Multibrain: Republic, Democracy

Some brainiacs such as the philosopher Michel Serres (of “France decapitated”), make a big deal that France is a “Republic”, and the USA a “Democracy”. It’s the sort of mock sophisticated distinction that those who want to look intellectual embrace. Serres has taught in plutocratic universities of the USA, he should know better. Or, maybe, he knows better how to serve his masters than yours truly. The distinction is without merit.

First it blows up the differences between France and the USA. In truth, both Republics are much more similar to each other than they are, to any other regime in the world (including the United Kingdom).

Differently from Rome and Athens, the USA and France were born as entangled republics. Both Republics have recent imitators, namely dozens of modern states.

Second, the main difference between “Republic” and “Democracy”, as it happened 25 centuries ago, was just a matter of language and esthetics. The beauty of how the concept sounded in Greek did not translate in Latin (‘Populus-Imperium” has six syllables).

Athens called itself a “demokratia”, because demokratia was a Greek word. Greek spoke Greek, Romans spoke Latin.

Too Big For Debate Killed Respublica

But democracy was not exclusively a Greek concept. It was as strong, if not stronger, in Rome.

Indeed, the “rule of the People” is how human societies have always worked best (except during war): distributed intelligence, creating the super-brain effect, from the many brains debating. The “Multibrain” effect. Whereas, indeed, I do not believe in the “Multiverse”, the human brain, and, even better, any human society, is a multiverse onto itself.

Democracy allows to tap in this multiverse of the multibrain. Democracy is a multiverse. For real.

So the Romans spoke Latin. They had two words for “power” in the sense of “rule”. “Potestas” for lower magistrates, “Imperium” for higher magistrates (Consuls, Proconsuls, Praetors; “Censors”, although higher magistrates, did not have the “Imperium”).

It would have been all too long, thus awkward to make a single word with “populus”, “potestas”, and “imperium”. Thus the romans instead used the Thing Public (Res Publica). Later the Demos-Kratos of the Greeks, Latinized into “democracia”, was used.

But that does not mean the Romans did not practice democracy. They did. Real democracy, that is, direct democracy. In practice, there was little difference between direct democracy as practiced in Athens, and that practiced in Rome.

(But for the fact that Athenian democracy lasted two centuries, and the Roman one, around five. Also, even under the Principate founded by Augustus, many Republican functions kept on going, and it was not clear that the Republic had stopped, as the weird transition between Augustus and Tiberius amply demonstrated.)

The various Roman “Magistrates” were masters of diverse functions, and represented those functions. They implemented People Power, they did not displace it. They did not represent people, just functions.

Rome, or at least the Roman Republic, which lasted five centuries, ignored that oxymoron, “Representative Democracy”. SPQR, the Senate and People of Rome, lasted so long, precisely because the Romans refused to be represented in some theater, by professional liars. (For those who don’t know, oxymoron is Greek for “sharply stupid”.)

Athens’ democracy failed, because, as Demosthenes pointed out, the Greek city-states refused to make the tremendous war that was required to get rid of the fascist plutocrats from Macedonia. In the end the war came to them, and Antipater, one of Philippe’s senior generals, took Greece over thanks to enough torture and execution to terrorize the Greeks into submission (130 years later, the Roman Republic freed Greece, and the legions were then withdrawn).

If it was so good, why did Rome quit Direct Democracy?

I have argued that it was because of the rise of plutocracy. That’s entirely correct, but then the question occurs of what allowed this rise.

I have written detailed essays pointing the finger at the Second Punic War, the rise of the war profiteers, the death, or dilution of the really noble Patrician families’ spirit (whose ancestors had conducted the Roman Revolution in the Sixth Century BCE). I also pointed out to the fact that the Roman Republic became, thanks to that war, around 200 BCE, a global power.

All too many rich, powerful families were then able to do what is now called “inversion”. Namely rule from abroad (where Roman Law did not apply). So they escaped confiscating taxation that was meant, precisely, to decapitate the plutocratic effect.

But there was another pernicious effect of the vastness of the Roman Imperium.

Athens had met it already. In the Athenian Assembly (of the People), important decisions needed a high quorum. That meant distant farmers had to travel to Athens for a few days. That was expensive, so the Athenian Republic paid for distant farmers to come to vote.

The situation was much worse in Rome.

The Athenian City-States ruled Attica, which is about 100 kilometers long. The Athenian Imperium extended at some point to the Black Sea (to insure the wehat supply). Moreover, all Athenain dependencies could be quickly reached by boat.

Not so with Rome. Cities such as Numance (Numentia) sat in the middle of Northern Spain, weeks of travel from the sea.

Rome was physically incapable of maintaining communications fast enough to maintain direct democracy (in any case the old democratic set-up in Rome depended of the detailed status of citizens within “tribes”, and would have had to be severely modified just to extend to Italia).

Very slow communications was the deep down root killer of Roman direct democracy.

We don’t have this excuse. Not anymore.

Quite the opposite. Whereas Rome experienced a loss of opportunity as the empire extended, modern technology, the Internet, offers us the ability to do as the Romans did under the Republic: vote all the time, about anything.

We don’t need no stinking representatives. Freedom is a mouse click away.

Patrice Ayme’

DIVING INTO TRUTH

What’s truth? Many a philosopher sat at his desk, pondering “truth”. Can experience with a desk bring truth? No. Only action demonstrates truth: truth is what works.

Tilt over like an otter on her back, big gulp of air, lift the fins sky high, and the blue of the sky turns into the deep blue sea, a universe wilder than outer space, yet through which the human mammal can dive masterfully. The blue yonder is pierced by the silver and gold flashes of sunlight violently reflecting on fishes’ scaly skins amidst undulating algae. Who wants to fly? Everybody. Forget artificial wings. Flying is practiced best with fins and goggles.

A school of 200 depths’ yellowish, dinner plates sized denizens groups up, and rotates to intimidate the suspicious predator in their midst. Another fish with red stripes let me approach, simply happy to extend his impressive spiky dorsal fin. A message well received: don’t touch me there, or anywhere.

Trans-Species Cooperative Intelligence At Sea

It has never been so easy to approach so many fishes. Either the fishes of the area are less hunted, or they learned what a spear gun looks like.

Solo deep sea diving is about the most dangerous sport imaginable. Death can happen at any moment by losing consciousness, and falling to the bottom of the sea (there is no buoyancy below 13 meters down or so, even if one started with full lungs, so one sinks).

Losing consciousness? Try to spend 56 minutes out of 60 below water. Solo deep sea diving, being the most dangerous sport, is best to test one’s philosophical ability and control. Indeed, it requires a perfect theory of truth.

A perfect dive is a perfect truth.

A logical system has two elements:

1. The basic rules of the subjacent logic L. (“The logic”.)
2. The semantic truth S in the engulfing universe U. (“the semantics”.)

Basically, a) says how to make well-formed propositions, and b) which ones are true.

L contains axioms, so does the semantics. Where is “TRUTH” in all this? It’s both in L and S.

Truth = L Union S

The main axis of thinking ever since civilization has prospered has been to reduce S and augment L. Why? Because S embodies factual truth, it can be enormous.

For example in animism, S is enormous: every tree, forest, spring, animal, and even cloud shape is endowed with a soul of its own. Modern science has reduced this to zero (inasmuch as it impacts their behavior).

In Elementary Particle Physics, S is disturbingly large: the so called “Standard Model is full of free parameters and mysterious symmetries (sometimes on, sometimes off, for no known reasons).

For a while in physics, it looked as if S was reducing to a few principles (such as the conservation of energy). But then the on-going main interpretation of Quantum Physics blew up the Logic to hell. Semantics became everything.

How? By claiming that even what seemed impossible has a non-zero probability of occurring. In today’s Quantum Physics, camels go through needles, it’s just a matter of time.

