“Democrats”, Plutocrats, & Plutophiles

Clearly, we are not in democracy. The Clintons made more than one hundred million dollars out of politics, just telling (financial) plutocrats that they deliver, and can deliver even more, again. Indeed, the Clinton gave financial plutocrats… the world. (With the help of Bushama since.) The official American  “left” is presently ready to select those world famous corrupt politicians as their leaders. (That does not mean I prefer Ted Cruz to Clinton; not at all, just the opposite. I stay faithful to the Lesser Evil Principle.)

“Socialist” Senator Sanders is running close behind plutocrat Clinton in Iowa, first state to vote, tomorrow. Some people may object that Clinton is no plutocrat, because her fortune is not yet in the billions, and only multi-billionaire qualify as plutocrats. That lack of imagination arises from a very narrow, low dimensional, naïve, obsolete, culprit definition of what “plutocrat” is.

Is There Anyone In The World More Officially Corrupt For All To See Than The Clintons? Give Me The Name! I Want To Know! Is That Stench The Best “Democrats” Can Do? These Are Serious Questions.

In truth lots of money provides with lots of power. It is this power on others which is intrinsically evil, intrinsically corrupting. Clinton has it, and she proved it aplenty since she controlled the White House.

Rants of the .1%, and their clients to explain why being ruled by the Clintons is best, are all over. The plutophile New York Times included. In “Plutocrats and Prejudice”, the excellent professor and Ubermensch Krugman claims, with Hillary, that there is a multidimensional causality of evil: racism, sexism, etc. play a role. They have to be fought. And if that leaves no time to fight big money exclusively, claims Paul Krugman, that’s only “realistic”. He denounces the “naive” Sanders and his supporters:

Krugman: “Like many people, I’ve described the competition between Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders as an argument between competing theories of change, which it is. But underlying that argument is a deeper dispute about what’s wrong with America, what brought us to the state we’re in.

To oversimplify a bit — but only, I think, a bit — the Sanders view is that money is the root of all evil. Or more specifically, the corrupting influence of big money, of the 1 percent and the corporate elite, is the overarching source of the political ugliness we see all around us.

The Clinton view, on the other hand, seems to be that money is the root of some evil, maybe a lot of evil, but it isn’t the whole story. Instead, racism, sexism and other forms of prejudice are powerful forces in their own right. This may not seem like a very big difference — both candidates oppose prejudice, both want to reduce economic inequality. But it matters for political strategy.

As you might guess, I’m on the many-evils side of this debate. Oligarchy is a very real issue, and I was writing about the damaging rise of the 1 percent back when many of today’s Sanders supporters were in elementary school.”

Krugman can write all he wants, he did, and acted, differently. In 1980, Ronald Reagan was viewed as an extreme rightist (now he is viewed nearly as a leftist!). Paul Krugman went to serve Ronald then-an-extreme-rightist. At the time, Reagan’s economic theory was “trickle down”: make the rich richer, they in turn, will enrich the 99%.

Instead, what happened is that now the .1% are the only people the president of the USA listens to, and worries about. And so it has become around the world, in consequence.

Krugman was always a little Hillary, no wonder they like each other: splurging at the trough of big money and big oligarchic power, while talking, and posturing left. Actually, Krugman was a predecessor: he was helping Reagan, before Bill Clinton helped Ronald Reagan with Iran Contra (a complex conspiracy to sell weapons to Iran secretly and illegally, and using the profits to finance a guerilla in Central America). Governor Bill Clinton provided Reagan with Mena airport in Arkansas. Planes full of CIA employees brought weapons to Nicaragua, came back with drugs. One was shot down over Nicaragua, another crashed in Arkansas. (Thanks to sufficient assassinations, not too many people are minding the subject anymore.)

As Krugman was economic adviser to Reagan inside the White House, he was obviously co-responsible with “Trickle-Down”. So we see history demonstrates that Krugman-Reagan-Clinton-Trickle-Down-Cult of the .1% is all the same universe. The roots of G. W. Bush: then W. Bush was just a playboy making money thanks to his bin Laden connections and the like. (Ex) president Bush and (the brother of Osama) Bin Laden met in New York, on 9/10/2001, the day before 9/11.

OK, ready for another bout of disinformation? Krugman: “But it’s important to understand how America’s oligarchs got so powerful.

For they didn’t get there just by buying influence (which is not to deny that there’s a lot of influence-buying out there). Crucially, the rise of the American hard right was the rise of a coalition, an alliance between an elite seeking low taxes and deregulation and a base of voters motivated by fears of social change and, above all, by hostility toward you-know-who.”

So here Krugman is claiming that it is racism against Obama which made people vote to the right, and that this caused plutocracy. No, lies, lies, lies.

Clinton deregulating finance, destroying FDR’s work was the main engine of today’s plutocracy. (And I don’t like FDR, but I recognize what was, because that’s what is.) Even under Obama, the supposed victim of racism, tax rates on the 400 richest went down 20%. So clearly it’s rich democratic politicians who passed laws favorable to plutocrats.

Krugman:  “Yes, there was a concerted, successful effort by billionaires to push America to the right. That’s not conspiracy theorizing; it’s just history, documented at length in Jane Mayer’s eye-opening new book “Dark Money.” But that effort wouldn’t have gotten nearly as far as it has without the political aftermath of the Civil Rights Act, and the resulting flip of Southern white voters to the G.O.P.

Until recently you could argue that whatever the motivations of conservative voters, the oligarchs remained firmly in control. Racial dog whistles, demagogy on abortion and so on would be rolled out during election years, then put back into storage while the Republican Party focused on its real business of enabling shadow banking and cutting top tax rates.”

Disinformation again: the flip in question, while real, does not explain the rise of plutocracy, which mostly went ballistic under the rule of Clinton-Goldman-Sachs.

At a time when the biosphere is faced with extinction, the sort of dance the Clintons and Obama did, with Bush laughing in the middle, goes nowhere: the middle class has not progressed in the last 25 years. The Clintons freed the financial sector and its “money changers” (FDR) and now those dragons of the apocalypse roam the world.

A bushel of wheat is bought and sold 2,000 times (two thousand) between the Middle West and Africa. That’s fine with Clinton, let her have one to one dinner with the head of Goldman-Sachs again: her husband did what Goldman-Sachs’ Rubin told him to do. How melts, and wheat is bought and sold, to infinity?

Krugman persists. In “Pre-Iowa Notes“, he claims that:

“For those who were joyful and uplifted on inauguration day 2009, the years that followed have been a vast letdown: American politics got even uglier, policy progress always fell short of dreams. Now comes Sanders…. some people really want to hear that message, and don’t want to hear that they’re being unrealistic.

But there’s something else, which I keep encountering, and which I’m sure I’m not the only one to notice: even among progressives, the two-decade-plus smear campaign against the Clintons has had its effect. I keep being told about terrible things the Clintons did that never actually happened, but were carefully fomented right-wing legends — except I’m hearing them from people on the left.”

Krugman is smearing us by claiming we are smearing the Clintons. He is also disinforming us. Well the Clintons, or at least Bill Clinton, gutted the “Banking Act of 1933” (“Glass-Steagall”). When Hillary gets 675,000 dollars from Goldman Sachs for speaking a few hours, what’s the difference between that and a bribe?

There Are Countless Pictures Of Hillary Clinton Apparently In Love With The Chair Of Goldman-Sachs (Left)

I am not exaggerating: I have dozens of these. What’s going on guys? Bernie Sanders has raised concerns over the $675,000 she made from Goldman Sachs. Asked if she would release the content of her speeches to Goldman Sachs, Hillary just laugh with her fabulous goat laughter.

In 2011, Chelsea Clinton, then a 31 year old graduate student, was installed on the corporate board of Barry Diller’s Internet media holding company. When she was barely twenty years old, she was made a “hedge fund manager” by other family friends. Undoubtedly, for her outstanding talent in financial matters, and vast experience in media management. Chelsea then got an annual salary of 600,000 dollars from NBC (as a “special correspondent“). She is a high multimillionaire in her own right, and now an “investment banker”. Chelsea recognizes a personal net worth of 15 million dollars (1916). We should all become “investment bankers”, and then become presidents and get the Nobel Prize, for whatever.

[Mr.Diller is Chairman and Senior Executive of IAC/InterActiveCorp and Expedia, Inc. and the media executive responsible for the creation of Fox Broadcasting Company and USA Broadcasting. He stands number 268 on Forbes 400 list with a net worth of $ 2.3 Billion. Obama reduced the tax rate of the Forbes 400 by 20% in his first term, no doubt because they suffered a lot in the 2008 crisis they had set-up.]

