Greek Crisis, Or Greed Crisis?

“The Awesome Gratuitousness of the Greek Crisis” bemoans Paul Krugman. Really? Is not that a bit naïve? How does that fit with converting the Drachma at twice the rate, or Lagarde changing her music, after the Greeks had accepted her conditions? Does not it all look at a different plan of the “Deep State”? Like having just one boss, supposedly located in a White House?

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/the-awesome-gratuitousness-of-the-greek-crisis/

Indeed, my dear Paul Krugman, the exact chronology of events makes one rather believe that [IMF Director Lagarde] is following her usual pattern: doing what she’s told to do, and taking the heat, as Dominique Deux, an esteemed commenter on this site, puts it. Dominique’s profession involves him with this sort of people, he is in a good position to know.

So is it a case that: “There are horrible people who, instead of solving a problem, tangle it up and make it harder to solve for anyone who wants to deal with it. Whoever does not know how to hit the nail on the head should be asked not to hit it at all.”

[Friedrich Nietzsche The Wanderer and His Shadow, aphorism 326, 1880.]

Well, I don’t think so. The Drachma was deliberately converted at twice its rate. Everybody knew it at the time. That was clearly a time bomb.

***

Paul Krugman’s Analysis Of The Raw Data, I Agree With:

“I’ve been looking back at the numbers, readily available from the IMF, and what strikes me is how relatively mild Greek fiscal problems looked on the eve of crisis.

In 2007, Greece had public debt of slightly more than 100 percent of GDP — high, but not out of line with levels that many countries including, for example, the UK have carried for decades and even generations at a stretch. It had a budget deficit of about 7 percent of GDP. If we think that normal times involve 2 percent growth and 2 percent inflation, a deficit of 4 percent of GDP would be consistent with a stable debt/GDP ratio; so the fiscal gap was around 3 points, not trivial but hardly something that should have been impossible to close.

Now, the IMF says that the structural deficit was much larger — but this reflects its estimate that the Greek economy was operating 10 percent above capacity, which I don’t believe for a minute.”

And Krugman concludes that:

“So yes, Greece was overspending, but not by all that much. It was over indebted, but again not by all that much. How did this turn into a catastrophe that among other things saw debt soar to 170 percent of GDP despite savage austerity?

The euro straitjacket, plus inadequately expansionary monetary policy within the eurozone, are the obvious culprits. But that, surely, is the deep question here. If Europe as currently organized can turn medium-sized fiscal failings into this kind of nightmare, the system is fundamentally unworkable.”

Well, the system was revealed to be unworkable, thanks to the 2008 financial crisis. States were asked to come in, and replenish banks stolen by plutocrats. Meanwhile, the taxing authority and capability of states had been stolen by the likes of Jean-Claude Junckers:

***

I Stole, Thus I lead:

The president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Junckers, speaks of “betrayal” (“trahison” in his native French). He should know about betrayal. Whereas the semi-mythical Corleone in the movie “The Godfather” stole millions, Junckers helped to steal directly hundreds of billions of Euros, and, indirectly, trillions.

When the Euro was conceived by Jacques Delors and his colleagues, it was supposed to stand on two legs, one financial, one economic. However, jealous national governments decided to do away with the economic leg. Only after the 2008 financial crisis was reluctantly built a partial banking union (with mutual insurance and inspection of the biggest banks).

In Greece, as elsewhere, governments saved failing banks with public funds. However, in Greece, the real deficit was higher than the official one, and Greece needed a supplementary help from foreign institutions such as the ECB, EC, and IMF (the “Troika”).

The Troika provided enough rope with its help, to hang Greece with, thanks to “austerity” measures.

***

Let’s Vote NO To Plutocrats and Their Obsequious Servants:

Here is Paul Krugman again:

….”acceding to the troika’s ultimatum would represent the final abandonment of any pretense of Greek independence. Don’t be taken in by claims that troika officials are just technocrats explaining to the ignorant Greeks what must be done. These supposed technocrats are in fact fantasists who have disregarded everything we know about macroeconomics, and have been wrong every step of the way. This isn’t about analysis, it’s about power — the power of the creditors to pull the plug on the Greek economy, which persists as long as euro exit is considered unthinkable.”

Indeed.

The ECB, the IMF and European “leaders” are not incompetent. They are extremely powerful, and thus extremely corrupt. What use is their absolute power, if they do not show they can use it absolutely? Should not they engage in the hard work plutocrats and banksters have entrusted them with? Otherwise why should they, or their relations, get rewarded when they come out?

What they want to hide is the nature of the financial crisis, and thus the nature of finance.

“Austerity” is another word for the plutocratization banksters have increasingly brought, over the last few decades. They define the rules, they write the laws. They are indignant that the Greeks vote, because the Greek elite ought to be mature enough to feel that Democracy, Demos-Kratos, People Power, is just a mask for the power of the few and well connected.

There is no reason for austerity whatsoever, if one lived in democracy.

Verily, there is plenty of money out there, among the filthy rich, and plenty of capacity to make money, as needed for We The People. What is in short supply is the will to provide money for We The People.

Alain Bauer, a top, world class criminologist who does not teach only in France but also overseas, for example China, Singapore, estimates that the total money hidden in tiny tax havens amounts to 70 trillion dollars. Even more money is hidden in plain sight, thanks to Delaware and Great Britain (the famous “Non-Doms”), and shell companies.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/07/06/usa-financial-extortion/

***

Money Creation Is Diverted To Plutocrats, By Plutocrats:

It’s not different from Stalinism, fundamentally!

Even more money is created by the banks for financial derivative trading. The size of that trade, somewhere out there on planet finance is more than ten times world GDP (so it’s around 800 trillion dollars). How come most of the money created is created for the richest, by the richest?

Don’t forget that banks are given a public mandate to create most of the money. So, in a sense, bankers ought to be just what they are: public employees, the modern equivalent of those who struck coins for the government in the three thousand years prior.

It frequently happens in history that minor events act like the proverbial snowball. This, clearly, maybe one such case. It is, in particular, the IMF, based in Washington, last I checked, which is pulling the plug.

What is Washington doing in what ought to be internal European affairs? Well, demolishing a financially independent Europe. Agents of the USA such as the head of the ECB, Draghi, will be happy to oblige. Draghi got his Phd at MIT, and was later  vice-chairman at Goldman-Sachs a Financial Uber Conspiracy Katastrophe (with a telling acronym).

What could go wrong? Last time there was a catastrophe of financial type, banksters lost the banks’ money to plutocrats, and We The People was asked to reimburse the banks. Thus, overall, the wealthiest people and organizations came out of it even richer.

Now the Greeks are refusing to obey, and get ever poorer with their own agreement. Time for another catastrophe? If well done, the rich ought to get even richer. With a little bit of help from their friends at the ECB, IMF, EU, EC, and all these strings pulled from Washington and New York, etc.

http://baselinescenario.com/2010/03/15/senator-kaufman-fraud-still-at-the-heart-of-wall-street/

We have different hearts than those of Wall Street, and it is exactly what the Greeks are now showing for all to see.

