Carbonizers Worst Monsters Ever?

ONLY a worldwide carbon tax CAN SAVE THE BIOSPHERE as we know it: tax all products according to how much producing them has brought up the carbon content of the atmosphere. Only this will stop the intolerable. With the present policies, we are sure that the devastating rise in CO2 will accelerate.

The tax ought to stop the burning of the 450 million years of FOSSIL fuels we are trying to carbonize the planet with at this point. (That does not mean we would have to go without fuel: algae fuel is carbon negative; that means it absorbs CO2; it requires only CO2 and sunlight; the U.S. Navy, among others, uses it. By contrast, oil from tar sands produces 3 times the CO2 of fossil oil!)

Only morons, masochists and sadists don’t fear this chart:

CO2 Now Off The Chart

This represents 450,000 years of data. We are actually around 450 ppm, off the chart, when counting, as one should, ALL the human made, industrial greenhouse gases.
The carbon tax ought to be put progressively, with allowance for the construction of dams and elevated lagoons next to solar and wind farms (to use them as basal energy), electric trains, power lines, and other heavy machinery needed for a sustainable economy.

***

CARBONIZATION: WORST CRISIS IN 65 MILLION YEARS:
In his second inaugural address, President Obama proclaimed climate change a priority of his second term. Thanks partly to his self-obsessed inaction in his first term, it’s too late to avoid a state of the climate unknown in civilization, within a decade or so.

Except if drastic measures are taken, much worse is to come. In a weekend near you.

In about two cnturies, 7 out of the 9 driest Januaries in California have happened since 1976. In 2013, California suffered its third driest January ever. Why? Because the storm belt has moved too much north. The same phenomenon tied to warming brought 74 degrees Fahrenheit (24 Celsius) to Kansas in that same January (instead of the usual freezing temps).

The first measure to take is for the USA to implement carbon taxes similar to those in Europe.
Why the USA? Because the USA lead the plutocratic dance, and plutocrats rule. They persuaded the rest of the world that Europe was wrong about coal, oil, gas, tar, and that full carbon ahead was the way of the brave.

After Obama’s re-election, a bill glided through Congress with broad bipartisan support and won a quick signature from President Obama: the European Union Emissions Trading Scheme Prohibition Act of 2011. Just as in most things, Obama talks one way, spectacularly, and acts the opposite, even more spectacularly. However, here it is not a question of naming Wall Street insiders to watch over Wall Street (as Obama did twice, for his new cabinet).
When Obama “prohibits” doing something about carbon emissions, he enables the destruction of the biosphere, one day to be viewed as the greatest crime ever.

Obama goes to Kailua, contemplates an immense magnificent white sand beach he has known since he was a boy. The Secret Services and hordes of black clad special forces hold back the rabble… 500 meters away. A magnificent beach, and soon to be under water, thanks to his good offices.

Why would one want to live on in infamy?

Yes, destroying the biosphere is not among the greatest crimes. But, clearly, the greatest ever. it’s worse than nuclear war, in the fullness of time. Holocausts are bad. Organizing a holocaust (whole-burning) of the whole biosphere, the worst.

Nobody he can talk about in public, forced Obama to sign the planet killing bill: he had won re-election. Casual remarks of his about Lincoln shows that he has no awareness proportionate to the gravity of the situation.

The pollution caused by planes is enormous. Supposing the most efficient plane flying today with a full passenger load (the A380 Superjumbo) three round trips Chicago-Frankfurt produce 11 tons of CO2, per passenger. When Obama translate his person to Hawai’i, it’s about dozens of times that, hundreds of tons. By comparison, the average USA house uses less than 7 tons, the average USA driving per year, 3.5 tons, commuting, less than 2 tons.

Global carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels are on track to exceed the limits that scientists believe could prevent catastrophic warming. CO2 levels are higher than they have been in 15 million years. And CO2 is less than 8/9 of the story. Because there are other industrially generated greenhouse gases. And carbon soot contributes to warming, it turns out.
The Arctic, melting rapidly and probably irreversibly, has reached a state that the Vikings would not recognize. Yet, when the Vikings colonized Iceland, Greenland and Vinland (America), the climate was at the warmest since the heydays of Rome.
Right now forests are growing in Greenland, and wood has been harvested there, for the first time ever (the Vikings, having ravaged the forests of Iceland, imported their wood from America).
“We are poised right at the edge of some very major changes on Earth,” said Anthony Barnosky, a University of California Berkeley professor of biology studying the interaction of climate change with population growth and land use. “We really are a geological force that’s changing the planet.”
***
WHOLESALE SHIFT NEEDED
The Arctic melt is occurring as the planet is just 1.4 degrees Fahrenheit (0.8 degree Celsius) warmer than it was in preindustrial times.

One has to realize that, at the peak of the last major glaciation, when an ice shield united New York and Aquitaine, all across the Atlantic, the temperature of the North Atlantic was only five degrees Celsius lower.

At current trends, the Earth could warm by 4 degrees Celsius in 50 years, according to a November World Bank report. In truth, it could go much faster, because of a couple of NON LINEAR effects neglected in conventional analyses.

The coolest summer months would be much warmer than today’s hottest summer months, the World Bank report said. “The last time Earth was 4 degrees warmer than it is now was about 14 million years ago,” Barnosky said. However, in the past, changes of climate were slow enough for animal species to accompany them by quick evolutionary changes.

With a few exceptions. Notably the catastrophic extinctions of the past, when the climate changed brutally within a million years or so.

During the extinction of dinosaurs, pterosaurs and plesiosaurs, birds (flying dinosaurs), and mammals barely resisted whatever happened, and the subsequent cooling of the climate. However during the more severe Permian-Trias extinction, 252 million years ago, 96% of marine species got extinct. Major terrestrial megafauna was annihilated.

It is technically feasible to halt the incoming catastrophe by nearly ending the use of fossil fuels, RIGHT AWAY.

It would require a wholesale shift to renewable fuels that the United States, let alone China and other developing countries, appears unlikely to make, given that many Americans do not believe humans are changing the climate. It’s all about the citizens of the USA, because only them can stop the mad rush to disaster. The USA leads world public opinion more, than, say, the French Republic, or the disparate European Union.

Even the superstitious based is starting to realize that Earth has a problem. “Science is not opinion, it’s not what we want it to be,” said Ms Hayhoe, a loudly evangelical Christian and climatologist at Texas Tech University who was lead author of a draft report on U.S. climate change issued this month by the National Climate Assessment and Development Advisory Committee, which was created by the federal government.

“You can’t make a thermometer tell you it’s hotter than it is,” said Hayhoe (she and her husband, a linguist and West Texas pastor, have written a book on climate change addressed to evangelicals).
“And it’s not just about thermometers or satellite instruments,” she said. “It’s about looking in our own backyards, when the trees are flowering now compared to 30 years ago, what types of birds and butterflies and bugs that … used to be further south.”Robins are arriving two weeks early in Colorado. Frogs are calling sooner in Ithaca, N.Y. The Sierra Nevada snowpack is melting earlier. Cold snaps, still happen, but less often. The frost-free season has lengthened 21 days in California, nine days in Texas and 10 in Connecticut, according to the draft climate report.
Whereas North-west Europe’s winters may become more severe, if the Gulf Stream short-circuits from flooding of the ocean (!) by light cold waters from accelerated Greenland melting.
***

EXTREME WEATHER, EXTREME CHANGE:
Scientists are loath to pin specific events, such as SuperStorm-Hurricane Sandy, to global warming. Outliers events have always happened.

But “the risk of certain extreme events, such as the 2003 European heat wave, the 2010 Russian heat wave and fires, and the 2011 Texas heat wave and drought has … doubled or more,” said Michael Wehner, a staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory and co-author of the climate report. “Some of the changes that have occurred are permanent on human time scales.”

It’s not just droughts. As temperature rises, the water content in the atmosphere augments, so flooding augments. And, and this is a clear statistic, extreme weather events, overall, are much more frequent.

Last year, the continental United States was the hottest it has ever been in the 118 years that records have been kept. Globally, each of the first 12 years of the 21st century were among the 14 warmest ever.
Connecticut was 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit (4 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average. At current rates of CO2 emissions, scientists expect New England to have summers resembling the Deep South within decades.

The pine bark beetle, killed by winter freezes in the past, has become epidemic over millions of acres of forests from California to South Dakota. Mountainous forests die, and then burn, to be replaced by sagebrush, accentuating the drying of the South West USA. Similar insect invasions are happening throughout the giant forest of North-West America, all the way to Alaska.

Oceans, which absorb CO2, in a reaction that makes carbonic acid, have increased in acidity. The acid gnaws at the calcium based skeletons of the micro life in the oceans, damaging coral reefs, shellfish and organisms at the bottom of the food chain. Washington state shellfish growers have seen major failures in oyster hatcheries because the larvae don’t form shells.

A report this month by the National Research Council, a public policy branch of the National Academies, said such changes in ocean chemistry in the geologic past were accompanied by “mass extinctions of ocean or terrestrial life or both.”

No wonder: those tiny organisms fabricate roughly half of the oxygen of the atmosphere.
***

TIPPING POINTS:
The clear and present key question is when greenhouse gas emissions reach a point where changes become so self-reinforcing, that they get completely out of human control.

Polar sea ice reflects the sun. As it melts, the dark ocean absorbs more solar heat, raising temperatures. Similarly, the Greenland ice sheet is melting rapidly, reducing reflectivity and heating the Earth faster, speeding up the melting of the West Antarctic ice sheet (much of which will be replaced by very dark ocean, accelerating the warming further).
(Some of these effects can play, against each other, for a while: for example, it snows more on the Himalayas and East Antarctica, a desert; precisely because temperatures are rising, and moisture !)

The northern permafrost is thawing, with the potential to release massive quantities of CO2 and methane, CH4, a ten times more potent greenhouse gas, presently stored in frozen soils. Hundreds of billions of tons of vegetation frozen solid since dozens of thousands of years.

There is no faulty logic here: in the past there were episodes of warmer overall temperatures, due to the solar exposition of Arctic lands to strong sun in July-August. But the CO2 was MUCH lower (see graph above!). During those episodes, plants grew, on the surface, for millennia, above deep permafrost. Then the planet’s orbit changed, and plants froze again. Then the cycle repeated. In some places, the frozen vegetation is dozens of meter deep. And the present colossal greenhouse threatens to melt the whole thing, and the North will literally rot.

These non linear factors guarantee a sudden change, the timing of which is hard to predict.
“We could be at a tipping point where the climate just abruptly warms,” said Mark Z. Jacobson, director of Stanford University’s atmosphere/energy program. When Obama following Cousteau, warns of the children’s future problems, he follows Cousteau, who used to warn about the grandchildren’s fate. Well, all indication are that the catastrophe is already upon us.
***

CHANGES OVER TIME
UC Berkeley’s Barnosky says tipping points could come earlier than anticipated when factoring in population growth and land use. (Cautiously, as a good academic, he does not consider the real catastrophic potential tipping points, just those which are sure to impact.)

More than 40 percent of the Earth’s land surface has been covered by farms and cities. Much of the rest is cut by roads (which can destroy bird species, Hawaiian studies have shown). By 2025, that human footprint could reach 50 percent, a level that on smaller scales has led to ecological crashes, such as a fisheries collapse or an ocean dead zone.

“It’s just sort of simple math: The more people, the more footprint,” Barnosky said. “If we’re still on a fossil fuel economy in 50 years, there is no hope for doing anything about climate change. It will be here in such a dramatic way that we won’t recognize the planet we’re on.”

Not all climate scientists are so factual. Ashley Ballantyne, a bioclimatologist at the University of Montana who studies paleoclimate records, said the climate has always changed, with ice ages, warmings and mass extinctions. At current CO2 concentrations, the Arctic and Greenland are likely to become ice free, as they were 4 million years ago, he said nonchalantly, in his simplicity.

We know very well that the Antarctica ice shield appeared when CO2 went below 440 ppm. We are presently ABOVE 450 PPM in CO2 EQUIVALENT greenhouse gases (at the present rate, in CO2 alone we will reach 440 ppm within ten years). Moreover, it turns out that carbon soot is accelerating the warming further.

This means that the only reason there is ice in Antarctica is ice itself. It Antarctica were covered with forests, as it used to be, the forests would stay. Today. In other words, we are no more in a glaciated climate, we have ice, purely because the fridge is still cold. But the fridge is broken.

Thanks to USA policies, burning coal will be again the main source of energy produced, within 5 years: more soot, more CO2, more arsenic, more mercury. But all what fashionista ecologists can do is go nuclear about Fukushima (total number killed: zero), whereas in the meantime coal has killed millions (nearly all of them indirectly).

“Polar bears are poorly adapted to an ice free Arctic, Ballantyne said, “but it wasn’t bad for boreal trees. They were quite happy.” Right, Ballantyne. Military men should be very happy too, as tremendous wars will flare up all over.

An international political consensus set as a danger zone a global temperature increase of 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit (2 degrees Celsius), which is expected in 25 years based on current trends and when atmospheric concentration of CO2 reaches 450 parts per million (by then CO2 equivalent gases should be above 510 ppm).
CO2 is now almost 400 parts per million.

Two degrees Celsius is “an arbitrary number,” said Alan Robock, director of the Center for Environmental Prediction at Rutgers University. “On our current path, we will go zooming way past that.” Namely we will cross two degree Celsisus, while the temperature increase accelerate.

Climatologist James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and activist Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, believe the only way to preserve the Holocene climate humans are used to is to cut CO2 concentrations to 350 parts per million, last seen around 1988.