During These Sumptuous Dinners, The .1% and Their Leading Plutocrats Can Plot In Public. Breathing Together, That’s What “Conspiring” Means

[Hillary and the Chair of Goldman-Sachs, again!]

Asked by the Des Moines Register on Thursday if she regretted to make money from speaking to plutocrats, Clinton compared herself to President Barack Obama, noting that significant campaign donations from Wall Street did not stop him from passing the Dodd-Frank reform law. Disinformation again: this “reform” is much weaker than the Banking Act of 1933 which the Clintons demolished. The Obama administration went easy on Wall Street by refusing to criminally prosecute the major financial institutions responsible for the 2008 economic crisis, or laundering drug money, or financing terrorist networks, etc.

The two Clintons made speaking fees totaling over $125 million since 2001. Obviously payments for services rendered. Maybe payments for future services.

Not to say Hillary Clinton is monolithic. Maybe that’s why she sent classified information over non official channels (a crime). Maybe she knew she was an evil which cannot be stopped, but by devious means. Her ambition, she knew, could not be stopped, nor her greed. But, deep down, in the greatest depths of her soul, twinges of remorse and decency wanted her stopped. So they flattered the brazen side of her who wanted to flaunt her power, and suggested she use her email for top secrets.

Democracy the way we are supposed to enjoy it, is just one letter away from demoncracy. Clearly, to feel that those, the Clintons, following directions from the CEO of Goldman Sachs (Robert Rubin) who destroyed president Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s work to limit financial plutocracy, are best to lead the nation, means the present “Democratic” Party is way right. Way, way right. The Roosevelt family (Teddy and FDR, whom he helped bring up) was itself one of the oldest plutocratic family in the USA. So the plutocrats of the 1930s are now viewed as dangerous leftists.

The first American billionaire and financial plutocrat, Carnegie was for a tax on income of at least 50% and punishing inheritance tax. Why? To help the state, which makes entrepreneurship possible, and to prevent heirs, those no-good people to have too much power (I am paraphrasing). Now, no-good people are running for an encore, and We The People who-know-nothing are applauding the ever more amazing ascent of those who gave us the chop.

Patrice Ayme’

Is Oligarchy Intrinsically Evil?

Yes and no. Unjustifiable Oligarchy Is Intrinsically Evil. Unfortunately, be it in China, Russia, the USA, the EU, and nearly all states, this is what we are enjoying now. Here is a little recapitulation of why it’s deeply inhuman, and unfathomably stupid. Considering the mental crisis out there, it’s something to fix as a priority.

Oligarchy is the rule of the few (oligo in Greek). The fundamental problems of the concept of oligarchy are two:

First, the rule of the few is fundamentally anti-humanistic. Human beings evolved in smallish groups. Various experiments have shown people cannot know more than around 150 people. Beyond that human neurology cannot handle it.

Second, in these small human groups, brains were made to be used in parallel: everybody think, their thinking is considered more or less equally, and the best ideas blossom out of debates. One can see this, if one thinks carefully. Moreover, an experimental proof has recently surfaced. It has been discovered, last year, that the most important decision making in baboon societies, where to go, is made DEMOCRATICALLY.

The Problem Was Not Just With Hitler. All Present Regimes Have It, More Or Less. One People, One Kingdom, One Guide. However One Brain For Tens of Millions Proves, Unsurprisingly, Brainless

Let me give a few details on research recently published. It was made possible by fitting all the 25 adults of a baboon troop with GPS receptors endowed with a precision of 30 centimeters (a “foot”), recorded every second. It is well known that alpha males often dominate the rest of the troop for acquiring food or mates (they are also prominent for defending the troop) . However, and that is stunning, the alpha males do not  monopolize the decision-making for the all-important function of determining where to go!

A new distinction has appeared in baboon society: the “INITIATORS”. Just as there are alpha males (and alpha females, often mothers of alpha males), there are baboons who specialize in showing the way.

Notice the difference with today’s human society where the alpha males (those Obama, and not just Obama, calls the “leaders”), and the “initiators” are the same who lead the way to implementing new ideas.

In all of the world’s countries, politicians dominate. Even in the USA. The USA has the world’s largest government in money spent, as it spends more, than the entire GDP of Russia. It is actually about as large as Germany’s GDP. In fiscal year 2015, the federal budget is $3.8 trillion. These trillions of dollars make up about 21 percent of the U.S. economy. Much of them are distributed at the discretion of a handful of politicians, who, in turn decide who to finance (Elon Musk’s Space X, Tesla, and Sun City being examples of firms partly financed by the state) or who not to prosecute (the various technology monopolies being another example; in another times, under other governments, they would have been broken up).

Another way to think about it is that one fifth of the U.S. economy is directly controlled by the a few politicians. (Or maybe just one, the president!) That’s about 65 million people whose livelihood depends only upon the government of the USA, at the whim of just… one man.

Instead of going into detailed examples, as I often do, squeezed between bronchitis, antibiotics and a lack of time, I will just evoke fateful choices presidents of the USA made recently. To wit: deregulating finance (Clinton), invading Iraq, without, moreover, imposing order there (Bush), letting the derivative madness and banks run amok (Clinton-Bush), a liberal killer drones policy (early Obama), dropping fuel cell research (Obama), privatizing space (Obama), cutting down taxes on the hyper rich (Bush-first term Obama) etc. Obama did just one notable positive (besides following France on Libya): breaking the incredibly disgusting practice of American health insurance companies to insurance only healthy people… (OK, that was a tiny, but decisive step.)

Instead I will wax philosophical, going back to Socrates. The executed philosopher spent a lot of his philosophical time whining that Athenian Direct Democracy could not work. Socrates’ arguments were correct: if you want a good general, you should not elect him because somebody who talked well wanted to be a general.

The Roman Empire, followed by the European Middle Ages, and especially France, the successor state of Rome, found a solution. What I call “Democratic Institutions”. Those are meritocracies of expertise, organized as oligarchies. Guilds were examples in the Middle Ages. Medical Associations, for centuries, have decided who was a medical doctor in good standing, and who was not. Similarly for masons (free or not), architects, barbers, etc.

Philippe Le Bel arrested all the Templar at daybreak on Friday, 13 October 1307. It was a beautiful, and the first, example of a national police in action. The police of a state is another democratic institution.

Direct Democracy has to work hand in hand with Democratic Institutions. One cannot just decide what is the truth, just because it happens to be popular. Otherwise Kim Kardashian’s buns would be the only truth to be had.

But one has to keep in mind that Oligarchy is intrinsically anti-human. Not just anti-humanistic. It is deeply averse not just to our species, not just to our genus, but even to the order of primates.

And why is that? Because intelligence has been the evolutive strategy which has propelled the humanoids to supremacy over the biosphere, and now made us strong enough to be the main factor influencing it. Intelligence is higher, the higher, better, more subtle, richer, more powerful the ideas it produces are. Such ideas are born from the minds of the many, because they need debates, the equivalent of sex for ideas, to advance towards greater understanding.

Direct Democracy enables initiators all over, initiators of ideas, it’s the best enabler higher civilization ever had. And believing that oligarchy is better, the greatest enemy civilization has: not only it ends up promoting plutocracy, but, first of all, and worst of all, stupidity itself.

Notice this, though: most of the world society and economy is organized along oligarchic lines (although they are often hidden in suitably dark pools). It’s time to turn politics on its head.

Patrice Ayme’

MINIMIZING EVIL As the Greatest Good

Do the ends justify the means, or the means, the ends? Neither. A completely different answer awaits. We have to change our considerations of complex issues from unsophisticated, uncouth, flying blind, to something much more subtle, inspired by the turn towards more subtle analysis that physics itself had to take, in the last three centuries (just post-Newton).

“Maximization of agency towards greater good”… is the only good. Why?

Because the world is fast, and getting faster, exponentially. We are confronted to an increasingly violent shoot storm. Philosophy is not just a consolation anymore. Philosophy has become the only pragmatic way out of a gathering multidimensional cataclysm.

Yes, it is also an excretion storm. Humanity is excreting, all over the planet, creating lethal imbalances all over. Contemplate the Great Barrier Reef, in Australia, one of the world’s greatest biological structures. 2,300 kilometers long, 350,000 square kilometers in area. Yet, it is suddenly threatened by utter destruction. Why? Australian agriculture, all these plants, eaten by all these hungry vegetarians, out there. (In full truth, sugarcane is the primary culprit.)

Crown of Thorns, 35 Centimeters Across: Science Always Beats Fiction!

Yes, of course, the spikes will make you bleed, and they are venomous.

