This Alone Validates Clinton’s Loss

I was poking around the definition of “national debt”, by consulting various online entities, some of them governmental. “National debt” varies according to what one considers. I was looking to see whether “Quantitative Easing” (the buying by the central banks of depleted assets to the wealthiest to make them wealthy again — the way it was done by our unforgivable leaders).

The smallest interpretation of “national debt” in the case of the USA is around $13 trillions, 80% of US GDP. That smallest notion of debt considers only the FEDERAL debt held by the PUBLIC… After excluding all sorts of obligations (like Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, real estates entities held by the US government)… or what the US government owes to future Social Security recipients (most of the US population). The smallest number is what the Demoncrats love to brandish. However, it will not affect the stunning discovery I made (below).

This Is The Smallest Interpretation Of Debt, The One Held By The Public, After EXCLUDING All Sorts Of Gigantic Obligations, Bankrupt Governmental entities, And Inter-Governmental Debt, And Also After Excluding the “Fed Balance Sheet”

Obama augmented enormously the US National Debt. What for?

The OECD considers that US government debt, including state and local government, is 125% of US GDP. By comparison, the OECD considers that the “general government debt” of socialist France is a bit less, 120% of GDP (same link).

The maximal interpretation of the US National Debt is well above 50 trillion dollars, more than 300% of GDP. Similar numbers, in terms of percentage of GDP, are true for comparable countries (such as France, UK, etc.)

The US government seizes some revenues, like the Social Security tax and consumes it right away (instead of putting the money in the Social Security Trust Fund). The result of this sort of maneuvers is “intergovernmental debt”, which is around 6 trillion dollars. I knew this. This “borrowing” from Social Security has to be absolutely incorporated in the notion of National Debt, because it represents borrowing from the Public by other (unwilling) means. Fair accounting requires to do this.

By this reckoning, the internationally recognized US Federal debt, in December 2015, a year ago,  was 101% of US GDP (a number comparable to that of socialist France… I don’t mean that as an insult: the present presidency of France is held by the French Socialist Party, and so is the Parliament and Senate! They will be thrown out of power in five months.)

But then I learned something new, which jumped at me. The US National Debt reached 106% of GDP in July 2016, six months later. That is an annual rate of augmentation of roughly 10% a year. In a way, it makes sense: when Obama was inaugurated, the US National Debt was just 68%. So, in seven years, Obama increased the US debt by 33%, a rate of augmentation of nearly 5% a year. So Obama just doubled his rate of augmentation of US debt in 2016.

After I pointed out this enormous jump of the debt on Tweeter, I got the following reaction (from which I borrowed the title of this essay):

Philip N. Beam Sr.‏@PhilipBeamSr

@Tyranosopher @CraigRBrittain @wikileaks Just this alone should be enough to validate Hillary’s loss.

Indeed.

And this debt catastrophe is not going to improve: the cost of Obamacare is up 25% from 2016 to 2017. The New York Times and the Reaganite Paul Krugman (the fellow Nobel of Obama and self-aggrandizing, self-described as “the conscience of a liberal”) swooned that this 25% jump in Obamacare cost, was just a one-time augmentation.

However, as there are no serious cost controls in Obamacare, this is highly unlikely: taxpayers will have to pay increasingly plutocrats such as Warren buffet, who made many billions out of US health care, to better lecture the losers down there who don’t know how to invest or work, and, moreover, vote for Trump.  

One may wonder how, mechanically dear leader Obama generated so much debt. The following graph explains it all: Obama lowered the taxes on the wealthy, while showering the poor with gold, and various services, to make them stupidly favorable. This is a very old method, invented and practiced industrially, by Roman emperors (it did not end well).

Under Obama Tax Receipts, Which Come Mostly From Taxing The Rich, Were Kept Artificially, Unsustainably Low. No Wonder the Hyper Rich Were Mostly All For Obama, And Against The (For Them Frighteningly) Unpredictable Trump.

So Obama was a Progressive In Name Only (PINO), or DINO (Democrat In Name Only). He built up a giant deficit, and thus National Debt, so that his friends would stay rich.

Yes, indeed. During the 2008 crisis, part of the wealthiest lost most of their wealth to fellow wealthy people (thanks to a lot of leveraging, as organized by Clinton, Bill). Obama could have let the entities in difficulty go bankrupt, as Reagan and Bush Sr. did in the 1980s. And then buy them on the cheap. Instead he went a different route, using TARP and paying TARP with Quantitative Easing. A route which made the wealthiest, wealthier. (He probably does not understand this, to this day!)

A related matter is the striking improvement of some US socioeconomic metrics in the last couple of months before the US presidential election.

For example, the US median family income rocketed up in the last few weeks before the elections.. I was very surprised by this, and suspicious. Indeed, the US median family income peaked, in real dollars, in 1998, when it succumbed to Bill Clinton’s pro-wealth policies of the Goldman Sachs government. Ever since it has been down, as Democrat and Republican leadership followed the sort of Reagan, trickle down policies which got great demoncratic leaders such as Robert Rubin, Lawrence Summers and Paul Krugman launched (Rubin was CEO of Goldman Sachs, while Summers and Krugman were at the White House, telling Reagan what to do).

In Brazil, president Dilma Rousseff did a similar trick: she cooked the numbers to make the economy look better than it really was. She was re-elected, thanks to those numbers, but when the cooking surfaced, and started to smell bad, she was impeached. It turns out that the Brazilian sociopolitical leadership is thoroughly corrupt. All the way to socialist icons and ex-guerillas (such as Dilma; by the way, Dilma did not profit personally materially from the cooking of the numbers… except that she got, however fleetingly, re-elected).

Some will say that the USA is not Brazil. Indeed, the USA is much more corrupt, so the institutionalization of the corruption in the USA is hard to even point out, lest one is ready to be called a lunatic.

It is not just financial corruption, it’s also media, even mental corruption, which is more extensive in the USA: when Brazilian leaders lose an election, they don’t accuse Russia.

So did Obama’s underlings cook the numbers? In light of the stupendous augmentation of the debt in the months prior to the presidential election, one can only be suspicious.

Augmenting the US National Debt, my dear Obama, at a ten percent annual rate, was trying to buy the presidential election. That’s how history will remember it. History will also remember that you tried to lower the American Republic to the status of vulgar Banana Republic, by claiming it was all Russia’s fault.

For years, the USA crowed that it was the world’s hacking master, even making Iranian nuclear equipment spin out of control (Stuxnet virus). Vast arms of the government masquerading as private entities, among them Apple, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, were hacking the world, and it was fine.

A real democratic republic and open society should never underestimate others’ propensity to mimic anti-democratic, anti-republican and vicious means!

This happened before: the Athenian empire behaved several times in terrible ways. And that was probably why Athens lost the Penopolesian war (Athens had stolen the Delian League treasury, and destroyed the island state of Melos, both for no good reason, among other exploits of demented cruelty unbound). Later, other Greek states imitated the Athenian ways, and Athens lost the war, and half of her population. She survived only thanks to Sparta (the ultimate ignominy!)

Behaving badly feels good, until on is found out by the public. Happy new year Obama and your sycophantic pro-plutocratic media!

Patrice Ayme’

If there’s any doubt ….

Paul Handover from the site “Learning From Dogs” penned a very well written essay around some of the issues I worry most about and we should all worry most about. After I complained I had little energy to write essays, Paul replied:”But you inspire productive outcomes in others! My latest post is entirely down to you.”

Indeed it was. Paul’s essay is reblogged below, after my own, suitably apocalyptic, introduction.

Thanks Paul for helping with this problem, a problem potentially as big as one hundred world war twos, potentially unleashed anytime. Some will scoff, but Obama just took the largest sanctions since the cold war. (Against the advice of his foreign minister, Sergei Lavrov, Putin said he will not retaliate; Wikileaks is saying the leaks come from the USA, some hint they come from the NSA, as Podesta, Clinton’s chief of staff, is listed as a foreign agent).

I will reblog your entire essay, which is much better written than I can master, as soon as I have time….
Thanks again, and happy new year for you and your readers!
Patrice

People whine a lot about World War One and World War Two. Whining is good, as long as it leads to examination of the causes of what went wrong.

World War One was pretty much started, in first order of appearance, through the will of five men, five Prussians (one of them the Kaiser, a plutocrat, eldest grandson of queen Victoria, cousin to the Tsar Nicholas II). Those men actually had planned to attack within 18 months, on December 11, 1912.

Would they have engaged on that “preventive war” without the assassination in Sarajevo, and the subsequent ultimatum of Austria-Hungary to Serbia? We don’t know (the assassinated Archiduke was a strong, albeit grouchy, advocate of peace at nearly any cost, and a close friend of the Kaiser).

However a fact is carefully ignored by history textbooks and history university professors: on June 1, 1914, the adviser of racist US president Wilson, Colonel House, proposed to the Kaiser a world government, with the UK, explicitly adverse to the “racially inferior French”.
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/11/plot-against-france-1912-2013/

Little noticed by textbooks and historians is the fact that the USA, with the help of the “neutral” Netherlands, enabled the Kaiser to keep on fighting in spite of the Franco-British naval blockade (which was absolute). The Kaiser needed cotton for his high performance explosives, and it came from the US.

