No Taxation Without Decision

Responsibility, Greeks, Jews, Nazis, Decision Making, Trans Pacific Partnership, Big Pharmaceuticals… Or All the Evil The Lack of Direct Democracy Fostered:

“Eugen Lowy”: Dear Patrice… The Greek economic problem is more a moral problem than an economic problem. The moral question is what responsibilities has an individual to take regarding the decisions of leading elites of community they belong to.”

I have thought of this problem deeply and forever, in light of the Nazi problem. When I was around the age of 6 (!), a cousin told me that Nazism was not the fault of the Germans, but of the crooks who had led the Germans. I did not believe it at the time, and I spent a lot of time demonstrating to my satisfaction that this was not true.

I do believe in collective responsibility. We are collectively culprit to let ourselves being abused by plutocrats and their giant corporations:

Banks: Mandated to Create Money. Money Farmers. Pharmaceuticals: Mandated to Create Health. Health Farmers. Media: Mandated to Create Minds. Mind Farmers.

The State and the Government is not just who We the People elect to be represented by. De facto.

I believe in the collective responsibility of those who accept wholeheartedly criminal systems of thoughts and moods.

To say: ”My leader was a liar and a crook, I disavow him (her)” is acceptable, and honorable. However, it loses all credibility if one still espouses the moods and ideas that made the leader what he (she) became.

There is plenty of evidence that, after the Nazis had been militarily extinguished, Nazi moods and thoughts survived in Germany for decades. In particular, Germans who had resisted, or fought the Nazis were viewed, then, as traitors. It took decades to honor those who had attempted to kill Hitler.

Young officers of the best lineage (Prussian aristocrats) who planned to kill Hitler, and survived the post-coup bloodbath of Hitler against his own officer corps (around 5,000 assassinated), were then blocked by top Nazis such as the famous Von Manstein, to have any influence on the Bundeswehr.

This only happened because tens of millions of Germans were still Nazis, for want of a better word. When the Nazi ringleaders (for example Von Manstein) died, moods and ideas changed: today’s Germany is much closer, in moods and ideas, to present day France than to the Germany of 1945.

Today Richard Von Weisacker died. He had been German president. His father, one of the top Nazis, got seven years imprisonment at Nuremberg. The president himself had served in Hitler’s army. Such people recognized their crimes, all the way to Jerusalem. However, only their deaths turn the page.

Here is another example: I was in the USA during the ramp-up and unleashing of the Iraq war. I saw “friends” and “family” lay on sofas, watching hours of American “Football” and basketball. They could not care less. They had no inclination to find what was going-on. It was all the way like that, throughout the media. The slightest murmur or comment against plutocrat Bush was viewed as an unpatriotic act.

That made them all, as individuals, accomplices of the killing of hundreds of thousands of innocent Iraqis.

As far as the Greeks are concerned, it is obvious that the average Greek did not partake in the erroneous and criminal decisions taken by the Greek and European elites.

Eugen: “So the moral question is, who has to take responsibilities for promiscuous behavior? Should it be the Greek leading elites? The Greek people? Maybe the German and French banksters and their servants? Or maybe the moral responsibility lays on the shoulders of the descendants of the German Nazis? And then if the one responsible to be blamed will be finally found, what will be the right punishment for them?”

To determine responsibilities, one has FIRST to determine causalities. Most people do not have the faintest idea about how money is created. Bankers create money (through credit). Thus bankers have extraordinary, unworldly, undemocratic powers.

This fact, in turn, is carefully hidden by systems of moods and thoughts whose main role is to hide what bankers really do.

Eugen: “Then the other moral-political question is, what responsibilities shout carry the leading elites, who implemented, short sighted policy of greed, personal enrichment and deception and if they are punishable for their crimes.”

Before they can be punished, the crimes they committed have to be understood, and viewed as crimes.

An example is the Jewish problem.

Eugen: “For 2000 years the Jews were an easy target for persecution. They were pushed to the edge of the societies, dehumanized, marginalized, humiliated, closed to their ghettoes. Too many times the Catholic Church initiated their annihilation.”

This is case where the crimes committed have not been understood. Not only that, but the very semantics used is criminal. Anti-Judaism is described as “anti-Semitism”. That confusion, per se, is a crime. A crime against reason.

Judaism is the mother religion of Christianism, and, thus Islam (although there is also a direct filiation, dues to the Yattrib/Medina stay of Muhammad). Judaism became, at some point, more than 2,000 years ago, a religion, not just an ethnic group (one can argue this happened more than 25 centuries ago, because of the Babylonian captivity of some Israelis). Thus “anti-Semitism” is not an appropriate term.

After the demented theocracy that smothered the Roman empire, Franks re-established Pagans, Atheists and Jews to their rights. Charlemagne took himself for Israel’s King David (somebody famous for disobeying god’s criminally insane orders).

Christianism (= Catholicism for 15 centuries) eradicated, or try to eradicate, using methods that made the Nazis look like choir boys, all religions for 15 centuries. Then those rabid dogs had a go at each other, logically enough.

In particular, in the case of France, seven religious wars occurred, in short order at the end of the Sixteenth Century (meanwhile the Church was busy burning alive philosophers). Then, in the following century the Sun-Tyrant, Louis XIV, threw the Protestants out of France (as a result France started to lose wars and territory, surprise, surprise).

Jews had been living in France for 16 centuries, and Protestantism was around five centuries old (I consider the Cathars to be the most radical Protestants, ever).

Eugen: “In your essay you attack the multinational corporations and their unscrupulous tendency not to pay taxes. The problem of paying or not paying taxes is not a question of morality… but a question, who is better to allocate resources to create maximal well-being for the people of the states. I personally have difficulty to believe, that the government is the best tool to do it. I rather believe, that decentralization of resource allocation decision process, could be more effective than its monopolization in hands of the government. “No taxation without representation”, is a very relevant slogan in these days, when the political elites can do any kind of unscrupulous decisions without a need to pay for its to many times disastrous consequences. ( viz Greece above ).”

Part of this argument has been made by Bill Gates. And it’s as old as plutocracy.

“No taxation without representation” is itself a slogan that creates its own poisonous context. The context being “representation”. In the USA, as it is, around 600,000 people are “represented” by one person. The Greeks would have called that tyranny.

I propose instead: “No personal taxation without personal decision”.

In the 1790s, De Sade, eminent deputy of the far-left at the Constitutional Assembly, proposed not just that women vote, but that direct democracy be established. That was very sadistic of him.

Our leaders are ignorant little twerps. What they know best, is how to lie. Beyond that, they are at a loss. This is not surprising: the People is ignorant, ill-informed, and infantilized. An elite, mostly made of people with the worst motivations, takes all the decisions, and claims to have all the knowledge, and the wisdom.

In truth, they know naught.

The way to expose that is to establish a debate, that is, direct democracy. Out of the debate will come the intelligence.

Imagine the Nazis debating in public, with input from everybody, their “Final Solution” for the “Jewish Problem”. Imagine Putin having to explain in detail, in a debate, how the “volunteers” who stream into Ukraine are paid and equipped. Imagine having General Powel having to explain what exactly he meant with, and how he obtained, his little drawings of trucks converted into biological weapons labs. Powell, representing the USA, used these lies at the UN, but nobody was empowered to contradict him.

Entire nations ought not to be represented by real, or even potential, liars. It is high time for people to be fully informed, and fully enabled to take the fundamental decisions.

Are we getting more direct democratic? The decision of displacing a TGV (High Speed Train) in Eastern France’s Loraine is submitted to direct vote: very good. Meanwhile the TPP, the Trans Pacific Partnership negotiations are pursued secretly among plutocrats.

“Don’t Trade Away Our Health” whines the New York Times (where were you during the negotiations of “Obamacare”?)

Actually, I should not make fun of the author, Joseph Stiglitz, a good guy:

“A secretive group met behind closed doors in New York this week. What they decided may lead to higher drug prices for you and hundreds of millions around the world.

Representatives from the United States and 11 other Pacific Rim countries convened to decide the future of their trade relations in the so-called Trans-Pacific Partnership (T.P.P.). Powerful companies appear to have been given influence over the proceedings, even as full access is withheld from many government officials from the partnership countries.”

Compare with the Wansee conference, where the Final Solution for the Jews was elaborated: ”a secretive group…” Abomination and infamy always entail secretive groups, as De Sade pointed out.

Stiglitz points out that the bad guy there is the USA Trade Representative, who wants to increase Big Pharma’s” profits.

If Big Pharma spent its money on research, that would be OK, but it’s not the case, most of the money goes to corruption: advertising, so-called marketing, and extravagant salaries for the Plutos and CEO class at the top.

The USA Trade Representative will soon be rewarded, as a good pet, with extraordinary salary and compensation (as Obama comes and goes). Stiglitz:

“Historically, though, the trade representative’s office has aligned itself with corporate interests. If big pharmaceutical companies hold sway — as the leaked documents indicate they do — the T.P.P. could block cheaper generic drugs from the market. Big Pharma’s profits would rise, at the expense of the health of patients and the budgets of consumers and governments… If the United States Trade Representative gets its way, the T.P.P. will limit the ability of partner countries to restrict prices. And the pharmaceutical companies surely hope the “standard” they help set in this agreement will become global — for example, by becoming the starting point for United States negotiations with the European Union over the same issues. ”

Let me have Stiglitz say what I did for years. But it’s good to have a Nobel in Economics saying it:

“Of course, pharmaceutical companies claim they need to charge high prices to fund their research and development. This just isn’t so. For one thing, drug companies spend more on marketing and advertising than on new ideas. Overly restrictive intellectual property rights actually slow new discoveries, by making it more difficult for scientists to build on the research of others and by choking off the exchange of ideas that is critical to innovation. As it is, most of the important innovations come out of our universities and research centers, like the National Institutes of Health, funded by government and foundations.