Ballantyne dismissed the 350 goal: “That’s like a 70-year-old alcoholic saying, ‘I’m going quit drinking when I’m 60 years old.’ ”
McKibben and Hansen propose a tax on fossil fuels at their source, to be reimbursed to all U.S. residents, as Sen. Bernie Sanders, independent-Vt., plans to propose in a “fee and dividend” scheme modeled on Alaska’s oil royalty rebates to state residents.
***

THEIR NAMES WILL LIVE IN INFAMY, FOR MILLENNIA TO COME:
In November, having won re-election, Obama distinguished himself by signing on a Republican law that outlaws the European Carbon Tax on planes landing in Europe. Little does he visualize that this sort of biosphere-hating decision is sure to make the planet into a sort of hell. which sort exactly, we don’t know.

White House press secretary Jay Carney, asked Wednesday about the Sanders bill, said: “We have not proposed and have no intention of proposing a carbon tax.”
In other words, we are monsters, and we have no intention to not be monsters anymore.

The Carbon Tax would have to be a big tax, McKibben said, “that drives up the price quickly. Maybe you go to the pump someday and YOU’RE PAYING WHAT PEOPLE IN EUROPE PAY FOR GASOLINE, WHICH IS GOOD, because then it reminds you every time you go to the pump that you don’t really need a semi-military vehicle to go to the grocery store.”

Stanford’s Jacobson maintains that wind and solar could power the world many times over. He calculated that the world would need to install 1.7 billion solar rooftops and 4 million wind turbines.

A little detail that Jacobson overlooks, though, is that the only way to store that energy efficiently, barring spectacular progress in, say, fuel cells, is by BUILDING DAMS all over.

However, it can be done. There is a project in Belgium to build a multibillion dollar island-dam next to an offshore wind farm.

Jane Long, chair of the California Council on Science and Technology, said any such conversion would be costly and difficult at best. Still, she said, “one way to get out of the hole is to stop digging.”
***

WHEN LED BY PLUTOCRATS, HELL IS HOME:
Plutocracy is a world disease. It learned to make itself invisible in the 1920s and 1930s, when Mussolini, and then Hitler, claimed to be socialists, when, in truth, they were just in the service of their plutocratic masters.

Some will say that’s the past. But not at all. It’s worse than ever. Just better hidden. Berlusconi, a multi-billionaire, serial Prime Minister running for re-election, again, just claimed Mussolini was “good“, and Mussolini “just allied himself with Hitler because he thought it was the winning side“. Plutocracy is all about winning. Never mind the consequences, never mind that it is infantile. Never mind that Mussolini killed 6,000 Italian Jews to death (among many other problems, such as 455,000 Italians killed).

The new Chinese plutocrat in chief, a billionaire president, is putting pressure on Honk Kong supposedly free media to not inquire about plutocracy. Being led by plutocrats has known consequences.

Speaking of inquiries, on 10 June 1944, SS assassinated 642 civilians at Oradour, France, including 247 children burned alive. German prosecutors are visiting the site for the first time, as they study possible prosecution in 2013. Hey, I guess, better late than never. The judgment of history will be terrible. Always is.

That brings us back to the greatest crime ever. Murder of the biosphere. Obama and company cannot say that they did not know. They were told.

Now they can go with their little games of actors, self important toddlers with the wisdom of crabs. All about the pincers. History will judge them, and, before crushing their memories, will make them live in infamy.

If our great biosphere destroying leaders want to start to redeem themselves, two words: CARBON TAX. Very simple.
***
Patrice Ayme

Mali: Lesson III

Abstract: The USA has to realize that enforcing civilization, worldwide, is a matter of security, not just high principle.
Yes, it was uncivilized for the USA to attack Afghanistan in 1979 and Iraq in 2003. However, it’s civilized to help the French as much as possible to defend the secular Malian republic and the Malian People.
As far as fighting a long war, the USA itself was born no earlier than 1776 from a conflict that had started earlier than 1756. Rolling back fanatical invading Islamists since 721 CE, and other invaders before that (Huns, Goths, Vandals, etc.) has been Francia’s main business. Not for the pusillanimous, right! If civilization is not strong, civilization is nought.
***
“U.S. Weighing How Much Help to Give France’s Military Operation in Mali” say the New York Times’ David Sanger and Eric Schmitt in Sat, Jan 26 cover article. Let me discuss.

The historico-geographical context of the Mali war is global, spanning a small planet, and a very long history.

French Mirage 2000 Thirsty Over Chad

New York Times: “WASHINGTON — The Obama administration is debating how much more aid it can give the French military forces who are battling Islamic militants in Mali, weighing the benefit of striking a major blow to Qaeda-linked fighters in Africa against concern about being drawn into a lengthy conflict there.”

Oh poor little scared USA, plausibly dragged into lengthy conflict, never had a war longer than 11 years. Let me explain to USA how the civilization that gave birth to the USA a millennium later arose to start with. Well, through a lengthy conflict. Actually the present civilization arose through several lengthy conflicts, and would not have existed without them (after all after defending by themselves against invasions, starting in 400 CE, the Franks finished the conquest of Europe, something Rome had given up on).

Franks’ Mirages F1, Mali: Civilization, Tradition.

Several of the French quirks that irritate the Wall Street Journal, such as nationalizations, or controlling the Church as an organ of the secular state, were invented, or amplified in a terrible war against invading fanatical Islam in 721 CE to 750 CE, the first phase of a war that never really stopped.

So, speaking of lengthy conflict, that’s nearly 1,300 years of conflict. More, if one views Francia as part, and official heir of the Roman state, which she was by 400 CE. The first Muslim attack against Rome was led by Mahomet himself, mounted on a horse, at the head of his army. The Romans did not offer battle, and a disappointed Mahomet returned home to Mecca, where he promptly died…

In the early Eight Century Berber and an Arab armies, having recently embraced the war religion of Islam, wrestled Spain from the (divided) Visigoths, ruling over a divided country.

How? The population of Spain was divided in (more than) three Judeo-Christian sects and ethnic groups (including the Basque). The Visigoths did not believe that Jesus was as much of a god as his “father”, an idea traced to the bishop of Alexandria (Egypt), Arianus. So they were Arians, and not liked by the Catholic Orthodox, who made the majority of Spain, and believed in the Trinity, that is, that Jesus was god just as much as his dad.

The Jews, numerous in Spain, also did not like the Visigoths who ruled them, and some cooperated with the invading Muslims. The end result of all these acerbic divisions was that the Muslims seized Spain. Then they proceeded to kill a fifth of the Catholics (from church records).

The occupiers and decimators then got very strong, because they controlled now a huge new territory. Yet, in 718 CE, the Muslims failed for the third time, under the enormous walls of Constantinople.

In 721 CE, the Muslim armies invaded Francia. (Yes, Francia. I corrected Wikipedia which ignorantly called the place “Gaul”.) The Muslims followed the old plan to finish Constantinople from behind. Grecian fire, a mystery, but highly efficient weapon, had annihilated a Muslim fleet of more than 2,000 warships besieging the capital, thus going around was in order.

The Muslims tried to seize Toulouse, besieging it for three months. They confronted the army of Duke Eudes, the Duke of Aquitania, and put it to flight. They chased it, and fell into a trap. As they contentedly feasted, celebrating their victory, Eudes rushed back and the Muslims were taken by total surprise.

The invaders suffered an enormous defeat. According to Al-Maqqari, Duke Odo/Eudes had an army of 300,000, and the Muslim death toll was an astounding 375,000 on the invading Ummayaad troops. It is fashionable to say these numbers are inflated, as it allows to belittle the triumph of the Franks. But why not to believe the only eyewitnesses reports we have? The astounding figures give an idea of the scale of the confrontation.

In any case, all historians agree that the battle of Toulouse in 721 CE was, for sure, a gigantic defeat, and the turning of the Islamist tide, the first catastrophic defeat that the Arab, Syrians and other Yemenites had ever suffered.

The Muslim invaders had taken decades to conquer the Catholic Roman cities of the Maghreb. They had suffered reverses, until they allied with savage Berbers from the hinterlands. But never, ever, did the Arab islamist armies suffer a devastating defeat, on land before Toulouse.

They tried another method, good old fashions razzias: after seizing Narbonne and other cities they dashed all the way to Autun, not far from Paris (725 CE). But they could not hold territory.

The rest, as the commons say, is history. Exasperated and troubled, the Caliphate in Damascus insisted, and launched an even more formidable invasion, incorporating in the army crack soldiers recruited all the way to Yemen (learn, White House, that, even then, the terrorists came from afar!).

This time Duke Eudes was defeated, in a terrible battle next to Bordeaux (eyewitnesses say we would never be able to determine how many died, so many there were). The South West of Francia got ravaged.

But Charles Martel, “major of the Palace” had had 11 years to constitute the most formidable army since the heydays of Rome. To pay for it, he had nationalized the Church. The gold paid professional soldiers handsomely, to provide for their families. Charles’ formidable army had been busy conquering Germany, all the way to Frisia… a nice way to train.

The Muslims reached the region of Tours. They spread far and wide, in at least a third of Francia, pillaging, and bringing back lots of goodies and enslaved captives to a central camp, by Poitiers. Meanwhile, they kept surveillance on the Roman road between Tours and Paris. Roman roads were made to carry armies.

The Muslims had annihilated, in Syria, nearly a century before, the main Roman army, 160,000 men. After that, throwing to the winds the most basic laws of war, they had hunted and killed potential Roman soldiers all over the east. In a few decades half the Roman empire had been conquered, and all of Persia.

Charles Martel did not take the road. Suddenly he appeared half out of the woods, on a hill, just where he wanted to be. The Emir called back his troops from far and wide. They took eight days to all come back (so some may have been 200 miles away).

The Muslim cavalry charges broke on the “ice like” wall of the Frankish phalanx, bristling with lances. The Franks had better armor, better swords and battle axes (they were heir to 1,500 years of Gallic metallic superiority). Duke Eudes attacked the Muslim camp, freeing prisoners, threatening booty and camp followers of the Muslim army. The crazies with god were routed, and not buried. Frankish heavy cavalry successfully pursued them, for weeks, killing countless numbers. The whole place was named the “Alley of the Martyrs” by the discomfited Arabo-Berber invaders.

Five years later, the Muslim invaders were back, with another giant force, combining a land and sea attack. They thought they were ready for Charles’ mighty phalanx. But this time Charles had joined to his phalanx an enormous heavy cavalry with giant horses (737 CE). Fighting with lances and battle axes standing on stirrups made the “EUROPEAN” knights unstoppable. Yes, that’s when the word EUROPEAN appeared first.

The Syrian and Arab army destroyed, Arabs supported by the Persian took over, and the Caliphate was displaced to Baghdad (750 CE), close to the Iranian plateau. (Conventional historians do not point this out.)

So how does this connect to Mali?

First Muslim terrorism against the West was invented by Mohammed the Prophet himself. Islam was presented as a specifically anti-Western war machine (that can be read in the Qur’an, where the Romans are specifically mentioned, and the strategy to attack them).

Five years ago the terrorists in the Sahara desert were 200. But the Sahara was left at their disposal, and they are financed by drug trafficking and feudal Wahhabite regimes from Arabia. So around Mali alone they are now 10,000. Leaving a territory to terrorists enables them to grow.
***
New York Times: “The immediate issue is whether and how to supply American aerial refueling planes… any refueling would probably be approved only with restrictions.
“The discussions center on cost, and the concern about whether this becomes an open-ended mission for the French in Mali,” one Defense Department official said. “What does that mean about our commitment?” “

Is big bad Pentagon scared? France fought Qaddafi on and off for three decades, nearly killing him at some point in Chad. Instead of worrying whether France is going to fight too much, the leadership of the USA ought to worry about the fanatical Islamists in, say, Egypt (they are in power there!)

New York Times: “Most of the reservations about whether President Obama has the legal authority to engage in military operations were resolved, officials said, after it was determined that the main targets were linked to Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb. But the degree to which President Obama wants to get involved in Mali is still an open question, presenting the president and his national security team with the latest in a series of decisions about how heavily to intervene in remote conflicts.
Also in play is the depth of the American commitment to France…”

There is nothing very remote about Mali. Florida and Senegal are geologically identical: they used to be part of the same plate.They are facing each other across the ocean, six hours of subsonic flying will get you there from USA territory, it’s about half the distance to Hawai’i from washington, DC.
Lose Mali, lose West Africa (including Nigeria).
Commitment this, commitment that, commitment to, our commitment… The USA seems to have lots of problems with the concept of commitment. Do the USA need to be committed?
As far as being committed to France, well, ought a son be committed to his mother? Camus said yes. I concur.

New York Times: Mr. Obama’s aides say that the model under way in Mali now — with the French taking the lead, and a force from the region backing them up — is exactly what they want to encourage. But some officials say they believe the French went into Mali hastily, in the words of one official “before they understood exactly what they were biting off.”

France has fought in the desert for centuries, and won quite a few. There was nothing hasty about the French counter-attack. Left alone, left to seize Bamako, which they could have done in one day, the followers of the fanatical terrorists would soon have been millions (they indoctrinate children as young as 12 as soldiers).

It’s a strange sight to see those warriors, crazed with god, driving the largest trucks, on which they mount tanks’ gun turrets… why did nobody think of this before? Because never before warriors so little attached to their own lives thrived in such great numbers.

New York Times: “White House officials say they want to understand the broader political and strategic plan to end the conflict before they get more involved.”

There is nothing to understand strategically, while the house is burning down: destroying the terrorists is the immediate goal. Another immediate goal should be to make sure the black Malian forces do not exert reprisals against the white, Tuareg or Arab “Malian” rebels. That is where pacifying officers from the West could help.