Massive production of plants requires a lot of phosphates, and other fertilizers. The latter gets into the sea. One thing leads to another. And then the babies of a killer starfish, the Crown of Thorn starfish, survive at roughly 100 times their natural rate. And the ladies Crown of Thorns are rather prolific: they produce up to twenty million eggs each. What is the Crown of Thorns prefered diet? Live coral. Crown of Thorns have already eaten their way through roughly half the Great Barrier Reef.

It is a science fiction situation, it requires a science fiction solution (philosophy will tell you as much). There are too many killer starfishes already. One needs killer robots. They are been developed: the starfish terminators have eyes, and they recognize Crown of Thorns with 99.9% precision, and inject them with bile, to which the Crown of Thorns is highly allergic.

Autonomous killer robots at sea: what could go wrong? Are sharks next? Of course! Not to terminate the species, but to make the swimmers safe (we could reprogram for plutocrats, some will insinuate…). Proper usage of philosophical evil optimization theory shows that, only this way, is evil minimized.

So welcome, killers robots!

Take another example: lack of awareness, and the evil Clintons, helped by the Bush of Oblahblah, let the financial plutocracy grow completely out of control. The silly ones will give money, clothing, even food, and feel emphatic, happy about themselves, and their pacific tendencies. Does the Will to Peace generate peace? A philosophical question. And the answer is awful: when a bushel of wheat goes from the American Middle  West to Africa, it is bought and sold virtually, by the financial traitors… No less than 2,000 times! Then they live in plush mansions. Of course those traitors are culprit. But so are those who let them thrive, namely all those ready to vote for crooks (names starting with “C”).

Shoot storm? Yes, not just animal waste and dirt that is flying, but outright bullets. To wit: extremely violent wars out of nowhere. Contemplate Rwanda, Somalia, the Islamist State. Worse could be around the corner: a (nuclear) war of India with Pakistan, quickly generalizing, is imaginable.

Science fiction, some will sneer, from the bottom of their feel-good ignorance.

But 2015 was considerably warmer than 2014, which was, itself, the warmest year, ever, by a long shot. Greenland is melting, fast. A collapse of ice shields in Antarctica, little talked about, looks imminent (at least to me).

Science fiction, some will scoff, and turn around, to study nothing. Yet, look at the Zika virus, propped by global warming. The USA is scrambling to study it. It did not exist six months ago, as a problem for WHO. Now it’s a total panic. Brazil just attributed 4,000 cases of microcephaly to that virus carried by mosquitoes. Four countries advised women not to get pregnant, more will follow. Tomorrow.

Genetic engineering may be a way to stop Zika. Otherwise, massive usage of poisons (which

already started). This sort of question are all highly philosophical, they are always choices between an evil, and the other.

In Libya, the West, led by France, destroyed a bloody despotic regime, practicing mass murder, but then, the West dropped the ball. On the philosophical ground of non-intervention, and Obama “leading from way behind” France, the West let the Natives argue between themselves to find out how they would organize this country, which is more than 4,000 years old.

That was a serious debate: Libyans have had some outstanding issues, of civilizational grade, for millennia (so do Algeria, Tunisia, even Morocco). One of these issues is whether the 3,500 years old alphabet could, or even ought, to be used, in parts where it still exists, rather than the youngish alphabet brought by the invading Arab armies, armed with their “Submission” (= Islam).

However, profiting from the chaos, the Islamist State moved in. And now it’s moving ever more, as the West is destroying it in the Orient.Now France wants to attack and destroy the Islamist State in Libya. Is this philosophically correct? (I think so, can’t wait!)

Philosophical questions are everywhere, and they are not just fascinating, but they have to drive policy. The situation is much more acute than when Seneca was advising emperor Nero, or when emperor Marcus Aurelius was playing stoic philosopher.

To all these questions, only one context in which to frame the answers: relativity. Relativity of knowledge, relativity of evil, relativity of consequences, relativity of action.

So yes, “maximization of agency towards greater good” is where it’s at. Not just where ethics ought to be at, but where action should be.

(Massimo P. and his friends have what seems to me roughly the same approach to goodness of “maximizing agency“; see: “From ancient to modern From ancient to modern Stoicism — part I“. It’s pretty clear that it was always the overriding principle of my approach to philosophy. I thank Massimo in passing for giving me the occasion of planting my claws and fangs into something juicy, in other word, making my thoughts more, well, effective by providing a debating ground.)

Can we find some inspiration in science? Yes, of course. Look at physics: energy is not of the essence. The essence is the potential, not the absolute energy. It is the potential which sits on the right hand side of the De Broglie-Schrodinger equation. Thus it’s the potential which acts (contemplate the Bohm-Aharanov effect).

Physics is dominated by the principle of least action (found by Maupertuis, during the Enlightenment). Least action of evil, such is modern stoicism. Keeping in mind that inaction is itself a form of action.

Notice that the old problem of the “ends which justify the means” has been completely reformulated in a much larger physical and philosophical universe. The entire, immense power of modern logic, mathematics and physics can then be brought to bear. It is not a question of carrying the equations over: equations constitute only logical foam. What is deeper than the equations, what really gets the logic going, is the context they represent.

For example, a way to formulate Quantum Physics, related to the Least Action Principle, is to consider the “sum over histories”… Well, just as human history itself. Causalities, entangled, are all over histories.

Ethics has got more complicated, but, in this vastly richer landscape, minimal energy, minimal evil solutions abound.

This is not just the great age of science, it’s the greatest age of philosophy. In the age of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius, the empire was in danger, from forces, in and out. Now civilization itself is in question, and even worse, the biosphere itself is threatened. It’s an ecology most propitious to a blossoming of philosophy. The greatest questions ever, await the greatest answers.

And much inspiration has to come from science, whose main job is not just to find the facts, but sophisticated logics to give them meaning. Today’s most sophisticated logics and mathematics are far ahead of the best known yesterday.

We want goodness? Let’s maximize agency towards goodness. The Principle of Least Evil, in other words.

Patrice Ayme’

Record Heat 2015, Obama Cool

2014 was the warmest year ever recorded. 2015 was even warmer, and by far, by .16 degrees centigrade. The UK (Great Britain) meteorological office announced that the temperature rise is now a full degree C above the pre-industrial average. At this annual rate of increase, we will get to two degrees within six years (as I have predicted was a strong possibility).

What’s going on? Exponentiation. Just as wealth grows faster, the greater the wealth, mechanisms causing more heat are released, the greater the heat. Yes, it could go all the way to tsunamis caused by methane hydrates explosions. This happened in the North Atlantic during the Neolithic, leaving debris of enormous tsunamis all over Scotland.

2015: Not Only Record Heat, But Record Acceleration Of Heat

The Neolithic settlements over what is now the bottom of the North Sea and the Franco-English Channel (then a kind of garden of Eden), probably perished the hard way, under giant waves.

Explosions of methane hydrates have started on the land, in Siberia. No tsunami, so far. But it can, and will happen, any time. The recent North Easter on the East Coast of the USA was an example of the sort of events we will see ever more of: a huge warm, moist Atlantic born air mass, lifted up by a cold front.

Notice that, at the COP 21 in Paris all parties, 195 nations, agreed to try their best to limit warming to 1.5 degree Centigrade. At the present instantaneous rate, that’s less than 4 years away. Even with maximum switching out of fossil fuels, we are, at the minimum, on a three degrees centigrade target, pretty soon.

By the way, if all nations agree, how come the “climate deniers” are still heard of so loudly? Well, plutocrats control Main Stream Media. It’s not just that they want to burn more fossil fuels (as it brings them profit, they are the most established wealth). It’s also that they want to create debates about nothing significant, thus avoiding debates about significant things, such as how much the world is controlled by Dark Pools of money.

Meanwhile, dear Paul Krugman insists in “Bernie, Hillary, Barack, and Change“, that it would be pure evil to see him as a “corrupt crook“, because he believes everything Obama says about change and all that. Says Krugman: “President Obama, in his interview with Glenn Thrush of Politico, essentially supports the Hillary Clinton theory of change over the Bernie Sanders theory:

[Says Obama]: ‘I think that what Hillary presents is a recognition that translating values into governance and delivering the goods is ultimately the job of politics, making a real-life difference to people in their day-to-day lives.'”

This is all hogwash. We are not just in a civilization crisis. We are in a biosphere crisis, unequalled in 65 million years. “Real-life differences“, under Obama, have been going down in roughly all ways. His much vaunted “Obamacare” is a big nothing. All people in the know appraise that next year, it will turn to a much worse disaster than it already is (in spite of a few improvements, “co-pays” and other enormous “deductibles” make the ironically named, Affordable Care Act, ACA, unaffordable).

