Euro Derangement Syndrome

Abstract: Paul Krugman’s campaign against the European currency is reaching new heights of absurdity. In his frenzy, he now advocates catastrophe, any catastrophe, “to exit from the euro“.

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Paul Krugman passes in the USA for the “conscience of a liberal”. He is now recommending to invest in the future, insisting that debt for jobs or education is no sin, as I was doing several years ago.

However, Krugman has also Euro derangement syndrome. Paul Krugman wants Greece to become like Argentina. More specifically he recommends that Greece follow the disastrous sequence of events that started in 2001 in Argentina.

That, especially for an economist, is astounding. In 2002, Argentina defaulted and inflation reached 40%. Only during the month of April 2002, inflation in Argentina was in the double digits. In four weeks, prices officially augmented by more than 10%. This is what Krugman recommends for, would have liked to happen to, Greece, Cyprus… Anything, anybody, whatever, to break the Euro. Euro derangement syndrome.

As we will see, Argentina’s economic situation, upon a severe collapse of the financial system was much better than that of Greece, or Cyprus would be. Argentina has everything, including a giant, extremely fertile territory,  extending from the tropics to sub-polar Patagonia. Argentina was once the second richest country in the world, per capita.

However, Argentina is generally recognized by everybody, even economists, to have become a basket case. And that, for political reasons. Political mismanagement was so acute it extended to the economy.

Greece was also mismanaged: there was a civil war after World War Two, between Greek communists, and Anglo-American forces (who already knew what was best for Greece; that ugly war killed more than 158,000 officially, and was accompanied by the adoption/kidnapping of Greek children from internment camps to the USA).

Later a dictatorship of colonels, generaly viewed as put in place by the American secret services (following the orders of Wall Street, a place located few miles from Krugman’s mansion).

Greece was admitted to the European Union, as long as it became a democracy, first. Thus it escaped direct USA management (and tyranny, I avoided the pleonasm). It was a great success. Probably left many an American plutocrat frustrated.

But Wall Street did not forget its old Hellenistic dominion. Goldman-Sacks cooked up the numbers used for the admission of Greece to the Eurozone.  Goldman’s cooked numbers were believed at the Eurostat (the statistic arm of the EU). Maybe because Wall Street has agents throughout the European machinery (Mario Monti, ex Italian PM, and Mario draghi, head of the ECB were partners at Goldman-Sacks).

Of course Wall Street has agents, or should we say brains? all over the (plutocratic) universities of the USA. Such as Princeton, Harvard… Here is Krugman in the integrality of a March 28, 2013, blog post of his:

“What’s the Greek for Corralito?

It’s now three years since I suggested a possible route to Greek exit from the euro: a banking crisis, followed by sharp limits on bank withdrawals similar to Argentina’s 2001 corralito, and then — with the panic argument against exit removed — reintroduction of a domestic currency.

Obviously, that hasn’t happened. Despite intense suffering, the Greek political elite’s commitment to the euro has proved incredibly strong. My analysis of the economics wasn’t wrong, but my political guesstimates were off.

Still, Cyprus is now following the first part of the script. And let me ask again: what, exactly, is the point of remaining on the euro? The convenience and efficiency of a single currency is gone; meanwhile, the future for Cyprus on the euro is one of years of grinding deflation and catastrophic austerity. Is the hope of someday, somehow restoring the status quo ante enough to justify all of this?”

Corralito meant to corral Argentines, as if they were hoofed animals to be domesticated. After being corraled, those fierce stallions, the Argentines, rioted violently. As I said, inflation was 40% in 2002, and GDP per head fell 20% in the three years following the corralito. But that’s what Krugman;s professional advice is. Why? A hint:

Amazingly, the corralito ended up being good business for some American banks. They negotiated with their accomplices in the Argentine government to receive compensation bonds for the “missing” money, which had never really left their banks, only moving from one branch to another. These American banks made richer by the corralito have their world headquarters a few miles from Krugman’s mansion.

Krugman does not seem to have noticed that banks in Cyprus were bankrupt. The situation was exactly that defined by the word: bankrupt. The banks were ruptured. They had to close. They closed for 12 days.

Why, how did the banks reopen on March 28, 2013, on the same day Krugman wrote the note above? Obviously, Krugman does not know. He shows no inkling that he knows, or understand, what happens. In Krugman’s mind, Europe is only a malevolent force.

Banks reopened in Cyprus, because the European Central Bank sent to Cyprus huge shipping containers full of Euro bank notes. That was ONE point of remaining on the Euro: having a currency. Krugman cannot know this, because he sees no point at being on the euro, that’s his metaprinciple, his fundamental emotion that rules over all his logic and data gathering.

Curiously, Krugman seems to be unaware of this basic fact. That the money was shipped by the ECB. Maybe he is unaware that in a free market economy, one needs a currency?

If Cyprus switched suddenly to its own currency, Cypriot debt would explode, the worth of Cyprus would be cut by half, or more, inflation on food and fuel would reach instantaneously 50%. The catastrophe would be immense.

As other texts of Krugman reveal, the Princeton Nobel Laureate is only aware of the first fact, the debt explosion thing, and it thoroughly confuses him. The other facts, which are much more important, although they are more fundamentally economic, he has no idea of, nor does he seem to care.

Krugman does not seem to realize that one can default on debt, but not on fuel, and, one cannot, a fortiori, default on food!

Krugman wants Cyprus to be like Argentina, but does not realize Cyprus imports French wheat, whereas Argentina’s economy turned around after 2002, greatly thanks to massive exportation of extremely expensive soybean to the People’s Republic of China. Details, details untended, and before you know it, the devil is attendance. Argentina is not only completely self sufficient on food, but it’s one of the world’s greatest agricultural exporter. Cyprus is not self sufficient in any of the economics fundamentals, by a long shot.

I will follow quickly with an in depth essay to justify what I just wrote, in more excruciating details, and explore why it is that Krugman has… What, gone crazy? Or is it simply ugly American imperialism, Wall Street style, at its best? Is it simply because, bottom line, Krugman lives richly off a system that has Wall Street as its skeletton?

A system of imperialism and exploitation, so thorough that it pervades the heart, so much so, that the mind goes crazy?

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Patrice Ayme

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Note 1: Is Argentina doing well now? Officially, Argentina has now 10% inflation (but non-governmental evaluations puts it at 25%). The evidence that Argentina is not doing well economically extends to the mental. Argentina is deeply disturbed. So deeply disturbed that it does not mind to flaunt its threatening obsession by islands initially settled by the French (“Malouines” from Saint Malo), 500 kilometers away from the closest Argentinean coast.

 Paul Krugman, does not seem anymore afraid to flaunt his nationalistic obsession than Argentinean leaders are. I like and approve many of the economic policies of president Cristina Fernández de Kirchner. But one has to understand she had to put them in place after generations of mismanagement in Argentina. To have similar policies in Europe could only be the consequence of disasters that have not happened. And will not, because the economic disasters in Argentina were the product of dictatorship. And also of the influence of the Chicago Boys. Are the Princeton Boys any better?

Note 2: There was actually a campaign out there, probably orchestrated by the likes of Goldman-Sacks, complete with doctored graphs, that present “Krugman’s” ideas above.  See the article in “Capital.gr” in 2011. Shall we see Krugman as part of this campaign? Tell us it’s not true, Paul…

Cyprus: Ethics Beats Exit.

CYPRUS, MOSCOW CAPITULATE, AFTER EURO ULTIMATUM, PLUTOCRATS KAPUT!

Good stuff, that Cyprus accord. I got accused of being a German Nazi, or something like that. Beats a good cup of coffee, anytime. Beware indeed of Franco-Germans bearing a ten billion euro gift to the destitute pirates. A new way of doing away with dogs has been identified: drowning them with euros.

By giving an ultimatum to Cyprus, France and Germany forced Cypriots to reach a higher level of awareness. Namely that moral failure does not pay. Plutocrats are going to have to regurgitate up to 40%, of their ill gotten gains.  

Franco-German Plot Enforces Higher Morale.

[French finance minister Pierre Moscovici on the left, plotting world conquest with his wheelchair bound German colleague Wolfgang Schäuble, and IMF’s Christine Lagarde.]

Dixit Wolfgang Schäuble about acerbic critiques of Deutschland: “C’est toujours comme cela, c’est comme dans une classe (à l’école), quand on a parfois de meilleurs résultats, ceux qui ont un peu plus de difficultés sont un peu jaloux” (Translation: laggards are devoured by jealousy).

I used to be highly critical of past “rescue” packages, starting with the Bush-Paulson-Geitner-Pelosi circus of 2008, because modest People, most of the population, the 99.9%, who had nothing to do with the crimes, were punished, instead of the real culprits, who made sure, through their manipulation of the media they own, that they would profit again handesomely. It was joining insult to injury. Squared. But this Cyprus deal is completely different. Indeed, it’s the exact opposite. It’s bringing Milton Friedman, the deregulation beast, and Pluto to kneel. 

What is the Cyprus deal? Well the details are far from being worked out said French finance minister Moscovici. The broad lines are known:

1) the European Central Bank has agreed to fork enough money (“liquidity”) so that banks can reopen in Cyprus, after being closed for nearly two weeks. On top of that the Eurozone, with help from IMF, will fork out ten billion euros through the European Stability Mechanism. (But not to recapitalize Laiki and Bank of Cyprus.)

2) Laiki Bank, the country’s second largest, will be dismantled (broken in two first). That should bring more than a billion euros. It’s the first time since the 2008 financial crisis that a deposit bank is purely destroyed. Accounts above 100,000 euros may mostly disappear. Oopss.

3) deposits below 100,000 euros will be removed from Laiki and transferred to other banks. That’s 30 billion euros (more than $40 billion).

4) deposits of Russian mobsters and other malevolent plutocrats above 100,000 euros will be heavily taxed at Bank of Cyprus.  Tax rate: 30% to 40%. That should bring 4,2 billion euros.

This way Cyprus will bring in 7 billion euros to add to the ten billion that the German, French, and Peoples of another 15 Eurozone nations, with the IMF, in their magnanimity, consent to send over to the greedy needy Cypriots. Greedy because they enjoyed for years 5 to 9% on their savings accounts, while everybody else was copiously stolen by their governments with below inflation returns. Needy because, like the proverbial cigale who danced all summer, they are now 17 billions short.

No more laundering, tax on corporations will go from 10% to 12.5% (same as Eire). Transaction and capital control will be set in place to prevent capital flight, maybe for months.

Olli Rehn, the economy commissar in Brussels promised Cypriots a “very difficult proximal future”.

There is the lesson the plutocratic sycophants or those paid by the Czar in Moscow want you to draw. Then there is reality.

Reality is that, since the 2008 financial crash, the plutocrats and their sycophants have made it so that, we the People, made the banksters, mobsters and plutocrats, rich again, using taxes, debt, and the general thievery of extravagantly low interest rates.

There was a serious ethical problem with this:

Those who caused the crisis did not get punished, and thus the perverse system of individuals, tribes, thoughts and emotions they belong to, stay unpunished, as if they were perfect. Not just that, but they profited from it. Thus the criminals were even encouraged, and criminality lauded. Obama, a president of the USA, no less, sang the praises of his “friend” Buffet (who will make zillions from Obamacare) and his “friend” Jamie Dimon (one of the main operators of the 2008 financial mass criminality).  

Notice that this rescue of the billionaires was a total violation of free market theory: free market theory says that losers get eaten alive, and that’s very good. So why did the losers at, say, Lehman Brothers, got to keep their billions?

Well, the billionaires are not rescued in Cyprus, they are going to get taxed 40%.

Why did the government give more than 50 billion dollars to Goldman Sachs, when it was down and out? Some (who made lots of money out of Goldman-Sachs, such as Warren Buffet,) will say that the business was viable. No. Free market says that business was dead, and should have been eaten.

A business such as G-S was made viable, because, not only did the government give more than 50 billion to G-S, but then made it so that G-S business would be viable, by keeping on with the derivative machinery, huge money gifts (“Quantitative Easing”) and other plots.

And what of jobs for the People? And what of a sustainable economy? And what of saving the planet? Were not these things more important than rescuing criminals from the very instruments they set up to exploit We the People?

Look at Eire (Ireland): private banks failed, the government stepped in, replaced all the lost money, while taking giant debts. Basically the pain and suffering got displaced from plutocrats, very rich people, shareholders, wealthy creditors, to most of society which could afford it the less, and all the less as the criminals had already sent their jobs, and most capital, overseas.

The same phenomenon is on-going in Spain. In Spain giant banks, which were in conspiracy with all sorts of well fed plutocrats are now failing. The Spanish government has stepped in to rescue those worthies, with the money of the poor, putting Spain in a terrible “sovereign” crisis. Why? Well, look at the symbols. The young son in law of the Spanish king, that is a good looking, if brainless, basket ball player, and suspected criminal, owns a ten million euros mansion in Barcelona.

Plutos and their sycophants expect that the Spanish “sovereign”, that is the Spanish People, will come to the rescue, some more, backed up by European taxpayers, those suckers in France and Germany.

However, there is now a socialist government in total control of France, and, differently from the plutophile abuser of the elderly, Sarkozy his name, they can’t justify to tax the French citizenry to save the king of Spain and his hyper wealthy son in law, a vulgar basketball player. That logic convinced Merkel and Schäuble.

Indeed there is another way If You Want To Save The World, Default. This is the strategy adopted in Cyprus. It should be adopted all over. When the hyper rich and their servants get demolished by their own instruments, step aside, and let them be devoured by their own monstrosities, so they can explore the horror of their deviant souls.