Patrice Ayme’

Selection Of The Dirtiest

Plutocratic Circus Blossoms As Greek Tragedy

It was not supposed to happen, but a woman in Washington, who used to head one of the world’s largest law firm in Chicago, closed all banks in Greece for a week, and made it so that Greek families now live on fifty Euros a day.

Is that democracy? Who elected that woman? Nobody. More exactly, a handful of guys, talking to each other behind closed doors. But not all is lost. Look at her superiorly tailored suit, her little diamonds, her pearl necklace. She belongs to the well dressed, Wall Street style elite.

A Face Of Evil: Wall Street Fascist Devices In Control Of Europe

[International Monetary Fund (IMF) executive director Christine Lagarde attends a news conference at the end of a Eurogroup meeting at the European Council building in Brussels, March 25, 2013. Elegant fox presides over the hens, to mandate their future.]

A gallery of abominable crooks who give themselves airs decides how to make an example of Greece. Hey, the Porto-Rico governor just announced Porto-Rico was not that rich, and its debt could not be repaid (proportionally, it’s higher than Greece’s). Quick, let’s starve to death a few Greeks! Kindly,  Paul Krugman in “Greece Over Brink” calls the monsters who preside over us “fantasists”.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/29/opinion/paul-krugman-greece-over-the-brink.html?

I will stick to the truth, as I have no reason to spare corrupt crooks who abuse their powers. Differently from Krugman, I don’t have to be polite with these sadistic monsters.

Some may raise an eyebrow: am I not overly critical against a particular individual? Yes, for cause: my scathing critique is directed to a particular criminal behavior. I have no problem hating particular individuals, such as Hitler and his ilk.

Condemning people for crimes they engaged in is the exact opposite from hating people for no good reason, such as where they come from.

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely:

Why did the Eurozone bring the International Monetary Fund based in Washington, half a mile from the White House, into what ought to have been an internal European affair? Was it to make sure that Washington would rule the Eurozone?

Does that sound counter-intuitive? Not at all. It is something completely natural. The top European leaders are, or have been, all agents, top operators in, or completely obsessed by the American system.

It’s clear that Greece cannot pay the monumental debt it incurred when money was given to banks. And here the IMF has behaved atrociously: after the Greek government accepted all conditions last week, unbelievably the IMF came up with new orders, such as augmenting the Added Value Tax, higher up. Such an VAT strikes everybody, including the poorest of the poor. The standard rate of VAT in Greece is 23%. (Compare with California’s 10% sales tax!)

Christine Lagarde thinks the Greeks are children. But, when she was offering hundreds of millions Euros of public money to plutocrook Bernard Tapie, she did not mind to deal with a child. Why?

Probably because she is corrupt. Corrupt, some of the naive will say, smirking. Does not corruption imply giving money? Show me the money, and they cackle smugly. However, money is power, absolute money is absolute power, and it corrupts absolutely. Lagarde, an ex competitive swimmer, has enormous power, given to her by other politicians, themselves elected from, and by, money.

http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/jun/25/greek-crisis-20-key-moments-eurozone

Actually, it’s not a probability, but a certainty: absolute power corrupts absolutely. Lagarde, although the prime villain this week, is closely followed by the head of the EC, one of the world’s greatest engineers of corruption, ever, and the German finance minister (yes, someone already shot that one, that’s why he is in a wheelchair).

***

Financial Terror Feeds Terrorism In General:

Muslim terrorism is, first of all, an intellectual phenomenon: terrorists just read a book written by generals in a time so primitive, the Arabic language did not fully exists, in written form. However terrorism is (partly) motivated, not just by the manipulations of plutocrats, but also by a legitimate rage against plutocracy.

Plutocrats know no bounds, such is their cruel nature. They belong to the most horrendous aspects of mythology. Indeed, the victimization of Greece is a case in point. Some of the most horrendous creatures are on the front stage, pontificating, making up stories that will be remembered for centuries.

Plutocrats hated Alexis Tsipras, the new Greek PM. They had to make him fail. Just when he had agreed to violate a bit the mandate under which he had been elected (his party, Syriza, controls 156 seats in Parliament), Lagarde and her abominable muses, sprang the trap: they asked for more from the (basically) innocent people of Greece. Specifically, they wanted an even higher VAT, as if 23% were not enough.

This, from crooks who fly in private jets.

Somer people will say that someone like Lagarde went from swimmer to head of the IMF on merit. There is another possibility, though: look at Heinrich Himmler. Did he get up there, at the head of the SS, on merit? Not really. Even fellow Nazis admitted he was not that bright (and joked that his brains was Reinhart Heydrich).  Himmler got up there because he was willing to do the dirtiest work.

In the end, Himmler, to advance himself in the rather difficult circumstances of the collapse and invasion of the Third Reich, had to save thousands of Jews (in cooperation with the Swedes, who were also anxious to paint themselves as the opposite of what they had been). Himmler did what it took to advance himself. Whatever it was. If it meant kissing and making up with the Jews, so be it.

So did Stalin: he used to rob banks, with maximum violence, at the head of a gang. So does Lagarde and her ilk. Such individuals will do whatever it takes to advance themselves. That’s why so many “leaders” got where everybody could look up to them. That’s why, and how, they ended, ordering tens of millions. It is the SELECTION OF THE DIRTIEST. Oligarchies all need goons to do the dirty work, just as they need janitors. The dirtiest goons take the decisions, their masters, the plutocrats, smile. The world we have.

Patrice Ayme’

To Preserve Civilization, Exterminate Fanaticism

Fanatic comes from the Roman “fanum”, the temple. Thus, a fanatic is one from the temple. I let fanatics comment on my site: it’s important to know how the minds of the deranged work. So one of those who thinks that they should fight for that weakling, god, claimed that: “… you said in your other articles you wanted to exterminate Muslims…”

I, of course, never said such a thing, be it only because this would be extremely against the law in many countries. This lie is an example of the old method of aggression known as “who wants to drown his dog accuses it of the rabies.”

I, of course, never said that I wanted to exterminate all Muslims, be it only because this would be extremely against the law in many countries. Saudi Arabia has decapitated people for much less than that. And Pakistan condemned individuals to death for just telling truths about the so-called “Prophet“. Moreover, I do not think such a thing: I had very close friends, and even teachers, who were Muslims, and so on. Somewhat observant Muslim friends watch over my little daughter (I don’t mind she can’t eat pork when they feed her…)

Thousands Of Mosques Are Among World’s Most Beautiful Art. Blue Mosque, Istanbul

This is simpler than the distinction between “state” and “particle” which has confused physicists. Islam is a system of thought. (Or, rather: various versions of Islam are systems of thought.) “Muslims” are individuals, and millions of them believe in god roughly as much as I do, that is, not at all.

Wanting to exterminate literal interpretations of “Islam” is, not just allowed, but honorable: that is what “Christians” did to hard core “Christianism”.

When fanatics claim others profer rabidly hateful, unlawful statements, they are actually trying to motivate, and justify, their own rabid rage.