Nietzsche tried to reduce S, the Semantics, to the Will To Power.

That’s, of course, stupid.

The Will To Power mostly rises in social animals. Such animals defend themselves as one, mind, the mind of the leader, so determining the “best” leader (namely the meanest) is of the essence.

A better reduction of meaningful motivation in human beings, and, more generally, animals is the much more general Will To Survival. All the power most animals have, is to insure their survival.

All these fishes I was gliding by, had a theory of mine, a theory of my mind, more exactly. You could see it in their eyes, how they wobbled, and fixated, until, reassured, they went back to considering other tasks, They had deduced, from their experience (S above) and the logic L of the situation (my non-threatening behavior), that their survival was not compromised.

What dominates species out there, in the jungle or the sea, is survival. The Will To Survival. Survival is determined by what is true.

Human beings are truth machines. And so are all brainy animals.

Fishes are very brainy.

Those doubting this should see a grouper inciting a moray eel (muraena) to hunt. The grouper is good at catching fishes in the open, moray eels are supreme in cracks and holes. The grouper goes to the muraena, whose head full of large sharp teeth observes him. Then he shakes his head right and left, in a gesture simulating the motions both eels and groupers make when swimming.

It may require several attempts, but then they go hunt together, the eels below the rocks, the grouper above. Suddenly, in flash of activity, many fishes meet their demise. Both fishes are five times more efficient when hunting together.

If a fish escapes from a grouper and hides into a crack, the grouper often goes to the closest moray eel he can find. Then he entices the eel to go fishing. Then the grouper repeats the head shaking dance, more slowly, where the fish went to hide. Then the eel dives into the hole. (Groupers, who are known to be very clever fishes, also cooperate with other fishes.)

Grouper and eel eat, because they have discovered a few basic truths.

Truth is what works.

Notice that the nature of the work Moray Eels and Groupers can do is limited. Thus, so is the notion of truth they can reach. Octopuses are very intelligent, they can unscrew bottles. However they live only a few years, and have no means of cultural transmission. The drama of the Octopus is that every single individual has to reinvent everything.

Advanced life has made intelligence ubiquitous, but finding truth has been highly constrained by the nature of the work species can do. The genus Homo, though, could work in the forests, in the savannah, in the trees, on the cliffs, across streams, and even arms of the sea, or under water. Even before it became super-brainy. And that’s why it became super-brainy.

Our ape like ancestors developed vast notions of truth, because they could do all sorts of work. In turn that created an ecological niche, the superiority niche, which made intelligence a greater advantage. (Until the recent reign of vegetarians, the politically correct, and other gallant promoters of weakness and retardation at the cost of brutal logical efficiency… Or simply the crutches of advancing technology: the present Homo seems to have significantly smaller brains than late model Neanderthals.)

How does that fit the [Truth = Logic + Semantic] equation above? It’s simple: Semantics is true, when it works, and Well Formed Formulas in logic are also what works. As science progresses, Semantic Truth’s empire shrinks, while that of Logic expands. How? Ever more logic shows how, and why, the Semantic Truth is actually the work of logic.

From the physics perspective, “action”, “work” and “truth” are all the same, as the Principle of Least Action ties them up together: the truth of the trajectory, the truth of the evolution of a process, is what minimizes “work” (of/in the physical action). Wherever we look, we see it:

Truth is what works.

Patrice Ayme’

Note 1: Science Is What Works, INSTINCT IS FAST LEARNING, and TRUTH AS ENERGY contain elements of the preceding, while developing further other perspectives.

Note 2:  So what is the difference between humans and animals? The greater capability in humans to do all works, so construct all truths, including the work, and truth, of cultural transmission.

Obama: Un-American Corporations

Bait, Switch, Bait, Oops: Obama Discovers His Sponsors Are Scofflaws.

After baiting us, Obama could have done a lot when he became president. He did not. Instead he switched to the will of those mentoring and monitoring him. As early as 2007 Obama was surrounded by plutocrats, and had been told to keep his real friends away… by said plutocrats (some of whom already mentored Bill Clinton that way).

It was all the easier to do, as Obama, just like Clinton, did not know much, beyond his hunger for domination, and how to navigate by pleasing everybody. If the only people who know much around you are plutocrats, plutophiles and their servants, that’s all your universe is. Just like the world the Cathars depicted, it’s dominated by the Devil, and its name is the Good Lord.

In the first three months of his rule, Obama could have done much. Such control of government (Congress, Senate, Presidency) is rare.

Although it’s true that the banks needed trillions to keep going, Obama could have financed them with the Treasury, instead of TARP and Quantitative Easing, and thus acquire control of them (as Reagan and Bush Senior, two eminent Marxists did, in an earlier, similar crisis). But of course, when one is a child with his toys, with senior plutocrats in attendance, baby-sitting, it’s a ridiculous perspective.

Even a series B actor like Reagan knew more. Now the Marmot-In-Chief, realizing the hour is late, has woken up.

President Obama called for Congress to end a tax loophole that allows big corporations to designate a foreign country as their official address, avoiding American taxes while maintaining their presence in the United States. (Individuals trying this without using anonymous companies go to jail, or risk destitution. Plutocrats, though, just set-up perfectly legal companies off-shore.)

Same said companies also avoid big taxes from other big countries (Germany, France, UK, etc.), and accept them from tax havens (Ireland, Luxembourg, British Virgin Islands, etc.) So it’s not just the USA that is at fault.

The president indulged in unusually harsh language to describe companies using the relocation practice, known as “inversion”. Obama claimed they were renouncing their American citizenship by “cherry-picking” the nation’s laws at the expense of ordinary taxpayers.

“These companies are cherry-picking the rules, and it damages the country’s finances,” he said. “It adds to the deficit. It sticks you with the tab to make up for what they are stashing offshore… I don’t care if it’s legal — it’s wrong…You shouldn’t get to call yourself an American company only when you want a handout from the American taxpayers,”. The audience booed the companies.

Mr. Obama called on Congress to close the loophole, as he poses for what White House officials call a “new economic patriotism”. The president is pressing that argument as elections approach in the fall.

Republicans refused to consider the president’s tax proposals. And the question is… why did Obama not impose all this on day one, in 2009? When he had control.

Because he never intended it to pass. Or maybe he did not want to be shot.

Now that he is sure that it won’t pass, he is trying to pose as a great progressive.

History will see through these games.

Yet, it’s good Obama talk about this. By ignoring such subjects, We the People has been an accomplice to its own demise.

Patrice Ayme’

Obama, Neo-Con

About this title: Obama enabled maximally prominent Neo-Cons to represent and govern the USA. When I asked Silicon Valley cognoscenti what it meant for a supposedly “democratic” presidency to nominate maximally prominent neofascists, I was told: “They represent the HIDDEN government of the USA.”

For years it was incorrect to point out that emperor Obama had no clothes, that all he had was playing with his brown skin. That observation was called racist. Yet, it has been made recently, loud and clear, by leftists of renown: president Obama has been incompetent, and a sell-out. As Thomas Frank puts it in Salon:

“Right-wing obstruction could have been fought: An ineffective and gutless presidency’s legacy is failure.

Yes, we know, the crazy House. But we were promised hope and change on big issues. We got no vision and less action.”

Change? Skin Color

Within days of Obama’s accession to power, banks were given public money without any counterparts. This was an outrageous theft of public money. I advocated it was “Time for RICO“. I may as well have told the mafia to summon the police.

Just as Reagan-Bush 25 years ago, and Sweden later, after 2007, the UK and Germany nationalized giant banks such as Northern Rock, RBS, Hypo Real Estate, when they had to give them hundreds of billions to save them. Instead in the USA, the banks were given trillions, without so much as a change of management; the fact the banks were given money was hidden by the simple device of TARP, then giving plenty more to banks through Quantitative Easing, to reimburse TARP…

To the great applause of conscientious, politically correct “liberals”, such as drummer boy Krugman.

