Black Holes Are Not Black

NOR ARE EQUATIONS EVERYTHING.

Hawking’s claim to fame has been to show that, considering what we held to be true in physics in 1970, Black Holes are not really black. So it’s not surprising that he wants to advertise that fact.

Basically Quantum Field Theory assumes that there are (“virtual”) pairs of particle-antiparticle that come into existence, not long enough to be observed directly, but long enough to change (“renormalize”) the Field (whatever the “Field” is). These quantitative changes are observed, so these “virtual” pairs are assumed to exist.

Next to a Black Hole, one of the pair could fall in the Hole, and then the other could escape. Hence the Hole would radiate. That’s Hawking radiation (my way). There are lots of hidden hypotheses, though. That means, it could be wrong. Anyway, this is the largest Black Hole within two million light years:

Giant Black Hole Sagittarius A*, Core Of Milky Way

Does it look dark to you?

As stuff falls into Black Hole (see the “threads”in the real picture above), immense energy is gathered by the fall (as in a hydroelectric plant), and then most of it is thrown back out as violent radiation. As you can see, the Black Hole is not black at all. Actually the giant Black Holes at the core of galaxies are periodically exploding with greater force than hyper novas. And that means that life in many volumes of the galaxies has not possibility to evolve in sophisticated forms as we did.

A whole cloud is expected to fall into our giant Sagittarius A*, within weeks).

Even in Black Hole theory itself could be wrong: it’s full of holes, I demonstrated grandly once to a prestigious audience at Stanford (Yau, Susskind, Penrose were in the audience among other celebrities).

I was looked at as cows watch a high speed train. In the meantime, though, Black Hole theory has become decidedly gray, and, decades later, many of these celebrities became famous for precisely what I talked about. First.

(That little feat did nothing for my career, indeed, as this opinion, that Black Holes were full of holes,  was viewed as thoroughly iconoclastic at the time).

The kind Matt Strassler, in his excellent blog, got all excited about Hawking’s latest pronouncements.

“Media absurdity has reached new levels of darkness with the announcementthat Stephen Hawking has a new theory in which black holes do not exist after all.

No, he doesn’t.

First, Hawking does not have a new theory… at least not one he’s presented. You can look at his paper here — two pages (pdf), a short commentary that he gave to experts in August 2013 and wrote up as a little document — and you can see it has no equations at all. That means it doesn’t qualify as a theory. “Theory”, in physics, means: a set of equations that can be used to make predictions for physical processes in a real or imaginary world. When we talk about Einstein’s theory of relativity, we’re talking about equations. Compare just the look and feel of Hawking’s recent note to Einstein’s 1905 paper on the theory of special relativity, or to Hawking’s most famous 1975 paper on black holes; you can easily see the difference without understanding the content of the papers.”

That was too good to let pass. I sent the following comment, which was published immediately:

Equations are just very precise sentences, nothing more, nothing less. They are not the Golden Calves.

Equations are crucial to distinguish two exquisitely close theories (as in BH physics… to be distinguished from BS physics).

However, not only equation fetishism, but exquisitely precise physics can itself become a trap, if the conceptual foundations of the theory are wrong. Some have said that equations are necessary to validate concepts. That, too, is wrong.

The best known example of precise, but erroneous theory is the geocentric theory. It became a prisoner of its precise mathematics (Fourier analysis in disguise). It took 19 centuries (Kepler) to make the math of heliocentrism precise enough to contradict geocentrism (but Kepler’s mentor, Tycho was handsomely financed because he had a hunch that ancient astronomers had cheated, especially about Mars).

Earlier, Buridan (1320 CE) had contradicted Aristotle, by discovering inertia (“Newton’s First Law”), and pointing out that it made heliocentrism as valid as geocentrism (but for the little problem of “scripture”…. the specialists of which put all of Buridan’s work at the “Index of Prohibited Books”, a century after his death… Although he was part of mandatory teaching in Cracow, where Copernic studied…. thanks to Hus, earlier burned to a crisp, alive, by the highest cardinals).

Ideas are more general than equations. Equations, like sentences, are written with concepts (root: becoming pregnant)… and pre-conceptions. “Shut up and calculate” goes only that far (my gaze is turning towards “superstrings”).

With the wrong concepts, it does matter how many equations one writes. (The same happens in other fields, such as economics!… or philosophy, or psychology!)

***

Anon (January 31, 2014) objected that:

“Equations are not just precise sentences, they are precise *quantitative* sentences. Equations are how you figure out if your concepts are right or wrong, by comparing them to empirical reality. 

Without equations, it doesn’t matter whether you think your concepts are “right” or “wrong”. With equations, then if the concepts are sufficiently wrong then it’s the equations that will show that. If the equations do not show that, then what is your basis for saying that the concept is wrong?…

It’s easy for you to sit here with all that history behind us and say that they should have just realized that ellipses were the right concept to begin with, but it’s only obvious to you because of the precise math that went into showing that this was indeed the right concept to describe reality. 

For things where we don’t already know the right answer, then equations are how you figure that out. Trying to declare which concept is “right” before working out the equations and seeing if it matches reality is bass-ackwards.”

Anon: I did not say ellipses were easy to figure out, nor that concepts can be dissociated from equations. Ellipses were not easy to figure out. Kepler tried something like 100 different curves. However, clearly Buridan knew that the heliocentric theory was right. Heliocentrism is no more about ellipses than Kepler’s theory was about the 1/d in gravitation.

Kepler mad a “30 year war on Mars” (as he put it). And he won. However, he believe erroneously, that gravity went as the inverse of the distance (instead of the inverse of the square of the distance).

A French astronomer got the 1/dd, and Newton exploited it. The point is: theories have degrees.

For example, Einstein Theory of Gravitation is a modest, pretty obvious extension of Newton’s theory of gravitation. (One that Newton partly called for.)

Geometry did without equations until Bolyai and Lobachevsky. Even then, the (re)”discovery” of Non Euclidean geometry was, fist of all, a philosophical phenomenon, the realization that geometry was a local computation, or modelization.

Riemann’s shattering ideas were in a paper (Habilitationsschrift)… With just one (sort of) equation. His paper was all about concepts, including some erroneously attributed to Einstein.

Speaking of Einstein (Matt started it, see above) his Special Relativity work of 1905 was just a neat repackaging of what was already known (that means Einstein 1905 strictly did not have ONE new equation).

Considering the history of the last 5,000 years of science, Descartes having invented algebraic geometry less than 4 centuries ago, to equate science and equations is unwise. And soon to be irrelevant, thanks to computing power. After all, equations are digital, and the universe is not.

An inkling of this: there is a field called combinatorial topology. General topology (which is… more general) does not rest on numbers. Ironically the Black Hole problem is all about Quantum Topology (we don’t know what that is, the crux of the problem).

It gets better than that: the essence of the Incompleteness Theorems of mathematical logic is precisely that any formal expression belongs to a countable world… And the universe does not. To which I have added the further twist that the available energy if finite (and that obviously impact expressions, hence computations).

Theory is hard, but it is the law. Of nature.

Patrice Ayme

Cap Wealth To Decapitate Plutocracy

By law, under the Republic, Individual Roman wealth was capped at the equivalent of a few dozens of millions. The reason why is that the Roman had great understanding of the reasons exposed below.

That capping of the wealth of families was the law for more than 250 years (before that, there simply were no Romans rich enough to make such a law necessary). A conservative Consul, and great general who had been elected dictator during the invasion of Rome by a Gallic army had the law passed around 380 CE.

That law capping wealth became ineffective when Rome conquered most of the Mediterranean. By then hyper rich Roman invested overseas. The hyper rich created the Republic Of Offshore, and avoided taxation all together.

That caused, first, enormous inequalities. Then, when righteous politicians tried to enforce the law a civil war that, thanks to buying politicians, and using political assassinations, the plutocrats won. After that, the Roman Republic declined and fell, until, in 400 CE, the Roman government, unable to pay the army, put the Franks in charge of the defense of Gallia and both Germania Inferior and Superior.

