EMOTION PRIMES REASON

EMOTIONS SPEAK, EMOTIONS TEACH, EMOTIONS LEARN

At altitude in the High Sierra Nevada, in the crisp winter night, I was contemplating the dazzling firmament, sparkling with stars, the Andromeda galaxy fully visible. Aldebaran, the twinkling red giant star, spoke to me of my early childhood, when my grandparents and my uncles taught me the night sky, and the cosmos. Aldebaran also spoke of the Saharan sky of my infanthood, its sparkling orange accentuating that of the distant horizon. Who has not seen desert stars at dusk, has not seen the grandest sight.

I felt fully rejuvenated, full of ambitious curiosity, at one with the universe.

More evidence that emotions speak, teach and learn? I considered carefully how small children learn languages. It’s an object of wonder. And mystery. My daughter is bilingual, French, English, and is learning Mandarin. The latter is accomplished by going to a Chinese school, eight hours a day. Native Chinese speakers are impressed by her fluency.

Athena’s best friend also just turned 4 year old, the daughter of a Turkish family. She speaks English and Turkish. I spoke to Athena’s friend in French only. Surprise: the Americano-Turkish toddler understood much of what I say.

Toddler power.

How do children understand language? They do it without books, by observing contexts carefully. The exact same mental attitude that is essential to science or philosophy.

I discovered that children feel out the context, including the emotional context, and compute what the meaning has got to be. Then they learn to associate the probable sounds to the probable meaning, memorizing the whole thing ever more precisely as they correct the subtle differences between what they understood or uttered, and what allows achieving better communications.

A child is, among other things, a physicist, learning the basic facts of reality: fall, get hurt, etc. Notice that it’s the emotion that does the learning: fall, get all roughed up, break the precious skin, get distressed, cry a lot. Thereafter “gravity” (a concept Athena associates from falling off trees and holding planets around) is taken really seriously. The more it hurts, the more serious. Gravity would not have been so well understood, so seriously understood, had not as much pain been experienced.

Pain is the ultimate experience.

This shows right there that there is something wrong to avoiding pain at all cost: it would mean avoiding learning at all cost, the essence of humanity. Some will say: “Oh, we are good, and want to live as we please, avoiding pain shall be foremost, whatever it takes.”

Buddhists, of course, promote the notion. Yet, when push came to shove, they had to establish a pretty nasty empire. But not nasty enough. Nasty enough to infuriate the future Genghis Khan, not nasty enough to resist him when he came back with a large army. Yes, you have to live with others, whose pain is, all too often, your pleasure.

(See tourists, polluting with CO2 around the world as they go to far off beaches, searching for pleasure through materialistic extravaganza, insuring that those beaches they claim to love, will be flooded very soon.)

The most important books one reads, and most frequently, are books of emotions, not books of words.

A small sensation can have a huge emotional impact. People can be hated, or humiliated, or spurned, once, and never forget. Remember Hitler, who felt humiliated and alienated by weirdly dressed Jews in the center of Vienna, when he was a beggar. “Is this a Jew?” he wondered. And then Hitler learned to associate his wretched condition of truly destitute German to the alienation he experienced in Vienna, thanks to this vision never experienced before of a black dressed individual with abundant black hair hanging all over.

He was not the only German to feel that way, and it all built up into a giant hatred (helped, of course, by 15 centuries of Christian anti-Jewish emotions and pattern of homicidal abuse).

Thus a small emotion can have huge intellectual, even civilizational, or anti-civilizational, impact.

Emotions are what get people to move. People’s minds to move, that is. And more. Emotions are how minds were built.

Addressing thoughts is one thing. Thoughts are digital. Addressing emotions is addressing what reality is made of. A continuous field, just as those fields we call Quanta. What’s out there is more complicated than Homer. Because words can only clumsily approximate what we feel. Such as individual photons. Themselves, fields.

The emotional universe is where we live. It’s what we are. A civilization is not first about words, but about how it feels about the universe. And, from there, what it teaches, speaks of, and even what it can learn of.

Imprisoned in their brutal view of man, the Greco-Romans did not learn enough to prevent the near collapse of civilization. We won’t have the second chance they got in us. Time to feel right. Enshrine it in the law as needed.

Patrice Aymé

***

Note: The fancy philosophy above is fully compatible with the most recent neurobiology, and takes flight from it, extending its dendrites where the glia are the most active…

Emotions Are Not Free

People say: ”Oh, we are free to think and feel as we see fit!” But this is not true in several deep, even brutal, unavoidable, ways, many of them hidden. Elites have always known that hearts are the core of what needs to be controlled. On this their power rests, since before there were pyramids, and they stood.

Only 7,000 Gestapo agents watched 80 million Germans. Hitler could not have held Germany with them alone. So how did Hitler do it? With very strong emotions.

Pascal famously said: “Le Coeur a ses raisons que la Raison n’a point.” Those reasons of the heart deserve to be known, not just because they are reasons, too, and not just because they dictate to rationality itself, but also because they can be manipulated in ways that ought to be, and are already partly, made unlawful.

Instead of denying that there is spiritual and emotional control out there, as the meek insist, I propose to embrace control… be it only to dissect it with gusto.

Throughout the reigns of Clinton, Bush II, and Obama, “progressives” and “liberals” have been played like violins. It has not been much better in Europe.

In both cases, the People was persuaded to engage in public service by forking public money to private banks so that the hyper rich could stay hyper rich (it was done with semantic smokes and mirrors. To this day, most of We The People understands nothing to what happened).

How was We The People made so blind? To start with, even indignation was in short supply.

Pulling at their heart strings of We The People just so, enabled ever increasing plutocratization. That’s done by hammering continually the fallacious association between bad economy, and deficits. And thus impregnating the emotion, in the public, that public spending is bad (and thus implicitly that the rich ought to go tax-free).

How hearts can be bent out of their natural shape.

A well-known saying is that one person’s freedom ends where another nose’s starts. But that’s not so easy: after all, just threatening to hit someone else is an assault. Also what about public nose, public space, etc.? Are plutocrats not infringing on everybody’s public space when they made society so that only their money is endowed with power?

In any case, all and any law controls actions. However, controlling emotions and thoughts is just controlling the origin of actions.

The best minds of the (French) Republic, after a monster fight to death with racial mass murdering fascism of the demented type, in the period 1914-1945, were confronted to a paradox: Germany was, in 1900, the most literate country in the world. However enough of the German population got maneuvered into beastly madness to make their nation the tool of monstrosity.

What went wrong? The heart. German hearts had been taught wrong. Nietzsche screamed this from every roof top, by 1888, and before. A teenager such as Einstein fully agreed, and fled Germany (Einstein the rebel, later did enough discoveries for 4 or 5 Nobel Prizes in physics, most of them for work in… Quantum Physics).

German hearts had been bent out of shape by the plutocrats who owned Germany (enabled by a somewhat self-destructive alliance-symbiosis with various Anglo-American plutocrats).

Starting even before the World War was finished, many medium level intellectuals in France deduced that an example had to be made, to strike the hearts even more than the certainly grandiose, but somewhat suicidal, Republic’s attack against Hitler in September 1939.

So the French Republic executed more than 40,000 Nazi collaborators, with a judicial ferocity that even republican Rome never knew. But not just this. Anti-hatred laws were passed.