The climate crisis show that there is no more day-to-day routine. At Paris, the only administration which caused problem, at the last-minute, was Obama’s. How is that, for “change”? The USA is not just “leading from behind”, but pulling in the wrong direction. Really, sit down, and think about it: under France’s admirable guidance (!), 194 countries had agreed on a legally enforceable document. Saudi Arabia agreed. The Emirates agreed. Venezuela agreed. Nigeria agreed. Russia agreed. Byelorussia agreed. China, having just made a treaty with France about climate change, actually helped France pass the treaty. Brazil agreed. Zimbabwe agreed. Mongolia agreed. And so on. But, lo and behold, on the last day, Obama did not.

I know Obama’s excuses well; they are just that, excuses. Bill Clinton used exactly the exact same excuses, 20 years ago. Obama is all for Clinton, because, thanks to Clinton, he can just repeat like a parrot what Clinton said, twenty years ago. Who need thinkers, when we have parrots, and they screech?

I sent this (and, admirably, Krugman published it!):

“No doubt Obama wants to follow the Clintons in making a great fortune, 12 months from now. What is there, not to like?

Obama’s rather insignificant activities will just be viewed, in the future, as G. W. Bush third and fourth terms. A janitor cleaning the master’s mess. Complete with colored (“bronze”) apartheid health plan.

What Sanders’ supporters are asking is to break that spiral into ever greater plutocracy (as plutocrat Bloomberg just recognized).”

Several readers approved my sobering message, yet some troll made a comment, accusing me of “racist “slander”. Racist? Yes the “bronze” plan phraseology is racist. I did not make it up. And it is also racist to make a healthcare system which is explicitly dependent upon how much one can afford. Krugman is all for it, but he is not on a “bronze” plan. Introducing apartheid in healthcare? Obama’s signature achievement. So why should we consider Obama as the greatest authority on “progressive change”? Because we are gullible? Because we cannot learn, and we cannot see? Is not that similar to accepting that Hitler was a socialist, simply because he claimed to be one, it had got to be true, and that was proven because a few million deluded characters voted for him?

We are in extreme circumstances, unheard of in 65 million years, they require extreme solutions. They do not require, nor could they stand, Bill Clinton’s Third Term (or would that be G. W. Bush’s fifth term? The mind reels through the possibilities).

“Change we can believe in”: the new boss, same as the old boss, the same exponentiation towards inequality, global warming and catastrophe, the same warm rhetoric of feel-good lies.

As it is, there is a vicious circle of disinformation between the Main Stream Media, and no change in the trajectory towards Armageddon. Yes, Obama was no change. Yes, Obama was the mountain of rhetoric, who gave birth to a mouse. Yes, we need real change, and it requires to start somewhere. And that means, not by revisiting the past.

Patrice Ayme’

 

Torture To Death: Christ’s Crux

Patrice Ayme’: The angry, cruel, somewhat demented, child murdering, jealous, holocaust-prone god of Judaism-Christianism-Islamism justifies bloody despots. (So does Literal Islam, and even much more so, but that’s besides the point here. What is interrogated here is the origin of Christianism’s, and thus Islamism’s, hyper-violence)

Chris Snuggs: “Christianism does not belong in the same basket as Islam. Disregard how men have perverted both; just compare what they ARE, what their fundamental message is.”

PA: Agreed… If one forget that they are not at the same stage of development, and if one uses a stochastic filter. Stochastic comes from the word for “aim” in Greek. It’s used to mean “probability theory”. So the idea is to look at the New Testament, and take, so to speak, the average statement, ignoring those where (the mythical) “Christ” speaks about swords and all that… Sword, as an instrument to foster faith. Force, the Sword, is what made Christianism seductive to Constantine. He was a forceful man. He steamed his wife, alive, killed his nephew, and had his meritorious, accomplished, most famous general and admiral of a son, executed.

Force & the Sword, Justified & Practiced by God, Is The Christian Mood Which Seduced Constantine, Because So Was His Calling

[Roman Emperor Constantine’s statue at York Minster, Britannia, his birth place.]

Here is a sample I have often used:

Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

Some will play it down: ‘Oh, it’s just one sentence!’ Others turn this around, and sneer, when one criticizes Islam’s violence:’Oh, there are also violent statements in Christianism!’. Both COUNTER-IDEAS miss the point: just as one horrible scream can create a terrible mood, so can a horrible statement. PPP Torture Is Intrinsic To Christ’s Business Model [Final Judgment.]

And, by the way, there are actually multiple statements of the greatest of horror, and an insistence that horror was prescribed, ordered, glorified, organized, instituted by god himself. It’s not by accident that the very symbol of Christianism is the worse torture known to man. Even Christ could not figure it out. Well, my child, lonely nailed on your cross, I did: “VIOLENCE IS THE PRICE OF LOVE’. And it was fun to figure it out.

Judaism, its child, Christianism, and its grandchild, Islamism were all war religions. Judaism appears shortly before King David, the enlightened founder of the Greater Israel. (At least so says the Bible written by captives in Babylon, more than half a millennium later.) Christianism, or more exactly what he called “Orthodox Catholicism” (= “Orthodox Universalism”) was imposed by Roman emperor Constantine, who was one of the greatest warriors in history, second to none. As a teenager, the special force like, privileged youth Constantine already terrified the imperial court. Emperor Galerius, the “animalistic, semi-barbarian” persecutor of Christians, tried to get rid of Constantine with a number of dangerous challenges, including suicidal cavalry charge, and fighting a lion in single combat.

Constantine became the single emperor of the entire empire, after many decades of multiple emperors governing in a more or less collegial manner (there were up to 6 emperors at a time, mostly because of the problem of distance in the far-flung empire!).

Christianism is a system of thoughts. But it’s also a system of moods. Systems of thought can be subtle: Islam, for example comes equipped with two meta-principles: Taquiyah (lying to unbelievers as religious principle) and the Abrogation Principle.

Christianism did not have Taquiyah: early Christians obstinately refused to lie, and diminish their god, or their faith, in any way, to the bafflement and anger of other Romans. But Christianism definitively has the Abrogation Principle; when god feels it is good medicine to torture to death his own son, who did nothing wrong, definitively the message that it is good to torture to death people who have done nothing much.

Systems of moods are even more subtle than systems of ideas, because they do not say things directly and explicitly. The mood in Christianism is, basically, that it’s OK to kill, horribly, for no good reason: after all, man is created in the image of god.

Now is there anything more significant to torture to death the innocent? Should we call torturing to death the innocent the most prominent, the most significant, the most particular, the most peculiar, and marking art of the Christian god?

As I insisted, most human beings have known and practiced love. Human beings don’t need lessons on love, as if it were an alien planet never seen before.

But human beings have not known, and, or, practiced, nor justified, excused and become familiar with, torture to death. Christianism not only justified torture to death of the innocent, but made it the crux of its entire system of mood. Torture to death is the clé de voûte, the keystone, the part without which the entire edifice of Christianism collapses.

Judgment And Torture Constitute Christ’s Business Model

And indeed, the last executions and torture to death of Christianism in Western Europe happened during the Nineteenth Century. In the preceding century, Voltaire had railed against the execution by “slow fire” of quite a few people, from a senile Jesuit to an eighteen year old a Jewish girl. The People was upset because of the Lisbon quake cum tsunami, which caused massive, irreparable damage. The girl was burned slowly just because she was Jewish.

Literal Christianism set up the mood which Literal Islamism inherited. Both originated with the guy who steamed his wife (and is a saint of the Orthodox branch of Christianism. Yes, this had deep consequences, including economic.

In the preceding, torture to death was vilified as Christianism’s ugliest mood. However, it does not stop there. The mythical Jesus, a rabbi, approved of the entire Old Testament. And that includes the mood of being willing to kill one’s own child to please one’s boss (“god”).

Yet, it does not stop there. Just as the cross is an add-on not found in old Judaism, Christianism is full of would-be cannibalism (“drink, because this is my blood”, “eat, because this is my flesh”). Would be cannibalism? Well, no wonder the Crusaders roasted children when they got hungry. History is not just an exacting teacher. Like the Christian god, history has no qualms, it just is.

And history is not just about facts and ideas. It is also about moods. Christianism went hand in hand with plutocracy, because it was all the excuse plutocracy needed to reign by the sword. And love was the screen behind which it hid its vicious rule.

How and why Christianism became supreme, as Constantine’s Catholicism, goes a long way to explain, and excuse, Literal Islam. This is the main reason to consider this agonizing corpse.