The efforts to raise drug prices in the T.P.P. take us in the wrong direction. The whole world may come to pay a price in the form of worse health and unnecessary deaths.”

In 2013, 100 leading oncologists from around the world wrote an open letter in the journal Blood calling for a reduction in the price of cancer drugs.

Dr. Brian Druker, director of the Knight Cancer Institute, one of the signatories, asked: “If you are making $3billion a year on [cancer drug] Gleevec, could you get by with $2billion? When do you cross the line from essential profits to profiteering?”

None of this would happen without secrecy, and the very respect which is extended to the creeps who lord over us. Time for some audacity from those who ought to govern, us: We The People, not them the bosses.

All this evil is made possible by the concentration of decision making in a few hands. That is intrinsically plutocratic.

Absolute power corrupts and pollutes absolutely: when watching our dear leaders, remember, you are watching people who are absolutely corrupt. If they were not so before they got power, they sure are it, now. The very notion that a few are only habilitated to know all, and decide all, is sick.

No taxation without decision.

Patrice Ayme’

World’s largest pharmaceutical firms
Company	Total revenue ($bn)	R&D spend ($bn)	Sales and marketing spend ($bn)	Profit ($bn)	Profit margin (%)
Johnson & Johnson (US)	71.3	8.2	17.5	13.8	19
Novartis (Swiss)	58.8	9.9	14.6	9.2	16
Pfizer (US)	51.6	6.6	11.4	22.0	43
Hoffmann-La Roche (Swiss)	50.3	9.3	9.0	12.0	24
Sanofi (France)	44.4	6.3	9.1	8.5	11
Merck (US)	44.0	7.5	9.5	4.4	10
GSK (UK)	41.4	5.3	9.9	8.5	21
Astra Zeneca (UK)	25.7	4.3	7.3	2.6	10
Eli Lilly (US)	23.1	5.5	5.7	4.7	20
AbbVie (US)	18.8	2.9	4.3	4.1	22
Source: GlobalData

Europe’s Greek Tragedy

Finance Without Morality, Is Only Ruin Of The People:

People like a good cliffhanger. It beats difficult analysis, any day. Will Greece be pushed out of the Euro? Everybody wants to know.

The answer is simple: no. Before I explain why, let me point out that Paul Krugman, over the years, said many silly things about the Euro. However, he is learning, and his last effort, “Europe’s Greek Test”, is pretty good.

“In the five years (!) that have passed since the euro crisis began, clear thinking has been in notably short supply. But that fuzziness must now end. Recent events in Greece pose a fundamental challenge for Europe: Can it get past the myths and the moralizing, and deal with reality in a way that respects the Continent’s core values? If not, the whole European project — the attempt to build peace and democracy through shared prosperity — will suffer a terrible, perhaps mortal blow.”

OK, Krugman should not call it the “euro crisis”. It’s not anymore a “euro crisis” than the related 2008 crash was a “dollar crisis”. And the point is not to get “past moralizing”, but to get, precisely, in the thick of true moralizing.

Krugman: “But doesn’t Greece have an obligation to pay the debts its own government chose to run up? That’s where the moralizing comes in.” And the moralizing is not just the way plutocrats and their parrots claim it to be. Krugman has finally discovered that only one side is submitted to beating until the masters’ mood improves:

“It’s true that Greece (or more precisely the center-right government that ruled the nation from 2004-9) voluntarily borrowed vast sums. It’s also true, however, that banks in Germany and elsewhere voluntarily lent Greece all that money. We would ordinarily expect both sides of that misjudgment to pay a price. But the private lenders have been largely bailed out (despite a “haircut” on their claims in 2012). Meanwhile, Greece is expected to keep on paying.”

Paying for what? Banksters! Krugman has finally come across the great truth of the so-called rescue of Greece:

“…to oversimplify things a bit, you can think of European policy as involving a bailout, not of Greece, but of creditor-country banks, with the Greek government simply acting as the middleman — and with the Greek public, which has seen a catastrophic fall in living standards, required to make further sacrifices so that it, too, can contribute funds to that bailout.

One way to think about the demands of the newly elected Greek government is that it wants a reduction in the size of that contribution.”

Krugman concludes:

“Objectively, resolving this situation shouldn’t be hard. Although nobody knows it, Greece has actually made great progress in regaining competitiveness; wages and costs have fallen dramatically, so that, at this point, austerity is the main thing holding the economy back. So what’s needed is simple: Let Greece run smaller but still positive surpluses, which would relieve Greek suffering, and let the new government claim success, defusing the anti-democratic forces waiting in the wings. Meanwhile, the cost to creditor-nation taxpayers — who were never going to get the full value of the debt — would be minimal. 

Doing the right thing would, however, require that other Europeans, Germans in particular, abandon self-serving myths and stop substituting moralizing for analysis. 

Can they do it? We’ll soon see.”

The usual moralizing analysis that is done is not just completely wrong, but thoroughly superficial: the average Greek has been punished for a crime she and he did not commit. They are been punished with their lives. Meanwhile, the culprit bankers are not giving back their mansions.

So Germany is going to become reasonable about Greece. Why? Because it is co-responsible: the Drachma was converted into Euro at twice its real value. Germany agreed to this. That instant wealth for Greece was going to bring a lot of purchase of German luxury cars by wealthy Greeks, and it did. So the average Greek was set-up by wealthy and controlling Germans, whose influence made German economists consent to malversation.

Another point: Germany saw its debt cut down four times during the Twentieth Century, and the last time was in 1953. Basically Germany did not have to pay for Nazism and reconstruction.

If Germany did not have to pay for Nazism, why should Greece have to pay for German bankers? (Hmm… Wait. It actually makes sense…)

In particular Germany did not pay in any commensurate fashion for the Greeks it killed in World War Two. How many Greeks did Germany kill when it attacked Greece in Spring 1941, and for the next four years of brutal occupation, complete with sending tens of thousands of Greek civilians to extermination camps? Or killing them on the way?

So many Greeks were assassinated by the Nazis that one does not know how many died. Up to more than eleven percent of the population. Scaled up to the present population of the USA, that would be around 33 million dead.

33 million dead, and now you ask for more?

The sort of governments which has been in power throughout the West, has been serving the wealthy capital class, from the USA to Greece. It’s not just the Eurozone.

The British Royal Mail was evaluated by some financiers at 12 billion Euros. But the “Conservative” government sold it 4 billion. In a few hours of trading, the privatized company gained 60%, making a lots of instant wealth for investors.

Plots everywhere by the plutocrats, what could go wrong? A Great Bitter Ocean to drown in.

Some ponder the nature of man, the Dark Side French ex-justice minister Badinter spoke about.

Yet, that’s another mistake. One does not avoid cruelty by just becoming a vegetarian, or a vegan. Actually, it’s easy to argue that this is an immoral mood.

Instead, blame General Economics.

It has been thoroughly documented that, in national parks such as Amboceli, elephants kill goats and cattle, just because they don’t like them crowding around water holes.

MORALITY HAS TO REACH ACROSS CENTURIES:

Spain, now followed by Portugal, has decided to allow Sephardic Jews to return. Five centuries after throwing them out. This is worth pondering as a morality play. After 381, the Catholic Church became not just a terrorist organization burning libraries, but an officially sanctified one lethal one killing all groups it did not like, and, first of all “philosophers”. The Church came close to annihilating the Jews, but then the Franks took power and re-established the civil rights of non-Catholics. In the following centuries, many Catholics converted to Judaism: whereas the Pope and his goons always threatened to burn alive miscreants, Judaism was more relaxed.

However, for a number of reason, such as Saint Bernard, Saint Louis and the like, and the death struggle against the Islamists who occupied most of the Mediterranean, the Catholic Church and its Inquisition came back in force.

Millions of Jews were thrown out, or forced to convert to Catholicism, or terrified, tortured to death, burned alive. Even towards the end of the Eighteenth Century, Voltaire condemned the execution of a young Jewish girl, burned alive in Portugal, just because she was a Jew.

Well, last week, a ten year old Nigerian girl was covered with explosives, and detonated in a market place, by Boko Haram, an Islamophile terrorist organization.

That would have been unimaginable in Nigeria, sixty years ago (you know, under the dirty colonialists). But now, it’s happening, and it’s the leaders of the world who are culprit. Because that’s the world they organized. With their lies.

So let’s talk truly now, and start with Greece. When one of the world’s most despicable men, Jean-Claude Juncker, a tax evasion specialist serving plutocrats for decades, enabling trillions of dollars to be stolen from the people, say that Greece, the Greek people, should pay, we should retort.

Retort that it is his kind that should pay, so we can start to put an end to the systems of moods and lies they set in place.