Don’t expect Krugman to draw the same lesson. Would that kill his business, influence, career model? Would nobody want to share caviar toast with him in Manhattan? Far from him those terrible thoughts! Instead all he got is that:

…a crisis of confidence that would collapse a country’s banks… Cyprus is there: closed banks, capital controls. In an important sense it’s already off the euro;

[link of Krugman to a completely stupid article by a presumably respected USA economist explaining why a “Cypriot euro” is worth less than a “French euro“, meaning those American economists understand nothing important]

Here is dear Paul, pursuing with this anti-European illogic: [Cyprus]… it has an inconvertible currency, the Cypriot euro, that just happens to be pegged to the other euro at a parity of 1. Why, exactly, should this parity be sacrosanct?

… Cyprus is now very overvalued — not only have the big capital inflows of yore dried up, a major export industry — offshore banking — has just died.

OK, there are still some considerations: access to ECB lending, possibly anti-inflation credibility, and general relations with the European Union. But Cyprus is now almost surely facing the prospect, not of recession, but of deep depression. Is this worth it?

Of course, it’s worth it. First look at the ten billions. Ten billion euros for one million people, that’s a lot of money. in absolute numbers, that’s more than four times the financial support of the USA for Israel (and that’s for 8 million people, not just one million).

More fundamentally, think. OK, thinking is hard. The Obama administration just announced anti-ballistic missiles missiles would be boosted by 50% in California, consecutive to Mr. Kim the terrorizing plutocrat in North Korea, who threatened repeatedly to make a pre-emptive nuclear strike on the USA.

No less. That, per se, should be viewed as a war crime, by the way: threat of mass murder, mass terrorism from a government, certainly falls under the Geneva Convention! Time to crack down on those venomous critters. The simple fact that they are so loudly Hitler-like is world-destabilizing.

Thus American economists, learn this, if you can. There are considerations more important than the economic ones. You can’t have an economy, if you don’t have a territory. France and Britain guarantee Cyprus’ security (to keep all Turks unwilling to think the unthinkable invasion of the 60% of the island they did not invade yet).

The military aspect is the fundamental reason why Cyprus is in the European Union. Being in the EU does not just protect Cyprus. It could come in handy in case of all out conflict in the region: the French Air Force could use Cyprus, as it did Crete and Sicily against Libya. Clearly some in France are itching to unleash Rafales against the Syrian Air Force, once Al Qaeda has been annihilated in Mali, and an international force can be fully installed to keep the peace. (And then, of course, there is the little question of Israel, which does not have a single friend in the region… but for Cyprus, with whom it shares an offshore gas field.)

And what of the Czar in all this? Did he recover from his bout of rage, when he found out that his laundry gig in Cyprus was up? Putin and Medvedev were told something in no uncertain terms, because they suddenly fell silent about Cyprus. While they were brought to heel, strangely, Boris Berezovsky, a billionaire, an authentic plutocrat who brought Putin to power (he said through secret, illegal financing), before they got bitterly estranged, was found mysteriously hanged in London. Knowing that some of Putin’s advisers pretend to be proud to be no smarter than bragging street thugs, and that rage operates in futile ways, this is eerie.

Morality is not just about the purity of heavens. In the fullness of time, morality is also about sheer survival, it’s a very basic notion. The economy has to reflect the most basic notions. Good to see Cyprus eventually turned away from the Dark Side. A democratic economy always beats a gangsta economy.

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Patrice Ayme

Raid Treasure Islands, Finally?

Abstract: The plutocrats, plutophiles, and hired guns who dominate the planet have brought a Greater Depression. A punier crisis in the 1930s brought political fascism all over. To avoid a repeat, representative democracies need heavy corrective measures, now. Here is the latest outrage.

Cyprus has invested many times its GDP. In Russia alone. Year after year, for years. Cyprus is a money laundering scheme. One of the many pirate islands around the planet, whose main enterprise is organized crime. Initial violent reactions in Moscow from president Putin and his prime minister Medvedev show that they were party to this conspiracy.

That set-up allowed plutocratic mobsters to buy more and more of Russia. It has also enabled them to purchase a large part of the West. Criminal money, satanic minds, all over, what could go wrong?
Enough has been seen, it’s time to use force.

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Pompeius: Magnus Accomplice to Pirates?

ROME, OR WHY ONE SHOULD KILL PIRACY, NOT PAY IT OFF:

In the late Roman republic, the seas came to be paralyzed by piracy. Roman politicians, busy at each others’ throats, had overlooked the growth of pirate havens. Pirates owned ports, cities, countries. The situation became untenable; international trade was coming to a stop, and Rome depended upon grain from overseas. Pirates were hanging just outside of Rome, Corsica was full of corsairs, very naturally, even a young Julius Caesar was kidnapped against ransom.

Finally the Roman Senate gave full power to a young Gnaeus Pompeius. After a winter preparation, Pompeius sent 13 legates all over. Cicero was enthusiastic: “Pompey made his preparations for the war at the end of the winter, entered upon it at the commencement of spring, and finished it in the middle of the summer.”

Some say that it took just 40 days for Pompeius to re-establish  freedom of navigation. Yet, years later Cicero knew better. He bitterly criticized Pompeius’ work: “we give immunity to pirates and make our allies pay tribute.”

Sounds familiar? If Cicero’s charge is true, it explains a lot of the further deterioration of the Republic. Two reasons to believe it’s true: 1) No anti-plutocratic measure was taken in Rome at this stage.

2) This is exactly what we have been doing since 2008: exacting tribute from the citizens, and paying the pirates. “Quantitative Easing”, that is money given to the very banksters who caused the 2008 crisis was tribute paid by the citizenry, while immunity was given to financial pirates.

The grossest of the gross will claim that we have nothing to learn from Rome. But Rome had a republic, a pretty direct democracy functioning for more than 4 centuries, and that’s still the world’s record in duration. How did the Roman pull that trick?

The Roman republic lived for more than 4 centuries with an explicit limit on the wealth that could be acquired by any given family. It is precisely attempts to break down inchoating plutocracy by application of an existing law enforcing that limit, which brought the civil war that the Gracchi brothers lost. By then the plutocrats had private armies, and they used them to kill the Gracchi and thousands of their supporters.

Conclusion: Crack down on plutocracy, before it cracks you.

So what happened to Rome? Plutocracy kept on going, until by the Late Second Century it devoured the ability to destroy foreign enemies, and then devoured the state. In the Third Century, plutocracy devoured the socio-economy until the military rebuilt society in its image. In the Fourth Century, plutocracy merged with theocracy, and devoured philosophy and the brains. By 400, plutocracy devoured the army itself. The Franks were put in charge of the defense of the North-West corner of the empire.

Next Roman state was replaced by the Frankish state, which was very lean, and Frankish law came to rule. Frankish law enforced equal inheritance in (large) families, and leaders were elected. Plutocracy did not die, but became a shadow of its former self, all the more as brains were re-established under the guise of a church ruled by a secular state, that ordered it to teach secular.

Clearly the Gini Index of the Imperium Francorum and the Renovatio Imperium Romanorum that followed was much lower than that of the Roman empire. Only then could civilization be re-launched. Because there was money to finance progress. Again.

Conclusion: plutocracy is a malignancy, it has to be eliminated ASAP, should one want civilization to go up, instead of down. (And of course nowadays we need more civilization than ever, as the old civilization we enjoyed is running out of resources. Same as what happened to Rome, just way worse, and on a planetary scale.)

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MOOD ABOUT PLUTO CHANGING IN EUROPE:

Injecting 85 billion dollars a month, as USA central bank chief Bernanke announced he was doing, is not enough (although that’s injecting 7% of GDP a year in printed money!). Rats have to be removed from power, prosecuted, fiscal havens have to be exploded, and tax cheat global corporations have to be forced to pay tax where they make sales. Earth’s problem is bigger than just banksters, and oil men.

Such was the hope Obama surfed, before he spent four years flashing his mesmerizing, mile wide, dazzling smile-to-seduce-the-world. And nothing happened.

Fortunately there are inkling that the mood is changing.

The  evidence is coming from Franco-Britannia, the EU, the Eurogroup. Suddenly, laws are passed: Financial Transaction Tax, limiting banksters’ bonuses. Taxing tax eschewing corporations is considered. The latest: telling Russian plutocratic mobsters that they have to pay tax, if they want to go on pumping dirty money through Cyprus.

This turn of civilization against plutocracy, to save itself is slow going. Indeed, the leaders of the West profit of a system rigged by plutocracy. Those elected politicians, supposedly servants of the People, live like kings, in the service of their plutocratic masters. Putting a few in jail, as justice is trying to do in France, may help.

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REVOLUTION BREWING IN FRANCE:

First the good news: the plutophile who was French president a year ago, has been indicted (“mis en examen“). Justice believes there is enough evidence that Sarkozy was “abusing” an old lady, to put him under “examination”. One cannot make that good stuff up: elder abuse is next to Pluto, second only to pedophilia. Meanwhile many prominent politicians are on trial for  what they did in Iraq. French politicians, of course.

Amazingly, the abuser of the elderly, Sarkozy his name, married to a Franco-Italian billionairess, cost French taxpayers 2 million euros a year. The rich is never rich enough, in the mind of the established order of things. The suspected criminal prepares his defense from a 300 square meter office, next to the Élysée! ($250,000 a year in rent, paid by French taxpayers.)

Top Americans politicians cannot be suspected of any wrongdoing; they prey next to god, as they emphasize all the time, and never go on trial (except for the son of Jesse Jackson). Does not matter if they chew down the Fourth Geneva convention for breakfast. In fact Sarkozy is hounded for practices that are perfectly legal in the USA. 

Sarkozy had to hide in the dark, and persuade an old lady it was perfectly OK to give him money. While he was doing what Obama does one thousand times more, just in one day, and while Obama does it for a thousand days, as he buys himself a presidency.

Americans have stricly no problems when they see their president sleeping in a plutocrat’s bed. And if the president sleep in 100 plutocrats’ beds, it’s one hundred times better. Well, in France, it’s illegal, and it’s elder abuse to make the richest lady in Europe believe she is suddenly in Palo Alto, or something, and American law has superseded French law.   

Ex USA presidents cost USA taxpayers at least 4 million dollars a year (without counting their health care cost, and regalian security cost for them and their relatives). Obviously they deserve it: they all are extremely rich multimillionaires, and the richest get subsidies, so that low lives can dream even more.

Meanwhile in Spain more and more people are imitating the king, his family and the PM: they are living outside of the law. In the region of Andalusia, unemployment is at 35%. Low lives have started to seize government property, and cultivate food to survive. I guess austerity has met ingenuity.

French President Francois Hollande confided that “the unthinkable is now becoming possible, in France and many other countries, I know what I want to do, the problem is I do not have much time to succeed”.  By “unthinkable” he means the return of fascism.

Some may scoff: “who cares about France?” But France is the brainy spider in the middle of the European web. The decider on Cyprus was clearly the French finance minister Moscovici (in full accord with his wheelchair bound German colleague). Interestingly, France is also of one mind with Britain, and not just about Mali… But about taxes!

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FRANCE & BRITAIN ASK OECD TO FIND WAYS TO TAX GLOBAL PLUTOS:

It is clear that France and Britain have had enough with mobsters (aka tax cheats). The governments there are on opposite ends of the political spectrum, that makes their alliance all the stronger. Alliance? Were not they trying to eviscerate each others’ budgets recently?

Conservative PM Cameron has realized that austerity alone does not work (as many have pointed to him with relish). British GDP numbers are worse than in the 1930s “Great Depression”. To relaunch the economy, Cameron reduced top tax margin from 505 down to 45%. Yet, Cameron is running a terrible deficit, he has to increase revenue.

Can taxes be augmented in France? The newly elected Socialist French government knows it has taxes as high as they can get without having the Sans Culottes take over. Indeed the Constitutional Court barred the proposed 75% proposed top tax margin rate (throwing the law out, although it had passed!). Then the Council of State followed on March 21 2013 by declaring that the top rate ought to be no more than 66%.

(The USA has neither a Constitutional Court, nor a Council of State, but it has a Supreme Court that plays with the constitution, when plutocracy is at bay, contrarily to, well, the constitution…)

So both the French and British government discovered the only solution: get those who pay no taxes to contribute, by force.

There are two main types of those: 1) multinational plutocrats, 2) multinational corporations.

So Mr. Osborne, the UK finance minister and his French colleague, Mr. Moscovici, sent a check to the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development, based, in Paris, France). They asked this economic organization of the 34 most developed countries to find out how to tax multinational corporations.

there for a decade or so, The head a OECD an ex Mexican finance minister, Mr. Gurria partly educated in the USA at Harvard. On Saint Patrick day, march 17, 2013, he flatly declared on Tele5Monde (French speaking world TV): “les multinationales ne paient pas d’impots” (“multinationals do not pay taxes”).  And he added in no uncertain manner that this had got to change. He is very happy with the Franco-British checks. And

So even Osborn is determined to tax an entire category of international plutocrats and corruptocrats. Gurria insisted that it was Osborne the Conservative, and not Moscovici the Socialist, who launched the initiative.

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MAKING AN EXAMPLE OF PLUTOCRAT ASSAD:

For me, plutocracy is, first of all, the rule of the Dark Side without any overwhelming justification from the Light Side.

This being said, Assad’s family is filthy rich in the traditional sense, having stolen We The People more than quite a bit. His shop-alcoholic wife used to support London’s luxury stores, and now she has fled to Moscow, one of Assad’s cornucopian source of weapons (the other being Iran, thanks to Iraq). She and Putin can commiserate of the fate of their funds in Cyprus, I guess.

