Krugman Rising From The Deep

Nowadays, I rarely bother to criticize, let alone advise, Obama (OK, I did it on Syria).

The One has become insignificant, it does not matter what he thinks, supposing he thinks at all. (Chuck Hagel, the Defense Secretary just called the policy of the USA in Syria strategically compromised, long term, as it profits the other enemy of civilization, Assad. Hagel is right. Attacking ISIL without taking out Assad is unbalanced. I am sure another Christain, or Druze strongman can be found.)

Soon the entire Congress will be Republican, and the Obama groupies will wonder what happened. Well, they have only themselves, and their reveling, to blame.

What happened is that, while Obama adulators were celebrating, when Obama became president he got surrounded by a thick cloud of plutocrats and their servants. Thus all Obama’s policies were all plutocratic, including (most of) Obamacare.

Unfortunately, the so called “Democrats” were not brainy enough to realize this. They believed that their beige hero would save them all. And, besides, superman like, find a solution to everything.

And, even if “Democrats” had brains, they had neither theory, nor a plan on how to handle the world.

The same problem has arisen with Clinton, Bill, earlier, and with the dimwits of the Socialist Party in power (supposedly) in France: no progress whatsoever.

I can’t reproach right wingers such as Cameron, or Merkel to be right wing. Even Abe in Japan does what he said he would do.

But the left, in Europe and the rest of the West has long been derelict.

Why? How? Lack of correct ideas. They did not think it through.

The best Krugman could suggest, for years, was more money for kleptocratic banks (“QE”), or devaluation (as Abe is doing in Japan). Fortunately, at last, Krugman is changing. As he is the most followed political economist in the world, it matters. Polls in Europe showed that the (Ex(?)-Europhobic Krugman) is the most trusted voice… On the left!

Then, of course, it all makes sense: if Krugman, the most trusted voice on the left, was actually on the right, or nowhere in particular, then no wonder the left was a right, and civilization got off the rails.

Krugman is realizing, slowly, that the debate has been framed by the plutocracy, especially about the lack of investments.

So now Krugman realizes that he and his kind (ex-Fed chief Bernanke) owe apologies to Japan. Says he:

“TOKYO — For almost two decades, Japan has been held up as a cautionary tale, an object lesson on how not to run an advanced economy. After all, the island nation is the rising superpower that stumbled. One day, it seemed, it was on the road to high-tech domination of the world economy; the next it was suffering from seemingly endless stagnation and deflation. And Western economists were scathing in their criticisms of Japanese policy.

I was one of those critics; Ben Bernanke, who went on to become chairman of the Federal Reserve, was another. And these days, I often find myself thinking that we ought to apologize.”

Well, indeed, you should: to keep its economy up, the Japanese government engaged in a gigantic effort (its debt is now 240% of GDP… Slightly more than the 90% of Britain or France).

And Krugman to diagnose: “… the West has, in fact, fallen into a slump similar to Japan’s — but worse. And that wasn’t supposed to happen. In the 1990s, we assumed that if the United States or Western Europe found themselves facing anything like Japan’s problems, we would respond much more effectively than the Japanese had. But we didn’t, even though we had Japan’s experience to guide us. On the contrary, Western policies since 2008 have been so inadequate if not actively counterproductive that Japan’s failings seem minor in comparison. And Western workers have experienced a level of suffering that Japan has managed to avoid.”

If it were only workers! Grandmothers and everybody not a banker or hedge fund managers also suffered from Quantitative Easing (which brought savings’ interest down to zero).

So what happened? Krugman again:

”What policy failures am I talking about? Start with government spending. Everyone knows that in the early 1990s Japan tried to boost its economy with a surge in public investment; it’s less well-known that public investment fell rapidly after 1996 even as the government raised taxes, undermining progress toward recovery. This was a big mistake, but it pales by comparison with Europe’s hugely destructive austerity policies, or the collapse in infrastructure spending in the United States after 2010. Japanese fiscal policy didn’t do enough to help growth; Western fiscal policy actively destroyed growth.”

And Krugman to evoke the austerity mistake even in Sweden, and to conclude:

“I’ll be writing more soon about what’s happening in Japan now, and the new lessons the West should be learning. For now, here’s what you should know: Japan used to be a cautionary tale, but the rest of us have messed up so badly that it almost looks like a role model instead.”

I added the following in a comment:

The case of Japan is special: it has collapsing demographics, not compensated, as it is in many Western countries, by a vigorous immigration. Japan also has no indigenous energy to speak of (even its nuclear waste recycling long depended upon France).

It was long obvious to yours truly, that the conditions we are in are worse than in 1930s. The Great Depression of the 1930s happened mostly accidentally; it was a succession of obvious mistakes: a boom, followed by a crash, made worse by a tariffs war, leading to industrial shrinkage, and a liquidation of banks.

Nowadays, it’s different: the planet is crashing, a more serious problem. This could be stopped, but for that the general mindset would have to be different. However, said mindset is constructed by an ever more powerful plutocracy, a few hundred individuals who order the world around.

In particular, the plutocratic mindset has seized the financial sector and the government. The former does not need the public to make money: the financial sector has tricks such as Quantitative Easing up its sleeve, boosted by the continual authorization for banks to cooperate with, or engage in financial piracy.

The latter, the government, refuses to engage in massive public investment, from top notch free public schools, to massive infrastructure to massive public healthcare (if you brandish Obamacare, contemplate its deductibles). Simply because, as a proximal reason, if government goons hold that line, cushy jobs are for them to take when they come out of government.

The way it connects with the financial pirates is simple: money creation is a zero sum game, when pushed to the max. If more money went to the real economy, it would be as much not going to the financial pirates.

Krugman, and his eminent colleagues have not understood this yet, that all the money created for financial thugs, is as much not going for vaccine research, schools, bridges, healthcare, etc. Hopefully, they will, some day. Before that day, do not expect progressive polices to bear fruit, or, even, to exist.

The media, everywhere, is little better than FOX News: it’s a giant propaganda machine which has interest to make the rich richer, and the poor, stupider.

Plutocracy is the metastatic cancer which has invaded, paralyzed all the minds. Before a stunted economy, and decaying society, we are confronted to decomposed minds. And mostly on the left. The right, at least, the plutocratic right, knows how to take care of its own.

Patrice Ayme’

Total Plutocracy

Christophe de Margerie’s jet hit a snow plough on a Moscow runway at midnight, flipped on its back, caught fire, and skidded across. The four on board died. A friend of mine said: ”Why are you smiling, what’s funny about that?” Hey, I’m like Margerie, I am a “bon vivant”. Margerie was reputed to be great fun, especially when visiting dictators. So I am keeping up with the fun.

With French ministers, according to a past Ministre de L’Ecologie, Margerie was spiteful, and made them feel that he was the real boss, and politicians were nothing. But not to worry: the French president, the French Prime Minister, the Emir (owner) of Qatar, the head of the International Monetary Fund, and countless other worthies gave a national funeral to the great man who looked like an aged walrus.

Capo Dei Capi: How Come So Putin Strong? Who Elected You?

With 200 billion Euros in revenue, TOTAL SA is not far behind the French government budget. TOTAL’s profits are 14 billion Euros (“Soyons serieux!” laughed Margerie). It pays nearly no tax in France, having concentrated there its money losing refineries.

Other countries get nearly all their fuel from French refineries; TOTAL has also a green light to frack in Britain. So this is not just a French situation. TOTAL is one of the five great oil companies concentrating the fossil fuel firepower. Those companies have the best technology. Some of TOTAL’s specialties are very deep water drilling, and using steam to extract tar oil in Canada.

What was de Margerie doing at midnight? Flying back to France, after meeting with Putin and Medvedev, late at night.

That’s how these guys are: great fun. Putin was recently invited to Milan for a big time European meeting. He arrived several hours late to visit with Merkel, who was not amused. After keeping her up past midnight, he motored to Berlusconi’s mansion, and the two plutocrats reveled together until 4 am. (We don’t know how many female teenager were in attendance to further their studies.)

The next European meeting was at 8am, and Putin showed up.

Supposedly Margerie had just told Medvedev and Putin to cool it with Ukraine. At least that’s the massaging message Margerie’s minions floated after his death.