Plutocrats and those who enable them, have been full of audacity, for decades. But, without audacity, you cannot save the Republic. Because the world, or at least the ecology, always moves on.

Ah, and of Greece and the Euro?

The Greek Central Bank can actually print all the Euros it needs. So the charade in Greece was made possible by the complicity of the ruling elite. Syriza can put an end to that.

And what of Germany forcing Greece? How? By bringing back the Schliefen plan, and swinging millions of robotic soldiers, through France, as in 1914? Hahaha. Sorry, I am obnoxious. Not likely, anyway, as 98% of the military muscle in Europe is held by France and Britain.

The Euro is the Greek currency. Germans can’t change that. It would be easier for them to adopt the rubble of the Rouble as new German currency instead.

Not that force should not be used. Banksters and their accomplices should be made to regurgitate the ill profits they made from Greece and other places they victimized.

Patrice Ayme’

GREAT BITTER LAKE CONSPIRACY

A conspiracy occurs when a number of individuals together (“con”) breathe (“spirare”).

Conspiracy doesn’t imply necessarily plotting, although, in the case of the Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy, a conspiracy launched by president Franklin Roosevelt, the famous “Democrat”, this is exactly what happened. Three quarters of a century later, we are still in the thick of it.   

History is made mostly of… conspiracies. Those who don’t want to learn about conspiracies, don’t want to learn about history. A friend, Paul Handover of Learning From Dogs, attracted my attention to the British movie, “Bitter Lake”.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UM8W87UcO2U&feature=player_embedded

“Bitter Lake” is about the conspiracy between American plutocracy and Saudi plutocracy. Plutocrat Roosevelt was freshly flown from Yalta, to the Great Bitter Lake, on the Suez Canal. The idea was to steal the Maghreb, and the Middle East from the French and the British, by making a theocratic alliance, with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud.

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud had proclaimed himself king of Arabia in 1932, after conquering most of it, with British military help. The Saud family ascent rested on an alliance with Wahhabi Islam, an extremely intolerant version of Islam, which interprets the sacred texts of Islam literally (Wahhab followed an earlier fanatic, who had been condemned to death, for Islamist Fundamentalism in… 1200 CE, more than eight centuries ago).

Abdulaziz Ibn Saud had established an authentic “Islamist State“. It made a natural partner to US oilmen, and US financiers. This partnership extends to this day: look at Obama preventing pursuits against the Saudis for 9/11, their financial support of the Islamist State, and the friends the Clintons keep.

At Yalta, Roosevelt had warmed up, by giving half of Europe to his Comrade Stalin. (Plutocrats of the world naturally unite!) That should break the back of Europe, if Hitler had not done enough already (correctly thought the US Deep State).

Never mind that Poland had fought the Nazis courageously the Nazis, at a time when the USA was militarily and diplomatically collaborating… with the Nazis (or maybe, precisely, the Poles had to be punished!) Roosevelt had to be strict: the French had successfully escaped from the military occupation (AMGOT) he had set-up for them.

Having warmed up at Yalta with its continent-sized gift to Stalin, US president Roosevelt was ready to make a diabolical pact with Abdulaziz Ibn Saud. After all, the Brits had shown the way, decades earlier, and it had been a bloodbath. This would organize the world economy for the “American Century”.

The USA agreed to protect Saudi Arabia, as the UK had done earlier. In exchange for oil, and the recycling of the profit in the worldwide dollar system, controlled by the USA. this became even more pronounced under Obama…

The movie “Bitter Lake” exposes (some) of the American plutocracy led conspiracies which led to the devastation, among other things, of Afghanistan, and other constituencies, thanks to the Wahhabist Islam it unleashed on the world.

Readers of this site will be familiar with the general ambiance.

One caveat: all what is in the documentary and makes American plutocrats (Roosevelt) and their servants (Reagan) look bad, is correct. However the real situation, the real badness is way worse. (For example the secret, official USA intervention in Afghanistan was under Carter, on July 3, 1979. However the real even more secret intervention, through the Pakistani ISI was even earlier and even more vicious.

So is history all conspiracies, and nothing but conspiracies?

Not quite. (Although in nearly all cases, whatever the spark is, the new situation is handled with new conspiracies: breathing together is intrinsic to the human experience!)

Sometimes civilizations are brought down by occasional natural cataclysms: a volcano exploding, accompanied by earthquakes, and a tsunami helped to bring Cretan civilization down. Earlier, a great flood had brought the Sumerian cities down, drowning them all (that flood is probably alluded to in the Bible). It did not look man-made, but it was (from human impact up rivers from abusive land usage). The Sumerian cities brought many invention central to Western civilization (the bicameral representation, the alphabet). Up the Euphrates and Tigris basins, agriculture and herding ravaged the soils and made them unable to store water. At the same time salination ruined the delta.

The Maya, after millennia of establishing a great and dense civilization resting on intense agriculture and a sophisticated, gigantic hydraulic system, with huge canals and dams, stumbled into a century long, drastic drought, just when they were losing control of their ecology (they over-harvested their key construction tree, to the point they had none, and were forced to switch to inferior species, for example).

Thus, even natural disasters are not, quite often, not that natural: the hand of Homo has been all over, for a long time. The Mongols knew this. After Genghis Khan took control of Northern China, having exterminated the Buddhist Xia, and conquered the Han, his generals insisted that he should destroy not just the Chinese population, but also the Chinese ecology (by destroying the forests, and making the landscape suitable to Mongolian species such as goats, horses, etc.).

Genghis Khan wanted to save Chinese civilization: he refused.

Sometimes one great leader can do more than Jesus ever did. (Genghis as the Jesus Jesus never was: the inversion of all certainties. The Mongol leader was actually educated by Christians, Nestorian Christians.)

And then there is determinism, inertia.

Often plutocracy gets established through sheer inertia, because of the power of compounded interest. This is why many a civilization sent the wives to the funeral pyres, with the Great Leader.

I have a personal connection to Afghanistan. Although I never visited, my parents did, several times, in the 1970s. Geology opens many doors.

As it happened, my dad was among a European group of geologists working for the Afghan government, who discovered Afghanistan’s riches… In the 1970s. All hell broke loose shortly thereafter. I have narrated in the past why I think that this was not a coincidence: the USA wanted its cake, and did not feel the same about Afghans, Russians… and the French.

I write about these sorts of things, day in, day out. But most people prefer the opium of feel-good… Pet a dog, dream about (being) celebrities…

In the end, “Bitter Lake” accuses the growth of the financial system, and its connection with the military-industrial complex (Ike warned about), corruption.

Readers of this site knows that plutocracy, as a controlling mind of its own, had started before the inception of World War One.

Nowadays, plutocracy is an apex of glory and mind control. Giant American global corporations, the 200 largest ones, do 100 billion dollars of tax evasion through Luxembourg alone. Each year. Many are media companies. Wonder why stories make no sense?

Juncker directed that. Now he is head of the European Commission, and insist Greece shall pay every single penny of its debt. Pluto insists little ones shall pay.

Oh, by the way, the real name is “Great Bitter Lake“, not just “Bitter Lake”. It’s actually a bitter ocean we are all drowning in.

In any case, the movie “Bitter Lake” is good start. A bit of what is going on, through the Afghan microscope. Much is made of the sci-fi movie Solaris, where a planet changes the minds of those who mess with it. Well, sure. But it’s not Afghanistan. That planet is planet finance, planet Pluto, and it’s malevolent.

“Bitter Lake” ends this way: “At the end of Soviet science fiction film, Solaris, the astronauts returns to Earth. Everything seems real enough but somehow he does not trust in anything any longer…

Our leaders seem to have lost faith in anything. And the simple stories they tell us don’t make sense any longer. The experience of Afghanistan  has make us begin to realize that there is something else out there, but we don’t have the apparatus to see it. What is needed is a new story, and one that we can believe in.”

Well, I have that story. And that “apparatus”. But, by definition, it’s out of the comfort zone. As usually defined.

Patrice Ayme’

Leveraged Morality Needed

New Morality, Greece, Final Solution, Poisonous Apple, Mayhem, etc.

We live in a highly leveraged world. Not only do we have H bombs, but smart phones, for years, have been smarter at chess than any human player, by a very long shot.

Maybe we should exert our minds with higher pursuits than chess. Morality comes to mind.

In highly leveraged world, morality, too, has to be highly leveraged.

One cannot just condemn guilty acts, one has to condemn the ideas and moods which led to these guilty acts, when they can be discerned.

Thus the more advanced morality we need requires more discernment, more… discrimination.

A French Jihadist, Mohammed Merah, ambushed French paratroopers, one by one. He ordered one of them to kneel. The paratrooper refused. He was shot to death, standing up. He was also a Muslim (and his mother, who is deeply republican, wears a scarf).

How do we know this? Merah was wearing video equipment. That means he was sure to be acting in the name of righteousness (who is more righteous than Allah?)

Merah went to shoot children at a Jewish elementary school (that was also the plan in the latest Paris attacks, but the terrorist had to switch to a Jewish supermarket).

One of the little girls fled. Merah pursued the seven year old, grabbed her by the hair, and shot her to death. This is all on video. Such videos should be shown.

They should be shown, because horror motivates to ask the question: what is it in the systems of thought and moods the likes of Merah believe in, that led them to behave exactly as the very worst SS? (Those who read this site religiously know the answer.)