We are launched in the same exact same pattern nowadays. Plutocrat Tom Perkins’s loud claims that the Jews were the 1%  in Germany is delirious. Just as his claim that the hyper rich are persecuted, same as the Jews were.

It’s actually plutocrats similar to him who created, financed, enabled, armed and fueled the Nazis. Let alone exerted undue influences on the Anglo-Saxon government to isolate the French Republic in its attempts to throw Nazism out.

American plutocrats’ influence on the Congress of the USA explains why the Congress, having legislated against France and Britain’s attack against Hitler in 1939, refused absolutely to give an ultimatum to the Nazis, and waited bovinely until Hitler declared war to the USA well after Pearl Harbor. Those years of infamy, were the years of gathering plutocratic strength in the USA, as American plutocrats carefully nurtured Hitler and Mussolini.

The immensely rich are intrinsically evil, for the good and simple reason that primates are just, and the hyper rich’s very existence is not. After all, money is power, and immense money is immense power. Power on whom? Other people.

Feeling their intrinsic evil, the hyper rich sink ever closer to Pluto, by using their power to pay politicians and media to distort reality ever more. We see it in Ukraine, in Russia, in Turkey. How much do we need to see here, before realizing that it is after civilization itself that plutocracy is?

Plutocracy & Nazism Are Entangled

If I had a Hammer To Smash Infamy

Pete Seeger, 94 years old, just died. He wrote:

“If I had a hammer I’d hammer in the morning

I’d hammer in the evening all over this land

I’d hammer out danger, I’d hammer out warning

I’d hammer out love between my brothers and my sisters

All over this land”

Nietzsche said he was making philosophy with a hammer. Is Obama a hammer? Yes.  But he does not hammer for the pecus vulgaris. Under Obama fundamental research got cut, although he bemoans it, but then Obama gives rich people $7,500 each time they buy a $100,000 car from Obama’s friend Elon Musk. Musk is another of these hyper wealthy white immigrants from South Africa Obama apparently likes to surround himself with. Obama is all about diversity, as long as it stays plutocratic.

Obama just gave his SOTU (State Of The Union) speech. That yearly obligation is part of the 200 year old, sketchy, obsolete, USA Constitution.  Obama, chin up, reading left, reading right, celebrated his Trojan Horse presidency, charlatan outside, black Reagan inside, Wall Street heart beating at the core.

Periodically the elite of millionaires listening to the guy-in-chief stands up and applauds. “Corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher”, Obama hammers. Rarely? What a weird dissemblance!

Actually, under plutophile Obama, corporate profits, after tax, have never been higher in terms of GDP. And that’s very wrong, because median income has been going down. The latter  never happened before for decades: maybe the Constitution never goes down, but the economy does. Both phenomena are related.

Pete Seeger and Hays wrote “If I had a hammer” in defense of the leaders of the American Communist Party who were on trial in 1949. Where is the American Communist Party now? It has been hammered into inexistence. No doubt disappearing the Communists is part of what Obama calls “democracy”.

No more American Communists, but we have is this ersatz of a parody of a brown Kenyan boy delivering the speech his (white) masters wrote for him. Talk about a guy without a hammer.

Not all Obama said was absurd, far from it. What was absurd is that everybody listens to him, as if he had any power. Verily, he has none. He had plenty five years ago, and did not use it. His masters had chosen well, a creature with no spine, nor ideas of its own, with just the will to navigate towards the top the Financial Times had defined for him.

One can safely say that Barack Obama’s presidency, barring the unforeseen, like a North Korean nuclear strike, will have presided over the most unremarkable American presidency since Charles Pierce. Of course, racist supporters will claim that this is, by itself, a success. Since I am not racist, i can’t approve that gutter style reasoning.

The State Of The Union (“SOTU”) speech has become the State Of Totally Uncomprehending.

Obama is talking off a carefully prepared text, with choreographed TV panning around on diverse, appropriate critters as he speaks. One learns that:

”This son of a factory worker is going to college this fall… The USA is the greatest nation on earth”. Wow, indeed, speak about equal opportunity. Obama calls his mom a “single mom”. Truth is what he decides it is. Actually she was married all the time, first to an uppity albeit flighty, Kenyan, then to an Indonesian millionaire, a front man for USA corporations (and probably the CIA: did Obama inherit his job?).

150 businesses and corporations and “non-profits” (Gates, the well known non-profiteers) are going to help with education, Barack Obama pontificates. He quoted by name some giant corporations (Microsoft, Apple, Verizon, Sprint, etc.) to explain they paid for 16.000 “public” schools “so it won’t cost a dime to the Federal government”. Alleluia. Is this corporate advertising guy for real? Ah, yes, the president also tells us that “Cosco is smart”.

No doubt preparing his future career as a humongously paid American corporate cheerleader. He may as well train in public.

“America is all about some people achieving incredible success, we don’t resent that.” What about achieving credible success instead? “No country in the world does what we do, on every issue. Every country looks up to us.” Why are politicians of the USA so dementedly nationalistic? Because only hyper nationalism holds the country together?

Several times, his wife looks distraught, on the verge of tears. Something she knows we don’t? As the camera pans on her, she sees the red light, and she beams a huge smile, and makes big round eyes, as she has been trained to do. One should make a sequence of such pictures.

Not everything Obama said was absurd, but then he quickly slip into infamy:

“We fight terrorism by sticking to constitution and being an example… That’s why I have put prudent limits on the use of drones. That’s why I will work with this Congress… The privacy of ORDINARY people is not been violated.”

Excuse me? Obama implies that: Extraordinary people, though, are fair game.”Here and abroad.” Meditate this, you, extraordinary people: your privacy is violated, the president guarantees it.

Extraordinary people are extra-constitutional, like these Communists Pete Seeger sang about in 1949.

The audience starts chanting USA USA USA USA. At least nationalism is strong. Encouraged, Obama says: “the world looks towards us…. our veterans need mental health care”

Real thunderous applause about that point. Indeed, the veterans need it: they have got to have been crazy to start with, to  serve, body and soul, that  corporate-plutocratic monster that devours the planet, and invade forsaken countries on the other side of the Earth, just because that’s where the profits are.

Even more thunderous ovation for a mangled soldier with shrapnel in his brain. For more than two minutes the audience of all-powerful millionaires stands up and applauds. What are they applauding? Their capacity at ordering shrapnel into people’s brains, worldwide? Michelle puts her hands on him… He was victim of a road side bomb in Afghanistan. It was his tenth deployment, helping to kill people overseas. Very moving, indeed.

Has a thought been given about why the USA went to war in Afghanistan in 1979, and in Iraq in the 1990s? The “extraordinary troops that kept us free” is all the analysis we get from Obama. More applause. Afghanistan is ambiguously credited as “America’s longest war”. All Americans know the war lasted 13 years, the lie that covers the fact it lasted 35 years. At least.

“Terrorist do not launch attacks against our country”. Just against other countries. Nobody in that chamber knows, or would want to know, that be it in Iran in 1953, or Afghanistan in the 1970s, and many other places that cannot even mention, lest my readership scream, it was the USA’s secret agencies that launched those terrorist wars.

So Obama is using his pluto-corporate bully pulpit.. That’s all the power he has left, to gain plutocratic good points. It’s not just pathetic. It’s the exact example for the rest of the world not to follow.

Indeed, the USA has strictly no effective elected leadership at this point: Obama will ride in the big plane, lead the big life, being escorted by an army everywhere he goes, and be celebrated as the “leader of the free world”. But he is no leader, and he is not free. He has no program, and no power. The generals were (sourly) watching the State Of The Union (strange democracy, under military watch!).

The generals are the power, as in the times of Jackson (feared chief of the army, great conqueror on his own volition, later president).

Does that mean there is no leadership in the USA at this point? Not at all. The “chief business of the American people is business”, said President Coolidge in 1925. However the sort of business the USA knew in 1925 has now grown in something incomparably more sinister, the Republic Of Offshore and its unelected, plutocracy of corporations and their masters.