To make their meaning clear, that the days of arrogant plutocracy are numbered, France and Britain announced they will ship soon to Syrian rebels absolutely lethal French and, or, American anti-aircraft missiles. The Americans do not even have to agree, because the French Mistral are even faster and more deadly than the American Stingers.

The essence of the matter is to make revolutionary secular forces win the war, because otherwise Russian inspired, or Salafist inspired, plutocrats will surely win, and establish their terror, strong as they will be after killing a million or so. Not intervening in the Spanish Civil War had been the fundamental mistake of France, Britain, and the USA in 1936… OK, intruth American plutocrats were fully on the fascist side (with fuel, ammunition, weapons, and Texas oil). At least, this time, those three are no as inert… 
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CYPRUS ULTIMATUM:

Cyprus’ banks invested heavily in Greece, while paying, year after year, interest rates between 5% and 9%, for years. Cyprus’ banks need immediately 17 billion Euros to keep on operating.

The Eurogroup (mostly the finance ministers of France and Germany) agreed to give ten billions, if Cyprus found the rest. As the Greek church is part of the state there, it could easily sell part of itself, and find the money. Another solution is to tax plutocrats. There are 8,000 (mostly Russian) plutocrats in (nominal) residence in Cyprus.

The European Union gave a banking ultimatum to Cyprus. I saw that one coming. Cypriots had a good run. Money from their tax haven. Hush money. Who protects the tax haven from, say, Turkey? Franco-British military force. Do Cypriots pay for the Franco-British military establishment? Now they will.  

Moscovici agreed to lift the limit of reimbursement to 100,000 euros. (I don’t see why, as those accounts made huge money in the last few years!) That means the Plutos will be taxed at an even higher rate. 25% has been suggested.

There can be NO run on the banks, as all accounts have been blocked in Cyprus. Even the smallest ones. Plutocrats are given a choice: be taxed, or go bankrupt.They can’t even escape, because of capital controls. The days of Cyprus as a tax haven are over. Let all other tax havens join them at the bottom of the sea.

The problem with plutocracy is not just the plutocrats themselves, and the institutions that serves them. It’s also the general mentality that crimes pays, and the more criminal, the more paid one is.

That psycho mechanism, that crimes pays best, has to be broken at some point, and the point is now. Otherwise one would down in the sort of catastrophe that affected Germany. Nietzsche screamed in writing, by the 1880s, that Germany’s mood was turning from ugly, to criminal, and even mass criminal. Nietzsche even explicitly accused Kant. Indeed, Eichmann in Jerusalem, tried for the assassination of more than one million people, brandished Kant’s moral system as his justification.

Nietzsche was not listened to by Very Serious Germans. Why? Because Germany was a successful, run-away plutocracy, ever more fascist to fight the socialists. When Bismarck, no shrinking violet, nor fanatical socialist, finally understood a monster was born under his loins, he was thrown out, and Nietzsche’s prophecy, the destruction of Europe by Germany, proceeded.

We now have the same situation, on a world scale.

Plutocracy, fascism and depletion of resources (including climate) are all entangled. if we did like the Romans, and let our civilization go down, we would not have, like the Romans, a plan B. For the Romans, plan B, as it turned out, was the Imperium Francorum. 

What is therefore needed, immediately, is to traumatize plutocracy. In all sorts of ways. Exploding the island tax havens is a good start.

It’s a new paradigm. Common financial commentators in the USA whine to high heavens that trust has been breached, never to be seen again. Quite the opposite, a new trust has been established. It’s all about trust. Put your money in a tax haven, TRUST the European Union to tax it.

Spare nought. Cyprus today, Monaco tomorrow.

Even Monaco Has Got To Go

Of course, it’s traumatic. Voltaire gave a moral order:”Il faut ecraser l’infame!” (“One ought to crush infamy“) Traumatizing infamy comes before crushing it thoroughly. What else?

So it’s very simple: give an ultimatum to every single tax haven. The truth about these havens is that they are a modern form of piracy. Their relationship to the West is even more abusive than that of Rome’s pirates to Rome. Indeed, they are just another face, another interface, of Western plutocracy with the the weak it’s abusing.

The exact charge against Sarkozy is “abus de faiblesse” (“abuse of weakness”). It’s highly symbolic

In the case of Cyprus, it can submit, or be kicked outside of the Eurozone, to join the fishes at the bottom of the sea. Against the Russian mafia, a greater force has to be employed, and examples made. After years of tremendous interest rates, Cyprus’ parliament has stupidly decided to be greedy in the line of fire. Excellent.

***

Patrice Ayme

Truth Is Hell: Iraq, etc.

TRUTH DIGGING CONSISTS IN UNMASKING EVILS:

Abstract: I celebrate the Iraq invasion my way, pointing out some of the devils, or evils traditionally ignored. The lack of learning after the disastrous Iraqi crusade is directly due to the persistence, in the USA, of the power structure that brought the war. The war itself was a giant red herring to hide much worse, the collusion between Washington and some of its worst creatures.

A red herring that between 2003 and 2007, killed more than a million Iraqi. A red herring that caused morality in the USA to collapse, and stay collapsed, every day that the war criminals are not prosecuted (interestingly many major French politicians are on trial in France for unlawful activities in Iraq… for much lesser alleged crimes than the ones Bush and company would be charged with).

Often devils (O’Connor, Saint Louis, Joan of Arc) are still viewed honorably.

With Saint Louis, the Dark Side overwhelmed any other side. Contrarily to his reputation. [In the Sainte Chapelle, Paris, 76 meters high, that he had built in 33 months.]

This failure to perceive devils for what they are is a consequence of the same cognitive-moral failure that brought us Bush, and his adulation by the sheeple. A lack of attention to the details, where devils lurk. Ever since there were evil beasts, and they wore camouflage, precisely because they were evil.

Democracy only survives if a truth machine, elucidating all hidden devils. If the devil is in the details, only the devil knows the truth. Truth should strive to go where evil lurks.

***

WITHOUT CORRECT DETAILS, HISTORY IS JUST THE HOUSE OF DEVILS:

“All tyranny needs to gain a foothold is for people of good conscience to remain silent.” Said Edmund Burke, who added: “Those who don’t know history are destined to repeat it.”

Sounds good. Yet in Burke’s mind, his version of history called to invade France, destroy the Constitutional government there, and  replace it by the Ancient Regime of time honored plutocrats and theocrats. Never mind that king Louis XVI himself had spent all his long reign trying to make plutocrats pay. The alternative was default. So Louis called for a revolution.

Burke yearned for the likes of Saint Louis. Somebody who kills in good faith.

Saint Outside, Devil Inside.

Saint Louis was a co-patron of the Order of Saint Francis. By modern standards, he would have been caged immediately (see below). Nice to see the present pope being unaware of these intricacies. So he was with the Argentinean dictator Videla who he used to feed.

Never mind that Louis XVI himself, as king, had initiated, condoned, and literally signed on the French Revolution. Burke’s murderous policy was implemented, bringing the death of millions, in France alone. And many times that, over all of Europe. Armies roamed from Lisbon to Moscow.

In the end, Human Rights won, which revolted Burke so much, that he thought moral to risk killing much of Europe for it (as France was three times england, and as the government there was constitutional, to call for an invasion was to call for devastation throughtout Europe, as, indeed, happened).

Unfortunately for Burke and his followers, Human Rights are now the core of the charter of the United Nations. That god who Burke had the presumption to help, is in full retreat, except in the most desolate places (that will include the vacuity of many an American youth’s mind).

Burke was a hero to crypto-fascists such as Hayek and Friedman, who provided the “intellectual” justification for atrocious dictatorships from Chili to Argentina, all the way up to Mexico, just as Heidegger provided it for Nazism. Hayek, Friedman and their ilk, actually provided the ideology  for the new plutocratic order we are enjoying nowadays, all the way to Moscow, Cyprus and Dubai. (More on these forsaken pirates havens in another essay soon.)

So Burke lives to this day, in very many places, including the red hot anti-French hate among a significant part of the Wall Street journal readership (I’m a subscriber, so in a good position to judge.)

In a similar vein, the famous elected German chancellor, Adolf Hitler, started his mesmerizing work, “Mein Kampf” with pages of (anti-French pseudo-) history. Same idea as Burke: hit on human rights hard, right away. Only then did the fascist Guide switch to the ethological description of Jews in Vienna.

By April 1945, and 70 million dead later, the Guide conceded he had been misguided all along about the Germans and the Slavs.

So it’s not just enough to remember history, it’s important to know history, that is the facts as they really happened. History is about the details, and the devils therein, all of them. Leave none unturned.

***

PLUTOCRACIES USE THOSE POOR DEVILS, MERCENARIES:

In “Marches Of Folly“, an excellent editorial, Paul Krugman asks: “Did we learn anything from Iraq?”.

“Ten years ago, America invaded Iraq; somehow, our political class decided that we should respond to a terrorist attack by making war on a regime that, however vile, had nothing to do with that attack.”

Let me comment  here right away on Krugman’s “somehow”. “Somehow” is the crux. A quick historical reminder helps to understand the madness that gripped the USA.

A similar situation happened after the Second Punic War. Carthage’s own mercenaries revolted, and attacked Carthage. Carthage defeated them with great difficulty.

Why did Carthage employ armies of mercenaries? Because it was a plutocracy. At that time, the Roman republic was a rather direct democracy. So Rome could bring up armies of citizens, who were fighting for themselves. Self motivation made Roman soldiers much more determined than any of their paid adversaries.

The lesson of that disaster was that Carthage had to become much more democratic. Ironically, considerably enriched by conquests all over, plutocracy simultaneously took Rome over (and that was going to lead to the crash of Greco-Roman civilization).

How does this relate to the “somehow”? Very simple.

Carter, the very Christian president, had launched war, secretly, against Afghanistan. Although he had entire armies of goons at his disposal, the Geneva Fourth Convention violator in Washington needed more, to attack an entire country. Using a mercenary army raised by the Saudi plutocrats was the solution implemented in 1979.

Al Qaeda was initially an organization created by the CIA and the Saudi Intelligence Agency: they literally went to fetch the young Osama Bin laden in Turkey. As he was very pious, the bellicose side of the Qur’an could be manipulated to guide him, by making him believe he was as good as anyone to interpret the sacred texts. Then the godless goons taught Al Qaeda how to conduct asymmetric warfare against the Afghan republic (attack schools, not the military).

The entire political, plutocratic and propaganda class of the USA was immersed in all this. And it worked well for 15 years, until, well, just as with Carthage, the mercenaries understood they were being played, and underpaid. Then they turned against the hands that had taught them. The result: an asymmetric war between the gigantic army manipulated by Washington and the mercenary force. And then 9/11.

By then the Washington establishment had to admit everything, namely that, since 1945, it had instrumentalized Salafist Islam, in Arabia, Egypt, Iran, Algeria, etc. Or then it had to deny everything, and be more in power than ever. It just had to tell a good story, and stick to it. The story was that on 9/11, the sky was very blue, and then planes came out of nowhere…

Just charging bin Laden presented the inconvenience that some were bound to dig, and ask how bin laden appeared on the scene. It was best to go charge an enormous red herring first, with the largest imaginable lies possible ( a technique used and explained by no less than the German Chancellor above). The very size of the lies would have distracting properties, all by their absurdity.  So Powell went to the UN with kindergarten drawings.

How does one disguise all this mess? Under which carpet does one hide it? Well, war against Saddam Hussein. (It also had the advantage of destabilizing the Middle East, and that is to Israel’s colonizing advantage.)

***

PLUTO PROFITS FROM WAR, ANY WAR:

Here is Krugman again: “Some voices warned that we were making a terrible mistake — that the case for war was weak and possibly fraudulent, and that far from yielding the promised easy victory, the venture was all too likely to end in costly grief. And those warnings were, of course, right.

There were, it turned out, no weapons of mass destruction; it was obvious in retrospect that the Bush administration deliberately misled the nation into war. And the war — having cost thousands of American lives and scores of thousands of Iraqi lives, having imposed financial costs vastly higher than the war’s boosters predicted — left America weaker, not stronger, and ended up creating an Iraqi regime that is closer to Tehran than it is to Washington.”

Counter-intuitively, many of the war party of the USA love a bigger and more influential Teheran:  with a bit of luck, Teheran will do like Saddam, feel overconfident, and offer a casus belli. Then full war against Iran could be joined. However, of course, not all wars can be won. Overall, although it may not look like it to the clueless, the war against Iraq was a defeat for the USA.

The USA has a lot of false friends in the Middle East. The SIA is feeding Al Nusra, a Syrian Salafist army in Syria, and something will have to be done about that, and soon.

Krugman again: “So did our political elite and our news media learn from this experience? It sure doesn’t look like it.”

Why would they look as if they learned something? That would mean they went, somehow, through something untoward, that something adverse happened, to THEM. It certainly did not happen to them; they are richer, and more domineering than ever. Fortunes were made. Not far from New York, a war profiteer built for himself a sort of Versailles. Don’t expect to see this sort of data points, or giant architecture, appear in USA Main Stream Media (it was on French TV).

***

ATROCIOUS WAR CRIMINALITY IN IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN:

The USA invaded Iraq. Now it has completely lost that war. 4,500 USA soldiers died, and more than that in allied soldiers and mercenaries. Dozens of thousands of other soldiers were gravely wounded and millions got psychologically damaged by suffering, or inflicting extreme violence.

After the terrorist attack on Sept. 11, 2001, Tomas Young, then a 22-year-old from Kansas City, Mo., made a naive decision parroted by many other Americans around the country: he enlisted in the military in hopes of getting even with the enemies who killed nearly 3,000 men, women and children. Little did he know that those enemies were in Washington, where the war had been fully engaged July 3, 1979. Little did he know that these enemies were just American mercenary forces. As a good vacuous American youth, he was unaware that his own government had already caused the death of three millions, not three thousands, in Afghanistan.