An ex-French justice minister, main proponent of the outlawing of the death penalty in France, Badinter was relating this, and reflecting that, after 70 years of commemorations of the Holocaust, one came back to the same anti-Jewish hatred as when the Nazis reigned.

Badinter said that he believed there was a Dark Side to man. He stopped there.

Indeed, there is a Dark Side, and I know exactly where it comes from.

It’s an evolutionary advantageous trait.

One plays with it, at one’s own risk.

The world grab of plutocrats is exactly the sort of things hatred is supposed to address (Hitler was already riling against “plutocrats”… However, Obama-like, he was financed and propped by them!)

What Badinter ought to ask, is why people such as Merah have so much hatred?

Syriza, the Greek left, has the same program as the French Socialists had in 2012. So Syriza is standard socialism.

The French Socialists did not deliver. Not just that, but the Dear French Socialists, headed by an investment banker, Macron, are trying to pass a law preventing blasphemy… about high finance. The interesting question is why this is happening. Is it just greed, or realizing that the world, headed by Obama’s sponsors, is too mighty to be changed, and thus collaboration is best, as under Vichy?

Meanwhile, people get jailed in Egypt for atheism. New York Time’s Egypt’s War on Atheism

“It took one session on Jan. 10 for a court in the Nile Delta … to sentence Karim al-Banna, a 21-year-old student, to three years in prison for saying … that he was an atheist… Mr. Banna was originally arrested, in November, when he went to the police to complain that his neighbors were harassing him… his name had appeared in a local newspaper on a list of known atheists. Instead of protecting him, the police accused him of insulting Islam.”

Whining about Insulting Islam is the gift that keeps on giving… Secularism is about living in one’s age. This is what the word “secularism” means. It is actually a neutral concept.

Those who impose a particular god are obviously not living in our age. Indeed, in this age, thanks to the Internet, all those who know how to read know of many gods. Hinduism proposes already a million gods. Which one to choose? Why to choose one? Most of these gods are more than twice older than Muslim god, or his “messenger”.

So choosing a particular god of the past is to choose a particular view point from the past. Imposing this shrunk, obsolete version of the world, makes for very small cultures and the small minds they spawned.

This creates countries that do not compete very well economically and culturally. Such countries are poor and engaged in a vicious spiral down the drain of history.

Thus imposing theocracy while so many other countries are (mostly) secularist is a great disservice to Egypt. Laicity, the opposite of the choosing of particular god(s) is not just superior philosophically, and culturally, it’s the easiest way to higher economic performance.

So, if theocracy is such a terrible thing, why does it arise? Because theocracy is oppressive, and, thus, justifies oppression. All the way to the bottom of souls.

Theocracy is the best friend of those who take themselves for gods… And that is why theocracy is generally imposed by generals (Constantine and Theodosius were the Roman emperors who imposed Christianism; Muhammad and the early Caliphs were all war chiefs).

So do not ask how to stop the hatred. Asked, instead how it got started.

In Europe, clearly, making everybody poorer in job prospects, education and wealth, played a role. And this is not a problem localized in Europe, with European solutions. Quite the opposite. By refusing to reduce its emissions of carbons in the last 30 years, the USA and its Chinese pet, gained a huge economic advantage.

Apple just made PROFITS (profits, not just revenue) of 18 billion dollars. In three months. Yes eighteen billion. Selling 74 million smart phones, a lot of them in China. I guess the little plot is going strong. This is the largest profits by a corporation, ever (including the oil giants in their rimes).

Apple ferries hundreds of billions of profit through the tiny, tax-free British Virgin Island. 

A world like that will lead to ever more Jihadism, and bigger and better weapons can be had, thus forcing us into ever more of a police state.

Humiliating people leads to revolt, and revolt, rebellion, lead to progress, by throwing down hateful moods and ideas. So it always has been, so it always will be.

Patrice Ayme’

Judaism’s Promised land

 

Auschwitz, the Jewish Problem, and a Better Final Solution:

I want to make sure I am not Politically Correct, every day, so I chose my words carefully… Political Correctness has established its empire on the ruins of Philosophical Correctness. But politics ought just to be practical philosophy, it cannot afford to contradict it.

I turned Deutsche Welle (German TV) on, and fell on a Jew talking at Auschwitz, inside what had to be the world’s most gigantic tent, draped with sumptuous blue lights. Zehr gut. Germans’ fate is now forever tied to Auschwitz, as the German president said. Studying Auschwitz ought to bring the final solution to much German ideology, including Kant, Herder, etc.

I switched to the French TV, and the same elder gentleman was here again, making the same discourse, and it was the same camera. I love it when Germans and French agree, about what is important, and it’s rarely not the case these days.

The speaker, an Auschwitz survivor, said words were important. To qualify those assassinated by the Nazis, one should speak of assassination, not “loss”. It’s not that we forgot about them, and we don’t know where they are. They were assassinated. I could not agree more. I have made that point in writing for years.

The French, German and Ukrainian president were in the audience. The day prior, a rocket attack on the large city of Mariopol had killed tens of civilians. The Organization of Stability and Security in Europe, and others, determined that the rockets came from the terrorist-Russian side. Asked about it the half demented Russian dictator, declared that a NATO “Foreign Legion” was causing mayhem in Ukraine. NATO replied that the only foreign legion in Ukraine was Russian. Putin confirmed that “patriotic volunteers” had crossed into Ukraine. He condemned “Russophobia”.

Putin did not go to the Auschwitz commemoration, pretexting he was not invited (nobody was; the event had been organized 9 years ago by the UN…)

Putin’s slow motion terror is a sight to behold. As I have explained, it was enabled by the last moment failure of a surgical strike against Bashar El Assad, personally and directly. Saudi (!) and French aircraft were on the runways, ready to take-off, but, at the last moment Obama lost his balls, and assassinated respect for the West’s military… With the failure to execute mass criminal Assad.

Assassination science is a complicated subject. Failure to assassinate here, will lead to assassination there.

The top German generals had decided to assassinate Hitler… They just needed British and American verbal support. Would the UK and the USA announce that they will stand publicly with France against Hitler? … Instead of siding with Hitler, as they had done so far? Then the generals, headed by chief of staff Beck, could make a coup, kill the top Nazis and argue to the Volk that it was a question of saving Germany from criminal madness.

Instead, the UK and USA governments betrayed humanity. They told Hitler that his generals, all his top generals, were plotting against him. That was in 1938. Beck was forced to resign, and to commit suicide in 1944 (after Beck headed the “Von Stauffenberg” coup).

The head of the World Jewish Congress talked. He accused “anti-Semitism”.

Word precision, please. Concept precision, please. Arabs are Semites. Many Arabs, if not most, detest Jews. So are Arabs detesting themselves? Of course not. So asking Arabs to fight “anti-Semitism” is like asking Americans to fight “anti-Americanism”. Silly, thus, ineffectual.

On January 21, 2015, French philosopher and plutocrat Bernard-Henri Levy told the 193-nation assembly that the world must confront “the renewed advance of this radical inhumanity, this total baseness that is anti-Semitism.”

This is complete madness, on the face of it. BHL wants us to become mad. Hamas has in its charter, Hadith 41;6985, which orders to kill all the Jews. Hamas rules Gaza, a city more than 2,000 years old… And Gaza is full of Semites. Bombed by would-be Semites, the Jews of Israel. When BH Levy tells the inhabitants of Gaza to renounce “anti-Semitism”, they can only feel that he is mad. Or that he views them as subhumans (as BHL recognizes only Jews as Semites, thus Gaza denizens as non-Semites, thus as having no identity, since BHL amputates them from their very existence!)

I said “would-be Semites” because, ironically, as Christians could convert to Judaism for centuries under the very long lived Franco-Roman empire, many European Jews were actually, first, of European descent. (Several top Nazis were themselves more or less of European Jewish descent; Hitler himself was a dubious case; he made thousands of German Jews, “honorary Aryans”.)

The World Jewish Congress head accused “most nations of Europe” to be culprit of Auschwitz. Not one word about the USA. Yet, the USA was more culprit of the massacre of the Jews than any other nation, barred Germany itself. We are in 2015. How much longer do we have to wait for this basic truth? The fact is both instructive, and a warning.

Not only did the USA refuse to accept Jewish refugees (so millions, blocked from immigration, were killed in Europe; France, by contrast, had open borders). But American managers, such as Prescott Bush, managed the slave labor from the Auschwitz archipelago. That was obliterated by the official version of history, as was the employ, at the highest levels (the Dulles heads of CIA, State), of many Nazis and Nazi collaborators, all powerful in the USA, not just in the 1930s, but also in the 1950s…

By not mentioning any of this, the head of the World Jewish Congress makes himself an accomplice of the most important enabling factor of the Shoah.

Who learned nothing?

The Arabs, accused to be “anti-Semites”? Or those who play dumb, 80 years later? And still can’t make the connection between the fact Obama was in Saudi Arabia, making oil plots, and not joining with 30 heads of states in Auschwitz (not anymore than he was in France two weeks earlier to demonstrate for Freedom of Expression).

The head of the World Jewish Congress should call a cat a cat, instead of calling cats “anti-cats”. What he should have bemoaned is “anti-JUDAISM”.