This has world consequences: it made American financiers rule the world, more than ever; GE, saved by Obama’s $60 billion, just bought a French giant competitor, Alsthom. This is the Faustian deal of the USA: its plutocrats may rule the USA, but they also rule the world, and that increasing empire profits average Americans.

The dying Roman Republic went through a similar Faustian bargain with its increasing militarization: the resulting empire profited the Populus Romanus, while killing the Republic. The most insidious corruption corrupts the souls.

Real Change: Beggar In Chief

[Profitable presidency: Obama spent at least 400 day raising billions from the richest plutocrats.]

Then, unbelievably, Obama kept on saying he could not do a thing without Republican’s approval (never mind that he had 60% of the votes in the Senate, and a strong majority in Congress). It was, Obama explained disingenuously, a new way of doing politics by consensus. The savages opposing him rejected it, Obama’s fanatics informed us, thus making him a failure.

In truth, Obama had such strong control of all the government and the legislative, he could easily have imposed “Medicare For All“.

I have said all of this in the past, but, from another pen, my point of view comes out stronger. Thomas Frank again:

“America should have changed but didn’t… [how] to explain an age when every aspect of societal breakdown was out in the open and the old platitudes could no longer paper it over—when the meritocracy was clearly corrupt, when the financial system had devolved into organized thievery, when everyone knew that the politicians were bought and the worst criminals went unprosecuted and the middle class was in a state of collapse and the newspaper pundits were like street performers… for an audience that had lost its taste for mime and seriousness both. It was a time when every thinking person could see that the reigning ideology had failed, that an epoch had ended, that the shitty consensus ideas of the 1980s had finally caved in—and when an unlikely champion arose from the mean streets of Chicago to keep the whole thing propped up nevertheless.”

As early as 2009, it dawned on me that Obama was neither incompetent nor a sellout. I said so on some leftist sites, and was promptly thrown out, as a “troll” and a “Neo-Con”. Obama was a Neo-Conservative from the start and was chosen for that, by the higher-ups of the “democratic” party: they gave him a keynote speech, and their top master operative.

Obama practiced Dick Morris and Bill Clinton’s theory of triangulation — basically the democrats do the republicans’ work for them: democrats deregulated, balanced the budget, and unleashed the financial markets of the USA, while allowing huge corporations to pay no taxes. Clinton declared that the “era of big government is over.” Big banks, small government.

All of this covered by noises to the contrary while the notorious weasel, Dick Morris, chuckled. Weasels are somewhat below apes in the evolution of evolution. Not to worry, French judges never heard of Dick Morris, and he is white, in any case.

Nearly all American leftists, including myself, did not see early enough that Obama was a Neo-Con with Martin Luther King’s mien. We got manipulated by his speeches and rhetoric. His King-style voice rhythms sucked all back to the nostalgia of the progressive 1960s.

We were blinded by political correctness. I recovered quickly, in the first few weeks of Obama’s administration: it was clear Obama was all in rhetoric, and no action.

Obama claimed he could not do a thing, because the “Republicans” blocked him. In truth, fifth generation plutocrats such as Max Baucus, a major democratic senator, were the excuse Obama evoked, in democratic circles, to say he could not a thing. (That Max Baucus lather authored “Obamacare”, is pretty telling.)

I wrote, on this site, about the commonality between Obama’s behavior and that of the “boys” who used to serve white masters in Kenya. Some in my family wrote to me I had trampled on their hearts, and had no common decency. I replied my decency was uncommon. (No doubt it made their stays at Camp David less comfy, so they have hated me ever since.)

Obama is a far more competent Neo-Con than Bush Jr., or even Reagan, ever were. Those had opponents. Obama got collaborators, all over. No banana peel shaking for him. No need for French judges.

The two Bushes generated a backlash and really could only rule in secret, or though devious means. Obama instead pushed the agenda of Wall Street Banks, USA corporations, and the CIA/NSA much further than Bush ever dreamed of, by going public about it while carefully misrepresenting the truth.

For example, Obama officially clashed with Netanyahu. However, below that surface of enmity, extensive cooperation developed, say on anti-missile systems (the fact I like those systems is irrelevant). Such systems were crucial to allow Israel to not negotiate with the Palestinians.

Clinton was the best president the republicans ever had. Under him Franklin D. Roosevelt’s revolutionary reforms of finance and banks were completely undone; Rubin, that is Goldman Sachs and their followers were solidly in command. Clinton, while officially at war with Newt Gingrich, was actually doing the work the Republicans could never have done, had Bush Senior still been president.

As the Republicans got all they wanted, the debate switched further to the right. When the democrats acquired control of Congress in 2006, they went right. Pelosi and company accepted to give all the money banks and shadow banks wanted in 2008. Without any counterparts. Obama became the best president the Neo-Cons could dream of.

Obama once convoked all the top bankers to the White House. He announced, triumphal, that the Obama team was “the only thing between you and the pitchforks”. He delivered. Thanks to political correctness, nobody important dared say that the emperor had no clothes. That, would, indeed, have deemed to be racist. Still is. But not for long.

The picture that will stick with Obama is the one I observed six years ago: a black boy, serving the white masters. and not for brains: under Obama, the share of scientific publications by the USA has collapsed. Why? Under Obama, plutocratization has jumped (as I said, because of the treatment of finance). So it has in academia. But money has deleterious effects on research (if nothing else, it creates the wrong mood and obsession).

Obama ran his first campaign as “change you can believe in”. Yes, none at all. Obama, at best consolidated Bush’s Neo-Con rule. At worst he is still the engulfing lie that appearance is all what reality is about.

Patrice Ayme’

WAR CAN BE GOOD. Never So Political Correctness.

War can be many things. It’s fundamental to humanity in all ways, bad or good, smart of dumb, but always at the core. We make war, as we make ideas. We adulate celebrities, precisely because we are ready to adulate war chiefs. The astronomical genius Kepler declared, and waged, his “war on Mars”. It lasted 30 year . Kepler won: Mars followed an ellipse, not a circle, or some weird oval.

That war can be many things, some of them good, many necessary was understood by prophets such as Jesus, and Muhammad (or the much earlier and deeply influential Zoroaster). The Qur’an advocates “Jihad”, a war-like effort, as a core duty of the faithful. Some situations, those prophets said, are best dealt with the sword (for the record I do not approve of using the sword against “unbelievers” as Jesus and Muhammad seems to have advocated; instead I propose to smother unbelievers with ideas… of course, we don’t have the same notion of unbeliever).

Real war can sometimes be, not just justified, or justifiable, but the one and only solution: only heavy bombing persuaded the Nazis of the error of their ways, nothing else could have. War against those who want to wage nasty war for no good reason whatsoever is always justified. In front of ultimate evil, turning the other cheek won’t help the good, just quite the opposite: it will help the worst.

War Is The Essence Of Plutocracy

Dean Mitchell: “I have to disagree. The history of war shows us that there is always a vested interest in war that has nothing at all to do with justice. Justified war seems like madness to me.”

Nathan Daniel Curry: “…To turn the other cheek requires a very deep metaphysics to make any sense. The problem is why war repeats. The reason is our societal models. Patriarchy does not work. Only a triune society can intuit the complexity of human nature and hear the sense of lack that breed the myopia that leads to helpless people lashing out in cruel and pitiful ways. The truth is they are not helpless. It is the ego that preaches that doctrine.”

Hearing this argument, Florent Boyer smiled: “What about the Amazons?” Indeed, the Amazons! They really existed. Women princess warriors buried with weapons. So much for the patriarchy thing.

