset.

Note: Starting in 1990, France intervened several times in Rwanda, trying to blunt the violence. Under UN mandate. In 1994, France evacuated civilians in Operation Amaryllis, and finished the Rwandan civil war with Operation Turquoise.

Heat Is On, USA Cooking US All

EUROPE TRIED HARD TO SAVE THE PLANET: Europe limited its CO2 emissions better than the rest of the world. Under the Kyoto Protocol, 37 industrialized nations and the European Union pledged to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 5% measured against 1990 levels by the end of 2012.

This provided the rest of the world, not held back by such efforts, a competitive advantage. Who pays? Europe.

The Kyoto Treaty was not ratified by the USA, but exploited by its plutocracy: as China was (stupidly) exempted, under Kyoto, from emission mitigation, industries owned by American plutocrats were relocated there, to escape modern anti-pollution norms. Result?

Tyranny & Carbon Burning Cooking Biosphere

The Russian gas giant Gazprom announced that a giant (and very dangerous!) Liquid Natural Gas tanker, the Ob River, left Norway on November 7, accompanied by two nuclear icebreakers for nine days, breaking through thin winter ice. It saved twenty days on the trip. Notice that such LNG tankers carry the explosive power of a nuclear bomb, and going through the desolated Arctic may be safer. (Ob River can carry 150,000 cubic meters of gas and weights around 150,000 tons). Thus the North-East Arctic Passage was open for big time business, and, in …winter. The heat is on, indeed.

USA ADVANTAGE IS CAUSE NUMBER ONE OF PLANETARY WARMING:

As usual with important progressive treaties, ever since the SDN, the Society Of Nations, in 1919, the USA baits and maneuvers the other countries into economically, or politically disadvantageous positions, and then switches out at the last moment. The Versailles Treaty was an early example of this time honored technique (the SDN was supposed to impose the precautions that Versailles failed to give, but then the USA made the SDN fail, opening the way to Nazism). This classical bait & switch trick explains why the USA does not recognize Palestinians, the International Criminal Court, or the Rights of Children. 

Non ratification of Kyoto advantaged the USA. It is particularly obvious with the development of shale oil and gas there. Never mind the tremendous ecological consequences. Canada had ratified Kyoto, but violated it completely, by developing tar sands. Canada formally left Kyoto last year, before being struck by sanctions. 

As the Wall Street Journal observed on December 3, 2012, ecological considerations hold back the rest of the world in the fracking race. But not so in the USA, and this gives said USA a tremendous advantage. What the Wall Street Journal did not say is that the willingness of the USA to destroy the planet as it searches for comparative advantage, is a distant consequence of the thoughts and moods inherited from that tremendous accomplishment, the holocaust of the Native Americans. Exploitation, no holds barred: the gift that keeps on giving.

The American indigenes were eradicated through the imposition of a relentless exploitation mentality hidden under an indispensable thick hypocritical mood, the latter enabling the former. Not only are the exploitation mental machinery and its mood still major cultural components of the USA, but the continent is pretty much empty: the USA has more arable land than China, or India, with a fourth of the population. Moreover, some of the states with lots of fracking have little arable land too (Wyoming, North Dakota). Basically, they are throw-away states. After the last polluted farm or ranch has been surrendered to the fracking fumes, the land will be returned to wild critters and evil spirits, while the USA prepares for the world war, that the worldwide ecological devastation will bring.

***

 

POLLUTION DENYING PROPAGANDA:

A tremendously crazy campaign was organized by the CO2 polluters, for years, in Anglo-Saxon countries. The well paid propagandists denied everything, using the Crazy Lie Technique: they claimed insanely, and the more insane, the better, that CO2 meant nothing, that the heat was NOT rising, that climate scientists invented the data, in a vast conspiracy called “Climategate“, that CO2 was not a pollutant, but, instead, the more, the better, etc…

Those crazy lies worked with its target audience, the ignorant, uncritical People of the USA. At least well enough to give a cover for the Congress of the USA, to affect to believe that those insanities ought to be given a serious hearing. This delaying technique allowed the polluters to gain more than two decades. Europeans fought back, by giving hypocritical Vice President Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize. If you can’t beat them, spoil them.