More subtle, but long term necessary, is giving the Tuareg a state (“Azawad”?), or secure autonomy (but say, Algeria, Morocco, will not like it).

New York Times: “But since France entered the conflict in early January, there has been little time for strategic planning. The United States has begun transporting a 600-member French mechanized battalion and its gear to Mali, and is providing intelligence information, including satellite imagery, American officials said on Friday. “The spigot is opened all the way,” one official said. So far that help has been provided at no cost to the French.
But the refueling would bring the American involvement to a new level, directly supporting military attacks. And for Mr. Obama, who devoted part of his Inaugural Address on Monday to a celebration of the end of a war in Iraq and the winding down of the American commitment in Afghanistan, the prospect of getting involved in a conflict against a shadowy enemy far from the United States is unwelcome.”

There is nothing far, anywhere, in this world. North Korea is closer to the USA than England and France were under Napoleon.

One has to distinguish wars one should not have done (Afghanistan since Carter attacked it on July 3, 1979; Iraq since the West has been messing with it, that is since before Rumsfeld shook hands with Saddam Hussein December 20, 1983)… And wars one should do.

The only reason the enemy is “shadowy” is that the USA is unwilling to trace the money back to the feudal oil states it supports. Because they are part of the world’s plutocratic order. It is of course troubling to see Socialist France attack with wild abandon the mignons of the world plutocratic order’s feudal branch.

New York Times: “In the case of Mali, one official said, American intelligence assessments have concluded that the Islamic extremists have little ability to threaten the United States. “But they can threaten the region,” he said, “and that’s where the argument for American involvement comes in.””

Once again, that’s an illusion, that they don’t threaten the USA. Indeed with French precision bombing in the middle of the night, it’s hard for them to concentrate on the USA (but they do threaten the USA when they talk on French TV!).

True the Islamic extremists have little ability to threaten the 48 contiguous states at this very moment, but if they come to dominate the region, they will.

New York Times: “The government of President François Hollande has said it will stay in Mali and the surrounding region as long as needed. The United States has been more hesitant about supporting the new government in Mali, which came to power in a coup mounted by an American-trained military leader.”

These are details. True, American trained troops in Mali were a disaster. But Mali is SECULAR REPUBLIC. One can have a republic, even after or during a coup, because republican institutions are not restricted to the (“elected“) upper governmental structure.

Another point is that sending an army to free a country from terrorists support We The PEOPLE of that country. When France sent an army and a fleet to the English colony of North America, she was not sending them to a government, but to We The PEOPLE of the USA.

New York Times: Mr. Obama talked on the phone on Friday with Mr. Hollande, but White House officials did not say whether the leaders had dwelled on the refueling issue… Several French tankers are providing air-to-air refueling for … Mirage and Rafale combat and reconnaissance aircraft… but officials in Paris would like to have American tankers ready as a backup if the ground operation faces stiffer resistance than anticipated, or an unforeseen crisis requires France to send more aircraft.
A White House statement said [Obama and Hollande] had talked about the need to quickly establish an African-led force in Mali, as well as the importance of Mali’s establishing a path to elections and to “restoration of democratic governance” in the country.
Jean-Yves Le Drian, the French defense minister, said:“The goal is the total reconquest of Mali, we will not leave any pockets.”But Gen. Carter F. Ham, the head of the Pentagon’s Africa Command, voiced more limited objectives.
“We would all like to see the elimination of Al Qaeda and others from northern Mali, realistically, probably the best you can get is containment and disruption so that Al Qaeda is no longer able to control territory.”

Well the best way to wage war is to win it. That is, if one is not just humoring a greedy military-industrial complex, and friendly rapacious feudal states in the Middle East.

Ultimately, Islamic terrorism is not compatible with the pursuit of an advanced technological civilization, and will have to be dealt with it thoroughly, that is, philosophically. That is, deal with it definitively, as we did, say, with Moloch, Gallic human sacrifices, or with Aztec terrorism.
But first the military side, the Dark Side, has to be taken care of. This is now.
***
Patrice Ayme

Washington Taliban

No need to go to Afghanistan to visit with the Taliban. It was invited at the Presidential Inaugural.

INAUGURAL VIOLATION OF CONSTITUTION:
The Constitution for the United States of America starts with a preamble:

“We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.”

Notice: Not a word about Allah, God, or whatever Deus ex machina, or any sort of superstition grounded being. So why did a so called “Episcopal Priest” come to the “Inaugural” of President Obama, to address the multitude in a so called “benediction”?

Benediction means saying something good. But it was nothing of the sort. That priest, “Reverend Doctor Luis Leon” proffered insults against humanity. Is that the message the President of the USA wanted to convey?
Dutifully all the potentates lowered their heads as they absorbed the wisdom. They mimicked well giant penguins watching eggs between their webbed feet. Only Sasha Obama looked as if she could not believe what she was hearing:

No God, No Good? Are They All Lord Crazy?

***

WITHOUT LORD, MAN IS HELL, SAYS INAUGURAL MANIAC:
Below is more than half of Leon’s benediction:

“Let us pray:

Gracious and eternal God, as we conclude the second inauguration of President Obama, we ask for your blessings as we seek to become, in the words of Martin Luther King, citizens of a beloved community, loving you and loving our neighbors as ourselves.

We pray that you will bless us with your continued presence because without it, hatred and arrogance will infect our hearts. But with your blessing we know that we can break down the walls that separate us. We pray for your blessing today because without it, distrust, prejudice and rancor will rule our hearts. But with the blessing of your presence, we know that we can renew the ties of mutual regard which can best form our civic life.

We pray for your blessing because without it suspicion, despair, and fear of those different from us will be our rule of life. But with your blessing, we can see each other created in your image, a unit of God’s grace, unprecedented, irrepeatable (sic) and irreplaceable.

We pray for your blessing because without it, we will see only what the eye can see. But with the blessing of your blessing we will see that we are created in your image…

We pray for your blessing. Bless all of us, privileged to be citizens and residents of this nation, with a spirit of gratitude and humility that we may become a blessing among the nations of this world. We pray that you will shower with your life-giving spirit, the elected leaders of this land, especially Barack our president and Joe our vice president.”
***

YOU MONSTERS NEED A LORD TO RULE YOU:
OK, let’s recapitulate; 5,000 years ago, Sumerians established a fun religion with plenty of myths, such as Adam, Eve, the Apple, the Snake, the Garden of Eden, etc. Meanwhile the Egyptians wrote a number of fairy tales for children, including the waters parting, etc.

2,500 years later those myths and fables were gathered together in a book (=”bible”) by some obdurate Jews enjoying Babylonian hospitality in a concentration camp. The central personage of the bible is Allah, or “Yahweh”, the “jealous god” of the Jews, always keen to destroy those who don’t obey his maniacal insanity. For example Yahweh tortures to death the son of (the famous king) David of Goliath fame, because David did not enforce mass murder with as much enthusiasm as Yahweh had ordered, and Yahweh becomes obsessed with making David suffer.

These monstrosities were made into a religion to make monstrous soldiers more thrilled by mass murder than David had been. That was the smart plot the emperors of the decaying Roman state found to persist with the plutocratic rule with the help of a bloody theocratic terror. It was not that smart: the killing of intellectuals, in connection with the continuing persistence of the hyper wealthy to pay few taxes, brought a quick collapse.

The evacuation of Britannia, while passing over of Roman military power to the Franks in Germania and Gallia, in 400 CE followed the theocratic, Sharia like terror edicts of emperor Theodosius, a Spanish general, by just 19 years. The consequence was the military collapse of the “Occidental Part” of the empire. But the monstrosity of Judeo-Christianism kept on going, and the destruction of thinking throughout the empire kept on going for another two centuries.

The monstrosity of the Judeo-Christian god was the gift that kept on giving, for more than a millennium after that. After all, if We The People are monstrous, why not exploit us? Don’t we need to be punished?

Now Luis Leon, a refugee from Guantanamo (!), Cuba tells us that, without the blessing of that imaginary divine, jealous imaginary ogre in heavens,
hatred and arrogance will infect our hearts
distrust, prejudice and rancor will rule our hearts
suspicion, despair, and fear of those different from us will be our rule of life,
we will see only what the eye can see.

So if we don’t abandon ourselves to pathological naivety, ignorance and superstition, we would be full of hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia. But everybody semi-intelligent nowadays, except for some forlorn peasants, ought to know that the bible is made of recycled fables, now that we have the originals, 2,500 years older.

Thus what Reverend Doctor Luis Leon says is that if we are not hallucinating, we are full of hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia. In other words, he views humanity as emotionally disgusting when not insane.

well Luis Leon and his Jesus Christ are wrong. Nearly all and any human has been brought by love, through love; such is the truth of nearly all babies. And Jesus was wrong, and the so called “Golden Rule”, “love others as you do yourself” is also wrong. And so is the biblical Ogre in the sky.

Parental love for the child can, of course, be much greater than the love the parent has for herself, or himself. So the Golden Rule is too weak to describe the beauty and strength of human love. Why? It’s not just a question of neurohormones. It’s also a question that the child, the little child, is precisely completely alien to all what the Reverend doctor Luis Leon believes defines us, as a despicable species.

One could even say that, as Mr. Leon apparently believe small children are full of hatred and other terrible traits, Mr. Leon is a child hater. One must fear that is just not step from child molestation, as clearly, he has already stepped over into (verbal) child abuse. Why are the leaders of the USa so keen to respect a child abuser?

Too bad I was not invited at the Inaugural. had i been there, i would have risen my head, spit on the ground, and walked out. differently from Beyonce’, I don’t do play-back.

Learn, followers of Leon: if we were as despicable as Leon says, we would never have evolved as a . Our hateful, arrogant, distrustful, pre-judging, rancorous, suspicious, despairing, xenophobic ancestors would never have established enough cooperation with each other to survive.
Learn Leon: as you preach that we are despicable, the debasement of humanity, you preach that hatred, arrogance, distrust, prejudice, rancor, suspicion, despair, xenophobia are us, and thus to be expected in others, as we expect them in us. As some crazy with god act as you say they naturally ought to do, we will get plenty of exploitation, greed and terrorism.

And learn, USA leaders: what’s crossing your silly minds as you bow to horror, and make a religion out of despising humanity? Because that is what Luis Leon preached, the contempt of humanity, one could even say the hatred of humanity.

If you believe we are all that despicable, and you bow to that revelation, as if an object of wonder, you are telling the entire world what you are.

It’s not just ugly, it’s a contradiction, as you too, were brought in love. Your abject submission to Luis Leon’s horrors makes you into hypocrites.

Or maybe you forgot? How come? Too much greed, too much hubris for too long, too much association, for too long with those who are all about greed, power and hubris made you forget that, without love, there is no humanity?
Practicing the Dark Side too long does not make just for a bad heart, but also for an incompetent, senile mind.

Just look at Sasha Obama’s unbelieving face. Truth, children find hard to hide. Yes, Sasha, no Lord can endow humanity with what defines it.To believe otherwise is to make abjection into a religion.
***
Patrice Ayme

1979 US ATTACK AGAINST AFGHANISTAN Secretly Ordered

[This is not just a little reminder, most people in the US have no idea this happened, and consider you insane to entertain such a notion!]
ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, PRESIDENT CARTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, LAUNCHED THE AFGHAN WAR (and gloated about it to the… French media; censored in the USA!)
National fables can be the ultimate enablers of mass destruction. One such fable is that the USA was attacked on 9/11 by evil forces the US government had nothing to do with.

The conflict in Afghanistan killed three millions Afghans, while wounding and displacing much more civilians than that. This conflict was instigated by the USA’s CIA, through its agents in Pakistan instrumentalizing Islam. The conflict took a turn for the worst when the White House of demoncrat President Jimmy The Very Pious Carter put its full weight behind it, as will be revealed below:

The following interview of Brzezinski in Le Nouvel Observateur, Paris, 15-21 January 1998, was never published in the USA, for obvious propaganda reasons (that issue of Le Nouvel Observateur was available in the USA, minus the following offending interview, so as to leave We The People of the USA in comfortable, cozy darkness). And please realize that the real truth is even worse for the USA, whose role in Afghanistan, even before Carter’s unilateral attack, was already a war crime:

Question of Nouvel Observateur: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, Obama’s Defense Secretary, stated in his memoirs [“From the Shadows”], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secret until now, is completely different. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Secret Agencies of The USA Organized A Muslim Fundamentalist Mess In Afghanistan, Using Pakistan ISI, And Saudi SIA, To Block French & Russian Influence There, & Trip The USSR Into An Invasion

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

B: It isn’t quite that. We didn’t push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn’t believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don’t regret anything today?

B: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic fundamentalism, having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

B: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Zbigniew Brzezinski: NONSENSE!
***

Thus the USA did attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan. The CIA and its Saudi equivalent got the good idea of recruiting a god crazy scion of Saudi Arabia’s second plutocratic family, Bin Laden. It was a good choice: Bin Laden was also an engineer and a manager, he quickly organized a powerful army of fanatics well-financed by friendly plutocrats. The CIA suggested to attack soft targets, such as schools, and the tactic was highly effective.

After 2001, the USA installed in Afghanistan a theocracy (as a holy book is the basis of its constitution).

By “Any Outside Force” Carter Meant The French Republic Private Mining Companies, Not Just The Soviet Ones. Read Between The Lines.

Theocracy comes naturally to the USA. The Bible provided with a mood favorable to holocausts, as, after all, the god found in the Bible so indulged. Thus the Bible was central to enabling the eradication of the original inhabitants (and doing so with a good conscience). On January 21 a benediction was given on the steps of the Capitol as part of Obama’s election. In a discourse that the worst of the Taliban no doubt applauded, Rev. Luis Leon informed us that “without the blessing of God” we would be abominable monsters. It was fascinating to see the leadership of the USA bowing to the Reverend’s horrible declarations.