My Arrows Pierce Sexist Males

[470 BCE Greek vase representing an Amazon. Notice the pants, the skirt, the shield, and the arrows’ quiver.]

And so forth. With all due respect, all the objections above remind me of someone protesting a thunderstorm by pointing out that it damages leaves, except that smart insects can crawl and hangs below the other side. All true, indeed, but irrelevant to a family whose roof is been taken apart by a tornado.

Stopping war is not about calling Hitler “my friend”, and sending him love letters as the Mahatma Gandhi did. Stopping war is done by launching efficient systems of thoughts and mood.

The Franks shadowed the retreating Huns after helping to get them out of Orleans. A few weeks later, with the standard Roman legions headed by Aetius, and the Visigoths, the Franks crushed the Huns. 375 years later, or so, the Franks penetrated the three concentric rings that defended the Avars in Hungary, and destroyed them.

The Mongols of Genghis Khan, who descended directly from the Huns and Avars, remembered all this. So, after reaching the Adriatic in present day Croatia in the Thirteenth Century, they reminded each other that their weapons had proven of little use against the Franks (who had invented tactics the Mongols adopted). It was decided to stop the Mongol advance, and stay in the steppe.

That’s how one stops war. Through terror. Through past shock, future awe.

This master idea, that “Justified war seems like madness to us” was held by Central European Jews when confronted to Hitler. They clang to it with the intelligence of barnacles lashed by waves.

As I have observed, seconded by Hannah Arendt, that those “Jewish Councils” collaborators of Adolf Hitler. This deliberate, willing collaboration only incited the Nazis to go further. Instead, the Jewish Councils ought to have screamed bloody murder, and screamed for help from the French Republic. That would have made it easier for the French to declare war unilaterally on Hitler, without waiting for British agreement.

Those who believe there are no justifiable war, are not just mad, they are, with all due respect, the sort of people who enabled Adolf Hitler. And the like. And there are really a lot of Hitler-like leaders out there.

As I explained in the Will To Extermination, man is all about exterminating man. Complaining about war, is complaining about man. Instead of begging not to take part in war, ask what war is worth fighting, and which one to avoid.

In this light, Nathan’s eternal return of a state of war, sounds like the eternal return of man. That war repeats is not a problem. The problem is that the problems that made war the only solution, keep on repeating. Fortunately, change is in the wings. When the ocean starts rising 10 centimeters a year, and a billion people catch the fancy that they are not fishes, and would rather live somewhere else, while energy supplies get constricted, the military is going to be busy. The false debate of whether war is just in the mind, will vanish.

Especially as countries that have purchased pieces of other countries, try to impose their sovereignty.

Dean Mitchell: “I understand that position, Patrice, but the problem with Hitler was wholly contrived. Sniff out the danger when it is obviously there instead of encouraging it and there is no need for millions to die.

War is never an “only solution” except as a profiteering racket. Men go to war to act as pawns of the puppet masters.”

Patrice Ayme: Sniff out danger? Whatever, Dean, whatever. It did not happen like that. Hitler was not a the monster out of the depths, who surfaced like Godzilla, taking over the world. Quite the opposite. Hitler was the master tool of a massive conspiracy that involved Soviets, American, English, and even German overlords.

To this day, that conspiracy has not been “sniffed”. Mention it to the average Joe, and the reaction will be hostile: the notion disrupts the established order of thought.

The Devil is in the details, camping on one’s own good will, and self-admiration, is not a solution.

War is a solution, but it is rarely tried first.

The best example is France, from 1919 to 1939. France knew that the Germanoid superiority monsters, having got away with their demented crimes in World War ONE, would try again. The help of the British aristocracy (Lord Russel, Keynes are some of these famous double agents, on the intellectual side), and American plutocrats completely blocked the French Republic (Hitler got colossal financing from Henry Ford as early as 1920; while the entire government of the USA expropriated Germany before redistributing the proceeds to some of the most evil men in the USA… who found German henchmen to serve them, such as Schacht).

The French republic tried to stop Hitler and his fascist mentors for 20 years. Finally, on September 1, 1939, France gave Hitler with a 48 hours ultimatum to get out of Poland. On September 3, around 11 am, Great Britain and then France, declared war to Germany.

Yes, the Nazis were right, they did not want that world war (not yet! They were not ready). Yes, France started it. But it was a matter of survival.

Dean Mitchell: “Remove Hitler and the likelihood was that there would have been no war.”

Patrice Ayme: Once again, France tried her best. But France had in her way London, Wall Street, and even mighty German-American Jewish (!) plutocrats as the Warburgs. Yes, the Warburgs collaborated with Hitler, not, as the “Jewish Councils”, with the rat-like wishful desire of survival, but out of sheer greed for money and power.

The French secret services tried to break the Warburgs as early as 1934, while the French government tried to persuade Washington D.C. to stop the USA’s plutocrats support of Hitler. All that did was to make Washington hate Paris.

Dowd, historian at the University of Chicago and then USA ambassador in Berlin agreed 100% with the French. His best friend was Francois-Poncet, the French ambassador. Both used to amble the close by Tiergarten, the Berlin zoo, to escape Nazi eavesdropping, while fearing assassination.

Furious that Dowd could NOT get along the Nazi government, and his dire warning about those thugs, Roosevelt removed Dowd in 1937, and replace him by a pro-Nazi: Roosevelt was into helping his plutocratic class. In London Roosevelt put the outrageously pro-Nazi Kennedy as ambassador. And so on.

Hitler annexed 3 countries, invaded a fourth. Finally, Britain found its spine. At that point, France could only attack. What did the USA (plutocrats) do? Provide crucial military support to Hitler.

All of this has been occulted in official history.

But, yes, there are just wars, even if they killed 70 million, 4% of humanity. The Secession War, according to the latest, best estimates killed 3% of the USA. That, too, was a just war.

Bismarck said: ”Real philanthropy consists all too often into knowing to shed blood”. Bismarck, who was a great man in many ways, launched a lot of wars, and an empire, all quite successful, from his point of view, and yet bound to cause catastrophe because all too many Germans ended up confusing war and philanthropy. (Just as the present USA confuse plutocracy and philanthropy.)

So there is clearly a risk to overdo it. War can be an eternal return of the same, just worst: after two millennia of intense military activity, France has not recovered, by a long shot, the borders that Gallia (“Gaul”) had when the Romans started to invade it (Holland, Belgium, Switzerland, Northern Italy… The natural borders, in other words, used to be in it, when the Romans were made to pay ransom to the Celts).

But then, again, when the Prussians attacked in August 1914, they committed war crimes and atrocities on a deliberate, industrial basis, as ordered from above, as soon as the first few days of the conflict. Surrendering to them, at that point was surrendering to barbarity (that was naturally the notion advocated by Lord Russell, a highest British noble, and thus a relative, spiritually speaking, of the Prussian aristocrats; the Kaiser was a descendant of Queen Victoria).

So it’s not just that “war is a continuation of politics by other means” (Carl Von Clausewitz’s Vom Kriege (On War) published posthumously in 1832). It’s not just that Bismarck’s more radical expression was correct. Let me go all the way, all the evolutionary way:

War is the continuation of life by the means of death, it’s what humans do. Forgetting this, is forgetting not just what humanity does, but what humanity is.

As I explained before, the unique position of humans as the apex creature for millions of years, has made it so. War is how man is regulated. Just as there is the law of the jungle, there is the law of man, and its name is war.

To ignore this, and switch to the “politically correct” mode, where wishful thinking is the absolute good, facetiously brings, even more war. The Nazis said so much about themselves that they were and wanted to be, “immer correct” (always correct), that they forgot the big picture.

That sea, now rising by nearly two centimeters a year in Bangladesh, means war. Those who ignore it, are collaborating with the coming war, the greatest humanity will have ever brought.