Why was Margerie so important to the Russian dictators? Because the six “supermajor” oil companies have the advanced technology. After all, they recruit from the best universities in the world (that’s paid by taxpayers). TOTAL SA was the spearhead of high tech development for hydrocarbon production in Russia. Among other things, it’s helping to build a gas liquefaction plant in the far north, to load special ships with methane (something TOTAL does with Qatar, in the world’s largest such installation).

Once a ship is fully loaded, it has several times the explosive power deployed at Hiroshima (such a catastrophic accident has not happened yet, but it’s just a matter of time).

When citizen Lambda dies, Mr. Anybody, nobody official cares. When a major plutocrat dies, our leaders, even our socialist leaders, weep, and present the accident as a national, even international tragedy.

Is the death of a plutocrat worth that much more, that all this public weeping has to occur?

And, by the way, who and what has authorized Mr. Margerie to lead his own foreign policy? Who authorized him to make nice with thermonuclear dictators? To the point of allowing their survival?

Let me explain: Putin and his goons established a realm of terror in Russia. Thus the Internet is under watch, and brainy Russian engineers can only wish to flee.

I don’t know specific cases in engineering, but I know the case of the top bat researcher in Russia.

As it turns out, most bats are next to Sochi (something about the special climate, and lots of caves). So the bat researcher visited the caves recently there, until all sorts of goons chased him off, and he was accused of having taken pictures of two giant palaces that Medvedev and Putin were building for themselves, next to bat caves. (They probably have dreams of being new Tiberiuses living in limestone caves in Capri). The bat researcher was threatened with long term detention, and barely escaped to Germany (where he has research friends).

The end result is that Russia does not have the engineering talent and know-how TOTAL SA has.

But, as I said, it’s in great part due to superlative schools paid by poor French taxpayers; so this is again a case of a corporation, which, like Google, lives like a leech, sucking civilization dry to feed its pet plutocrats.

All this French high technology has kept Putin’s prospects high, making him more arrogant. Encouraging him to invade Ukraine. Am I saying de Margerie had blood on its hands? Not exactly, but he sure was aiding Putin.

De Margerie was a keynote speaker last spring at Putin’s annual economic summit in St. Petersburg—an event that most Western executives, under public pressure, skipped. Then he signed a deal with Russian oil group Lukoil (LUKOY) to develop shale oil in Western Siberia.

De Margerie also pressed ahead with Russian investments, including the $27 billion Yamal natural gas venture in the Arctic led by Russian gas group Novatek. Even though sanctions against Novatek and one of its owners, Gennady Timchenko, complicated financing. De Margerie told Bloomberg News recently that he was “doing everything” to move the Yamal project forward, in keeping with his belief that politics and business should be kept separate.

However, business with Hitler, or Stalin, was not business. It was partaking in criminality. TOTAL said that Russia could become its largest supplier of oil and gas, within a few years.

Was de Margerie abetting Putin? Here is de Margerie whispering his poisonous bad faith to Reuters: “You hear people say we have got to protect ourselves from Ukraine and then they talk about Russia. This is not the same thing… Are we going to build a new Berlin Wall? Russia is a partner and we shouldn’t waste time protecting ourselves from a neighbour … Russia, which has saved us on numerous occasions.”

Let’s not waste time protecting ourselves from Russia the neighbor-partner who shoots down civilian airliners, and kills thousands, invading Ukraine, while disguising the death of hundreds of Russian soldiers?

Well the Ukrainian People has answered Mr. Walrus de Margerie: 70% voted, in the legislative elections, half and half for the parties of the strongly pro-European President and Prime Minister. The PM is on the record saying what I also believe, from Putin’s own words, that Putin wanted to annex all of Ukraine.

What’s the funniest aspect of all this?

What if really de Margerie put the pressure on Putin and Medvedev, as it is now rumored? Margerie was known to believe he had the power. Let’s imagine him saying:

”Hey, guys, you know, you are losing in Ukraine, you bringing us all down, it’s time to take your losses, or this sucker is for sure crashing. You are losing those elections in Ukraine. And, without me, you are not much. I have the tech, you just are bullying your way around. It reminds me that the Ukrainian republic wants to frack its way out of its energy crisis. I am ready to help them, so watch out, ha ha ha.”

Imagine Putin boiling with rage: he always wanted the power, and now he had to submit to a French walrus.

Is it why the snow plough driver (who was not really drunk) went in reverse?

Before that strange occurrence, the French pilots had seen the machine, and others cross the runway . Then they got the go ahead of the tower. After 14 seconds of acceleration, they saw another vehicle cross the runway, ahead. A curiously busy runway, while a plane is trying to take-off.

Sure, it’s embarrassing to have “Russia lost de Margerie” (website Gazeta.ru ). But it may have been even more embarrassing to have him turn around, and, say, help Ukraine frack, after declaring to his face, jokingly. that, all well considered, Putin was nuts.

Then de Margerie would have died, because he went to dinner with the Devil, using too short a spoon. Since Putin came to power, there has been hundreds of unexplained prominent manslaughters in Russia: entire buildings went down, journalists, opponents, etc.

Vlad the Invader will see his economy sink. But the Russians love him, for the same reason, all proportions kept, that the Germans had never been more in love with Hitler as in 1945.

Nothing like constant beatings to improve morale.

The larger philosophical question is why we let unelected individuals and walruses such as Margerie decide the fate of the world. The French giant bank BNP got sanctioned in New York for helping Sudan, under trade sanctions crimes against humanity, sell its oil. Of course, it helped that it was a French bank. American banks have done worse for years, and their bankers keep on whistling all the way to the bank.

The way out, once again, is direct democracy. Sanctions against Putin should have been voted by We The People. This is what the Ukrainian People did indirectly (more than 70% of the legislators just elected are pro-European, that is, anti-Putin).

Socrates used to worry a lot about direct democracy electing leaders who did not know their job. For example, incompetent judges and generals. The way around is what I call democratic institutions (justice, police, army, education, etc.).

For profit corporations are themselves giant institutions. Total is the world’s fourth largest non-state energy company. It has superlative technology, like the other oil supermajors.

But all these for profit institutions need to be watched over, by We The People, just as the democratic institutions do.

After my friend saw the areopagus of plutocrats swarming at De Margerie’s funeral, she said: ”I understand now why you were smiling.”

Yes, lots of devils around, we need longer spoons. We will do those devils in, only if we go gaily into battle, like bon vivants, like De Margerie used to, in their service. I agree, that living well, is a good mien, especially in the fight of life. Our targets are those who believe they own the world, because they were born this way. Christophe Gabriel Je into battlean Marie Jacquin de Margerie’s mother was born Taittinger (a French champagne and plutocracy family). The Jacquin de Margerie were also of the plutocratic persuasion.

How many hundreds individuals are controlling this more than seven billion people world?

Patrice Ayme’

 

CATEGORIZING the MIND

What is the mind made of? We have progressed enormously as far as the brain objects are concerned: neurons, axons, dendrites, glial cells, neurohormones, various organs and substructures in the brain, etc.

But is there a broad mathematical framework to envision how this is all organized? There is! Category Theory! It turns out it’s a good first order approximation of mind organization. At least, so I claim.

Category Theory is about diagrams. Category Theory has been increasingly replacing advantageously Set Theory. It’s not only because Category Theory does not have to ponder the nature of objects, elements, sets.

Category Theory was long derided as “abstract nonsense” and “diagram chasing”. But it gives very deep, powerful theorems.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category_(mathematics)

I claim the powerful theorems of Category Theory should translate directly into… neurology.

Amusingly, although I accused Aristotle to have demolished democracy and fostered plutocracy through his beloved pets, the mass murdering criminal plutocratic psychopaths, Alexander and Antipater, I recognize humbly that it’s the same Aristotle who invented categories (thus making him a great thinker, and justifying an Aristotle cult among those who need to have cults to feel good about themselves)…

Aristotle’s meta-idea about categories was just to talk about the most fundamental notions:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categories_(Aristotle)

The present essay was suggested, and is an extension of what the honorable Bill Skaggs seems to have wanted to say, in Scientia Salon, in his “Identity A Neurobiological Perspective”. (As far as I can comprehend.)