But now polls show that, even in the USA, the citizenry has come to believe that the heat is on, fro the whole planet, and that human pollution by heat trapping gases such as CO2 was the cause (by 65%). So the polluters had to change tac. They are inventing a new approach, and it seems to be working, even with many ecologists (as I discovered to my dismay in the last few weeks). Apparently there is a tremendous number of naïve ecologists out there, the same ecologists whose idiotic posturing allowed the Kyoto Protocol to fail, while the USA leveraged it for comparative advantage.

The new trick by the gas polluters consists in saying that nothing can be done, against the rising CO2, we may as well accept it. The only hope is that the world population would crash massively and to have the culled rabble leading those much simpler lives poverty provides with: see the Simplicity Institute, “A Prosperous Way Down”, and a number of articles exposed in the site “Learning From Dogs”, such as “Unintended Consequences”.

The truth is much more prosaic: 

THE CARBON TAX IS HATED BY POLLUTERS:

A worldwide Carbon Tax would reconstitute the free market as fair and balanced, giving a chance to alternative energy sources, without subsidies, or government programs. The Carbon Tax would just charge for the cost of the damage the heat trapping gas emissions cause, including the cost of repairing the entire biosphere back to health.

The Carbon Tax could be imposed asymmetrically. Say a car comes from China. One would evaluate how much coal was used in the industries providing the car maker and its parts makers, and their energy providers. Then one would add the bunker fuel used in the sea transport in the evaluation of how much fossil fuel has been used to bring the car to market overseas. One would apply that made to ALL goods. China does not have to cooperate.

The World Trade Organization has already determined such a tax is no custom duties, and does not violate its charter.

The Carbon Tax would be a nail in the coffin of fossil fuels. So, of course, carbonizators hate it.

Europe has been slowly taking measures against CO2 pollution, including increasing carbon taxes, here and there. One such law requires airline to pay a carbon tax (as all methods burning carbon should). So the Republican Congress of the USA wrote a counter law to force airlines from the USA to NOT obey the European law. Their counter law, their illegal, the planet destroying law of the right-wing extremists in the pockets of oil men, is now on Obama’s desk. Obama could, and should veto this planet destroying law. Will he? Will he find the moral fiber? Will the president of the USA find the ferocity that is needed, in the face of infamy?

Well, he will not, if all ecologists do is to say there are no solutions but those we would get after a world war that would kill 50 times more people than World War Two did (that is basically what the links above propose to do; in other words a non solution solution!) How did we get there?

Notice by the way that one of Obama’s predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a somewhat similar situation, proved to be a coward. Instead of declaring war to Hitler, in summer 1939, he signed sanctions against the French Republic and the United Kingdom, for having declared war to the atrocious, mass murdering, racist Nazis. So self-interested cowardice is a well anchored tradition of the USA.

However, this time, as superstorm Sandy demonstrated, the consequence of collaborating with mass homicidal folly will be heavy for the USA. For one, Florida will, for sure, disappear below the waves.

The porous limestone bedrock of Florida will prevent the fabrication of polders there: Florida is not the Netherlands! Sea water will seep inside the rock, below any dam in Florida.  

***

 

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS NOT DEMOCRACY:

In Representative Democracy, somebody who knows nothing is put in charge of everything. In truth, Representative Democracy is more akin to what the Ancient Greeks called tyranny, the rule of one.

In the USA that knows-nothing is elected with lots of money. In France, with lots of bureaucracy.

So in the USA money rules, whereas in France bureaucrats do. Most other “democracies” are in between.

Notice that in Germany, which is doing better economically, having reformed its work market quite a bit, politicians have to be a bit more responsive to the masses, due to the use of a proportional voting system (somewhat diametrically opposed to the first-by-the-post British system). Proportional voting is more collegial: Merkel had to govern in the beginning with the Socialists, and is now running in the next elections against her former (Socialist) finance minister. 

Some will smirk, but that Socialist gentleman is very strict and put a lot of heat on tax havens such as Switzerland forcing it to reveal thousands of tax thieves and irreversibly change its laws about banking secrecy. In other words, the proportional voting system can empower the People against the plutocracy. It’s better than the systems found in the more fascist, more militarized France, Britain and USA.

In Switzerland, a (“Con”)Federal Council of seven provides with a collegial direction to the entire country. That works obviously better than having an elected tyran. The problems found in large representative “democracies” are found there too, but on a much smaller scale.