Less than three years later, Young’s Army service placed him not in Afghanistan — where then-President George W. Bush had told the nation the terrorist plot had originated — but in Iraq. On April 4, 2004, just five days into his first tour, Young’s convoy was attacked by resistance fighters. A bullet from an AK-47 severed his spine. Another struck his knee. Young would never walk again. For the next nearly nine years, he would suffer a number of medical setbacks, and now intent to die by withdrawing treatment. Neofascists should not worry: Young will not count as an Iraq war casualty.

From Young’s letter, published on TruthDig:

I write this letter, my last letter, to you, Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney. I write not because I think you grasp the terrible human and moral consequences of your lies, manipulation and thirst for wealth and power. I write this letter because, before my own death, I want to make it clear that I, and hundreds of thousands of my fellow veterans, along with millions of my fellow citizens, along with hundreds of millions more in Iraq and the Middle East, know fully who you are and what you have done. You may evade justice but in our eyes you are each guilty of egregious war crimes, of plunder and, finally, of murder, including the murder of thousands of young Americans—my fellow veterans—whose future you stole.

Young goes on to attack the “cowardice” of Bush and Cheney for avoiding military service themselves, and to encourage them to “stand before the American public and the world, and in particular the Iraqi people, and beg for forgiveness.”

(Read Young’s entire letter here.)

Not to worry: plutocracy is also a mood, where all values are inverted. Greed is viewed in more regards than altruism. As far as Bush and Cheney are concerned, Tomas Young is just a loser, with not enough brains to make the correct investment.

It goes without saying that international law ought to be brought to bear on all war criminals. Justice is not just about trying Serbs and Africans. Plutocrats should qualify too.

One of the USA’s main axes of exploitation, since 1945, has been to instrumentalize Salafist Islam. That was initially used against Britain, France, and even Israel (times change…) The difference between now and 60 years ago, is that many of the Salafists have realized they have been played (and first of all the Iranians; OK, technically the term “Salafist”, the “old ones” does not usually qualify Shiites, but I am generalizing, for semantic convenience!)

The hostility of the USA against the French republic during the Franco-Algerian civil war made a bad situation irreversibly worse:

***

ONGOING FRANCO-ALGERIA DRAMA:

51 years ago, on March 19, 1962, the Evian Accords finalized the transfer of power from the French Republic to the (“Algerian”) FNL (Front National de Liberation). Officially, this was a good thing, a step forward, the flow of history. In truth, it was basically a transfer of power from one terrorist organization, to another.

That was a disaster for the populations concerned. About 15% of the people living in Algeria fled, living everything behind, and many committed suicide. Algeria has known dictatorship ever since, first from the FNL, then from the military. Hundreds of thousands were killed in the following decades, at the hands of terrorists (from official Algerian numbers).

There is no doubt that the French state behaved extremely badly in Algeria, starting in 1945. Before that, it was just behaving badly. There is also no doubt that the FNL was an extremely nasty terrorist organization.

So there is nothing good to celebrate there. And the mayor of Perpignan, a major French city had the courage to recognize this simple fact today, that a very bad thing happened on March 19, 1962. The mayor ordered to bring down the French flags, and circled them with black.

Truth always start with an emotional admission. Even in mathematics, or science.

The politically correct emotion about the Evian Accords has been, for 51 years, that they were good, and necessary, however grim it was to sign them. They went with history. Nothing, of course, could be further from the truth. The French republic’s abuses in Algeria were not wiped out clean by another 51 years of abuse, starting with abusing truth.  

Confronted to that sort of past, in Algeria or Iraq, where reality is viewed as unbearable, there is only one principle worth having first. Namely that the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, can prevent nasty outcomes. Especially those lies festering to this day.

Because, of course, the basic reasons for the Franco-Algerian civil war, are festering to this day, just on a grander scale. And now, the USA, instead of pulling nasty (Salafist) strings from the shadows (against France, BTW), is now on the frontlines (with France, happily).

The main reason why Germany is, finally, doing so well nowadays, is that a lot of the truth finally came out about some very bad ways German minds used to consider politically correct to operate under, while knowing no others.

***

WITH SAINTS LIKE THAT, WHO NEEDS DEVILS?

Not that only Germany has to be freed from simplistic, hence devil laden history. It’s not just that the American Founding fathers were slave masters. By contemporary standards, Saint Louis was a vicious criminal, and, at best, would have been interned as an insane maniac (he had declared, in writing, that nothing could be more pleasing to him than planting a knife into a non believer’s gut, and then playing around with the blade, once so inserted; why the Catholic church considers such a creep a saint rests on the fact that Catholics are not familiar with the lives of their most famous saints… and of course, that the church hierarchy is deeply evil).

Speaking of saints, the most revered Joan of Arc was a peace breaker. Paris and London had come to terms, and decided to reunify the kingdom (Treaty of Troyes). The king of England reigned over France. Unfortunately, he died within 2 months. His infant son was supposed to reign upon his majority. Wise people in England and France knew that this was an excellent arrangement, because, France being much bigger than England in all ways, there was no risk she would be gobbled up by England (contrarily to misrepresentations ever since). End of the 100 years war.

But then Jeanne, or rather the forces behind her (Yolande of Aragon) , from the south (Armagnac, Bourguignons, etc.) stepped in.

Jeanne restarted the Franco-French(-English) civil war. This time London and Paris were on the same side. Jeanne had quite a difficult time seizing Paris. Why such a divisive theocratic war monger is admired to this day is no mystery. Once Bush was selected, I mean when Charles VII had been unconstitutionally made king, there was no turning back. Jeanne d’Arc had to be made into a saint, or at least the judgments against her thrown out.

So will say it was better that England and France kept fighting each other for another 4 centuries: war is a force that gives us meaning. Perhaps. However, it’s neither wise, nor glorious not to teach in detail the reality of what happened. What happened is that Joan of Arc is another Christian “saint” who killed millions, and whose message, bloody sword in hand, voices from god in her head telling her war was all we needed, for no rational reason, is really not something one anyone wise would want to promote.

History is sometimes made by rats. As the famous sayingobservation has it, a rat gnawing through a dike can drown a nation. Now to this list of most creative creatures, we can add Sandra O’Connor, a so called “Justice”. Not only she has no notion of history, or justification, but that most fundamental human instinct, regret, central to learning anything important, has been extinguished in her. Her excuse? She is a “Westerner”. (Is that supposed to mean she has a gun instead of a head?)

Speaking of handing the presidency to plutocrat Bush, the vacuous Sandra reverted to a three year old persona. Said she: “There’s no point in my, at this point, saying I regret some decision I made. I’m not going to do that.”

Another bratty behaviour she may want to consider is to stop breathing and turning all blue until wiser people take pity. The Sandra girl by ordering to NOT recount Florida, gave the presidency to plutocrat Bush. The one who won the popular vote by two million, and also won Florida, Al Gore, was given a Nobel Prize instead of the presidency of the USA, to calm his nerves!

The point, O’Connor baby, is that, by saying that you regret your unconstitutional demolition of democracy, you would turn your back to Pluto, and join humanity. At least, symbolically speaking. That’s better than nothing. And better than staying forever, in the judgment of history, not just somebody who should never have existed, a one person democracy destroyer, but someone who persists into not even regretting her badness, contrarily to, say, Darth Vader.

It’s astounding one has to spell such an elementary truth to a big time Supreme Court “Justice”. Why are people such as these next to god? (Answer: because their very mediocrity insures that they will do the bidding of the plutocratic order.)

As the Romans knew, but O’Connor, and most of the truly bad soldiers of evil, do not want to admit: Errare Humanum Est, Perseverare Diabolicum! (Error Is Human, Persevering Diabolical!)

Going for the truth, and yanking it out of the entanglements where it lurks is always hellish in character. After all, woe onto those through whom scandal arrives.

Jean-Paul Sartre said: “Hell, it’s the others.” (L’enfer, c’est les autres): that was a neologism, an unusual way of using “autres”. It is mistranslated as “Hell is other people”, a different idea.

More generally, hell comes with the full reality that requires us to understand we would become obsolete, lest we change our minds. It may be painful to visit hell, but that’s where the hardest truths are lurking. Being ultimately good means turning hell into heavens.

***

Patrice Ayme

Revolutionary Science

Abstract; Some of the interaction between plutocracy and science. As it turns out, well established science is very revolutionary, and plutocracy may have interest to swipe this under the carpet by promoting anti-science (as revolution is contagious!).

***

There is something called TED talks where authoritative speakers, often with commending, not to say commanding, British accents, distill a wisdom compatible with the reigning oligarchies, and a clipped delivery. Although the subjects vary, the tone seems to be always the same.

“TED” stands for “Tech, Entertainment, Design”. Anti-plutocrats should be aware that TED banned a talk where Nick Hanauer pointed out that “rich people don’t create jobs”. TED did not find Hanauer entertaining. Thus we know that, by design, TED applies the technology of eradication to some “ideas worth spreading”. [After getting lots of flak, after this essay was first published, TED reversed itself, and then published Hanauer’s talk. At least for a while.]

“Ideas worth spreading” according to TED, are those of plutophiles and plutocrats. So TED gave its ‘grand prize’ to the pseudo-Christian “Bono” of U2 (for becoming a Facebook billionaire?), or to Bill Clinton (for authorizing banks to invest in financial derivatives, instead of the base material world they used to belong to, before their elevation to the derivative universe?).

In a book called “Science Set Free” (USA), or: “Science Delusion” (UK) Dr. Sheldrake challenges notions about science that many take for granted:  Sheldrake itemizes what he calls the 10 “dogmas” of modern science, then tries to challenge them in his own special way.

Rupert Sheldrake was invited to give a TED talk. He is a Ph.D., a biologist, author of more than 80 scientific papers and 10 books.  A former Research Fellow of the Royal Society, he got a Ph.D.  in biochemistry at Cambridge U.  He was a Fellow in Cambridge, and Director of Studies in biochemistry and cell biology.

Here is the default world view of science educated people hold, according to Sheldrake. Every of these scientific dogmas is questionable, he says. As I will show, and it’s spectacular, little does he know…

1.  Nature is Mechanical.
2.  Matter is unconscious.
3.  The Laws of Nature are fixed.
4.  The total amount of matter and energy is constant.
5.  Nature is purposeless.
6.  Biological inheritance is entirely material.
7.  Memories are stored inside your brain in material processes.
8.  Your mind is inside your head.
9.  Psychic phenomena are impossible.
10.  Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works.

(Sheldrake believes in his own weird and unnecessary theory. He does not understand the way units relate in physics, so he went on a flight of fancy from there. He wants young giraffes’ (!) minds to be educated by a mysterious force out there, not realizing that the environment itself is doing so, in subtle and mighty ways.)

What fascinated me, when I came across Sheldrake’s amusing list above, is that the most established recent science itself has thrown many of these dogmas down. So Mr. S. is blissfully unawares of the true state of science. Indeed:  

 1) Nature is Mechanical: we are machines, “lumbering robots” (Dawkins)

What’s outrageous about Dawkins, and many other leading thinkers, is that they do not seem to have a full vision of science. Question: What’s mechanics? It is certainly not about mechanical robots, in the classical mechanics sense. One has to realize that mechanics is Quantum mechanics. And nobody under-stands that. quantum systems have one thing in common with conscious system, namely that they are not completely predictable.

 2) Matter is Unconscious: lots of philosophy of mind in the last century is about proving that we are unconscious.

Right, well…Question: define conscious. Are sleep walkers conscious? Is an electron conscious when it decides to do whatever it’s doing with the 2-slits it seems aware of? Consciousness cannot be experimentally defined.

 3) Laws of Nature are fixed:

Remark: this is under constant check by physicists. When on the moon, the acceleration of gravity, a “law”, has changed. The reason for the suspicion is the fact the universe itself is evolving. Also Conventional Big Bang theory creates universes from nothing; that’s probably why it’s false.

Einstein himself admitted that his theory of gravitation threw down the constancy of the speed of light (be it only because gravitation can make light go around in circle, or come to a stand still).

 4)  The total amount of matter and energy is constant.

First we should know how to detect all the matter and energy, before we assert such a thing. The whole riddle of Dark Matter and Dark Energy is that we can’t do either. So, by astronomy’s own reckoning, right now, we miss 96%, we fail to detect or explain, 96% of the matter and energy out there (WMAP). The WMAP seven-year analysis gave an estimate of 72.8% dark energy, 22.7% dark matter and 4.6% ordinary matter.

This science is so official that the discovery of Dark Energy has already been rewarded by several Nobel Prizes.

 5)  Nature is purposeless.

Question: Are we part of nature? Some of us have purpose.

 6)  Biological inheritance is entirely material.

Question: What is material? Is information material? Is a photon material? If it is, and it is, then information is material. Much of biology is a mix of the inherited, and the informed. Both come from material processes.

 7)  Memories are stored inside your brain in material processes.

What else?

 8)  Your mind is inside your head.

We don’t know what “inside the head” means, because we don’t know how many dimensions the universe really has. Some contemporary physicists have tried to depict gravity as a leak, in three dimensions, of a stronger phenomenon, in higher dimensions. It goes without saying that the same could apply to minds.

 9)  Psychic phenomena are impossible.

I don’t know what a “psychic” phenomenon could be. Control of object by pure thinking has already been achieved in the lab by animals, including Homo.

 10)  Mechanistic medicine is the only kind that works.