***

The problem with Islam is simple:

the Qur’an has around 83,000 words. However, in the following post, the author has isolated hundreds of verses of the Qur’an, for a total of around 10,000 words, calling for violent acts, many of them most gruesome:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/06/22/some-violence-in-holy-quran/

I have quoted some of the verses in the Qur’an before, complete with all references, and the magazine “The Economist” then censored the posts, as it claimed they “violated guidelines“. That “The Economist” considers that the Qur’an ought to be censored, speaks volumes. Now “The Economist” pretends to have something to say on the subject: “First, Do No Harm” (it’s better than their old Politically Correct, insipid, anti-civilizational and despicable positions).

Similar calls to violence exists in the Bible, which inspired the Qur’an. However, around 400 CE, the so-called “Fathers of the Church” decided that such statements were allegorical, and metaphorical (still the question was debated for another 13 centuries, and many were burned alive, when the Church insisted that “scripture” had to be taken seriously!)

So what to do? Certainly shut down all religious establishments and preachers who do not present the material in the Qur’an as allegorical and metaphorical.

Tunisia took such measures today, closing scores of mosques where a literal interpretation of the Qur’an was made.

Another important point to be made is that it is the West itself, or more exactly its dark operators, all the way to the president of the USA in 1945, which encouraged violent, literal interpretations of the Qur’an, in the apparent hope of dividing Muslims, and manipulating them.

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/01/29/great-bitter-lake/

An example is that the CIA and its colleagues pushed, financed and armed Khomeini and his Shias to revolt against the Iranian Parliament in 1953. The bloody coup enabled to institute there Reza Pahlavi ‘s absolute and torturous monarchy. No wonder Khomeini viewed the USA as the “Great Satan”.

Hence, if the (supposedly secular) West stopped flattering Islam obsequiously (as Obama did) to just then bomb its strictest adherents (as Obama does), that would constitute a measure of progress.

Secularism is the religion of doing our best now, according to the science, technology, and understanding we have. It is millions of year old. It is the attitude which propelled human evolution. It is the natural religion of man.

Islamism, like Christianism and Judaism which inspired it, is a fascist religion. It is focused on the myth of a (quasi) omnipotent, jealous and furious god in the sky, who is a murdeorous maniac. According to the Bible, in the so-called “Ancient Testament”, god is furious against King David of Israel, because the latter refused to exterminate an entire people. God had told David to exterminate that People, and David refused. So what does “god” do? God tortures to death David’s son, for a week, just to punish King David.

With a god like that, who needs rabid dogs?

Of course that ideology, Abrahamism, justifies all and any fascist method: if the Great Leader orders you to kill your child, you must immediately obey, and all Muslims are supposed to celebrate Abraham’s abject and murderous superstition, every year.

Justifying fascism of the worst type is the bottom line of Abrahamism. Abrahamism is an embarrassingly primitive religion. Make no mistake: sometimes, it’s optimal. It’s thanks to that crazed ideology, perfect for making armies of fanatics, that, in a few years, Muhammad and his followers, were able to carve the world’s largest empire. Neither the Romans, nor the Persians, were ready for seeing the wounded being exterminated on the battlefield (Arab women did this, accompanying the initial 40,000 men Islamist army). Rome and Persia were caught by complete surprise by the ferocity of Arab Muslim warriors, and that allowed the latter to succeed.

So today’s ferocity is nothing new. When three massive Islamist invasions of Francia happened between 712 CE and 745 CE, the Franks reciprocated in kind: after the battle of Poitier (732 CE), they let all their slain enemies, thousands of Muslims, rot in the sun, refusing them burial.

Ferocity can only be defeated by a greater ferocity: just ask the Nazis. Earth is now a village, and it has no place for maniacal fascism. Ignoring this fact all too long, will only make the situation worse.

Two days ago, a solitary student walking on the beach with a sun umbrella, revealed his weapons, and proceeded to kill and wound 80 people in seven minutes. (Videos showed he had been trained by the Islamist State.) The next day, the Tunisian government closed down 80 mosques teaching literal Islam.

In the Eight Century, the Franks, who, by then, called themselves the “Europeans”, responding to the Islamist invasions, nationalized the Catholic church, and then forced all and any religious establishment to teach secular knowledge; thus the West rests on secular intervention by the government. And that does not mean to put ; nice to see Tunisia emulating that example.

Literal interpretations of Islam ought to be made unlawful. As the Christian ones already, de facto, are.

As simple as that.

Patrice Ayme’

No Multiverse, No Teleportation. Yet Quantum Consciousness?

There is a flaw, at the very root of the definition of the Multiverse:

Multiverse partisans believe anything, any physics, is possible. However if such is the case, among those possibilities, the universe is one of them. But then, if the Universe exists, there is just one universe, and the Multiverse can’t be!

Logic is a terrifying thing for those who have too little…

[The preceding is actually the latest variant, thanks to yours truly, of the 25 centuries old Cretan Paradox.]

We are led by some physicist who, not only have little knowledge, and little imagination, but they don’t have much logic, either! We look up to physics, because we look up to intellectual, or, more precisely, logical, scientific leadership. Prominent statements about the “Multiverse” or “Teleportation”, though, go the other way.

“Teleportation” Is About States, Not Particles. Nothing Simplistic!

In one of the world’s major science museum, instruction is conducted for children between the age of 4 and 94 years old. Somewhere above the mastodonts and triceratops’ fossils is an special exhibition of the science of science-fiction.

An exhibit was about “teleportation”. There I was informed that particles had been successfully “teletransported” by “scientists” already.

I was so pleased to be informed of this that I teletransported all those who believe such inanities to a mental asylum.

They make a drastic mistake: confusing “particle” and “state”.

Particles cannot be “teletransported”. To pretend otherwise is a complete affabulation. What can be “teletransported” are Quantum States.

http://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-quantum-teleported-a-particle-of-light-across-25-kilometreshttp://www.sciencealert.com/physicists-have-quantum-teleported-a-particle-of-light-across-25-kilometres

The staff of Sciencealerts, 22 September, 2014, used the following banner: “Physicists have quantum teleported a particle of light across 25 kilometres.”

No, they did not. They teleported the state of a third photon.

This sort of confusion goes to the core of the mental retardation in which physics has spent most of the Twentieth Century. I pointed out that it originated with Einstein. Einstein made the following statement, which I view as an extreme error:

“Energy, during the propagation of a ray of light, is not continuously distributed over steadily increasing spaces, but it consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING and capable of being absorbed or generated only as entities.”

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/26/einsteins-error-the-multiverse/

That opinion of Einstein  above,  “the propagation of a ray of light… consists of a finite number of energy quanta LOCALIZED AT POINTS IN SPACE, MOVING WITHOUT DIVIDING” is complete affabulation, a fantasy. Yes, I know, Einstein got the Nobel Prize in Physics for it, and, thus, by saying this, I do not just grab Einstein by the horns, but the entire physics establishment. As Martin Luther would say, though, I see no other way…

I affabulate, and fantasized too, most often. However, when I do, while searching for truth, I try to respect known, well-established facts. In 1905, Einstein could imagine things about photons the way he did. Why not? It was natural: from Lucretius to Newton, most thinkers believed in particles. Particles were supposed to be the ultimate atoms of matter (atom means, in Greek, what cannot be divided).

However, since then, facts have intervened. The “particle” hypothesis became untenable. Indeed, the particular effect, how,  the Quantum shows up, is only how the energy of fundamental processes is released. In complete conflict, how the fundamental process proceeds is all about waves.