Conclusion? A trio of men can start a world war, if they have the power to do so: the Kaiser, the US president, and Von Moltke.

The usual conclusion of textbooks is that Europe was a powder keg ready to explode, and that’s good enough to explain what happened. It is basically a lie: Great Britain had no army, and the entire French government was on vacation in late July-early August 1914. So France and Britain were completely innocent. However, the fact remains one had built a machine which enabled a trio to assassinate world peace

The same general context was true for World War Two. through their actions, both the US and the UK rebuilt Germany as a war machine and an economic powerhouse, as a partially owned subsidiary. After the fall of Spain to the Nazis and fascists, Great Britain decided to support the French Republic in opposing Hitler by all means necessary (February 1939).

After France and Britain declared war to Hitler for his invasion of Poland, US President Roosevelt could have made the war stop early by delivering on the “guarantees” he had given France. But he did not. As a result, what should have been a short war against the Nazis, turned into a vast holocaust.

Conclusion: if one sets up a situation where things can go very wrong, given enough time, they will. The Obama administration engaged in a one trillion dollars nuclear weapons program, but did nothing to reduce the nuclear weapon threat. An obvious strategy for peace would have been to withdraw the land based ICBMs (Britain never had any. France dismantled its own; only three countries have them now, including the USA). Those are launched on warning, and are extremely dangerous.

In this, as in so many other matters, Obama has been an immense disappointment. People who want progress, should push for progressive ideas under the Trump administration. We cannot just hope that Trump will trump his critics (as he did so far). We have to push him in the right direction. The fate of humanity is at stake. And it could be gone in a flash, thanks to our previous, highly criminally derelict leaders.
Happy New Year To All!

Learning from Dogs

…. there’s no doubt!

My title and sub-title comes from commercial aviation. It’s one aspect of the safety culture that safely the millions of passengers who embark on a commercial flight each year. (IATA estimate that it will be 3.6 billion in 2016.) In other words, if the flight crew have even an inkling of an issue with the aircraft while in flight they will make an immediate decision to land.

Why I chose this title will become clearer as you read on.

The end of the Second World War so far as Europe was concerned came on May 8th, 1945. In other words: VE Day. London was not a pretty sight in 1945.

Toni Frissell’s famous image of an abandoned boy clutching a stuffed animal in the rubble of 1945 London. (Image taken from this website page.)

What’s the relevance of May 8th, 1945 to me?…

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Isaac Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy

In the Real World, Foundations Saved Civilization Before:

The combination of imperial collapse followed by re-birth from Foundations within happened several times already, for real.

Civilizations collapsing into Dark Ages from the actions of dozens of millions of people occurred more than once. And then very small groups arose, often within the collapsing empire, and imposed new ways of thinking which enabled civilization to restart. One such case was the Mongol takeover of China, and the subsequent collapse of the Yuan dynasty replaced, within a century, by the Ming dynasty (appropriately founded by a Buddhist monk).

Yet the most striking examples of collapses are in the West, and the most spectacular ones come with two foundations.

The first collapse was that of the seven superpowers which made the Bronze Age civilization. They were attacked by nations which made “a conspiracy in their islands” (said Pharaoh Ramses III in 1175 BCE). Besides the calamitous invasions by these “Peoples of the Sea”, a number of disasters striking simultaneously (calamitous climate change, including super drought, quake swarm, etc.) brought the entire trading system down, upon which some civilizations depended for survival, and then generalized destruction followed. The Foundation consisted in a number of Greek city states, mostly on the Ionian coast. The Second Foundation was Athens.

However soon enough, an unserious Greece was taken over by the fascist Macedonian empire, and its successor regimes, the Hellenistic kingdoms.

The Second Foundation was the Roman Republic itself. Rome had been created where the shock waves from Magna Grecia, Italian Greece, and the Etruscans collided. That positive interference brought herdsmen to civilization. The Etruscans were themselves one of these roaming “Peoples of the Sea”, and they had settled in Syria for a while, before grabbing the part of Italy with the richest iron deposits: Foundations everywhere.

Rome freed Greece, and then turned into an evil empire itself. Rome degenerated ever more into all sorts of fascisms… and progressively collapsed ever more, as one major system after another became dysfunctional.

Then emperor Constantine re-founded Rome by imposing the Catholic Church, which had grown semi-secretly for two centuries, as a favored institution within the empire.

At the same time, other Roman generals cum lawyers equipped the savage Germans constituting the Frankish Confederation with a Latin written law, the Lex Salica. The Franks were opposed to Christianism. In a further twist, Constantine and his successors used the Franks as shock troops of the empire (Once the Franks staged a full civil war to give back control of the empire to secularists).

Meanwhile the First Foundation, Catholicism, collapsed Rome, and then it gave control to the Second Foundation, that of the Franks, which had opposed them. In a complete turn-around, the Franks then adopted Catholicism, modifying it extensively to eliminate all its bad aspects (no more apocalypse around the corner, total tolerance for fellow religions, mandating secular education, etc.), while keeping the good ones (charity, altruism, Christian Republic mentality, etc.). Within 150 years, the Franks would outlaw slavery in Europe (there had been no slavery in Germany, so this is more the German than Christian influence: all bishops were very rich and they had dozens, or hundreds, of slaves).

Small foundations can, and will always, save civilizations. For two main reasons: 1) their small size enable them to think democratically, thus better. 2) the excellency their struggle for survival forces on small foundations, require them to think straight and true (otherwise they won’t survive).

It is likely that some of the real events I just related inspired Asimov: he was a very knowledgeable person (and the Foundational aspects of Rome and Athens were well-known, as was the social failure to oppose Macedonia in a timely manner, in spite of the strident warnings of the philosopher Demosthenes).

When I read the Foundation Trilogy, long ago, I found, even then, some of its aspects very dated. But in a way, that is the entire point.

Psychohistory was not invented yesterday, we have crucially depended upon it, for millennia.
Patrice Ayme’

Skulls in the Stars

I’ve recently been trying to become more acquainted with science fiction as a genre, as most of my life I’ve been focused primarily on horror fiction.  A natural and obvious place to place some emphasis is on classic works from the golden age of science fiction, and a natural and obvious place to start there is with the work of Isaac Asimov.  A few weeks ago, I read Asimov’s Foundation (1951), and blogged my thoughts about it.

Asimov has written seven books set in the Foundation setting; I figured that I would be content reading the first one, to get a feel for it, and then move on to other authors and other series…

… and, as of today, I’ve started reading the fifth of the Foundation novels.

As the first three books, Foundation (1951), Foundation and Empire (1952), and Second Foundation (1953), form the original trilogy, and I thought it…

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TRUTH, SCIENCE: CONSTRUCT, Only Then Try To Falsify

The notion of truth is central to the human condition. “Belief”, “Faith” claim to solve it. But there is a better way: dynamics.

BUILD, THEN VERIFY: HOW SCIENCE & TRUTH PROGRESS. TRUTH IS AN ECOLOGY.

Popper’s Error: Science Is Not Just About Falsification. Science Is Construction First, Falsification Later:

Abstract: ‘Falsification’ ruled 20th-century science. However, falsification was always second to construction. First construct, only then falsify. Why? As simple as it gets: One cannot falsify something that one has not constructed.

So what is truth? For a hint: look at biological evolution: in a way evolution is a truth, any species solves a number of problems it is confronted to. (It could be the Ebola virus: the virus solves the problem of its own survival.) I will show truths are also denizens of an evolutionary process. (Leaving the Bible’s Logos in the dust…)i

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Detailed Examples Show That Falsification Is Always Second To Construction: the heliocentric theory jumps to mind.

Heliocentrism (Earth rotates around the Sun) was first proposed by the astronomer Aristarchus (320 BCE). At least so said Archimedes. The arguments were lost. However, Aristotelian physics was in the way. PPP Carefully Looking At The Phases Of Venus Falsified The Ptolemaic Model of the Solar System

Buridan (~ 1345 CE) demolished Aristotelian physics (no, islamophiles, Buridan was indeed first). Armed with his correct inertial theory, Buridan proposed that Earth turned around the sun. But he could not prove it. Copernicus said more of the same two centuries later: yet it could not be proven.

The philosophical argument had been known for 18 centuries: the Sun was the bigger thing, so the smaller thing, Earth, should rotate around the bigger thing. (Maybe some Ancient Greeks thought about another argument, relative to speed: if the Sun turned around, in just a day, its speed had got to be enormous; enormous speeds were unfriendly; if Earth rotated around, it needed to rotate on itself: would the clouds fly away? Aristotle’s erroneous physics said so, but Buridan explained  that Aristotle’s arrow experiment was false, by introducing rotary inertia.

Kepler came out with his laws, a stupendous achievement. Still one could not prove heliocentrism definitively. It had become the simpler description, though, by a long shot. 

Falsification Of The Egocentric Ptolemaic System Was Only Provided By The Goddess Venus; By The Way, I Protest Against The Adjective “Copernican”. Aristarchus, and Even More, Buridan, Were The Main Architects of Building The Truth About The Heliocentric System. Buridan threw Down Aristotelian Physics, Something Even Archimedes Did Not Do (that we know of!)