Some will object: ”Wait, they execute all these collaborators, and then pass anti-hatred laws? Is not that self contradictory?” No. You see, the collaborators were guilty. Those they killed were innocent. Anti-hatred laws are against the killing mood. Killing killers is also a way to kill the same killing mood, especially for future reference.

So let’s recapitulate: the criminal insanity that gripped Germany, a pure product of plutocratic control, was a case of total manipulation of the deepest heart strings. The same happened in places such as the USSR, where dozens of millions were killed because of the emotional deformation of common moujiks.

One could see something similar in the USA when G.W. Bush launched his legion in a war of aggression in Iraq. It was a time when most citizens of the USA goose stepped behind Bush, just because an employee of the CIA, Bin Laden, had killed .1% of the number of individuals that the actions of Carter had killed in Afghanistan. Of course that made no emotional sense: the USA had started it all, and pursued it all, and taught Bin Laden the nastiest ways. Instead of marching to Baghdad, justice ought to have marched to Washington.

Yet, just as German hearts had been taught it was all the fault of the Jews, and Russians, that of the Capitalists (whatever that is), the Americans got emotionally persuaded that it was all the fault of Bin Laden’s enemy, Saddam Hussein (whatever “it” was).

So hearts are already getting manipulated. It’s high time that justice gets to see how lawful those manipulations are. It’s all a question of manipulating hearts for the best. As it is already done, all too often, for the worst.

For example the fossil fuels plutocrats have made the public in many Anglo countries (USA, Canada, Australia), hysterical CO2 deniers. How? The fossil fuel maniacs spent enough money to incite heart manipulators to teach the right notion. Hence a new religion, climate denial. A religion made to serve the likes of the Koch brothers, mighty plutocrats them all.

As long as the emotion that there is nothing wrong with fossil fuels, and CO2 reigns, it will be hard to do anything serious against the CO2 mania. How to feel right about it? Well, maybe by realizing that spewing CO2 is a form of hatred. And there the law can help.

Hatred is an emotion, but it is not a free emotion anymore. It is an emotion under watch, that can be struck by the law.  

Hate speech has become criminal, even in the USA. The fact such laws were duplicated from France does not make them any less American. Total freedom of expressed emotions is already a thing of the past, and rightly so.

I have no problem doing the same at the United Nations, and even using anti-hate laws as a ram against customs that I don’t like (such as circumcision, or regimes that are too satanic). So it’s a matter of legislating my superior taste… ;-)!

Some, such as Tom Alex, a contributor to the comments on this site, have objected that: “How can feelings be criminal? This is absolute totalitarianism, where the state -and actually a FOREIGN state- believes it can and should have a say and furthermore control and penalize feelings through some judge. Plutocrats would absolutely love that. Been fired and have hard feelings towards your ex-boss? You’re a hateful ****, and should go to jail. Posting against plutocrats? You’re spreading hate.”

The origin of Tom Alex’s worries were my approval of the indictment of Bob Dylan for “public insult and incitation to hatred”, for comparing (existing, innocent) Croats to (dead) Nazis, and justifying a hatred (existing) Serbs are supposed to “sense” when exposed to their “blood”, the usual recital of those who want to justify hateful antagonistic atavism.

A few points: one can have all the feelings and thoughts one wants. The problem is PUBLICLY EXPRESSED hateful emotions, of the UNJUSTIFIED type.

Thus, the devil is in the details. I am going to come out with a stridently hateful (some will say) essay against (the hateful gross and mass murdering friendly leadership of) Japan. I don’t mind, it’s the exact target of that mental torpedoes volley. What I will publicly say is both true and justified. That makes it completely different.

Zola went to jail, big time, during the Dreyfus affair for the famous “J’Accuse!”. In it, him, and other top intellectuals, accused publicly the elite of the French Republic of a criminal conspiracy. Well, they were right. Ultimately, everybody got exonerated, starting with Captain (later Colonel) Dreyfus. More than that: anti-Judaism in France got lethally wounded (this is why most Jews in France survived WWII’s Gestapo, whereas nearly all Dutch Jews died).

If I suggest that French and Croat Nazi collaborators of the worst type ought to have been executed. Well, that’s OK, because those were terrible people doing horrendous things. A trial would determine that those people ought to have suffered the worst treatment, indeed. In this spirit, Norway, the Netherlands, and others, re-instituted the death penalty against Nazi collaborators after WWII, just for them. Fine.

Having strong anti-UNJUSTIFIED-hatred laws will help the search for truth.

And that’s what we need. You want to hate KGB’s Putin, or Tojo-loving Abe? Be my guest. And do it publicly, and question why Russia and Japan need to humiliate themselves that much, while, implicitly, thanks to the brutality they deploy and worship, threatening us all.

The calculus of hate and aggression needs to be refined. Because justice and progress need to be armed and stronger than the alternative.

For example GW Bush ought to be prosecuted for war crimes. Among them, war of aggression, a hate crime.

Attacking North Korea, even preventively, would not be a war of aggression, as North Korean leaders already threatened the USA (and others) with nuclear strikes (!). Similarly, France’s unilateral attack of Hitler in September 1939, was not a war of aggression, whatever the Nazis said at the time. Indeed, the Nazis had repeatedly attacked civilization and human rights first.

Hating hatred for real requires justice to be involved. One cannot leave plutocrats, be they the Kaiser, Stalin, or G.W. Bush to be free to mold, knead and brutalize hearts as they see fit. As civilization progresses, and becomes ever more intelligent, just as a matter of survival, so justice has to.

Patrice Aymé

***

Notes: On French trans-national jurisdiction. There is a common European citizenship. It’s entirely in the realm of French justice to react when citizen of the same polity (Europe) are hated by whoever, be it a citizen of the USA.

Moreover, for questions of Human Rights, French justice tends to apply worldwide.

On the USA’s indifference to the plutocratic obscenity, a learned emotion: Watch Obama meeting, twice, with all the plutocrats he could find, in December 2013. First with the health care crats. Just six of them, around the table with their crat in chief, made 100 million dollars, in the preceding few months. One could see the problem of USA health care, just there: the filth of riches.

Then there was the meeting with the high tech spies (Google, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.): how can we manipulate the truth? By flaunting his associations to the hyper rich he regularly begs for money like a pigeon hungry for crumbs, Obama has taught everybody in the USA a weird, twisted, masochistic, debasingly insane emotion, gratification by plutocratization. A new sort of bully pulpit. Call it the pigeon perch.

Obama’s Dog Wishes

Once I was talking to a MD, a very young cancer specialist. He is making millions, in the very exploitative health care system of the USA. He told me Obama was really smart. I asked him why. He said: ”He taught Constitutional Law, was a Senator, and now he is president. What other proof do you need?” I pointed at Obamacare. He chuckled, no doubt contemplating decades of happy returns of multi-million dollar income, in the guise of helping the underclass.

Right, Obama is very smart. Yet, one can be smart in many ways. This is Obama’s wishes, 24 December, 2013. I am cutting and pasting Obama’s exact tweet:

“From this family to yours, have a peaceful Christmas Eve.” pic.twitter.com/nfPOEni3xk. This is the picture:

Obama: I Stick My Tongue Out To You

A given thing can always be looked at in many ways. A way to look at Obama sending a pic of his panting dog is that Obama is acknowledging the truth.

In words: When you are a dog, it is natural to stick your tongue at We The People. Obama cares for your health: he is ready to lick you.