Einstein himself, after talking extensively about this with the (physicist and) philosopher Karl Popper, came to write the “EPR” paper… what is now called TELEPORTATION.

Einstein called this teleportation of states a “spooky interaction at a distance“. In truth, it’s an obvious consequence that fundamental processes are computed with waves, and waves are, by definition, NON-LOCAL.

***

Quantum Computing: What’s the Difference, And How Conscious Is It?

Present computing is similar to computing with water canals, one primitive manipulation at a time. Quantum Computing will be about computing with the interferences waves bring.

For more on Quantum Waves:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/04/05/quantum-wave/

And there a quandary is presented: Quantum behavior has much in common with the attributes of consciousness. Thus a full computer may well behave unpredictably, and as if it had consciousness, but also, truly, be conscious. We wouild be not just facing Artificial Intelligence, but Artificial Consciousness.

Skynet may not just acquire control, but be sentient…

This, I do believe, is a real “danger”. Working on the Quantum Computer, is working on Artificial Consciousness. However, the proximal danger is that the aura of contagious stupidity has infected what passes for political leadership. To with European “leaders”, leading into the abyss, because the Greek leader has decided to submit the latest austerity measures to a referendum by the Greek People.

Does not the Greek Prime Minister know that the People does not rule? Demo-cracy = Demos Kratos, People Power. Not what we have. How come the Prime Minister of Greece does not know the basics of the corrupto-world we live in? Democracy is just a word polite people of wealth and taste use to mask plutocracy.

The Greeks want a referendum on whether they want to suffer some more? Unforgivable. So negotiations of the worthies with uppity Greece are interrupted. The CE chief, J-C Junkers is little more than a polyglot Mafioso, having managed the tax evasion of hundreds of billions of Euros of hundreds of companies, when he “led” Luxembourg. Now he can talk tough.

Insanity in physics has shown the way to insanity in politics and ethics. Inspired by the Schrodinger cat who is supposed to be both dead and alive, our great leaders thought they could get away with being all about money, and all about the people. If you don’t like this universe, go live in another.

(OK, maybe our great political leaders do not know enough physics to think this consciously; however the little critters who advise them, and write their discourses for them have themselves friends who feel they are very smart, and that physics says one can be all things to all people, at the same time. So the pernicious influence of mad physics go far, that way. And it has penetrated ethics, indeed.)

Even the Pope has noticed that supposedly refined economics, such as “cap and trade” (a European invention now used in California) were obviously inspired by the Devil. He condemned them. But, nowadays, like Schrodinger’s Cat, our great leaders imagine they can be the Devil and the Good Lord at the same time, in different places, and we will still embrace their feet religiously, our hearts frantic with unbounded admiration.

Time to cut the Gordian knot, with a very sharp sword. A sword cannot cut the universe in two (as the naïve Multiversists believe), but it can certainly cut the crap. And teletransport minds to a state closer to reality.

Patrice Ayme’

Should The Most Violent Society Lead?

“International” authorities keep pressuring Greece to conform to “austerity“. But what does “international” mean? It means the domineering socio-economic order, inspired by? Inspired by violence. As I will show.

The basic story of the present Greek tragedy is the following: (some) plutocrats stole (gigantic amounts of) money from their accomplices the banksters. States and institutions (IMF, ECB, Fed, etc.) then stepped in, and replenished the banks which their own management, banksters, and plutocrats had just stolen. No attempt was made to recover the money from the plutocrats who had stolen the, now apparently, but not really, ruined, plutocrats (pulling the strings from behind).

Then the governments and said “international” institutions turned around and asked the Greek Public to compensate for all the money those worthies had given to the banks. The same request was made everywhere, thus all sorts of budgets, from social services, to defense, to fundamental research, were slashed (even in the USA; the big exception is… China, where bankers toe the line fixed by the state more carefully).

This replenishment of the banksters by the Public was, and is, the world’s greatest fraud, ever perpetrated. It’s closely related to the following. Where did the money go?

70 trillion dollars (70,000 billion dollars) of stolen money rest in Tax Havens (source: Alain Bauer, a renowned world criminologist). Not even counting the hidden money in the world’s two largest tax havens, Britain (Great or not), and the USA.

The worthies, our great leaders,  having bought their own elections, know the ropes… Or know enough about the ropes, not to ask too many questions. Clearly this situation, overall, this gigantic conspiracy, this cover-up, is, all together, an act of the greatest violence.

Could it be related to the enormous violence of the country which leads this show? Here are some international comparisons; the USA leads in violence:

USA Violence Is Not Just About Guns. Jail, God, & Paying For Everything Is Also Part of It.

[Homicide by guns is just one metric of violence in the USA; there are worse ones, such as having to fork out 100K for a university education with the elite. Interestingly, there are no national statistics, in the USA, on police violence; judicial violence can be measured, by the millions which “justice” processes… violently; no such luck with those police processes… Or should we say, dispatches?]

Violence is both cause and consequence, feeding on itself. Violence is not just about killing people. Incarcerating them is also violent. Even The Economist recently observed that the USA was “Jail Nation”. Having a violent God, accepting money rules all, including elections, is also part of the violence.

No less than 8 million citizens of the USA are either in jail, or under suspended sentences, probation, etc. In a society with that much legal (and thus, police) violence it is only natural that it spills all over.

My point? Who controls, who has built, most of the world’s institutions? The USA (observe the dollar as the world’s reserve currency, and where the IMF and the World Bank sit: not even half a mile from the White House). So, if the ideology and practice of the USA is impregnated with violence, it’s an ideology of violence which controls everything, and especially economic theory.

Even Academia is hyper violent in the USA; to attend Harvard what you need is beaucoup bucks. Harvard and the like cost around 100,000 dollars a year. That’s why I call them “plutocratic universities“.

Obama himself pointed out last week that the homicidal rate in the USA is 49 times that of France. That’s satanic. I know many Americans are bad, but do they deserve to be eliminated at 50 times the rate of Frenchmen?

Homicides, guns and violence are related markers, and marks of society. There is a relationship with the Human Development Index. Notice, in all these comparisons, that small countries don’t really matter. Comparing republics such as France and the USA has meaning: both are republics, both have independent defense systems, and worldwide empires (France controls nearly 11 million square kilometers, the USA nearly double this).

However, a small poodle such as Sweden will follow the orders Washington gives, and Luxembourg, with less than 1% of the population of France, and no industry, but for corruption, follow the wishes of all and any plutocrat.

Main article: List of countries by inequality-adjusted HDI

The Inequality-adjusted Human Development Index (IHDI)^[9] is a “measure of the average level of human development of people in a society once inequality is taken into account.”

Note: The green arrows (), red arrows (), and blue dashes () represent changes in rank. The changes in rank are not relative to the HDI list above, but are according to the source (p. 168) calculated with the exclusion of countries which are missing IHDI data.