He then bemoaned Jews could go around Paris with a Kippah. Sure. Let’s have everybody walk around in big religious garb, hoping for the best. Time for a bit of sensitivity, perhaps? The latest activities by Israel in Gaza killed around 2,300 people (most of them civilians… even according to Israel!)… And wounded more than 10,000. That’s a lot of dead and wounded for a population of 1.8 million (more or less caged, thanks to Egypt and Israel).

Scaled up to the USA, that would be more than 400,000 dead… An astounding number.

More generally, Judaism gave us Christiano-Islamism. It’s supposed to be a great gift. However, Christianism took over the Roman empire by 400 CE (that’s when Roman emperor Theodosius had to be beg forgiveness on his knees to the archbishop of Milan, one of the so-called Church’s Founding Fathers).

The government by bishops, for bishops, did not just collapse the empire, it collapsed civilization, and even demography. The Franks took over a devastated Europe, created their own bishops, and their own saints, and their own interpretation of Christianism. Then they domesticated the Popes.

Something similar happened with Islam. After the Islamists took military control, they proved incapable to come to terms with secularism, which is the condition sine qua non for civilization.

Thus, centuries later, after most of the population converted and was submitted to Sharia instead of secular law, civilization became moribund, and has been thus ever since.

Not to be left behind, Christian madness made a comeback after the First Crusade (1099 CE), and brought crusades, pogroms, Inquisition, ethnic cleansing, Jewish and Muslim eradication, for centuries to come. This was no small stuff: the crusade against the Cathars killed millions (scaled to the populations, it’s worse than what the Nazis did; indeed the Cathars were killed to the last, and all their works, but one, or so)

Hence Judeo-Christo-Islamism stinks to high heavens most of the time. It keeps on being re-captured (surprise, surprise), by Elected People theoreticians… Come to think of it, that, and the respect for a crazed, bloodthirsty god, is the very basis of the doctrine…

Maybe Jews would be well advised to understand that their problems, just as those of Islam, originate greatly from their religion. It’s OK, to change religion: Gallia changed religion, getting ever more secular, no less than four times in 2,000 years (from the Celtic human sacrifice cult, to Roman cult, to Christianism, to now Secularism).

The Promised Land ideology allowed to give the inspiration and religious backing for the North American Euro colonists to eradicate the Natives, following what they read in the Bible. So the Bible is still very popular in the USA: it made Americans not just feeling good about themselves, but awesomely rich: by the Nineteenth Century, an American going west was a multimillionaire, thanks to the Bible propelled government’s generosity.

Apologists will say it’s not so much the Promised-Land greed, but the Ten Commandments which are the core of the Biblical doctrine. That was not very useful when the Germans got angry.

Indeed, as one of the Auschwitz survivors just said: One needs an Eleventh Commandment: Don’t Be Just a Spectator.

Even more important: have your own ideas. Parrots make poor thinkers. Poor thinking makes you dinner.

Patrice Ayme’

Hope FROM Greece

Not Just Hope FOR Greece, But For Us All:

Man is a force which revolts against fate.

The revolt against Nazism was too late. The revolt against the austerity imposed by plutocrats and other lootocrats is none too early. Greece just voted for revolution, after years of exaction by the wealthiest and their obsequious servants. Finally. Hopefully, the rest of the West will follow.

AUSCHWITZ WAS NO ACCIDENT:

“One must crush infamy!” said Voltaire. It has to be done every day, even before breakfast. Infamy, indeed, never stops. Seventy years ago, the Auschwitz extermination camp was liberated. Auschwitz was just one camp out of thousands. It happened to the most literate country: it’s not how you learn, it’s what you learn, which makes a monster, or an angel.

Auschwitz was surrounded by an archipelago of secondary camps and factories where slave labor was exploited (some were managed by Americans, like the famous Prescott Bush, founder of a dynasty). Auschwitz had a much nicer sub-camp, just made for the Red Cross to visit.

Nazis Couldn’t Beat The World Champion, Victor Perez, So They Shot Him To Death.

Auschwitz was evacuated ahead of the Red Army. The idea was to duplicate the sort of trek that had proven so useful to exterminate American Natives (Tocqueville witnessed the death march of the Cherokees). A prisoner who marched, with his brother, had been the youngest world boxing champion ever. The French Victor Perez was shot January 22, 1945. The camp commander had organized hundreds of bouts with Perez, and the small Franco-Tunisian defeated many times enormous Nazi specimens.

In Auschwitz itself, more than a million died. But the Nazis preferred to kill people here, and there, it was harder to document. Many died on the Auschwitz evacuation march.

The Nazis had lost the war, but hatred is a force that keeps on going, especially when hope is long gone. Hate is a frenzy which makes its own heaven for twisted minds.

Germany was full of hate: that was communicated from the very Prussian mood, and institutionalized with hate and fascism specialists such as Kant. By 1815, when the French got defeated with their Enlightenment, hate and apartheid against Jews and Slavs was re-established, and the road to Auschwitz re-opened.

The number one lesson of Nazism is that it originated with moods and systems of thought which ruled Germany by 1816.

STARVING THE GREEKS WAS NO ACCIDENT:

The Greek nightmare is part of the general nightmare: the wealthiest and most powerful control the money making system. They bet with each other. When some of them fail, they ask taxpayer to make up for their losses.

It’s simple, yet efficient. It’s obscene, yet the way.

This is why, when the budget of Greek science was lowered by 75%, the Troika found it normal. That is why, when the public University of Crete was given a total budget which was just twice its electric bill, the Troika found this normal. The University of Crete is among the top 50 universities in the world by some criterion.

But the Troika meant to punish normal people, and especially brains: after all, that’s where the critiques come from.

Meanwhile, the largest class of Greek plutocrats (sheep line magnates and the Church) went tax free.

Everywhere, it has been the same: world GDP (the sum of all real economic activity) is 60 trillion, financial derivatives trades total 800 trillion. So most of the money in the world is created, so that plutocrats can trade with plutocrats. When some of them lose, as they did in 2008, taxpayers and the general public are supposed to pay. Pay with more austerity.

In truth, the leadership of the West is not just ethically corrupt, but even cognitively corrupt. They don’t understand the monstrosity of the decision and economic system they have created. The way out is to do like the Greeks, and revolt.

And enough to point an accusatory finger at the Euro: it has little to do with what is going on. The Troika would still be there, even if the Euro was not. What is going on is that plutocracy, worldwide controls all the major decision, and its mood is to bring ever more gloom and doom to the little guys. This process will go on, until people revolt, as they just did in Greece. What is needed is for the Greek revolt to propagate.

Krugman’s Ending Greece’s Nightmare explains the situation pretty well (except at the end where is anti-Euro mania resurfaces). Here he is:

“Alexis Tsipras, leader of the left-wing Syriza coalition, is about to become prime minister of Greece. He will be the first European leader elected on an explicit promise to challenge the austerity policies that have prevailed since 2010. And there will, of course, be many people warning him to abandon that promise, to behave “responsibly.”

So how has that responsibility thing worked out so far?”

Well, it was all a gigantic theft: Greece was lent money to reimburse private banks (many not based in Greece). The very principle of the ting was a crime: why would people have to take a loan to reimburse banks that had nothing to do with?

On top of that, the terms of the loans made them NOT reimbursable. (Technical details omitted this time, some are in Krugman). It was like a loan from the Mafia… For the good reason, that it was exactly what it was. Global Plutocracy is just a generalization of the Mafia (and, as they order the USA Army around, watch it!)

Krugman works for the plutocracy too, so he ends his editorial with the usual call to end the Euro (so king Dollar can keep on reigning!)

But the plutocrats have their fingers all over the planet, in all the pies. Even The Economist spoke in its last issue of “America’s New Aristocracy”.

The way out is to tax the wealthiest 93% as Eisenhower did. No exception. The 93% tax ought to be determined not just on income, but on potential income, and on spending. Worldwide. That will turn around the loopholes. The 93% tax ought to kick in at the level of one million a year, or so.

Taxes (and things that act like taxes, but have different names) on the middle class ought to be lowered.

Maybe Syriza and its coalition, elected today, will want to try that in Greece? An advantage is that it would help bring the Euro down where it belongs, somewhere around 80 cents to the Dollar… How? Because the Plutocrats would be terrified, that high taxation will come to destroy their little heaven of hell on Earth, and they will pull their Dark pool money out of Europe frantically…

Hope allows to have a nice life without having worked hard for it. If we want to work hard, at this point, following Syriza, we have to rebel. And let no German come up with Auschwitz related objections. And remember: the Nazis killed around 800,000 Greeks…

Patrice Ayme’

In Today’s USA, Losers Are Sinners

In: WHERE IS THE EMPATHY?

Kristof in the New York Times relates the loss of a childhood friend, and Kristof accuses a MOOD: the lack of empathy. This story is highly evocative of the general mood in the USA (and its significant difference with the ‘welfare’, institutionalized empathy in Europe).

This sort of story points at importance of systems of moods. Those are off the radar of conventional sociology and philosophy.

“YAMHILL, Ore. — THE funeral for my high school buddy Kevin Green is Saturday, near this town where we both grew up. The doctors say he died at age 54 of multiple organ failure, but in a deeper sense he died of inequality and a lack of good jobs.