And don’t worry about Obama’s succession. As Obama gave his SOTU, the camera panned over several young and cute Republican Senators, some of whom (say Rubio) do not hesitate to hold an extreme right wing discourse. Ever since Nixon, all presidents of the USA have been right wing, and it’s getting worse. Plutocratization marches on.

Patrice Ayme’

Plutocracy & Nazism Are Entangled

We, writer of this modest site, are, of course, nothing. Krugman wrote the editorial “Paranoia of the Plutocrats”. A  dishonest critter at the New York Times (Krugman himself the New York Times told me) dutifully censored my own comment, lest its readership realizes that Krugman’s latest observations constitute a light version of those I have long made. Besides, I pointed out that both the search for power, and the craving for wealth, select for evil behavior, and the more evil, the more obscurity is called to cover them all. That’s why it’s called the “Dark Side“. 

That makes the hyper-wealth-fed Dark Side into something growing proportional to itself, in other words, into an exponential phenomenon.

This is why Obama’s and Bush’s own obscurantism in deed and will went hand in hand with the rise of plutocracy, the rule of the Dark Lord, Pluto, down below, mythically, heuristically, practically, and theoretically.

Collapsing into darkness characterizes, and enables, plutocracy, and this is exactly why plutocrats defend stridently whatever obscures, obfuscates or confuses (see BHL’s “philosophy” of obscurantism in the final note below).

If We Own All, We Rule You

Indeed Bernard-Henri Lévy (= « BHL »), the hyper wealthy French celebrity-philosopher published in the Daily Beast “The French Were Right to Ban Dieudonné’s Offensive ‘Performance Art’”. BHL used the traditional argument tyrants always used to justify “banishment”. I commented. As usual, BHL censored me. (He just read my comments, use some ideas therein in his books, and carefully never publish anything I say: after all, he is a professional thief, of the highest order, those who steal the planet, see below.) Surely the fact that Dieudonné is half Black African is playing no role? (BHL was born in Algeria… A very white place.)

Dieudonné Enrages French Plutocrats By Shoving The “Quenelle Up Their Ass”

Israel’s Parliament is contemplating a law making the usage of the word  « Nazi » unlawful. That’s rather strange : the old name of god in Hebrew was the abbreviation for « the one whose name shall not be uttered ». If Israelis are required by law to not pronounce the word « Nazi », that means « Nazism » is divine. Will masochism now become the law?

Seriously: among the primitives, not pronouncing the name of the divinity in anything but awe was always viewed as a major sin, sometimes deserving of the death penalty. Is Israel getting THAT primitive? A case of gathering plutocracy? The more one steals Palestinian land, the worse one gets inside one’s own mind?

Or is it simply that the land grabbers inside Israel do not want to be reminded that they behave like the Nazis used to? (Compare with the Nazi’s theory of “Lebensraum”, the Life-Space, and replace “Deutschland” by “Israel”.)

Then Thomas Perkins, an eight billion dollar plutocrat, famous for his 150 million dollars yacht, the “Maltese Falcon”, wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal (January 2014):

“Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich”.

From the Occupy movement to the demonization of the rich embedded in virtually every word of our local newspaper, the San Francisco Chronicle, I perceive a rising tide of hatred of the successful one percent.

There is outraged public reaction to the Google buses carrying technology workers from the city to the peninsula high-tech companies which employ them. We have outrage over the rising real-estate prices which these ‘techno geeks’ can pay,” Perkins concludes by warning of a “very dangerous drift in our American thinking… Kristallnacht was unthinkable in 1930; is its descendent ‘progressive’ radicalism unthinkable now?”

OK, so “progressives” are Nazis? Interestingly, that is just what the Nazis tried to make the folks believe. Another lie, which the Nazis also tried to impart upon the folks, with some initial success, was that the Jews were Germany’s “one percent”. It is troubling to see a major actor of Silicon Valley embrace both major Nazi lies, as if they were obvious.

Germany had a complete plutocratic class, little of it was Jewish. Perkins’ world is upside down. (Long ago someone writing a comment on my site had the same exact objection as Perkins, and called me a “Nazi”; he wrote  that to be against plutocrats was similar to be against Jews. I left the comment: I never censor. BHL, see below, says something exploiting the same mood as Perkins.)

In November 1938, on Martin Luther’s birthday, the Nazi leadership ordered an attack on all businesses in Germany held by Jews. 91 Jews, officially, were killed, more than 30,000 sent to concentration camps.

There was glass all over the streets, and it came to be known as “Kristallnacht”. As I explained, it had everything to do with Luther (a notion the politically correct New York Times ferociously censors: it views comparing Hitler and Luther a form of racism).

Kristallnacht also had everything to do with the plutocrats who supported Hitler, and had supported him, from the start. Not one plutocrat was hurt by Kristallnacht. The people who were hurt owned, overall, property, true, and the Nazis, facing the failure of their economic policy, stole said property, to redistribute it to their followers.

OK, now for plutocrat BHL, high priest of the inversion of all values.

Dieudonné, a ‘performance artist’ was banned by the French Conseil d’Etat, a sort of high court. The pretext is that as BHL puts it: “He was an incendiary, anti-Semitic ideologue whose silencing poses no threat to real freedom of speech.” Notice the past tense: does that mean that some henchman paid by BHL has already “silenced” Dieudonné?

Dieudonné is half from Cameroon, and French president Hollande called him “M’Bala M’Bala”. BHL claims that: “The man banned by the French high court was not a political comedian, satirist, or any kind of humorist but rather—and this cannot be overemphasized—an ideologue whose credo, endlessly repeated over the course of long performances, is that the Jews control the world, that they have a monopoly on the media and political establishment, and that the duty of the enemies of that establishment is to shove the quenelle (as Dieudonné’s distinctive variant of the Nazi salute is known) “up the ass of Zionism.”

Now, wait a minute here. BHL and all his friends, including those dear friends at the French presidency, from Mitterrand  to Chirac, to Hollande, were, or are, always “up the ass” of any woman in sight, and boast about it all the time, by word, or deed.

Why is it bad when Dieudonné talks about doing too? Because he is black?

The “quenelle”: an arm pointed to the ground, the other hand helping it down is an extremely mild version at worst, of the aborted Nazi salute in Kubrick’s Doctor Strangelove, a classic of the movies. The guy parodied in Doctor Strangelove is no less than Dr. Kissinger, a German Jew who became a sort of Evil Doctor in the USA establishment, complete with Nobel Prize for Peace.

Confusedly, the Fascists-Nazis-Stalinists made a lot of propaganda against the “plutocrats” (a word used by Hitler and other top Nazis). The confusion was deliberate. The fascists, to cover their tracks, came to equate “plutocrats” (who supported them) and “Jews”.

That was rather ironical, because, although some of their partisans were stridently anti-Jewish (say Henry Ford), other were actually… Jews (say the Warburgs in the case of Hitler; countless “Jews” helped to instigate the Soviet Revolution; for example Trotsky, head of the red Army, was from a Jewish-Atheist family… later those Jews found themselves victims of a vengeful anti-Soviet population). The same phenomenon was inaugurated by the Kaiser Wilhem II. Although he had many Jewish friends before the war that he started, he turned virulently anti-Jewish afterwards.

If one changes “Jews” into “plutocrats” in BHL’s statement above, one gets:  “the plutocrats control the world, that they have a monopoly on the media and political establishment, and that the duty of the enemies of that establishment is to shove the quenelle…”

Is not it exactly what is going on?

BHL is for “silencing” critics.  Yet, the problem is that “silencing” this is against the law, and the spirit of civilization. In other words, like all good plutocrats, like Perkins, BHL is just a savage. He can sue me about this if he wants: suing the truth is hard.

In a state of law, one ought to roll out the specific expressions at fault. If Dieudonné broke the law, give exact quotes that are demonstrably false and condemnable, and let justice do its job. Otherwise what one engages in is just trial by innuendos, and dictatorial fiat, both of them forms of hate crime.