Countless leaders rose through obscurity, throughout the ages, and were viewed, by their millions of followers, as the smartest men who ever lived.

Some will say, this is different, the USA is a democracy. But of course not: including the so called “representatives”, less than 1,000 people pull the string in the USA, population 320 million. In Athens, thousands of people pulled the strings. A quorum of 6,000 citizens existed for the less controversial decisions. It’s as if, in today’s USA, a minimum of twenty million individuals had to explicitly vote for decisions.

Republican Rome was also much more of a democracy than we have nowadays: a Consul had full judicial and executive powers just for one month at a time, and that just for a year, and had to share power with the Tribunes of the People, who were sacrosanct, and kept the legislative power.

As I explained, in “Representation Is No Democracy”, Switzerland is legislatively democratic: the People decides the laws. But not so in the other Western so called “democracies”. Athens was legislatively and executively democratic.

So Obama became president. He and a critical mass of his supporters had a party until they lost most power in their carnival cruise ship. Then they accuse the Republicans to have taken over the helm. They had just forgotten to use their full power to serve We The People, when they had it.

Most of Obama’s “reforms”, and change of directions had to do with pursuing what G.W. Bush had started. So we are in G.W. Bush’s Fourth Term.

G W Bush, son, and grandson of one of history’s worst plutocrat, naturally had decided to make tax payers rescue American banking, and American industry, even before Obama became president.

The only thing Obama really did is to decide to have the American Middle Class pay some more to the health care plutocracy, by duplicating the “reform” Republican plutocratic governor Romney had imposed in Massachusetts. Interestingly, Obama, a Freudian dream boy, calls Obamacare his “signature achievement”, the exact same term, signature, that he uses when he kills civilian gatherings with drones.

Most of Obama’s supporters can’t see deeper than Obama’s bronze color, and, to this day, sing his praises. I personally gave two years, much writing and action behind the scene, influencing the influential, and spent a fortune getting Obama elected, just to see him follow exactly the “advice” he got from all and any the plutocrat he met, whom he all celebrated as “friends”.

Thus one can safely say that most of Obama’s supporters are not very smart. Yet, that’s smart: not only they do not suffer more than mussels beatifically beaten by the waves, but they please their masters. Plutocrats don’t want them any other way than dumb, and self congratulatory.

And what of Obama? Is he smart? There are many ways to be smart. One can be smart as a dog, smart as a human, or street smart. There is no doubt that Obama is street smart. Wall Street smart.

However, history judges the presidents of the USA according to higher standards. What does Obama think of it himself? Well the picture says it all. It’s what’s called a Freudian slip. Obama views himself a s a dog. He is not just basically powerless, but he has been Wall Street’s lapdog. Now he wishes you Happy Holidays.

History will just point at Obama’s abysmal lack of accomplishment, or when the Financial Times philosophy came to power. Even G.W. Bush’s Medicare Part D (Seniors don’t pay for drugs) can point at a higher achievement to serve We The People. And, by the way, all the most dreadful policies of Bush (torture and arbitrary detention officialized, defended, and globalized; invasion of Iraq) , were inverted by Bush himself, not Obama. Obama’s presidency sat on Bush’s Shoulder.

Bush: See How Easy It Was, To Roll Them Up? Obama: Well, You Decided All, I’m Just In Love.

Obama introduced his own satanic policy: arbitrary execution by drones of gatherings, so called “signature strikes“. Something still going-on, the latest being an attack on a wedding in Yemen, a few days ago: spirit of Christmas, Nixon style. The worst about this, is that, differently from Auschwitz, which was secret, this is all public, and thus the horror is endorsed by the People of the USA…. Very publicly.

Obama realizing, however unwittingly and subconsciously, that he is just a dog, commander in chief, presumably, of a pack of many dogs, and a lap dog of Wall Street, is a sad gift to make us. But we will accept this gift. Finally he came with the truth. As the world totters on the edge of many abysses,  truth is the greatest, and first, gift.

The Ancient Greeks already cut and decorated fir trees for the winter solstices, and the Roman Saturnials were such an extravaganza, complete with gift exchanges, that many laws were passed to reduce their duration below four weeks. Sometimes, honoring tradition is the best thing.

From one who holds the truth dear, following a 28 centuries old tradition, Happy Holidays! And, next time, let’s all try to find a dog who, at least, can bark.

Patrice Ayme

Zero Point Energy Machine

Are there science fiction technologies nobody expects, over the horizon? Yes. Let me present the CASIMIR FORCE. And suggest, with my characteristic generosity, how to make an energy producing machine from it.

To understand what I propose to make, one has to visualize this: fundamentally, there are no particles, nor fields, only waves. (De Broglie’s) Matter Waves (invented in 2013). Those matter waves are also all over. In particular, the waves are in between two electrically conducting plates, and outside them, too.

Between the plates there are fewer waves. Why? Those waves basically die when they touch an electrically conductive surface. So the only waves present, between the plates, are basically like strings attached on both sides (the exact same picture as the “harmonic oscillator”) Thus the frequencies permitted in between plates are few. But outside the plates, the frequencies can be anything.

The waves are related to the phenomenon known as “particles”: particles carry momentum. As they bounce around, they push. But they are fewer pushing from inside. Hence there is a force that forces the plates to come closer.

Fewer Quantum Matter Waves Inside = Less Pressure, So Plates Squeeze Until More Photons Are Trapped Inside

Basically, one can say that the vacuum is more vacuous inside, between the plates than outside. The vacuum gap was measured, and it’s called the Casimir Force, after his discoverer (Casimir was a Dutch physicist).

This is often (a bit abusively) described as the “Zero Point Energy”. (Einstein and a colleague introduced the notion of “nullpunktenergie” in 1913.) I used the term, though, because it makes an excellent slogan.

Can one generate energy from Zero Point Energy? Yes. Even gecko lizards do it.

How to go to the stars with ZPE? By generating motion. Motions will allow to move magnets, hence generate electricity. To generate motion, connect the plates to springs keeping them apart (but not so far that the Casimir force would disappear). Suppose the plates are made of semiconductor material. Plug in a base current turning them conductive. At that point, the Casimir force turns on, and the plates come closer. When they are close enough, cut the base current: the springs pull back the plates, unleashing an escape interrupter, repeating the process. So it repeats.

The rest, ladies and gentleman, is just technological details, like building tiny enough magnets… But that could take a while, as it would require mastery of constructing nanoscale devices. Technology can take a long time to develop: it took 150 years to go from discovery of the photovoltaic effect until the first practical photocells. The example of controlled thermonuclear fusion shows the same: it took 60 years to reach breakeven pure thermonuclear fusion controlled energy production in 2013… although poorly controlled thermonuclear fusion was demonstrated by spectacular explosions, in the early 1950s (it was so poorly controlled that, because of a conceptual mistake, not understanding that Lithium 7 would turn into Li6 during the explosion, and then fuse, the Castle Bravo explosion released 15 megatons of TNT, instead of the expected maximum of 5 Megatons).

In any case, progress is being made in harnessing the Casimir Force.

This, in truth, the Casimir Effect is nothing new. It’s all about waves. The Casimir Force, in a sense was well-known to mariners of old. Two tall ships in a long swell, but without wind, parallel to each other, would be invincibly attracted to each other, and crash, with catastrophic consequences.

Old Mariners Knew The Casimir Force All Too Well, as an indisputable danger.