However, forget Theseus’ ship and Hollywood’s Star Trek “Transporter”. As I said in “Quantum Identity Is Strong”, Quantum Identity is not erasable, and makes those time honored examples impossibly disconnected with reality. The notion of identity has thus to be found elsewhere (as we intuitively know that there is such a notion).

According to modern Quantum Field Theory, we are made, at the most fundamental level, of fluctuating fields. They come and go, out of nowhere. So, that way, we are continually been deconstructed and rebuilt. The question naturally arises: what is preserved of me, as a set of Quantum Fields? Well, the most fundamental mathematical structure is preserved.

The same seems to hold, to a great extent, in neurobiology, as neuro circuitry, to some extent, seems to come, go, and come back.

Thus we are all like old wooden Greek ships, perpetually falling apart, and rebuilt.

To some extent, this is what happens to species, through reproduction: cells split, and reproduce themselves, thanks to DNA.

A species has identity. Yet that identity is made of DISCONTINUOUS elements: the individuals who incarnate the species, who are born, and then die. And others appear, just the same, sort of. How is that possible?

A species’ identity is its structure. Just as a neurology, or an elementary particle identity is its structure. Not just a geometric structure, not just a topological structure, but its structure, as the most fundamental notion, as a category.

So what is preserved? Shape. And how to morph said shapes… Naturally (there is a notion of natural transformation, in Category Theory).

Historically, analyzing shape was systematized by the Greeks: Euclidean geometry, cones, etc. Then, at the end of the Nineteenth Century, it was found that geometry studied shapes mostly by studying distance, and yet, even if distance was denied consideration, there was a more fundamental notion of shape, topology. That was the structure of shapes as defined by neighborhoods.

Two generations later, Category Theory arrived. Category Theory is about morphisms, and the structures which can be built with them. Please listen to the semantics: structures, morphing… This is all about shapes reduced to their most basic, simplest symbolic expression. It’s no wonder that it would come in handy to visualize neurological structures.

A morphism is a pair of “objects” (CT leaves unspecified what the “objects” are). To model that neurologically, we can just identify ‘objects’ to neurons (or other neurological structures), and morphisms to axons (although dendrites, and more, could be included, in a second stage, when the categoretical modelling become more precise).

The better model is category theory. When are two diagrams equivalent? When are they IDENTICAL? Cantor defined as of the same cardinal two sets in a bijection (a bijection is a 1 to 1, onto map).

Category Theory defines as identical the same diagram (a drawing reduced to its simplest essence). Say: A>B>C>D>A is the same as E>F>G>H>E.

Thus, when are two diagrams identical in category theory? When they are modelled by the same neuronal network. (Or, more exactly, axonal network: make each arrow “>” above, into an axon.) And reciprocally!

Discussing the mind will involve discussing the most fundamental structures constituting it. What better place to start, than the most basic of maths? Especially if it looks readily convertible in neural networks.

Category Theory is the most fundamental theoretical structure we know of. It is the essence of identity, and identification. In conclusion, two objects are identical, neurologically, and in fundamental physics, if they are so, in category theory.

Time to learn something categorically new!

Patrice Ayme’

***

Note: No True Isolated Rocks: In other news, and to address a point of Bill Skaggs, whether a rock can be truly isolated is an open problem, experimentally speaking.

According to the theory of gravitation of Einstein and company, a rock cannot be isolated. Why? Because the rock is immersed in spacetime. Spacetime is animated by gravitational waves: this is what the Einstein Field Equation implies. Now, according to an unproven, but hoped-for principle of fundamental physics, to each force field is associated a particle. In the case of gravity, that hoped-for particle is called the graviton. “Particle” means a “particular” effect. Thus, an isolated rock, according to established theory, and hoped-for theory, ought to be adorned occasionally with a new particle, a new graviton, thus ought not to be isolated.

In my own theory, Objective Quantum Physics, on top of the preceding standard effect, resolving Quantum Entanglements, ought to create even more particles in “isolated” rocks.

“The Economist” Hates The Qur’an

To Comment Moderator, The Economist:

You said the four verses I quoted from the Qur’an broke your comment policy, and you removed them, with all the comments they brought. May I know why? To my knowledge, the Qur’an is not considered to “contain any form of hate speech“. (As you implicitly asserted.)

I am completely baffled…

It is not exactly the first time I detect censorship at The Economist regarding delicate subjects. Mistreating your long time subscribers may not be to your advantage.

Sincerely yours,

Patrice Ayme

***

On Oct 22, 2014, at 11:48 PM, CommentsModerator@economist.com wrote:

Dear patrice ayme,
The attached comment, posted under the pen name Tyranosopher, has been deleted from The Economist online.  The comment was removed because it breaks our comments policy: http://www.economist.com/legal/terms-of-use#usercontent. We remind you that repeated violation of our comments policy may result in your being blocked from posting comments on The Economist online.
Yours sincerely,
Comments Moderator The Economist online
Your comment:
Tough questions? Maybe someone does not understand tough love?Quran (2:216) – “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”Quran (3:56) – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”Quran (3:151) – “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority”Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve.
Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”

***

The Economist has also blocked inconvenient observations of mine about connections between bankers and the Nazis, and, more generally non-conventional remarks on World War Two (they sent me a whole package of past comments of mine censored in this area, I guess as an implicit threat; I was unaware I had been censored).

This shows the extent, and delicacy of propaganda. All the material The Economist censored were strictly historical facts (as the Qur’an above is: it’s 13 centuries old!)

Maybe I should do like my friend Paul Handover, condemn the propaganda, and cancel my subscription to TE?

***

More philosophically, I would say this. The Qur’an, obviously needs to be officially re-interpreted (as the Bible was). Just censoring it in The Economist will not help, quite the opposite. The two young “white” Canadian-born deranged young men who attacked and killed Canadian soldiers last week, obviously heard verses as those above, and took them literally. The verses above encourage converts to Islam to have recourse to ultimate violence.

I long held the opinion that many political and intellectual leaders in the West refuse to attract attention to the problem that the Qur’an causes, precisely because they want to keep exploiting those they encourage to live according to unreconstructed Koranic principles. This is pretty much in evidence in the relationship with feudal regimes in the Middle East (but one can argue that this exploitation through “Orientalist” stupidification is 150 years old).

By refusing to broach the subject of what the Qur’an seems to say, in a public forum, The Economist encourages the furthering of a literal interpretation of Koranic verses. Thus The Economist encourages lethal and hateful activities. But maybe it is what many of the plutocrats who love The Economist truly want?  Nothing like a jolly war, here, there, and everywhere?

Patrice Ayme’

Google & Other Free Riders: Civilization Pays For Them

Julian Assange just updated on October 24, 2014, a long essay from 2011: “Google Is Not What It Seems”. In this long expose’, Assange explains that he was taken for a ride by Google, which turned out to be, to his great surprise, little more than an arm of the government of the USA, and the “bipartisan” oligarchy behind it.

Assange’s report is full of amusing details, such as the CEO of Google giving to Hatch, Senior Republican Senator of Nevada, plots of lands. An ex-wife of Google CEO also joined in gifting plots of land to Hatch. (Sen. Errin Hatch is worth personally only 4 million dollars, much less than the average Senator’s worth: 13 million; no doubt Google felt his pain.)

Google’s ocean of equally apportioned gifts to politicians of both sides, goes well beyond any common decency: as I have explained in the past, Google’s billionaires also gave millions of climate deniers, probably to be able to keep on distracting the public with stupidities, just so… While at the same time posing, loud, clear, and splendid, as great protectors of the climate (between two flights in private jumbo jets, between various exclusive ski resorts and paradisiac tax havens).

In the end Assange’s interesting mountain of facts on Google gives birth to a protesting mouse. Here his Assange’s conclusion, in extenso:

“But part of the resilient image of Google as “more than just a company” comes from the perception that it does not act like a big, bad corporation. Its penchant for luring people into its services trap with gigabytes of “free storage” produces the perception that Google is giving it away for free, acting directly contrary to the corporate profit motive.

Google is perceived as an essentially philanthropic enterprise—a magical engine presided over by otherworldly visionaries—for creating a utopian future. The company has at times appeared anxious to cultivate this image, pouring funding into “corporate responsibility” initiatives to produce “social change”—exemplified by Google Ideas.