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TWO MILLION JAPANESE VISITED PHARAOH TUTANKHAMEN

in expositions in Tokyo and Osaka. Why? Ancient Egypt played a crucial role in the invention of mathematics and the alphabet. Among others discoveries. Thus Egypt is part of the foundation of civilization. So is Mesopotamia.

Egypt and Mesopotamia, plus Iran and India conducted a sort of conference on progress, for millennia. 

After crops were bioengineered in the area (“Fertile Crescent“), men and their cultivars colonized Western Europe. The original Italians did not just look like Iraqis, they were the real thing. 

So is colonization a bad thing? No. it is actually hard to find a population anywhere in the world that did not descend from colonists. 

And do Japanese descend from Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Greeks, just justifying their interest for Pharaohs with a personal touch? 

Of course they do. because our civilization, which is also theirs, does. After all, the first axiomatic proof of the Pythagorean theorem is in Euclid (300 BCE), although it started to be discovered nearly 2,000 years prior, in Egypt and Babylon.

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NO CIVILIZATION, BUT CIVILIZATION, AND PROGRESS IS ITS PROPHET:

Some have talked about the clash of civilizations. But, in the grander scheme of things, there is now only one civilization. We count in 60 minutes in one hour, because arithmetic in base 60 was useful for the tremendous astronomical computations in Mesopotamia to determine the seasons, when to plant, and the floods of the great rivers (the higher the base, the more compact the computations). That was more than a millennium before Romans did anything more advanced than herding cows.

There is an astounding prolongation of systems of thought, and systems of moods, throughout the ages. For 10,000 years, civilization has proven to be a continual construction, in the Middle Earth, an initial condition onto itself (in the differential equation sense).

On a more minor theme, as climatic and hydraulic conditions became tougher in the Middle East, the place became ever more sympathetic to increasingly fascist regimes and the religion that fit them (the Abrahamic religion being exhibit number one).

However, superior technology, such as desalination installations (some soon available with solar cells, on a small scale) change the fascist equation. If there is no more need for vast centralized military organizations to provide with survival, the Middle East may hope for more democratic days.

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COCONUT REPUBLICS UNITE FOR TREATING PALESTINIANS AS NON HUMAN!

The USA voted with other coconut republics such as Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, and three other states, against the statute of “observer state” for Palestine at the United Nations.

138 nations voted to give the Palestinian state the same status as the Vatican. Even Switzerland voted FOR the Palestinian recognition. 

Obama and his spokesman disapproved: “peace will only be achieved by face-to-face negotiations, not unilateral action”, apparently not remembering the famous negotiations between the Nazis and the Jews, that led to the killing of most European Jews. The final solution was to get rid of the Nazis, but it took five years and eight months of world war to do so. 

The position of the White House, that Palestinians should lay as low as possible, and beg their Israeli masters discreetly, in private, reflects blindness to the fundamental principle of combative goodness.

It is all the more curious, as Obama and company claim to be Christians. The mythical Jesus Christ did not hesitate to confront the forces of evil, indifference and wealth, with ways sure to lead to arrest in the modern USA (and all sorts of subsequent persecutions).

Martyrs, saints, holy persons, peacemakers and Nobel Prize winners, and, more  generally the principle of goodness, act unilaterally. Face to face, slave to master, as Palestinian to Israeli, the way the White House claims to want it, has nothing to do with goodness. The USA is now face to face with the company it keeps: Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, Israel, Harper’s ecocidal , Kyoto defiling Canada.

The Obama administration also does not know how to count: unilateral means one side, but when 138 independent nations throw 138 votes, that is not one sided. What was one sided was the USA and a handful of its ridiculously small and dependent client slave states it showers with money and influence.

Is that civilized behavior?

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WHY DOES CANADA HATE PALESTINIANS?

Canada, a geophobic state voted with the USA, against human rights in Palestine. everybody knows that one of the interest of Palestine becoming an observer state at the UN is to be able to haul Israel to the International Criminal Court. The ICC, in force in now 121 countries, targets genocide. Several activities of some past or present Israeli governments seem to be genocidal in character. (it is not in the interest of serious Israeli patriots to allow Israel to engage in genocide, a point may orthodox Jewish organizations have made forcefully!) 

Canada is apparently not on USA payroll. But actually Canada’s present federal government and the oil plutocrats are accomplices in crime. Harper, the eco-destructing PM of Canada is anxious to have Obama allow his pipeline of twice cooked oil find an outlet somewhere (since British Columbia is not cooperative). 