[In the Ptolemaic System, Venus Was Always Between Earth And Sol, Thus, Venus Always Appeared As A Crescent. Seeing Venus fully lighted by Sol showed Ptolemaic astronomers were full of it. Now, OK, they had to wait for the progress of European optics in the middle Middle Ages… Reading glasses and all that…]

And then Galileo found that the little things, the four satellites of Jupiter, were rotating around the big thing (Jupiter). Another indice.

At this point, there were several independent lines of arguments each pointing at heliocentrism as the most economical, most likely explanation (size, speed, lesser overall rotational inertia (rotational “impetus”, to speak as Buridan did), Kepler’s Laws, Jupiter’s satellites).

It was a “beast in the forest approach”: it sounded like a lion, it smelled like a lion, it had the color of a lion, it looked as if it had the ears of a lion. So what of Popper’s “falsification” approach in this? Suppose that it did not have the color of a lion. Does that prove it’s not a lion? No. It could be bright red, because it’s covered with blood, and it’s still a lion. Or all black, because it’s in the shade, yet, still a lion.

By 1613, though, Galileo’s telescope had enough power to resolve the phases of Venus (and dare to publish the result). Only then was the heliocentric theory definitively proven, and the Ptolemaic system ruled out. If the way the phases behaved had not come out right, heliocentrism would have been wrong. PPP Venus provided with the Popper Falsification. However, even before that, all astronomers had come to the conclusion that it was certain that the Earth turned around the Sun.

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Of The Bad Influence Of Popper & The Primacy Of Falsification:

Falsification is not fun and cuts down the impulse of imagination. Putting falsification from cognition first kills imagination. Imagination is more important than cognition. Imagination is the definition of the human condition.

To realize that only the phases of Venus were an incontrovertible proof, one had to have derived the heliocentric theory far enough to come to that conclusion. By the time it became clear that the Venus phases were the incontrovertible proof could be, 99% of the theory of heliocentrism was established. 

It was a question of mental chicken and egg: neither came first, the theory had to evolve. Actually, the phases of Venus can be resolved by exceptional observers with fantastic eyes, and special atmospheric conditions (the human eye can resolve a minute of arc, Venus apparent size is around two-third of that).

If one had been guided by only finding a definitive proof of heliocentrism, one would have invented no science. For example Buridan and his students invented graphs. They also demonstrated early calculus theorems, but without any of the sophisticated formalism, equation, analytic geometry, which those theorems would push to discover…

By considering that only the last step of an inquiry makes that inquiry scientific, Popper and his falsification obsession make science impossible. (Down with Popper; make no mistake, I like Popper, but then I also “like” Ivanka Trump’s mien in the coach cabin of a Jetblue sardine can, when she kept calm in the middle seat, while being “harassed” by two PC college professor idiots… They were thrown out of the plane, came to regret their actions, and then deleted their Tweeter accounts where they wrote about the deedd they planned. Both the martyrized Ivanka and one of the cruel college professors of barbarity were with small children, including two infants…)

As Buridan pointed out, one could not tell the difference, experimentally , between the heliocentrism he proposed and Scripture (so one may as well believe scripture, he added insolently). But that impossibility to falsify did not prevent him to think about it, and to think about it as a science.

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Evolution theory is even more constructivist: 

The Greek philosopher Anaximander of Miletus, before the Persian fascist annihilated Miletus, proposed that people descended from fishes. Later, Aristotle, baffled by fossils, ordered his students to go out, observe and establish a registry of living forms.

By then evolution theory by mixed artificial and natural means was well-known in Greece, as related methods produced superlative cattle sold around the Mediterranean. Nobody can know how much was explicitly in writing about evolution (out of 700 Greco-Roman classics we know of, only 150 survived… through the Frankish controlled monasteries).

Evolutionary ideas were revived in the Eighteenth Century, until Lamarck proposed the theory of evolution in 1800 CE. Lamarck became quickly an object of hatred from the dictator Napoleon and the Christian Church. A bedrock of his conclusions were microscopic studies of fossils of mollusks (decades behind the microscope destroyed his eyesight). Lamarck was a research professor, not a falsification professor: he invented ideas, and even words: he used neologisms such as biology, mollusk, invertebrate, etc.

Lamarck also proposed a non-selective mechanism to explain evolution (as I said above, the Greeks were thoroughly familiar with natural and artificial selection). That obviously could not be disproven, and the mechanism was completely unfathomable. It is only now that epigenetics has been demonstrated to exist, and some mechanisms explaining it have been made explicit.

Methinks there is much more to come (because DNA is a Quantum machine in a Quantum environment, and all interactions are non-local…

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Those Who Don’t Want To Build, Don’t Want to Know:

We build theories, first. Then we test them, always. First build.

Those who don’t want to build, don’t want to falsify.

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Finding Truth By GOING BEYOND The BIBLICAL GOD:

To assuage and pacify the Neoplatonist leadership of the Roman empire, the evangel of John proclaims in its first few sentences that the “logos” was God, and God was the “logos”. In other words, logic, the discourse, ruled the universe.

Now the “logos” itself is its own truth: any logic defines a propositional truth from its axioms: well-formed propositions are “true” in a sense. HOWEVER, propositional truth is not ALL the truth in a logical system. That observation is the key to the problem of truth.   

Moreover, there is the problem of meta-truth. Meta-truth evolves out of truth (Godel famously proved that meta-truth existed). Logicians have been struggling with both non-propositional truth and metatruth (Godel’s proofs were proofs of existence, and did not provide with an explicit mechanism to build metatruths; later Godel and Cohen rolled out axioms which were independent of others, and thus could be considered true or not).

The preceding shows that building a scientific theory is a built-up of truth: Popper’s work was naive, removed from reality.

A scientific theory’s formation is an evolution of truth: it defines truth as it goes. Science is the best state of formal knowledge we have: thus truth is an evolution

Still, although truth evolves, that does not mean there is no absolute formal truth. There is: planes fly, don’t they? For a plane to fly one million formal truths need indeed to be true, at the same time, or the plane would crash.

Thus one can see that truth does not evolve like a species: metatruth evolves like an ecology does, generating on its way perfect species, local truths. An ecology evolves perfect species, such as sharks and oysters, which barreled, same as they always were, through massive extinction waves in the last few hundreds of millions of years. Evolution also produced species whose main business is to evolve, such as hominins (ourselves and all those cousins of us we used for dinner, in the past).

So, in the evolution of logic and metalogic, perfect truths are produced, so perfect they become part of the logos themselves (truths such as realizing that love is the engine of all things human!).

God is truth, and we make it up, as we debate reality with our imagination.

Patrice Ayme’

P/S: The essay is better appreciated if one is familiar with 20th century philosophy of science (and it penetrated the exercise of science itself, especially physics). Karl Popper claimed that, if a theory is falsifiable, then it is scientific. However, if I say, tomorrow the sky is blue, that’s falsifiable, but not necessarily scientific. The Popperian criterion excludes from the domain of science not unfalsifiable statements but only whole theories that contain no falsifiable statements. That’s silly, because Popper wanted to ‘prove’ that Marxism was not scientific… Yet clearly the work of Marx contains falsifiable statements. Moreover, Pauperism leaves one with the Duhemian problem of what constitutes a ‘whole theory’ as well as the problem of what makes a proposition ‘meaningful’.

My approach above pretty much throws the whole thing through the window. Science has to do with truth, and metatruth, which have architectures of truth, just as a building or a plane have them.

 

Saharan Snow, Enjoy, It Will Not Last

Global warming is accelerating, as anticipated: the Arctic sea ice is the smallest ever for the season. Also the Polar Vortex wanders. As I have argued in the past, global warming also means, through equipartition of energy, great depressions, great high pressure, and great dynamics. Greats dynamics means great motions of whatever is big and can be moved. From depression, to wiggles in the jet streams, to the polar vortices themselves: whatever can move, will be moved.

This has brought some counterintuitive effects: for decades, Antarctic sea ice spread out away from the icy continent, pushed by stronger winds. Also the accelerating melting of the giant Antarctic ice shelves (some 1,000 kilometers wide), has brought to the surface light sweet water, which readily freezes above the colder, denser saltier ocean water below. Thus climate deniers chuckled that Antarctica was getting colder, whereas, in truth, was they were observing was the exact opposite.

Climate Denying Sites Published Similar Pictures, Where The Forest In the Background Cannot Be Seen, To Make It Look More Miraculous, Of Course…

So, year after year, the Antarctic sea ice spread out, and that was a shining demonstration of the global warming. Of course, this sort of evolution evolves steadily away from equilibrium, until things break, and a completely new attractive minimum comes within reach. This apparently just happened with Antarctica: after a year where the sea ice spread more than two standard deviations above the average, now the sea ice is shrinking two standard deviations BELOW the average.

The Polar Vortex has wandered: for many weeks it was over Siberia. Instead of being around the North Pole. Thus the temperature at the Pole was 20 Celsius (roughly 40 F) ABOVE normal. Then the vortex went to North America last week, and temperatures plunged there. Now higher temperatures are again announced for the Pole.

Ah, and what of this Saharan snow? Actually it was in an Algerian locality perched at 1078 meters above sea level in the Atlas mountains. It receives rain, and is surrounded by (thin) forest. Although this particular locale had no snow for 37 years, it snows every year in the Atlas: Algeria has ski resorts. The Atlas culminate at 4167 meters in Morocco and stretches 2,500 kilometers (1,600 miles). Many peaks are above 4,000 meters, and the barrier is formidable. The Atlas actually creates the Sahara, as it blocks moisture from the Atlantic and Mediterranean to reach the interior of the continent (the Sierra Nevada does the same in North America, blocking much Pacific moisture).