But as Google Ideas shows, the company’s “philanthropic” efforts, too, bring it uncomfortably close to the imperial side of U.S. influence. If Blackwater/Xe Services/Academi was running a program like Google Ideas, it would draw intense critical scrutiny. But somehow Google gets a free pass.

Whether it is being just a company or “more than just a company,” Google’s geopolitical aspirations are firmly enmeshed within the foreign-policy agenda of the world’s largest superpower. As Google’s search and Internet service monopoly grows, and as it enlarges its industrial surveillance cone to cover the majority of the world’s population, rapidly dominating the mobile phone market and racing to extend Internet access in the global south, Google is steadily becoming the Internet for many people. Its influence on the choices and behavior of the totality of individual human beings translates to real power to influence the course of history.

If the future of the Internet is to be Google, that should be of serious concern to people all over the world—in Latin America, East and Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, the former Soviet Union and even in Europe—for whom the Internet embodies the promise of an alternative to U.S. cultural, economic, and strategic hegemony.

A “don’t be evil” empire is still an empire.”

Tellingly, Assange focuses on the way Google manipulates data and public opinion. He forgets the core of the problem: where does Google’s immense power comes from?

Well, Google pays very little taxes… And has corrupted politicians, worldwide, to make it so. That does not mean money was always exchanged. But certainly clout and promises were.

An organization which profits from the state, worldwide, as Google does, and then pays nearly no taxes, as the top corporations of the USA, including Google do, is a criminal organization.

(Normal people and small businesses do pay taxes, and, if they do not, they are treated like criminals, and go to jail.)

“Don’t be evil”, Google’s order is just a way to make people impotent: “Don’t be evil, we will do it for you!”

The owners of Google own personal jumbo jets. One can argue that they are leeches on civilization, as all of other owners and CEOs also are, per the nature of the tax-free money they make, and allow their giant corporations to make, and their influence on political leaders, whom they induce to perpetuate the system which makes them fat, well fed leeches.

Leeches are brainless, because they don’t need a brain. And those brainless creatures are fatally weakening civilization.

It’s because of the fact those people use the state, for example the fundamental scientific research financed by the state, but are not contributing to it proportionally to the profits they make from it, that the fundamental research budgets are falling everywhere (and especially in the USA and the EU).

This is not just a matter of lost opportunity, injustice, and the masses increasingly walloping in lack of education, lack of health, employment, and gathering misery. It’s also a matter of refusing to finance research on many lethal infectious diseases: Ebola is a prominent example now. But many diseases, which would be perfectly curable if the research was financed, are perking up. Not just tuberculosis. Research on general antibiotic resistance, worldwide, would be flushed with money, if just one billionaire paid taxes as much as they used to in the 1950s… In the USA. (I’m serious, I checked the numbers, and the science; thousands of antibiotics in the wild could be developed for a few tens of millions of dollars.)

A lot of the “austerity” drive is entirely synonymous with little people paying Google’s, and other enormous corporations’ taxes. And not just with their pocket books, but also with their lives.

Patrice Ayme’

Quantum Identity Is Strong

Krugman just wrote “Plutocrats Against Democracy”. I have to comment much further about this pet subject of mine. Or how evil plutocrats collapse civilization. However, I got distracted meanwhile by an article on identity. (Some of the essay below is highly technical, requiring first year Quantum Mechanics; I recommend hyper jumps around the technical stuff, as the end contains a nice hook.)

The author says: “The philosophical problem of identity is epitomized by the paradox known as the “Ship of Theseus.” Suppose a ship is rebuilt by removing one plank at a time, and replacing it with a new plank of the same shape and material. Is it still the same ship?… suppose all the planks that were removed are brought together and used to construct a new ship of identical form. Wouldn’t it be more appropriate to say that is the same ship as the original, and the one with new planks is a duplicate? There is no easy answer. Every possible reply seems to lead into a morass.

The Ship of Theseus and several related paradoxes have been tangling philosophers in knots for thousands of years, dating back to the ancient Greeks and continuing with Locke, Hume, Kant…”

It’s telling that the author evokes as authorities enslaving, racist “philosophers”. Those “philosophers”, or shall we call them racist slave masters? to sell their enslaving and racist philosophy, had to make us all stupid, and this is an esoteric example. In truth, there is no morass whatsoever.

In the old theory of atoms, the one Lucretius wrote a poem about, 2,000 years ago, atoms were all the same. So one could imagine a morass.

However, astoundingly, Quantum Physics has given us back a strong notion of identity. So strong it is, that Quantum Physics can be used to tell us if a message, a message which looks completely intact, has been read (this is the essence of “Quantum Cryptography”).

The author above also mentioned the duplication of the starship captain in Star Trek. I replied:

“Most people just adopt their philosophical identity without examining it. Thus millions of people are basically mental clones, philosophically speaking, and have no real Free Will, or personal identity (see the Islamic state).

However that does not mean one can extend the principle of replication to the real world. Twenty-five centuries old considerations and Star Trek are not the most up to date references.

Anybody with a serious knowledge of Quantum Physics would doubt that duplication is possible. Indeed replication requires the full inspection of the element to be duplicated. That’s impossible, from the so called Heisenberg Principle, the Uncertainty Principle intrinsic to waves.

Indeed, in Quantum Physics, the no-cloning theorem forbids the creation of identical copies of an arbitrary unknown quantum state. It was stated by Wootters & Zurek, and Dieks in 1982. It has profound implications in quantum computing.

The state of one system can be entangled with the state of another system. One can entangle two qubits. This is not cloning.

No well-defined state can be attributed to a subsystem of an entangled state (this is the essence of the Schrodinger/Einstein cat). Cloning is a process whose result is a separable state with identical factors. Publication of the no-cloning theorem was prompted by a proposal of Nick Herbert for a superluminal communication device using quantum entanglement.

Cloning would violate the no-teleportation theorem, which says classical teleportation (not to be confused with entanglement-assisted teleportation) is impossible.

So sorry, physics says: no double Perseus ship, and no double Kirk.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No-cloning_theorem

Bill replied in turn that: “I can’t see anything I wrote that depends on an ability to replicate quantum states. (I’m not sufficiently into the Star Trek universe to know whether the Transporter is supposed to operate on that level, but that’s not how I was thinking about it.) Anyway, identical quantum states are not required for identity: a rock at two different times is in quite different quantum states, but it is still the same rock.”

I then made a crucial observation which escapes totally the Multiverse crowd:

Quantum States are NOT all that we are, but they are a great part of what we are. Real duplication would imply duplicating them, and that cannot be done.

Besides, saying that a “rock at two different times is in quite different quantum states, but it is still the same rock,” is, with all due respect, not correct.

Let’s call the quantum states lx>. According to the Hilbert axiomatics of QM, the rock is going to be: SUM over Ix> [(f(x;t) Ix>]. There t is one group parameter of transformation (known as” time”).

Thus the isolated rock is always in the same quantum states, although the mix may vary according to t, unbeknownst to us (this is the essence of the quantum cat paradox).

A rock at different times will be found in different quantum phases, but the same quantum states (this is the essence of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Physics given to Haroche from Ecole Normale Superieure Paris).

Quantum Physics has enormous implications even for something as simple as “identity”. Moreover, those implications are still under development. If they were not, we would already have Quantum Computers. But we do not.

Yet we know that biology can Quantum Compute. How? Birds can see the Earth’s magnetic field. That is only possible if birds use Spintronics, a type of Quantum Computing that barely works occasionally a bit in the lab, at very low temperatures.

Birds use it, in the wild, at room temperature, and see very well, thanks to it.

Patrice Ayme’

Free Will, Modernized

Converted Canadian Muslims crush, and shoot Canadians. Hey, they read it in a magazine! Do those killers have free will? Or are they just Qur’an programmed machines? This is the sort of quandary which advances in neurology show the ancient debate on Free Will ought to be about. Here is a tiny refresher about the Qur’an:

Quran (2:216) – “Fighting is prescribed for you, and ye dislike it. But it is possible that ye dislike a thing which is good for you, and that ye love a thing which is bad for you. But Allah knoweth, and ye know not.”

Quran (3:56) – “As to those who reject faith, I will punish them with terrible agony in this world and in the Hereafter, nor will they have anyone to help.”