1.  Norway 0.891 ()
2.  Australia 0.860 ()
3.  Netherlands 0.854 ( 1)
4.   Switzerland 0.847 ( 3)
5.  Germany 0.846 ()
6.  Iceland 0.843 ( 2)
7.  Sweden 0.840 ( 4)
8.  Denmark 0.838 ( 1)
9.  Canada 0.833 ( 4)
10.  Ireland 0.832 ( 4)
11.  Finland 0.830 ()
12.  Slovenia 0.824 ( 2)
13.  Austria 0.818 ( 1)
14.  Luxembourg 0.814 ( 3)
15.  Czech Republic 0.813 ( 1)
16.  United Kingdom 0.812 ( 3)
17.  Belgium 0.806 ( 2)
18.  France 0.804 ()
19.  Japan 0.799 (New)
20.  Israel 0.793 ( 1)
21.  Slovakia 0.778 ( 1)
22.  Spain 0.775 ( 2)
23.  Italy 0.768 ( 1)
24.  Estonia 0.767 ( 1)
25.  Greece 0.762 ( 2)
26.  Malta 0.760 ( 3)
27.  Hungary 0.757 ( 1)
28.  United States 0.755 ( 12)
29.  Poland 0.751 ( 1)
30.  Cyprus 0.752 ( 1)
31.  Lithuania 0.746 ( 2)
32.  Portugal 0.739 ()
33.  South Korea 0.736 ( 5)
34.  Latvia 0.725 ( 1)
35.  Croatia 0.721 ( 4)
36.  Argentina 0.680 ( 7)
37.  Chile 0.661 ( 4)

Countries in the top quartile of HDI (“very high human development” group) with a missing IHDI: New Zealand, Singapore, Hong Kong, Liechtenstein, Brunei, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Andorra, United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Cuba, and Kuwait

The most violent country ought not to lead: it’s as if one chose the local violent drunkard as the leader. However, it’s precisely because they are stupid and violent that bullies lead. Thus a paradox: the worst, are most esteemed.

Just after five Islamist attack in five countries around the old Roman Imperium, killed more than 70 people in 24 hours, including more than 40 in Tunisia, it may feel strange that I focus  on the USA. However, Americanism and Islamism are directly related, these days.

Islamism was quasi-inexistent in, say, 1948. It is the implementation of the Great Bitter Lake Conspiracy, a plot elaborated in Washington, and more exactly from the “democratic” advisers around president Roosevelt,  which fabricated the rule of Islamism (though the good works and financing of the Saudi plutocrats).

The mentality imposed by lords of the USA brought us Islamism, and the sort of tricks played on Greece. And they belong to a class. This so-called “Deep State” was animated, already a century ago, by individuals such as the Harriman brothers. (The Wikipedia link gives none of the savory details, where countries such as France, Nazi Germany, and the USSR figure prominently.)

There is a war against democracy, but its ways are subtle enough to escape the understanding of the baffled masses.

Patrice Ayme’

One God, One Thought, All Submitted

God As A Conspiracy Of Plutocracy:

You want guidance, oh souls who are lost? Then it’s best to stay away from stupidity.

It’s rather daft to believe that not believing in gods, which are human inventions, somehow misses upon some of the human condition by not taking fairy tales as real. Make no mistakes: fairy tales are useful. It’s good to believe a little bit in them.

To act, to proceed into any action, we have, somehow to believe, that engaging in it will make a difference. Beliefs are good, indispensable. It’s not just those who believe in superstition(s), who believe in something. We all do.

But when potentates try to sell a particular brand of belief as the end-all, be-all, they are deluded. Or, worse, they want us to be deluded. What for? Once we are made stupid, we can be exploited. (A live example of incredible exploitation is the situation in Greece, where an enormous conspiracy makes an entire people pay for financial plots they did not engage in.)

That Son, Crispus, Was Really Killed By His Christian Father, Constantine

[Solidus representing Caesar Crispus, Constantine’s first son, assassinated by his father in 326 CE. Constantine is a “Saint” of Orthodox Christianity: if you believe in Constantine’s sainthood, you are ready to die for banksters, and, or, monks.]

Most of the 10,000 or so religions we know of had, each, many “gods”. However not so the religion of Abraham. Who imposed that? Generals. Constantine was a general, he took over the Roman empire in his twenties. Later he steamed his wife alive, killed his nephew, and his gifted son (who did not like his father’s “Catholicism”).

The other great general was Muhammad himself (and his successors, aka Caliphs).

The one and only god was imposed, because he was an excellent role model for the one and only fascist in power: fascist on the throne, fascist in the sky. It just fit. The religion founded by one general is naturally one with a general on the top.

That does not mean one should not look positively to the present pope: he makes a nice Father Christmas. (And has many excellent ideas, such as cap and trade of carbon perm its being a sin… As I long believed.)

India has a million gods. But the fascist military structure implicit in Christianism helped Europeans to conquer the world. With Biblical efficiency.

How? India, under polytheism, had zero religious wars (as Partha a commenter to this site, pointed out). Why? Polytheism accommodates many feelings, ideas, dispositions, characters, and divinize them all. This insures tolerance where it is the most important to have it, in the heart.

However, under the fascist god, any slip of interpretation of proper worship may result in divine annihilation, thus it’s of the essence to kill unbelievers. That’s why religious wars and holocausts (as happened to the Samaritans) started in the Roman empire after Constantine imposed Christianism. Before that there had been none since the Romans had done away with human sacrifice religions (Gaul, Carthage), four centuries prior.

The essence of monotheistic theology is, if you will forgive the neologism, fascitology. It’s military pathology in disguise, and how to make intolerance divine. Killing god is a must for those who want to be free.

And that’s exactly why the SS adopted in 1933 “Gott Mit Uns!” (God With US) and the Congress of the USA goose-stepped behind in 1954 with “In God We Trust”.

Making We The People stupid with god enables masters to manipulate it down into complete impotence and destitution. As observed.

And this is precisely while the malignant cult of god grew in the USA, as plutocracy came to rule ever more (the initial establishment of the American Republic, was all about “Nature’s God”, not about the Christian fascist superstition).

To goose step behind banksters, all you need is god.

Patrice Ayme’

How Neanderthals, Dinosaurs Disappeared?

IS THE SAME FUNDAMENTAL MECHANISM AT PLAY?

Dinosaurs are still around: they are called birds. Birds are those dinosaurs which enjoyed high metabolism. In difficult circumstances, those who acted quick could stay warm, and make the slow, or their eggs, into lunch. Mammals, too, and probably even more, exerted deadly pressure on dinosaur reproduction.

Dinosaurs were big (the smallest, like Velociraptors, were feather covered, and turkey sized). To create the same number of average individuals dinosaurs may have required a thousand times more energy as for the average bird: obvioulsy after a disaster, their population would not rebound as fast.

The Past Is Printed With DNA, & We Can Read It.

[As we can read DNA like a printed book, Paleontology is becoming history, complete with written documents! Represented above: the 40,000 years old Homo Sapiens jaw which was sequenced, and found to be a Sapiens Sapiens- Sapiens Neanderthal hybrid.]

Much spectacular progress is made in paleontology, every month. In the latest, some dinosaur protein would have been isolated. Sequencing and making a Jurassic Park, someday, is not science fiction anymore. Such was the truth, in June 2015. (In the preceding month, that would have sounded like science-fiction.)