The mathematics, and even the physics are exactly the same. This is a clue that, after all, Quantum Physics may be more natural than usually depicted. And it’s all very natural: geckos, the famous lizards who can run upside down along ceilings, actually use (a variant of) the Casimir Force.

In the title, I used “Zero Point Energy” (ZPE). This is a bit dishonest. Einstein himself so strongly disagreed with some forms of ZPE, that he refused to learn Quantum Electro-Dynamics (QED; although he had the best, most dedicated and patient, professor). However, the basic form, as displayed here, is completely uncontroversial (and an experimental fact).

Waves: Little Understood Yet

The only question is this: as the Casimir Force, following the recipe above, would provide with enormous amounts of energy, with no pollution whatsoever, even in interstellar space, and as it looks just to be a question of precision nanotechnological construction to make it work, why are no massive technological ZPE program in evidence in the most advanced countries?

It’s not like the CO2 is not building up, and the methane not exuding the permafrost in humongous quantities. And it’s not like the Chinese are not catching up, multiplying Jade Rabbits on the Moon, either…

Patrice Aymé

Stalinism Not Dead

Greed Me Up:

Putin just freed a number of people who he had unjustly caged, sometimes up to ten years, to show what a democrat he was. All he showed is that he is the dictator of Russia. He dictates to justice what to do. Yet, he has not enough intelligence to understand this. We are led by morons: is not that reassuring to plutocrats?

Meanwhile a Federal judge nominated by Bush Junior, September 10, 2001, declared the NSA’s activities “probably unconstitutional”. Does that mean Obama is going to be less rabid about Snowden? Don’t hold your breath: Obama follows the plutocratic consensus.

Pluto Watches You

(British NSA installations, Cornwall.)

And the plutocratic sense, in the USA, has been that, for a century, secret back room deals of the dirtiest type have been profitable to the elite (after a close call in World War Two, when fascism got out of control, backfired onto Anglo-Americano-German plutocracy, and could be defeated only by awfully equalitarian methods, that led to two scary decades of mass prosperity afterwards).

To that world, that world of multimillionaires and billionaires, the only world Putin and Obama know, Edward Snowden is the worst traitor, the greatest danger: the type who does not act out of greed.

Whereas the message, deep down inside, that plutocrats want to be understood, until there is no other, is that greed is the fundamental principle of man. Hence plutocracy is the crown of creation. (The message of Ayn Rand, her student Greenspan, etc.)

***

We Can’t Think, But We Can Spy:

International Media (Der Spiegel, New York Times, etc.) reveal another batch of targets by Anglo-American governmental spies. Says the NYT:  “The Secret documents reveal more than 1,000 targets of American and British surveillance in recent years, including the office of an Israeli prime minister, heads of international aid organizations, foreign energy companies and a European Union official involved in antitrust battles with American technology businesses.

Britain’s Government Communications Headquarters, working closely with the National Security Agency, monitored the communications of senior European Union officials, foreign leaders including African heads of state and sometimes their family members, directors of United Nations and other relief programs, and officials overseeing oil and finance ministries, according to the documents. In addition to Israel, some targets involved close allies like France and Germany… the Institute of Physics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, an internationally recognized center for research…

Also appearing on the surveillance lists is Joaquín Almunia, vice president of the European Commission, which, among other powers, has oversight of antitrust issues in Europe. The commission has broad authority over local and foreign companies, and it has punished a number of American companies, including Microsoft and Intel, with heavy fines for hampering fair competition. The reports say that spies intercepted Mr. Almunia’s communications in 2008 and 2009.

Mr. Almunia, a Spaniard, assumed direct authority over the commission’s antitrust office in 2010. He has been involved in a three-year standoff with [Don’t See Evil] Google over how the company runs its search engine. Competitors of the online giant had complained that it was prioritizing its own search results and using … other websites without permission

The surveillance reports show American and British spies’ deep appetite for information. The French companies Total, the oil and gas giant, and Thales, an electronics, logistics and transportation outfit, appear as targets, as do a French ambassador, an “Estonian Skype security team” and the German Embassy in Rwanda…

The Stalinist state lived off spying. And greatly died from spying. (Hitler used to hold 80 million Germans with only 10,000 Gestapo agents; the Stasi held 17 million East Germans with 180,000 agents, smothering the country; the USA spying archipelago has more than a million spies…officially… Not counting Facebook, Google and the like).

A theme of this site is that the USA has been conducting under cover activities of the worst type for a full century.

Those methods are reminiscent of those used to eradicate the Indians and are characteristic of the Anglo empire: reserves for Natives were created in South Africa, Canada, Australia and the USA. Except for South Africa, where the method was applied too late (and first to… wildly resisting whites!), the reservation approach resulted in the quasi annihilation of the Natives (by contrast the Iberian ex-colonies are of “mixed” blood to speak like that intellectuel de bas étage, Mr. Bob Dylan).

Those methods brought the First and Second World War, to the murderous extent they were: in both cases the USA practiced a “bait and switch” strategy on Germany. That allowed the fascists leading Germany at the time to engage in world wars, that only their masters in Washington and Wall Street could win.

At this point, the USA persists in applying this approach. It was fruitful in the Middle East, as it insured USA control of the fossil fuels there, for 60 years. It brought the “American Century”. However it is now as obsolete as French style colonialism in 1950. For example, Obama, still pursuing Carter’s strategy in Afghanistan, intends to leave forces there for another ten years. USA soldiers keep dying there, in the interest of plutocratic corporations. You know those that don’t pay taxes and feed plutocrats.

No way to make a better world.

Yet, in December a USA mission left for Mars, Maven. Europe launched no less than two major scientific missions with a total of four satelites, including one, the double telescope Gaia, built with a new material, silicon carbide, ten meters across (the machine, not the telescope), with  the world first billion pixel camera chip (that will operate at minus 110 Celsius).

Gaiai left from French Guyana, about the last pristine equatorial forest, on the Russian workhorse rocket, Soyuz, and will travel to the Lagrange point S2, at 1.5 million kilometers. Meanwhile Jade Rabbit, a Chinese robot, realized the first soft landing on the Moon in 37 years. And two USA astronauts, including a colonel, embarked on a series of spacewalks to repair the International Space Station, a place full of technological challenges.

More deeply, a German team announced that it had achieved NON DESTRUCTIVE photon detection (that will open plenty of possibilities, some very practical, other very esoteric).

This is how to make a better world: by achieving better, deeper understanding, not just by plotting, spying, cheating and stealing from others.

Patrice Ayme

***

New York Times Editorial Board, following day in “Bad Times For Big Brother“: “Mr. Obama acknowledged that some reforms could be done, but he insisted that there was no evidence that the phone surveillance program was being abused — a truly disturbing assessment given all the revelations since June. He said there’s a need to restore Americans’ trust in their government. The way to restore that trust is not through cosmetic touch-ups, but by Congress and the courts setting firm limits on all surveillance programs and ensuring that the administration complies.”

Complying with civilization is not something Stalinism is about. It’s more about destroying eleven (11) vehicles in a wedding procession in the middle of nowhere. Just because it wants to show it can.

100 BILLION YEAR OLD UNIVERSE?

Abstract: Dark Energy is a fact. Dark Energy is not an extrapolation such as the Big Bang, or an extrapolation of extrapolations, such as Cosmic Inflation. Dark Energy enables a completely different cosmology. Taking Dark Energy seriously renders Cosmic Inflation and the Big Bang superfluous… And make the universe much older than usually considered.