The situation in the Republique du Mali is completely different: it’s a secular state, an independent democracy, which called the United Nations to intervene, and the UNSC agreed, unanimously. The French Republic is just implementing that resolution.
***
Patrice Ayme’
***
For seeing the war of the USA against Afghanistan in a wider context; https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2010/09/17/obama-commemorates-911-his-way/. An obvious argument is that it did not escape USA strategists that the resources of Afghanistan were best tapped by the USA, rather than by France and the USSR.

Mali: USA Ought To Fuel France

Abstract: If there is one lesson that morally upright people in the USA should draw from World War Two, it’s the following. When the French Republic asks for military help, the USA ought to salute briskly and respectfully ask:”How much?” After all, a son such as Uncle Sam, should not leave his mother in distress.

This correct attitude is directly applicable to the situation in Mali and the Sahara right now. Mali is not Afghanistan. Afghanistan was an error, an irrelevant sideshow that the USA imposed on itself by (unlawfully, and secretly) messing up that forlorn country in the 1970s. (9/11 was an infortunate blow-back, after the conflict deliberately instigated by the USA, brought the death of millions of Afghans.)

The war in Africa is completely different from that error in Afghanistan. Africa is of extreme strategic importance. Africa is an enormous continent, it has enormous resources, a vast and extremely varied population. It is part of the geographical, cultural and historical center of the human world. It is contiguous to Europe. Africa has been neglected too long.

It’s clear where the Dark Side is, in this war. France had the right reflex by punching back hard as soon as the terrorists crossed the cease-fire line. France needs a bit more equipment to fuel her fighter planes optimally, as they patrol a giant territory.

Mirages Above Mali

No fuel, no war.

But it’s not just the USA. If there is one lesson that democracies should draw from World War Two, it’s that France should not fight infamy alone (with insufficient British help). At the very least, all European countries should join in.

How? As the French combat units reconquer vast swathes of territory, Malian troops in their wake are left to police the immensity. Their resentment against Tuaregs and Arabs is showing up; other Western countries’ soldiers could help the Malians and other Black Africans keep in touch with the philosophically, and strategically, correct attitude
***
Idiocies are arguments that keep coming back to the fore first, among the poorly educated.

An (idiotic) slogan that keeps coming back is used by Johnnie Carson, who heads the Africa bureau at Obama’s State Department. Mr. Carson observes that Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb (AQIM) “has not demonstrated the capability to threaten U.S. interests outside of West or North Africa, and it has not threatened to attack the U.S. homeland.”

That specious reasoning was evoked by several historically uneducated Obama administration officials to refuse air refueling requests from the French Republic. Let me explain the importance.

The French fighter-bombers have to patrol and intervene in an area larger than Texas, and some have to do so from bases thousands of miles away. It’s a bit as if they patrolled Texas from British Columbia. So the need for air refueling of bomb laden French supersonic bombers is acute! Although the French have air refueling capability, they don’t have enough to do the mission comfortably.
The enemy is not a hop and skip away, as it is the case in Afghanistan, where the Taliban is at most 200 miles away from gigantic, fortress like, NATO air bases covering entire landscapes. (See technical note about Rafales and Mirages.)

Let’s go back to the pathetic reasoning of Johnie Carson with his weasel words and total lack of moral perspective:”[The terrorists] have not demonstrated threat to U.S. interests… not threatened to attack the U.S. homeland.” ??? Is not that the famous Washington reasoning used in 1940 about the Nazis? Is Johnie Carson trying to emulate the comedian Johnny Carson by poking fun at the Holocaust?

Right. Auschwitz was built by the Nazis, starting on 21 February 1940. Auschwitz did not demonstrate the capability to threaten U.S. interests outside of West or North Africa, and it did not threaten to attack the U.S. homeland.
So, I guess, that is why Washington did not do anything about it.
Washington is apparently concerned if and only if, it is threatened. In other words, by its own admission, Washington is all about self interest, not civilization. This is exactly the opposite of the French credo. That explains the difference in behavior of France and the USA in 1939.

France declared war to Hitler September 3, 1939, because France had had enough of that terrorist. 40 French divisions tried to break through the Westwall (“Siegfried Line”) in the following days. The first British soldier arrived to help France within a month. The Canadians landed entire divisions by June 1940, nine month later. The proverbial Americans arrived on June 6, 1944, 57 months later, as part of D Day. Yes, fifty seven months later. The Americans were not the majority of the landing force on D Day.

According to Mr. Carson, as the Nazis did not demonstrate the capability to threaten U.S. interests, the USA, as a society and polity, may as well have helped Hitler in 1939. And this is exactly what was done diplomatically and through all sorts of American corporations. The same courtesy was extended to Mussolini (this did not escape the Italian resistance, which would return the favor by hanging Mussolini from an American, Esso gas station in Milan).

The Ethyl Corporation of America sent 500 tons of a crucial additive, lead tetraethyl, an anti-knock compound, so the Nazi Air Force (Luftwaffe) could stay in the air, and keep on fighting the French (the Luftwaffe would go on, to lose 36% of its power during the Battle of France in May-June 1940). Meanwhile, the Congress of the USA passed an anti-French, anti-British law. President Roosevelt regretfully signed it into law.

As the Nazis had not demonstrated the capability to threaten U.S. interests, nor threatened to attack the U.S. homeland, the USA rejected the French demands for military help in 1940. The exact reasoning still used by Mr. Carson.

Waiting fifty seven months to help one’s parent is no moral rush. Yes, because without France there would have been no USA to start with, so France gave birth to the USA. (Although, in part because the USA defaulted on the multi-trillion dollar debt to France, this fact is not advertized.)

Waiting fifty seven months to help civilization is no moral rush.
Waiting fifty seven months to help humanity is no moral rush.

(OK, I am been a bit unfair, here, as the USA saw prior combat in Tunisia, Sicily, Italy; but, precisely, in that case, after the French had broken through the Hitler Line, south of Rome, the USA stabbed in the back general Juin; instead of giving Juin more divisions to rush into Austria, as juin had requested, the American command did the exact opposite, making sure the French could not rush towards Austria, thus extending the war by a year, and making sure half of Europe could be given to Roosevelt’s comrade Joseph Stalin!)

Adolf Hitler declared war TO the USA, on December 11, 1941. The USA found itself at war, with Nazi Germany in 1942, contrarily to Washington’s plans, which were to do nothing bellicose in 1942. As that was in Washington’s best interest.

This attitude of the USA was, and is, not excusable. It reflects a military and cultural tradition born in the woods of North America. The USA was born, fighting Neolithic Indians. Later, even the war of the South against the North was a sure thing: most of the industrial basis of the USA was in the North, and the craziness of the “cavaliers” of the South could only bring their death, as it did.

So the tradition of the diplomatic service in the USA is not aware that war is serious business, and can turn into completely unexpected ways. Several of the major battles of WWII, when re-enacted in (computer aided) war games, nearly never turn the way they did happen. Thus it is best, not to play with war. Thus the Pentagon, aware as it is of these facts, will naturally disagree with State, and want to help the French hard and early, because the Pentagon knows that’s how democracies win wars: by being big, open, with clear war objectives, and being fully in one’s right. (In other words the exact opposite of the weasel war started by Carter’s CIA in Afghanistan in the 1970s.)

The Second World is full of totally unexpected turns of events, which went one way, but could have turned the other. For example if the Ethyl Corporation of America had not sent Lead Tetraethyl to the Nazis, the Luftwaffe would have been grounded, the French and British would have had mastery of the skies… Grounded the Luftwaffe was in front of Moscow in December 1941: it was so cold, only Soviet planes were in the air. The Nazis were not lubricated enough… They suffered their first strategic defeat.

I could go on like this, with a list of unexpected, and hard to expect, events of the Second World War. As it was, to win the war, the USA had just to join France and Britain in September 1939, and declare war to the Nazis. German generals would have done the rest, declare a national emergency, explain that the Nazis were endangering Germany, and destroy them.
There was an official plot that way, organized by Beck, the Wehrmacht chief. However the ambiguous attitude of some leaders of the USA and the UK undermined Beck (who was then betrayed by some of the Anglo-saxons he had asked to help; the plan was finally activated only in 1944… Way too late.)

Sufficient to say that the French army, having underestimated the Vietnamese Communists at Dien Bien Phu, found themselves encircled by an enemy that had, unexpectedly, dragged big guns through the jungle. The French asked the Americans for air support. Eisenhower refused. Conclusion: a “Communist” dictatorship, truly a form of communal plutocracy took control of half of the country, and the USA was involved in a 20 year war in Vietnam (which it took that long to lose)

The present situation in Mali was greatly caused by from the USA. The USA trained five units of the Malian army, and four of them defected to the invaders, with their brand new weapons and newfound skills.

The French (counter-)attack followed, within hours, the attempt to seize the rest of Mali: 50 French special forces dropped on the ground next to Konna, were supposed to help planes find their targets. They found themselves in combat as the Malian army retreated.

Within days of the French intervention with massive bombing, the Tuaregs, having reconsidered the situation in the light of new evidence, proclaimed that they were switching their allegiance to France. Even the American neoconservative historian Robert Kaplan is rallying. He said. “I have a new philosophy: If the French are ready to go, we should go”

This is indeed wise: ever since the Romans put the Franks in charge of defending much of their empire, and ever since the Merovingians outlawed slavery, armed human rights has been a sort of main business model of France… And it’s hard to imagine how it could be otherwise with a democratic republic (even islands such as Britain and the USa had to subscribe, to some extent, to that philosophy).
I personally think that the Tuaregs should be (somewhat) independent. De Gaulle, who did not know Africa, and could not care less, gave Tuareg territory to all the countries around at independence. But the Tuaregs have a very old civilization, that had an alphabet more than 1,600 years before Arabic appeared from their common root.

Naturally that would not please the neighboring countries (the Kurds have the same problem: they, too were at home, 2,000 years before the Turks showed up in the neighborhood.

All matter to negotiation. After all, South Sudan was created, as it should have been (making Azawad independent is very similar problem, in reverse!)

Meanwhile, please help provide those tankers to fuel the French Air Force. (Otherwise I will have to remind us who fueled the Nazi Air Force when the latter ferried the rebel army of general Franco into Spain, in 1936…)
***
Patrice Ayme

USA Arm-Stronging Planet?

Sustainable countries are sustained, literally, by a type of secular nationalism, imposed by their national institutions, and showing up as local traditions. This peculiarism is akin to a religious structure, and often related to the local superstition(s). Religions have moral systems. Moral systems have very practical consequences: countries behave according to them, according to their own national morality.

The tradition of crooks confessing on national TV (that they were honest crooks, so to speak) is a tradition in the USA. And also, confessing, and that is obvious in the case of the cyclism crook Lance Armstrong, can be itself a manipulation.

American peculiarism is of peculiar interest because of the great influence of the USA, and its pretensions to universalism. It is always inappropriate to masquerade peculiarism as universalism. Yet peculiarism is often there to hide exploitation below red herrings, and other irrelevance.

In the USA, the bigger crooks, the more they visit visit the White House regularly. During the “Chinagate” affair, under Clinton, the chief crook visited the White House no less than 58 (fifty-eight) times (in less than 4 years). He was a major money contributor to the Democratic Party, and also a Chinese government agent. (22 other agents were convicted.)

Aaron Swartz was an Internet genius (having been co-author of the RSS program at age 14). JSTOR is an organization to STORe Journals. It is restricted to those who are viewed favorably by the powers that be (for example I do not have presently access to JSTOR, being an enemy of the established order).
Never mind that the research published in the academic Journals was financed by the public (yes, even arrogant Harvard is financed by the public, the word “private” as in “private university” is a joke).

In plutocracy, the public is made to be stolen, and the great priests (now played by Nobel prize winners and the like in “prestigious” institutions) are there to make that into a religion.
For a very long time, academic journals, or, more generally, academic publishing, have been a good trick to make multi-billion dollar fortunes, so the wealthy have been partial to this system, one more system to divert public funds to their pockets. (In Great Britain alone, several multi-billion dollar fortunes arose from academic publishing.)

Aaron Swartz noticed this, that JSTOR was an organization to steal public property. He downloaded millions of articles of JSTOR, to allow the public to access it own public property. That was an important violation of the plutocratic principle that only the mighty has access to knowledge, because knowledge is power, and power belongs to those who have it.

(The Obama administration uses this plutocratic principle when it uses secret recipes to decide which citizens of the USA will be summarily executed by robots, for whatever those citizens did that crossed the secret red lines.)

Aaron Swartz was relentlessly pursued by the government of the USA, the latter thus proclaiming, for all to see, that the established order had a moral right to steal public property. Swartz risked 35 years in jail, no less (for trying to give back to the public, public property, the primary crime in plutocracies!) He faced a trial, public humiliation, enormous cost in time, worry, money, gigantic injustice, the feeling that he was nothing, and would be crushed by plutocracy, no matter what.

Aaron Swartz committed suicide. When he was still free to do so. At age 26. He was made an example by plutocracy. Morality, plutocratic style, re-established. All plutocrats can rejoice. JSTOR came out with a declaration oozing with haughty hypocrisy.

Notice the analogy between JSTOR and the banking system: banks also use public money, and the full back-up of the public, through the money giving (“printing money”, “monetary base”, “quantitative easing”) of the public’s government.

However, in recent times, after a number of corrupt individuals tweaked the system to their advantage under Clinton, the bankers became convinced they could get away with anything. Now they have got used to confiscate the money, and keep it to themselves, their friends, politicians, and (so called) public servants. That’s why they have the command and control of the red carpet at the White House, and the president calls them “friends”, express his admiration, and go play golf with them.