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“What We Are Seeing Now In Greenland Is Out Of Bounds With Anything Seen In the Last Few Millions Year”

Two papers just published in Nature support my old opinion that the Greenland icecap is more fragile than it was previously assumed.  These papers arose from collaborations from many prestigious institutions, in several countries, with support from the US National Science Foundation. It uses new radioactive techniques (new in that context).

Basically, when exposed to the radiation of the natural environment, isotopic compositions get modified: elements become radioactive in specific ways; however, when tucked under kilometers of ice, said radiation does not reach the ground, and elements have a different isotopic composition; thus, scientists are now able to figure out what the ice cover was… even 7.5 million years ago.

A study pondered the Eastern Greenland ice cap. There are high mountains there (up to 3,700 meters). Computer models show that it should not have melted in the last 7.5 million years (some hopefully claim it never will, but that’s just fossil fuel industry driven computations…). This is indeed what was found in the isotopic studies. The leader of the study, Bierman, opined that:

“…the ice sheet in East Greenland responds to and tracks global climate change… The melting we are seeing today may be out of the bounds of how the Greenland ice sheet has behaved for many millions of years.”

That team collected only samples off the mountainous east side of Greenland. Its results don’t provide a definitive picture of the whole Greenland ice sheet. But its findings  provide strong evidence that “an ice sheet has been in East Greenland pretty much continuously for seven million years,” says Jeremy Shakun, a geologist at Boston College who co-led the new study. “It’s been bouncing around and dynamic — but it’s been there nearly all the time.”

However, people on the ground, see the ice sheet retreating by miles, every year, in some places, leaving an eerie landscape behind.

***

Contrast does not mean contradiction: 

The other study in Nature was led by Joerg Schaefer of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory and Columbia University, looked at a small sample of bedrock from one location beneath the middle of the existing ice sheet. It came to what appears to be a contradictory conclusion: Greenland was nearly ice-free for at least 280,000 years during the middle Pleistocene — around 1.1 million years ago. This contradicts existing computer models: the Common Wisdom was that, after earth entered a period of glaciations 2.7 million years ago, camels disappeared from the High Arctic, and that was that.

“These results appear to be contradictory — but they may not be,” Bierman says. Both studies have “some blurriness… Their study is a bit like one needle in a haystack, and ours is like having the whole haystack, but not being sure how big it is.”

Both teams looked at isotopes within grains of quartz, produced when bedrock is bombarded by cosmic rays from space. The isotopes are created when rock is at or near Earth’s surface — but not when rock is buried under an overlying ice sheet. By looking at the ratio of two of these cosmic-ray-made elements — aluminum-26 and beryllium-10 caught in crystals of quartz, and measured in an accelerator mass spectrometer — the scientists calculated how long the rocks in their samples had been exposed to the sky, or covered by massive ice. The technique is not new, but was never applied before to cores from marine sediments. Now they are busy extending the methods to other places, including Antarctica.

All of this will allow to evaluate better the probability of melting of the ice sheets in the present conditions.

I think the real danger comes from Antarctica, and it’s coming soon. “But there’s enough sea-level rise tied-up in Greenland alone to put a lot of cities and long stretches of coastline underwater,” says Paul Bierman, “including Donald Trump’s property in Florida.”

Well, Trump knows this (whatever he says to assuage his most clueless, suffering supporters). And thus Trump may do more than Obama, who did nothing, except covering up with hot air coming out of his mouth the black reality that the Federal government coal is sold at less than 20% of what it costs (according to a study published in Science in December 2016). Now, in another orgasmic bout of hot air, Obama and Trudeau, less than a month from giving the reins to Trump, have barred drilling in the Arctic. Looks like Obama is suddenly waking up to the possibilities that being a US president brings.

The moral thing to do is to be informed, and to look, in particular, at hypocrisy with a clear eye. Now Obama will be able to claim that he stopped the pipelines and the drilling. Zorro arrived at the last second to save the Earth, seven and a half year too late. History will laugh at how naive his (frantically hypocritical) admirers were.

Patrice Ayme’

 

 

 

 

 

 

Should Truth Be Moderated?

I Think, Therefore I Attack:

The first problem is that the importance of the relationship between seeking the truth and needing some aggression to do this, is underestimated.

We think, therefore we attack. Not just your brain, but mine too. Seeking the truth involves destroying yesterday’s false, fake, naive, ill-informed certainties. (This is why a land of faith in the irrationalhas a problem producing truth.)

Truth is what is. At some point, brains which learn are informed by what is. Brains are formed into what is. Formation requires energy. Learning the truth is about brain construction. So it is energy hungry, it is a baby which needs to be fed. Or it will devour you.

Truth is why philosophers in good standing are hated by the commons: the philosophers ask the commons to spend energy, in-form their brains, spend energy, get out of their comfort zone, burn what they adored. Not only do philosophers and other deep thinkers have different brains, the ones of philosophers and thinkers being much superior, they assuredly have different epigenetics. Well, as president Franklin Roosevelt said about bankers, I welcome their hatred: I devour it, it makes me strong (even Nietzsche did not dare to say that).

In Greeks politics, as explained by Aristotle, there were “tyrants” (turannus, actually). Aristotle explained these were individuals who whipped the People (“Demos”) into a frenzy against the oligarchy in power. (Oligarchy means rule of a few.) Donald Trump is filling this role a bit, panicking the oligarchy in power and all its sycophants and servants. 

Aggression is intimately tied to deep thinking. Both require strong motivation to destroy what was, to build a better self.

Refusing To Understand Aggression Is Refusing To Understand Not Just Why & How Mammals Killed Dinosaurs, But Refusing To Understand The Primate Condition Itself

***

US Oligarchic Plutocracy’s Religion: Moderating Truth Itself:

The US oligarchs and their own brainless mobs have argued that “fake news”, “post-truth”, the FBI and the KGB (Putin) have conspired with those who set-up the electoral college, to make them lose their privileges (soon).

Facebook, the Washington Post and the New York Times (all of them controlled by some of the richest and most oligarchically connected individuals in the world) have argued they need to “moderate”, and “be moderate”. It is not just particularly ironical with the New York Times. Paul Krugman from the NYT has written, for years, that comments needed to be moderated. Or the likes of me would pervert their innocent readers by exposing them to truth. So all of my comments were excluded, because I am apparently viewed as an immoderate partisan of truth (in earlier, more pleasant times, the Times’ editors would call me, to listen to my wise opinions).

Thus the call to moderation of the New York Times pertains to the same sort of general perverse psychological strategy which brought Adolf Hitler to pretend all day long that he was all for peace and a “calm” savior of minorities.

I have come to believe that most of the economic “science” of Nobel Laureates such as Paul Krugman is just oligarchic propaganda. Actually most of what someone like Milton Friedman said about social organization, science, the state, or lack thereof viewed as an asset, arguably led to the disastrous state of affairs we are in now. Milton Friedman got the Nobel in economics, but it’s easy to show important parts of this work, with tremendous policy consequences, which were enacted (mostly by Nixon, Reagan and Clinton), are sheer counter-factual nonsense.

(For example Milton Friedman argued that the state never helped to invent anything, whereas the evidence to the contrary is overwhelming: 99% of the greatest discoveries of humanity had state support in some sense; actually the roots of the university system comes from a mood the Frankish leadership had in the Sixth Century, practices they had in the Seventh Century, and passing mandatory secular educational laws in the Eighth Century.)

That such an ignorant person as Milton Friedman spewing outrageous lies was able to steer society, not just the economy, starting with Richard Nixon, goes a long way to explain why all presidents ever since, were bad for the USA (and the world), whereas all the preceding presidents, after Hoover, were certainly good for the USA.

So the New York Times banned all my comments about “Quantitative Easing” after the first few. Why? Because I pointed out that the richest people in the world profited from it, the way QE was done, and that it was disastrous for the 99%.

***

Facebook Will Determine Truth According To The Most Hateful, And Will Check It With Servants Of Those Which Made It Rich:

Now Facebook has announced it would use its own users to detect non-truth. My own personal experience shows that, since the confrontation between Trump and the present oligarchy, I have been insulted to an unreal level. I have been condemned in public for being things I am absolutely not. In truth, I have Jewish  friends, very close Muslim friends (they host my seven-year old daughter everyday), and I am a certified alien, and condemned as such (wherever I go). I was also anti-Trump decades ago, because I did not like the way US banks helped him, and right now I am not going to be anti-Trump, just because Trump tells the truth.

So Facebook is going to empower the individuals most hateful, most ignorant, hence most belligerent, to weed out… truth. To reinforce this, Facebook will use professional “truth” determing for profit services which have been fanatically devoted to Hillary Clinton, candidate of the oligarchs and plutocrats of the present establishment. 

***

Hence a question: Should We Moderate Truth?

Of course not. That would be inhuman. Thus, if we are human for the better (plutocrats are not), we should not moderate truth. Humanity is strong, dominant, because humanity is a truth machine.

An oligarchy is always in place because the People assent to it: Aristotle, Rousseau pointed this out. That means that the minds of We The People broadly accept that the oligarchic rule is wise enough. And it is, in general, a lie.