So why is BHL so willing to silence critics? Because he is himself a plutocrat in the classical mold, namely his fortune is inherited, and he slept with the state. As a dashing young man, he went to see his close friend, France’s president Mitterrand, an ex-Vichysiste, who collected women as others do butterflies.

The Vichy state of Mr. Mitterrand (Mite-Rat?) loaned BHL millions when the family business was going down, in the early 1980s. Later Pinault, a major French plutocrat, one of the world’s richest men, who tried to flee to Belgium last year, bought some of BHL’s business for dozens of millions of dollars.  BHL was also friend with plutocrat Jean-Luc Lagardère, who besides his main business making weapons, owned Hachette Livre, the largest publisher in France, and Hachette Filipacchi Médias, the largest magazine publisher in the world.

BHL is plutocracy central, French version (that is arrogant and lesson giving, while pocket filling) .

BHL’s main business, as a dashing young man? Kill the equatorial rain forest. He can sue me about this if he wants: suing the truth is hard.

I do appreciate BHL as a philosopher: he can be very right, deep down inside, although, fundamentally, his main theory is as wrong as wrong can be. And that makes BHL as interesting as a venomous cobra. For the venom, that is. The neurotoxicity.

Basically BHL, naturally enough for a plutocrat, hates the Light… And he writes about that, in some of his most famous quotes. At least, it’s coherent. (See note.)

BHL followed me on Libya, and I persist and sign. So why is BHL panicking about Dieudonné? Why is Perkins panicking? Why is Israel panicking?

They are all faking it, and using indignation as a manipulation, just as firemen will start a counter-fire.

Because they all suspect that We The People, worldwide, may realize that they have been manipulated. Not so much by “Jews” (although they would like us to say that, so that they can accuse us to be racist!). But by the plutocratic phenomenon.

What’s that? An international of plutocracy, the Republic Of Offshore. A similar phenomenon was at the root of World War One, as I have explained. And certainly at the root of World War Two (JP Morgan and his creatures covered both). And at the root of the so called “American Century”.

The danger now is exactly the same as a century ago: left to its own instruments, the people of Germany would have reigned in its own plutocracy, in 1914. Instead, to shut down the Socialist Party Deutschland (SPD), the German plutocracy launched a world war.

In a way, it worked: a plutocrat such as Krupp survived World War One, and became one of Hitler’s main support (he conveniently died before being tried as a war criminal after 1945). Thyssen (“I paid Hitler”) survived with his family fortune intact, and his industrial group, until a recent merger, was the most powerful in Germany. It worked especially well for the plutocrats made in USA who supported Hitler: many of these corporations are still household names.

So the danger now is that frantic plutocrats will impose a police state. Obama is well on his way, complete with death by robots of civilians, and NSA unleashed. Meanwhile , plutocrats try to impose state of hysteria. Just to change the conversation from the Republic Of Offshore, you know where the money to feed Obama and other propagandists come from.

Patrice Aymé.

***

Plutocrat BHL’s total inversion of all values, so grotesque, I cannot find the strength to translate that garbage: “Fascism does not come from Obscuratism, but from light… Rationality is totalitarianism”, etc.: « Chacun sait aujourd’hui que le rationalisme a été un des moyens, un des trous d’aiguille par quoi s’est faufilée la tentative totalitaire. Le fascisme n’est pas issu de l’obscurantisme, mais de la lumière. Les hommes de l’ombre, ce sont les résistants… C’est la Gestapo qui brandit la torche. La raison, c’est le totalitarisme. Le totalitarisme, lui, s’est toujours drapé des prestiges de la torche du policier. Voilà la « barbarie à visage humain » qui menace le monde aujourd’hui. »

Translation: If you want to bring to Light the untold destruction of the primary equatorial forest in Africa brought by Bernard-Henri Lévy and his henchmen, so that they could make billions, you are a totalitarian. Besides, BHL won’t have dinner with you in the Manhattan’s most expensive restaurant.the law.

Representative Politics Is Dictatorship

Representative Dictatorship Is Not Democracy

I know a young lady who was elected for the first time in California. She is sent to a posh resort for a week to learn the basics of her new job, being a “Democratic” politician. Everything is wrong with this picture (not just the mansion she lives in and her million dollar family income, while claiming to be a leftie). Everything is wrong, but it’s typical: all elected representatives in the USA are treated very well, and get to meet who, it dawns on them after a while, can insure for them, and their families, much nicer lives. (The New York Times, to its discredit, just discovered this PACS trick in 2014.) How many states? 200 St? Yes, But Just One Republic Of Off-Shore. And it’s not restricted to China:

Republic Of Off-Shore, Invisibly Dictating To All

A gigantic manipulation industry has developed, with its own strategists. Barack Obama seemed to have come out of nowhere, but, even before he started to score big, he was viewed as the anointed one, by the highest powers in “Democratic” circles: Axelrod,  a professional manipulator who had just led Kerry’s campaign, was sent to Obama, just a modest Senator. Obama then gave a keynote speech at the Kerry convention, etc.  When he campaigned, Wall Street money started to flow, more than towards any other candidate, by orders of magnitude, etc. No wonder Obama has found so hard to bite the hand that fed him.

The USA has 320 million inhabitants, 550 representatives in charge of legislating. That’s roughly one representative for 600,000 people.

In Switzerland the ratio is one to one: one citizen, one vote for legislating. Banks had found harder to buy the citizens, and the reserve requirements there, are roughly eight times what they are in the corrupt rest of the West.

I call the ratio of how many legislate for how many they claim to represent, the DEMOCRATIC INDEX. In a democracy, it’s one.

In the USA, for 600, 000 citizens, there is just one vote for legislation. It’s democratic index is roughly ZERO.

So Switzerland is 600,000 times more democratic than the USA, at the legislative level.

In truth, it’s way worse than that, because representatives, in the USA, are bought by the plutocrats (see Obama, Barack, above). That is why, right now, the banks and the financiers leading them, are doing with legal impunity things that would have sent them to jail eighty years ago. Because, recently, plutocrats and their agents bought enough legislators, around one thousands Senators, Congressmen and Presidents, to repel the law, the Banking Act of 1933.

It’s also why the tax code’s length and complexity exploded under Obama: so that legal thievery could exploit all that fine print.

Representative politics has got to be eliminated. Switzerland has eliminated it at the legislative level.

Why can’t all other countries of the West do the same? Because the present plutocracy rules through the representatives, especially in the USA. Thanks to their control of the media, they have made it so that normal, decent people sincerely believe that it is reasonable to feel that they are living in democracy.

However, the present day USA is closer in many ways to North Korea’ s present dictatorship, than to democratic Athens, 25 centuries ago..

After we have done away with representative dictatorship in the legislative realm, the executive could also be democratized.

Enough to be led by clowns playing Darius, 23 centuries later.

To handle the executive along democratic lines, we don’t need very much imagination. There are Roman Republican lines and Athenian lines.

The Romans opted for ferocious, extreme checks and balances, all over: if you were eligible for this, you were not for that, and if you had wealth, it could not be more than the equivalent of a few dozens of millions. Roman Consuls, for example, had full power only for one month at a time.

The Athenians just stuck to democracy. In Athens enormous quora (a minimum of 8% of the potential electorate) had to be found, before any decision of the National Assembly (where all sat, and all talked), could be reached.

Nowadays, of course, with the Internet, We The People could be constantly, and thoroughly consulted.  By the way, polls show the following: if this Internet direct democracy was implemented in the USA, the country would become very progressive in a matter of days.

So ladies and gentlemen, this is the way: fight for direct democracy. The alternative is ever more plutocracy, inequality, inequity for this circus led by clowns who know just one thing: military and secret services, media and games, tax free corporations, and respected illusions, are all what they define as goodness, their power, rests on.

Obama wants to jail Snowden to satisfy the law of the strongest over the spirit of democracy. Just as when Manning revealed a war crime, he had to be punished, according to the law of the strongest. Might is all the right might needs (By that token, Hitler’s prosecution of the anti-Nazis was fully justified.)