Patrice Ayme’

Revolution Needed, Vote Sanders

Clinton Would Be Another Obama to Nowhere:

Contrarily to legend, countries such as France, its scion, Britain, and their children, among them the USA, have been highly successful not in spite, but because of a succession of beautifully executed revolutions.

The level of inequalities of the planet has become so drastic, the economy is sputtering, the biosphere collapsing. Yet, the West’s leading grandiosely self-described “liberal with a conscience”, Krugman is in full Kliton, Clinton-for-president campaign. Not a day passes without another blast against Sanders. Oh, well, it was so good last time Clinton was president, the friends Krugman comes across all the time in New York, the financial plutocrats, got to seize the levers of the world, and fed Krugman lots of caviar and champagne, besides paying for 100,000 dollars a year to send the kids here Krugman and the like teach their erroneous discourses. (I am not saying Krugman is the worst; quite the opposite, he is the sweetest.)

During Obama’s First Four Years, Tax Rates on the 400 Richest Went Down 20%

So give me a break with Bush… Obama was Bush’s Third and Fourth term. Or shall we call it Clinton’s Sixth term? The point is that since the ex-chair of Goldman-Sachs, Robert Rubin, officially Secretary of the Treasury, started to tell a (swearing) Bill Clinton was he was going during his presidency, we have never looked back: the financial plutocrats, the sneakiest, sleekest, slickest and sickest of them all, have been in command. That command, they would lose if Senator Sanders became president (and, as far as they are concerned the arrogant Trump, a builder of real things, is as scary, he could do a Roosevelt on them…)

Says Krugman “How To Make Donald Trump President Step 1: Democrats nominate Bernie Sanders. I don’t think Sanders is unelectable, but…” The Krugman class, highly paid pseudo-intellectuals ambling the rich carpets of Davos and plutocratic academia, is aghast from the prominence of leading candidates who have been railing against Wall Street and for a dramatic overhaul of health care in the USA.

Krugman deliberately ignores the possibility that Ted Cruz, not Trump, is the real Republican nominee. Why? Ted Cruz is the Goldman-Sachs candidate, like Obama and Clinton before him.  

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/12/24/trumped-hillaryously-cruzing-to-hell/

The day before claiming Sanders would make Trump president, in the New York Times editorial, Krugman in “How Change Happens”, revived the old John Lennon’s spite for revolution:  …”there are some currents in our political life that do run through both parties. And one of them is the persistent delusion that a hidden majority of American voters either supports or can be persuaded to support radical policies, if only the right person were to make the case with sufficient fervor.”

Real weird a statement for a country which was founded in a revolution, and saw the most violent Civil War, this side of Rwanda.

Of course, nothing significant happened during the Obama presidency. (With the one single exception that, now, health insurance companies cannot just refuse to insure people, based on pre-existing conditions. To compensate, “Obama” instituted a color scheme for health insurance, where colored (“bronze”) plan is basically worthless. Is it a Freudian slip?)

Krugman, I love Krugman. Krugman is highly intelligent (many things are relative), so he can be used as a test bed of devious, not to say vicious, sophisticated logic. In particular Krugman presents us with the opportunity to dissect disinformative twisted logic:  radical policies have happened many times in the history of the USA. FDR was a case in point. But so was LBJ. More to the point, Paul Krugman served in the REAGAN White House, and Reagan (counter-) revolution was pretty much approved by voters. So was G.W. Bush let’s-go-invade-the-world, either-you-are-with-us-or-against-us, policies, which were also very radical (and not in a good way).

Krugman: “… on the left there is always a contingent of idealistic voters eager to believe that a sufficiently high-minded leader can conjure up the better angels of America’s nature and persuade the broad public to support a radical overhaul of our institutions. In 2008 that contingent rallied behind Mr. Obama; now they’re backing Mr. Sanders…

But as Mr. Obama himself found out as soon as he took office, transformational rhetoric isn’t how change happens. That’s not to say that he’s a failure…

Yet his achievements have depended at every stage on accepting half loaves as being better than none: health reform that leaves the system largely private, financial reform that seriously restricts Wall Street’s abuses without fully breaking its power, higher taxes on the rich but no full-scale assault on inequality… who can claim to be Mr. Obama’s true heir — Mr. Sanders or Mrs. Clinton? But the answer is obvious: Mr. Sanders is the heir to candidate Obama, but Mrs. Clinton is the heir to President Obama. (In fact, the health reform we got was basically her proposal, not his.)

Could Mr. Obama have been more transformational? Maybe he could have done more at the margins. But the truth is that he was elected under the most favorable circumstances possible, a financial crisis that utterly discredited his predecessor — and still faced scorched-earth opposition from Day 1.”

Here is again a piece of disinformation, which, actually, originated with Obama himself. Obama (for whichever reasons inside himself, probably greed) did not want to disappoint the powers-that-be (his considerable future income will depend upon them), nor his power base (60 million gullible voters, and your truly). So Obama pretended that the “rancor” (as he put it) of republicans prevented him to act. Parrot Krugman, following the choir of millions of pseudo-leftists, claims that “scorched earth” from the opposition stood in the way. Don’t worry: no luxury carpet burned at the White House.

We have heard this argument since day one of the Obama presidency: Obama could not do anything, because he did not control Congress (where the democrats had a majority), nor the Senate (where the democrats had a supermajority, more than 60 votes out of 100). So Obama, handicapped by his DEMOCRATIC majority and supermajority, had to kill time until he lost control of Congress, and lost his supermajority in the Senate?

Or is it that Obama was isolated among partisans of the status quo, immensely rich “democrats” such as D. Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi, who are extremely happy with the system as it is, and just want to tinker with it, to give the appearance of changing what they truly profit from and do not want really to be changed?

Using “Medicare For All” as a fundamental health system with private insurance add-ons is basically the way the French healthcare system works. The present healthcare system in the USA could be morphed towards such a French like system, without wrenching changes (whereas going abruptly to socialized medicine as in Britain, Sweden, or single payer as in Canada, Germany would be too brutal to be pragmatic, indeed).

In finance, Obama had a great crisis, thus a great opportunity to cut out all the abuse. The Roosevelt, FDR and Teddy made drastic reforms: on day one, FDR closed all banks. Instead, under Obama’s first term, the New York Times found that the 400 wealthiest taxpayers’ tax rates went down 20%… relative to Bush.

Obama is caviar left, Clinton is caviar left. But the biosphere was much warmer in 2015 than in 2014. Meanwhile giant amount of unhindered, plotting and conspiring “Dark Pools of Money” are sloshing around the world, constituting most of the world’s trades.

In the latest funny twist, the cost of a barrel of oil full of oil has become cheaper than the cost of the same barrel, once emptied of oil. I told you oil was dirty!

In Canada, said barrel, with the oil inside, cost less than five cauliflowers. Agriculture has been despised too long.

The rise of sustainable energy (including nuclear in India, China) has much to do with it. This, and fracking in the USA, and the lift of the embargo against Iran, broke the camel’s back. Revolutions may be unleashed in several countries (Venezuela, Arab oil producers, Algeria, Russia, etc.). If you add Trump and Sanders to the mix, many plutocrats are starting to seriously worry.

All the more as their old semi-enemy, the European Union, is at the crossroads between strength and weakness, between further crackdowns in all sorts of ways and further degeneracy.

So resist Krugman’s siren songs. Clinton is a plutocrat singing plutophile songs. Vote for real change, vote Sanders. Differently from Obama or Clinton I, Sanders has a very long track record, we know who he is. Differently from Clinton, although initially a genuine New Yorker, he is not on the take, something Hillary clearly is.

Patrice Ayme’

VIOLENCE IS THE PRICE OF LOVE

We will try to show why, in species, VIOLENCE IS THE PRICE OF LOVE. Both are entangled, evolutionary speaking. As a species grow in its capacity to express love, so grows its capacity to defend that love, strongly, that is, violently. The relationship is mathematical.

Human beings arise from love: a baby without tender loving care, simply dies.

Some will inevitably argue, disingenuously, that the care does not always have to be “tender” and “loving”; let’s insist, however, that tender loving care for a baby is roughly the strongest instinct of human beings, precisely because, without it, the species would not exist. A vaguely normal human being, in a vaguely normal state, cannot resist the need to take care of a baby who needs care.

(That does not mean an enraged, or hateful human will not kill a baby; it means such an amount of lethal rage is unusual… otherwise the species would not exist. A more normal rage is to kill the parents, and keep the baby. It is of note that the Nazis deliberately killed, in the most atrocious circumstances I have been appraised of, in the entire history of humanity, very small children in World War Two. This fact, by itself, because it happened in most literate and intellectually exacting Germany is enough to cause considerable pause. But this is not the main axis of today’s essay.)