Why? Because the oligarchy, being from a few, is not as smart as if all thoughts from all of We The People had been processed, that is exposed, considered, and debated: the Roman empire collapsed, from society-wide Alzheimer. And most civilization collapse from civilizational Alzheimer (be they the Qin, Yuan, Ming, or Kaiser Wilhelm empires, or Easter island).

***

What To Do? Learn To DEBATE Ideas.

That means insults should not be viewed as rational arguments.

For example calling Donald Trump “anti-semitic”, meaning anti-Jewish, as Paul Krugman did, 48 hours before the presidential election. In truth, Trump’s son-in-law is an “observant Jew”, and his beloved, trusted daughter Ivanka converted to “observant” Judaism, when she was 27… Examples like this show that the “Democratic” pundits were deliberate promoters of lies.  

Viewed from afar, the entire organization of US society is a lie. The Democratic Party was a Demoncratic (= plutocratic) Party. And this is the truth. Yes, that’s also an insult, but insults which abstract truth are alright, and sometimes necessary. The problem is when the “truth” turns out to be lies (as the rock group the Jefferson Airplane put it 48 years ago in a famous song, “Somebody to Love“).

There should be no moderation in the art of thinking the truth.  Especially in these times, when civilization is destroying its home.

Those who claim that truth should be moderated are not just enemies of humanity and all its values, but enemies of the biosphere itself.

Patrice Ayme’

 

.

 

 

 

Blame Obama’s Nihilism For Syria’s Destruction

Pontificating Pseudo-Leftists Destroyed The Better Values, Including Care and Rationality, By Claiming They Were Not Worth Fighting For, Nothing Was. From This Obscene Nihilism, Of Slimy Souls, We Will All Suffer All Too Practically.

The Economist has woken up, from its Trump Derangement Syndrome, to the reality of the catastrophic moral abyss known as the Obama administration. Subtitle of The Economist: The war in Syria: The lessons from Aleppo’s tragic fate. WHEN INTERESTS TRIUMPH OVER VALUES TERRIBLE THINGS CAN HAPPEN. (Dec 17th 2016.)

The interest of whom, dear The Economist? Not just Putin’s, Assad, and the plutocratic circles in London which professionally love the Assad family’s billions. One speaks here also of the interests of prima donna Michelle Obama and the US Democratic Party elite presently still in power, and the interest of those who feed them all, the globalocracy and the worldwide plutocracy, especially the one of financial type. That interest goes beyond profiteering from those who support massacres. It goes as far as destroying the values which make civilization possible. Let me explain.

Aleppo Barrel Bombing By Assad Regime Summer 2015. What the Joint Franco-American Intervention Was Supposed To Stop

The joint French Republic USA attack on Assad after Assad killed thousands of civilians in gas attacks, would have taken out the entire Syrian Air Force, including helicopters dropping barrel bombs.

Obama’s last minute loss of nerves, and calling off the attack while French bomber pilots were already strapped in their seats, was a moral failure of Auschwitzian proportions. Of such moral failures was the road to World War Two and Auschwitz, paved. (And it did not take too many of these failures, barely more than a couple, before the insane moods had set-in, and world war was unavoidable.)

Says The Economist: “GROZNY, Dresden, Guernica: some cities have made history by being destroyed. Aleppo, once Syria’s largest metropolis, will soon join their ranks. Its 1,000-year-old Muslim heritage has turned to dust; Russian aircraft have targeted its hospitals and schools; its citizens have been shelled, bombed, starved and gassed (see article). Nobody knows how many of the tens of thousands who remain in the last Sunni Arab enclave will die crammed inside the ruins where they are sheltering. But even if they receive the safe passage they have been promised, their four-year ordeal in Aleppo has blown apart the principle that innocent people should be spared the worst ravages of war. Instead, a nasty, brutish reality has taken hold—and it threatens a more dangerous and unstable world.”

A mood that political leaders and dictators can get away with mass murder for all to see has set-in. This has happened many times in the past:  that change of moods is always necessary before great wars. Just as it did in Germany before 1914 (after massacring hundreds of thousands of Namibian Natives, the Herero and Nama, as if they were rats, or game animals, offering money for their heads, hunting them for sport). Just as it did happen worldwide in the 1930s (Japan attacked China, Italy attacked Ethiopia, US plutocrats and the Nazi dictator attacked the Spanish Republic, and all made like bandits, getting away with anything, including the biggest lies they could imagine, etc.)

Encouraged by these profitable pursuits, Imperial Japan, Fascist Italy, Nazi Germany constituted the “Axis”, in 1936, while US plutocrats helped make the Axis all it could be. The Axis was a series of diplomatic treaties. But, more importantly, the Axis was a sharing of satanic values. Shared satanic values which the leaders of the Axis believed was the best way to success. And for a while, for them, it worked. In the end, it worked only for the Deus Ex Nachina, the USA itself. (However, because that this Machiavellian strategy worked in the past for the USA is no guarantee that it will work in the future. Actually, it won’t because Kim’s nukes will soon be able to reach the USA; in WWII, nobody hostile could even get to the US mainland!)

Italy, Japan, Germany conquered, and, or came to control  huge swathes of territory, through the nastiest, most satanic ways. The success of these Plutonic values led countries such as Bulgaria, Romania, Hungary, Yugoslavia, the USSR, Thailand, Iraq, etc., to join, de facto and through treaties, the Axis. And of course, this further success encouraged plutocrats to help the Axis (just as Putin’s and Tehran’s success will encourage others to join them… such as Turkey’s Sultan). It all snowballed, until the French Republic, followed by the Commonwealth, declared war. France, though, got overwhelmed through surprise, bad luck, an uncautious head of the army, reason…

And also France came down in a few days in May 1940,  because the French (and British) Air Forces had not enjoyed enough practice. The French Air Force and the RAF took a few weeks to learn the tricks the Nazis had learned and refined in air combat in the preceding four years, say, while bombing Guernica and attacking ground forces, in Spain. If you want peace, prepare for war, by practicing war.  

If you can’t beat them, join them in fighting, you will improve.

The brains of many present world politicos, such as Vladimir Putin, Assad, Xi, Kim have set-in into a more aggressive mindset. Thanks to Obama’s incompetent childishness, and holy-than-thou attitude. Maybe their epigenetics, not just their neurohormones, emotions, feeling, reconstructed memories and  ideas have installed in their heads operating systems which toy with millions killed and displaced as if it were a chess game.

A small, but telling example? China just seized an US military underwater drone, while the civilians manning an US vessel a few hundreds meters away watched in disbelief. The US made a demarche to recover their stolen robot.

Trump’s reaction: “China steals United States Navy research drone in international waters — rips it out of water and takes it to China in unprecedented act,” Mr. Trump wrote in a Twitter message. His original tweet on the subject on Saturday called the seizure an “unpresidented act,” but a replacement message corrected the spelling error. Spelling error? Assuredly, a judicious one.

Many of the best ideas have started as errors. The USA has been “unpresidented” for eight years, indeed.

“We are feeling what not having hope feels like,” Michelle Obama told Winfrey in response to a question about whether President Obama had achieved the “hope and change” he promised while campaigning in 2008. ” The self-absorbed Michelle did not mean Aleppo. She obviously meant she has to give up on that big presidential plane in 4 weeks. Hey, no more vacation in the billionaire’s palaces anymore, with the media moguls? Otherwise her husband’s presidency has been abysmal on all what can be measured: poverty (eight million more!), food stamps (13 million more!), employment rate (not the UNemployment index known as U2!), home ownership, cost of health care, cost of education, etc. The Obama presidency was pretty much a sham, organized by spoiled, ignorant children, but hundreds of thousands have now died because of it, and everything indicates that this is just the beginning:

The Economist says: “Britain’s parliament voted against taking even limited military action. As millions of people fled to Syria’s neighbours, including Lebanon and Jordan, most European countries looked the other way —or put up barriers to keep refugees out.

PARTICULAR BLAME FALLS ON BARACK OBAMA. America’s president has treated Syria as a trap to be avoided. His smug prediction that Russia would be bogged down in a “quagmire” there has proved a historic misjudgment.

Throughout his presidency, Mr Obama has sought to move the world from a system where America often acted alone to defend its values, with a few countries like Britain riding shotgun, to one where the job of protecting international norms fell to all countries—because everyone benefited from the rules.

[Or when naivety becomes criminal, murderous idiocy!]

Aleppo is a measure of how that policy has failed. As America has stepped back, the vacuum has been filled not by responsible countries that support the status quo, but by the likes of Russia and Iran which see the promotion of Western values as an insidious plot to bring about regime change in Moscow and Tehran.”

Entirely correct, The Economist. Barack Obama has proven to be very far from a progressive, or a defender of the better values (as one would expect from somebody financed by Goldman Sachs more than any other entity). Instead, Obama has proven to be a right-wing terminator of people. He let the massacre in Syria happen in slow motion.

Obama also spurned and terminated the better values as something worth defending (and thus Obama served Goldman Sachs and its ilk, lack of better values). Obama taught us all to be moral slime. To avoid “quagmires”, Obama became one himself. Obama should have given war a chance (if John Lennon had been around, he may well have concluded that!) Invertebrates never had a chance. Invertebrates like Obama.