Well the placebo effect really exists, and that’s pretty spiritual (as it’s all in the mind!). Speaking of revolutionary science…

***

ARE REMEDIES FOR THE PLUTOCRATIC PLAGUE GETTING FINALLY APPLIED?

It’s not clear the placebo effect will save plutocracy, though. The illusion that bankers and oil men created for us the best of possible worlds is fraying fast. (In spite of desperate counterattacks such as those orchestrated by Sheryl Sandberg, a creature of Larry Summers, soon to be adressed appropriately on this site.)

Real, mechanical, old fashion remedies against the plutocratic plague are on the way. The European Union ordered Cyprus to levy a 10% tax on plutocrats’ bank holdings. Otherwise, the EU will let Cyprus go bankrupt. It goes without saying that Cyprus’ days as a tax haven are over, should Cyprus’ Parliamentpass the law it has been ordered to pass. Meanwhile, ATMs are blocked.

In other anti-plutocratic news, France and Britain threatened to send sophisticated anti-aircraft missiles to the rebels fighting the major plutocrat Assad. They gave what boils down to an instructive ultimatum to the rest of Europe.

By instructive, I mean that many countries that were clueless when confronting Hitler, are now incited, by France and Britain, in a pedagogical manner, to learn to assume some anti-fascist standing. For some of these countries, it’s like learning to walk. It’s an occasion for them to learn. Obviously, France and Britain will act, and Obama’s admirable USA, quite differently from Roosevelt’s despicable, cowardly and greedy USA, will follow.

Even Conservative PM Cameron had his fill with (Assad’s) outrageous plutocracy, so he offers to roll out the missiles. Nice.

***

Patrice Ayme

MATH “EXTINGUISHED” NEANDERTHALS, Mostly.

HOW & WHY (SOME) NEANDERTHAL TRAITS WERE OUTBRED:

Abstract: Considering what is known about Neanderthals’ physiology, especially their mass, and brain development, they were at a reproductive disadvantage relative to the more gracile and less energy demanding Homo Sapiens they met. In combination with quasi-extinction events, and exponential demographic recovery, the dilution of Neanderthals’ genetic traits, except when vastly superior, was thus ineluctable, as observed.

So it’s not the fittest traits which survived Neanderthal-Sapiens interbreeding, but the most easily reproduced traits. This generalizes to other evolutionary situations, and provides with a new mechanism for the machinery of evolution.

***

Many racist theories fester around the “disappearance” of Neanderthals. The latest one, from Oxford University, claims that Neanderthals’ big, beautiful eyes, and their big muscles caused their demise: Neanderthals were too busy looking at things, while flexing their muscles. The “idea” is that larger eyes would have crowded the Neanderthal brain out, making them relatively stupid. How stupid can Oxford get? In particular eyes made them incapable of having social groups as large as those of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

Big Eyes Do Not Kill

Sapiens girl on the left, Neanderthal girl on the right (reconstitution published in Science Magazine a few years ago).

I have long argued that the strength of democracy came from having many brains working in parallel. There is little doubt that larger social groups bring a higher cultural intelligence, hence higher individual intelligence. So I agree about that bit of logic. Yet, ironically, to reach the conclusion that Neanderthals’ social group were less numerous, the simple fact that Neanderthals were bigger, is enough. There is no need for hazardous demeaning allegations about Neanderthals’ brains.

That big eyes made Neanderthals stupid contradicts some facts that were thought to be established:

1) Sapiens Neanderthalis’ brains were significantly larger to start with. See Wikipedia.

2) Many very clever Homo Sapiens Sapiens have small brains. Famously Anatole France, an intellectual, had only a 1,000 cubic centimeters brain. Homo Floresiensis, the “hobbit” species living on the island of Flores, Indonesia, until it was wiped out recently, was extremely intellectually capable, although it had really small (and completely different) brains.

3) In the Middle East, Neanderthals and Sapiens went back and forth through the same large caves over 50,000 years. So whatever happened, it was not in evidence for 50,000 years.

So, of course, I have my own theory. That’s what philosophy is all about: trying to guess what really matters most, and how that most significant data logically articulate. Then scientists, politicians and writers can swoop, figure out the details, and attribute themselves the glory.

What could have happened by around 28,000 years ago that caused the demise of Neanderthals? At the time, the last fierce glaciation was gaining ground. (It reached its maximum 25,000 years ago.) Some have argued, absurdly, that the Neanderthals could not take it. That’s beyond silly, as Neanderthals had evolved, from half a million years ago, precisely to handle extreme cold.

Neanderthals were stocky, powerful, and they had thrived through hundreds thousands years of glaciation, mostly on a meat diet, hunting big game. But they also knew how to cook plants, and eat them.

27,800 years ago, Cave Bears were exterminated. That huge animal who lived in caves, primed real estate Sapiens Sapiens and Neanderthals craved for. Could the disappearance of Cave Bears be logically linked to the disappearance of Neanderthals? Yes. That’s a consequence of my theory. More advanced technology played a direct role. So did size: Cave Bears disappeared, because they were larger than European Brown Bears (called Grizzlies in America), according to the mechanism below, differential exponentiation.

How did men kill Cave Bears? With technology. We do not know exactly what weapons men had at their disposal. However, technology had improved, and kept improving. Recently it was found that Sapiens Sapiens (Homo SS; I hope one gets the joke) in Africa had invented bows and arrows 80,000 Before Present (BP).  (About 60,000 years earlier than previously thought!) Before bows and arrows, the propeller had been invented, and was used in Europe. The propeller took advantage of angular momentum to send a sort of mini lance further and stronger than by hand.

Why did the Neanderthals and Denisovans (another human species from Central Eurasia) lose their edge? Advancing technology is the obvious answer. When technology of clothing and weapons was sufficiently advanced, the physiological advantage that the Neanderthals genetically had, disappeared. Homo Sapiens Sapiens could thrive just as well through winter.

At that point, Homo Sapiens Sapiens from Africa could be as successful as the Neanderthals through the freezing wastelands of Europe. OK.

But the Homo SS outbred the Neanderthals, so they became genetically more successful. How do I explain that?

Simple. However, the explanation involves the exponential function, the same function found all over, and that the mathematician Rudin called “the most important function in mathematics”. The exponential also explains the plutocratic phenomenon, and that is why it’s so dangerous. The exponential always rules extinction events, that’s why one day a species is all over, like the American Pigeon, or the Tasmanian Tiger, and the next day, it’s gone.

So visualize this. Neanderthals were bigger than Homo SS, just like the Polar Bear is bigger than the Black Bear. Bigness is an adaptation to cold. Southern Europe’s Brown Bears are smaller than those found in Kamchatka, or Alaska (also known as Grizzlies: the Grizzly is an emigrated European Brown Bear!) Bigger makes warmer inside. That’s why the most massive animal that ever was, the Blue Rorqual, at up to 180 tons, is nearly twice the mass of the largest dinosaur (it’s not just that it’s floating, but also that water is cooler than Jurassic air, I hold).

To simplify, let’s use a bit of exaggeration (that’s reasoning by exaggeration, one of my preferred tactic of thought; the one humor exploits, and why joking helps thinking). Let’s assume Neanderthals were twice more massive than Homo SS (certainly, in the average, Cave Bears were twice the mass of Brown Bears).

Now let’s consider an habitat where Homo SS and Neanderthal bands roamed. They will tend not to mix, for obvious racist reasons. The racial hatred between Neanderthals and Homo SS has got to have been colossal. People who look too different are not even sexually attracted to each other (and where Neanderthals and Homo SS were in contact in the Middle East, for 50,000 years, there is no evolution of an interbred species, an indirect proof that there was no love lost there!)

The density of human mass is going to be roughly the same all over, because that density depends only upon the resources available (mostly meat on the hoof, and fur in burrows in glaciating conditions).

Thus, there would have been apartheid. But the Homo SS would have been twice more numerous, where they reigned (from my assumption of twice the mass). So now graft on this a catastrophe; a drought, a flood, a very tough winter, a volcanic super disaster, whatever. The climate was highly variable, starting about 40,000 years ago, just when Homo SS appeared. Some have stupidly argued that Neanderthals were too stupid to adapt to this changing circumstances. Like this paralyzing stupidity struck them just when Homo SS were around. My explanation is more subtle.

After a catastrophe in said habitat, say one of these numerous habitat in Europe isolated by glacial mountain ranges, or seas and lakes, most of the human population would be wiped out, Homo SS, just as Neanderthals. There would tend to be always a small remaining population, because the greatest limit on man is man himself: as a population gets wiped out, resources rebound, and life of the survivors tend to get much easier (that’s what happened in Europe after the Black Death of 1348 CE; if nothing else, survivors could ask for higher salaries from their plutocratic masters, and they did).

So say 90% of the population of the habitat was wiped out. As suddenly resources are no limited, the human population will rebound exponentially. The equation is: N(t) = N(0) exp(Rt). “R” is the “Malthusian” parameter, the rate of growth. Now it’s going to require twice the resources to feed a Neanderthal to sexual maturation (under our outrageously simplifying assumption that Neanderthals are twice the mass). Thus one may assume that R(Homo SS)/R(Neanderthal) is 2. The end result is that the quotient:

Number Homo SS/ Number Neanderthal = A exp(2t). (Where A is the ratio of the populations H SS/Neanderthal after the catastrophe.)

Thus the population of H SS would exponentially grow relative to that of the Neanderthals, resulting in a quick extinction. And in no way this is happening because Homo SS were superior. Just because they were more gracile.

Another factor is that Sapiens had a larger reservoir of population to the south of Europe and the south of North Africa, in sub-tropical Africa, so Sapiens could come up from the south in great numbers, especially when the climate was cool enough for the deserts, including the Sahara to be covered with savannah-park… an environment for which more gracile Sapiens was more suited, and in which the preceding argument about mass of the body would apply.

It is known that the climate fluctuated violently where Neanderthals lived and had evolved for. The consequence was potentially lower population expansion when exposed to invasion by Sapiens whose genetic reservoir (the South) was mostly a refuge from said wild temperature fluctuations (so, although the climate would massacre the Neanderthals in the north, the Homo SS in the south would be ready to expand much more, from a larger population, and thus expand into the north; this is a question of comparing two exponentials again, the one starting from a larger population grows faster) .

When the temperature fluctuated up, Sapiens populations could invade relatively
recently more sparse Neanderthal habitat, which had brought Neanderthals to a near-extinction event. This, accentuated by interbreeding, would have led to quick Neanderthal gene replacement (replacement, because of interbreeding).

Why didn’t the replacement of most Neanderthal genes by Homo SS genes happen before? Because the advancement of technology. That was partly led by Neanderthals, but whatever Neanderthals invented was transmitted to the larger Homo SS population, and made Neanderthal genetic advantage redundant. Moreover, the relatively smaller Neanderthal population, all other mental things being equal, would have been exposed to the Tasmanian Effect (See my enormous essay, the Tasmanian Effect, which considers various traps small populations can fall into, among other mental, and thus demographic disasters).

On top of that, technological advances insured that life was becoming possible for Sapiens in Eurasia. As Sapiens encroached, Neanderthals kept on living in more difficult, fluctuating places, thus propagating the extinction.

Hence the mystery of the evolution of contemporary man is smoothly explained. Just a bit of math. QED.

Europeans & Asians: Not Just African

***

Patrice Ayme

***

Note 1: what of the mentally deliquescent and racist article in the Proceedings of the Royal Society? First, they sank so low as to “using orbit size as a proxy, that Neanderthals had larger visual systems than contemporary AMH [Anatomically Modern Humans]“. That’s about as intelligent as saying that, because special forces use night vision goggles, they have got to have bigger visual systems.

The main woman author also found the same physiological feature, bigger eyes, in the past, about people presently living at high latitude. She contentedly asserted that, because light levels are lower in the north, people living in the north (40,000 years at least for Homo SS) have bigger eyes. Amusingly, she did not draw, in that case the conclusion that Norwegians and the English are therefore more stupid. Somehow, though, in her lack of smarts, she applies that controversial reasoning to Neanderthals. Does she have giant eyes?

Seriously the Oxford study rests on a central fact that contradicts one of established facts about Neanderthals. Indeed it claims Neanderthals’ brains were not any larger than Homo SS.

***

Note 2; what catastrophes am I talking about? Well the climate fluctuated wildly, to start with. Second, A Campanian ignimbrite volcanic super-eruption around 40,000 years ago, followed by a second one a few thousand years later, certainly crashed Neanderthal populations (based on logic, and evidence from Mezmaiskaya cave in the Caucasus. Mitochondrial DNA analysis of a specimen there is C14 dated 29,000 years BP, one of the latest living pure Neanderthals). After such a catastrophe, the exponential rebounds of populations would have advantaged Homo SS, as explained above.

***

Note 3: OK, I exaggerated with the mass ratio. (Mathematicians often do this, considering an exaggerated case to understand the mean, through the tails.) But the real mass ratio would be aggravated because, Neanderthal was built in such a way, relative to gracile Homo SS, that they consumed more calories per day (some paleontologists have come up with 300). So there is no doubt that the effect above will play a role, even if the mass ratios were not as bad. Notice the mechanism above would tend to extinguish the Neanderthal traits that were most characteristic of the subspecies.

***

Note 4: A preferred trick of Neanderthals’ haters is to exhibit Archaic Neanderthals‘skulls, and compare them to those of modern men. The skull of an Archaic Neanderthal of 400,000 years ago should not be compared to a modern human, less than 40,000 year old! All the more since Neanderthals’ brain size augmented faster than the brain size of Homo Sapiens Sapiens.