However the Dark Side of the mental force exists. All over intelligent species.

Love Is Strong With Parrots. Grab One, The Other One Will Fight.

The Dark Side of the human mind causes pause: was it unavoidable that a species with a Dark Side became the most intelligent species on Earth? We will see that, indeed, it was bound to be the case. Where does this Dark Side comes from? How does it relate to Love? Does the Dark Side enable Love?

The obvious answer, which is not good enough, is that Homo is a carnivorous genus. Even some chimpanzee groups have been observed to adopt a systematically carnivorous diet (eating meat every day). In the case of humans, there is a further complication: chimp like humanoids need (some) trees. Without much trees around, our humanoid ancestors were easy to catch (differently from, say, bats, which are so hard to catch, they can live 40 years). To be safe away from trees, our ancestors had to instil terror in potential predators.

Once in Senegal, I saw a chimpanzee hanging from a tree barely bigger than he was. It was in an area with low bushes and a few miniature trees. The relative sizes of the humongous black and hairy chimp, and the tiny tree were strikingly disproportionate. So was the incredible rage of our fellow humanoid. Our mere presence seemed to have unhinged the universe. Mr. Chimp shook the tree so badly he nearly broke it, and then disappeared, bounding, shrieking, and howling, as if he were on a mission to go destroy the universe, somewhere, somewhat, out there. It was very impressive. The entire zone was full of lions. But no lion in his right mind would come anywhere near such an insane maniac.

That was the whole idea.

Baboons are omnivorous, like chimps, and that mean that, like chimps, they love meat. And the hunt. Moreover, chimps and leopards love to eat (smaller) baboons, and that only boost the baboons’ aggressive disposition. But the further twist with baboons is that, like humans, they (some of them) conquered the savannah.

All these primates have to be hyper aggressive to survive, so they are hyper aggressive.

Would they be less aggressive if they were NOT carnivorous? That’s unlikely: look at elephants: they are immensely intelligent, they know who they are: make a dot above their eyes, bring a mirror, and they inquire (few animals can do this). They have colossal memory, understand much human language, and can be tamed, directly from the wild. However, elephants can be extremely aggressive. Poachers use the elephants’ aggressive solidarity to kill them: kill one, and others come back, charging.

Are there non aggressive very intelligent species? It’s not clear that one can find a single example of a thoroughly pacific, highly intelligent species.

Walruses, who scratch food with their huge teeth at the bottom of the sea, can turn violent and hyper aggressive if they perceive, or imagine, a threat; walruses are used to fend off Polar Bears, and human hunters. Siberians know them as the “tigers of the sea”. They will charge a boat. Some whales are pretty pacific: typically they eat plankton. Hunters such as Humpbacks and Sperm Whales are something else.

In 1820, the whaleship Essex was deliberately charged twice, with extreme violence, by a huge bull Sperm Whale, and sunk in the middle of the Pacific. It is clear that the whale plotted the attack, and conducted it with extreme gusto. Another five cases of major boats sunk by whales are known. Specialists of whale neurology believe that the whale acted in protection or vengeance (at least one of its group had been harpooned earlier, although it counter-attacked and broke the line).

Sperm Whales have the largest brains on Earth. Those brains are more more complex – in certain ways – than those of humans (much of the brain process sound in an exquisite way, both for hunting with the sonar and for communications far, far away…). Their cerebral cortex is much more convoluted than the human cortex. Sperm whales are social creatures with strong bonds, staying in stable social groups, keeping constant companions throughout their lifespan. Webcams have shown they often dive all together, within a meter or so of each other (and they can be 25 meters long, like the one which sunk the Essex). Whalers of old used to harpoon a calf, keep it attached and alive, and then harpoon the adults who came to its rescue.

First Mate Chase survived the harrowing, 4,000 miles navigation across the sea, complete with drawing straws to find not just who was going to be eaten, but who was going to kill dinner (ironically enough, this cannibalism happened because the crew refused captain Pollard’s suggestion to sail to the Marquesas, from fear of… cannibals). Owen Chase recalled: “I turned around and saw him… directly ahead of us [nearly 2,000 feet, 550 meters, away], coming down with twice his ordinary speed… with ten-fold fury and vengeance in his aspect.

“The surf flew in all directions about him with the continual violent thrashing of his tail. His head about half out of the water, and in that way he came upon us, and again struck the ship.

“The ship brought up as suddenly and violently as if she had struck a rock and trembled for a few minutes like a leaf.”

Even parrots will attack to defend their mate. Approaching an island at sea, swimming and diving, I was attacked relentlessly by giant gulls (goelands). I have avoided the dangerous crossing to that island ever since.

As intelligence grows, so does love. And thus so does the necessity of defending said love. Ultimate defense means not just violence, as Israelis and Palestinians inflict on each other, but it means inflicting, and suffering, death.

Love cannot be separated from the Dark Side. Love causes the Dark Side, be it only as a defense. The Dark Side is the price of Love.

The preceding is an explanation, and an apology of violence, in some ultimate circumstances, but should not be construed as a pretext to institute or amplify violence, just because a philosopher justified it some time (and so did Christ and Muhammad). Just as there are many types of Christianism and Islamism there are many types of violence, and many “non-violent” religions and philosophies allow many sorts of violent reactions to mitigate a violence previously imposed on the innocent. (This is the obvious way in which to reinterpret violent Jihad.)

There is an even more devious, and therefore irresistible consideration to entertain: carnivores eat herbivores, thus have to outsmart them. Hence the violence meat eaters live by, is, by itself, a contributor to higher smarts. And indeed, except for elephants, animals with higher smarts are carnivorous (yes, even orangutans love meat). Therein a quandary. And a disturbing cosmic perspective.

The thin red line between heavens and hell seem to fluctuate in human hearts greatly from the nature of the physical law. It does not mean we have to hide our hearts in the sand, Quite the opposite.

If we want more goodness, the modern theory of evil, violence and intelligence tells us that we will have to think more of physics, not just psychology.

Meanwhile, please do not ask the extraterrestrials what they had for dinner. You may not like the answer.

Patrice Ayme’

Political Correctness, Philosophical Correctness, & The “Miniature Nuclear Attack In London”

How The Rise Of Political Correctness, So Hostile To Philosophical Correctness, Led To The Mood That Brought Us The “Miniature Nuclear Attack In London”:

Nearly ten years after, a British judge, Sir Robert Owen, looking as grave, serious, gloomy and ponderous as a human being can ever be, formally accused Vladimir Putin to have ‘probably’ ordered what a British Parliamentary committee called “a miniature nuclear attack in London”.

Meanwhile the second largest lake in Bolivia, lake Pupo, is fully dry. This has to do with the fact, announced simultaneously by the highest scientific authorities in the USA and the European Union, that 2015 was, BY FAR, much warmer than 2014, previously the warmest year ever.

How did we get there? Political Correctness has a lot to do with it. Political Correctness was always the Trojan Horse of evil. Plutocracy cannot do without Political Correctness. PC is a notion which implies its own demise. In contrast to its opposite, PhC, Philosophical Correctness.

Putin At Work. Putin Loves the Fresh Bellies Of Boys. And Dead Rivals. Alexander Litvinenko Dying From Nuclear Poisoning In London.

What is Political Correctness? The history of the term is revealing. “PC” in Latin derived grammar is for “Parti Communiste”. It is indeed how the term “Political Correctness” started, in the first half of the Twentieth Century: as “Party Correctness”. The Communist Party required to toe the “Party” line. And that meant, in practice, to obey Stalin (not his real name), the “Man of Steel”, who was often allied with evil preaching the exact opposite of real communism, for all to see. Stalin was born from an alliance with German fascists for decades, culminating in an official military alliance with Hitler against France and Poland (August 1939). In the 1950s, the Moscow “Communists” allied themselves, for all to see, with president Eisenhower and Nazi collaborator Allan Dulles’ USA against France, Britain and Israel.

Following the Communist Party’s doctrine thus became an exercise in Intellectual Fascism in its purest form: follow the Leader, not matter what. Intellectual Fascism uses the principle of “Pensée unique“. An example is Margaret Thatcher’s slogan “There is no alternative”, parroted later by German Kanzler Gerhard Schröder’s “Es gibt keine Alternative”.

In recent usage, the term was introduced in the USA by the Supreme Court, and came to the fore with debates on books such as Allan Bloom‘s The Closing of the American Mind (1987), Roger Kimball’s Tenured Radicals (1990), and Dinesh D’Souza’s book Illiberal Education (1991). None of this sharp criticism stopped the Political Correctness movement. It has blossomed further recently with “Safe-spacers”, a new sort of anti-intellectual critters infesting Anglo-Saxon campuses.