In truth, Obama, like all pseudo-leftists, is a poser without values much beyond greed (such as the ravenous greed for power or Nobel prizes). A nihilist. Western progressive values, or the better values of humanity itself, under the pseudo-leftist doctrine, cannot be imposed, because they are viewed as imperialism itself.

This is why Obama put Putin, rather than the French Republic, in charge of Syria: because Putin, or the theocrats in Tehran, or the plutocrats in Beijing, have values which are just as valuable, Obama implicitly, yet extremely repetitively, said. (The reason for this is that the main financier of Obama’s first campaign was Goldman-Sachs: thus the superior values of Goldman-Sachs were transmitted to Obama in a superior way: greed, self-advancement, navigation, etc. Financial manipulators are dictators behind the stage friendly to those dictators who take the stage)

Politics select for self-obsessed slime. Obama has none of the higher values higher human beings are, whatsoever, but he is good at faking ennui and a loftier stance. A comedian. What is his motivation to do so? Obviously a world without redeeming values fit those who breathe greed perfectly. So Obama, by refusing to defend values, manu militari, is actually making the plutocratic mood progress, thus making those who will pay his bills in a month, richer, more powerful, and more generous.

The plutocratic ideal is fundamentally nihilist: it replaces the better angels of our nature, which humanity absolutely need to exist, with low and vicious aspects, and neurohormones, like greed, power onto others, cruelty, etc.  

And what of the little pseudo-leftists who feel that Obama is the best thing since whole wheat bread, and have been clamoring for more of the same, hundreds of thousands dead, millions of refugees full of Islamism? Many of them have elected. not to defend values, but on hating those who have them. Because hatred is a strong emotion.

Also, most of the pseudo-leftists are just ignorant, and ignorance is not just comfortable, but easy to acquire.

By refusing to act against hatred, Obama has refused to defend the better angels of our values. Instead he has left open the road to irrationality (inventing excuses for not defending said better values) and hatred itself.

Thus Obama contributed to making a much bigger war more likely. Indeed, Obama has told us that to see half a million people killed in what used to be the richest part of the Roman empire, is no concern of his. Nothing that motivates him. Half a million people dead, dictators, some nuclear armed, reinforced, and Obama congratulates himself for having avoided a “quagmire”.

Obama’s powerless UN ambassador, ironically named Power, complained to Russia that it had no decency. that Power chick does not know that, when one has the power of extermination, decency is irrelevant. She and her boss, Obama, are that ignorant. Obama did not just unpresident himself, he was never really president, just taking orders from his (plutocratic) minders. Doing so, not realizing that only military force imposes and preserves civilization, puts us,and all the better values, at risk of being ruled by the spirit of Pluto, at the hands of plutocrats. And the proof is the powerlessness of Obama’s pious declarations on what constitute decent behaviors, the exact behaviors he violated. Now the jerks are compulsively talking about Russia’s sofware prowess, after letting Putin and Assad ravage Aleppo, and Syria.

Might is not necessarily right, indeed. However, right without might, cannot be. Ever.

Civilization is fundamentally about force. The force of the highest human values reorganizing nature, including human nature, for the better, fighting adversity, and winning.

And to do that, to win, we need not just smarts as Ulysses, but also might, like Heracles.

Slime is cool, indeed, but it could not possibly invent civilization. Only entrepreneur could, and did. That’s why we have hands, big hands. Give us that world which we shall mold, for the better; the empire of humanity, this is what us humans make, and always made. The divine primate. Slime, those who will not defend the values which make us the most human, we have to wash out at sea, before their impotence exterminates us.

Patrice Ayme’

 

How Civilization Innovates When It Encourages Wild Thinking

When, How and Why Does a Civilization Innovate?

The crucial innovation is technological innovation. The rest, even science, follows. What brings technological innovation? New findings in science (oops). New findings in science, in turn, depend upon advances in philosophy. Advances in philosophy, in turn depends upon a friendly and encouraging mood of inquiry set-up by the State… And advances in philosophy depends upon new science, and new technology. Quite  a bit of a vicious, or virtuous, spiral is at work, because nonlinear effects are at work: the product reinforces the cause. This high nonlinearity explains why civilizational progress was always highly concentrated: Sumerian cities, Egypt, Mesopotamia, Phoenicia, Crete, Greece, Rome, Western Europe… China…

All of this, history shows. And logic supports. (Some day, as university professor Asimov foresaw in “Foundation“, all of this will be part of mathematical, fully computable psychohistory!)

The converse also works: a state keen to destroy advances in philosophy, or thinking in general, becomes dysfunctional: this is what happened with the Roman empire, and it happened quickly. After Theodosius I established Christianism as the state religion (complete with the state having the choice of executing heretics, that is, those who made a choice), the Roman state lost control of its north-west borders within less than two decades (the Franks were given [“Roman”] military control of three provinces in 400 CE: the two Germania and Gaul; as the Franks were, then, non-Christian, this changed history, for the better; meanwhile, civilization collapsed.) 

Same Picture All Over The West. But China Goes The Other Way. Notice the JFK-LBJ Effect, Coming Off Strong Support For Basic Research In the 1950s-1940s

An earlier, and famous example with China: The first emperor who unified China, Qin Shi Huang, following his Prime Minister’s advice, ordered most previous books and records burned to avoid comparisons of his dictatorship with an innovative past. After the emperor’s death, from ingesting immortality conferring mercury pills (210 BCE),  the wise PM had the emperor’s eldest son and top general connived into killing themselves, and the Qin dynasty and its unification work crumbled.

Some will sneer: that was long ago, this is now. Not, not at all: mental patterns recur.  On being compared to Qin, the First Emperor, Mao, the “communist” dictator, responded:

“He [Qin] buried 460 scholars alive; we have buried forty-six thousand scholars alive… You [intellectuals] revile us for being Qin Shi Huangs. You are wrong. We have surpassed Qin Shi Huang a hundredfold. When you berate us for imitating his despotism, we are happy to agree! Your mistake was that you did not say so enough.”

Modern China is still profiting from the breakthroughs the West did. That made the Chinese very satisfied, they are the most satisfied people in the world, as living standards quickly improved.

But what when it runs out of breakthroughs? However, can the West go on with breakthroughs? I suggested to call the University of California the “Breakthrough Univerity”, because it was long the world’s best financed state university (however Ronald Reagan endeavored to destroy this, by introducing tuition, that is, a decrease of state financial support).

Mental breakthroughs depend upon massive support for thinking beyond the edge of official thinking. That means, state support.

Just to look at a small portion of (world) history and its greatest innovators: Rabelais, Montaigne, Copernicus, Bruno, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Leibniz, Huygens, Bullialdus, Isaac Newton, all enjoyed state support (that does not mean that the state, their own state, or other states, did not try to terrify and, or kill them; for example, Rabelais, was a top doctor, and Sorbonne professor, and some of his friends and collaborators were burned alive, after the Sorbonne decided so). Even Blaise Pascal profited from the state, and tax collection is why he invented the first general purpose computing machine (the Greeks had some for astronomy).

Bill Gates went to see Trump today, and they talked about “innovation”. It is not clear to me what Gates understand of the subject. For the primitives, Gates is science itself. For the thinker, Gates is someone without a college degree. That does not mean he cannot think. But can he think in a way which understands how breakthroughs are produced? That’s unlikely, because his success was from exploiting others’ ideas (Microsoft arose from an IBM program which used MS-DOS, a university programming language; Gates mother was an IBM director, and he got a dream contract from IBM).

Tomorrow the great geniuses of “Silicon Valley” are going to see Trump. They are geniuses in gathering money for themselves. Not in finding ideas for us all to enjoy. And their connection with the state has nothing to do with fundamental breakthrough in thinking (but more like breakthroughs in spying and corruption). Sheryl Sandberg, a sort of girlfriend from Lawrence Summers, was parachuted at Treasury under Clinton, then Google, then Facebook. Now she is a billionaire. Armed with her relationships, she is now viewed as a brain. Does greed have a brain? Yes! But not of the most superior sort.

Billionaires, at Facebook alone, have a wealth worth more than ten times what the budget for research on various disease signed by Obama, December 13, 2016, has.

Civilization innovates when the state has decided to support deep innovation. This is why Sparta failed, and Athens succeeded.

Athens succeeded because we are following, however imperfectly Athenian ideas, not Spartan ones. And Athens was a choice, but also the natural choice. The human choice. Humnity innovates, that is what it does best. The corporate fascist state, be it encouraged by Louis XIV of France, Mussolini, or Obama, is an innovation killer, if carried just a bit too far. (Louis XIV financed Huyghens, and even Molière, and many a writer; thus it is not as if Louis was unwares of the danger of fascism; still he fully indulged in it.i

If one wants productivity and progress to perk up, the state has to become as smart as it was, when John F Kennedy was president: fully supporting deep research as much as possible.

Where else are people going to get jobs, anyway?