Lots of Americans would have seen Kevin — obese with a huge gray beard, surviving on disability and food stamps — as a moocher. They would have been harshly judgmental: Why don’t you look after your health? Why did you father two kids outside of marriage?

That acerbic condescension reflects one of this country’s fundamental problems: an empathy gap. It reflects the delusion on the part of many affluent Americans that those like Kevin are lazy or living cushy lives. A poll released this month by the Pew Research Center found that wealthy Americans mostly agree that “poor people today have it easy because they can get government benefits without doing anything in return.””

But, says Kristof, the problem with people like Kevin (of which there are tens of millions in the USA), is not that they are lazy, but that there are no decent, well-paying jobs:

“Lazy? Easy? Kevin used to set out with his bicycle and a little trailer to collect cans by the roadside. He would make about $20 a day.”

Resident Reagan had the following idiotic retort: there are no despicable jobs. All are equally honorable.

However, a country is only as rich as the sum of all the added value of the products its jobs provide with. If a country, such as Saudi Arabia, Australia, or the USA has immense mineral wealth, it can be rich, or at least not dirt poor (Venezuela, Russia) with few people working.

Right now the USA is rich for quite a few reasons that are unique, thanks to its geography, and its history (dollar as reserve currency, and the buying of complicit elites in tens of countries, worldwide).

“Kevin’s dad had only a third-grade education and couldn’t read. But he had a good union job as a cement finisher, paying far above the minimum wage, and he worked hard and made sure his kids did, too. He had no trouble with the law.

Kevin and his big sister, Cindy — one of the sweetest girls in school — both earned high school diplomas. Kevin was sunny, cheerful and astonishingly helpful: Any hint that something needed fixing, and he was there with a wrench. But then the dream began to disintegrate.

The local glove factory and feed store closed, and other blue-collar employers cut back. Good union jobs became hard to find.”

[Kevin became a] “manager making trailer homes. He fell in love and had twin boys that he doted on. But because he and his girlfriend struggled financially, they never married.

Then, about 15 years ago, Kevin hurt his back and was laid off. Soon afterward, his girlfriend moved out, took the kids and asked for child support…. [Kevin] was far behind in child support and was punished by losing his driver’s license — which made it pretty much impossible to get a job in a rural area… ”

And so on: poor nutrition, 350 pounds, diabetes, heart attack, death…

Loss of hope. Loss of faith in a society drifting towards ignobility.

The mood, in the USA, as in all countries, is organized by the ruling elite. The USA is turning away from the equal opportunity society (for the whites) post World War Two. (Or the one that existed for centuries prior, by just going west!)

Instead, democracy is slowly strangled by plutocracy. So the mood is all about the Law of the Jungle being the normal law of the land. Thus lack of empathy is part of the system. Only the “philanthropists” (another name for the plutocrats) are supposed to have empathy. Others can get lost.

Universities make millions each from “college sports”. Players are basically not paid. However, they get good grades, although they don’t need to attend classes (or then purely formally, occasionally!) Professors are supposed to be part of the plot (and better be, if they want their departments to keep on existing!)

To justify the superiority of those who have it all, and often inherited it all, one has to be able to punish those who are not playing the game. The more those who look as if they deserved to be low lives, suffer, the better. So the society is actually organized to create misery, and punish it. Losers are sinners. Thus winners are philanthropists.

By not taking care of those who deserve empathy, resources are freed to protect and expand the empire of those who have it all, and want more. The resulting might insure the success of the USA as the greatest nation on Earth.

It may be all very perverse, but it sure works very well. As a blossoming plutocracy. Watch the GDP expanding at a 5% rate. Of course, mostly because wealth is expanding at an even higher rate.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/21/state-of-the-bunion/

However, common people work hard in the USA. Harder than in most other places. Why? Because there is a lack of empathy. Common citizens know that, if they fail, not only will they be punished, but they will be viewed as sinners.

Google earns 50 billion dollars a month. And pays no significant tax. When crime gets big enough, it is divine: this is a mood the Bible and the Qur’an imparts.

Meanwhile, in Germany one German out of ten never heard of Auschwitz. I saw a group of full grown high school students facing a panel with names. None seemed to know what it was. When the instructor of the Jewish Museum asked if a name told them something, there was giggling. Ravensbruck, Dachau, Auschwitz… None knew a single name of extermination camps.

Let Germany not get in a mood of forgetfulness. German orderliness, and discipline are wonderful moods, in the service of goodness, but not in the service of forgetfulness.

Moods are deeper and more pervasive than systems of thought.

That is why religions cannot be separated from society, let alone civilization. Only secular humanism is compatible with today’s civilization. But humanism has always been about having sufficient empathy.

The USA is riding high on fracking at this point, and similar plots. And Germany used to ride high enough to feel optimistic about attacking the world. But only sustainable moods are wise.

In a superiorly intelligent species, intelligence can only born from empathy. So empathy, not profit, is at the center of civilization. Let Greece show the way!

Patrice Ayme’

QUANTUM: De Tout Pour Faire Le Monde

QUANTUM: OBVIOUS YET ALL CHANGING

Quantum Physics is so natural that it embraces the fundamental organizing principle of superior human intelligence: “Il faut de tout pour faire un monde”.

It is continually said that Quantum Physics is “weird”. Maybe it is, but much less than any alternative previously imagined, such as Classical Mechanics. Classical Mechanics rest on a handful of strict “laws”. Instead, as we will see, the Quantum rests on just one very general principle, but, from there, enables the great freedom of spaces galore.

Indeed what is the most obvious alternative, between Classical and Quantum?

True, at first sight, the world looks classical. Yet, the classical vision, that the world made of points, is very naïve.

Electrons Make Their Own Space Around The Nucleus

An analogy helps.

One need to go back to biology. Centuries ago, it was thought that a human being originated as an “homunculus”: a human being, just much much smaller. The truth turned out to be different: instead of keeping the same system of idea, genetics and molecular biology brought in completely new systems. The older ones are still around, but they were mostly displaced, or even partly completely replaced, by new systems of ideas.

Similarly, physicists, for centuries, thought that in the physical universe, the smaller one would look, the more one would see just the same thing, space-time with points, ever smaller. Could the small be like the big, just smaller and smaller?

That would have meant that there was no different explanation to the inner working of what we see… From what we see. Looking at the very small would not have provided with a different system of ideas (although looking at a smaller scale had provided with new systems in biology).

Such was the Classical Prejudice: smaller was not supposed to be any different. Yet plenty of phenomena were found that the “small is not any different” view could not explain.

And indeed, nature is not like that. First, Planck found that supposing that light energy was emitted in lumps explained two mysteries (Lord Kevin had called them “dark clouds”). Einstein then explained the photoelectric effect by the reception of light in lumps too.

Jumping further than he should have, he then proposed the hypothesis of “lichtquanten”.

Where did those Planck-Einstein lumps, those “Quanten” come from?

The most natural explanation was waves. In a constrained space, stable waves happen only at some frequencies. This explanation appeared with Bohr, in the constrained spaces around atoms, and was generalized with De Broglie’s Wave Principle”:

“To any particle is associated a guiding wave”.

At that point, Quantum Physics was essentially done: if it was all about waves, the uncertainty principle was obvious.

Next one had to define what a “wave” could be. Well, something given by a wave equation (what else?). Notice the difficulty: wherever we look, it’s not obvious what a wave is (just rolling out the second order partial differential equation used for bow strings will not do; although that works for that, does not make it a general principle, as we are going to see!)

The De Broglie(-“Schrödinger”) equation was just the most obvious candidate, but others appeared, like the relativistic Klein-Gordon.

Dirac rolled out the most general, simplest wave equation, the square root of the most obvious relativistic wave. That first order Dirac equation required a new space, Spinor Space (discovered independently much earlier by the mathematician Elie Cartan in 1913). It predicted a new particle: the anti-electron.

So Quantum Physics is actually the simplest imaginable logic to organize Nature as we have observed it. It’s not “weird”, it’s enlightening.

Notice that I implicitly solved the “Measurement Problem”: the concept of wave is, well wavy, fuzzy (actually, Quantum Waves penetrate walls, to some extent). So we cannot be sure that the “wave-function” we have are really perfectly defined, as a depiction of all what “reality” is, to START WITH (actually there are non-linear, arbitrarily close approximations of the “Schrödinger” equation).

Actually the history of Quantum Physics (and QFT) is a succession of wild guesses about what the wave equations could be. A few of these guesses worked, most of them did not (in many cases because non-linear effects had been neglected, such as “Normalization”).

De Broglie’s “Guiding Wave” class of theories was rejected (erroneously, it turned out) by some arrogant mathematicians. However, very recent experiments showed that some basic Quantum behavior can be duplicated experimentally with waves in fluid mechanics.

Bohm’s approach is just the PARTICULAR case of De Broglie’s general approach; as Bohm was born in the USA, the Anglosphere refers to him, but it’s truly De Broglie who invented the whole thing.

Reintroducing particles, as Bohm does, is throwing the baby with the bath. The bath, and the baby, are made of waves. Nobody said that they have to be linear.

(David Bohm, a physics professor at Princeton, USA born, was thrown out of the USA for… thinking. He was the first one to say that his 1953 theory was just part of De Broglie’s ideas. Bohm pursued his career in Brazil, and then England. In the late 1950s, he discovered the “Bohm-Aharanov effect”, the major fact that potentials were central to Quantum Physics, the very foundation of so-called “Gauge Theories” of Quantum Field Theory. )

And the Quantum is waving out there in many ways, in many spaces, some infinite dimensional. That’s the best realism we have.