The basic reasoning establishing the Big Bang is of primary school level. And yet, from recent observations, it is probably erroneous. I propose that the universe is rather of the order of 100 billion years old, rather than the official 13.8 billion [sic!]. Why do I think the universe is much bigger, and much older than most accredited, professional cosmologists do? Why would celebrity physicists be misinforming the public?

Galaxies To Infinity. 100 Billion Years Old, I Say.

[One photon a minute to get this picture!]

Boldly averaging observations of red shifts in our neighborhood, it has been artistically found that galaxies located 3.2 million light years away recede at 72 kilometers per second (that art was involved is obvious when one gets in the detail… And why Hubble got the numbers wrong by a factor of two initially).

Divide that inter-galactic distance by that speed, and that should tell a primary school student when the universe started. The good news: physicists understand this. The bad news: it’s all too simple, reality seems to disagree.

Let’s do the computation in detail.

(We will use the notation “^” to indicate powers; so 10^2 is (10) (10), 10^4 is 10,000, etc.)

Light covers (3) (10^5) kilometers in one second, and there are around 100,000 = 10^5 seconds in a day. So light covers (3) (10^10) ( 3) (10^2) ~ 10^13 kilometers in a year (=10,000 billion kilometers). Multiply that by (3) (10^6), the distance to that receding galaxy, to get:

(3) 10^19) kilometers (3 times ten billion billion kilometers). Divide by 70 kilometers per second, to find how many seconds it took for galaxies to separate 3.2 million light years: that’s ½ (10^18) seconds. Now there are around (3) (10^5)(10^2) seconds in a year. One gets roughly 14 billion years.

14 billion years ago, or so, the material of that 3.2 million light year away galaxy was next door.

From, there, applying the Principle of Homogeneity (PH: that everything is everywhere roughly the same), one deduces that all those things that became galaxies were next to each other. Notice that this recourse to PH is a philosophical jump: it seems likely, because it is the simplest we can think of, but it’s not a sure thing.

The only way this could have happened is if this expansion all started in the same place… in time (not space!). Presto, you have the result that the history of the universe is that of a Big Bang that started 14 billion years ago. So far, so good.

Notice a second philosophical jump occurred: to get to the conclusion that there was a Big Bang, we assumed that the expansion happened at the same rate, all along. That sounded like the easiest hypothesis, 80 years ago (or when the Big Bang was explicitly formulated, around 60 years ago). But there was NO proof, that the expansion had been at that rate all along, and some observers of things cosmological, or theoreticians, begged to differ (even during the 1960s).

I certainly did not agree with the certainty that the preceding reasoning was a sure thing, because it was not. I do not trust concept that are viewed as sure things, when obviously they are not. I view in them probable examples of herd effects.

However, in the last ten years, it turned out that, to everyone’s amazement, a fact unanticipated by the majority of cosmologists emerged. The rate of expansion was found to be increasing noticeably.

A force expanded the fabric of space ever more. It was called “Dark Energy” (energy, because that’s what one needs to expand space, dark, because the force vector itself could be not be seen; also there already was one problem, called “Dark Matter”, mass distributed all over, dwarfing the visible mass).

I Propose Doing Away With Weird Stuff On Left Side Of the Sketch (Explosion, Cosmic Inflation, etc.)

The very existence of “Dark Energy” immediately busted the “universe is 14 billion years old” conclusion. Indeed, one cannot assume the expansion was 71 kilometers per second, all along, when we see that this expansion is now accelerating. It’s changing: get it? C H A N G E… It’s changing now, so it should have been changing in the past.

It’s more logical to suppose the expansion was always there, and accelerated all along, that the expansion accelerated in the past as it does now. So as the expansion of the universe is NOT linear now, it’s only simpler, logically, to suppose that it was NOT linear in the past. Instead, it looks as if, in first approximation,the expansion of the universe was some sort of exponential tapering fading in the past.

(In other words, since its rate is accelerating now, we may as well suppose it accelerated similarly, all along! Instead the extrapolated Big Bang + extrapolated Cosmic Inflation + Observed Dark Energy implies that the rate of acceleration of the Universe varied enormously in the past: first accelerating gigantically, then slowing down, then coming to a standstill, then re-accelerating… Weird!)

On the back of an envelope, considering the present rate of acceleration of the expansion, and extrapolating that acceleration in the past, your generous servant can determine the universe ought to be 100 billion years old, rather than 14 billion years.

Some will whine: and what of the Cosmological Background Radiation? Well I have a Quantum answer to that. There are also other explanations available such as Olbers Paradox, and Tired Light (which my own theory, SQPR brings naturally, for deeper reasons).

The 100 billion year old universe is philosophically, axiomatically, simpler. (It also gives a lot of time to explain enormous large scale structures such as bubbles and walls of galactic clusters, which looked too organized to have evolved in a mere 14 billion years; “100 billion” is just an order of magnitude, not a precise number; maybe it’s 200 billions…)

Why is it that physicists are presenting the date of 13.7 billion years for the age of the universe with so much certainty? Because smug, god like certainty, is what sells. Everybody loves knowing living gods exist. To know things that only an oligarchy knows, especially if this esoteric knowledge violates common sense, can only make one famous, thus powerful. Hence well fed, the pelt lustrous and the mien proud.

Some do not require more than this: they are simple apes, greed is their event horizon. Real thinkers are made of nobler stuff. Meanwhile, the universe is out there: let’s look carefully, but emotionally, at the picture above: millions of galaxies, as far as we can see. One cannot avoid the feeling that this universe is much older than simply thrice the age of the Earth.

And now that’s what the simplest logic, clinging to the established facts, embraces.

Patrice Aymé

TRUTH AS ENERGY

Energy is the central concept in physics. Could it also be the central concept to determine truth?

High Energy Physics is, well, about high energy, as its name indicates. All of Quantum Field Theory consists into speculative manipulations about how energy is thought to behave as it flows. This is the theory that, in its most ambitious versions, claim to determine the truth of the world (grandiosely called the TOE: Theory Of Everything).

Don’t laugh! The Ancient Greek philosophers looked at nature to find out truth. What else? So do I.

The Greater Depression (copyright Tyranosopher) is about the lack of decent, rewarding, well paid work. What’s another name for work? Energy. Thus the Greater Depression is all about energy, or the lack thereof, showing up in dearth of work (that is, energy!)

The CO2 crisis is all about energy: we produce most of our energy by burning coal, a method invented by the Romans. Then a stroke of genius, now a perverse twist on the burning of wood by Homo Erectus.

Even love, according to standard evolutionary psychobiology, has to do with energy: it’s about selecting who we view as the most energetic, dominant, provider of life.

Thus, in a sense, everywhere we turn, energy determines the reality, the truth of the world.

Yet, one does not catch flies with the truth. Honey, though, works. Here this word, this concept, again: work.

What has meaning is what works. Get it? A deeper truth than it looks: it relates veracity with the physics of energy. Literally. Philosophy for our age.

Alexi Helligar: “What is truth? We like to think truth is obvious. But the profundity of obvious truths are so difficult to grasp that it takes sometimes multiple lifetimes of wisdom.

We think truth is all that matters. In this we are mistaken. More important than truth is meaning. It is meaning which tell us the next step we must take. The contents of our various religions may not be true, but they are meaningful. The meaningful lie is far more effective to significant action than meaningless truth.”