Banking is another case of stealing public money by an oligarchy. But of course not too many academics will protest about JSTOR, and, thus, banking. Once “top” academics are fed at the trough in Harvard or Stanford, they laud the plutocracy that feed them, as Roman intellectuals used to do, to their great satisfaction, as small thinkers, and great greedsters.

A related case is that of Mr. Assange of WikiLeaks, an Australian. His greatest crime should have seen him decorated by the USA Medal of Freedom. Indeed it showed an attack helicopter destroying like vermin a number of civilians, and rescuers, having mistaken a reporter’s camera with a gun. It demonstrated that the U.S. Army had criterion of engagement inside cities that should be changed. And yet, Assange is pursued with rage, as if he were a danger for civilization.
Instead it is those who are gun happy and those who steal public property are threats to civilization.

In barely more than a week, the Boeing 787 “Dreamliner” experienced a brake failure, a fuel leak, a fire which fire fighters took 40 minutes to extinguish with specialized equipment, on the ground in Boston, a cracked front cockpit window, and finally smoking battery that leaked corrosive fluids, projecting flammable liquids 4 meters away, provoking an emergency descent and landing. The 787 Dreamliner was ordered off the skies, worldwide.

Immediately, propagandists with weasel words implied that this had happened before. But not so, to see a new model of planes with so many problems is an unprecedented event in aviation history.

(The Comet in the early fifties exploded mysteriously four times, and the DC10 also had two very deadly crashes; they got grounded, but these were, essentially mysteries about unforeseeable metal fatigue problems; the 737s also had a mysterious control failure, over several years, but, there again, this was more of mystery, a subtle, unforeseen problem; right now the A380 “Super Jumbo” is the object of a recall of cracking aluminum rib brackets in its wings, 4,000 of them per plane, because a British company made a slight mistake; but that’s no big deal, just a recall, and most companies will wait major revisions to do so.)

Why did not this happen before? Because Boeing was an engineering company based in Seattle. It made great planes. Now Boeing is a financial company with headquarters in Chicago, making financial-political plots, worldwide. So the 787 is a shoddy plane.

Meanwhile the F35 Lightning II, another worldwide USA led political-financial plot, is delaminating (the layers of composite material of the tail are separating from each other). Same story at Locckeed-Martin as at Boeing.

There is nothing like sheer violence. To impose oneself, and get to the top. Lance Armstrong (not his true name) made a fortune of more than 100 million dollars, and it’s entangled in his “charity” (“Live Strong”). OK, granted it’s little relative to ex-president Bill Clinton’s fortune, and much less of an ethical breach.

All along Armstrong cheated, and the rumor has it that his cheating was so successful, because it happened with the complicity of some controlling authorities.

The same thing happened with the USA Olympics committee in the times of Marion Jones, and for decades before that. Times magazine made a cover claiming she would get five gold medals. Never mind that Marion Jones was tightly connected, and even married, to notorious drug circles in the San Francisco Bay Area. Unfortunately the Olympic committees of other countries had enough of this American corporate circus, and Ms. Jones got finally busted. She went to jail a bit.

The fact remains that known drug addicts are celebrated as great sport figures, and entire sports are going control free, because they are big business, and the grotesque, steroid exhuding aspect of the athletes is part of the draw.

So Arm Strong confessed, a sort of religious ceremony USA citizens are eager for, in their simplicity. He was questioned by Oprah Winfrey, herself a monument of the system, a billionaire of her own, paid to ask the right questions in the right way on the authorized subjects, as part of the general lobotomization program. One could nearly see the dollars scrolling across the screen. It has always been clear that Armstrong benefited from the highest complicities, and still do.

That way Armstrong (not his true name) is pretty much like USA corporations and plutocrats. No paying their way, but profiting from the system, arm stronging the rest of the cycling world into oblivion, just like the USA corporations and plutocrats are arm stronging the rest of the planet into oblivion. While USA industries were making billions from Armstrong, the rest of the planet, once again, was getting the short stick.

Countries come with their moralities. The USA long enjoyed the moral and judicial system exhibited in “Django Unchained”. But what did work, sort of, exploiting a rich and empty continent, killing millions of slaves and Indians, will not work on a crowded, simmering planet, full of people who are neither slaves, nor Neolithic American natives.
***
Patrice Ayme

Obama Unchained?

Abstract: Kneading a violent, but, sadly, factual movie of Tarantino with Obama in an explosive conceptual mixture…

Quentin Tarantino, in his best movie so far, explores how slavery worked in the USA. It exposes slavery as not just a grotesque paradigm of plutocracy, but also its essence.

The violence of slavery in the South was deliberately engineered to appear as insane and as terrorizing as possible. There was a deep reason for the apparent insanity. Insanity sometimes has its reasons that reasonable reason can’t reach.

(The reason for this is synonymous to the incompleteness theorems of metamathematics: the space of all reasons is bent, just as the cosmological universe is, and has an event horizon, for closely apparented…reasons.)

Crushing Infamy Wisdom Makes

Insane violence, just as in Mali, where terrorists have destroyed hundreds of mosques (!) named to the collective patrimony of humanity by the United Nations, destroyed extremely old books, cut feet, hands, raping children [witnesses say], making “battlefield brides” from 10 year old girls, recruited 12 year old boys as soldiers, etc. And for the same… reason.

Confronted to such a degree of maniac violence, reasonable people tend to, well, reasonably submit, as the terrorists hoped, to start with. So criminal madness, made to look as mad as could be, is the force multiplier of ultimate oppression. A secondary enabler, in the particular case of the American South, was the American justice system, which pretty much rested on arbitrariness and ultra-violence, in an uneasy balance of evil with outlaws and slave masters.

Tarantino shows that the only way to advance out of the deepest infamy is to explode compromises, not to say compromission. President Lincoln was forced to draw the same conclusion.

The case of American slavery reached grotesque violence. Even greater, but righteous, violence was the only way to deal with it. This is the lesson of history. (The Civil War killed nearly a million, about 3% of the population.)

In Mali overrun by satanic terrorists, negotiating with those fanatics who value no life, not even their own, means to reconquer the country, using maximum force. Nothing short of this will do. Wisdom means using maximum force against those using maximum evil.

President Hollande said:”On me demande quoi faire avec les terroristes.[Short pause, as if the question was eerie]
Bien, LES DETRUIRE!” [Looking around bewildered, as if he could not believe he was asked to profer such an evidence.] (“I am asked what to do with the terrorists? Well, DESTROY THEM!”)

Destruction is how to deal with evil. Nothing else will do. Waiting too long with DESTROYING Hitler and his Nazis, just made it worse. And so it is always, with any genuine evil. the fact pacifists refuses to understand this makes them into evil collaborators, cowardly, but, even more fundamentally, plain lazy. Too lazy for brainwork.

Half of the word “plutocracy” is made of “evil”, let me insist to those who are overlooking the notion. Tarantino made a movie about plutocracy in action. That is, evil in action.

Obama, was, of course, elected to do away with plutocracy, but that aspect of his mandate long eluded him… even if it means violating his campaign promises (which were so compatible with my views in 2007-2008). (OK, now that he is on top of the crab heap, it’s much harder to do. Power does that; half of my family stopped talking to me, lest I indispose Obama, or the miserable crab heap below…)

In a tax deal, Obama just augmented taxes on salaried people, even some earning very little, but mostly eschewed taxing plutocrats & their corporations. A move in the wrong direction?

Will Obama emulate the fictional hero, Django, and unchain himself in more ways than one? The medical jury is out. The latest symptoms of Obamania are that the desire to be perceived by the masters as the only adult in the room, an infantile syndrome that Tarantino fingers extensively as fundamental to what made slavery possible, is still alive and well in Obama’s brain. Sad, oh so sad.

I advocated that for guns, Obama should open fire on the gun maniacs. He seems to be doing just this.
For the debt ceiling, what about emulating President Eisenhower, proclaim an emergency, and raise the tax on multimillionaires to 92%? There sure is a much worse emergency now.

We surely do not want that, when historians look at Obama’s reign, they just think: 1858 (explanation below). And, certainly, that’s not what Obama want, either? Time to get unchained!
***

SLAVERY WAS SYMBIOTIC WITH INSANE VIOLENCE, & THAT WAS DELIBERATE:
“Django Unchained”, is an excellent movie by Quentin Tarantino. Excellent, but mean, cruel, somewhat demented. The movie is addressing a set of facts, slavery in the USA. Mean, cruel, completely demented facts. Ingrained, set in stone. A galaxy of evil. That complete dementia enabled slavery’s nature, and nothing short of that would have done it. Tarantino is just depicting an insanity that was.

An insanity that was perfectly self sustainable. If the North had not destroyed the South, that evil was perfectly sustainable, it could have lasted 1,000 years.

We have an even worse dementia nowadays, when the leaders of the world, with their empty minds, believe that there is nothing wrong with burning 400 million years of accumulated carbon. Maybe they can personally profit, but their memories will not. Someday, no doubt, after 70% of humanity had to evacuate their homes from the rising acidic ocean, they will be viewed as the worst monsters history ever produced. Their names will live in infamy, long after Hitler’s name is forgotten.

Some have told me, in light of the primary school mass murder by a war weapon, that it was a sin to even mention such things, because, you know, they are so terrible. This exact reaction is what made Auschwitz possible: Hitler’s Germans did not want to talk about terrible things.
Web sites have even censored me for mentioning the gun problem! As if me, who has never touched a gun, was somehow culprit of atrocity by explicating, and condemning, the machinery behind the atrocity. Similarly, Tarantino is getting accused of guns and slavery, for showing both in action.

This confusion between fact and fiction irks me, and also irks Quentin Tarantino. And rightly so. Those who conflate critique and practice should get their heads examined.
The confusion between act, and practice, on one side, and fiction and analysis on the other, is how philosophers such as Sade or Nietzsche, and actually, pretty much all philosophers, have been identified with what they detected, analyzed, and condemned.

Carefully entertaining confusion between message and messenger is a tool of oppressors. The very first thing about the brain, is that the brain massages the message, while becoming a messenger of whatever it kneaded inside.

Conflating incoming data and brainwork on said data denies the very nature of the brain, and imposes crushing, self oppressing stupidity.

Back to “Django Unchained”. The movie is the occasion of making important points about civilization:

1) civilization comes and goes. The movie opens with two cow boy types mounted on horses brandishing big guns, while half dozen characters stumble between the riders, shuffling like hobbled penguins, all day long, and then deep in the freezing night of Texas. They are black slaves, their chaffed and bruised ankles, chained together. The grotesque spectacle is long depicted, as it is telling of the cruelty of slave traders. Slave traders were allowed by law over much of the USA in 1858.

2) when civilization goes, the degeneracy that follows hides below a veneer of the opposite of what it is.

The enslaving South was in the habit of fancying itself as somewhat French in taste. Masters called each others “cavaliers” (French for “riders”), and affected French manners. (A modern equivalent is Hitler, always talking about peace, and posing himself and Germany as victims; in truth the opposite of what was happening.)

As Tarantino points out, the upper society of the South did not know any French. It was offended to be reminded of this fact. Hiding behind a French veneer was how to fake civilization, when that enslaving society was just the opposite.

Under Merovingian queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, in 658 CE, slave trading had been outlawed in the gigantic Merovingian empire.

The slave trading depicted in “Django” happened exactly 1,200 years later. In other world, the upper society of the Southern USA was primitive, and offensive… By Merovingian standards!

Revealingly, I have met the same sort of character in the present day Silicon Valley. They waxed lyrical about French cheeses and wines, while flaunting their French ways, until, well, I hinted that the real thing, the real French culture, was about rationality, emotional, or not, first. Then, they hated me, without any limit, the exact effect Tarantino warns about in his movie. Over the decades, I had the dubious pleasure to experience this effect with 90% of the upper society people in the Bay Area who know where France is located.

Let me say in passing that, whereas the movie is fiction, the ambiance it describes in the enslaving South is not so. The World Socialist Website found the movie “miserable… pointless and stupid”. But, unfortunately and revealingly, that is just how it was in the USA then.

The ambiance depicted by Tarantino is a historical fact, and that is why the Secession War turned into the bloodiest civil war in the history of Western Civilization. Yes, plutocrats owned and whipped “niggers” and, to this day of today, if one has a drop of African blood, in the USA, one is black, that is “niger” in Latin. And yes, the oppressed themselves cooperate with that scheme, to this day of today, when they dutifully call themselves “niger” (“black”), when they are multiethnic, as much of humanity is.

Tarantino has no time to give a lecture on why the south fancied itself as French, precisely because it was the exact opposite of the spirit of France. But it is a historical fact that it did. However Tarantino gives an explicit pointer that this pseudo-French veneer is both fraudulent, and very important (and this pseudo French dashing incited arrogant Southern plutocrats to launch the Secession War):
The second main character in Django Unchained, a charming (and humanitarian!) bounty hunter, endowed with the power of law, points out to Mr. Candie, a plutocrat played by Leonardo DiCaprio, after seeing a black slave being torn by dogs:

“You name our main fighters after Alexandre Dumas’ characters, but Dumas would not have approved what you did today, to give a black man to dogs… You see, Dumas was black.”Candie has nothing to say to this. That Dumas, the very epitome of the Cavalier Spirit, was black would have been shattering to those who believed in racially justified slavery, had they known of the fact. And the truth is even worse: Dumas’s father, a mulatto, was one of the top general of France, and one of the most dashing “cavalier” who ever was.