Patrice Ayme’

PLUTOCRACY: EPIGENETICS, Not Just Wealth And Democide

CHOMSKY FINALLY Agrees With Patrice AYME: AMERICAN DREAM DIED BECAUSE OF PLUTOCRACY… But Chomsky does not go as far as using the word. And that makes him, and his devoted followers, miss the most sinister aspects of it all, and the reason why it is so hard to fix plutocracy, the EPIGENETICS OF EVIL. Thus they complain about the fleas, not the wolf carrying them. Details about how that instrument of US plutocracy, Nazism, came to be, thanks to US plutocracy and its banks, illustrate the demonstration: as long as something that big in the calculus of evil is altogether missed, there is little hope…

***

English America did start as a plutocracy in the sense of an extremely wealthy class of the wealthiest investors sitting in England, after having ravaged Ireland. Jamestown was like that, Yes, it was a tiny hamlet fortress, but then the colony grew, mostly from using slaves for tobacco farming. Then England, wrecked by civil wars and revolutions, lost control of its American colonies until the 1700s. Attempts to make Lord Penn the ruler of Pennsylvania ended up in the American Revolution.

Washington, Jefferson, and Al. were very wealthy and somewhat satanic, as they held slaves, and killed Natives, but they were small fry relative to blue blood European plutocrats, who were much wealthier, and thus had to be much more satanic to stay in power.

So the English American republic became a not very plutocratic republic (if one doesn’t consider slavery, and the massacre of Native Americans, two huge ifs…) And on it went. The rebellious Confederacy was to some extent a plutocratic revolt centered around the idea of buying, selling and abusing people as if they were chicken: it failed.

The first US billionaire was Carnegie. Carnegie was far left, by today’s standards, advocating 50% tax on the wealthy, and punishing estate taxes. His widely advocated ideas brought a mood conducive to the passage of the anti-trust act under President Teddy Roosevelt. Here is how the top 0.01%, the top 30,000, are doing in the USA:

Inequality Fosters Plutocracy, The Rule, Not Just Of Wealth, But evil & Bad Genes

So when did the US democracy go bad? JP Morgan, a banker, escaped the anti-trust thrust.   Dr. Schacht, a German banker cum economist joined the Dresdner Bank in 1903. In 1905, while on a business trip to the United States with board members of the Dresdner Bank, Schacht met the famous American banker J. P. Morgan, as well as U.S. president Theodore Roosevelt. Schacht  became deputy director of the Dresdner Bank from 1908 to 1915. Meanwhile, when Wall Street collapsed in 1907, JP Morgan “bought all of it” (or at least a big part of it), bringing the market around.

By 1914, US plutocrats, and the racist president Wilson, conspired with the German Kaiser, enabling the Kaiser to hope to destroy his personal enemy, and the enemy of German, if not American and British plutocracy, the French Republic. That magnificent plot backfired on Germany when Great Britain declared war to the Kaiser within days of its attack on France.

But it did not backfire for the USA, just the opposite: the US supported the Kaiser for three years with ammunition components, etc., while the UK and France piled up debts to the USA. More exactly, US plutocrats made a fortune, while putting the UK and the French Republic in their debt.

In 1919, US plutocrats made it so that German fascists could have another go at the French Republic, by brandishing, of all things, the concept of peace.

Remember, for US plutocrats, the motto of the French Republic, Liberty, EQUALITY… sounded like a funeral bell tolling. They absolutely had to remove that menace: at the time, the French empire was larger in population and extent, than the USA itself, and had the world’s most powerful army and air force (yes France was then mightier than the USA in several ways).

While arguing that Germany should be protected from France, the US requisitioned giant amounts of German private property, then transferred that, with characteristic generosity, to US plutocrats, finishing the deal, by burning the records of these chummy transactions, in a highly convenient blaze, which made the transfer of these properties safe from retrospective consideration. I am not joking: the cause of the burning of the Commerce Building on January 10, 1921 was never determined: rats, smoking were excluded, and electric wires kept new and perfect. The fire started in the file room, was all over said room in a couple of minutes, and lasted five hours.

In any case, the US became the de facto overlord of the so-called “Weimar Republic” (the official name was “Second German Reich”; Hitler changed it to “Third German Reich” in 1935). That enabled US plutocrats (some of them Jewish) to turn around the US antitrust law.

The symbiosis between Nazism and US plutocracy was total, including the latter giving birth to the former. Dr. Schacht was central in this (and that’s why he was judged and exonerated, as one of the top 24 Nazi war criminals in 1945 at Nuremberg).

To win the war, the US became, de facto, a sort of social democracy. It slowly went back to plutocracy when Nazi operators and collaborators such as the Dulles brothers, took control of the USA in the 1950s. A quick learner and follower, Richard Nixon, became president in 1969, setting up the HMO system, while making an alliance with the Chinese dictatorship.

Ford, Carter, Reagan, ramped up the plutocratic pressure. The dam broke under Clinton, who actually dismantled the MOST IMPORTANT legislative piece of president Franklin D Roosevelt’s long presidency: the Banking Act of 1933 (“Glass Steagall”).

The Deep State, suitably plutocratized then established a number of evil corporations which were used as intelligence agencies (internally and externally). This is when Sheryl Sandberg was parachuted from the Treasury Department where she was the official girlfriend of Lawrence Summers (successor of R. Rubin, ex- Goldman Sachs chair) to Google and then Facebook (she will meet with Trump Wednesday).

Inequality grew.

***

Chomsky, A Crow On Its MIT Branch, Crowing Lugubriously:

That was for the causes. Chomsky started to condemn the “financialization” of the USA for the acceleration of inequality in 2013, under Obama (Patrice Ayme explained that it was caused by the abrogation of the Banking Act, already more than 10 years ago; Chomsky vaguely describes, Patrice explains…).

Here is Chomsky’s latest description: “The ‘American Dream’ was all about class mobility. You were born poor, but could get out of poverty through hard work and provide a better future for your children. It was possible for [some workers] to find a decent-paying job, buy a home, a car and pay for a kid’s education… It’s all collapsed — and we shouldn’t have too many illusions about when it was partially real… The so-called American Dream was always based partly in myth and partly in reality.” Chomsky said, noting that Americans are losing their hope due to “stagnating incomes, declining living standards, outrageous student debt levels, and hard-to-come-by decent-paying jobs.”

“The inequality in the contemporary period is almost unprecedented. If you look at total inequality, it ranks amongst the worse periods of American history… However, if you look at inequality more closely, you see that it comes from wealth that is in the hands of a tiny sector of the population…

The current period is extreme because inequality comes from super wealth. Literally, the top one-tenth of a percent are just super wealthy,”

Chomsky describes. One of my trusted commenters asked me recently what I thought of Chomsky. A philosopher is not just a botanist. A philosopher would explain, and suggest new explanations. Chomsky also avoid to use the concept of “plutocracy”. He describes it, he describes how wealth, being powerful, grabs power… But he doesn’t label it… which prevents him to go at the bottom of things, as he usually focus on “imperialism”… a completely different notion (imperium, that is military command, may happen with or without plutocracy; initially the concept was from the Roman Republic, which was not a plutocracy). 

***

Plutocracy, Epigenetics of Evil:

However, that comes short. Very short. Chomsky does not dare to cross the semantic Rubicon of calling it for what it is, plutocracy, the evil power, the genetics, and epigenetics, of evil.

This is why Chomsky clings to the idea that the American Founders debated what is at stake now. Now, they did not: the Internet has changed everything, starting with the minds, the moods, hence the genes, or the genetic expressions, to be a bit more precise. We know that fishes in a changed environment, change genetically. Females can become not just males, but super males.

Plutocracy is not just the rule of wealth. We know, from studying epigenetics in other species, that animal behavior influences genetic, let alone neurohormonal expression.

The absolute power of enormous wealth does not just corrupt absolutely, it corrupts genetically.  

Complaining about the fleas is good, but seeing the wolf carrying them, better. Wisdom is not just about seeing what’s wrong, but doing better what can be improved.

Patrice Ayme’

Allied

What are the duties of love? How does love arise? What are the duties of a human being? These are some of the themes touched in the excellent fictional story “Allied”. “Allied” is happening between Morocco, London, and a bit of France in the period 1942-1944. The movies stars Brad Pitt (excellent) and Marion Cotillard (stupendous, Oscar deserving for her great facial expressions).

The movie is a mix of historical realism and a serious distortion, I should even say, violation thereof. the distortion is essential to the story, but fatal to the understanding of why it is that Britain won the war, and the Nazis lost it. Basically, the British were extremely tough, and even tougher than the Nazis, that’s why they won. The British could be tougher, precisely because they had humanity on their side (the part not just sorely, and erroneously missing from the movies, but even deeply obliterated in the movies).  

This has consequences for the now famous subject of “fake news”. In a sense, the entire “Allied”, although an excellent movies, and precisely because it is an excellent movies,  is fake news writ large. Deep disinformation. Maybe I should give stars to fake news and disinformation. When Hillary and Barack says companies reimbursed TARP, that’s five star disinformation. When US propagandists, so-called “historians”, say from Harvard, claim that the US acted only as liberator and savior in World War One and Two, that’s ten star disinformation. “Allied” is a good eight star disinformation about how smart British Intelligence was, and how deeply democracy connects with civilization.

Two Stars & The Sahara, What Could Go Wrong? Well, Depicting Civilization As It Was Not. And As It Ought Not To Be.

So what is the story told in “Allied“?