In democracy, We The People rule, and lead. But this will not happen before They The Clowns leave the stage of power. What does history say? That will not happen without violence. Do not just brace yourself, call onto the coming struggle as the physical and mental activity that we need for health. Not just physical and mental health, but civilizational and ecological health. Sitting is the new smoking.

Patrice Ayme

The Satanic Imperative

I explained in Black Hole Inequality that if inequality grows too much, a society will be sucked by it as if by a Black Hole. Such collapses typically conclude with war, invasion, or a natural calamity: Jin, Song, Yuan, Ming dynasties, & the “Fall” of Rome, or the Maya are examples.

The situation we have today possesses unparalleled perils we are not addressing because we are not in democracy, and the ruling elites are doing their best to distract themselves with corruption, in a fit of psychology reminiscent of the Nazi elite stealing treasure and art all over, while the Great Reich was falling. (See below for the Chinese elite’s theft of at least 4 trillion dollars, a pale imitation of what the American elite has been doing since it has been hiding behind the Bushes.)

Inequality is born from the exponential growth of power (in particular capital), that’s a purely mathematical effect. It became possible when capital appeared. That is, when artifacts appeared rendering life comfortable… Two million years ago (first stone tools). In conjunction with a failure of taxing said growth of capital enough, capital will grow exponentially.

In turn, inequality, being widely perceived, experiments show, as insufferable by primates, has to be covered-up under a thick layer of lies and dissemblance, to be entertained further by those who profit from it (Note 2). Even madness is not far, because those who rule have want the rabble believe that white is black, and black is white. Indeed, ethics is absolute, but, in an unjust society, it’s those who rule, who want to be absolute.

Hence the greater the inequality, the worse the emotions, the more satanic the behavior of those at the top. This is why the reign of the rich brings up the Dark Side, Satan, Pluto. That insight was reached by the Greeks at least 26 centuries ago (and later reinforced by the mythical Jesus).

Hence inequality is not just about injustice, and diminished economic opportunity for the average citizen. It’s also about a society increasingly led by fewer and fewer people gathering all the money and power, and ever more so, as long as a strong mechanism to block further inequality is not put in place.

But, even more horrifyingly, a society where inequality grows is a society where the leaders learn to increasingly lie and use the worse methods for their class to keep on ruling.

As inequality grows, so does the Dark Side.

***

KRUGMAN KEEPS ON DISCOVERING INEQUALITY:

Inequality is the drama of the Obama presidency, his signature achievement, even more than Romneycare. Obama’s is the Inequality presidency. Obama lowered taxes (mostly to the non rich) thus allowing him to leave untouched taxes on the hyper rich that were way too low. (So Obama used the former to hide the latter, a nice magician trick; Note 1.)

Krugman, his lower eye on his rather dim readership, and his upper one on his masters, wrote a less grand, but still educative editorial in the “The Populist Imperative”:

“The outstanding faults of the economic society in which we live are its failure to provide for full employment and its arbitrary and inequitable distribution of wealth and incomes.”

John Maynard Keynes wrote that in 1936, but it applies to our own time, too.

If, as has been widely reported, President Obama devotes much of his State of the Union address to inequality, everyone should be cheering him on.

They won’t, of course. Instead, he will face two kinds of sniping. The usual suspects on the right will, as always when questions of income distribution comes up, shriek “Class warfare!” But there will also be seemingly more sober voices arguing that he has picked the wrong target, that jobs, not inequality, should be at the top of his agenda.

Here’s why they’re wrong.

First of all, jobs and inequality are closely linked if not identical issues. There’s a pretty good although not ironclad case that soaring inequality helped set the stage for our economic crisis

…Yes, we’re a nation that admires rather than resents success, but most people are nonetheless disturbed by the extreme disparities of our Second Gilded Age. A new Pew poll finds an overwhelming majority of Americans — and 45 percent of Republicans! — supporting government action to reduce inequality, with a smaller but still substantial majority favoring taxing the rich to aid the poor. And this is true even though most Americans don’t realize just how unequally wealth really is distributed.

By contrast, it’s very hard to communicate even the most basic truths of macroeconomics, like the need to run deficits to support employment in bad times. You can argue that Mr. Obama should have tried harder to get these ideas across; many economists cringed when he began echoing Republican rhetoric about the need for the federal government to tighten its belt along with America’s families. But, even if he had tried, it’s doubtful that he would have succeeded.”

Krugman is funny: a man can’t teach what he does not understand. There is this famous saying that: give a man a fish, feed him for a day, teach him to fish, feed him for life.

In his unforgettable books, the irreplaceable Obama teaches that life is all about… navigating. I did not see Obama teaching values such as employment, or how to do anything productive, such as fishing and thinking.  Obama is not the Old Man and the Sea. It’s the Young Man and the Pot of Gold.

Obama’s confused policy in science and technology is a testimony to that. Obama wasted 150 billions (said his guy in charge) supporting friendly capitalists like the Elon Musk. That augmented inequality: Musk is just a filthy rich South African immigrant, who did not need all those billions from the USA president.

So Obama wasted those 150 billion, while carefully starving the science missions of NASA, including some international collaborations. The science budget at NASA is only 5 billion a year., but that makes work lots of workers and engineers, let alone scientists.

And Krugman to conclude: The point is that of the two great problems facing the U.S. economy, [employment and inequality], inequality is the one on which Mr. Obama is most likely to connect with voters…

So I hope we’ll hear something about jobs Tuesday night, and some pushback against deficit hysteria. But if we mainly hear about inequality and social justice, that’s O.K. “

It never hurts to listen to the birds singing in the trees, either. It’s more troubling when we have been navigated into a disaster by a guy who knew only to navigate to the masters. As I showed, after tax corporate profits have never been higher under Obama. But don’t worry: he will sleep well. He is not Magellan (who died pierced by arrows in the Philippines).

***

PLUTO HAS BEEN A GOOD MASTER FOR SOME:

So let me repeat slowly: plutocracy central is the USA, As I explained in USA, Den Of Thieves. USA plutocrats have been the world’s mightiest and most durable ever since the Kaiser bit the dust. Kaiser Wilhem II of Germany, that is. USA plutocracy was the indispensable Deus In Machina that has ruled for more than a century, although sometimes through servants and collaborators: Stalin, Hitler, Mussolini, are examples (even Mao was helped by USA plutocracy, not just in the 1940s, but by Nixon).

Obama does not know much, but he knows that the big corporate actors of the USA don’t pay much tax. That’s not a violation of the law, because they are the law (that’s the way he has got to see it, according to his “navigation” morality). At least so he was told, or decided, in 2008.

The way many strategists in the USA (be they in think tanks, the intelligence agencies, the military and rarefied pluto circles, Davos style) figure it out, rogue plutos and their corporations made the empire of the USA, by leveraging the world wars. And the struggle for world domination is not over. Just as they made German plutos an offer they could not refuse, a century ago, they made Russian plutos and Chinese plutos similar offer, that they could not refuse.

We are witnessing an attempt to implement the same trick. (However, that can work, see: Note 4.)

***

CHINESE PLUTOCRACY, PART OF THE WORLD’S PLUTO MACHINE:

The corrupt, not to say satanic, Chinese leadership has hidden at least 4 trillion dollars in the Caribbean and other balmy places, for more than 22,000 tax havens clients, including 15 of the apex political animals in China.

This is what the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists announced this week.

Those files come from JUST two offshore firms — Singapore-based Portcullis TrustNet and BVI-based Commonwealth Trust Limited — that help clients create offshore companies, trusts and bank accounts.

(That’s part of a cache of 2.5 million leaked files that ICIJ has sifted through with help from more than 50 reporting partners in Europe, North America, Asia and other regions.)

PricewaterhouseCoopers, UBS and other Western banks and accounting firms are middlemen helping Chinese plutos setting up trusts and companies in the British Virgin Islands, Samoa and other tax havens. Example: giant Swiss bank Credit Suisse helped Wen Jiabao’s son create his British Virgin Island company while his daddy was leading China and terrorizing Tibet.