Now we have a new fact supporting the theory I hold that Neanderthal’s traits were outbred. Here is yesterday’s recap from Nature:

http://www.nature.com/news/europe-s-first-humans-what-scientists-do-and-don-t-know-1.17815

Neanderthals are also still around. Or more exactly Neanderthal genome: 1% to 3% (although some claim up to 9% of combined Neanderthal and Denisovan ancestry!). And more so in East Asia and among Native Americans. Some find strange that Neanderthal genome disappeared more in Europe, where Neanderthal reigned so long.

But it just means that genetic competition between Sapiens Neanderthal and Sapiens Sapiens traits was more in favor of the later there… Perhaps simply because winters are milder in Europe.

Neanderthals had evolved from Archaic Homo Sapiens, and ruled Europe for 300,000 years. Most of the time, the continent was in the grip of glaciation. Neanderthals evolved genetic adaptations to these Arctic conditions, such as a larger body mass, and a more compact, more muscular, powerful body.

However technological advances such as clothing, burning coal (!), the propeller (to launch javelins further), and the bow made those Neanderthal genetic modifications obsolete, moot, duplicative. A prime defect was higher mass. Reproducing the same number of Neanderthals required more energy than the same number of more gracile forms of Homo Sapiens.

When in competition, the reproductive advantage of the more gracile traits grow exponentially in time:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/03/14/why-did-neanderthals-disappear/

It is not about Homo Sapiens Sapiens enjoying superior traits relative to Neanderthals.

The disappearance of Neanderthals is about most Sapiens Neanderthal traits having become excess evolutionary baggage. So the traits got out-selected. One should expect that the heavy, Arctic genetic traits were weeded out, and only superior traits (the 3%) were kept. As observed. And more so in Europe, as winters are milder there than in the rest of the Eurasian land mass (South Asia excluded). As observed. In other words, after an Arctic excursion, Neanderthals transmutated back into what they came from, keeping some useful mutations (many having to do with skin).

The tree of evolution is rather a network (with a non-trivial topology).

A case in point is Homo itself. The first prototypes (so to speak) may have separated from chimpanzee like ancestors, ten million years ago. But the official theory has it, at this point, that there was some interbreeding with chimpanzees, around six million years ago again.

BTW, it is not true that no Neanderthal DNA is found in sub-Saharan Africa. That’s so yesteryear, 2014. Neanderthal DNA has been found all the way down to South Africa’s tip (2015 discovery), and the migration route traced.

Patrice Ayme’

PLUTOCRACY IMPLIES SLAVERY

Plutocracy tends to install SLAVERY FOR 99%… Or maybe it’s 98% (the percentage of non-Nobles in the European Middle Ages). Plutocracy, as a concept is much more general than considering the color of the skin, or other origins, as the primary value of an individual. Generally the interpretation of “plutocracy” is the rule of the wealthy (from associating Pluto to wealth, and kratia as power). So plutocracy is usually interpreted as a society where money can buy anything and everything… from power, to freedom, health and happiness.

Obama and others have woken up to the fact that “300 years of slavery” have left a mark in the USA. “The legacy of slavery… discrimination in almost every institution of our lives… casts a long shadow, and that’s still part of our DNA that’s passed on,” the president said… “We’re not cured of it. And it’s not just a matter of it not being polite to say nigger in public. That’s not the measure of whether racism still exists or not.”

Yes, indeed. It goes much further than that, all the way to the root of human ethology. Slavery itself has roots in the organization of English AMERICAN society. It appeared there exactly in 1619. Slavery had been unlawful in Europe, per Frankish law which was nearly a thousand year old… in 1619!

The mentality of masters and slaves is all over the USA. To this day. This is why the USA is different from Europe.

Road Not Taken: New France Failed Out Of Goodness

Road not taken: New France was supposed to offer civilization to the Natives. What for? said the Masters. And the Masters proceeded to exterminate all those who could not master them, including the French.

Yes, masters and slaves were all over Europe too, and a war was fought about that from April 1792 (general attack by all European plutocrats against the French Constitutional Monarchy) until June 1815 (Waterloo). Superficially the plutocrats won. But there were a number of revolutions in the Nineteenth Century, and the French Republic got re-established. In the end, anti-plutocratic principles of 1789 came to rule the United Nations after 1944.

So what is the Plutocratic Principle?

That the best way to organize society is for the haves to rule, and exploit, no holds barred, and sky is the limit.

The idea that Plutocratic Rule is best, is already found in Aristotle. Thanks to his intimacy with the world’s mightiest men, that’s how Aristotle destroyed democracy. Aristotle thought monarchy was the best organizing principle of society. He conveyed that idea authoritatively to a number of very close friends and students. Among them the Macedonians Antipater, Alexander and Craterus, who were like family.

As a result, Direct Democracy has been buried for 23 centuries, and counting.

The liberty for the haves to exploit was optimal for the quick conquest of the Americas. It’s a success story. Who can argue with success? Philosophers? Deep thought? That’s why they are not welcome, in Plutocratic quarters.

The conquest of the Americas, fundamentally, was a military operation.

The French tried to make it into something else, an ethical operation, helped with a bit of fair trade. This moral calling arose from the discovery of Canada by Jacques Cartier. The next attitude the French explorer and commander found, to his dismay, was that many American Natives were actually hostile to the invasion of their land by Frenchmen. So it was decided, and it became a tradition, to use a light touch for the colonization of North America by France: it had to be made with the approval of the Natives, in particular the Hurons.

It worked splendidly.

The Hurons got civilized, Christianized, they built farms, grew and prospered. French “Coureurs de Bois” established fair trade all over Canada and the West, to Colorado, and beyond. They fraternized with the Natives, married them, had children.

It worked splendidly, until English plutocrats showed up, the “West Country Men“.

Those investors (including the English King) had refined the Plutocratic Principle in Ireland. It involved lining up roads with human skulls, to enlighten the Natives about what resistance untailed.

Against the Plutocratic Principle, Civilization contend in vain, if it does not go to war.

The French state insisted that only individuals of the highest morality be allowed to visit Canada. And that was with a return trip in mind. Women were carefully interrogated and inspected to make sure that they would not use their charms liberally.

The English plutocrats and their agents (the Iroquois) defeated the French, and annihilated the Iroquois.

Even before this, it became clear that Native Americans and Africans made excellent robots to help conquer the land, so, propped by the Plutocratic Principle, they introduced slavery. And soon there were much more slaves in some states than white masters.

Slavery was defeated by Lincoln.

But its root has not been. It has not even been detected, let alone condemned.

The Plutocratic Principle is better at war. To win a war, an army, a country, needs to act as one large body with just one brain. This is why the Fascist Instinct is crucial to a world conquering primate such as the genus Homo: E Pluribus Unum. The Plutocratic Principle is a generalization, to society, of the Fascist Instinct.

At some point, the human tendency to over-exploit the land has to be kept in check: thus the Dark Side. In the Americas, as anywhere in the world, this involved massacring people, to keep the numbers down.

But genocide is still something else: it reduces cultural diversity.

The Interest of the Dark Side has been, ultimately, sustainability. There is goodness in the Dark Side, on the level of the genus Homo. It protects against termination of the genus.