It’s more fundamental than space and time, as we classically know them.

The classic picture of the universe was naïve. The Quantum vision changes everything. It provides us with enormously powerful new systems of ideas. It is intrinsically not just multidimensional, but, one could say, multiversal.

Common French wisdom has long proclaimed that :”Il faut de tout pour faire un monde” (One needs everything to make a world”). Philosophical systems embracing this principle are the most opposed to intellectual fascism. Intellectual fascism is the organization of one’s view of reality around a handful of axioms: religious fanaticism for a superstition is the archetype example.

Societies where Il faut de tout pour faire un monde are the most inclusive, and those were the open market of ideas can produce. They allow to make better ideas blossom, and bad ideas fade away.

It is comforting to know that Physics, deep down inside, works just the same.

To each context, its universe, yet, out of many, just one. It takes everything, including all sorts of spaces, to make a world. This is what the Quantum proudly proclaims.

Patrice Ayme’

European Politics: Wall Street Servant

European Politicians Did What Washington & Wall Street Said, As the Obsequious Butlers They Are:  

Europe is made of small nations which feel independent of each other, an entertaining madness. But its corrupt elite has only one master, body and soul, and it’s on the other side of the Atlantic, where the strongest nation rules (the world, mostly through the meek minds of their butlers anxious to please).

EUROPE WILL GIVE BANKERS MORE MONEY, JUST AS IN THE USA:

The European Central Bank will enable member central banks to buy a trillion euros/dollars of assets owned by banks (sovereign, that is, government bonds, mostly). This is called “Quantitative Easing” (QE).

QE buys assets held by banks, to make banks richer. Supposedly credit will then be easier to have for the little guys. The idea is that then everybody will feel richer, when bankers feel better and wealthier. A happy banker is the greatest gift.

We are fully in the logic, and mood, that bankers, and their delicate psyche, make the world turn around.

Make no mistake, as Obama would say: we are still in democracy. Proof? Common citizens are not asked to kneel when bankers pass by on their way to private jets. At least, not yet. What the Commons are asked to believe is that bankers will become interested by their miserable, unworthy, low class plight. Instead of having the bankers send all the money they manage and command, most of the money in the world, to fiscal heavens, financial derivatives, dark pools, and giant above the ground plots, like the Davos World Economic Forum. It is entirely their right, for bankers to provide money wherever they want, to whoever they want, as bankers created the world, and thousands of pet politicians, besides.

This is so true that French president Hollande went to Davos to beg the high financiers to stop financing terrorist networks. It is like asking crocodiles to stop taking care of their young. The financial saurians neither understand what the French are talking about, nor care to, as all they know is biting and gulping furiously.

What QE does, is to remove from bankers the excuse that they do not have enough money. Don’t laugh: bankers own everything, including the notion of seriousness. That’s why satire is not welcome in the USA.

Europe is following the USA, which started an enormous QE as Obama got to power… While preaching austerity, and accusing Europeans to be big spenders addicted to state insured health care (instead of the wonderfully profitable Obamacare).

The same as in the USA, giving bankers money, was done in Great Britain (and that’s why interest on UK’ long bonds are thrice those of France).

By comparison to what the European Central Bank (ECB) is going to do, the TARP inspector in the USA claimed that the Fed provided eight trillions of QE (the Fed says it owns 4 trillion dollars of USA government bonds from the Treasury of the USA… to which it returns billions of interest).

Krugman criticizes Europe to have been “Too Responsible”: “The United States and Europe have a lot in common. Both are multicultural and democratic; both are immensely wealthy; both possess currencies with global reach. Both, unfortunately, experienced giant housing and credit bubbles between 2000 and 2007, and suffered painful slumps when the bubbles burst.

Since then, however, policy on the two sides of the Atlantic has diverged. In one great economy, officials have shown a stern commitment to fiscal and monetary virtue, making strenuous efforts to balance budgets while remaining vigilant against inflation. In the other, not so much.

And the difference in attitudes is the main reason the two economies are now on such different paths. Spendthrift, loose-money America is experiencing a solid recovery … Meanwhile, virtuous Europe is sinking ever deeper into deflationary quicksand; everyone hopes that the new monetary measures announced Thursday will break the downward spiral, but nobody I know really expects them to be enough.”

Neither did the ECB chief, who said exactly that. Clearly, Europe did not create enough money.

Krugman did not explain why, and how, the difference arose, and he is silly to believe that the economy of the USA is now growing at a 5% just because its bankers are bathing in money. Economist are often one trick donkeys, but here Krugman overlooks the obvious: look at the price of energy, look at the tax heaven status of the USA, look at USA monopolies.

EUROPEAN LEADERS ARE SERVANTS OF THE GREAT WALL STREET SPIRIT:

The question is why did American politicians and European politicians behave so differently from each other?

The reason is simple: American politicians are masters, European politicians are servants, or, at best butlers, of the former (Jean-Claude Juncker being an example of the latter sort).

Nowadays, a politician is a professional employed by wealth. She, or he, is like a bookmaker, somebody who takes bets. In this case, the bets are on those policies who will benefit most those who have the money, that is, the power. It’s a delicate thing, made of polls, lies, and taking orders from wealth.

That was completely obvious in France: the ex-fascist, Mitterrand, ran for president on a socialist-communist platform. Once that did not work too well, the Vichysto-resistant president went on a Wall Street compatible program, and France has never looked back since (with disastrous consequences).

Now they teach five year old French children how to do banking (at least my daughter explained that last week). Hey, I guess, she can become a banker too, and get money for nothing. If not that, she can turn to Islamophilia, and make a career talking about big, bad French imperialism, until Wall Street proposes her a job. But I digress…

If France fell in that high finance trap, money for nothing thanks to friendly bankers, you can be sure the rest of Europe did even worse. (Don’t roll out Germany as an example of probity: the success of its expensive cars, I drive one, and its machine tools export was greatly obtained by paying workers salaries as low as one euro an hour… This has just been corrected.)

WE PLUTOCRATS RULE HELL:

The most powerful nation, the USA, is ruthlessly led by its plutocracy. The bubble of 2008 transferred massive winnings from bets by some plutocrats against their peers and against giant money center banks which were public in two ways: on the stock exchanges, and, more importantly, as the organizations in charge of creating most of the money (through the extension of credit).

The bubbles popped. The financial system, throughout the world, was bankrupt. To fix it, the Central Banks enabled the creation of massive new credit (=money), by lowering interest rates to zero. The money center banks were then free to re-enact their previous act, and re-invest massively in financial derivatives, same as before, but now even more.

True, Obama dispersed a few hundred billions of “stimulus”. Much more money went from the Fed to the money center banks, trillions of dollars of it. One started, just as before.

A lot of the wealth of the USA comes from fracking (a gift from god), Wall Street conspiracies, and worldwide tax dodging by giant USA monopolies, all of this with the complicity of the world’s most powerful capitals, Washington and New York.

By pretending otherwise, attributing all the economic splendor of the USA to the wisdom of QE, Krugman is promoting the myth, and the banker.

THE EUROPEAN ELITE IS CORRUPT:

If not corrupt as far as getting money directly (but it does: watch the number of EC commissioners who ended in fancy Wall Street employ), its mind is sure corrupt (they all want to be employed by Wall Street; by the way, lots of French president got lots of money, and not just directly from Wall Street, or the like; an example was torrents of money from Hariri, a Lebanese-Saudi businessman, later exploded by Hezbollah).

Is the European elite culprit? Sure. It was bought into the mood, and money, coming from the USA. So it saw nothing, it wanted to see nothing.

So the European elite saw nothing that what was going on. It did not see the more than 100 billion of tax dodging by USA corporations, through Luxembourg alone. It did not want to see it, so it did not see it. The European elite did not see the Euro which was too high, way too high, maybe twice the vale it deserved against the dollar.

The European elite did not see the cutting of the science budget in Greece by 75%, and the like. The European elite did not see the young people deprived of education, of jobs, of future, of money… The European elite did not want to see European discoveries exploited in Silicon Valley and coming back as tax dodging monopolies. The European elite did not want to see that European energy became twice more expensive than it is in China, or the USA.

All what the European elite has been doing, for 35 years, is to please plutocracy (also known as “liberalism”). Plutocracy central is based in the USA, in the most powerful nation. Thus, in a way, Europe is paying the price of not being master of its own destiny, because, naturally, its elite politicians go to serve the richest masters, with the biggest army, and those are based in the USA.

(The USA’s wealth has much to do with being the owner of a giant expanse of temperate real estate, immensely rich in all ways; it’s not all about today’s conspiracies.)

So the USA got the best policy, not because the Americans are the smartest, but because they are the masters.

The Europeans are “much too responsible”, because they are, fundamentally, servants, and servants have to be responsible. Servants of their masters in the USA, one rung below the servants there.

Will Europe revolt?

Maybe it will. Maybe it will wake up from its Wall Streetophilia, Washingtonophilia, Islamophilia, and Europhobia, which has masochistically affected it al too long.