Quran (3:151) – “Soon shall We cast terror into the hearts of the Unbelievers, for that they joined companions with Allah, for which He had sent no authority”.  This speaks directly of polytheists, thus including Christians, since they believe in the Trinity (Muhammad incorrectly believed that Christians had ‘joining companions to Allah’… as his mentor was a relative, a Coptic monk!).

Quran (4:74) – “Let those fight in the way of Allah who sell the life of this world for the other. Whoso fighteth in the way of Allah, be he slain or be he victorious, on him We shall bestow a vast reward.”

Quran (8:12) – “I will cast terror into the hearts of those who disbelieve. Therefore strike off their heads and strike off every fingertip of them”

Quran (8:39) – “And fight with them until there is no more fitna (disorder, unbelief) and religion should be only for Allah”

OK, I stop here with Qur’an machine’s quotes, because this essay is not about Islam, but about Free Will. The preceding makes it clear that whoever really believes textually and literally in what’s written in the Qur’an ought to march into the Parliament in Ottawa, and destroy the disbelief there, to gather the vast reward.

And the question is: do these people have Free Will?

The modern debate about Free Will has not been about that. It has been, for centuries, about “gratuitous acts” [actes gratuits]. This has been an entirely stupid debate, the provinces of lost philosophers; any bear or lion hunter knows free will exists, not just in humans, but in the minds of ferocious beasts (thus making them hard to predict; once I found myself weaponless, 10 years old, and facing the largest lion I ever saw; I carefully paid my respects, and backed off slowly as I anybody in such circumstances ought to do, acknowledging the splendor of the king of beasts, making Him feel very good about Himself, and thus making my on-going existence something which, however minute and unworthy, represented an element of satisfaction for the Lord of Africa).

Modern brain scanning techniques have brought a twist on that: the launching of an act is preceded by unconscious brain preparations, several tenths of second prior.

That is totally unsurprising. The brain is like an immense, giant machine, with millions of programs and preparations running simultaneously. Consciousness looks, and can only look, at very few of them.

At least, we know this now.

For example the latest Nobel in Biology was attributed for the discovery of tiny hexagonal networks of neurons which act like microscopic Geostationary Positioning Systems. Such circuitry is active continuously, to provide a sense of place. It influences consciousness, and thus Free Will.

(Say: if the internal GPS indicates we are falling off, the Free Will debate will be shut-down. Instantaneously.)

The free will debate is thousands of years old. It became acute after Constantine’s terrorizing dictatorship imposed as state religion an omnipotent, omniscient god. How can be free, if god is everything?

That had the pleasant consequence that intellectuals, instead of worrying about the dictators, conducted 17 centuries of sterile debates about whether god allowed them to be free (in truth it’s Constantine and his tyrannical successors who did not allow them to be free).

When a bell rings, Pavlov discovered that the dog’s digestive system sprang to attention. The free will is the one who rings the bell. But what if it was not an individual ringing the bell, but history itself? Would we be conscious of it?

Of course the phenomenon of springing to attention is familiar to macho men seeing a beautiful woman in the distance. Conditioned reflexes are all over. But could it be that the exaggerated masculinity of those who spring to attention when seeing a woman, be itself a conditioned neural, glial, and neurohormonal system of sorts?

It is well known that people learn to fake emotions and behaviors: homosexuals living in the closet have long done this. But not just them. I claim it’s all over the place. Even in the fascination with wine. So some will reach happiness only when they can drink a bit of alcohol, etc. This conditioning is cultural: Bacchus has been celebrated, and associated to wine, for millennia. A fundamental sensation, happiness has been subjugated to a cultural notion.

Each nation has its crazes, its conditioned reflexes, its own notion of free will. Most of the minds are made from the outside, complete from ideas to emotions, to what to say in most situations encountered. And so it is, all over.

But then what happens to fee will? Is it all about conditioned reflexes from elaborated systems of mood and thoughts, many of them culturally given?

When called to exert free will, all what is happening is a cocktail of conditioned reflexes of long, and subconsciously established, systems of thoughts, emotions and moods. In other words, most people are just puppets from the genealogy of ideas, morals, moods, emotions, and conditioned reflexes.

What’s Free Will?

I started with Qur’an programmed robots. But then the Anglo-Saxon enslaving West is not a place exempt from the most absurd, obnoxious and criminal programmation.

I recently partook in an exchange on Free Will on an interesting and open minded philosophical site. The author had extolled the “philosopher” David Hume as the “first psychologist” Let’s roll a quote from that great Anglo-Saxon genius. Here is David Hume, enthusiastically buttressing the Anglo-Saxon slave masters’ system:

“I am apt to suspect the Negroes to be naturally inferior to the Whites. There scarcely ever was a civilized nation of that complexion, nor even any individual, eminent either in action or speculation. No ingenious manufactures amongst them, no arts, no sciences. On the other hand, the most rude and barbarous of the Whites, such as the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have still something eminent about them, in their valour, form of government, or some other particular. Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen, in so many countries and ages, if nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men. Not to mention our colonies, there are Negro slaves dispersed all over Europe, of whom none ever discovered the symptoms of ingenuity; though low people, without education, will start up amongst us, and distinguish themselves in every profession. In Jamaica, indeed, they talk of one Negro as a man of parts and learning; but it is likely he is admired for slender accomplishments, like a parrot who speaks a few words plainly.”

This grossly racist quote is from whom some Anglo-Saxons searching for respect call the “first psychologist”, David Hume. It brings the same question about Free Will.

Notice that Hume does not just imprint with offensive notions about “negroes”, but also offensive emotions about them. And by “offensive” I mean just that, inducing an offensive, that is, an attack.

That anti-human Hume’ notion of sub-humanity sprang from the greed of gross exploitation: having armies of slaves overseas made many a plutocrat in Western Europe extremely wealthy.

In this, it does not differ from the Qur’an’s main axis of attack. We know from the Hadith (a book gathering all what was said about the life of Muhammad by direct witnesses) that the context of the very first (2; 216) quote is that Muhammad the Prophet, then Master of Medina, was trying to convince his followers to go attack and raid some caravans.

It’s an axis of attack, but also an axis of imprinting, of making people into assault machines, enslaving, killing, “striking off their heads and striking off every fingertip of them”. As seen on TV.

So what’s Free Will if we are just machines programmed, emotionally and logically, from the outside? Even for the most inhuman tasks?

If any, Free Will has to incorporate the impact, the struggle, one is having feeding one’s brain with seriously, strenuously examined data. It is exactly what parrots do not have.

One cannot decide when to decide. One can only decide to examine with an open mind, what one’s deciding structures will be constructed with. At best.

Patrice Ayme’

DeKanting Philosophy:

Writing this essay made me sad. I had come across a group of self-assured philosophers, singing the praises of Kant. That was a moment of solitude. Sheep praising the wolf. When I brought up objections, pointing at the enormous connection between Kant and Nazism, I was haughtily told “We, in philosophy, do not judge thinkers on one sentence”.

This depicts how followers of Kant behaved in Nazi occupied Europe:

Dog Philosophy: Obey, Always To Obey The Mighty. Confucius, To Kant

One Sentence, One Idea Can Move The World, And Not For The Best:

In the Twelfth Century, Saint Bernard (de Clairvaux; Abelard’s, and humanity’s, enemy) was asked how he, the saintliest and most influential Christian (he told Pope Urban II what to do), could defend homicide.

Saint Bernard haughtily replied: ”It is not homicide, but malecide, the killing of evil.” Bernard, one of the known universe’ most evil men, then launched the Second Crusade, the Cistercian order, the Knights Templars, the Inquisition, and the killing of millions, for centuries to come.

People who are viewed as philosophers, by a large following, have much more influence than is generally attributed to them.

Some are anti-philosophers, those who give guidance, honor and cover to the satanic minds who grab power and lead civilization to the abyss, driven only by the greedy instinct of the self-destructive predator.

Locke helped slavery. Rousseau, Kant, Herder etched in the stone of (pseudo) philosophy the erroneous systems of moods and thoughts which brought Nazism. Yet, they still have lots of cognitively impaired followers. Truly these guys are not philosophers, but plutocratic puppets. That makes them all the more dangerous.