3) Plutocrats of the South of the USA believed that their immense brutality and disregard for human life, including their own, would always allow themselves to dominate. This illusion was shattered with the tremendous cavalry charges of the Secession War. Top Southern generals, full of bullets, draining of their blood, kept on riding proudly as their boots filled with blood, giving orders. But, ultimately, they died. And the likes of them was never seen again.

4) Tarantino got somehow accused of the Newton primary school shooting, on the ground that Quentin depicts violence, so he is bad, and the shooting was bad. That, of course, is logic worthy of slightly unbalanced two years old, who can’t distinguish contemplation from participation.

Tarantino movies have long dialogues to expose this sort of demented, quirky two year old logic, upon which our world rests. Those who don’t like to think in depth find these dialogues deeply upsetting, because that is precisely how they think.

The great decisions to make war in Iraq and Afghanistan rested on two year old logic. And there may be hell to pay about them, because, not only were perfect defeats engineered at enormous cost, but the triumph of two year old logic was elevated for all to see. The problem with the latter, is that it can then be used by terrorists, or even other states (North Korea, China?).

Actually Pakistan, in its preceding attack against India used two year old logic for all to see. (To paraphrase: “We have nukes, so we know India will not attack us, whatever we do, so we may as well do whatever we want.”; this plutocratic logic will be unbounded, until the day comes when India prefers to risk nuclear war).

Another class of demented logic is the pseudo expertise, from complicated argument resting on imaginary data. We see a lot of this with today’s economic experts (“austerity was a panacea,” they said, until it bled the economy to death…)

In “Django Unchained”, Di Caprio makes a beautiful demonstration of demented pseudo-expertise, as he gives a lesson of phrenology. Phrenology was a 19 C pseudo science that explained the mind by looking at the geometry of skulls. There is nothing to it, it’s nearly completely false (I say nearly, because the Incas had found out that, by compressing foreheads tremendously they could create humanoid killing robots).

What DiCaprio wants to demonstrate, is that Africans are submissive and non creative. The rest of the movie is about demonstrating, with facts, the exact opposite. Django becomes immensely creative, and totally rebellious, as he proceeds to annihilate the entire estate of Mr. Candie.

It did not start this way. Initially Django is playing an Obama like character, silent, guarded, keeping to himself, somewhat motivated first by not making waves. Then he reveals himself to put justice above anything else, even his own safety (or that of his family, that is, his wife).

So is Mr. Tarantino saying that Obama could turn into somebody re-establishing justice? Is Tarantino hoping that Obama is going to turn into a real life Django? I sure hope so.

Fat chance? Obama seems still affected by playing the part of the Stephen character in “Django Unchained”. If I were president, at this point, I would drive the plutocrats crazy (French cooperation would be automatic, and other important European leaders would follow; the rest of the world could be forced into squeezing out plutocrats, or join Depardieu in Siberia, to be used as Mr. Putin’s carpet).

Yet, forcing the Plutos into submission is not what Obama is doing. He speaks as if he were, but… Obama solved the fiscal cliff by rising the taxes of people making less than 100,000 when he repelled the repel of the payroll tax. Also those with income of a few hundred thousand dollars (barely enough, say, in the Silicon Valley to buy a two bedroom house) saw their taxes augmenting by 10%.
But what of the true rich, the real plutocrats? Those who are not on salary, and can claim, through tricks, that they have no taxable income? Nada. They go on as before, using all the tricks that allow them to pay very little tax, or not at all.

I worked massively for the first Obama campaign for two years. I spent a huge amount of time and money (compensated by smiley photos with dear friend Obama).

Yet, by the time of Obama’s victory, in 2008, a pattern came in full evidence, and I wrote about it on my site, even then. The pattern was to talk one way, and act the opposite, at least in finance and economics. Thus, strangely, I have felt terrible for more than four years, as I contemplate the duplicity of the leaders, and the naivety of the masses bleating their approval of the shepherd.

So there was the fiscal cliff. It was proclaimed to be a victory of the People because taxes were raised on salaried income, and the payroll tax was cranked back up. Guess what? Plutocrats don’t have salaries and they are not on someone’s payroll.
And guess a bit more: all the tax evasion mechanisms of plutocrats and corporations were left intact.
Obama foams at the mouth about China manipulating its currency. But that’s not the problem with “China”.
“China” is just a Trojan Horse used by (mostly USA based) plutocracy.

On a $600 iphone, only ten (10) dollars go to China. But then Apple washes, cleans and rinses its giant profits through various tax havens (such as the British Virgin Islands), and the plutocrats, with various other tricks, such as borrowing instead of earning, escape taxation further. In the end, said plutocrats, now mimicking wise men, advise Obama to go on with his boy, Lew, and the USA becomes a generalized heaven for plutocrats. Thanks to havens the USA is becoming a heaven for plantation owners, satanic style.
Do you think the big donors who sat with Michelle Obama last year for the State Of The Union pay tax? No they don’t. Yet, every year they become richer, and thus more influential.

When he announced the “fiscal cliff” “compromise”, President Obama claimed that upper-income Americans would be paying their fair share. But he failed to fulfill a campaign promise to change part of the tax code that benefits some of the richest people in the country.

Some of the wealthiest Americans – such as private equity managers, hedge fund managers and venture capitalists – will continue to enjoy the tax code that allows them to avoid paying billions in taxes.
As the San Francisco Chronicle puts it:”In the Bay Area alone, employees of top money firms donated $6.7 million to federal candidates and political committees during the 2012 election cycle.
An analysis was performed for The Chronicle by MapLight, a nonprofit that analyzes the effects of money and politics… said Daniel G. Newman, president and co-founder of MapLight. “Millions in political contributions brought billions of tax breaks for some of the wealthiest people in America.”

More than four years ago, Obama promised that he would end the practice of taxing carried interest as capital gains instead of as regular income. Such a change could raise an estimated $13 billion to $20 billion over the next decade, and impact 36,000 to 65,000 people.
But Obama failed to live up to his 2008 promise, according to the nonpartisan fact-checkers at Politifact.com who recently rated it a “broken promise” of his first term.

What is even more worrisome is the would be nomination of Jack Lew as Sec. of the Treasury. Lew has an atrocious track record, as he was one of the instigators, under Clinton, of the deregulation of the financial derivatives. That diverted money creation to the exclusive profit of the bankers themselves, violating their fiduciary mission (which is to create money FOR the real economy, instead or for just themselves).
Lew is connected in a major way to worldwide plutocracy, that he served as director of wealth management at Citi. No less.

Lew got enormous bonuses, even after his bank had (just) been bailed out by the public.
Those are the people blocking the taxes (on them, plutocrats) which would alleviate the deficit. Remember that president Eisenhower, a republican, brought up the tax on millionaires to 92%. He did this, Ike said at the time, extinguish the World War Two debt. Why can’t Obama ask the hyper rich to pay 50% tax? I understand he cannot be as much of a leftist as Ike, but why not go half way?

Obama not only does not propose to do this. Not only did he augment taxes for the working stiff. But he left all the tax avoiding tricks of the plutocrats intact, those tricks that guarantee the blossoming of plutocracy at an exponential rate.
What’s the computation here?

Well, most often, plutocracy grows so fast that it overwhelms the resistance of the majority of the People, and it then rules without sharing much. This is what happened to Rome, what happened in all of Europe during the Middle Ages, etc.

In 2008, the USA voted for Obama, because it thought he would turn into Django Unchained. Instead Obama became all too friendly to the likes of Mr. Candie (Di Caprio).

Mr. Candie’s faithful servant, Stephen, is played, with great subtlety, by Samuel Johnson. Stephen has completely turned to the Dark Side, although he believes he serves good (“Candie never killed a nigger” he says, when enjoying knees shattered by Django’s bullets). Although black like charcoal, Stephen is whiter than the whites about white supremacy. Obama’s soothing words about having achieved tax fairness, just because he is taxing more salaried people reminds us of the sort of hypocrisy and non factuality with a straight face those who collaborate with the Dark Side are expert in.
One of the main property of Hades-Pluto is invisibility. A tradition pursued throughout the Middle Ages, when Satan was called “Le Malin”, “The Crafty One”. This means that the disguise of reality is fundamental to the Dark Side. Not only does it allow to mislead the innocent, but also to excuse, and enable the guilty.

We The People of the USA needed a Django in 2008. Some say we got a Stephen. Somebody who can sit in the rich back room, talking peer to peer with the plutocrat, thinking he does good by changing things as little as possible, as plutocrats get to know and appreciate him.
The Civil War started a couple of years after “Django”. The immediate reason is that the South seceded and fired on Federal forces, as any history book will say.

However why that happened has to do with a collective psychology in the South, that embraced Armageddon in an orgasm of hubris. That, in turn happened for reasons that have to do with plutocracy growing exponentially. An exponential growth of plutocracy is not just a blossom of riches and power, in ever fewer hands, but also, consequently, a blossom of madness. Plutocracy refuses their humanity to most, hence puts into question the human nature of those who undergo it.

Alexander (so called The Great) was very bold in battle. No wonder: he had adopted Oriental metaphysics. once he got hurt and blood flowed from his body. “Is that the blood of a god?” he wondered. his Greek companions laughed. No wonder Alexander became ever closer to the Persian (ex-)Royal family.
It is not just because excess makes mad, that plutocracy makes people mad. But the crazier the plutocracy, the crazier the justifications for it to keep on rolling up. If one is Stalin, and one kills millions of peasants, a lot of comrades and generals, one may as well keep on going, lest a new opposition gets empower, and that’s also why Mao got ever crazier. The “100 Flowers” were followed by the even nuttier “Cultural Revolution” the latter allowed to get rid of the opposition the former had created.

As readers can see I take seriously my general definition of “plutocracy”: a leader fond of the Dark Side is a plutocrat, and that goes all the way down to Mr. Candie and all his attendants and family. That’s why Django shoots Candie’s sister, in spite, but rather, because of her impeccable education and sensitivity (it’s a low dimensional sensitivity: it does not extent to “colored people”). So Django insists that proper goodbyes be given, before he cold bloodedly gives he r the hot lead she deserves in her midriff, as it is clear to him that polite formalism is all the depth these people have, and thus that superficial formalism is an enabler that should also be executed.

The hubris is explained by the necessity to be ever more cruel, brutal and arrogant as plutocracy augments, and singularizes itself. It becomes the pleasure of getting away with those sins, and even inverting all values, and exhibiting them as virtues. This mechanism shows that hubris is intimately related to the Dark Side.
The American South lived a collective madness. A madness so great, it could not have been conceived before; the Romans had slaves, but Roman slavery, although just as bad as American slavery, was not founded on the (crazy) concept of race.

Rome’s Severian dynasty was founded by Septimus Severus, a Libyan of Libyan descent from a Libyan senatorial family, who rose to supreme military command in Illyricum, before he re-established order to Rome with his legions (by stopping the chronic coup and circus of the Praetorian Guard).
The paradoxical result of the South’s hubris crisis was that, at the very end of the Civil War, slavery got outlawed.

So will Obama become Django, and unchains himself? Executive orders about the gun insanity in the present day USA is a good start. OK, the weapons of war madness is not as bad as the plutocratic insanity, but, as I explained in a previous essay, they are related.
And overall, they are supremely related by the metaprinciple of insanity being honored, unchallenged by reason, as if it is the supreme politeness to learn to respect it, no questions asked 9this politeness to insanity is one thing Tarantino targeted in his movie, as I explained).

Obama should go Django and start shooting liberally executive orders to explode the existing order. What does he have to fear? Nothing.

In the alternative, if Obama does nothing, and just sells himself like Clinton, let me tell him what’s going to happen. Plutocracy will not blossom for long. It will lead soon to disasters so great that today’s leaders will end worse than Dante ever imagined.
Ultimate wisdom for the human species is ultimate fighting, because only ultimate morality gives ultimate reason, thus terminal domination.

Such is the paradox of humanity. Love blossoms out of blood, when peace comes too short to allow a decent, comfortable enough existence.
***
Patrice Ayme

***

French War In Mali

Finally! Friday January 11, 2013, Paris, Élysée: “Mali is confronting an aggression of terrorist elements coming from the North, with a brutality and fanaticism that the entire world knows” said the French president “I have therefore, in the name of France answered the demand of help from the Mali president, which is supported by the Western African countries. In consequence, the French armed forces have brought this afternoon their support to Malian units to fight against those terrorist elements.”

And, presto, France is at war again. This is the second military intervention of France in Africa, in one week. (The preceding one stopped an insurrection in the Central African Republic.)
And at least the FOURTH major French combat intervention in two years (Ivory Coast, Libya).

French Strike Mali [From Terrorist Video]

For those who are naive in these matters, historically, in the fullness of time, France is the primary military interventionist in the world. Ever. This started when the Roman empire put the Franks in charge of defending Germania and Gallia in 400 CE. After some initial difficulties that caused the fall of the Occidental part of the empire, the Franks annhilated the Huns, the Goths, the Lombards and various other critters. (The Franks also intervened in Britannia for centuries afterwards, before conquering the whole thing in 1066 CE).

The nations French military intervention created constitute the essential of the West: Germany (starting in 500 CE), much of Europe (by 800 CE), all the way to Eastern Europe, and including Catalonia and the reconquista of Spain (Charlemagne), England (1066), the reconquest of much of the Mediterranean from the Muslim invaders (South Italy, Sicily, etc.)… even the Netherlands is, to a great extent, a French creation (a 75 year war part of a 120 year French war against Spain)… And finally, of course, the USA.