***

Note 5: NEAR-EXTINCTION THEORY: WHY DINOSAURS DISAPPEARED: SAME MATHEMATICS! Part of the mechanism above generalizes for other species in competition. It provides with a disappearance mechanism after ecological turbulence, according to species’ ecological footprint. The reasoning can be generalized to other species’ extinctions. Let’s recapitulate the preceding, while generalizing it:

1) it is hard to transform a near extinction event into total eradication (see the Black Plague of 1348 CE). Indeed, the more the extinction, the easier it gets for the survivors, as resources rebound (this is similar to the famous lynx-rabbit oscillation).

2) However, larger animals (Neanderthals, DINOSAURS), or animals with a higher metabolic load (Neanderthals) are going to be to be left behind exponentially, during the rebound phase.

In the case of Neanderthals the periodic catastrophes could have been of climatic origins (waves of cooling, warming and unstable climate as the earth underwent various tipping points, one way or another, into the occasionally severely glaciated period between 60 K and 11 K BP. A severe volcanic catastrophe or two would have added near extinctions episodes.

In the case of dinosaurs, the massive Deccan eruptions, over millions of years, culminated with the most acute episode, more or less contemporaneously with a massive asteroid impact (!). According to the exponential extinction theory above, the back and forth of near extinctions would have put a severe extinction pressure on the dinosaurs and the like, as smaller, more efficiently active mammals and birds would have put huge pressure on dinosaurs and flying reptiles (same in the sea).

T Rexes had to grow by three kilograms a day, for years (same for Triceratops, etc.). A huge energetic demand on the land… While smaller mammals could go through generations, adapting to changing circumstances…

By eating dinosaurs’ eggs to start with, mammal and bird population would have exploded very fast back up at any relief in the hyper volcanism catastrophe. And the more they rebounded, the greater the pressure on dinosaurs (This would have happened in addition to other extinction pressures, such as cooling.)

See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/trapped-by-super-traps/

Note 6: A first reading of the ideas above may lead one to wonder why it is that small species do not overwhelm big ones, when they are in competition. But, in normal circumstances, one has an equilibrium ecology, the equivalent of equilibrium thermodynamics. the effect above does not apply. The effect above, exponential extinction, occurs only during non equlibrium ecological dynamics, as found during near-extinction events (hence the importance of near-extinctions). It’s the equivalent of non equilibrium thermodynamics (when Prigogine suggested the latter, he was viewed as nuts; until he got the Nobel Prize). An example of this situation would be a proximal super-nova eruption showering Earth with radiation.

Nuke Bad Comets

IT’S THE ONLY WAY (TO FULL EMPLOYMENT, AMONG OTHER THINGS).

Abstract: Appropriate use of technology is paramount, as civilization tremble, and the Earth turns into a gas chamber. The way drones have been used to kill extra-judicially in violation of the Fourth Geneva Convention, is deeply inappropriate. Yet, drones can be used very appropriately on a battlefield. But to use them to bomb millennia of Western morality, is definitively inappropriate. Our technology is turning us into gods, but we better be smarter than the Greek ones of lore. Remember what happened to the Greeks.

The way nuclear energy has been used has often been inappropriate. Yet, nuclear energy shortened up World War Two by several million deaths. Nukes could also save billions, should a bad comet suddenly appear.

Comet Pan-STARRS Visible This Weekend

The comet pictured above was detected by the Pan-STARRS telescope in Hawai’i. It’s a “sun-grazer” comet with an elliptic orbit of 106,000 years (so it’s predictable). Perihelion: .302 AU, March 10 (today!). So it is getting as close to the sun as Mercury gets periodically.

Guess what? By a troubling coincidence one such bad comet has precisely just surprised us. OK, it’s not coming for us, but how many of those are there out there? Obviously more than we thought.

Space faring nations with the appropriate technology, nuclear, military, electronic and ballistic, such as France and the USA, should make well financed contingency plans to prepare to engage such a giant object with a nuclear bomb upon very short notice. This is not trivial, because of the unusual speeds and energies involved. The technology would also allow to intercept “city killer” asteroid, even with only a few hours’ warning (after dialing down the megatonnage of the bomb).

Only nuclear energy would work to deal with large impactors, forget big tales for small children, about painting them blue or something. One does not deflect comets with brooms, or firecrackers, but with an explosive energy a million times greater than what Genghis Khan used. That we fortunately have mastered. If we are masters of our souls, we can be masters of fusion.

***  

A BIGGER BANG:

Cosmic warnings are piling up. On January 3, 2013, a comet was discovered. It’s called C/2013 A1. It is on a hyperbolic trajectory, and moves in a retrograde orbit. That means it may be extra solar, and should be leaving the solar system. Maybe it is coming from outside the solar system.

Comet C/2013 A1 is on a collision course with Mars.

October 2014?

Even The Economist, the rogue free market magazine I subscribe to, in “Hits Keep Coming”, thinks that the big governments’ program promoted by the present essay is a good idea, and would give something meaningful for NASA to do. 

A crucial articulation of the present Greater Depression is that people in Western countries are running out of meaningful things to do, as the plutocracy has deliberately robbed them of employment and power, thus meaning. This essay speaks of struggling against comets, but that will not happen, before a bit of class struggle.

C/2013 A1 is a completely different style of comet from Pan-STARRS. C/2013 A1 is hyperbolic, not elliptic. It means that the comet has so much kinetic energy that, should it not collide this something first, it will escape the Solar System.

C/2013 A1 will come so close to Mars that it may well hit it (comets, because they emit jets of steam, behave a bit like rockets: they can go sideways). Should C/2013 A1 collide with Mars, the event should be most remarkable.

The current estimate of the absolute magnitude of the nucleus M2 = 10.3 indicates a diameter from 10 to 50 km. Worse: the energy imparted is proportional to the square of the velocity, and that velocity is very high, much more than what is needed to escape the sun. C/2013 A1’s speed would be approximately 56 km/s by the time it approaches Mars. By comparison the Solar System’s escape velocity in the vicinity of Mars is 34km/s! The comet has more than twice the energy needed to go visit other stars.  

The energy of impact on Mars, should it happen, might reach the equivalent of staggering 20 billion megatons of TNT!

***

SPACEGUARD NEEDED:

We are lucky that C/2013 A1 is heading towards Mars and not Earth! One has to understand that big planets are for comets like honey strips for flies. They attract them.

That effect protects us. Jupiter is our existing Spaceguard system: it sucks in comets. Jupiter has 318 times the mass of the Earth, making it literally 318 times more attractive for comets (from the gravitation law that Isaac Newton reminded us a scientifically minded French priest had found earlier; often misattributed to Newton nowadays, in a spirit of manifest Anglo-Saxon, hence Wall Street-City of London supremacy).

Two large comets collided with Jupiter in the last two decades. That changed the mood among professionals.

Pre-Socratic philosophers would have been fascinated by all the understanding we have gathered on all these celestial bodies. They were already fascinated, as all this astronomy shook their metaphysics to the core. Before Socrates, it was thought that thinking had to do with learning about what was out there. (After Socrates-Plato-Pluto, it was thought the universe was all about what was in one’s heads. And, sure enough, within a century, plutocracy, Macedonian backed plutocracy, had won all over… Except the Roman republic. Who said metaphysics had no impact?)

In 466 BCE, Halley’s comet passed by for the longest time, 75 days. Simultaneously, an enormous meteor (perhaps associated to the comet) crashed into Northern Greece. A piece, as large as a wagon, landed on the ground and stayed a tourist attraction for more than 5 centuries. That shattered the ancient theories of the Greeks about the heavens. Anaxagoras’ science came to the fore.

The Greeks would  have been fascinated by Comet Shoemaker–Levy 9. Irresistibly attracted by the giant planet, that 15 kilometers diameter comet came too close to Jupiter. Shoemaker-Levy, quartered by Jupiter mighty gravitation, broke in 70 pieces or so, and went back to space. Still irresistibly attracted, the comet, now a train of comets of all sizes, hit the gas giant on its next pass. The pieces entered the Jovian atmosphere, making giant black impacts in it.

Each of the largest 7 fragments’ explosion was bigger than Earth herself. One explosion made a giant dark spot over 12,000 km across, and released an energy equivalent to 6 million megatons of TNT. That unreal succession of impacts into Jupiter in July 1994 blasted smugness about the stability of heavens to smithereens. Astronomer David Levy stated: “The giggle factor disappeared after Shoemaker-Levy 9”.

As the comet would pack 20 billion tons of TNT, something packing a few million tons of TNT may help Earth to negotiate with it. I want pacifists munching grass placidly in those vast, awesome Elysian fields in their heads, to meditate upon that.

***

JUST ONE SOLUTION. NUCLEAR ENERGY:

Nuclear energy, because of the basic reason that, by a factor of a million, nuclear energy is the greatest energy source we have. This is why the main problem of our civilization has become the problem of nuclear energy. How to use it appropriately, and not freak out.

If the comet were heading towards Earth we would be scrambling to put together a giant thermonuclear weapon. It could be done. The French republic, by itself, could do it, using in-house equipment. The chance of success, though would approach 100% if, and only if, one were to prepare well, in an international program.

Lots of Uranium 235, and Lithium 7, for a bigger bang, in the monster fission-fusion-fission thermonuclear device we would be hastening to prepare. One of several (because we would need back-ups). If we were really pressed for time, we could rigged together several conventional nuclear warheads, packed together to explode simultaneously. 

As NASA puts it in 2012: For non-technical reasons, this would likely be a last resort, but IT IS ALSO THE MOST POWERFUL TECHNIQUE and could take several different forms, as discussed in the report. The nuclear option would be usable for objects up to a few kilometers in diameter. http://impact.arc.nasa.gov/news_detail.cfm?ID=183

The efficiency of a thermonuclear explosion is augmented by an order of magnitude if it happens three meters below the surface rather than on contact, one centimeter above the surface. So NASA (2012) has proposed to extend the Nuclear Explosive Device with a frontal penetrator which would create a three meter crater. Easy computations show that, had the hyperbolic comet headed towards Earth, the interception speed would have been at least 80km/s, meaning that the thermonuclear fusion sequence would have to be started just before first contact.

Fast Electronics Required @ 80km/s

Of the shelf H bombs could take care of comets a few kilometers across.

The power of nuclear devices is hard to fathom. The Castle Bravo device made a crater in the atoll reef. Although it was exploded 7 feet above the reef, the crater  had a diameter of 2 kilometers (6510 ft), with a depth of 80 meters (250 ft). It would have been much worse if it had been buried by 3 meters (five kilometers across, 160 meters deep).

For larger comets, a true bomb from hell would have to be devised: a fission-fusion-fission with a powerful third stage. A third stage is simply a Uranium envelope around the thermonuclear bomb. When it gets hit by “fast neutron” from the H bomb, it fissions in turn. The largest bomb ever tested, Tsar Bomba, over the arctic island of Novaya Zemlya, was 58 megatons TNT. It was deliberately made with NO third stage. (And the second stage may have contained some lead, instead of uranium.)

It’s not that a third stage is hard to make; it’s just uranium metal. But Soviet physicists computed that, with a third stage, Tsar Bomba would have been too powerful. The plane dropping the bomb and its parachute would have been destroyed, to start with. As it was windows were broken more than 1,000 kilometers away, in Finland and Norway. Because so little uranium was used, relative to the Lithium Deuteride fusion fuel, the mightiest bomb ever was also the cleanest, ever, at 97% pure fusion. (Fusion is cleaner because it fuses light elements to create slightly heavier, but still light, elements, and light elements tend not to be fission, or then not for long.)

By enriching the third stage tamper with U235, one could probably go beyond 200 Megatons (and such a tamper could be rigged around conventional warheads, too!).

Thus, contrarily to urban legend from luddites in denial, the largest thermonuclear bombs could take care of the largest comets.

Man-Made Fireball 8 Kilometers Across.

The largest comets are 60% larger than the entire picture, if one uses the fireball as a measuring unit.

Even the largest comet would fragment and the pieces would rocket away. If done a few weeks before Earth impact, clearly all the pieces would miss (another rocket or two would be in back up, just in case).

***

BACK TO THE CATASTROPHE SCENARIO:

So let’s suppose again that C would be headed towards Earth instead of mars.

The next Ariane V would have to be modified hastily. Why Ariane V? First, that flight is already being assembled. It is Flight VA213, signifying the 213th launch of an Ariane from French Guiana since the family’s maiden liftoff in 1979. Its Automatic Transfer Vehicle, named Albert Einstein, would have to be modified with a booster, interception electronic package and basically a boom system in the front to detonate fast enough the nuke in the back, at the staggering speeds involved, so that the bomb can explode at 3 meter depth in the comet… 200 megatons against 20 billion megatons. Fun. Unreal reality.

In general, Ariane is the most dependable, most frequently launched rocket in the West’s arsenal. So it should be part of the quick reaction force to be assembled, as one would need to fling a hefty load.

***

IS IT ALL REAL?

When “experts” come, and talk about the frequency of impacts, the truth is that we do not have any idea what it is, up to a factor of ten, or more. It is certainly higher than what experts used to believe. three cometary impacts, or near impacts of comets on planets close to us in 20 years is a bad omen.

I was listening to National Public Radio where some scientist from John Hopkins pontificated that the asteroid strike in Siberia (which, a few tens of seconds off could well have annihilated a  major city) happened only every century. In truth, on land three impacts about ten times bigger are known in the last century. Scaling with the ocean, one gets nearly ten of these ten times bigger impacts. Not to say that this is the long term average: it could be a fluke. The same stupid guy was saying that, if we had only 6 months warning, we could not do anything.

And he works on preventing impacts! NPR said.

But what he forgot to say is that his program strictly uses the explosive technology Genghis Khan already had at his disposal. (And what happened? After a costly victory in Hungary, the Tumens had to turn back, them and their fancy black powder rockets.)