In return that outrage will make it easier to pursue further outrages in the USA themselves, such as further fracking. (Although the principle of fracking, per se, does not have to be eco-destructing, the way it is practiced now, it certainly is so… Besides the fact that it leads to further CO2 emissions.) 

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CAN’T JEWS & PALESTINIANS LEARN HISTORY WELL?

Petty reaction of Israel after Palestine was officially admitted by the UN to be an observer, 65 years, to the day, after the UN created the Palestinian state: Israel broadcast its decision to develop E1, a 12 square kilometers area that will cut off Palestinian East Jerusalem from the rest of Palestine.

Indeed the Israelis are mimicking the Nazi idea of erecting insurmountable walls around their ghettos. Israeli walls are chosen to be vastly superior, though.

The story of Israel is mighty strange; what came to be known as Jews were apparently those Israelis who were deported to Babylon, where they wrote the Bible. Meanwhile other Israelites, more cooperative, had not been deported. When the Jews in Babylon were allowed to come back and rebuild the temple, the relationship with the collaborators who had stayed home were not too good, and those were called Samaritans. Now, of course the Israelites have been chosen by their gods, like all people and all the gods they invent for themselves. However Jews believed it a bit more than usual, and perhaps too much.

Whereas the Celts let go of their bloody gods after the Romans, slowly, and Caesar, quickly, conquered them, the Jews clang to their “jealous” god ferociously, beyond reason. The result were two ferocious wars with Rome. The first one killed a million, the second, 65 years later, under Hadrian, resulted in the dispersion of the Jews. Emperor Hadrian’s government had tried to outlaw circumcision, on the ground that it was a primitive sexual mutilation. After that third savage war, between Jews and Rome, the Jews were outlawed in Jerusalem. The Samaritans kept on prospering.

Yet, in the Fifth Century, the increasingly insanely mass murdering theocratic state based in Constantinople (the one islam is the intellectual heir of) was in a collision course with anything not “Catholic Orthodox“. Intellectuals had to flee to Zoroastrian Persia. The Samaritans chose unwisely to fight. The result is that only a handful of them survive today.

We are all, we humans living on Earth now, descendants of colons, and our ex-gods were made to justify colonization. Judaism and Islam, both sitting on top of Mount Zion, are striking examples. Israelis and Palestinians have to admit this, this flaw they have in common, this crazy colonizing god, if they want to look inside each other, and themselves, as they have to do, should they elect to survive.

***  

OBAMA’S USA MAKES LAWS TO CARBONIZE THE EARTH:

The European Union legislated a tax on carbon emissions for all aircraft flying into European countries, a part of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). However, Obama signed a bill from the fanatical climate denying Tea Party republican Congress that, somehow, shields USA airlines from paying that European carbon tax, when landing in… Europe.

Maybe the USA believes that Europe is still divided, as it was in 1939? I have news for Washington: playing the Germans against the French is so much yesterday!

Obama’s pollution bill gives the US transportation secretary the power to exempt US airlines from the tax. An unusual bill, as it allows US airlines to ignore EU laws. It’s as if Obama signed a law allowing US corporations to ignore British law. Or to ignore German law. And also French law. Besides Spanish and Italian law. Who does Obama believes he is? It’s fine to ignore the laws of other nations outside of their territory, but here, the president of the USA orders its minions to flout the laws of 28 countries on their territories.

Has the Commander in Chief of the USA become the Outlaw In Chief? Ordering robots to kill civilians in friendly countries upon recommendation of a secretive Death Panel at White House was not enough? Is Outlaw-in-Chief, Destroyer of the Earth, the place in history Obama strives for? Does Obama want to live in infamy for centuries to come? It increasingly looks like it, and being surrounded by salivating admirers all the time goes a long way to elucidate the trance of delusion that may end up smearing Obama’s name for centuries to come.

White House spokesman Clark Stevens, in an orgasm of hypocrisy:“the Obama administration is firmly committed to reducing harmful carbon pollution from civil aviation both domestically and internationally, but, as we have said on many occasions, the application of the EU ETS to non-EU air carriers is the wrong way to achieve that objective.” Obama had tepidly admitted that the USA had not done enough on climate change. This shows he firmly intents to keep it that way. How difficult is it for him to get the republicans getting used to his veto powers?