How does one subjugate people? By making them feel wrong. Then it is easy to make them think wrong. In the end they believe it is smart to engage in whatever will and up oppressing, or even, could destroy them.

In the philosophy of the predator, destruction, whether means, or end, is an intrinsic good.

The archetype modern example here is Prussia, and the fascist, racist, anti-Judaic Nazi Germany it ended up creating… bringing the annihilation of Prussia.

The Germans, under the influence of a triumphing Prussia in the Eighteen, and Nineteenth Centuries Century, were led to believe it was smart to dislike, despise, hate, oppress, subjugate, exploit, dehumanize, Poles, Slavs and Jews. Superficially, it worked. Until September 10, 1914, when the all devouring Frankenstein of Prussian racial fascism had to beat a hasty retreat on the battlefield.

(Indeed, in parallel, and to be able to enforce all this oppression, subjugation, contempt, dehumanization, maximal force, that is, military force, had to be used. Thus, in Prussia and its admirers, militarism was inseparable with racism. Prussia had an army comparable in size to France, in the Seventeenth Century, with a tenth of the population. This militarization paid off handsomely: after coming close to total annihilation, under the gay aggressor Frederick II, Prussia grabbed immensely rich Silesia, its mines and industry, from Austria.)

Instead Of Reading Hitler, Read Kant, It Does Just As Well:

Thus a mood of exploitative racism and hungry military aggression was created by Prussia’s masters. All they needed were parrots to sing their praises. And they were many, the most prominent of these birds repeating songs of evil was Kant. Now for some comic relief. It turns out that Kant is still much admired, 70 years after his followers exterminated tens of millions of innocent civilians (they wanted to do more, but they were rudely interrupted by carpet bombing).

How was the mood created? In no small part by making people admire a pseudo-philosopher, Kant. Kant was racist, militarist, mechanical. A perfect philosopher for a racist militaristic regime.

“The reason a people has a duty to put up with even what is held to be an unbearable abuse of supreme authority is that its resistance to the highest legislator can never be regarded as other than contrary to law, and indeed as abolishing the entire legal constitution.” –Kant

In other words: dictators (=”highest legislators”) rule, disobeying them is immoral. That could only please Kant’s paymaster, the hereditary dictator of Prussia. Remark: This, that resisting the dictator is immoral, nothing new: I call that the Qur’an Fascist Principle (Sura IV, Verse 59).

“O Ye Who Believe! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.”

This is the essence of Hitler’s Fuhrer Prinzip. Kant was just a guy who heard about the Qur’an. This makes Kant vastly inferior to Voltaire. Voltaire read the Qur’an, and dragged the emperor of Mecca, Muhammad his name, it in the mud, to the point that the Politically Correct censored him, in the Twenty-First Century (!) Voltaire was right, so he gets censored, Kant is a Nazi, so he gets lauded. In a world where human values are inverted, a plutocratic world, in other words, this all makes sense.

Not only Kant was a fanatical Jihadist of the worst type, but Kant was a racist, and could be said to have invented the (false) theory of scientific racism. Sometimes the idiocy gets even funny: Kant thinks Africans smell bad. But it’s all scientific. Says the pseudo-philosopher:

“We know now, for example, that human blood turns black (as is to be seen in blood coagulum) …. Now the strong body odor of the Negroes, not be avoided by any degree of cleanliness, gives reason to suppose that their skin absorbs a very large amount of phlogiston from the blood, and that nature must so have designed this skin that in them the blood can dephlogisticate …”

Negroes are of course born idiots, and in this Kant follows another of the Prussiano-Anglo-Saxon pantheon of evil philosophy, Hume:

“The Negroes of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the trifling. Mr. Hume challenges anyone to cite a single example in which a Negro has shown talents... So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man, and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.” -Kant

Kant is the first author of no racial mixing (later implemented by the Nazis). A new concept in Europe:

“The mingling of stocks (due to great conquests), little by little erodes the character and it is not good for the human race in spite of any so-called philanthropy.”

For comparison, Rome had African (Libya), and Arab emperors (or “Augusta”). Rome happily mixed all races.

That racist principle was used by Kant with lots of direct impact. The Spanish Crown was encouraging a policy of interbreeding and had ordered the Mexican governor to comply. The governor had, however, opposed the order. Kant encouraged him (in contradiction to making obedience the highest principle; Kant acted as if racism was an even higher principle than obedience). In a letter to the governor of Mexico, Kant wrote:

“[Of the idea that] nature would develop new and better races of produce them through the commingling of two races there is little ground for hope in as much as nature has long since exhausted the forms appropriate to soil and climate, whilst cross-breeding (for example of the American with the European or of these with the Negro) has debased the good without raising proportionately the level of the worse — hence the governor of Mexico wisely rejected the order of the Spanish Court to encourage interbreeding.”

Heil Kant!

Kant’s account of race also includes the superiority of the white race and that the others will become extinct. For details, see Wulf D. Hund’s “The Racisms of Immanuel Kant,” a book which begins and ends with this quote from Kant:

“All races will become exterminated … except for the whites.”

Kant’s insults against Jews are too numerous to count. The Jews are by nature “sharp dealers” who are “bound together by superstition.” Their “immoral and vile” behavior in commerce shows that they “do not aspire to civic virtue,” for “the spirit of usury holds sway amongst them.” They are “a nation of swindlers” who benefit only “from deceiving their host’s culture.” Nicht so klar? Here it is, for the brin impaired. Kant: “THE EUTHANASIA OF JUDAISM IS THE PURE MORAL RELIGION.”

Johann Herder (1744-1803) quoted Kant’s lectures on practical philosophy: “Every coward is a liar; Jews, for example, not only in business, but also in common life.”… Nazis made a “hideous misinterpretation of Kant”? Or is it that some people are just hideous stupid?

So why is Kant still popular? Adolf Eichmann, on trial in Jerusalem, found the explanation:

“Now that I look back, I realize that a life predicated on being obedient and taking orders is a very comfortable life indeed. Living in such a way reduces to a minimum one’s need to think.”

In other words, Kant is the perfect philosopher for weak-willed idiots. All the more as he invented a weird, pseudoscientific jargon which appeals to those who find too difficult to learn true science, the uneducated and unintelligent. Hence said jargon became wildly popular with philosophically inclined half-wits.

Tolerating Kant, is tolerating Nazism. Adulating Kant, is adulating the essence of Nazism. Time to get acquainted with those facts.

In other news, one of the world’s most powerful men died when his jet got flipped by a snow plough. In Moscow. He had just been plotting with one of the world’s dictators. Interesting how plutocrats live on the edge. (More on this later.)

Indeed, plutocrats do not have much too fear, besides snow storms, as long as those who view themselves as “philosophers” drink the cool Kant aid.

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

 

Plutocracy’s Tentacles All Over Physics

There is a lot of politics in theoretical physics. Why? Because physics makes people dream, and tells them how to think. Thus, if one wants to make people in advanced countries dream and think wrong, one has to start with physics. Also there is an increasing gap between what technology allows and what legislation forbids, as tech goes ever faster. The crooks work the gap hard. See the Bitcoin story (and the hate mail that goes with it).

That’s how the drug trade was made possible: ultimately all the money has to be laundered. And only the banks can do this. But there were no laws sending bankers to slammers for that, plus lax enforcement. So, in the end a criminal activity, drugs, was rendered possible by another branch of government, banking (dim wits say banks are not part of government).

What lessons can be learned from the presentation of the gravitational-waves story? Ponders Nature (October 14, 2014).

Well, much: the much publicized discovery of Cosmic Inflation was scientific fraud, and it has bit the dust. Yet, it keeps on going. It’s even more than scientific fraud, it’s tax payer fraud: most advanced science, including the prizes (such as Milner prize, see below) is financed by the public (directly or not; so are the plutocratic universities).

Says Nature: “The (welcome) rise of the science blogger has fuelled this navel-gazing. Some bloggers seem to spend most of their time criticizing other science writers, or at least debunking examples of what they regard as inferior science writing. But they do lots of good stuff too. Although traditionalists lament the decline of science coverage in the mainstream press, a terrific amount of analysis and comment, much of it very technical, is happening online under their noses.”

Make no mistakes: it’s not because there are no equations, that it is not technical. An equation, after all, is just a sentence saying that two things that look different are actually the same.