However, nowadays, the technological powers at our disposal are so great, that one cannot give free rein to the Dark Side. Let’s suppose that American Natives had nuclear bombs instead of horse and tomahawks: trying to massacre them may have been counter-productive to the English Colony.

Similarly, all out war against the biosphere through “climate change” and acid ocean, will turn out just as good as it did for the dinosaurs.

The Dark Side, the very success of the Plutocratic Principle in the USA, are leading us to a collision course with reality. We are now at war with physics.

Thus the Plutocratic Principle has to be jettisoned now. That means that the USA should strive to be more like Europe, and less like its old exploitative self. In turn, that may teach some emerging superpowers, such as China, that the Plutocratic Principle is counterproductive.

Patrice Ayme’

With Such Volcanoes, WHO NEEDS ASTEROIDS?

I have long been of the persuasion that the asteroid did not extinguish the dinosaurs: it was too puny. I did not see how a big explosion could have extinguished giant life forms such as the Mosasaurs, who lived in the sea, on the other side of the planet.

Mosasaurs are central to this story: the name, Moselle Lizard, comes from the Moselle, a famous river which flows through the town of Maastricht, next to which the first Mosasaurs were found. In 1794, French revolutionary forces took control of the fossils (against 600 bottles of wine), and brought them to Paris Museum d’Histoire Naturelle for state of the art analysis. Cuvier, by 1808, had formally concluded that  le Grand Animal fossile de Maëstricht confirmed the evolutionary theory of his great rival Lamarck.

Pinatubo Warming Up, June 12, 1991

[The main Pinatubo eruption was three days later, and was obscured by ash and clouds all over; Pinatubo had strong global effects on world temperature; However, by geological standards, Pinatubo was tiny: 10 cubic kilometer of ejecta, 1% of Tambora in 1815; the Deccan Traps LIP was of the order of millions of cubic kilometers of ejecta.]

The age of the Mosasaurs accordingly became known as the Maastrichtian. Characterized by Mosasaurs, it covers the last six million years of the Cretaceous. And a tremendous discovery, the one I had been expecting all along was just made: the Maastrichtian was a time of colossal transitions. So much for the asteroid impact.

There was an obvious culprit for the extinction at the end of the Cretaceous: the Earth Core Eruption of the Deccan Traps. OK, “Earth Core Eruption” is my own semantics, and the theory behind it is not proven. The official term is Large Igneous Province (LIP).

Climate Apocalypse Well Before The Asteroid:

A decade long project in Northeastern China has drilled sediments as ancient as 100 million years ago. It is bringing results I expected, but even more so.

For millions of years before an asteroid struck the planet 66 million years ago, Earth’s climate was already in turmoil.

It has long been known, from ocean floor sediments, that the climate was unstable at the end of the Cretaceous period. Findings from deep drilling in the Songliao Basin show that the climate swings on land were far more drastic, than anyone expected. Average annual temperatures fluctuated up and down by as much as 20°Celsius over tens of thousands of years—a geological eyeblink. “It certainly wasn’t a good time for the dinosaurs,” says Robert Spicer, a paleoclimatologist at the Open University (Milton Keynes, U.K).

Sediments were piling up in the ancient lakebed in northeastern China at a much faster rate than in the ocean. This provides with a much finer chronology.

Shallow seas had contributed to warm and moisten the Earth so much in the age of dinosaurs (before, during and after the Jurassic). Evolving plate tectonic eliminated those during the last few million years of the Cretaceous. That snuffed out many species and hobbled others.

The Songliao Basin was a gigantic lake for 80 million years. During the Cretaceous, it covered 260,000 square kilometers, as much as the area of New Zealand (a micro-continent in my book). The lakebed’s sediments “provide a unique record of what the land environment was like during this turbulent time,” (Page Chamberlain, a paleoclimatologist at Stanford University, a principal investigator of the Songliao International Continental Scientific Drilling Project).

The drilling team, led by Wang from Beijing University, has gone 2.6 kilometers down. Analyzing oxygen and carbon isotope ratios in the sediments the seesawing temperatures during the last 6 million years of the Cretaceous, the Maastrichtian.

High latitude, and the pace of sediment deposit, ten times what it is in the ocean, gives a very fine record.

The sediments reveal not only astounding temperature swings, but also their likely cause.

Two major Maastrichtian warming events captured in the Songliao cores—68 million years ago and 66.3 million years ago -thus, BEFORE the asteroid impact- coincide with massive eruptions of the Deccan Traps, the Large Igneous Province in India.

Carbon isotope studies show that second warming event was characterized by a rapid doubling in atmospheric carbon dioxide. “This was the time when the bulk of Deccan eruptions occurred, which presumably released a massive amount of carbon dioxide,” says Zhang Laiming (China University of Geosciences).

Differently from an asteroid impacts, large volcanic eruptions are characterized with nasty fluctuating gases and temperatures. We know this from Iceland’s Laki eruption in 1783. Europeans found themselves experiencing various gases, some floating by the ground like colored fog, and tremendous variations of temperatures: hot sometimes during winter, cold in summer.

A volcanic eruption can release sulfates, which can bring considerable cooling, for the years they can stay aloft (around five years). Pinatubo cooled the entire planet by nearly one degree Celsius, thanks to this.

However, a volcanic eruption is greatly propelled by CO2, and that can warm up the cilmate for millennia. The combination is a strong whipping around, between cold and heat.

Now in parallel essay, I will make clear that dinosaurs were ill equipped for such fluctuations.

The intense greenhouse effect caused by CO2 from the Deccan Traps drove average temperatures to about 22.3°C. This compares with only 5°C at Songliao today.

The warming was interrupted just after the K-Pg boundary by a brief cooling episode. The team attributes to dust, soot, and aerosols from the Yucatán asteroid impact. However, I would point out that this is just a theory. In 1809 an unknown volcano exploded in the south hemisphere (as determined recently by ice cores). That was followed in 1815 by the explosion of Indonesia’s Tambora. The result was the coldest decade in more than a millennium (and may well have cost Napoleon’s army tremendous losses in Russia, as the 1812 winter was the coldest on record there).

As temperatures convulsed (and probably acidity in the oceans), ecosystems changed. The Songliao sediments trapped spores, pollen, algae, and ostracods (“seed shrimp“).

To my complete non-surprise, many of the species typical of the Paleocene —the geological epoch following the Cretaceous— appeared several million years before the K-Pg boundary (the first period of the Paleocene is called the Paleogene, Pg). Turnovers in the biota, Wang says, “had already been under way when the asteroid struck.”

Dinosaurs were already on their way out. The number of nonavian dinosaur species seem to have shrunk by half in the last 10 million years of the Cretaceous, with the biggest losses during the Maastrichtian (although according to a French geologist, there may have been more than 1,000 dinosaur species at the end). The Chicxulub impact was, Wang says, “the straw that broke the camel’s back.” Put another way, Spicer says, “if the asteroid came in on a less stressed system, the effects would not have been so severe.”

Well? Now the asteroid is reduced to a straw. We don’t need the asteroid. Straws sometimes change history. If Grouchy had not got lost at Waterloo, the French would have won. But not in the case of dinosaurs and mosasaurs, and pterosaurs, plesiosaurs, and maybe ammonites. Straw, or not straw, they were all condemned.