Without gigantic French help, and even… incitation, the American rebels would have all been hanged by the authorities, end of the story. Nearly all their cartridges were even made in France. Even while being created, the USA defaulted, and refused to pay back even a cent to the French Treasury for the enormously expensive war that had given birth to it. Thus default presided at the birth of the USA. (Louis XVI was advised to follow suit, and default too; but he refused, as he was hell bent on making nobles pay taxes, something that the National Assembly of 1789 finally imposed!)

That’s one problem with war. When made out of principle, it can only pay back with principle. But that does not mean it should not be made.

It’s not just that the Franks (or the Gauls before them) are slightly demented supermen in search of somebody to fight. The very position of France at the crossroads of the three main trade routes of Western Europe, since the Neolithic, condemned any people thriving there to be pretty aggressive and open minded. That is why the occupants of France may have changed quite a bit, but the mentality persists.

Frankish intervention led to the unification of Western Europe under the body of Roman law and the Roman language, and a version of civilization (and weaponization!) that they called Christianity. Achieving what they called in 800 CE “the Renovation of the Roman Empire”. The Franks, were Germans who civilized Rome, while learning the proper way of making war, a state, and a melting pot, from the Romans.

War is inseparable from democracy, be it just because plutocracy hates democracy. Plutocracy tends to blossom all over, all the time, and one of its main variant is “theocracy”, where (mass) criminal acts are ordered by god(s).

The French government declared that the invaders of Mali are “terrorist” and “criminal”. Differently from December 31, 406 CE, when the Vandals, Alans and various others crossed the frozen Rhine by surprise, France was not surprised that the terrorists decided to invade the rest of Mali, in the hope that the international community would take months to get organized after Susan Rice lifted her veto against France at the UN, and the Security Council voted to allow armed intervention as needed.

The French Air Force has already conducted bombing missions. This is excellent. In the West Africa of my childhood, one had to fear only spiders, horribly poisonous snakes, crocodiles and furry predators. The danger presented by man was inexistent.

Western Africa was way safer than Europe. Shockingly, once, a taxicab driver got killed for his money. That had never happened before. It turned out, and it was pretty telling that, a young French tourist had done it.

Black Muslim faith was not distinguishable from Western secularism in most ways, and was distinctly more progressive in some important ways (having to do with socialism, nudity, and… even the position of women in society).

The “Muslim” faith of the fanatics in the middle of the Middle Earth is a “different religion from mine” declared Abou Diouf, a Wolof Muslim, ex-president of Senegal (and General Secretary of the 70 nations strong francophonie).

Of course such a version of Islam, islam with a progressive, human, civilized face, is intolerable to a lot of bad actors.

Wahhabism, the faith of Saudi Arabia, is perfectly compatible with terrorism, gangsterism, drug trafficking, and, first of all, extreme concentration of wealth (in other words, the exact opposite of Senegalese style Islam). Thus extremely well financed bad actors, armed by the feudal oil powers, tightly connected to Wall Street, of Arabia, keep on financing it. This constant war agaisnt a self made enemy, serves as a justification for the feudal, fascist regimes in the Middle East. That’s why they keep on secreting what we are supposed to fight.

The usual professional pseudo-leftist whiners are sure to surface and accuse France of having interests in Africa. Well, there is something to the notion of empire. Originally, it simply meant command, order.

Under the British Raj, there was no danger that the Muslim dominated regions would engage into a thermonuclear war with the rest of the subcontinent. Had the British Raj evolved as Canada, that would still be an impossibility.

Whereas, as it is, after Gandhi’s pathetic circus, the existence of that Pakistani theocracy (see the connection with plutocracy, above) which he contributed so much to create, does not just threaten India with a few hundreds of millions of dead, but also could ignite a world war.

The old argument of the French in Algeria was that they were back, as the successor state of Rome, after a hiatus imposed by Arab Muslim invaders. This was also the basic argument of Napoleon in Egypt. And there is something to it.

After all, Rome had African, and even Arab, emperors.

So how does this compare with Libya, Syria and Afghanistan?

Well Qaddafi was a horrible dictator, who even raped young girls industrially. he had a deal with those plutocrats, Blair and G.W. Bush. As long as he was in place, an atrocious plutocratic symbol was in place. The difference with North Korea is that, as Qaddafi found out, Libya was only an hour flight out of European bases. Similar reasons brought JFK to a tough line about nuclear capable missiles in Cuba.

Syria is a mess. The only correct line of the West is to draw lines for Assad not to cross, and support the secularist opposition (even with weapons)… while trying not to help the genuine Islamists supported by the feudal regimes.

I have been opposed to the war in Afghanistan for, among other things, strategic reasons. The first one is that, when democracy fights, democracy ought to be pure. In Afghanistan the USA has been as impure as possible, and that had direct strategic consequences leading to the unavoidable defeat we are now experiencing.

During its great war with Sparta, Athens was not ethically pure, far from it, and that is why she was ultimately defeated by a coalition of enraged city states (led by Sparta, financed by Persia). Athens was impure because Athens used the defense funds of the Delian League to build itself pretty buildings still observable today, because Athens destroyed an entire island, Milo, just to show it was a superpower, and because Athens attacked Syracuse, there again, just because she could, as an undefeatable superpower. Athens aggravated her case by boasting of her great democracy and Open Society, while practicing the opposite for all to see.

(Analogies with the present USA, while regrettable, are not a coincidence, and fully intended.)

When the French Republic gave an ultimatum to Hitler, on September 1, 1939, the Republic had been ethically pure (Britain, that France dragged behind, had been much less pure, and its compromising with Hitler had a direct effect on its military preparedness, which was so insufficient, as to leave mostly France fighting, by a ratio of 1 to 20 in soldiers deployed!)

The first big mistake in Afghanistan is actually that the USA attacked the REPUBLIC of Afghanistan in the 1970s. It would seem that the USA (or some influential people in the USA) were after the mineral wealth that the republic of Afghanistan intended to develop with French (and probably Soviet) help.

A dirty war resulted, with the likes of the CIA instrumentalizing the likes of Bin Laden. Then there was 9/11. The West invaded Afghanistan, as was its right.

But then a tragic, and strategic mistake was done: that one of NOT enforcing a SECULARIST state in Afghanistan. Instead the west did what it should never do, put a theocratic republic, Iranian style, in power. Hence NATO fought for Wahhabism light. Thus the Afghans, including those in the army and police, got completely confused, and felt NATO ought to be supporting Fundamentalist Islam, and became crazy, observing otherwise.

Hence the famous “green on blue” and “green on green” attacks. It’s a hopeless situation, and too late to fix it. Better next time we invade Afghanistan from scratch.

Mali is completely different. Mali is a secularist republic. A natural ally of Western civilization, an emanation of it. Not supporting Mali would have extremely adverse consequences, because not just of its location, but because it would be not supporting civilization.

Fortunately precision bombing on armed columns have happened on Friday January 11. There is no doubt the terrorists were taken by surprise. Moderation in the support of civilization is no solution.
Patrice Ayme

Force Tax Havens

FORCE IN THE NAME OF DEMOCRACY’S SURVIVAL IS NO SIN.
The brand new Swiss president had the impudence of moaning that “big states do not treat small states as equal”.

At first, this sounds good: the eternal lament of the weak and small being oppressed by the big and strong, something to make the righteous weep. And yet bacteria are small, but nothing to cry about.

The proximal object of the Swiss’ hypocritical whining was the unilateral French decree on January 1, 2013 to tax 5,430 tax payers who earn their living in France, but were (lightly) taxed in Switzerland (through special contracts with Swiss cantons, although they are French citizens). Under what theory is one supposed to negotiate about that?

I have a question for Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden (and other European tax havens).

What were they doing in October 1939? Hitler had just invaded Spain, Austria, Czechoslovakia, and Poland. Hitler had started a holocaust in Poland, bombing cities, focusing on flour mills, for all to see. France and Britain had started a war against Hitler. 40 French divisions were trying to break through the Nazi Westwall in a very narrow, difficult mountainous sector (they would succeed 54 months later). The French could only attack there, because Belgium and Luxembourg were “neutral”.

It’s not that they are just small: roaches may be small, but they accumulate as great masses. The total population of Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden is now 51 millions (2012). That is, larger than the population of England (although less than the UK).

What were those “small”, “neutral” countries doing in 1939? Well certainly not cooperating with France and Britain. In other words, the “neutral” were not on the side of civilization.

Switzerland was racking in the cash and valuables of millions of Europeans from Middle Europe, who were fleeing the Nazis. That included all the valuables of hundreds of thousands of Jews (conveniently the banks would later lose the records of these transactions, once their clients had been exterminated by their accomplices the Nazis). While filling up its coffers with what would turn out to be an enormous stolen capital, Switzerland was not cooperating militarily with France. This had drastic consequences, because the Maginot line, which extended along the border with Italy, did not extend along the Swiss border.

So France had forces at the ready, in case the Nazis tried to pass by the central plain of Switzerland; the dispersion of French forces on May 10, 1940, was the major factor in the defeat of May-June 1940.

(The major sea-land-air invasion of Norway and Sweden ongoing in May 1940 by elite French and British forces did not help; for example the Legion could not be deployed to help the Fourth Heavy Armored French division led by de Gaulle cut behind the Nazi Panzer army; as it is giant French heavy tanks came within a kilometer of the top Nazi generals, at night, without knowing how close they came to decapitating the German command, including general in chief Guderian, who related the situation; a few legionnaires may have made the difference; but the Legion was getting ready to invade Hitler’s collaborator, Sweden.)

The usual Francophobic rabble will laugh, at the idea of 5 million French prisoners, 200,000 French killed. However France had on her territory hundreds of thousands of political refugees fleeing Nazism. A direct consequence of the French defeat was to enable further the extermination programs directed at Poles, Jews, Slavs, Gypsies. (And soon 28 million Soviets killed.)

Those extermination programs extended the extermination program against mental retards and degenerates, which was completely official, so Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark and Sweden knew very well what the Nazis were up to.

Sweden was outright intensely collaborating with Hitler by selling him enormous quantities of high grade iron ore that the bloodthirsty dictator needed for making his weapons. The ore was going through Norway along the “Iron Road” to Narvik, a special railway carrying the world’s heaviest trains.
The situation was so strategic that France and Britain decided to cut off that non-sense by force, while Hitler, anticipating this, decided to invade Norway, to secure the “Iron Road”.
Sweden could have sent the ore by a longer route to the Baltic, so France and Britain decided to invade Sweden with an army spearheaded by the French Foreign Legion. Unfortunately the Legion had to be recalled in May 1940, when the Nazis attacked through the Ardennes mountains.

Hitler, smart in the way predators are, and desperate, because his chances against the French army seemed tenuous, had concentrated all his forces on one road through the Ardennes. A Spitfire pilot saw the German armor traffic jam, reported it, and was not believed.

Meanwhile the worldwide dispersed French Air Force was not even at 50% strength over France, and could not check where exactly the main Nazi forces where. Hitler focused on a savage attack against the Netherlands, in the hope that the French would stupidly show a big heart.
The French High Command fell in the trap and, with consummate stupidity sent the Reserve Mobile army of seven armored divisions led by general Giraud to the Netherlands. While the ten Nazi Panzer divisions broke through the Meuse river, way south.
The reason Hitler broke there is that the French Maginot Line finished a few kilometers to the south. The Maginot Line could not be penetrated. It was even stronger than the Nazi Westwall, which held the five million man Western Allies for 6 months in 1944-45.

The portion of the Maginot Line that was supposed to be built in Belgium, going north, had never been built, although it was supposed to be built, by treaty with France. This non construction of crucial fortifications was a particularly fatal treachery of “neutral” Belgium.

The initial Nazi plan called for a double pronged attack through Belgium. It had been fully anticipated by the French High Command. Had the Nazis done this they would have encountered head-on the French and British army, and be defeated. French and British armor was superior to the Nazi one, with much bigger tanks. The rare pitched tank battles with the French and the British brought systematic Nazi defeats (it’s only by going AROUND French and British armor that the Nazis won in May 1940!)
However a plane carrying the Nazi plan crash landed in Belgium, and the Nazis had to change to the crazy plan that worked.

There is a contemporary lesson therein: plans do not resist contact with the enemy, that’s well known. Less known is the fact that a vastly inferior enemy, as the Nazis in May 1940, can win by trying something crazy, as the Nazis did in May 1940. The admonishment is that the Western Allies should not underestimate, again, what potential enemies are capable of. Ballistic missiles, satellite and cyber attacks should be prepared against.

To come back to the initial subject, had the Netherlands, Belgium. Norway and Sweden declared war to Hitler during Fall 1939, Hitler would have certainly lost.

So we can conclude two things:
1) countries that still claim to be neutral, such as Sweden and Switzerland, should be sanctioned against, on that ground alone. They are, in truth vile, always anxious to serve the worst, most profitable master they can find. (See the WikiLeaks story with Sweden or Switzerland’s anxious pandering to Qaddafi, as ongoing symptoms of baseness.)
2) countries that are “neutral” when civilization, basic human rights, or the right to life are at stake (as was the case in 1939), are actually followers of the Dark Side.

Some will say:”Grow up, we are not in 1939 anymore, this is not relevant today.” But nothing could be further from the truth. The order established worldwide, is primarily military. It is symbolized by the United Nations, and was established by the democracies during World War Two (as the SDN’s idea got started in France in 1916; the SDN was the ill fated predecessor of the UN).

Taxation precedes militarization, which precedes democratization (this point of view was argued in these terms in Athens 2,500 years ago, leading to the construction and manning of a 200 triremes fleet, and, at enormous human, financial and ecological cost, the victories of Marathon, Salamis, and Platea… Against a particularly parodic version of the Dark Side. Thus civilization won over fascization.