And those who want to mitigate the coming disturbance, need to be armed with the correct theory of war, instead of just making war to reality, armed with comfortably numb illusions.

Patrice Ayme’

Note On Amazons: Advanced technology, namely the bow and the horse, made women into as capable warriors as men. Women ride better than men, and they can be just as precise, if not more so. Some empires that brought the Amazon phenomenon were distinguished by multi-decadal war expeditions by their men folk (up to a documented 28 years in one case), so the women had to do everything, including procreating with alien warriors.

Slavery: Black, White, Plutocratic

A French woman was condemned to nine months in jail, for insinuating that Taubira, a politician, was from the same family as a hairy relative of an apparently less intellectual nature. In France, when one insults the leaders, one goes to jail. That’s the law. A recent law, too, that did not exist four centuries ago.

And yet, as Galileo whispered, after been condemned for claiming that the Earth rotated: “she rotates”. But, in present day France, judges judge reality, they did not learn from their Papal forebears. Want some more reality? Here is the famous painting “Convoi De Femmes Captives”

Africa: Steel, Slaves & Guns Before Europeans Came

“Homo” and “Pan” (Chimpanzee) are of the same “family”, in the scientific sense. Both are “Hominidae”. French judges are blinded by the “politically correct”, rather than by science.

Because of the prominence of politically correct thought, rather than factually correct thought, the French unemployment rate is about twice what it is in Germany, Great Britain, and the USA. I probably just gravely insulted the “ministres”, and should be put in jail.

Dominique Deux, an esteemed commenter on this site said that:

“Calling Ms Le Pen an ape would be well beyond good taste, but nobody ever used that excuse to enslave her forebears. Calling Ms Taubira an ape is being an accessory after the fact to a monstrous crime. Jokes and insults have a rap sheet, and that one has a very heavy rap sheet. Hence the need to strike – hard.”

There are two issues here: a) The theory that alleged descendants ought to be punished for crimes alleged ancestors may have committed, centuries ago.

b) The facts of slavery: who committed the crime, and why, etc..

I will treat only the second issue here, as I treat many issues: with relentless truth, throwing away all caution to the wolves of commonality.

Ms Le Pen has probably slaves among her forebears. Does that give her a right to strike –hard?

Indeed, before the Franks under Queen Bathilde, an ex-slave, outlawed the slave trade within the Imperium Francorum (Empire of the Franks) in 655 CE, slavery was ubiquitous. Some of the largest slave owners were bishops.

Africans were enslaved for three reasons:

a) The occupying Muslims taught the Portuguese plutocrats that slavery worked harmoniously.

b) The king of Portugal asked the Pope for the right to reciprocate. (Portugal had never been part of the Imperium Francorum.)

c) The Pope wrote a “Bull” to that effect.

However, with all other “races” and the rest of Europe, slavery stayed unlawful. It was tolerated in the colonies, because the reach of the law there was tenuous (initially; then traditions were created).

That re-introduction of slavery has nothing to do with the facts Africans were deemed to be apes. The proximal cause of the reintroduction of slavery was the usual suspect, Christianity. Claiming that slavery arose from the theory of evolution is an argument that even the opponents of Lamarck and Darwin did not use.

That men and apes are basically the same is obvious to all, but French judges. Carthaginians captured what they called “hairy women”, with a strong fighting disposition, south of Mount Cameron. From their descriptions, it’s clear those were female gorillas. That identification to “women” was a stroke of genius, as we know now that gorillas are indeed hominids. Just like Taubira.

From: “Hominidae: chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans, humans:

Until recently, most classifications included only humans in this family; other apes were put in the family Pongidae (from which the gibbons were sometimes separated as the Hylobatidae). The evidence linking humans to gorillas and chimps has grown dramatically in the past two decades, especially with increased use of molecular techniques. It now appears that chimps, gorillas, and humans form a clade of closely related species; orangutans are slightly less close phylogenetically, and gibbons are a more distant branch. Here we follow a classification reflecting those relationships. Chimps, gorillas, humans, and orangutans make up the family Hominidae; gibbons are separated as the closely related Hylobatidae. Thus constituted, the Hominidae includes 4 genera and 5 species. Its nonhuman members are restricted to equatorial Africa, Sumatra and Borneo. Hominid fossils date to the Miocene and are known from Africa and Asia.”

Some view Taubira as a victim because she has a brownish skin. Does that mean it’s politically correct to view all the brownish ones as slaves?

Who transported the Black slaves? Some Arabs and Europeans traders working on behalf of white, or whitish plutocrats. Where did they purchase their slaves? In Black Africa. Who captured the slaves? Black Africans, or Peuls, or raiding Moroccans or Arabs.

But mostly Black Africans. A dozen black African empire thrived on the slave trade. It’s black power, black plutocratic power, which enabled the slave trade. By, say, 1800 CE, except for the extreme tip of South Africa, and Zanzibar (Arabs) Black Africa was, still, completely unconquered.

Why? European military force could not make a dent on Africa. Africans had steel, and they made arrowheads, and even firearms with it. Besides, Europeans died like flies from African diseases.

Purchasing blacks from blacks, does not make the whites using slaves any less criminal. But it spreads further the question of criminality. It stops making slavery a disease confined to one particular race.

Stopping the Black African slave trade and related human rights abuses was actually used as reason for the European conquest of Africa in the second half of the Nineteenth Century.

How was that achieved? In Senegal, 5,000 Tirailleurs Senegalais were led by ten French officers. Yet, in 1900, a third of the population of Senegambia was still enslaved. The French administration brought that down to zero soon (yet, it’s climbing back up because of Quranic schools recently).

So let’s not cry too much about the black person, tortured by the white demons. It’s demeaning to all, including reality.

Let’s stay weary, instead, of those with demonic practice. And a first demonic practice, is to pose as a victim, and use this to engage in physical violence. Especially when, like Taubira, one is, instead, an overlord, as a profession (Taubira enacted the famous Taubira law in 2001). Someone so divine that, should you brandish a banana when she comes around, you go to jail. Big time. And, yes, putting people in jail is physically violent.

All societies had slavery, in the past. It was better than mass execution. Both were necessary, from ecological balance. Complain to god, or thank technology, for the (momentary?) improvement. But don’t accuse today’s people, of crimes they did not commit, because of the color of the skin of their ancestors. Amen.

Patrice Ayme’

Don’t Monkey Around French Tyrants

Philosophy is nothing if not explicit. Plato represents Socrates in various debates with various characters. Politics is practical philosophy. And what is the fundamental philosophy of the genus Homo? Curiosity, associated with imperial inquisitiveness, and abrasive intelligence.

In turn the later have brought human supremacy, and a subsequent optimization of the pursuit of happiness (imposed by the USA Constitution, aping Aristotle).

The superiority of the present civilization is a direct consequence from the preceding, this imperial spirituality, and it rests on free speech (First Amendment of the USA Constitution).

No free speech means that tyranny is free to rule. It is pretty clear that the so called “representative democracy” is a form of tyranny. So it would make sense that free speech would be curtailed by tyrants, as doing so will encourage tyranny.

HONNI SOIT QUI MAL Y PENSE:

Don’t Ape Me. Publish This In France, Go To Jail

[Logically challenged French judges, seeing this, apparently deduced that Taubira used to be the ape on the left, and condemn this inner revelation, as somebody’s else racism; the logic of fools knows no bounds.]

In France, “justice” condemns sexual mutilation of girls… if one of the politically correct color,  (Contrarily to Britain, where it is tolerated as “multiculturalism). Yet the punishments have been light. Not so for calling attention to Taubira’s “family” (in the scientific sense, see below).

Some will say I exaggerate, and calling Hollande Le Grotesque and his ilk “tyrants” show an inordinate lack of measure unbecoming a philosopher. However, I know history. In France the tyrant Napoleon is front and center: he has his special resting place below the magnificent gold dome of the Invalides (erected by the Tyrant Louis XIV). I recommend to extract him, and throw the debris down the Rhine, the rough center of his exactions.