The satirical, thus critical, core of Europe is France, and France got a number of jolts. The last of which left not just the president of the USA pretty cool, but even officially disingenuously spiteful of Europe’s alleged lack of inclusivity.

The French Republic is under attack, and maybe it is what it will take. France, with her welfare state, under attack, may remember who created Al Qaeda. France may remember that Wall Street and other vast chunks of USA plutocracy are not her friends… Ever since they financed Hitler in the 1920s and 1930s. Or even before that.

The adviser of president Wilson proposed an alliance to the Kaiser on June 1, 1914; said alliance was crucial to said Kaiser, in the first three year of the war. That such facts are not in Franco-British (or German!) history books is very telling. It means official history has a Washington bias. (Sponsored by the same people who brought you Islamophilia, and decry European colonialism! Never mind that Europe’s largest colony is the USA itself!)

France told the European Commission (EC) that she will disregard the deficit limits (as the UK, did, long ago, by the way). Now the EC says it’s a great idea.

Bring the Euro down to 80 cents on the dollar, or lower. Institute deficit spending… until interest rates climb back up (they are down to nearly one half of one percent in France, negative in Switzerland). Rearm. Yes, rearm. That’s where hope lays. Following the poisonous, Trojan Horse advice from Washington, for Europe to lay on her back and present her soft belly, is only the path to gloom and doom.

And please do not restrict the financing of Europe to QE, Wall Street style. American corporations ought to pay tax, effective immediately. Just sequester 10% of their revenues, and, if they don’t like it, they can go back where they come from. Arresting all the high financiers who finance terrorists would be also helpful. One should put them in the same quarters as the Salafists: they could preach to each other their versions of hell on Earth.

Patrice Ayme’

IS LIFE ALL ABOUT THE QUANTUM?

Far From Being Absurd, Life May Be A Quantum Force That Gets Ever More Complex

The most striking feature of the Quantum is that, by doing something somewhere, one can change the state of something else, somewhere else. Einstein found this “spooky”. Philosophically, it just says that, whatever the universe is about, it’s not about old fashion “points”, as found in old fashion mathematics.

This “Quantum Entanglement” and the related, yet diluted “Quantum Discord” constitute the true architecture of the universe. This revelation ought to impact everything. Not just philosophy, but also psychology.

I propose the following. Life, its gathering complexity, adaptability, progress, ethology, meaning, are all animated by the very nature of the Quantum. It’s neither weird, nor absurd, it’s a force that proceeds.

Let me backtrack a bit.

“There is only one really serious philosophical problem,” Camus says in his book, The Myth of Sisyphus, “and that is suicide. Deciding whether or not life is worth living is to answer the fundamental question in philosophy. All other questions follow from that.”

What does this mean? Not much. Besides the admission that apparently much of Camus’ life was absurd. Camus should have done like Nietzsche, and go climb mountains solo. There, as Nietzsche did, he would have found meaning.

One does not decide if life is worth living, most of the time, because, most of the time, life is not a choice. One does chose to breathe. One breathes. When one is thirsty, one drinks, and so on. There is a mechanical aspect to animals, who are machines which live. Most of the time, an animal’s systems are on automatic, best described by inertia.

Animals find meaning by experiencing the life that they are made for.

Recent studies have shown that young lions get neurological damage, if they don’t chew hard on tough flesh. Being a lion is meant to be tough, to be fulfilling. Camus and company lived too soft, in their hour of glory.

Lamarck believed that two forces acted on evolution. One had to do with adapting to the environment, the other was the “Pouvoir de Vie”. This “Life Power” brought increasing complexity to biological evolution. It goes without saying that it is observed. It is an open question whether life started on Mars (it probably did). What is clear, though, is that fortunes are spent to sterilize landers sent to other planets (including the Moon), because exobiologists are worried that today’s Earth life would take over: Earth life has become so complex, it can adapt to what space can throw at it.

This “Life Power” made reductionists spiteful, because they saw no science based reason for it. However, if they had been smarter, they would have seen it that it was a fact. They knew too much Classical and Thermo Dynamics… While the true nature of Quantum Physics was hidden by the siren song of the Copenhagen Interpretation.

Quantum Physics depends upon law (unfortunately, that “law” varies; it can be an infuriatingly parachuted wave equation, or another, or, more generally in the “Standard Model”, some manipulation of a hyper complicated Laplacian; in any case, it has to do with waves… Non-linear waves, in the general case!), initial conditions, and also the final space (a Hilbert space generated by eigenstates). This makes Quantum Mechanics somewhat teleological, an inconceivable horror for the classic-mechanical minded.

It means the Quantum looks far ahead, and everywhere, as if it were a god in the machine. It is a god, the god, in the machine…

The final space for genes is the environment. Genes are Quantum machines (a bit like Turing machines, but operated by the Quantum). This interaction between the genetic machinery and the environment means that we have a Quantum mechanism for fast adaptation to the environment.

Someday, soon, Quantum Biology may well become the queen of sciences… Ruling even mathamatics.

But not only this. The Quantum force operates through Quantum Entanglement… Entanglement creates a complexity at a distance, and that complexity propagates, as the Quantum Entanglement does.

So it is as if life progressed by extending Quantum tendrils in all spaces that it can reach, and it can reach a lot. There is Lamarck’ Life Power, there is the increasing complexity, and there is progress. If biology itself progresses, at fortiori culture, the minds’ tendrils.

Why was Camus so obsessed by absurdity? Because he got surrounded by absurdity. He came from a dirt poor environment in Algeria, and, in exchange for valor and work, was given everything by the Republic. This testimony, a celebration of human rights and equal opportunity, was then confronted to “intellectuals” who inverted, and buried all these values… In their names. Camus was told to follow Comrade Stalin, instead. When he begged to differ, he is called a colonial racist.

What is teleology? It’s the logic of the ends, the logic of purposes, logic at a distance. Socrates believed in it. Plato and Aristotle had their own versions. During the Enlightenment, dominated , and inspired as it was by Classical Mechanics, teleology got assimilated to the discredited Christian god, and fell into contempt.

We know more now, and we can afford different, more sophisticated teleologies. I claim that life is teleological, because it evolves not just haphazardly (“stochastically”), but also teleologically (thanks to Quantum Physics, which provides eyes and a feeling… for what is going on at a distance).

Teleology at the level of hydrogen bonds? Most probably (surprise, surprise). Modify the DNA’s environment, and Quantum Computational pressure is exerted on DNA’s hydrogen bonds (among other bonds). Thus the DNA  will evolve much faster than (classical “Darwinian”) haphazard mutations would have it.  It is such an obvious mechanism that evolution is bound to have selected for it. Life’s little secret is the Quantum!

Experiments are planned. All this will be probably viewed as obvious, all along, within ten years.

What this teleology does is to make life ever more adapted and ever more adaptable. If one measures progress by adaptability, progress there has been, as adaptability has progressed.

Philosophically, it means that, in the deepest sense, life, thanks to the Quantum, is behaving as if it were making value judgments. For example, at the molecular level, lowest energy solutions can be evaluated, and selected.

What is the aim of that teleology? Survival of the life form adapting. A question which immediately surges, is what is life? One thing that is clear, though, is the definition of goodness. For a give lifeform, that means survival of said lifeform. So, naturally enough, goodness will vary according to species, but also tribes, and even individuals.

So let the biggest goodness, and the goodness of the strongest lifeform win (as Nietzsche insisted… and this is the way life always has had it… as Nietzsche himself pointed out, following Sade, who was even clearer!)

Experiments in ethology are starting to test this (EJ Winner ought to consider them! ;-)). Basic psychology, such as a sense of fairness, have obvious survival values in social species such as primates.

Intelligence is also teleological. Philosophically, one can argue that intelligence, and even culture, are an extension of the adaptability of life at the nanometer scale, harnessing the Quantum. The extension probably uses the same Quantum machinery that starts to be put in evidence at the molecular level (say in the chlorophyll molecule).

If Homo Is Aware, Is the Universe Aware? It’s a bit like the question of pondering whether a planet harboring life is alive, or not. Earth is certainly alive, because life enables the very conditions on Earth that enable of its on-going existence, so far. The advent of oxygen producing lifeforms enabled the progress of complexity, hence the apparition of intelligence and advanced ethology of the conscious type.

Speaking of this, a question naturally arises: what is the definition of life? Life, so far, has no definition. The greatest minds have been left speechless.

Considering the preceding, clearly, such a definition will have to involve the Quantum, and Entanglement, besides reproduction. Crystals, and Quasi-crystals can reproduce an Entanglement architecture, but they are intensely boring.  They can be described by just one equation.

Life is any Quantum Entanglement architecture which can approximately self-reproduce and adapt while being described by a potentially growing set of equations.

Probably, we are aspects of the Entanglements and Delocalization that the Quantum is capable of, at least in a little corner of the universe. We don’t need no Sisyphus: we can operate on it, at a distance.

Spooky, admittedly, but that’s what we are.

All these revelations  change the overall mood towards the purpose of life. Life is not absurd, it simply is a growing, entangled complexity, our morality and intelligence, hopes, meaning, and consciousness are entangled with it. But the solutions we cling to, all too long, can well be, indeed, all too disjointed, point-wise, disconnected, and thoroughly absurd.

Equally clearly, the (meta, or final!) solution is to have all the absurdities gobbled up by life itself.

Patrice Ayme’