For decades, Switzerland and the Benelux have played tax havens (it varies from canton to canton; Luxembourg or Zug are particularly abject, the Netherlands milder, but bigger by two orders of magnitude!).

Tax havens are not just draining the bigger states from tax revenues. As I always mention, the withdrawal of the legions from Britain, Germany and Gaul in 400 CE was directly caused by lack of revenues (the Roman plutocrats refused to pay tax, they felt reasonably confident that, protected by their own private armies, they could resist the small invading German bands). The crisis had been long in coming (Marcus Aurelius confronted it already in 160 CE). The “Occidental” Roman empire collapsed within six years.

By draining tax revenues from the bigger, leading DEMOCRACIES (there are about ten of those, led by the nuclear armed USA, France and Britain), the smaller states, the tax havens, are actually conducting CHRONIC hostile operations against democracy, republic, civilization, basic human rights, or the right to life.

Thus, whenever Occidental democracy confronts an enemy, Switzerland, whether conscious of it or not, is an objective ally of said enemy.

So Mr. Swiss president, by choosing the Dark Side, your country is not just small, vile and ugly, but should also be treated as a hostile alien. Such is the lesson from 1940. As France, Germany, Italy, the USA, maybe even Great Britain are presently requesting Switzerland to surrender tax evading plutocrats, they should hesitate to use force (as they have been doing increasingly).

The other lesson is that France and Britain should have invaded Narvik and perfidious Sweden in 1939, instead of waiting passively, and stupidly, for Hitler to attack Norway. (If the Norwegians wanted to fight the Foreign Legion, well, tough luck for them.) Cutting the “Iron Road” in 1939 would have fatally weakened the Nazis.

Right now the galaxy of small and despicable tax havens, worldwide, greatly weakens the big democracies, and is at the root of the ongoing Greater Depression. Tax havens enable gangsterism, banksterism, and tax avoidance by the largest international corporations, while leeching off the military power and order established by the leading democracies.

Tax havens should be viewed as terrorist organizations, as they enfeeble those who fight the enemies of the Open Society, and treated as such. That means, they should be treated with democratically imposed military force, precisely what the plutocrats do not want to pay for anymore than they did in 400 CE.
***
Patrice Ayme

De Par Dieu: World Plutocrats Unite

The richest Greeks are buying the most expensive apartments in Berlin and London. “Shameful” says the president of the European parliament. The president of EU parliament, Martin Schultz, a German SPD member, calls attention to the breakdown of Greek society, with the poorest dying of lack of food and health care, while the richest and mightiest Greeks do not pay taxes (but the Germans and the French certainly do to back-up the European Central Bank Quantitative Easing, and various direct loans to Greece).

One week in December 2012, French actor Depardieu established residency in Belgium. Belgium is a country very friendly to plutocrats. The world’s fourth richest man, Arnault, another Frenchman, owner of all sorts of luxury brands, established residency there last year. The day Arnault announced it, there was a demonstration below the windows of his private residence. By thousands of enraged Belgians.

Reason? Plutocrats are spared taxes on capital gains and inheritance in Belgium. This is only normal: after all this plutocratic status is enjoyed by members of the Royal Belgian family, who are corrupt, and inherited this disposition, free of taxation.

Yet, someone has to pay for the state. Salaried Belgians pay some of the highest taxes on income in the world. This is directly related to others paying nothing: the hyper rich don’t pay taxes, because salaried persons pay them on their behalf. Such a system can perdure. After all, the plutocrats did not pay taxes in Europe for more than a millennium. They called themselves “the best who rule” (aristocrats).

This lack of taxation in the upper reaches brought ever more powers to the powerful. In the end, even when the king and government of France used everything in their arsenal to make the wealthiest pay taxes, they failed.

That unbalance at the top is why all of Europe underwent a succession of serious revolutions, among which those of the Netherlands (16 C, and a 75 year war against Spain) England (three revolutions and civil wars in the 17 C), the North American colony (1776-1791 + Secession War 1860-65), France (1789-1792 + 1830 + 1848 + 1871), Russia (1917), Germany (1918).

Perhaps suddenly aware of this problematic Belgian situation, Depardieu met in a private dinner the Czar of All Russias, Vladimir Putin in his gigantic palace (with TV, microphones and interpreters present, recording the very familiar tone). That was in Sotchi, a ski resort on the south side of the Caucasus. Sotchi and Putin have been officially celebrated by international sport authorities. A bit as Hitler organized the 1936 Olympic Games, in Berlin, to celebrate Nazism, Putin is organizing the next winter Olympic games, to celebrate Putinism, a crow’s flight from where he is waged heavy war in Georgia, and exerts mighty military occupations of many a country of the Caucasus.

Pontificates Depardieu: “Ceux qui disent du mal du president Putin ne sont jamais sortis de chez eux, ils sont restes en arriere depuis lontemps” (“Those who say bad things about president Putin never got out, they stayed stuck in the past for a long time”). Sorry that we confuse Stalin and Putin. Both are ending the same.

Putin gave Depardieu Russian nationality, and a Russian passport. Such is the power of the Czar. “Czar” is a deformation of “Caesar”. But Caesar could not make an alien into a Roman citizen overnight. Putin has more powers.

Depardieu has been protesting high taxes in France. His father was a French Communist Party member. Depardieu himself was a truant, delinquent and drunkard, who left school at 15. He was saved by the French movie industry, which is heavily subsidized by the French state, hence French taxes. Depardieu is a first class ingrate.

Now Depardieu, who made perhaps half a billion dollars in France alone is peeing on France. Literally so. Not only does he drive the wrong way on one way streets while cameras are rolling, but he actually peed in a plane, and not in the toilet.

Hey, who needs France when you can sing with the daughter of the dictator of Uzbekistan, do business with the Castro brothers, cheer for the dictator of Chechnya, enjoy payments throughout the dictatorships of Eastern Europe?

5403 French cheaters, a few thousands Germans, 1831 Italians, according to Eurostat, have become Russian citizens in 2010. Most of them are wealthy tax evaders. Rushing to take advantage of the Russian 13% flat tax rate on income and capital gains, a dream come true for plutocrats. Ironically the 13% rate was instituted to induce wealthy Russians to pay taxes. It is understood that it will be phased out in the future. Putin recently said that, as in France, taxes on luxury items ought to be introduced soon.

Depardieu was offered by Czar Putin a vast terrain to build a mansion, a car, and a job of minister of culture. As a quasi billionaire, Depardieu is happy to accept these free gifts from the Russian people. His residence will be next to where the Pussy Riot protesters are imprisoned. He immediately left Russia for Switzerland to encounter the head of the international soccer association to promote Russia for some world cup.

And yet, the glorious Depardieu vacation in Sotchi and Switzerland could not be all what it could. Not only is Depardieu obviously too obese to ski, but he has a justice convocation on Tuesday, 2 days after getting Stalinist citizenship.

French justice ordered Depardieu to appear in Paris regarding a charge of driving under the influence of alcohol. He actually got into an accident, with nearly four times above the legal alcohol limit. Here is the Dark Side reappearing again.

Depardieu used to be the darling of the French left (when that was profitable to both parties). Now he has become satanic for all to see. How come? This is a particular example of the genesis of the plutocratic effect, in the case of one individual’s psychology. The same happens to entire classes of individuals.

Basically, the persons affected get seduced by the Dark Side, and then so thoroughly enjoy it, that they want more, ever more. Being a leader, and enjoying the leadership status is one of the main component of the Dark Side. Nietzsche used to call that the Will to Power, and deify it (an idea Hitler followed single-mindedly).

The Will to Power is old, very old. It is even older than when it made baboon style, war-like primate societies possible, by perfecting fascism into a world conquering superior psychobiology. So it is completely ingrained in human psychology.

But there are many ways to lead. The ultimate leadership being, of course intellectual, as this is what the species is. Yet all forms of leadership call onto the Dark Side. Hence the fierce battles in academia. Hence the nomination of Stalin and Hitler to the Nobel Peace Prize. All humans confusedly sense that, without the Dark Side, nothing of consequence ever gets done (as Mahatma Gandhi, or Barack Obama, found out). The unfolding of the exact reasons of why this happens is quite elaborate.

One of these reasons: the Dark Side makes tribalism possible. Tribalism is central to humanity: it evolved from it. Tribalism makes human institutions possible. Including science, medical associations, or dignified philosophical societies.

Some will scoff: and how do I dare seize the noblest human institutions, and tie them to the Dark Side? But look at the Catholic church, or whichever Muslim hierarchy: in the fullness of history, although peace is their mouthpiece, they caused, directly, the death of dozens of millions of dead, and more than a millennium of terror.

And the case of Gandhi is famous: he brandished non violence against the British, while infuriating the Muslims, thus causing the partition of the subcontinent, leading to maybe ten million dead, while waiting for the great Indian subcontinent thermonuclear war.

By the way, Martin Schultz, a perfect anglophone and francophone, may well be elected head of the European Commission by the European Parliament after the next European elections. And why not? Listening to him, in French, one has more the impression of listening to a Frenchman more than when listening to Sarkozy the American, or Depardieu the Stalinist.

What is sure is that the European parliament will elect the next head of the European Commission, as per the Lisbon Treaty.

So why the English Europhobia? Very simple: up to 15% of English (in contrast to British) GDP is from financial services. And more than that is directly tied to plutocracy, if one includes English tabloids (controlled by the likes of Murdoch, a newspaper heir initially from Perth, Australia, in the lineage Maxwell, a scientific publishing tycoon, riding the public purse). One now knows that PM Blair got brainwashed into the Iraq War. And why not? left to himself, Blair was nothing. Murdoch was an empire, a sort of monarch who already told PM Thatcher what was up and what was down.

Instead, Blair was a good boy, as PM John Major had been before him. Major became a major at major USA based hedge funds. Blair “retired” and made 50 million dollars in just one year.

So now, exposed to continual disinformation, the majority of British stupidly attribute their problems to the European Union. Verily, their problems are not caused by the EU. Great Britain barely belongs to it; it has opted out of mostly all European institutions. it is not the EU that explains why Italian industrial production is vastly superior to the British one. It is rather finance supreme.

Britain blocks European construction at every turn. 25 countries have engaged the European Monetary system, three more are associated to it, 17 countries belong outright to the Eurozone. However, British vetoes block European construction, including that of a banking union. While everybody can see that a private banking speculation crisis caused the European financial crisis (the states got dragged into it while trying to save the private banks with public money).

Britain is like Depardieu: rendered grossly insane by the plutocratic phenomenon. meanwhile in the USA, health insurers are starting to crank up their rates by up to 22% in 2013. Poor Obama found a fancy name for his health care: the AFFORDABLE Care Act. However, in his naivety, he forgot about cost control of those he entrusted with the care of Americans as the farmer entrust the hens to the wolves (a well known method in Hawai’i). When I write “naivety”, I am charitable. A more ominous explanation is that Obama played golf with the wrong people.

Something that happens to people who live in big mansions paid by taxpayers, surrounded by armies of bodyguards, and they believe their minds extent to the end of the universe.

Satan is very crafty, and very cruel. Therein his strength and virtue. It’s the only god some deserve.

On January first 2013, the French government decided unilaterally to tax those of the 5,400 French citizens who pay very low taxes in Switzerland while earning their living in France. Excellent. The Swiss authorities are livid: after all the Canton de Vaud (capital: Lausanne) alone makes 300 million dollars from such tax evaders. No more free ride, no more living like a vampire, sucking French blood, Suisse!

Not that this new found will to resist tax evasion by the wealthy exclusively French. The USA has put increasing pressure on Switzerland, encouraging Italy, Germany and France to do the same. (This is one of the rare sectors where Obama has acted as a real democrat instead of a playing as dead as a plutocratic carpet.)

PM Cameron, the lazy and cowardly Europhobe, did something like this in Jersey, an island tax haven, a few Weeks earlier. He insisted that some Brits in London who insisted to pay (no) tax in Jersey, ought to be taxed in the UK (that can be up to 50%).

Some Jerseyists (?) spoke of independence (from Britain). A problem easy to solve by sending a few Royal marines, or French gendarmes. Who do these parasites think they are?

Why can Belgium or Switzerland, and many other banana haven countries afford low taxes? Why does France (or Britain or the USA) have high taxes? Well, very simple; in 1939, there were only four large modern armies in the world: Hitler’s, Japan’s, Stalin’s, and France’s. Only one democracy, and three dictatorships were well armed. We know what happened next: more than 70 million dead, nearly 5% of mankind.

The situation has not really changed. If we reverted to the military situation of 1939, with only the French republic with a serious army, the result would be quickly the same.

This is in no way surprising. The Roman legions were withdrawn from Britannia, Germania, and Gallia, for budgetary reasons in 400 CE. It is not that the economy was collapsing. The plutocrats were refusing to pay enough taxes to keep the dozen legions concerned.

The Roman state left the Franks in charge of defending much of Western Europe. Although the Franks were initially successful in Germania, they then ran out of luck, and massive invasions followed within six years. Then, and only then got the land ravaged in Britannia, Germania, Gallia, Iberia, and 4 years later, in Italia itself, and soon enough, Africa when the vandals made it there.

Thus one has to conclude that taxes are not just about fairness, and preventing the plutocratic effect. They are also about preserving the appearance of a republic.

France, the USA, Britain, Germany, and Italy have used increasing force to combat tax evasion and thus plutocracy, in recent years. They should not hesitate to use maximum force. After all the military force of France is about a billion times greater than that of Switzerland.

It is not just a question of defending democracy, or civilization. It is a question of not being dominated by the Dark Side. Without the rule of love supreme, humanity cannot go on. It’s love who has to tell the Dark Side what to do, and not the converse. Therein true goodness and wisdom.
***
Patrice Ayme