I have a general reasoning, the one I used to explain the “disappearance”, or, more exactly, dilution, of the Neanderthals, to explain this. It implies that large animals tend to disappear more readily. All the more those who did not control their temperatures well. Competition from mammals and avian dinosaurs condemned the dinosaurs.

Yet, there are lessons for today; the cataclysm we are visiting on the biosphere is orders of magnitudes more violent than anything which happened during the Maastrichtian. Even the dinosaurs were not dumb enough to organize their own doom.

Patrice Ayme’

Our Impotent Self Glorifying “Leaders”

I was watching Barack Obama in San Francisco, explaining that shootings of civilians by civilians, racist or not (“this sort of incidents”), does not happen with the same frequency in any other countries.  Obama talked angrily. He was at the sea cliff mansion of a billionaire, the Pacific on one side, the Golden Gate bridge on the other. But his anger was not just directed at the gun lobby. Reading his face, one could tell he had strong doubts about the BS splashing so vigorously out of his oral cavity.

Who Am I? What Do I Think? What Happened? Something Is Going On, But You Don’t Know What It Is, Mister President

Had Obama just doubts that what he was saying could bring any progress? Obviously Obama knew that we know that, whatever he says, makes no difference. A sad state of affairs. Mr. Skin Color President is taken seriously by nobody. But he still gets to use the big jet, so what’s the big deal? Since when did he care about anything else?

As Obama was denouncing the frequency of shootings in the USA, one was happening in Oakland (three wounded). Obama declared that it was “not enough to grieve”.  Indeed. But it has become so American, to just grieve. More and more, the rabble is into incantations, and little else besides. And the reason is in plain sight.

It was Obama’s 20th trip to San Francisco. To listen to him, one had to pay $33,400. Then one could get access to one of the various mansions of some of the wealthiest people on Earth Obama visited that day.

$33,400: more than half the median family income.

$33,400: does Obama feel the violence? It’s not Liberty-Equality-Fraternity, but Liberty-Inequality-Obscenity.

Does Obama feels he has power, because plutocrats and their little children give $33,400 to see his face? They would give the same money to whomever is president next. Its pocket change to them, and Obama is just the bus boy serving them, because somebody has got to do it. Obama was not born in Kenya, but his spirits sure died under a regime similar to the one colonial Kenya enjoyed.

Obama says the mood of the country has to change about guns. But 90% of the USA want tighter regulations about guns, 69% want to crack down on CO2. So why it’s not happening? Because the people who can afford $33,400 to see Obama in person are all who matter. And those people have very different priorities: they make money from fossil fuels, they need private armies to defend themselves, inequality is what feeds them, and the more, the better, they are happy that We The People Is NOT in power. And the first line of this, is that We The People’s opinion does not matter.

Is it why Obama looked so nervous and culprit? Maybe he stumbled on the truth? Did he finally realize he became… nothing? Nothing important?

The truth is that, during his entire presidency, Obama did nothing positive (besides killing Osama Bin Laden), and a few very negative things (letting banksters and the CIA get away with murder).

Why was Obama so ineffectual? Because he did not take one tough decision, and imposed it. Obama is not feared by anyone. And without fear, the Prince cannot rule, as Machiavel, having studied pope Rodrigo Borgia and ex-cardinal Caesare Borgia from very close, pointed out.

We are not living in democracy. Athens had a democracy, we don’t. Democracy means direct democracy, where the Demos has the Power (Kratos).

Instead what we have is a political system where immense powers go to a few individuals, and only to them. That way the system headed by Putin, Xi, or Obama are no different. The rest of the population, the 99.9%, is left without power whatsoever. (Seriously: studies have shown that what people want they don’t get. More than two-third of the citizens of the USA want something done about the CO2 crisis. Yet, federally, nothing is done.)

That’s why the population cling so avidly to their guns. At least they have the power of holding onto a self-destructive device which can turn them into god for a few seconds.

Obama did not understand any of this. Or he did not understand what it meant. He seemed to have really believe he was in a sort of democracy among his peers, and he could debate things, get to a consensus, and advance things this way.

Not so. When President Eisenhower imposed desegregation in public schools, he used the military. It was dangerous, and dangerous for Ike. But Ike was a soldier. He ordered to proceed with D Day during a lull in a major storm. Ike was tough.

When Lyndon Johnson imposed the “Great Society” reforms, he forced lawmakers to sign on, by using all sorts of unsavory means, thanks to presidential powers.

And President Roosevelt said: “I welcome their hatred” speaking of bankers. And hated he was: after all, he had started his presidency by closing all banks for four days (selected few were re-opened later). Then he outlawed gold possession, devalued the dollar (thus defaulting on US debt). And so on.

Obama thought he could keep on leading a charmed life, seducing everybody, and be a good president. But being a good president mean, leading people where they did not want to go. All the preceding presidents took hard decisions, even Nixon and Carter (Nixon founded the EPA, HMOs, pulled out of Vietnam, admitting defeat, etc.; Carter, at the very least named the hawkish Paul Volcker at the head of the Fed, to crush inflation, bring a recession, and cost Carter’s re-election).

The present political system is nasty. To get any positive result, any positive progress, one has to be nasty. Nastiness has to be carefully measured.

As I sketched in the case of Napoleon, Napoleon was way nastier than he needed to be, in the end, although he got there from the invasion of France by nasty plutocrats, and, first of all the British army and navy. That invasion lasted years. For years, Napoleon’s homeland, Corsica, was officially a possession of the English crown, because the king of England said so. That would infuriate any Corsican, republican patriot.

Meanwhile, on the other side of the pond, Angela Merkel, and her French poodles, having saved the bankers from their profitable perfidy, wants the Greek rabble to pay with dear lives. Seeing her business meanness and military impotence, inspired by Obama’s lack of balls, Putin has moved, and keeps on moving. Not afraid, as Xi in China, to take dangerous decisions.

Something Is Going On, But You Don’t Know What It Is, oh great leaders of the West.

Rome had started as quasi-Direct Democracy Republic (not as direct as Athens, much more direct than we have now). Six centuries later, this was not even a memory: Rome had become an unsavory mix of military dictatorship, plutocracy and theocracy. The ancient Republican structures, such as Roman law, were crushed underneath. Political power had lost sustainable legitimacy.

In 381 CE, emperor Theodosius (initially a Spanish Roman general) passed a number of laws which launched a “war against the philosophers”. The lack of thinking bore fruit quickly: the empire became so impotent that, by 400 CE, the Franks were put in military control of Gallia, and the Germanias. In 406 CE, the legions were withdrawn from Britannia.

This was the bitter and of the (Roman) plutocratic austerity program. And its motivation was the same as now: the plutocrats did not want to pay taxes. By then, most plutocratic families, or “nobles” as they called themselves, had a bishop in their family, giving them moral authority (this was the age of the “Founding Fathers of the Church”; Saint Jerome even made emperor Theodosius bent to his will).

If one wants moral authority, or just the ear, and presence of power, it’s simple nowadays: no need to pretend that one loves god. Just fork over $33,400, and the president is yours. Let drones and bullets fly. Pay lip service to violence. Amen

Patrice Ayme’