“Safe-spacers” believe they need space free from all and any debate adverse to their beliefs.

I have myself advocated that some forms of propaganda should be unlawful. The archetype is the Wahhabist propaganda from Saudi Arabia, which has perverted the practice of Islam, worldwide. Instead of having ever more modern Islam (which used to exist), we got a completely enraged, horrendously obsolete Islam… Which goes hand in hand with the Politically Correct mood.

In both cases, radical Islam and radical Political Correctness, youth has been oriented towards frantically loud protests about completely unreal, if not surreal issues, turning into completely useless protests of no bearing whatsoever. And not just youth: watch the British Parliament debate about banning Trump for banning some (Muslim) visitors, although that is not as outrageous as Britain’s proposed banning of other Europeans. Trump’s proposed ban is perfectly legal, what Britain proposes is perfectly illegal (in light of European law).

Compare today’s youth with that of the 1960s. Then youth was protesting stridently to force the governments in the West to do the exact opposite of what they were doing. Be in France, Czechoslovakia, the USA, etc. Where is youth now? With few exceptions, nowhere, youth is too busy with inconsequential matters. (When Bush decided to attack, invade and occupy Iraq, only San Francisco erupted seriously in the USA: there were 5,000 arrests, all discreetly amnestied later, to criminal Bush’s rage.)

Vladimir Putin apparently ordered the murder of Alexander Litvinenko after the latter claimed the Russian President was a practising paedophile, and claiming a film of him abusing young boys existed. Litvinenko had made many shocking allegations against Putin and the nasty ways of the FSB, many with long tendrils all over the West. In short, the holocaust in Chechnya  was organized in Moscow (with real Muslim Fundamentalist attacks in Russia, organized by the FSB, to feed the mood for a mighty counter-attack).

Mr Litvinenko accused his KGB rival of abusing children just weeks before two assassins slipped radioactive polonium 210 into his cup of tea in a London hotel in October 2006: “He (Putin) was a paedophile”.

Former High Court Judge Robert Owen started the inquiry on Litvinenko’s assassination as a coroner. His 320 page report ignited a war of words between Britain and Russia with his conclusion President Putin had ‘probably’ personally ordered the killing of Alexander Litvinenko.

• The report found Mr Litvinenko was deliberately poisoned by Andrei Lugovoi and Dmitri Kovtun. (One is a businessman, the other a Russian MP.)
• It is a strong probability that Mr Lugovoi poisoned Mr Litvinenko under the direction of Moscow’s FSB intelligence service. Mr Kovtun was also acting under FSB direction.
• The FSB operation to kill Mr Litvinenko was probably approved by then-FSB chief Nikolai Patrushev and also by Russian President Vladimir Putin.

The accusations were confirmed by the British Interior Minister.

Putin made his miniature nuclear attack in London in 2007, after years of G. W. Bush’s strong approval (Bush had “looked into Putin’s eyes, and seen his soul”). Both Putin and Bush used similar methods.

So the lack of protest against G. W. Bush in the West fed a mood which led Mr. Putin to believe he could get away with anything.

The rise of plutocracy in the 1990s, in the USA, Russia, Britain and the world was related. And related to the rise of Bush and Putin. Advisers to Russian president Yeltsin were rabid free marketers from Harvard. At the same time, the same mood that the allegedly free market was all the brain, mind, soul and guide we needed, affected other countries: in France, Prime Minister Balladur was privatizing along the same lines as Yeltsin in Russia (with the same result: collapse).

This friendliness to plutocracy boosted the wealth of London (maybe not Londoners). by selling its soul, and, it turned out, its security.

Political Correctness is anti-ethical, because the only correctness which is truly human, is correctness itself. Either things are true, or they are false, or still undetermined. Philosophical Correctness admits this, and, thus, that the world, including morality itself, is immensely complex. We have to engage that complexity by seriating problems and values. We can’t just whine, put our head in the sand, each time something is not pretty, according to the little priests of Political Correctness.

British Prime Minister David Cameron today, in Davos, said that what had happened with Litvinenko was ‘absolutely appalling’ and called it a “murder commanded by a state”. But Cameron admitted the Syrian crisis meant Britain had to cooperate with Russia. Albeit with ‘clear eyes and a cold heart’.

In the book “The Martian”, the astronauts risk getting out of food, so they devise the plan to leave resources for the youngest of them, by putting an end to their lives. Let’s not smirk. It’s not just that Earth’s life probably originated on Mars, and perilously travelled over. We are all Martians from spaceship Earth. And if spaceship Earth gets in too much trouble, desperate solutions.

The French and British Prime Ministers met in Davos. Valls, the Catalan born and educated French Prime Minister from Ticino, Switzerland (!) called the possible “Brexit” the exit of Britain from Europe, a “drama” (“drame”).

Let’s not get overexcited. Political Correctness, ultimately, is a loss of nerves, a failure to consider all the possibilities, and, thus, an implosion of imagination and thus, paradoxically, of precaution. Just as the failure of Western protests against Bush made Putin believe he could get away with everything, Political Correctness is plutocracy’s best friend. Plutocracy reigns through complex structures, its best friend is a simplistic mood.

Political correctness is also meek: instead of envisioning that a country such as Russia can fall under the spell of an evil man, PC just focuses on appearances. It is similar to the Victorian mood of dressing the feet of tables with textile, out of prudery, worrying strongly about that, and about that alone, while, and because, it allowed to live unaware of the reality that imperial powers, out there, were carving giant empires in blood and bullets.

Patrice Ayme’

Hawaiian Savagery & Planet Nine

New Giant Planet Around Sun? Hawaiian Savages Learned Nothing Important Yet?

After all these hard discourses, my friends, as Ludwig Van would say,  time for a little levity. Could spaceships some day fuel far out? It has long been suspected. And now indirect, computational proofs are piling up.

Science is just common sense. The edge of science is the edge of common sense, thus on the edge of the totally unfamiliar. Thus, it’s not obvious. But still, common sense should stay front and center.

For example, the dwarf planets around the orbit of Neptune and beyond, have extremely weird orbits. Pluto actually cuts the orbit of Neptune. And others do. These highly elliptical orbits always baffled me.

Or Maybe Planet Ninth Is All Frozen, Its Atmosphere All On The Ground?

[Hypothetical lightning has been represented on Planet Nine, in this art from Caltech; this was observed with other giant planets; distant Sun is visible, but won’t warm things much; at this sort of distances, only  energy of  nuclear origin could enable colonization, except if one make work completely new sources such as my suggested vacuum energy method. See: Zero Point Energy Machine.]

Caltech’s Batygin (theorist) and Brown (experimentalist) published their work in the current issue of the Astronomical Journal: “Evidence For A Distant Giant Planet In the Solar System”. “Planet Nine” explains a number of mysterious features of the orbits of icy dwarf planets, objects and debris beyond Neptune known as the Kuiper Belt.

“Although we were initially quite skeptical that this planet could exist, as we continued to investigate its orbit and what it would mean for the outer solar system, we become increasingly convinced that it is out there,” says Batygin, an assistant professor of planetary science. “For the first time in over 150 years, there is solid evidence that the solar system’s planetary census is incomplete.”

The discovery was long anticipated: I mentioned myself many times that the weird orbits made sense only if there was a huge weird planet out there. Although a star dashing through the solar system could have brought the same effect, and there was indeed such a star!

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2015/03/02/stellar-flybys-new-way-to-lifes-extinction/

(A red dwarf star zoomed through the Solar System 70,000 years ago, at 20% of the distance to Proxima Centauri, the (red dwarf) star closest to the Sun.)

In 2014, an ex-postdoc of Brown’s, Chad Trujillo, and a colleague, Scott Shepherd, noted just that: 13 of the most distant objects in the Kuiper Belt are similar in some orbital features. To explain that similarity, they suggested the possible presence of a small planet.

The six most distant objects from Trujillo and Shepherd’s original collection all follow elliptical orbits that point in the same direction in physical space (with a thirty degree angle off the plane of the ecliptic, the plane of planets). That is particularly surprising because the outermost points of their orbits (“perihelions”) move around the solar system, and they travel at different speeds.

“It’s almost like having six hands on a clock all moving at different rates, and when you happen to look up, they’re all in exactly the same place,” says Brown. The odds of having that happen are something like 1 in 100, he says. But on top of that, the orbits of the six objects are also all tilted in the same way — pointing about 30 degrees downward in the same direction relative to the plane of the eight known planets. The probability of that happening is about 0.007 percent. “Basically it shouldn’t happen randomly,” Brown says. “So we thought something else must be shaping these orbits.”