Obama loved to golf with the aptly named Wolf, head of UBS USA. Meanwhile UBS was found by the USA to have engaged in criminal conduct, but strangely enough, no American banker ever goes to jail (though the USA has no apparent problem jailing Swiss bankers, meaning that the USA is after market share, not justice).

A century ago, except for one large republic, France, Europe was dominated by plutocrats who all knew each other very well. War was the answer they found to the questions We The People asked, especially in Germany.

Right now, we have a somewhat similar situation developing: a new plutocratic Internationale has developed, and entangled all the world’s leadership systems. “democracy” is just a word they use to hide corruption. That they all know each other is not reassuring is anymore than in 1914. Just as in 1914, it makes them too confident and tolerant of the Dark Side.

The Prime Minister of Ukraine, an agent of Putin, gives interviews at the plutocratic conference in Davos, implying that he will keep on killing protesters, as needed.

Meanwhile, the Earth’s affairs are not attended by these golden clowns. A major catastrophic development in the CO2 crisis could happen any day, and then what? Everybody is unprepared to take intelligent, drastic countermeasures (remember that fundamental research budgets were actually reduced because of the 2008 plutocratic crisis… which makes sense in plutocratic logic!).

The first counter-measure? Increase educational levels. And that means increase funding for the likes of NASA or the Department of Energy, DOE (because, after all, there would be no CO2 crisis if we had more advanced energy sources). But the rumor is that Obama wants to save on laser fusion research (so he can give more money to his hyper wealthy “friends”?)

By refusing intelligent and soft counter-measures to rising inequality, we are preparing the worst.

Hence inequality is not just about giving in to the Dark Side, it’s about making the bed of war. And no doubt, among those who have nearly all and want to give nothing, war is always better than any alternative they can think of. Thinking is not their forte.

Patrice Aymé

***

Note 1: Obama, the Changeling, not to be confused to Chinese Princeling, brought us change we can believe: the greatest corporate profits ever, after tax, relative to GDP.  To compensate, he talks about inequality more than ever.

This is the State of the Union: schizoid (= a form of schizophrenia, being of two minds on one thing).

Note 2: Chimpanzees or Baboons have a strong sexual dimorphism, and thus a greater tolerance for injustice. Humans are closer in dimorphism to Capuchin Monkeys, who detest injustice.

Note 3. The graph of higher education hides a worse truth: a lot of the public spending helps actually fund the plutocratic (“private”) universities.

Note 4: Repeating exactly the same trick can work: the fascist German army defeated twice the French at Sedan (1870 & 1940). Even better, a more than 10,000 strong Persian army allied to Macedonia held the Thermopylae, just as the Spartans had done before, and, just as before, the Roman army took the same mountain path to crush them from behind.

Geography Is Destiny

Abstract: The vastly different geographies of the USA and Europe explain many things, and seem to require greater variety of behaviors than observed. Or how geographic destiny can lead both to exploitative ecstasy and conservative futility.

***

Many highly educated Europeans who migrate to the USA affect contempt for the old continent. That alleviates their remorse. Indeed they earn higher incomes in the USA’s jungle, most hospitable to the most educated (as long as said education can be sold!).

This weekend the New York Times revealed that the salary of Medical Doctors in some medical specialties average above 900,000 dollars, nearly twenty times the average family income in the USA. It’s of course just the tip of the iceberg. One of the insurance executive Obama has put in charge of covering the uninsured with his “philanthropy” earned more than 100 million dollar last year. That makes him of great counsel at the White House.

This is of course inconceivable in Europe. Something also inconceivable in Europe is the richness of North America.

Oil & Gas Shales Everywhere, That’s Smart!

But then so is the fact that one citizen of the USA out of six has no health insurance. That means one out of six citizens show up to the emergency room only when the cancer has grown too big, or the heart has failed too much.

Both facts are related. Abusive exploitation brings elation to the exploiters, desperation to the exploited. If the elation can leverage more power than the desperation, the exploitation goes on.

Sometimes, it’s the land that gets exploited. Fracking is devastating giant regions of the USA, but it does not matter, because the USA is giant. The USA is nearly the same surface area as Canada, the world’s second largest country (much of Canada is hopelessly frozen wastes, though). Nobody cares about what is going on in remote places of the Dakotas, Wyoming or Texas.

Fracking Near Riffle Rockies, Colorado: Where Is Everybody?

Wyoming is actually slightly larger in area than Great Britain (253 K square kilometers versus 243 K) however its population, about 550,000 people , is less than 1% of Britain’s 64 millions. Thus fracking in Kent does not compare with making a lot of pollution roughly anywhere in Wyoming.

The European Union, with a bit more than half a billion inhabitants, is not even half of the area of the USA, with roughly 320 million. Even more strikingly, the population of the USA is actually concentrated in less than half of the country. Many states in the USA are mostly empty, although many of these have a wonderfully temperate climate.

India, with more than three times the population of the USA, is a third the area. So about ten times the density. There again the density is not even at all, and the resources vastly inferior (but for… Thorium, hence the Indian Thorium program.).

At this point the economy of the USA is lifting up, because the energy production of the USA has been skyrocketing (both the energy used inside and the one sold outside, such as coal). This is deliberate. Any American business publication worth its salt, explains that the strategy of the USA is to render energy production cheaper, and more profitable, no holds barred. Obama’s EPA cracks down on coal’s pollution to better encourage its exports, pushed by fracking.

After all, as I have long explained, it’s the exploitation of oil in the USA, starting in the mid nineteenth century Pennsylvania,  that was perhaps the major advantage of the USA.

(Without Texas oil, generously provided by his plutocratic friends, Hitler would have been incapable of invading in Spain with Franco’s army, and his fascist helpers. That used to amuse Adolf a lot. He lost his sense of humor on September 3, 1939. Then he declared he would only wear a drab grey tunic until the war was won.)

Fracking brought the cost of natural gas in the USA down to one third of the world’s price (gas is dangerous to transport by ships, so it mostly stays in the USA). Displaced USA coal production is massively  sent to gullible Germany (and soon, China).

Of course, lots of methane leaks. Measurements show that the powerful greenhouse is smothering the southern USA, and thus, the planet. But there again, and that’s left unsaid, is that a mighty greenhouse would advantage the USA… Or at least that’s what USA strategists apparently think. In their stupidity, they see that most of frozen Alaska (more than a third of the EU’s area) will become balmy, and that war has always advantaged the USA. They forget little details, such as Florida under water, and California roasting (greatest drought ever unfolding there, second year in a row).

Last year, the USA added the equivalent of four nuclear reactors, in solar photovoltaic power alone.

All of this will have an effect. Meanwhile, propelled by all this energy, the population of the USA augments by three million a year. (Never mind if the death rate related to childbirth in the USA is nearly thrice that of the EU: pediatricians are the worst paid doctors in the USA.)

To not become completely irrelevant, powers such as the EU will have to use different energy strategies. However, at this point, it has just been all about conservation, and that maybe the main trouble of Europe’s economy.

Let me repeat slowly: the rise of man has been the rise of what I call AWE, Absolute Worth Energy, the energy at disposal to effect a worthy task. A related, but grosser notion, the energy at the disposal of any single human being has constantly augmented(The easiest way to do that is simply to produce more energy, overall; that proved difficult in the Late Roman empire, or 1300 CE Europe).

To diminish the AWE is just impoverishment. To augment the AWE without augmenting energy production is difficult, yet this is what Europe has chosen to do. It becomes outright impossible without new technology. The Photo Voltaic effect discovered around 1830 by a French physicist is new. But not wind and water mills, which were already central to the European economy in the Middle Ages.

Thus it is astounding that Europe does not have active research and development in, say, Thorium reactors. Just digging giant holes in Germany while scrapping Appalachian mountains to feed German power plants with coal is assuredly not the key to a better future.

Much of the German error in behavior from 1871 to 1945 CE had to do with forgetting that Europe was not the USA, thus not realizing that behaviors that had proven profitable in the New World would not prove so in the Old Continent. In a way the same sort of error is made to this day. This time, it’s not about killing the Indians, but, rather, about living like Indians. Squeezing one’s belt can go only that far.