Patrice Aymé: The truth known to Keynes: ‘in the long run we are all dead’ is very true, but it’s also very much meaningless, when one is engaged in that game known as life. So Alexi, you are very right.

Euclidean geometry is true. But, pushed too far, it becomes meaningless elucubration about Byzantine theorems. There are better things to do (such as the basic theorems of non-Euclidean geometry). Thus, better ways to use one’s energy.

Truth is not obvious, indeed. Great logicians (say Tarski, a Polish (-American) who blossomed two generations after Bertrand Russell) worked hard to establish a better theory of truth. What truth is still pretty much up in the air.

I got logic from Alexander the Great: if it’s too complicated, cut the Gordian knot. Thus, instead of the how-many-angels-on-that-pinhead theories of truth, I propose instead my META theory. META theories are local logical frames that allow to make linear logic in the vast universe of truth. META stands for Maximally Evident Truth Applied. (1)

From my point of view, most modern mathematics is not anymore true than angels on a pin. It’s as irrelevant as angels on a pin. Someday soon most mathematicians will guess and fear increasingly that this is true. Meanwhile they loudly cling to their mom Plato, like frightened new-born monkeys (as my friend Penrose does).

The best argument those who cling to Plato have is, precisely, meaning. The math they have done mean something, somewhere, they argue. “Look at our beautiful theorems,” they say ecstatically.

It’s exactly the same problem as with well-known superstitions. No proof for what they say, but they say it together, sing it together, so they believe it. Whatever “it” is. Belief is much comfortable: it saves energy. Instead of creating one’s own neurological circuitry, one learn to sing it from others (as the Nazis put it: Sieg Heil!) That’s the charm of tribes, their brain energy-saving side.

I propose to forget the error of infinity, this “corruption of the youth“, as a mathematician contemporary of Georg Cantor put it. I propose to concentrate on more meaningful mathematics, precisely. Solve hypersonic laminar flow. Forget what requires ZFC to prove.

Some could sneer that I talk about energy to justify truth, and now I talk about meaning, thus I am all over the place, thoroughly confused.

But not so.

The brain is an energy machine. The brain has interest to believe.

Belief is energy cheap; it basically consists, most often in just repeating what one has heard. As the Wolf put it to the Lamb: ‘On me l’a dit, il faut que je me venge, one has told me that I must avenge myself’. Once the Wolf has asserted the primacy of belief, he can devour whatever he so desires.

Believing is much less energy consuming than thoroughly demonstrating (that’s energy demanding, as it requires to have checked every single logical jump). The brain finds more meaning in models of the universe that require less energy to believe.

For example, once you have decided god explained everything, there is nothing else to figure out. One can be like a dog, and believe everything. So the popularity of god has to do with energy conservation.

A plane is built from the most delicate architecture of entangled truths. Truth is literally what works, i. e., conducts energy with meaning.

Some will object that I make a superficial reasoning by proximity, a topo-logy: a logic of place. Thinking has to do with energy, energy has to do with thinking, so they are the same. No.

What’s a thought? Well, a set of joint brain assemblies calling onto action. (A particular case is an idea, which can be expressed in words, that is, which can be digitalized, and thus can be communicated by voice or the like.)

It requires energy to set-up and be inspected by consciousness, to be made into a communicable whole (even if it’s only self-communication). So the establishment of a thought, and even its sustainability, require energy.

Now, not all and any energy display will be a thought. However, when is a truth correct? When it allows energy to flow in a way that is deemed correct. That is, when it has correct meaning.  The later notion is simply tied up, ultimately, to survival of the species.

Thus the architecture of energy, not only describes thoughts, but validates them.

Let’s go back to the idea of High Energy Physics (Quantum Field Theory,  QED, QCD, TOE, Super Strings, etc.). Why is it called “High”? Because it’s about high frequencies (the first idea of the Quantum is that energy comes in packets determined by the frequency: E = hv).

So what are we facing here? That thinking is about Brain Energy Physics. That implies both meaning and pleasure, both derivatives to optimizing energy flow.

Truth is the discourse that optimizes the servitude of energy to the survival of the species.

At least, so I propose.

I think, therefore I energize.

Patrice Aymé

***

Notes: (1) Reading old proofs, I found, to my amazement, that META is close in mentality to the initial proof of Georg Cantor on the uncountability of the real numbers; except I stand that on its head. Fields Medal Tim Gowers has been trying to contradict my reasoning, but I think is objection is devoid of powerful meaning.

***

Economy ought to be founded on Energy (I’ve insisted, to give economics, and thus society the rigorous foundations society needs it to have). In particular AWE, Absolute Worth Energy.

Absolute Worth is, ultimately, determined by survival. There is a science uniting psychology and economics, that justifies one with the other, and vice versa. The preceding goes much further, as it unites the whole thing, and thinking itself, as a subset of energy physics.

ESSENCE PLUTO CRISIS

[Just a reminder, and refrain.]

“Liberty, Equality, Fraternity,” allow civilization to function optimally (as they put all brains in parallel). The Greeks were rightly obsessed by them, especially Liberty, and various notions of Equality (several of which we have lost).

However, time and time again, in history, civilization collapsed into Slavery, Inequality, Hatred, Mayhem. How? Generally, through the plutocratic phenomenon. That’s when greed takes over any other inclination, to become the organizing principle of society.

90,000 pages of the tax code of the USA have been written to insure that the greedier, the less taxes one pays (99.99% of the People use only .01% of that tax code: the inverted percentages are no accident, but design).

Absent a progressive taxation that is sufficiently steep enough, the exponential growth of wealth guarantees that the plutocratic phenomenon will occur. The mathematics of interest enforces this. In simple language, the richer they are, the easier it is for the rich to get richer. (This was known throughout the Neolithic by societies which left a trace; it’s not known in the present USA, because the plutocrats have captured the collective cognition and reflection).

The plutocratic phenomenon, plutocracy, comes in two phases: first, an oligarchy confiscates most of the wealth and most of the economy. This is happening now, and is facilitated by the capture of political power. (1)

Secondly, this unjust rise of wealth for a few is accompanied by an implosion of the character of the oligarchs, down into the black hole of the Dark Side. Why? As their rule gets ever more unjust, the richer and more powerful they get, the plutocrats need ever more devious means to stay in power by force and lies. That, in turn, makes plutocrats ever more satanic. (2)

In other words, past a point, the only way plutocracy can grow, is by harnessing the Dark Side, big time. Satanism grows on itself, just as, in the early stage, wealth grew on itself.

This growth of global and overreaching Satanism is one of the (overlooked) consequences of plutocracy.

What does this mean in practice, in the situation we are?

The first thing to do is to break the enslavement of money creation to Wall Street (instead of Main Street). In normal circumstances, most of the money is created by private banks under a mandate from the government. Franklin Roosevelt knew this, and that’s why he passed the Banking Act of 1933 (3).

Secondly wealth ought to be detected: put in place a worldwide system to detect where and what all of wealth consists of. Break through all these shell companies and holdings.

Third, tax the hyper rich enough to block the confiscation of all wealth and power by just a few. Republican president Eisenhower instituted a 93% tax on the upper tax bracket. The same, worldwide, inflicted to all and any wealth above the billionaire level, would instantly re-establish civilization, and its prospects.