(Scientists should stop pontificating, or talk as if they knew, when they don’t, reserve that to the Pope.)

There may have been other impacts in historical times. Unrecorded.

Strange events happening in the Sixth Century, recorded by Chinese and Romans (the only civilizations recording anything reliably at the time) could be explained by impact(s) at sea. (Or then a large volcanic eruption, unidentified so far.) Those events, whatever they were, altered the climate.

Some will smirk, and ask to see the craters. Celestial bodies colliding with the Earth are not on any kind of trajectories. They are ruled by the sun, that is they tend to have trajectories similar to the Earth, but at an angle. So a typical impact will involve a low angle atmospheric entry, spreading death, fires, shock waves and devastation for thousands of kilometers. A crater will not necessary form (elongated craters have been found in Argentina). And remember, 2/3 of Earth is water.

Speaking of which, a proposed impact, the Mahuika impact, 1443 CE, off the south coast of New Zealand, would have been gigantic, typical of a mini comet 500 meters across. There is some evidence for such a cometary impact, from the existence of a crater, from Maori evacuation of the area, to suspected tektites, to suspicious ice cores in Antarctica, to megatsunamis, up to 220 meters high in the region (and 143 meters high in Australia). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mahuika_crater

So much for these things being rare.

***

CHANGE THE MOOD ABOUT MOODS:

In recapitulation: learn to do what you can do about what matters.

Lord Martin Rees, Astronomer Royal, Nobel Laureate, etc. in Science Mag. editorial “Denial of Catastrophic Risks”, March 8, 2013: “In a media landscape saturated with sensational Science stories and “End of the World” Hollywood productions, it may be hard to persuade the wide public that real catastrophes could arise as unexpectedly as the 2008 financial crisis, and have a far greater impact. Society could be dealt shattering blows by the misapplication of technologies that exist already … we should be more concerned about events that have not yet happened but which, if they occurred even once, could cause worldwide devastation.”

What Rees is saying is that we should change MOODS. We should change our system of mood. Preparing for a comet impact, and how to defeat it would help to change the mood we have about moods.

We need to learn to deny our Denial of Catastrophic Risks.

And we learn to do something about catastrophic risks we have identified (I call this new way of thinking catastrophic calculus). Having an active Spaceguard program against asteroids and comets of all sizes and origins, hyperbolic or not, would be a good symbol of the new attitude we need to adopt. Besides, it would reduce unemployment, and push technology forward.  That’s appropriate.

***

Patrice Ayme

Swiss Fight Pluto!

Abstract: The Swiss People, in defiance to the Swiss plutocracy and its attached mob of greedy sycophants, has struck a blow against the extremely wealthy, self perpetuating class of those who rule corporations in defiance of their owners.

Most of these owners are (very) small investors. So this blow for ownership is actually a blow against one of the pillars of plutocracy. That pillar uses corporations to steal other people’s money in a particularly blatant way.

How? By creating what I long called the CEO CLASS the entanglement of corporate boards with executive power in corporations (See the essay of November 2008 on Reforming World Finance). Here is the graph of CEOs compensations versus average salary, USA. (It’s a French translation, because the Berkeley original has magically disappeared from the WWW!)

Rise CEO Class. Jump Under Clinton!

USA CEO salaries are the two top curves, with their logarithmic scale on the left. The (lamentable) average USA salary (not indexed by inflation) crawls on the bottom, with its scale on the right. Source: Anti-Plutocratic French site.

CEO payments climbed up to about 500 times that of the workers in top companies in the USA, but only 15 times in France, 12 times in Germany.

[Interestingly, I searched for days this graph in USA search engines; although of USA origin, Professor Saez, UCB, it is (not so) mysteriously unavailable in USA search engines; a friend suggested I look at Google.France, and there was plenty there! Clearly the USA plutocrats cleaned the World Wide Web carefully, so that their English bound sheeple read only appropriate information! Nothing like the happy bleating of the sheep to fill a sheperd’s heart.] 

The entanglement of CEOs and the corporate boards supposed to watch over them, is reminiscent of, and probably inspired by, the entanglement of political and business power in the USA. That public-private entanglement dates from the early 20C: think of JP Morgan intervening in the 1907 crash, or think of the diversion of German property towards USA plutocrats after 1918 (don’t worry, the building were all the giving of seized German property was given to USA plutocrats burned down around 1922, erasing the tracks of grand thievery…).

A behavior that is widely admired in the USA, that of the towering CEO with an astronomical salary bestowed on him or her by a board of co-conspirators, is now criminalized in Switzerland. Such CEO and director thugs will be punished by a mandatory confiscation of 6 years of income, plus three years in prison.

In the USA, CEOs and their boards are immensely admired. The connected ones sit on corporate boards at an early age, to be paid extravagant sums of money, while doing nothing, but allowing CEOs and their minions to steal all the companies profits, from small shareholders, and workers.

Thus, Americans will now know that, by admiring CEO and boards, the American way, they are admiring what Europeans are increasingly viewing as criminals, and criminal boards of directors. OK, as slave masters long admired, I guess they have trained hard, and they will not suffer anguish that way.

Yet, one can hope that this criminalization of a motive of admiration should help with a worldwide readjustments of values.

So far, so good. But there is a twist. Why is it that mutual funds of the USA have supported so much the CEO class and its interlocked boards? Worldwide?

Well, the CEO class part of a larger conspiracy with the financial sector, where the real money is made. It is my pleasure to give some pointers. Those pointers, in turn, will allow to criminalize further said vaster conspiracy.

Meanwhile, all democracies should pass laws similar to the one Swiss representatives are now constitutionally obliged to pass. It is, of course, a consequence of Switzerland having a higher democratic index than any other country that explains that such a popular initiative was taken there. It’s clearly not a case of a country being run by rabid leftists.

***

EVIL IN A FEW WORDS, & ITS IMPLEMENTATION BY CORPORATIONS:
Evil triumphs when good people do not fight it. Why? Because the default state of humanity is strife. This is the point rabid pacifists keep on missing, it’s also the point Obama made in Stockholm, when he got his Nobel. It has been well known since there are men, and they think.

Nothing personal: because of its domination, the genus Homo evolved to control itself, quite bit as wolves do, by killing each other. The Romans abstracted this as: Homo Homini Lupo, Man Wolf Of Man (more than 2,000 years ago). Just like wolves, only more so, because we dominate more.

All species need to be kept in check, and the check of man is man.

But how does man fight man? Like all other social animals, by mobbing, or tribal fighting. So tribal effects have to be watched severely. The most famous tribes are the 200 or so nations and territories more or less represented at the United Nations. But there are other tribes, all over. The most ubiquitous being corporations. (What is meant by “corporations” varies in time, nations and space, but the tribal effect is what unifies them.)

The founders, and early presidents of the USA, so called “Founding Fathers” were fully aware of this.

As president and thinker in chief Jefferson wrote: “I hope we shall take warning from the example and crush in it’s [sic] birth the aristocracy of our monied corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength and bid defiance to the laws our country.”

The “example” is that of England (as the rest of the text makes clear). This is taken from a letter to George Logan, Nov. 12th, 1816. There’s a PDF file with scanned images of an edition of Jefferson’s works at this address.
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WHY THE SWISS CRACK DOWN ON THE CEO MAFIA:
It is no coincidence that Switzerland, the most democratic country, was the first to ask We The People, in a referendum, what they think about the feudal class that is taking over, armed with neofascist ideology.

The answer, delivered March 3, 2013, is that 68% of the Swiss believes that the conspiracy of thieves that has come to dominate civilization, should be forcefully terminated.

Superficially, Switzerland is doing better than ever. GDP expanded in 2012. GDP per capita is nearly twice that of the USA (at nominal rates, not cheating PPP). But these good numbers and nice surroundings mask the fact that the wealthy have been doing incredibly better, while the plebs has lost ground. Most Swiss cannot afford to own there, to start with. Two-thirds of them rent (whereas 55% of French next door own their homes 100%). That way they are like the inhabitants of most “rich” cities of the West in that they can’t afford to live where they work.

An increasing inflow of tax avoiding and tax mitigating plutocrats makes the Swiss increasingly conscious of a feudalization of the country. For instance, most of the world oil trading is conducted out of Geneva, now that London is proving less tax friendly to the world’s richest sharks. That makes Swiss property values skyrocket, and also make average Swiss, like average Belgians, hold the tax bag.

Yet Switzerland is less subjugated by its elite than other “representative democracies”.

This has to do with history. Other places were typically founded by large imperial machines (France, Britain, Germany, USA, Ex British colonies, Portugal, Spain, Spanish colonies, Italy, Russia, Netherlands), and, or slave societies (Spanish colonies, Brazil, USA, Russia). Some countries may look small now, but degenerated from empires. The Netherlands even conquered England; Denmark, Portugal, and Sweden ran empires (Sweden thought it owned Ukraine and Russia for a millennium). The present Swedish regime was founded by Napoleon, etc…

Instead Switzerland started as a rebellion against the family that would run the “Holly Roman German Empire” for centuries. The birth of Switzerland was fundamentally an anti-plutocratic rebellion. Same in the USA, sure, but only that other revolution minded plutocrat, Louis XVI of France, made in possible (in more ways than one). The Swiss revolt was indigenous.

Any initiative signed by 100,000 people can be presented as a referendum in Switzerland.

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SWISS CRACK-DOWN ON CEO CLASS:

Initiator of the “Rip-off Initiative” Thomas Minder is an entrepreneur industrialist, and right wing politician, who nearly lost his company when Swissair went bankrupt (from obscure financial maneuvers). In recent years, Mr. Minder observed that the world was put on its knees in the service of financiers. This is exactly the point demonstrators were making in Portugal this week.

As Portuguese demonstrators said, why should they sacrifice because infinitely rich bankers cheated? Or went mad? Or conspired with other rich fat cats to rob common people? Why is it that Portuguese people without money now have to pay to use the public hospital, when those who have caused the disaster keep on flying in private jets, shuttling among their mansions, worldwide?

As I said already more than 5 years ago, there is a CEO class. CEOs sit on each others’ board, and attribute each others’ salaries. OK, they are often more crafty, and use agents: relatives, or protégés. It is particularly clear in the USA, where it’s all about who you know really well: see the Summers-Clinton-Summer-Google-Facebook Ms. Sandberg (just a small example).

And it’s even more than a CEO class.

***

CEO CLASS AS A MULTIPLIER:

The CEO Class can be instrumentalized to divest power to talent that will serve plutocracy well.

A lot of people of power are able to transfer quickly and efficiently power to their children, or people they know will serve their children faithfully. It’s happening everywhere, especially in the USA.

Suddenly all powerful young people rise in the USA to seats on corporate boards: thus they are made to integrate the CEO Class, board side. Careful inquests always show connections with the powers that be. See Geithner, head of New York Fed, then tax cheating Treasury secretary, ah, but the son of Geithner (Geithner’s father was a Ford Foundation director who met with Obama’s mother… All and any connection with the painting behind Hitler in his Munich office will not be made, recommended an angel that passed by, dripping with finance…). Geithner was successfully vetted at Kissinger Associates, a plotting organization to connect plutocrats, corrupt politicians and other worldwide tyrants. He was put under the wings of Rubin and Summers (like Facebook’s billionaire woman, the genius feminist Sheryl Sandberg). Geithner was prepared to serve his masters well.

The CEO-boards Class systems enable the plutocratic machine to put large amounts of power to servile critters. This  is how ‘black’ women of the Rice class, such as Rice, Susan and Rice, Condoleezza, were all powerful by the age of 30 (the former a member of the National Security council, thanks to dad, a treasury director, the second on prestigious CEO boards all over, and a supertanker was named after her, because her masters at Stanford had determined she would serve her masters in the Dark Side well… still does: she is a towering member of the CEO class in 2013). Not that I have anything against blacks or “blacks”…

“Are they worth it?” Asked The Economist. While knowing very well the answer was no. One thing the extravagant growth of the CEO Class did not grow is corporate profits:

CEO Class Rising, Everything Else Lagging

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WANT DEMOCRACY? CUT POWER IN TINY BITS, DISTRIBUTE WIDELY:

Minder’s “Rip-off Initiative” was designed to prevent bosses from receiving huge bonuses by decision of a CEO class. So it makes it harder to congeal a CEO class: board members should serve only a single year.

This, by the way, is something to meditate in a more general way… In the Roman republic, the judicial, military, economic and political executive was incarnated by the Consuls. They served just one year (although they could be elected again: Marius was elected Consul 7 times!). And even in that year, ultimate power switched from one to the other, every month.

Republican Romans knew how fragile the Res (Thing) Publica was. Don’t laugh. The Roman republic, in full, lasted five centuries. Still the world’s record.

Now what we have is, what would have been called in the times of Julius Caesar, (elected) kings. The immense powers the president of the USA are perfectly ridiculous, especially when, as Obama, he does not use them. (An apparent worshipper of Satan, complete with devilish smirks, such as G. W. Bush, did not have such reservations: such a creature never will, by definition!)

Minder’s anti-plutocratic initiative says that companies cannot decide to give their executives “golden parachutes”. Salaries of board members, and companies’ executives will have to be approved by the companies’ owners. That is, by the shareholders. That, by itself, of course, is not enough, because the plutocratic web is entangled in all power structures, and sucks the substantific marrow.

When Novartis gave 71 million Francs ($77 million) to its CEO, Vasella, to the fury of the very numerous small Swiss shareholders of Novartis. The small shareholders could not do anything as most of Novartis’ shares are held by plutocratic institutions, which are part and party to the plutocratic phenomenon.