The researchers tried different possibilities, quite a bit as Kepler did with Mars. Whereas Kepler, using Tycho’s work, took decades, modern computers compute fast. It soon became obvious that only a massive planet explained what was observed. In particular it explains the orbits of  Sedna and 2012 VP113 which never get very close to Neptune, yet behave as if they were “kicked” by something (as Pluto and others which, coming close to Neptune, are kicked by Neptune).

The Ninth Planet would also explain the weird orbits perpendicular to the ecliptic of some objects, which were recently discovered…

Science is not over. Actually, it’s barely starting. Ironically only telescopes based in Hawai’i have enough light gathering capability to detect the hypothetical Ninth Planet, if it is close to its furthest point from the Sun. It’s ironical: these telescopes are on one of two giant volcanoes in Hawai’i (the other, just as tall, explodes periodically). Those telescopes, the largest functioning telescopes in the world, ten meters across, profits from the fact they are, atmospherically speaking, half way to space.

The savages in Hawai’i, apparently gravely offended by all this science, persuaded the Hawaiian Supreme Court to order to stop the construction of a giant Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) in Hawai’i. The TMT offends the Hawaiian gods. So Planet Nine now has a good chance to not be discovered in Hawai’i, and the savages there can keep on roasting people according to their old religion.

For those who forgot: the famous Captain Cook was captured, roasted and devoured in Hawai’i. (Hence the allusion to roasting, as this was not just culinary, but religious.) And the global mood, promoted by the powers that be is to respect all religions, especially if they are gravely offended by common sense and basic humanism. Or offended by free, unaccompanied German women in front of Cologne’s cathedral.

Hawaiians, I am afraid, learned nothing. In spite of their tragic history.

In the early Nineteenth Century, American missionaries came to Hawai’i and persuaded the authorities of that independent nation, to persecute Catholics.  That was promptly done, maybe in the hope of Hawaiian authorities to ingratiate themselves with American plutocracy. The French military intervened twice to force Hawaiian authorities to stop abusing Catholics (the first treaty was signed, but then violated, bringing the second French intervention, a decade later).

Ultimately American plutocrats and their Protestant missionaries acting as a fifth column, staged a coup against the legitimate Queen of Hawai’i. The Hawaiian Constitutional monarchy and its national assembly was then destroyed and annexed by the USA, to plant pineapple, sugar cane, and now tourists and pot. Fortunes were made. By American plutocrats. Hawai’i, for 15 centuries independent, and a civilization, not to say a culinary hot spot, became an other possession of the American empire.

One would think that Hawaiians would have learned that blind anger, irrationality and scorn for common sense only bring their doom. But apparently, not so. Instead of contributing to the Enlightenment, Hawai’i has decided to contribute to Obscurantism, in a frantic rage against astronomy, and the discovery of worlds untold.

You would think that Barack Obama, who was born in Honolulu, on the island of Oahu, Hawai’i, would have said something loud, along the preceding lines. Not so.

Abysmal. Astronomically abysmal.

Patrice Aymé

 

How Humanism Dies

Humanitarians Killed By Jihadists

Some of those who have Islamophilia claim that we obsess too much about Islamist terrorism. However, terrorism terrorizes. Everybody.

Merkel invited a million marvellous Muslims in Germany, and a few thousands of them, Muslim men, went on a rampage against German women in Cologne. The Qur’an has lots of passages about “women that your right hand posses”. (One can do plenty of things to those!)

Read the Qur’an, ladies and gentlemen, oh yes, read the Qur’an, and then you talk. The Qur’an is much much more fun than the completely insipid “50 Shades of Grey” (a book about a vaguely sadistic guy and a vaguely masochistic girl engaging in vaguely reprehensible practices). The Qur’an brims with fully endowed sadism, and uncomplexed total sexism.

Franco-Moroccan Leila Aloui, A Teenage Jihadist Faced Her, And Absolutely Had To Pump Her With Three Bullets. Too Beautiful. She Took Four Days To Die.

But do not gun killings as in the USA kill much more? The question has been asked by the Islamophiles (some of them no doubt pedophiles, as pedophilia is part of the sacred Islamist texts). Yes, they do: more than 300,000 in the USA in a decade. Murder, one by one, as in the USA, creates a pervasive mood of fear. Yet, it is not mass terror: the victims generally know their assassins (and many are gun lovers).

Whereas mass terror affects everybody, all the time. And it is capable of destabilizing entire countries. Some say: let those countries go. The objection to this is simple: how many North Korea do you want?

Bush and Blair made a deal with the bloody Libyan dictator Gaddafi, the “Deal in the Desert” in 2004. In exchange for dropping his nuclear bomb and chemical weapons program, Gaddafi got non-prosecution for mass murders committed in the West, oil going to Britain, and then lots of prisoners sent over by Blair and Bush, to torture to death, etc. And Gaddafi also got a lasting friendship: Blair called his friend the despot to try to save him from the wrath of the French led assault onto his satanic kingdom.

Leila Alaoui, already a famous photographer, 33 years old, was on a mission from Amnesty International. Leila, a talented artist, in the company of researchers from Amnesty International,  photographed young women who had been forced into marriages, by Islamist abusers. Some were as young as 11 (eleven) years old.

Leila was shot three times when she went to buy a salad, and found herself in front of a Jihadist. He had no idea who she was, except that she was obviously a free woman. She lost a lot of blood. A young African passing by picked her up, brought her to the hospital. She asked about her driver. She was not told that her driver, also from Amnesty International, had been burned alive in his car.

The Jihadists in Ouagadougou shot everybody in sight. They assassinated a six member Canadian family who helped, in a humanitarian effort, with a school since December. And two famous Swiss humanitarians, ex-MPs who had also been on an humanitarian effort were also killed. Then the Jihadists went back to finish the wounded. Many played dead. The Jihadists set the hotel on fire. Many burned alive.

French special forces were flown from Mali, and wiped the terrorists out. If you want peace, first make war.

Meanwhile, Oxfam, a British charity, came up with its annual report on inequalities.

62 billionaires own as much property as 50% of the world population, 3.6 billion people. Since 1998 the 10% richest got most of the increase in riches.

Moreover, Oxfam found that 7,000 billion Euros of tax evasion, mostly from corporations. This is 12% of world GDP. It’s more money than the GDP of any country, except the USA and the EU.

Meanwhile, French industrial production collapsed by 50% in 15 years. It’s not all a simple, direct effect of globalization. Something more subtle is at work.

What? Why? ENA, the National Administrative School, a sort of French Harvard played a big role. Know not knowledge, but how to “Mange”, I mean “Manage”, that is, exploit, fellow men. Big French companies selected the most “intelligent” 20 year olds, those who got to the likes of ENA, coincidentally those children are those of the elite. Many of these companies had been created by “privatizing” large French public companies. Something similar happened with Russia at the same time, with the same sort of “advice”, in the end emanating of that same source of neo-capitalism, Harvard.

Volkswagen instead replaced its CEO by an employee who started at VW as a teenage apprentice.

French savings go mostly to life insurance, which, “strangely”, by French law, cannot go to investments in industry (or maybe it’s not so strange when one realizes that the legislative process is increasingly dominated by the financial plutocracy!). Instead French savings gets to government bonds, and, first of all USA government bonds, thus feeding the American financial plutocracy (as it fits into the Quantitative Easing scheme).

Just as Quantum Entanglement entangles the world as one, plutocracy entangles the world with its satanic mood. Meanwhile, a national union government arose in Libya.

What for? Franco-American attack on the Islamist State in Libya. The idea is to have the new Libyan government ask the United Nations for help. Then the West could eliminate the Islamist State in Libya.

Some will say it will make the situation worse. However, sometimes all we can do is mitigate. Come to think of it, life is all about mitigation. Only god knows the ultimate ends, and this is why he does not exist. But we do.

In recent decades, it has dawned on Non Governmental Organizations of the humanitarian type that the preceding is correct. Humanitarianism without enough force of law is a non sequitur. 

Without military force to impose the law, the law of man, ethological law, the work of humanitarian NGOs cannot be done. (Yes, there was this systematic bombing attack against Medecins Sans Frontieres/Doctors Without Borders in Afghanistan. But that was no doubt nothing that Obama and company ordered. Both France and the USA, differently from Russia, have tried with greater attention to detail than ever, to limit “collateral damage”.)

Obama evoked these ambiguities in his Peace Award Nobel Lecture. Indeed. Only evil against evil can fight for the greater good. Goodness is the product of careful applications of evil calculus. Absent the application of force by goodness, evil moves in the moral vacuum, unopposed.

Patrice Ayme’