Patrice Ayme

***

Notes: A good way to get out of plutocratic service is default on debt (by the states). Contrarily to what many of my contradictors on the Internet, especially the Krugman blog, claimed, the USA did default on its debt several times (about 6 times). As usual when there is a default, it’s later erased from collective memory by semantic calibration.

For example FDR’ 1933 default, or the Argentinian or Greek defaults are called by other names. Generally one calls default “restructuring the debt”.  

A reason for the popularity of Wall Street style financing in the USA is the stability of the country, an island, just like Britain. Continental financial exchanges have a less good track record, due to invasions. The debt default problem is tightly related to this.

(1)    The seizure of an economy by oligarchs, under order from the USA, happens. This could be observed in Russia in the 1990s under Yeltsin, when Harvard academics, in a crafty plot, advised the naïve president, that a modern economy could not exist without a plutocracy.

(2)    Satanism: this is why Obama tells us that, to lower healthcare costs, one has to bring those who want to make a profit, and that’s why, when the democrats could do it, they refused to even consider enabling Medicare to negotiate the prices of drug in G.W. Bush Medicare Part D plan…

(2)’    Satanism: Just watch the NSA and the like. It’s not so much about “terrorists” that they are after, than just establishing a police state hooked on large corporations, that is, the plutocracy (which owns and control them). Don’t forget the CIA fabricated Bin Laden.

(3)    The so called “Volcker Rule” is a pale reminder of FDR’s Banking Act of 1933: it just requires banks to inform customers when they steal their money.

And now for what Dominique Deux said about the necessity to find out, where, what, how and who about wealth:

Dear Patrice, as usual your comment, far from dwelling in Utopia, is full of small seedlings which only need some nurturing and watering to bloom into perfectly feasible programs/policies. 

One such is “Break through all these shell companies and holdings.” 

Merely stopping to consider this opens huge venues. 

First of all, we’re supposed (ordered) to believe that this is a technically impossible task, and stop there. That is pure unadulterated BS. Government spying is both rife and efficient worldwide, but tracing back an oil tanker’s ultimate owner, or a holding’s ultimate paymasters, is claimed to be impossible due to that tired, low-tech trick of shell post boxes with copper plates in tax havens. Aw, come on. 

Fact is, the smart intel and law enforcement community is carefully kept busy chasing red herrings, and barred from joining that specific fray. No means, no results, it’s as simple as that. 

Year in, year out, hundreds of extremely proficient finance professionals are churned out by business schools and universities worldwide. French graduates, due to their high mathematical level, are among the best and at a premium, but they’re not the only ones by far. 

Let Governments start large recruitment programs, with a view to be as replete with financial intel capacity as they are now with anti-terrorist and economic spying capacity. This means decently paid analysts with decent career prospects. Tracing back clandestine ownership should no longer be a judge-ordered effort, using up spare capacities on a few idiots who made the mistake of getting conspicuous, but a blanket policy, with enough hardware and personnel to spare.  

The costs would be offset, by several orders of magnitude, by the obvious fiscal gains. Other advantages would unfold, some unforeseen. 

Of course the bright school and U alumni are all vying to become seven figure traders, sell swords in gilt armor for the masters of the world. Yet a two pronged approach of (a) offering decent earnings, status and government careers, along with the satisfaction of working for the common good, and (b) ruthless and exemplary treatment of the “golden boys” who somehow fall foul of justice, would make quite a lot of these bright young men (and women) think twice before selling their souls. 

(It’s a bit like prostitution: when attractive young women are given a real choice between gratifying work and selling their bodies, only a hardcore minority will keep to the latter. But the choice has to be real – no Wal-Mart till pseudo-jobs.) 

When I say “Governments” I do not mean all of them. A few relevant ones would be enough. Along with international agencies. 

You’re fond of reminding us of the greatness of WWII warriors. So, here it is: “Where there’s a will, there’s a way”.

Worse Than The 1930s

GREATER DEPRESSION II.

I have long argued that we are in a Greater Depression. See: https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/07/23/greater-depression/

Europe is actually doing worse, GDP-wise, in the aftermath of the 2007 crisis than it did in the Great Depression shock of 1931. Actually these are the early stages of the greatest catastrophe ever known to have struck the genus Homo, I claim, and will so develop, lest drastically new thinking is applied. Krugman is slowly coming on board.

In the 1930s, the word “plutocrat” was well known, & an object of contempt. In the early 1930s, revolution was simmering; the governments had to do something. The USA & UK went into full, Soviet-like, command & control economy to rearm. FDR launched a program of construction of no less than 24 giant (“fleet“) aircraft carriers in 1933!

In “If Only It Were the 1930s” Krugman shows the latest graph of relevant GDPs.

Worse Than 1930s Great Depression

[Germany, UK and USA were not in the Gold Bloc, but applied pretty much the Sterling method: default. France refused to default thus kick back on her armament program… When war against Hitler was already in full swing (1939-1940)]

Says Krugman:  the UK actually had a substantially higher ratio in the 1930s— and even more so after World War II. How did it deal with this debt? Not through the recipe currently being imposed in Europe, of fiscal austerity and internal devaluation. Instead, the UK relied on a cheap-money policy that produced low interest rates and moderate inflation — “financial repression” — with the central bank “subservient” not just to the government, but to government debt-management policies.

Amusingly, but tellingly, Krugman forgets to mention that the USA devalued in 1933 (devalued its debt, that is). That’s one of the first things Roosevelt did, hence the hatred of bankers.

Nowadays, erroneous policies boil down to who owns the world. The world has been colonized by the plutocrats. To service them, they impose slavery on all.

Little economists paid for sleek plutophile propaganda form a crucial, well rewarded, part of the scheme.

(Otto Rehn, by the way is thinking to run as a major extreme right wing politician in the coming European elections; thus the European Commission is led, in economic & financial matters, by a declared right wing extremist, and an ambitious one, indeed, not the cool technician he claims to be… hence his rage against socialist France.)

The radical solution is to default on the debt (I have advocated this long ago in: ”To Save The World, Please Default”). https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2011/09/14/to-save-the-world-please-default/

Or at least default on interest payments. That could be done right away. Plutocrats would not be happy, they would plot.

To shut plutocrats down entirely, establish a worldwide register of property, and tax plutocracy accordingly.

Using force is not as utopic as it sounds: the Swiss Parliament just denounced a fiscal accord between France & Switzerland. What’s next? France will use force and impose whatever it has decided Switzerland will do fiscally. That involves, among other things, not just taxing French plutocrats hiding in Suisse, but also 190,000 Swiss citizens.

Some will say: “Is not force bad? If France uses force against Switzerland, surely, this is bad.” Well, no. First, force is already used. Plutocracy is satanic violence, the worst side of man, ruling. Second, force in the service of goodness is always good, just as weakness in the service of badness is always bad. The difference? Morality.

At that point the famous John from Hartford, who is paid to sound smart on the behalf of the plutocracy, intervened. Said he: “Default on the debt? Yes I can see that doing wonders for growth and employment when personal and corporate credit in the US economy totals around $60 trillion compared to the less than $3 trillion of cash in circulation.”

John meant to be sarcastic, but he is just idiotic instead. I politely replied: John, thanks for pointing out this misunderstanding. Please pay attention to the context. We are talking about government debt. This is in the name of what the austerity is done. First point. I would be glad if this got cleared up in your mind, all the more since you are probably not the only such case.