Notice the analogy with the USA failure to recognize Palestinian statehood at the United Nations (as authorized in 1948, finally implemented in 2012!) It’s exactly the same mental attitude: doing something is viewed as worse than doing nothing. The White House is firmly committed to oh blah blah and will do strictly nothing that fosters progress significantly. It’s all about talking one way, so as to do the opposite.

One can only surmise that this same general attitude holds for places such as Egypt (towards which billions of USA taxpayer dollars are directed, while democracy fails under the call to prayer).

Obama says that he “leads from behind“. This is unconventional semantics for lagging behind, desperately clinging to the past. Is Obama just the robot president, programmed from behind?

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INTELLECTUAL OVERSTRETCH IS WORSE THAN GEOGRAPHICAL OVERSTRETCH:

Let me point out this about the USA’s detestation of the Carbon Tax. Starting with Roman Emperor Augustus, the great-nephew of Iulius Caesar, the theory of Imperial Overstretched  reigned supreme. It has been repeated ever since by many parrots: if a state spreads too much, it hits a state of diminishing returns, leading to collapse.

In truth, the theory is wrong. Completely wrong. At least, completly wrong in the case of Rome, as it turned out. And the proof that it was wrong is called Europe. Caesar did not believe in the silly theory Augustus would later embrace. Caesar was set to act accordingly at the time of his assassination. The Franks agreed with Caesar, and made an effort for more than three centuries, to create the short, highly defendable border in Eastern Europe that Caesar wanted. So doing, the Merovingian and Caroligian Franks created Europe. 

Although various Muslims (for a millennium), Vikings, and Mongols (thrice) attacked Europe fiercely, Frankish Europe operating as one continent proved highly defendable (which Augustus’ Rome spread along the Mediterranean proved, time and time again, NOT to be!). Thus Augustus, and his successors were wrong, with their rigid, all too long “limes“. Caesar and the Franks were right: a short and mobile frontier, with the strong intellectual component that republicanism (even Christian Republicanism, that took over around 400 CE!) was more stable, cheap, sturdy, and full of hope. 

Indeed there are more ways to stretch than purely geographical. Christianity itself is an example of spiritual empire: it spread much of Romanitas far out, where Roman armies never got. For example in Ethiopia, or Mongolia. 

Similarly an ideology can be very powerful, and stretch imperially, dragging armies behind. The Roman ideology, already obvious with the Roman king Tarquinus Superbus, was very universal (“catholic” in Greek), as befit a melting pot such as nascent Rome. 

Yet, in the end, the spirit of plutocracy smothered the spirit of the universal republic that had made Rome’s success. The Franks succeeded to conquer northern and eastern Europe, precisely because, although somewhat plutocratic, their civilization was much less so than the Late Roman empire. (If one could invent a political Gini Index, one would find it, and the economic Gini, were much lower under the Franks than under the Roman empire: decisions and powers were much less centralized.)

So what now? The spirit of the universal republic, prolongation of that of republican Rome (pre-slavery), thrives at the United Nations (and this game the leader of the Palestinian, Abbas, is fully playing). 

Why does the USA often stands as an outlier, with what are unfolding as catastrophic consequences, such as the sinking of the Kyoto Protocol? Why did the USA set back the mitigation of the heat trapping catastrophe by at least a quarter of a century after its extent became obvious? That is reminiscent of the long refusal by the USA to do anything about the massacres the Nazis were engaging in, years after such a horrible situation had become completely obvious. 

The problem with the USA is that the Biblical, relentless exploitative mentality (basically killing all the Indians, and the like) was highly successful. But its time as something that profited the European colonists in America is now passed. The exploitative mentality, no holds barred, is imperially overstretched. 

At this point the exploitative mentality of the USA is not just out-maneuvering the French, and Europeans, as it did, manipulating  the Nazis, the Soviets, the Muslims, and the rest of the world, over the last century.

The relentless exploitative mentality festering in the USA, but historically so central to its success as an empire, has stretched itself all too thin. The relentless exploitative mentality is now trying to out-maneuver the air, the sea, the biosphere, physics and geology itself (see Florida above).  And yet, clearly, fracking all in its way, is not the way. It is the way to infamy. How naïve. How costly, and deadly, all too soon to be revealed.

***

Patrice Ayme