Napoleon and Louis XIV were disasters for Europe, killing millions, making million more fleeing for their lives, all the way to Capetown and the New Paltz (New York state). But don’t tell that to the average French practicing their idolatry.

On December 27, 1594, Jean Chastel attacked the king Henri IV, wounding his lip. Chastel, 19 year old, of good bourgeois birth, was drawn and quartered within two days. However, a few month later, Jean Boucher, Cure’ de Saint Benoit, doctor at the Sorbonne, and rector of the University of Paris, published an “Apologie” of the would-be assassin, where he commanded his act, and invited another attempt on the king’s life.

Freedom of speech in France was thus greater, in some ways, back in the Sixteenth Century. And the tyrants, less tyrannical. A really paradoxical observation.

In a country such as France, right now, a few guys without much intelligence, but all the levers of power, are taking a succession of idiotic decisions, and they do this by behaving as if they were great princesses and princes of the Middle Ages, endowed with an aura of sanctity. The truth? Well, it’s in their genes. Apes (or more exactly Hominids, see below) are just glorified baboons.

The Eighteenth Century biologist Buffon thought baboons were too obscene to describe faithfully.

Such is the inheritance, not to say the truth, that French politicians  want to hide the most.

A woman was condemned to nine months in jail in France for the preceding picture and attending commentary.

The woman is an extreme right blonde bimbo, not really my cup of tea: at least once, an extreme right commando tried to kill me, with an Improvised Explosive Device, so I cannot be accused of having a right wing bias! But that’s beside my point, which is free speech, and even more so, free thought.

If someone says something idiotic, it ought to be condemned verbally (and I have advocated Truth as the fourth branch of government). But only tyrants send people to jail for suggestions of a non criminal nature. I fail to see what is criminal about suggesting that an ape such as me, is, actually, an ape. Now, of course, hard core Islamists and Catholics, Calvin, or Saint Louis, would believe that’s a crime. Apparently French judges also go ape about the concept.

One thing about the picture above, that will escape no doubt escape idiots, at first sight. This is a juxtaposition of pictures. One shows a young gorilla at 18 months. The other picture shows the French “Guard Of The Seals”, the Justice Minister (equivalent to Holder), a woman called Taubira, native of French Guyanna.

Let’s cut the crap: she is basically the one who decides to send people to jail, or not, as in Russia.

The seal she guards is apparently most importantly is that of imbecility. She could not hide a large monkey grin after the verdict was announced.

And what was the deed that was punished? The fact that French judges, and the French government decided to build a logic between the two pictures. They actually made an implication, deducing that the picture on the left was supposed to represent Taubira at 18 months.

In other words, those fools are the ones who admitted publicly that, when they see an 18 month old gorilla, they think about Taubira, now. In other words, they are admitting publicly that they are themselves racist scums, and biologically confused. So they send somebody else to jail, in their frustration.

We know what happened to free speech in Putin’s Russia: if women gather in a cathedral to sing a prayer to the Virgin Mary to rid Russia of Putin, they are condemned to jail (for racist insults against the church, basically).

What’s the problem with Putin? The West. Putin is aping what he sees being done in the West.

Or is it the other way around? Systems of thought are obdurate, and have a life of their own. What we see above is that the ferocity of the states is augmenting: USA goons are spying all over, and lurk within your computers. Mr. Xi will send you to jail if you invoke certain events that never happened in a certain place. Now France is showing clear signs of losing its mind.

Complete with censoring comedians (without any judicial decisions). The problem there is that the censoring Prime Minister is then supposed to steer the country just so… After demonstrating he is an obviously tyrannical little fool.

Systems of thought have a life of their own, for the worst, but also for the best.

After the Barbarians fought Rome for a millennium, they sort of won. And what did they do? They aped Rome. The principle of the Republic had won them over.

The Barbarians (Ostrogoths in Italia, Burgonds and Wisigoths in Gallia, etc.) reactivated much of the Republican ideals after say 500 CE, as the “Christian Republic” (from historical ignorance, and bias, the idea of Christian Republic is often attributed to Calvin, Locke, Rousseau; in truth it was partly enacted by the time of the Church Founding Fathers, by 400 CE… And led to a mess, because the political correctness that characterized Christianism, by groveling to the strong, was incapable of effective governance).

Systems of ideas have to be cultivated, educated, and, sometimes, destroyed.

Representative democracy has to be destroyed as an ideal.

Think Taubira. Who is Taubira? A primate. An ape actually. An ape dictating to seventy million people.

Yes, learn this, French judges: you are primates, not creatures of Allah. Or maybe you are creatures of Allah, but that’s a concept that exist only in your minds, and the books you read; it has no factual support. We apes, evolving smartly, over the last ten million years, pulled away from chimpanzees, not by denying what we were, apes, but by embracing it, understanding it and thinking about what it implied.

Denial may work when one has terminal cancer. But, otherwise, it’s hopeless. Maybe French authorities have cancer? A cancer of the mind?

If Taubira can’t stand that judges deduce it has been implied that she maybe just a primate, she should see the appropriate shrink. (Apparently the entire political class in France, we are told, approves of the judges’ Putin like diktat: so maybe they should all see shrinks? And reject Allah? Or then migrate to Turkey, by the feet of the Islamist Erdogan?)

Spiting people because of their origins is condemnable. Spiting condemnable ideas, though, is the essence of morality. Spiting science, such as the scientific discovery that the genus Homo is a type of ape, is extremely condemnable. So I condemn French “judges” for emulating Galileo’s judges.
Amusingly, I have been somewhat in error above. Political correctness has gained scientific semantics. So, instead of calling everybody “ape” from chimpanzees and gorillas to man, now everybody is called “Hominidae” (Hominids). Here it is:

Chimpanzee: Kingdom: Animalia, Phylum: Chordata, Class: Mammalia, Order: Primates, Family: Hominidae, Subfamily: Homininae, Tribe: Panini, Genus: Pan.

Here is Taubira, a “man”. Order: Primates, Family: Hominidae, Tribe: Hominini, Subtribe: Hominina, Genus: Homo.

Meanwhile the French People would be well advised to search for a new form of government more appropriate to the modern world, and the increasing democracy we all dearly need.

One does not have to look very far for inspiration: the Confoederatio Helvetica next door, an independent, and central part of the Franks’ Francia, is enjoying a much more direct form of democracy.

High time for Revolution.

Patrice Ayme’

Time Flies For Flies

I am an intellectual. I believe we are all intellectuals. Even animals and plutocrats think. It’s Descartes, upside down: Animals Think, Therefore They Survive.

I developed my idea that “INSTINCT IS FAST LEARNING.”

Time perception can only reflect how rapidly an animal’s nervous system processes information. To test this, researchers show animals a flashing light. If the light flashes quickly enough, animals perceive it as a solid, unblinking light: this is the principle of the movies.

Beyond 60 frames per second humans see a continuous motion; yet, anyone who has tried to catch a fly or a lizard know they move, and decide to move, faster than humans.

Time Is Relative In More Ways Than One

This gives a window for a lot of learning to happen in a bee, that looks like instinct.

The animal’s behavior or its brain activity reveal the highest frequency at which each species perceives the light as flashing. Animals that detect blinking at higher frequencies perceive time in a more frequent manner. Movements, events, learning itself, unfold more slowly to them—think slow-motion bullet dodging as recent movies.

The smaller the animals, the easier it is to turn them into dinner. So the more reactive they have to be, to dodge the bullets. Thus one would expect that species perceiving time more slowly to be smaller and have faster metabolisms. This is (roughly) was is observed (although some of the results are dissonant, maybe an experimental artifact: rats may be slow visually, but fast olfactively, say).