Second point: money is created through credit from private banks or dark pools, in normal circumstances. But, for example before and during WWII, this was thrown out of the window, when a command and control system was put in place.

That the USA required Great Britain to pay its war debt after 1945 was hostile to justice, decency, civilization, and highly detrimental to the British economy. That was made possible only by a British elite sold to Washington. That this is still going on today does not mean it will, tomorrow.

All governments’ fiscal problems would vanish if the hyper rich were taxed enough to kill the plutocratic phenomenon. This is a necessity, not to re-establish fiscal balance, but to re-establish civilizational balance.

Oh, by the way, John Hartford is grossly ignorant of what happened in the 1930s. Then all major governments (USA, UK, Germany) but for those on the gold standard (France) defaulted. The non-default of France was a disaster for the French economy.

Patrice Ayme

Equality, Innovation, Civilization Sustained

Civilization is technological, or is not. Civilization is progressive, or is not. Why? Because resources get exhausted: sustainability is always unsustainable.

Some will laugh, and point out at their new renewables: the sun, the wind, sea currents. However, all would die in a full run-away greenhouse we are pointing towards. (How that could be was exposed in some of my essays, long ago, and will be left as a question, to motivate the students! After all, that’s the way I used to teach math and, or, physics!)

We need bigger solutions. Or we will keep on sinking.

When God Humbled Plutocrats

[Roman Emperor Henry IV left out in the cold on the left; head down on the right.]

Speaking of students, Krugman is progressing in his awareness of the socio-economic situation. So is Obama who made a confused discourse about inequality (in Obama befuddled brains, the solution to inequality is more free market, Obamacare style, as he reminds us in his incoherence… and then joins stupidity to insolence by asking us if we have a better solution; well all advanced countries, but for the USA, have a solution: public health care).

Obama is a piece of flotsam moved by the tsunami of plutocracy unchained. He mentioned innovation, correctly. However his administration has made strides against it. As always, in the name of the so-called tech giants (truly plotting monopolies). As nearly always, implemented reality is the opposite of Obama’s lenifying discourses.

Intellectual Property (IP) has been seriously gutted out for the little guys (aka the inventors) since 2008.

The Obama administration has engaged in a war against “trolls“, an ill-disguised campaign for the largest corporate actors (ignoring that IP is fungible, the very principle of patents and copyright).

The Federal Circuit came up with a weird decision, AGAINST “injunctive relief”.  Large corporations can infringe in peace.

Moreover the Supreme Court decided recently that large damages amounts are more difficult to prove. NOW, if a corporation infringes on a patent, “apportionment” has to be effected.

This is a three-pronged attack against innovation.

But the pawns march on. March of the drones, all lined up behind the drone-in-chief.

The best way to get to get to Greece or Zimbabwe, as a society, is through rising inequality. Because tremendous inequality is what characterizes these societies most. In turn, it generates other ills of an overwhelming nature.

Economic inequality, at some point transmogrifies and changes dimensions, becoming fiscal and then political inequality (as presently in the USA). In the next step, even the appearance of democracy erodes (see Bush versus Gore, when a correct recount in favor of the on with the most votes was… outlawed).

Aristocracy and fascism arose from economic inequality. This was known for 26 centuries, and acted up by the creators of Greek democracies and the Roman Republic, through redistribution of wealth, or out-lawing the rise of hyper wealth.

There was a law in Rome blocking great wealth; the non-respect of this law brought civil war between the People and the plutocrats; the plutocrats won… until the Franks took over, 650 years later.

If we go full paleolithic, we will worry about food on the table, and energy. Both are under threat. Human organizations have to rise to the challenge. The distinctions between public and private, when a crisis gets strong enough, are irrelevant (look at WWII when Britain and the USA adopted economic command and control).

As we are threatened by several crises, of never seen-before severity, which are already having an impact, the time may come to avoid the self-reflective reflector jargon about neo-Keynes, post counter-counter neo Hayekism, etc…

The economists have failed to understand that, inasmuch as too much central planning is bad, so is too little. Part of economic theory ought to address the part of the economy that is public, not just the “free”-market, for profit part.

We do need governmental projects, not just government money (especially not just money sent to private banks). If Inertia Confinement Thermonuclear Fusion could be made to work well enough, for example, all our energy problems would be solved.

Fusion break-even was just achieved at LLL national laboratory; the only other project that way, worldwide, is from the French government. That sort of huge project, with potential giant, civilization changing impact, is only made possible from the largest economic entities around, governments (or even union of governments, as with the LHC, and ITER; these are not just science projects, but economic enterprises of incalculable cost… literally). The stupid sequester had an impact on thermonuclear fusion: researchers were ordered not to even reveal the breakthrough they had achieved.

The fascist plutocratic Roman imperial government was adverse to real scientific innovation (as ideas threaten plutocracy).  However, its barbarians enemies caught up with Rome technologically on the battlefield. That resulted, not just into defeat on the battlefield, but in the permanent outright replacement of Roman Army by the Franks (after experimenting with the Goths, and even the Huns).

Contemplate the Chinese dictatorship trying the first soft landing on the Moon, Luna, in 37 years; contemplate the fact China can access space at this point… But the only way Americans or Europeans get to space is by paying mentally unstable KGB dictator Putin.

Another factor in the fall of the Greco-Roman world was the exhaustion of resources. This had started early on, when, for military reasons (building the Athenian anti-Persian War Navy), Athens had eradicated the forests of Attica (500 BCE). Seven centuries later, the crisis was major, and multi-dimensional.

By 1300 CE, a similar crisis was affecting Western Europe. Half of the population died in short order (even more did during the Dark Ages). Yet, this time, innovative solutions were enacted swiftly, and civilization barely missed a stride (although, soon, horrendous religious and plutocratic wars wrecked the West).

The powerful kept supporting the loftiest intellectual ventures (just the opposite of what happened in Rome, when fake, mediocre intellectuals were supported; mediocre intellectual advice is worse than none).

Innovation is not just a central to the economy, but to the survival of civilization. But to have innovation, one needs the People experience enough equality to push for it. Although it humbles me to admit this, the Christian Church, with its strong socialist tendency (thank you Jesus), limited plutocratization: after all, kings in good standing washed the feet of the poor.

Not just this, but the Church, whatever its insanities, was viewed as of unimpeachable advice, even by the mightiest.  That’s another safeguard that has ceased to exist. The rumor has it that Pope Francis, by taking strong positions against organized crime and hyper wealth, also known as plutocracy, is endangering his life.

Even in the darkest of the Middle Ages, this was inconceivable (forgetting the special case of Philippe Le Bel). Once a (German-Italian-) Roman emperor, Henry IV, was forced to humiliate himself on his knees waiting for three days and three nights, naked below a shirt, fasting, before the entrance gate of the Pope’s castle, while a blizzard raged in January 1077.

Nothing can humiliate our plutocrats as much nowadays. It’s in our hands.

Let’s make laws. Let’s make a worldwide register of all properties. Then we can tax the pirates and profiteers, let alone run of the mill, .01% plutocrats.

Representation without taxation is a bad joke plutocrats played not just on us, but on civilization itself.

Patrice Ayme

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Note: China just made the first soft landing on the Moon in 37 years. Well, Obama is already there! OK, the Franco-American robot “Curiosity” on Mars is more sophisticated with its (French Thales) rock blasting laser. Yet, a warning: the Jade Rabbit is supposed to look for Helium 3 (a thermonuclear fuel).