I am notoriously against the Cosmic Inflation Theory (that the universe blew up at 10^10 the speed of light, or so; that is ten billion times faster than c, or more). My reasons are solidly scientifico-philosophical, and have been detailed in many essays previously.

As the evidence for Cosmic Inflation bit the dust, as I had expected, my comments were censored on Quanta Magazine. Silly comments were allowed, so it’s not like the standards are too high.

So I enquired about this bias. I found a possible source quickly. Quanta is financed by the Simons Foundation. (Of course Quanta says they are independent; just like the hand which feeds the pigeon is independent of the pigeon, I guess.)

Jim Simons is a multibillionaire mathematician who built a more than 100 BILLION (yes, with a B, as in billion) dollars business in high frequency trading. Basically Simons has the fastest computers, and employs the brightest mathematicians and physicists. When one has faster computers, and programs, one can make sure money.

This what the best and brightest do these days. Stealing from others, and the faster, the better. A case of degenerating civilization.

It is difficult to explain what the high frequency trading crooks do: their job is exploiting all the loopholes between technique and ethics. They can leverage tremendously some derivative trades (say in the futures market). They can also simultaneously take direct positions extremely fast. The combination is sure profits, by leading the markets where they want them to go, beyond the sight of legislators (who are very happy to be fed caviar by high frequency traders).

In other words, high frequency trading and related derivative activities make the world’s most lucrative organized crime. Except it’s not officially a crime.

The whole thing ought to be unlawful. Just as slavery is unlawful, and for the same reason (because it puts too much power in the hands of too few, making them increasingly vicious, until people really own people as if they were bananas).

Only now, in 2014, American legislators are starting to smell the roses (Simons is a major donor to the Democratic Party). (See note.)

Similarly, the “Double Irish” so many enormous plutocratic corporations use to avoid taxation all together is not an official crime, just a real one.

Simons also worked with his adviser Chern who also created ST Yau. (Together they worked on the Chern-Simons Class; BTW, I also knew Chern.)

It will be interesting to see if I keep on being systematically censored there. The age of computers is also that of unethical behavior rendered particularly easy to implement (see how Mr. Simons made his fortune, although he probably envision himself as a saint, because he gave money to some scientists, tax deductible, of course).

So who is this Natalie W who censored me?

Could she be a chick paid by plutocrats in more ways than one? (As one way is clearly established, through Jim Simons, much respected in scientific circles, because he has trop beaucoup bucks; if you want to be hated and despised in scientific circle, criticize Jim Simons).

Could there be a conspiracy? I quickly found this:

“People Aren’t Smart Enough for Democracy to Flourish, Scientists Say”

By Natalie Wolchover, Life’s Little Mysteries Staff Writer, February 28, 2012.

Natalie says: “The democratic process relies on the assumption that citizens (the majority of them, at least) can recognize the best political candidate, or best policy idea, when they see it. But a growing body of research has revealed an unfortunate aspect of the human psyche that would seem to disprove this notion, and imply instead that democratic elections produce mediocre leadership and policies.

The research, led by David Dunning, a psychologist at Cornell University, shows that incompetent people are inherently unable to judge the competence of other people, or the quality of those people’s ideas. For example, if people lack expertise on tax reform, it is very difficult for them to identify the candidates who are actual experts. They simply lack the mental tools needed to make meaningful judgments.

As a result, no amount of information or facts about political candidates can override the inherent inability of many voters to accurately evaluate them. On top of that, “very smart ideas are going to be hard for people to adopt, because most people don’t have the sophistication to recognize how good an idea is,” Dunning told Life’s Little Mysteries.”

… The most incompetent among us serve as canaries in the coal mine signifying a larger quandary in the concept of democracy; truly ignorant people may be the worst judges of candidates and ideas, Dunning said, but we all suffer from a degree of blindness from our own personal lack of expertise.”

Otherwise said, only plutocrats know who the experts are.

This argument was already used by Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. Aristotle thought his friends, lovers and executors, Antipater and Craterus were the best and brightest, they established literal plutocracy in Athens.

Natalie writes nice articles. She knows who is smart. Certainly not those who esteem democracy. Conspirare is breathing together, no need for a plot: conspiracy is better, because impossible to prove (she sat with some of my comments for weeks before rejecting them, no doubt consulting with higher-ups).

A few years back, a Silicon Valley multibillionaire of Russian oligarchic origin, Yuri Milner, funded a three million dollar prize for crazy pseudo-physics, the “Fundamental Physics Prize”. Pseudo-physics has become most of what the public knows as physics. (The Nobel committee revolted against this by giving the prize to a very practical and real invention, blue LEDs.)

“Physics” means “Nature”, and Milner has his own notion of nature. The more un-natural, the better (as one would expect from someone who made his fortune under Yeltsin, after a stint at the World Bank; Milner, like Simons, but not as much, is also a scientist, physics).

Most of the recipients of the Milner prize did not discover anything, they are just experts at self-advertising, and the “discoveries” they made (Cosmic Inflation, The Multiverse, String Theory, all sorts of weird and obscure mathematical, or pseudo-mathematical techniques) actually, well, did not happen indeed. At least not in natural nature.

When Einstein (helped to) elaborate a slightly more sophisticated theory of gravitation than the one co-discovered by Newton, at least he started from a fact of nature: the advance of the perihelion of Mercury, which the “Newtonian” theory could not explain at all (the advance comes from the fact time runs slow next to the Sun).

Most of Milner’s prize “discoveries” are not yet discoveries, and probably never will be.

I am certain though that fabulous prizes were attributed in the Roman Empire for the epicycles theory.

Why am I so sure? The richest intellectuals ever, lived in the Second Century of the fascist plutocracy known as the Roman empire. They were, at best, all mediocre thinkers. Plutocracy can survive only if mediocre thinking triumphs, because plutocracy is mediocre thinking personified.

During plutocracy, a degree of magical and superstitious thinking is entertained. Much modern physics, such as String Theory, Cosmic Inflation, is complete superstition: it stands totally above the world, there is no proof for it whatsoever, it stretches reason beyond words, and it’s not even the first thing to think of in fundamental physics.

Thus it is perfect, because pseudo-physics is a killing field for reason. And that’s why plutocrats love it.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Note on American legislators discovering fraud from Simons and the like: Both Milner (Russia) and Simons are politically connected (& Simons worked for NSA). On July 22, 2014, Simons was condemned by the U.S. Senate for the use of complex barrier options to disguise short term trading (subject to higher ordinary income tax rates) as long-term capital gains. “Renaissance Technologies was able to avoid paying more than $6 billion in taxes by disguising its day-to-day stock trades as long term investments,” said Sen. John McCain (R., Ariz.), the committee’s ranking Republican, in his opening statement. “Two banks and a handful of hedge funds developed a complex financial structure to engage in highly profitable trades while claiming an unjustified lower tax rate and avoiding limits on trading with borrowed money,” said Sen. Carl Levin (D., Mich.) in his prepared remarks. Nice wake-up, guys! Were you playing sleeping beauty before?

Is Simons going to jail for stealing 6 billion dollars? Don’t hold your breath. Just expect my scientific comments to Quanta to keep on being censored.

AUSTERE BONDAGE TO PLUTOCRACY

GOVERNMENT IS BANK, EMPLOYER, ENTREPRENEUR OF LAST RESORT. No Need To Beg The Rich For Money, Work, Or Anything.

The will to austerity is justified by the on-going financing of governments with the selling of bonds. No economist disagrees with this dark scheme. I propose to turn on its head that Conventional Wisdom, and propose instead that both austerity and bonds are entangled plutocratic conspiracies. They form one of the ways enabling present governance to betray We The People (while hoping to share the spoils, as the Majors, Schroeders, Blairs, and Clintons did).

There is no need to beg the rich for work: if We The People were in command, we could just elect to work on whatever we deem worthy to work on. By just making it so.