“Ecology for an organism is all about finding a niche where you can succeed that no-one else can occupy,” Andrew Jackson, an author of the study in Animal Behavior said. “Our results suggest that time perception offers an as yet unstudied dimension along which animals can specialize and there is considerable scope to study this system in more detail. We are beginning to understand that there is a whole world of detail out there that only some animals can perceive and it’s fascinating to think of how they might perceive the world differently to us.”

Flies, or plutocrats, may not think deep, but they think fast. And they cannot think deep, because they think fast. The most exploitative philosophy is thus the fastest, and shallowest. That is no doubt why, in one of his variants, the Devil, Pluto, Belzebuth, was represented as Lord of the Flies.

Patrice Ayme’

(Connoisseurs of Nazi philosophy will appreciate the connection with Heidegger’s “Sein Und Zeit“. Time is, indeed, the Dasein. As with a computer clock: no clock, no computer.)

Serres Decapitates France

I just landed in France with the elegance of the death star among minnows. A contributor to this site, Kevin Berger, attracted my attention to an editorial of Roger Cohen, “France Decapitated”, amplifying moaning from Michel Serres, a philosopher.

Probably to set the tune of fundamental idiocy that was going to overshadow his entire editorial, Cohen complained, to start with, that the Tour De France started in Yorkshire. In his crass ignorance, the connection between France and England eludes him totally (although Cohen is now a USA citizen, he originated as a South African Jew).

French Light Speed Communications, 18th Century

Cohen whined that having the Tour in England showed that “nothing was sacred anymore, and pigs will fly”. Well, since pigs already write for the New York Times, they may as well fly. As this essay will show, given enough ignorance, anything flies handsomely.

Mark Cavendish, the (ex) number one sprinter in the world, tried to force his way in the first sprint of the Tour, in Yorkshire (he himself recognized). He fell, dragging others in his fall, injured himself and then had to abandon the Tour, on day one. On day four and five, Christopher Froome, who won the Tour last year, fell three times on Northern France’s cobblestones, and also had to abandon. Cavendish, Froome, are British. At one point they owned the Tour. It’s only natural the Tour comes by where they are from. The roads were packed along the Tour in Britain, driving many a rider furious from too many cameras in their faces.

Ah, lest Cohen did not get the news, the Franks conquered England in 1066 CE, and stayed permanently after making an alliance with the people and freeing the 20%-25% or so, of the population who were slaves. English democracy was definitively launched by a number of Frankish rebels.

The Franks ruled what they called “Renovated Rome”. Indeed they spoke Latin, used Roman Law, and originated as the Roman army.

The original Roman army had evacuated Britain in 406 CE, for budgetary reasons caused by plutocratic will. (On the continent, the Franks had officially replaced the legions in 400 CE.)

Knowing there was no more highly trained, superiorly armed legions facing them, but only local soldiers, the unconquered savages of Northern Germany and Scandinavia attacked in the following six centuries and overran Britannia, including the Roman successor states (Northumberland, etc.), in a succession of complex invasions.

For centuries Britannia and Gallia had been part of the same Roman state. Earlier both were part of the same Celtic civilization, for more than a millennium. After 1066 CE, they were again part of the same polity, itself officially the “Renovated Roman Empire” explicitly proclaimed under Charlemagne… But effective for more than three centuries.

However, the rulers of Western Francia, gained by Gallic arrogance, proclaimed that the Paris/French king was “emperor in his own kingdom”, sometimes around 1000 CE. This brought a mess of little leaders, all over Europe, with no central authority until the European Union.

The mess of too many little great leaders after 1066 CE, all over Western Europe, led to no less than 50 major wars.

This is the fundamental reason to make a united Europe that Europhobes do not know about, in their crass ignorance, and immanent treacherousness.

Cohen, by refusing the Tour in Britain, on the ground that makes pigs fly, rejects history, plays dumb, and embraces hatred for European unity. In the garbage, please.

Cohen: “That the French are unhappy has become a commonplace. A nation that loves ideas is living in an ideological void. If that void is filled by anyone it is the rightist leader Marine Le Pen with her cleverly dosed venom about Europe, immigrants, crime, globalization and the other supposed culprits behind French national decline.”

That is roughly correct. Except that rumors of a French decline have been much exaggerated. And the solution is thriving next door in an independently managed part of Francia: Switzerland. (Let alone Germania, also independently managed Francia.)

Cohen: “France is a modern country as well as a beautiful one. Its attributes, from its health system to its rail system (when not on strike), are well known.”

I had a very personal demonstration of the superiority of French health care this week: my four year old daughter was cured within hours, from French antibiotics, after a harrowing flight. Californian doctors were apparently firmly set to leave her fate to the will of God. In the USA, antibiotics are for plutocrats and their animals, much dying keeps We The People in check.

French rail has held the world speed record for rail for seventy years or so (but for a few months of German domination). In the late 1950s, the Japanese bought and deconstructed French electric engines for building their own high speed trains.

The French health care system is not just good, it’s innovative, and the world profits from it. In the 1950s an observant French surgeon discovered the modern psychiatric drugs. Meanwhile a French woman discovered that Down syndrome was caused by an added chromosome. More recently deep brain stimulation was discovered in the Grenoble CHU as a method to cure Parkinson’s and other diseases.

A serious French effort has been underway for years to make a permanent artificial heart (a patient died mysteriously, so it’s not easy).

Cohen: ”But the French dislike modernity. They mistrust modernity. That is the nub of the problem. They dislike and mistrust it for two reasons. Modernity has redefined space and relegated the state. This is intolerable.”

A “modern” country that dislikes “modernity”, while inventing all sorts of “modern art”, and “art deco”, and “nouveaux philosophes”? And the number one inventor of “Relativity” was Henri Poincaré, who even named it, not Einstein. France, as the country that brought E= mcc (Poincare’ 1900, Einstein, 1905)? Intolerable. Quick let’s attribute that to a German Jew.

Lest you ask, Poincaré also invented topology. Among other things. Unfortunately he died while middle aged. If Einstein was turkey size, Poincaré was T Rex.

Modern, modernity and modernism are French attributes, thus are absolutely not the nub of the problem. Cohen, parroting three pence philosopher Michel Serres, is wrong as wrong can be.

Cohen is off the deep end here.

France is not just modern. France’s fundamental tradition is modernity. France’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, rests on modernism.

And so it shows. France invented the first cars (Eighteenth Century), hot air balloons and planes. All the preceding were private efforts under government (military) contracts. But the first submarines or helicopters were also made in France. And also cameras (both black and white, and color). Also the first (and, so far, only, ever) ram jet plane. The Concorde, by the way, still holds many speed records (the ones without air refueling).

The nuclear chain reaction and how to extract energy from nuclei, was so discovered in France, that the French government yanked all the patents out in January 1938, lest the Nazis read and understand them (fortunately, that understanding dawned on the dumb Nazi physicists led by Heisenberg only August 7, 1945).

More recently, the Minitel was a highly successful precursor of the internet. Astoundingly, and little known, the transistor, the integrated circuits and the PC were all invented in France (and quickly stolen by Silicon Valley and other USA propagandists). Optical pumping, a necessary precursor to the maser and laser, was also discovered in France.

On Mars the Curiosity Rover is mostly Americano-French. Besides scientific instrumentation, a French company made its supersonic parachute, another, Thales, made its laser.

Thales makes the world’s most powerful lasers, when it’s not building the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. The most advanced American material science labs purchase Thales lasers. French laser physicists are scared that, if they do not stay financed enough, they will lose their edge on the rest of the World. In ten years. (The NSA is supposed to fix that.)