Patrice Aymé

Plutocracy, Slavery, Martin Luther Reigns

Today is Martin Luther King Jr. Day, celebrating the one who had a dream of racial equality. Yeah, sure. What if the racial problem was mostly a smokescreen? A distraction?

Indeed, where did this racial inequality come from? Partly, as I have explained, it arose from the original Martin Luther, and his reference bible, the Bible. Let’s not forget that, because King David refused to massacre an innocent tribe, the Jewish God then tortured David’s son to death over a week or so. To punish his dad. How come Auschwitz is a big surprise to those who revere this sort of monstrosities? It’s just more of the same stuff, on a grander scale.

In the  1620s, English agents of the West Country Men-financed companies like the Virginia Company found that slavery  was a profit enhancer. Endured servitude for whites was not enough: to make an entire race of self-reproducing robots was best.

Tobacco was the obvious thing to grow. This was all very expensive, but with lots of capital, it could be done very profitably, thanks to slavery. Some American states were mostly inhabited with black slaves in the 1700s. By then the top people in the future USA were living much better than anybody but the top aristocrats in Europe.

So what brought slavery? Plutocracy. Slavery arose from greed unchained, and blossoming plutocracy. The Bible comforted the righteous, as it celebrated tribal hatred as religion.

Thus race was just a convenient marker. The real genesis of slavery was not racial hatred, but greed.

In November 1938, on Martin Luther’s birthday, the Nazi leadership ordered an attack on all businesses in Germany held by Jews. Some buildings were completely destroyed (such as the great Synagogue in Berlin). There was glass all over the street, and it came to be known as “Kristallnacht”.

A poll conducted afterwards showed that two-thirds of the Nazi rank and file disapproved of the violence. Somewhat similarly, when Germans learned that Nazis were exterminating mental retards, public protests terminated the program (not before a relative of Hitler got eliminated, logically enough).

Hence, when the Nazi leadership engaged in massive extermination, that was kept secret. This secrecy was facilitated by the German goose stepping mentality. However a question surfaces: if so many people disapproved of Nazism in its heartland, how come Nazism got so empowered?

My main thesis (imparted to me early on my an uncle who was not just an astronomer, but also the son-in law of Molkte) is that the “plutocrats”, who Hitler and company officially vilipended, were actually the Dei In Machina (gods animating the machine) of Nazism.

The connection with plutocracy central, the USA, was, naturally, most important. Why is the USA plutocracy central? The USA became a superpower sometimes in the Nineteenth Century, but, because of the size of that nation-continent, American plutocrats, and the organizations they led, were made of bigger stuff than their homologues anywhere else.

USA plutocrats were indeed huge. JP Morgan, a banker, all by himself, stopped the Wall Street crash of 1907. What does that have to do with our story? Morgan became friend and mentor to Herr Doktor Schacht, later to invent German hyperinflation in 1923, and, being the most important banker in Germany, a crucial promoter of Hitler. Don’t be surprised that banks from the USA were massive supporters of Hitler, too.

Most people do not know any of these facts: the cognitive landscape they see is reduced to a small room. And not by accident: Albert Ballin was a Jew, friend of the Kaiser, managing director of the Hamburg American Line, the world’s largest shipping company, and involved in the complicated negotiations about a possible joint ownership of the world by Britain, Germany and the USA (something Colonel House, right arm of USA president Wilson pursued in person on June 1, 1914).

After Germany was defeated in 1918, the USA confiscated a lot of German property. Much of it, including the Hamburg-Amerika Linie, the world’s largest shipping company, at some point found itself in private American plutocratic hands. How one went from public seizure to private-plutocratic will never be documented: the building where the documentation of these transactions were stored, fortunately burned in 1923.

This quick recycling from public seizure to Anglo-Saxon plutocratic control made the German economy a strange hybrid pretty much controlled by American plutocracy in the 1920s and 1930s.

In general, all these horrors were made possible by never talking about them. A Deus In Machina can only operate well when it is not seen as part of the machine.

Instead of whining about slavery, and pretend that it is all about shades of skin, it may be more reverential to ponder how it arose. And whether it’s not rising again, for the same reason: inequality of wealth and power.

Patrice Ayme

ETHICS IS ABSOLUTE

Someone in a philosophical forum, asked: ”Is ethics necessary?”

It goes without saying that ethics is necessary in any society to lay under law and order. But it does not stop there. Ethological studies have shown unambiguously that intelligent animals have a sense of ethics. (How does that sense of ethics arise is not clear to official science; philosophically, it is, though.)

Ethics is, to a great extent, within standard deviation, something we tend to do. It’s necessary, because we are born, and raised, most of the time, out of love.

A “moderator” of the forum I took part in, “Spiral Out” spiraled my idea out, by declaring that many non-human primates kill young not related to them, just because they are not their own. He asked whether killing the young was my idea of ethical behavior.

I had said: “tend to”. From the killing ape’s point of view, his behavior is ethical. Why? It’s clear that killing the young will make the female more amenable, by terminating what the enraged male perceives as her unhealthy obsession with the baby.

Ethics, comes from the Greek “ethos”, just like moral, which comes from the Latin “mores”. Both “ethos” and “mores” mean the same thing:  what is customary. Females, by the way, intuit all of this, and try to alleviate the problem with loving tactics to dangerous males, or by making alliances with other males: it’s very complicated, but they cope.

Yet, paradoxically, I also do believe that cruelty is a fundamental tendency in human (“natural”) ethics (see “Natural Born Killers”, a movie… That natural cruelty was also one of the main points of De Sade’s philosophy, let alone Greek or Roman philosophies). By coincidence, I just wrote an essay about that. There is no contradiction, ever since all is fair in love and war. Cruelty is one dimension, goodness another. So is empathy. I made no mystery that the Good Side dominates, although, sometimes, the Dark Side is necessary.

Spiral Out then pirouetted, approving what I said, and proclaiming that is was precisely because of that he was a “moral relativist”. Well, I am absolutely not a moral relativist, and the following is why.

Morality is not Special Relativity, with moving frames, here and there, and all uniform motions are relative.

Indeed, humans have always lived in groups. All advanced animals (no exception) cannot survive without a society. That society can be reduced to mommy (say with leopards).

The local social group, and even the species, or the environment constitute absolute reference frames for what is customary. Why? Simply because social, or species specific, or environmental survival forbids some behaviors. For example if apes killed all youngsters who feel unrelated, the species would die off. It is indeed observed that most advanced primates’ females have many sex partners, and thus an ethical modus vivendi was found.

In light of these absolutes, the social group, the species, the environment, ethics cannot be all over the place. Morality is actually, within standard deviation, and within standard circumstances, absolute.

How can morality be both absolute and relative? Before I call Quantum Theory to the rescue (it provides with a model), let me emphasize that morality is not a law. Morality is not a measurement.

Morality is, intrinsically, an average. Morality is the average of happenstance with moral significance, namely those that can enter said average.

The correct mechanical analogy is with Quantum Mechanics. In Quantum Mechanics, trajectories, and presence, are all over the place: they fill up all the accessible universe with complex waves. Those Quantum waves cannot be measured. However the probability of an occurrence is strictly determined. The latter is called a measurement.

Similarly, morality is strictly determined, as an outcome, although events of a moral character fill up the entire space that behavior can access.

SS assassinating civilians in extermination camps thought they were acting with superlative morality. However, they were wrong. Why? On a species scale, they were completely immoral, because, had other men in a situation of power behaved the same, exterminating whoever they could exterminate, humanity would have been exterminated.

As it turned out, they were even immoral relative to their chosen reference group: the Second World War, thus Nazism, exterminated more than ten million Germans.

The Quantum shows that not all that computes can be measured. The complex probability Quantum waves cannot be measured, only be computed with (after making the hypothesis of their existence). Only the end probability can be forecast, and measured. This has caused enormous confusion in Physics, so the point is not obvious. A similar confusion is at the root of the perception of moral relativism.