What plutocratic institutions accomplice to the CEO Class and the financial rip-off sector, am I alluding to? A lot of them are mutual funds in the USA. Or funds for retirement funds. Those used to give rich returns, but, in recent decades, they have faltered. Why? How come? well it’s part and parcel of the worldwide take-over by rich money managers. It may sound strange that they strive towards subpar performance: it’s an apparent violation of the free market principle.
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WHY MUTUAL FUNDS MANAGERS CONSPIRE WITH THE CEO MAFIA:
The naïve free market principle says that, when a mutual fund has subpar performance, the shareholder should move to another fund. Yes, sure, but what if they are all subpar? What if there is a conspiracy? Because, clearly that is what has been systematically going for like 20 years.

The funds are losing money right and left because the function of fund managers has become mostly to transfer money to the financial fat sharks of the plutocratic class. You know the ones they share the caviar toasts with. Thus small shareholders and retirees, present and future, make richer, ever more, the richest people in the world.

There is actually a closed circuit similar to that between Washington and private corporations and partnerships. Individuals operate as public fund managers for a few years, wasting a lot of investors’ money, and then they become “wealth managers”, “private bankers”, “hedge fund managers”, entangle themselves with the CEO class, and politicians, to make the really big bucks, extracting money from the public, including the public mutual funds for little people… or small shareholders of corporations such as Novartis. Don’t ask me for references: plutocratic universities such as Harvard, Stanford, are not too keen to study the subject, as those who profit from it, are their bread and butter.

Conspiracies to distribute People’s money to friends are all over the so called “representative democracies”. Why should not giant government spending be controlled by the People more directly? It can be done in… Switzerland.
***

SWISS DEMOCRACY VERSUS THE GIANT CORRUPTION IN AEROSPACE, F35 STYLE:
Plutocracy is encountering serious difficulties in Switzerland. Besides the “rip-off” initiative above, here is another example.

Some of the Swiss elite, probably paid under the table, had conspired to buy “Grippens“. The Grippen is an excellent plane made in Sweden. But the Swiss Air Force would prefer the superlative, stealthy Rafale, the world’s best omnirole fighter bomber, from the country next door.

The Swiss are going to be asked their opinion… about purchasing the Grippen. It’s pretty clear that, thanks to outfits such as this site, enough of them will know that they are been rolled in the flour, spending billions on underperforming planes (that actually does not exist in the version proposed to Switzerland). So they will vote against the Grippen.

Not so in the USA, And other countries where the people is supposed to pay hundreds of billions to purchase an entirely useless plane, the F35 Lightning II.

The F35 is already the world’s most expensive military project, ever, anywhere. Yet the plane is military incapable, and will stay so. The entire project is flawed (this kind of passive stealth does NOT work, the plane’s range, speed, acceleration, g loads, weapons capacity are puny).

The great peoples of the great democracies such as the USA, Great Britain, etc. are not consulted about whether they want to keep on going with that F35 corruption. The total program cost already more than 400 billion dollars with not one single plane that could go to war. It’s expected to end up costing about a trillion dollars with planes no better performing than the Vietnam war F105… And just as detectable.

But so far, while People go starving in several countries involved in F35 corruption (including in the USA’s Silicon Valley, where hundreds of thousands are on “food stamps”), nobody is exhibiting very much indignation.

***

PLUTOCRACY IS A SEVERE PROBLEM, IT SHOULD DEALT WITH SEVERELY:

The Swiss referendum forces the Swiss Parliament to draft a law giving shareholders the right to hold a binding vote on all compensation for company executives and directors. The law will also ban signing and leaving bonuses for senior managers and push greater corporate transparency. As said above, criminals will be punishmed by the confiscation of 6 years of income, and three years jail.

The Swiss have just struck a severe blow at the plutocrats, exposing them for the conspiring, manipulative thieves they are. Other European countries will be encouraged to follow, including Germany and Britain (in both countries laws on executive compensation are being elaborated, the German law may come up for a vote as soon as next week). The French Socialists will come back with a 75% tax law, that will pass muster with the French Constitutional Court…

The European Union in preparing a law cracking down on bankers’ bonuses. Great Britain is desperately trying to block it, as it will apply there, inside the very the den of thieves, too. But Great Britain will be overruled. It just revealing itself to be ruled by money. Plutocracy in fact, not just from crowned celebrities.

To have kings is bad. To have money as king, is worse.

It is high time that countries that call themselves democracies be as democratic as Switzerland. It would be a good start towards a more intelligent civilization.
***
Patrice Ayme

Elite Censorship

Abstract: In the guise of “moderation”, the New York Times decides what is fit to know. Some data threatening established lies crucial to the established order are systematically censored therein. And that’s worse than dumb.

Human beings are knowledge creatures. Manipulate what they know, turn them into pigeons, and they will come eat in your hand. Main Stream Media knows this all too well. Distortion of data is why the clear and present “Greater Depression” is turning into something worse than the “Great Depression” of the 1930s.

The refusal of looking at reality is what enabled the catastrophic, ongoing, austerity drive. In a self reinforcing loop, much of the austerity is now directed towards the cognitive part of the economy.

Austerity Exploding Up

“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” (European Commission, 2010.)
In truth, what do we see? What the graph above shows: unemployment in Europe is exploding up. Yet, in truth, providing jobs, is the primary object of economy. An economy does not exist only to make financial capital happy.

Progress has to start with truth, in full, thus reality. That’s why censorship is a bad idea, be it in Pyongyang, Beijing, Moscow, or New York. In states of law, the law ought to be enough. The rule of little chiefs has no place in republics, wherever practice has given institutions a fiduciary role.
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GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE MINDS OUT.
Paul Krugman, main New York Times editorial, Mars 1, 2013:
“We’re just a few weeks away from a milestone I suspect most of Washington would like to forget: the start of the Iraq war. What I remember from that time is the utter impenetrability of the elite prowar consensus. If you tried to point out that the Bush administration was obviously cooking up a bogus case for war, one that didn’t bear even casual scrutiny; if you pointed out that the risks and likely costs of war were huge; well, you were dismissed as ignorant and irresponsible.

It didn’t seem to matter what evidence critics of the rush to war presented: Anyone who opposed the war was, by definition, a foolish hippie. Remarkably, that judgment didn’t change even after everything the war’s critics predicted came true. Those who cheered on this disastrous venture continued to be regarded as “credible” on national security (why is John McCain still a fixture of the Sunday talk shows?), while those who opposed it remained suspect.

And, even more remarkably, a very similar story has played out over the past three years, this time about economic policy.”

In 2010, Olli Rehn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olli_Rehn declared that
“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” For a reality check, see the unemployment rate above. It seems to be sort of exponentiating. But the bankers are safe, don’t worry.

The Rehn of economic terror is currently serving as European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission. Such people are intimately tied to the plutocratic system. Many of these worthies go back and forth with the likes of Goldman Sachs. They never had it so good.

Jack Lew, just named treasury secretary, inventor of the “Sequester” was a great chief at Citigroup where he proceeded to help lose about 50 billion dollars, and was compensated for his troubles by seven figures of taxpayers’ money.

Mario Monti, unelected Italian PM went, with most of his government, to report to his wealthy masters at Davos. It was obviously deliberate: elections were coming, the Italian people were encouraged to acknowledge their masters too, just like their PM. Instead, to general surprise, they voted massively for Beppe Grillo, an outsider critical of the powers that be, once condemned for manslaughter. When going to the slaughterhouse, better to chose an expert.

Back to Krugman’s editorial. The Iraq war has been an unqualified disaster in slow motion. The computation of the neofascists (aka “neoconservatives”) had been that the conquest of Iraq would pay for itself, as the conquest of the West and other parts had.

This did not happen, because the British and American armies were unable to win. Instead they had to give power to the Shiites and agree to leave.

The only positive, for the West, has been that any potential enemy now knows it should not assume that the West would always behave in a civilized, or even in a predictable, manner (that was one the miscomputations of Hitler: he had claimed, loud und klar, that the democracies could never decide anything tough, so he was stunned, literally speechless, after he received the war declarations of Britain and France).

Actually many of the American neofascists explained that such was their computation: make the USA look crazed and dangerous. Recognizing now that the Iraq war was a mistake would be rejecting that last “positive”.

In economic policy, Krugman is rightly indignant of the disaster in Europe (that friends of the wealthy are anxious to duplicate in the USA, see the “Sequester” that started today).

Major economic indicators in some countries, such as Spain or Great Britain, are already worse than in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and are pointing down further (except in tax havens such as Ireland).

UK Flat Line GDP: Greater Depression Today

Britain is doing worse than in 1930s. Cameron is blossoming into a total failure.

I commented on the Krugman editorial. As Krugman had dared to evoke the Iraq war, so did I. Here is what I said:

“Wealth from monopoly and ridiculously low taxes for the plutocrats, austerity for everybody else, is bringing massive cuts in education and science. Having cut to the bone, plutocrats, their servants and sycophants are now sucking the brains out. Hey, if the rabble is stupid enough, it will salute its masters smartly!

Examples of this disaster abound: the European Union elected leaders, led by the right wing, the regressive Cameron and Merkel just cut the EU science budget by 13%! In the name of austerity. In the USA, the sequester promises cuts to science (NSF, NIH) of 5.1%. Over the next 6 months. In the name of austerity.

Cameron, before becoming PM of the UK promised that Britain would regain technological leadership. But Cameron, is, truly, fundamentally a very wealthy heir. Truly, he wants a richer elite, and a poorer plebs. So what did he do? Besides introducing astronomical tuition to British “public” universities, he reduced the science budget of the UK by 7.6%. In the first year.

Austerity is just the latest Trojan Horse of those who brought us run-away banking. It’s just the power of a small class of people who know each other, worldwide, and are preying on the rest of humanity.
No morality stand in their way, not even putting the entire biosphere in danger. The only way we are going to save the planet is through great advances in science and efficient technology. Otherwise mayhem is guaranteed. Among other nefarious consequences.

Donald Rumsfeld used to shake Saddam Hussein’s hand, when the former used to manipulate the latter, in the 1970s. The USA decided a secret war in Afghanistan in 1979, on July 3. See what president Carter’s National Security adviser, Brzezinski, declared:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/usa-attack-against-afghanistan/

A consequence was 9/11. Three million Afghans dead, another. Bad actions can have terrible fall-out.”

These observations of mine were censored by the thinkers at the New York Times. Nothing really new here. I have been sending comments to the New York Times for more than a decade, more than 1,000 of my judicious observations were censored. I knew that, by evoking the early history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I exposed myself to traditional New York Times censorship. In 2003, overall, the New York Times was for the Iraq war (with the exception of Krugman).

The official line about 9/11 is that the sky was blue over an unsuspecting USA, and suddenly planes jetted in, piloted by very bad men from Afghanistan.

Never mind that 15 out of 19 were Saudi Arabs, and none from Afghanistan! That qualifies as irrelevant details.
Any data contradicting that idyllic picture is indeed viewed as deeply anti-American. Apparently reality has an anti-American bias.

The day following that act of censorship, Krugman wrote a related post about European elites pontificating in 2010 that austerity worked, and the European crisis was over. By then I knew I had been censored, so I re-sent the exact same comment, omitting the last paragraph about Rumsfeld, and Carter’s attack on Afghanistan. It was immediately published.

So what happened to “the truth shall make you free”? Why is the New York Times so authoritarian? Why to censor me systematically when I mentioned that the debt of the USA, according to the government of the USA, the IMF, etc, was 111%?

The NYT’s official line is that the Federal debt is less than 80% because it has decided that the Social Security Fund is NOT a creditor of the government of the USA. In other words the New York Times is part of a vast conspiracy that deliberately masks the fact that more than 5 trillion dollars is owed to CREDITORS, the Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare. Then the establishment turns around and say Social Security is going to get broke!

This is confusing, to say the least. Until one realizes that there is one, and only one elite, and that it is the effective arm of the plutocracy. This is why Obama was so ineffective in the first two years: he had to depend upon a Congress and Senate, let alone a Main Stream Media that was as much part of the same elite as the Koch brothers, the Rockefellers, Bilderberg and Davos conferences circles.

I often read pathetic wishes from small destitute people, for the return of Nancy Pelosi, the professional pseudo-progressive elitist, to head Congress. Drinking Pelosi’s Napa wine, skiing at Pelosi’s Sugar bowl resort (cost: $85!) Something to excite progressives, if elite enough!

In truth, the TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU SMART.

Smarts are what the pseudo left elite fears most. The truth, from smarts. To be found out as those who speak one way, and act just the opposite. And that is why the New York Times has censored me more than 1,000 times, but the Wall Street Journal (where I commented more than 1,000 times) has never censored me. Not once. Nor did “The Economist”, ever.

Official progressives are afraid, because avowed progressivism is their business, whereas in truth they just belong to the elite, and the elite, right now, means the worldwide plutocracy. That’s why massive austerity cuts are implemented when billionaire financiers are taxed less, relatively speaking, than janitors (this is an allusion to so called “carry interest” used by hedge fund managers and the like).

Can one be truly progressive when one is truly afraid of reality? Of course not. Progress comes from the manipulation of reality, and that requires to know what reality is. First. So one can make one’s mind about it, before bringing one’s mind to bear on the problem(s) .

Manipulating histories about hostilities in the Middle East informs energy policies and macro-ethics, looking forward. It also exculpates, as Krugman said, the bad actors of past policies, and, worse, exculpates some cognitive and logical methods used by past, present, and future mass criminality. it is certainly not the way to progress.

If the New York Times wants to keep on pretending it is about reality, its censorship bureau should be put out of business.
***
Patrice Ayme