All right, all spoilers out, we are landing on the world of real here. Pitt lands in the desert, and goes to Casablanca, where he meets Cotillard. He is a Canadian special agent, she is a top French resistance fighter who has infiltrated Nazis and collaborators in Morocco. He poses as a phosphate industrialist from Paris. He tries not to talk too much, because his Canadian accent is detectable. Together they kill during a reception the Nazi ambassador. It was a quasi-suicide mission, and they get neurohormonally transformed from it (they fall in love) and marry in England.

Next they have a baby, a little girl. Now here comes the maximum spoiler. Even knowing it, the situation is still heart wrenching, though. Cotillard is suspected to be a Nazi spy. Pitt is charged to execute her, should her guilt be confirmed. This is when my heart-strings started to pull hard. He flies to france, and determines, beyond a reasonable doubt, that she is indeed a Nazi double agent.

He confronts her, she admits her guilt. She said she did not believe the Nazis would find her in England. They threatened to kill her baby Anna, so she revealed to the Great Reich what her husband, a high intelligence officer, knew. (Through a little Nazi network of fanatics, one a degenerate smallish woman, the other an apparent Jew resembling Sigmund Freud.)

So far, so good, in the plausibility department. Every single detail of the movie could be correct. Indeed, there were indeed plenty of double, even triple agents (agents known to be double who betrayed those in the know), during World War Two. Many got executed. Many got tortured to death over days, even months.

***

Yet “Allied”Establishes Not Just A Fake World, But a Fake Civilization, Vastly Inferior to the Real One:

There were indeed Nazi spies in England. Some even got executed. For example the three idiots who knew nothing, and crossed from the Netherlands by paddling to commit sabotage, in 1940. Why were they executed? Precisely because they were saboteurs rather than informants. And to set-up a nice terror mood among Nazi spies.

Most Nazi spies in Britain who were detected were proposed a deal: work with us, British counter-intelligence, MI5, to disinform your superiors, or die. None of the Nazi spies chose to die whom I know of. And this is what the movies gets completely wrong. Had really Cotillard existed and been found to be spying, her husband would have been ordered to divulge to her only false and carefully manipulated data.  

***

This way of having a world had a name: The DOUBLE CROSS SYSTEM XX:

Nazi spies in Great Britain were systematically made into double agents. Not all these spies were detected by MI5. Many, seeing that the war was turning against Nazi Germany, and, thus, or, seeing that Nazism was not their cup of tea (as the very head of army intelligence, the Abwehr, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris decided; Canaris was ultimately discovered, arrested and executed). ALL Nazi agents sent to Great Britain were detected and made to work for the Allied cause (some were from standard military intelligence, Abwehr and some from Nazi intelligence, the Sicherheitsdienst (SD)).

All the more in a case as delicate as that exposed in “Allied” were a high officer is married to a spy. As delicate, and as potentially fruitful.

(There were double agents at an even higher level, but they were not detected during World War Two)

Such subtleties are not just about reevaluating history. Nor are they about understanding which way civilizational progress goes, and how to evaluate it. They present immediate interest in appreciating the brouhaha about, say,  Russia having “hacked” (whatever that means) the US elections. If one analyzes deeply and subtly, beyond the headlines, in the claims of “interference”, one realizes that there is nothing there.

“Double Cross XX” was humanly superior:

1. It was human and had more altruism and empathy than the equivalent strategies in the fascist system.
2. It was smarter. Smarts is the essence of humanity. Denying smarts deny humanity. Fascism is intrinsically single-minded: thereupon its strength in combat, and stupidity, long, or even short-term (when combat is not at hand).

Movies such as “Allied” are not innocuous, when they drag the edge of civilization in the mud. By representing allied counterintelligence as cruel, vindictive and stupid, it is extolling these characteristics.

After all, the Allies, who quickly self-described as the “United Nations” won because of superior values. Three years before their formal declaration as an organization in San Francisco. An interesting aside is that the “Declaration of the United Nations” was explicitly founded in its first clause on the Atlantic Charter. This is something Russians ought to want to think about when they view NATO as a fundamental adversary.

Take one example out of millions. A German general of the Wehrmacht (a standard general, not a SS), Anton Dostler, ordered the execution of 15 US soldiers who had been made prisoner when, while wearing the American uniform, they tried to blow-up a tunnel in Italy. The general ordered them executed. Subordinates knew well that this violated the Geneva Convention. They stalled, and asked for confirmation of the order, and again and again. The general insisted, and the US troops were assassinated.

The general was subsequently tried. He argued that he was acting under an order from Hitler. However any member of the Wehrmacht had the right to refuse to obey orders in violation of the Geneva Convention, and the order was not direct and reiterated in the specific situation. The Nazi general was condemned to death, and executed.

Where does the superiority of civilization intervenes here? Simple: the subordinates of the general executed an order they knew was anti-civilizational. At that point they had to decide whether they wanted to risk disobeying a direct order from a maniac, or not. Earlier in the war, they could have said no, and the case would have been considered for prosecution (no such prosecution was ever engaged, because the Nazis were afraid of a judicial precedent going against them!).

However, late in the war, when, clearly the 1,000 year Reich was on its ignominious way out, summary execution for disobeying orders became wanton and frequent. Thus the subordinates could not feel that they were fighting for the right cause, under smart and wise leadership, but under idiotic gangsters. That, in turn, would focus their minds not on winning the war (how could vicious imbeciles win the war?) but on saving their skins.

Whereas, it was exactly the opposite on the Allied side: there the mentality was that the cause was just. Greater than a soldier’s fate, worth dying for.

As Britain was more human, more emphatic, vibrant with a higher civilization, German agents willingly went to the British side. And conversely. After the war, it was discovered that Nikolaus Ritter, the Air intelligence chief under Canaris, had known that the cover for the agents in Britain had been compromised, but due to the fear of repercussions, in the cruel, demented, unpredictable, unlawful, wanton, self-destructive nature of the Nazi regime, Oberstleutnant (Lieutenant Colonel) Ritter was too scared t0 inform Canaris (who was long a devotee of Hitler). Thus we can see directly that the less civilized a regime is, the harder it is to win a war.

***

Why To Insult (Britain Or Civilization In General? 

And once again, I will ask the same rhetorical question: why do those with money (like Hollywood movie producers, and investors, Trump just made one his Secretary of the Treasury!) have interest to misrepresent civilization, drag civilization deep in the mud? Because they have had so much money, in recent years, they feel like gods, and their pleasure has become to overlord people with all their taxpayer paid five star travelling around the world, their power talk with other rulers, their philanthropy, prizes, etc.

And their enemy? Civilization. Hence the interest to make us believe that British intelligence during World War Two was so brutish, vicious, stupid, short-sighted and inhuman to exterminate Nazi spies it could have manipulated, and did manipulate, in real history, as it happened.

To believe that British intelligence was so brutish, vicious, stupid, short-sighted and inhuman that it would have insisted to assassinate the beloved wife of one of their most esteemed operatives, a commander of the fully sovereign state of Canada, is well beyond ridiculous. Had such a case occurred, British counter-intelligence would have viewed it as a godsent, a fantastic occasion to make the Nazis believe more fake news, disinformation, misinformation and stupendous lies. (There may have been similar cases, with extremely high level spies, who got doubled-crossed… but they are kept secret to this day.)

***

The Double Cross System Double Crossed Adolf Hitler:

In the end, Adolf Hitler and his minions were persuaded, from fake intelligence, mostly from Double Cross XX, that the main D Day was not the one which happened in Normandy, on June 6, 1944, but one which was going to happen in the Pas De Calais (facing Dover, where the Franco-English Channel is narrowest). Double Cross XX had persuaded Hitler that an enormous army led by US General Patton (the most famous tank general of the Allies, professor of all top US generals, well-known for his ferocity), was going to rush across.

Actually that was a complete lie: all the Allied forces were concentrated to land in Normandy. Nazi forces basically held the Allies roughly two months, bottled in Normandy. Had Hitler understood on June 6, 1944, that the real D Day had just happened, in Normandy, the Allies may well have been defeated.

Then Hitler could have sent most of the troops in North West France to fight off the Franco-American Provence landing (where my North African dad fought, after the Italy campaign). Gott knows how this would have turned…

Had the Provence assault failed (that’s a big if) the Allies would not have had a second chance, for years. Moreover, the US strategists had warned that, thanks to new jet fighters and jet bombers, Nazi Germany would recover air supremacy by June 1945.

So Double Cross XX (crucially helped) won the war. The Allies won, because they were more civilized.

Allied is a magnificent movie. However, it is also a magnificent lie. And a vicious, deep lie, construed to make us believe superior civilization, and humanity is not what it is. And make no mistake: human beings are sensitive. I knew all the preceding, while I watched the movie. I knew perfectly well that the threat of executing Cotillard was grotesque, unreal, contrary to all what happened and should happen. I knew it was an attempt to confuse the Allies and the Nazis. Still when I saw the horrible fate of the innocent fictional toddler in that outrageous story, deprived of her fictional mother, I felt horrible.

Now Obama is in danger of insinuating that Russia stole the US election: he asked for a special report. That introduces a pretty horrible emotion. Even if we know that it is a fiction that a Russian is standing behind all US election official, the potential for emotional damage is enormous.

Trash civilization, by making us believe it was not the way it was. Now trash the US election system, by putting it in doubt. It’s the industry of doubt, destroying the foundations of value: a potentially lethal industry.

Patrice Ayme’