Is there a relationship between morality and the Quantum, beyond this analogy? Yes. Local morality, in the instant, as the expression of Free Will, is obviously a Quantum phenomenon. Thus the illusion of moral relativism is born out of the Quantum. And, like the Quantum, ends up with a classical world.

Hence Greco-Roman etymology correctly abstracted the wisdom of eons… and common sense. That morality, and a sense of justice is absolute is increasingly confirmed by ethological studies. Capuchin Monkeys, for example, have a very developed sense of equity. They get very angry when one of their fellows is treated better, for no good reason. They have been known to throw at the experimenter’s face whatever came handy when a lousy radish was offered as reward while the fellow next door got a delicious grape for the same task.

Thus, when the pitchforks come after the plutocrats, we will finally honor what we were born with.

Patrice Ayme’

Propaganda: Cruel, But Efficient

I subscribe to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist (among others). Of the three, the New York Times is, by far, the most efficient propaganda tool of the hyper rich. It’s done in subtle ways. For example Krugman ran a blog post: “January 18, 2014, 12:11 pm. The Myth of the Deserving Rich.

You would think that Paul Krugman would show a graph of the growth of inequality that is recent. Problem: if he did, all fingers would point towards Barack Obama, the great Dark Trojan Horse. So Krugman shows an old graph that safely finishes with the Bush era. (Implicit message: Bush = Inequality.)

Here is a more recent graph about (after tax!) corporate profits.

Obama’s Plutocratic Wealth Breakthrough!

As you can see, corporate profits, even under plutophiles Clinton and Bush, just, in the end, tracked GDP.

However, under Obama, there has been a breakthrough in after tax inequality. True, Obama controls profits not, but he controls tax (and, looking at the fine print, one sees the jump occurred when the democrats had a super-majority in the Senate and Congress: no hiding behind the Bush!).

Why inequality has grown is not complicated: the hyper rich financiers stole the financial institutions that they were supposed to manage (2008 “Bush Crash”).

Instead of recovering the money from the thieves he was golfing with, Yes-We-Scam Obama found the money in the Public purse. The thieves got to keep what they stole (see Fuld and his two friends at Lehman Brothers, who stole a cool 5 billions between them, while taking out the world financial system).

The exact same trick was implemented in Europe, thanks to the ignorance of the flabbergasted public.

(That’s why the recently proclaimed banking Union in Europe piously asserts that it will not happen again: next time the hyper rich steals everything, they will pay for it, it’s a promise!)

Don’t expect Krugman to explain any of this to you, as long as pitchforks are not visible from his Princeton office. Speaking of Krugman, here he comes in that post I started to describe:

“Many influential people have a hard time thinking straight about inequality. Partly, of course, this is because of Upton Sinclair’s dictum: it’s hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Part of it is because even acknowledging that inequality is a real problem implicitly opens the door to taking progressive policies seriously. But there’s also a factor that, while not entirely independent of the other two, is somewhat distinct; I think of it as the urge to sociologize.”

Sounds good? But what is this “sociologize”? And what with that old graph? Did Krugman saw nothing new ever since The One became president and had dinner with him?

Notice that the corporations’ “profits” in the graph I posted are what’s left after the CEO class has been paid pharaonic salaries. Marissa Maier, a blonde at Yahoo, just gave a severance package to a man she had recruited a year ago, for a fortune. It’s in excess, that severance, just that severance, not the signing bonus, of 42 million dollars.

Marissa has done well, and will receive her own colossal severance one of these days soon. Then, now that she is hyper rich, she can go to another hyper salaried CEO job, or do her duty and become a “philanthropist”, or a politician.

Did Barack Obama visit Marissa Meier’s Silicon Valley mansion? Of course. Slept there, ate there, beamed giant smile, etc. The whole gamut: people of wealth, and taste. That was when Marissa was at Google, an apparent subsidiary of the NSA. Hey, she was just at the White House, to talk about that with Barack. No blood, no foul.

By “socializing” Krugman means the theory that the poor  is poor, because it deserves to be poor, as it lives badly (dysfunctional families, drugs, unwillingness to learn, etc.). Krugman concludes disjointedly, by adopting some of what I said over the years:

“This is, by the way, why the Occupy slogan about the one percent is so brilliant. I would actually argue that the number should be even smaller. But one percent is an easy to remember number, and small enough to make it clear that we’re not talking about the upper middle class.

And that’s good. The myth of the deserving rich is, in its own way, as destructive as the myth of the undeserving poor.”

I sent the following comment, among the early ones.  Although more than 100 comments were published, mine was not. One has to know the New York Times is owned by the same plutocratic family since the Nineteenth Century.

Not publishing my comment allows the New York Times to claim I need to be watched, and carefully censored, as I am what it calls “unverified”. I am indeed, officially under a surveillance program at the New York Times! Here is my censored comment:

There are some people who earn their lives well, and then there is the plutocratic phenomenon.  The two concepts are distinct.

One would assume that most creatures contributing regularly to Krugman’s  blog live well enough to find the time to do so (I have contributed more than $10,000 to the New York Times’ coffers over the years).

The plutocratic phenomenon is something completely different. It has to do with the exponential growth of wealth and power. It can only be prevented by punishing taxes at the very top (the .1% and .01%). Eisenhower had a 93% tax bracket, at the very top.

As it is now all these myths Krugman talks about, and condemns, live on because plutocrats control the media, and are, unsurprisingly, plutophile.

For example, California Governor Brown organized, and won, a referendum to rise a tiny bit taxes on the 1%. Last week California papers had front page stories about the rich fleeing the state. In big black capital letters. Spending the time to read the article (it was basically the same article all over) showed nothing of the sort. But, to the common citizen in the street, what was impressed was the flight of the hyper rich due to a 1% augmentation of tax on the 1%…

That was, of course, a propaganda operation. The sob stories about the hyper rich selling their commercial centers to flee a 1% tax are just implausible.

Effective propaganda is subtle enough to not be seen by Common Wisdom. Thus we have to keep on digging in to find out how it is that the serfs willingly serve the great Lords.

This was my censored comment. At first sight, it does not look that terrible. The question is: what was so subterraneously, unconsciously terrible in my comment above that was worth censoring?

The fact that, having got a subscription for decades, at the same street address, the New York Times persists in calling me “unverified” is a lie? And that all can see this lie, as I allude to the extravagant cost of my decades of subscription to the NYT?

Or is it the terrible fact that had had to be censored, the sob stories about the hyper wealthy fleeing California. And claiming that they are obviously planted?

Or did I gravely sin when I proposed to follow republican president Eisenhower’s leadership?… And tax the hyper wealthy 93%?

Einstein famously said, a little bit fast, albeit in the context of Quantum Theory: ”Subtle is the Lord, but he is not cruel!”

Well. Einstein was not inclined to be so forgiving for the Germans who had killed the Jews. At least that’s the way Einstein put it to his dear friend Physics Nobel laureate Max Born, when the latter returned to Germany from England. Einstein was not happy that Born acted as if everything had been forgiven.

By refusing to forgive, Albert Einstein recognized something which is true: cruelty is a central part of the human character. Those who deny that are not just stupid, but dishonest and dangerous. Same as the righteous, pseudo-“liberal”, but truly plutophile, New York Times. (That has been splendidly embodied by frantic NYT propaganda for the plutophile health trick set in Massachusetts by Romney, now known as… Obamacare.)

Plutocracy is a phenomenon that rises mechanically when taxes at the top are not colossal enough (Apple pays 2% global tax, the local bookstore, if it has not been devoured by tax dodging Amazon yet, around 30%). Then plutocracy becomes an obvious injustice. Yet, primates are genetically engineered to hate injustice.

So how does the injustice persist? Through sophisticated tricks, as above, motivated by sheer cruelty, will to power, and viciousness. It’s cruel and vicious to censor my rather innocuous comment, but it’s of the essence of those who crave power.

Subtle are the plutocrats, and they are cruel. Cruelty is actually the essence of plutocracy. Welcome to reality.

Patrice Ayme