The major advance of the Franks beyond Antique Rome, freeing Europe of slavery, was made possible by more advanced technology where it really made a difference (mechanical advantage, hydraulic hammers, super-horses, more advanced agriculture, including the new genetically engineered beans of the Tenth Century).

That was also necessary. The moral advance of “Equality, Fraternity” occurred only because more advanced technology allowed to get rid of slavery, in the 7^th century. Just as, someday, it will allow to get rid of work.

Let’s not forget that the Franks replaced the Romans, first of all, because they had better, and that means more modern, weapons. Similarly, four centuries later, the steel of the Franks proved superior even to the superb Damascus steel of the Islamists.

So modernism is the essence of France: no modernism, no Francia. One does not change essence overnight. Cohen does not know what he is talking about in the matter of French culture: it is centered, in the fullness of time, around modernity. To put it mildly.

Cohen: “The redefinition of space has involved the technology-driven elimination of distance. As Michel Serres, a prominent French philosopher, put it in a lecture last year at the Sorbonne on the digital world, “Boeing shortens distances; new technologies annul them.”

Philosophers are like blades of grass in the French prairie. Yet, I like Michel Serres. Once a mariner, his feet are firmly planted in the waves, essence of the universe. However, why did Serres use the sentence: “Boeing shortens distances…”. This is a deliberate lie, a sophisticated lie, but still, a lie: it is construed to give a misleading impression. Serres could have said: ”Jets shorten distances…” Jet engines were not invented by Boeing, but by Messerschmitt, a European company. The Brits were the second to realize jets. Even several years later, captured Me 262 operated by American test pilots were much better than the best jets made in the USA.

Boeing, indeed, is an American company. Airbus is European, French dominated, and makes as many planes. So Serres wants to depict France as under aggression from the USA, rather than from Toulouse (where Airbus churns out more than 50 jets a month; arguably the world historical capital of aviation).

To deliberately inflict on the naïve a misleading impression, that’s behavior unbecoming a philosopher.

All the more as the French were big time pioneer of aviation to the point many parts of planes wear French names. French military aviation was huge as early as 1914. The Aeropostale in the 1920s and 1930s, inaugurated long range airmail, all the way to Chili (as readers of the Petit Prince may know).

Besides the French invented the proto-Internet with Minitel, and it was a massive success. A French government program, as early as 1945, enlisted top German scientists, to make fast signalization for very high speed trains.

Hard for me to take seriously philosophers who make such stupid mistakes.

Cohen: “Humanity has also changed its relationship to the state. The French place deep faith in the state. It is the righter of wrongs, the mediator of human affairs, the source of social justice, the object of duty, and the repository of power. The very word deregulation is odious to the French.”

Humanity is changing its relationship to the state in Switzerland. Elsewhere, not as much, if at all. Actually the argument is common in Europe that the state, in the guise of the European Union, is taking too much importance, and that the EU is regulating too much.

Cohen, aping Serres: “A revolution in communication is underway, not seen since the invention of the printing press, but it is not a French revolution. It is in fact an anti-French revolution. It challenges fundamental French values, the French sense of self, and the French attachment to the state.”

Whatever. The French state, centuries ago, had set-up a semaphore signalization system. France was covered with 556 stations. In tall towers placed upon hilltops, 10 to 35 kilometers away, a two armed device depicted symbols read through a telescope. That was retransmitted, just the same. This signalling system could transmit a signal 250 kilometers (150 miles) in two minutes.

According to Serres and his parrot Cohen, that’s supposed to be anti-French? On January 7 1785, a Frenchman, Blanchard, having thrown his pants out to lighten the ship, succeeded to cross the Channel in a Montgolfiere. A few weeks earlier Pilatre de Rozier, who had flown over Paris 15 months earlier, died, when his hot air balloon caught fire during the crossing. Were all these attempts at modernism, anti-French?

Articulating one’s logic around idiocies, amplifies idiocy. Let’s heap spite on such critters, in Quranic style.

The question still arises: what ails France? As France, clearly, is ailing. If not Serres’ dumb hypothesis that France hates modernity, then what? I will answer this in another essay. Interestingly, while presently the greatest fuel for the right wing Front National, it is easy to fix.

Patrice Aymé

The .01% Conspiracy

KRUGMAN WAKING UP TO THE .01%

Student Krugman is learning economics, or what one ought to call meta-economics, ever better. We will give him a gentleman’s D. Said he in “Who Wants A Depression?”:

“One unhappy lesson we’ve learned in recent years is that economics is a far more political subject than we liked to imagine. Well, duh, you may say. But, before the financial crisis, many economists — even, to some extent, yours truly — believed that there was a fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues.”

Yes, we know all too much: on so many issues, the economists’ consensus was both very injurious to society in general, profitable to economists, and thoroughly idiotic counterfactual. For example, a master idea was that hedge funds and the future markets, in spite of their leveraged size dwarfing the real economy, had neither impact nor even any connection with the real economy.

This monstrosity of a lie was long fostered by Krugman and his self-admiring society of friends and estimable Nobelized or Nobelizable colleagues.

That sort of fairly broad professional consensus on some important issues allowed all these creatures to live a grand life of importance and influence, as it pleased the Masters of the Universe to no end (what the Masters do then, is that they bring some money or chairs, or buildings to some Pluto universities such as Princeton, and everybody is happy: Meg Whitman get her sons in Princeton, where they can do whatever, etc.)

They can call it whatever, I call it corruption.

Krugman agrees that there is corruption:

“Who are these always-wrong, never-in-doubt critics? With no exceptions I can think of, they come from the right side of the political spectrum. But why should right-wing sentiments go hand in hand with inflation paranoia? One answer is that using monetary policy to fight slumps is a form of government activism. And conservatives don’t want to legitimize the notion that government action can ever have positive effects, because once you start down that path you might end up endorsing things like government-guaranteed health insurance.”

But it does not stop there. Krugman and colleagues have discovered the obvious:

“The really big losers from low interest rates are the truly wealthy — not even the 1 percent, but the 0.1 percent or even the 0.01 percent. Back in 2007, before the slump, the average member of the 0.01 percent received $3 million (in 2012 dollars) in interest. By 2011, that had fallen to $1.3 million — a loss equivalent to almost 9 percent of the group’s 2007 income.”

That low interest rates punish the “rentiers”, there is no doubt. Wealthy people in the Nineteenth Century were called by the French word “rentiers” precisely because they could live off rents. Being wealthy means to be able to live off interest, without touching the inflation adjusted principal.

So this is a reason to dislike low interest rates if one is very wealthy. But those with an aversion to risk, inflation or wild market fluctuations also detest very low interest rates, and rightly so.

Thus the question: are there other aspects of a policy of low interest rates that the wealthy do not like? In other words, can we go further than pointing out the obvious as our little Krugman does?

Well, first of all, THE WEALTHY LOVE DEPRESSIONS. During those, everything is so cheap that the wealthy, especially financiers, buy things for pennies on the dollar.

Nowadays, hedge funds allow the hyper rich to profit handsomely from financial and economic shocks. That’s why vultures funds are out to get countries that restructure their debt, with help from USA courts. They dearly regret not to have forced Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy into bankruptcy. So Argentina makes an excellent target.

A successful economy is, by itself of little value for the hyper rich. Quite the opposite. As said above, they tend to be rentiers. They are lions who made a killing, and want to keep what they got for themselves. Empowering, with a more economic clout the Populus is to be feared: if the poor is empowered, it can shake things up, and made demands to the rich, force them to share. The Revolution of 1789 was driven by the small bourgeoisie: newly empowered poor people.

Fundamentally, wealth, power, are relative. Nearly everybody lives so much better than Louis XIV, that, after due consideration, they would never exchange their lives for his. To be wealthy means to have things others do not have. Depriving the poor some more works as well as enriching the rich.

So our plutocratic leaders pursue both now.

Patrice Aymé