RIGGING BONDS FOR PLUTOS, THE INCREDIBLE HEIST:

In the present financial system, governments borrow from those who have money. Then governments turn around and pay back those who have money, making them even richer. This was tried before. At least one Republic came and went that way:

Superb Warning Against Plutocracy: Florence’s Republic Collapse. Basilica (Built 1294-1436) World’s Largest Dome Until Then

All economists, politicians, and opinion makers find borrowing from the rich to make them even richer, entirely normal. They are that despicable, ill-informed, on the take, or astoundingly ignorant and not very smart. Paying interest to the world’s richest men is a sort of inverted tax, the world upside down… until one realizes that this is a marker for plutocracy, and that was is an abyss for democracy, is a summit of achievement in the inverted value world of plutocracy.

In democracy, the richest gets taxed enough so that they won’t become too rich, in plutocracy, the richest, are never rich enough, and the government makes it so.

In other words, Western governments have an official, in-your-face program to make the rich richer. And its name is austerity, and low deficits.

Why low deficits? Because they insure the value of bonds the rich bought in the past.

Do we need this program of borrowing from the rich? No, as it makes the rich richer. Quickly.

Filthy Wealth Is On Its Way Back, Thanks To Rotten Governance

[France has the best statistics. Similar graphs hold for other major Western powers. In the case of the USA, hyper wealth was about half of that of the Europeans in the 19C. See note below on this wealth graph. Plus a quote from Piketty’s “Capital in the 21st Century” where it comes from.]

Are there historical precedents of this financing of the state by the richest? Plenty. Bankers became all powerful, when they financed Francois I and Charles Quint’s war with each other. Francois I’s hotel bills went directly to his bankers, as he went around France and Italy.

Similarly with the Rothschilds when they financed both sides of a whole slew of wars in the decades around 1800.

An even more striking example is the Republic of Florence. Florence, founded by Iulius Caesar, was formally a subset of the Imperium Romanum (Roman Empire; the term “Sacrum”, holy, was introduced later). Florence was one of the many states which, during the Middle Ages, tried to re-establish a Roman style republic.

To defend herself, Florence financed its army with bonds. However that made the rich ever richer, and, after centuries of this, Florence ended as a total plutocracy. Between the revolution that established the Florentine Republic in 1115 CE and the de-establishment of the Republic and appointment of a Duke by the Pope to rule it, in 1532 CE, 417 years elapsed. Nearly twice as long as the USA: view this as a warning.

How come we tolerate this government bond based system to make the rich ever richer? Where are the youth, when a revolution is needed? Oh, sorry, I forgot they were too busy borrowing from their rich masters to finance their own studies: revolution is the first thing they learn they cannot afford.

ALL WE NEED IS WORK

We need work. We need infrastructure. We need massive, cheaper, more ecologically correct housing. We need a new energy system. We need more research in biology (as the thoroughly avoidable Ebola epidemics shows), physics (no replacement for the present, unacceptable base load energy system, worldwide). We need more investment in mass, free education (as was the case in the 40s, 50s, 60s).

We need the government to organize all this employment. To compensate the newly employed citizens, the government could, in exchange, give them money. How? “Print”!

No need to tax. No need to ask plutocrats for money. Because that’s all what the “government bond” system is: begging plutocrats and money managers for money. Begging them some more is not needed. They have been paid enough. Actually, one should stop paying them, in this emergency situation, as soon as they have been compensated for their initial lending: default on the interest.

The entire “austerity” machine consists into claiming that those-who-have-money should be well compensated by governments. It is mission number one.

It is high time to break this vicious circle. Italy should default. France should plan for a 6% deficit.

Instead France is asking the European Commission to plan a 4.5% deficit each year for the next two years. Or do Merkel and the European Commission want to send an air force they don’t have in half a dozen war theaters in Africa and the Middle East?

A study of the German Air Force showed that Germany does not have more than 45 (forty-five) combat aircraft which could be flown (France has hundreds, battle tested over Africa and the Middle East, in the last few decades of uninterrupted warfare). War, and the Military-Industrial complex to support it, is expensive. The weaker one gets, the more the miscreants, imperialists, and the like, will be ready to pounce.

The entire aerospace domain, in countries such as France, Britain and the USA, is the object of more or less obvious subsidies. Why? World War One and Two are the answer. Air supremacy (by France in 1918, the USA and UK in 1945) brought victory.

When people get on a plane, the engines are not made in China, Russia, or North Korea. They are made by French, American and British industry. Exclusively. By itself the Franco-American company CFM International sold 27,000 CFM56 engines (found on more than ten thousand jumbo jets).

After he came to power, President Roosevelt ordered the construction of 24 fleet aircraft carriers. Having devalued the dollar by 33%, he had plenty of money. Just made it so. (The 24 carriers came in handy in 1941; Japan had only 10.)

Now we are engaged in a much worse war, one to save the biosphere, and try to prevent the planet to go Jurassic. Thus governments ought to be supporting not just aerospace, but new energy systems (see preceding essay), positive energy housing, efficient high speed trains, etc.

As populations age in the West, medical science to mitigate, or even reverse, aging, ought to be pushed (advances from 2014 show this should be possible).

How to do all this? How to do all what needs to be done? All what could be done?

Just make it so. Governments by We The People, for We The People, have just to support whatever enterprise is worthy… By financing it. No need to beg the rich.

Independent powers such as North America and Europe could live as complete autocracies (certainly the USA does not need anybody). Then money can be created by the government, and directed at whichever activity the government deems worthy. This strategy was the core of Marxism-Leninism, and in complete opposition to free market capitalism (not that the latter ever existed!).

The Nazis thought that was impossible. Rich plutocrats had financed Hitler. However, in December 1941, the Nazis reached, with difficulty, a subway station in Moscow. In the distance, they could view the gold cupolas of the Kremlin that Napoleon had brought down.

Facing the Nazis was the Soviet system, which just decided to create money, and work, out of thin air, without begging the rich. In this case the Soviet system was churning thousands of the very efficient T34 tanks. With horror, the Nazis discovered that their best tank, the Panzer IV, could only destroy the T34 at close range, from behind, hitting its engine.

Extraordinary industrial achievements by the USSR command economy were replacing the staggering losses suffered over the summer of 1941 (up to 21,000 Soviet aircraft had been destroyed).

In front of Moscow, 1.4 million Soviet soldiers counter-attacked 2 million Nazi soldiers. Losses and casualties were up to 1.7 million.

The USSR won. Decisively. Governmentalism won, decisively.

Definitively, it was proven that the command economy of a government could crush a for-profit, rich plutocrat system.

What was next? After Tojo and Hitler declared war to the USA, Roosevelt duplicated the Soviet machine, the Soviet way of organizing the economy, in the USA (in truth he had started in 1933). To organize the economy according to the diktat of the state, he named a young, but towering, Canadian economist as Czar, John Kenneth Galbraith.

We are in those sorts of times again.

The economists who put us up the (dry) creek of the present disaster will scoff that the so-called “free market” has proven superior. Not so. It’s not the free market which won World War Two, but putting We The People, massively, to work. In the USSR, the USA, the UK.

By the time the Nazis understood that plutocracy was not their friend, but rather their drug, and the free market was a bad joke played on them, not a machine, it was too late. The Nazis produced one tank when their adversaries produced one hundred, and one barrel of extremely expensive oil, when their enemies produced one thousand.

The truth about Nazism is that it was a puppet government; plutocrats were pulling the strings. Even with those strings attached, that government was weak.

It is time to understand that there is no strong economy without a strong government. It is time to understand that asking the plutocrats to pull the strings of the bond markets, while they require us to be on a diet, when not outright dying from ebola, makes for a weak government, and a weak economy.

Patrice Ayme’

Notes on the graph: Thomas Piketty, in his book “Capital in the 21st Century” stated the obvious:

“Whenever the rate of return on capital is significantly and durably higher than the growth rate of the economy, it is all but inevitable that inheritance (of fortunes accumulated in the past) predominates over saving (wealth accumulated in the present)…. Wealth originating in the past automatically grows more rapidly, even without labour, than wealth stemming from work, which can be saved.”

Yet, I doubt Piketty points out that the governmental bond system is rigged to insure that wealth grows faster than GDP: that could compromise his cute little career of official thinker.

The wealth graph above, if it were extended to earlier times would show roughly the same level. In other words, we are quickly going back to Medieval inequality of wealth. We are bringing back the world of serfs and lords. That world was characterized by injustice and stagnation. We don’t need it. The rich are too rich already; we need to make the rich poorer.