Slavery And The Question Of Rome’s Economic Decline And Non-Sustainability

Rome sustained an advanced mass civilization which was not replicated for millennia: the usage of ceramics was ubiquitous and massive; after the Roman state collapse, wooden utensils reappeared. To this day, most Californians cannot afford tile roofs, so their houses burn readily; a law to impose tile roofs, to reduce the loss of California cities to fire was abandoned, because… California can’t afford it; in the Roman empire, tile roofs were standard, so houses resisted forest fires; Romans were wealthier than Californians that way. Many historians have claimed that Greco-Roman civilization was not sustainable: there was not high enough a productivity to support such a mass civilization… So how could it be supported for 11 centuries?

Some historians, often of the Marxist persuasion, insist that Rome needed slavery to keep on going. As slavery was unsustainable, so was Rome, those economic historians insist. Indeed they claimed that only wars could bring slaves: as wars waned, so did the capture of slaves, hence the Roman economy also shrunk. This is obviously a disingenuous reasoning as the proximal cause of the collapse of Athens and Rome were military defeats, not lack of slaves… and after the Roman state collapsed, the wealthiest Romans, for example the families adorned with bishops (!) had plenty of slaves.

Moreover, archeology has found great economic prosperity until the uncough hordes of barbarian warriors showed up to destroy the economy, so as to destroy the society… and those invasive aliens collaborated with local Athenian, or Roman plutocrats..

Moreover, a careful examination of the known facts shows that Roman civilization was not founded on slavery… nor was Athens; although slavery was important for Athens’ silver mines, slaves constituted only a minor fraction of the Athenian population; sailors of the fleet were free men, differently from Louis XIV’s galleys, or many California fire crews in the Twenty-first century…

Roman Patrician Cincinnatus, twice elected dictator, had nothing to hide. He was deeply anti-plebeian, but not to the point of degrading public discourse with massive lying. Jardin des Tuileries, Paris, Francia, Rome successor state…

Indeed, the early Roman City-State expanded without much slavery for centuries. So slavery was not needed. For centuries, the strength of Rome was the plebeian farmer cultivating his own land. Even Cincinatus cultivated three acres of land with his own hands, on the other side of the Tiber, when the Senate asked him to become dictator to save the nation from invaders… something Cincinatus did in two weeks, thanks to a military innovation and absolute power, then resigned. 

A second reason to believe that slavery was not crucial to Greco-Roman civilization is that it backfired. The central argument of Tiberius Gracchus, read between the lines, is that, at the time, in the Second Century BCE, mass-slavery had backfired on middle class Roman citizen-soldiers, “making their lives worse than that of wild beasts” (who, at least, had dens to go back to, Tiberius Gracchus pointed out, with relentless insistence). 

Land redistribution from land grabbed by the wealthiest which should have been public land was the central conflict of the Roman Republic. However, a sort of steady state was attained for 375 years, before global plutocratization made the wealthy so much wealthier that the worst of them got completely out of control. 

Consul Julius Caesar’s successful land redistribution law of 59 BCE was a distribution of public land to plebeians. It was not a distribution of slaves. Land, not slaves, was where the wealth of Rome was. Mass slave owners in the Senate were enraged. They never forgave Caesar, in spite of his subsequent generosity, and their hatred was inextinguishable. They would kill Caesar, and would die themselves in the conflagration they caused… But the mood of rapacity and suicidal greed they installed, survived them, thrived and perdured until the Republic sank under the blows of fascism. 

Third point to show why Rome could have existed and even thrived without slavery: the successor state to Rome, the Franks’ Imperium Francorum, within 175 years of the formal demise of the Roman state in Occident, outlawed slavery, and the result was the Carolingian Renaissance. 

In spite of tremendous synchronized invasions by barbarians from all sides, the Vikings, the Muslims, the Avars and Hungarians, this “Renovated Roman empire” survived, and came out roaring, achieving objective levels of mass civilization Rome had not achieved, by the Eleventh Century. This shows the superiority of anti-slavery civilization. Aside from technological advances in agriculture, a consequence of the outlawing of slavery, the major difference of the Renovated Roman empire with the original Roman empire was the… outlawing of slavery.  

***

The leverage that mass slavery provided appeared much later in Roman history, and then quickly backfired within a generation or two, by 150 BCE: the wealthiest who used to possess so much public lands… illegally the national assembly, the Centuriate assembly as it was called, insisted… started to exploit those immense domains with armies of slaves, bringing the state of things Tiberius Grachus condemned. 

***

Vicious Opposition To The “Populares” Degraded Public Discourse And Changed It To Civil War:

The vicious opposition to Tiberius Gracchus was at the instigation of the self-declared “Best”, the “Optimates”, made of many of the families in Rome rendered wealthy by globalization and mass slavery. Those plutocrats were anti-nationalists, anti-populist, and fanatical organizers of plutocratic globalization. 

The global plutocrats wanted to make war all, conquer all, stabilizing the situation by making alliances with local plutocracies, all over. In other words, they were “Neocons”… And that’s exactly what they proceeded to do until the Republic became a fascist imperial plutocracy headed by a few families (much admired to this day, by the same perverse academics in charge of duplicating the same state of affairs). The enemy of the Optimates was the “Populares” Party.  Except The Gracchus family had been hyper establishment Patrician for generations. No gens was more famous in Rome. Yet the hatred deployed against Tiberius Grachus, including the baseless accusation that he wanted to become king, reminds one of the stridency deployed against Trump., The analogies go very deep.

The Optimates said, and paid others to say, horrible things about Tiberius, which were horrendous lies… But those lies worked: a mentality was created, similar to any self-referential insults throughout history… Like accusing the Jews of human sacrifices (whereas all the historical evidence we have is rather of Christians doing precisely that… to Jews). 

The Optimates did not accuse Tiberius to be friends of the Russians, Carthaginians or Numantians (Tiberius had been one of the top officers commanding in the successful siege of Numantia… However, this sort of accusation was levelled by Octavian against Marcus Antonius, with the Egyptians in place of Russians). In any case, the wild, unfounded accusations against Tiberius were believed by many people, or they found it convenient to pretend to believe them… (Mass) Assassinations followed soon thereafter… In the modern USA, when the president is accused to be a Russian agent, or to have caused a virus, the Trump virus, Pelosi called it, a similar degradation of civic discourse is engaged. 

The degradation of the public discourse by hurling grievous lies at Tiberius, his brother, their collaborators and followers hurt, forever, Greco-Roman civilization, because the grossest lying became an accepted  form of management of the Republic. Genuine discourse would not come back under the modern era, two thousand years later. Without it, there can’t be a Republic.

Patrice Ayme  

Lying Accusations Of Racism Are Themselves Racist

A bit of perspective. We are living in times similar to what happened when the global Roman plutocrats opposed frantically those who called for drastic reforms in Rome. The possibility of as nefarious an evolution of the public debate today is entirely possible.

As there is one world civilization now, the consequences would be way worse. Collaborators of the American-born plutocracy brought us the Nazis and Auschwitz. They promise to bring way worse immediately ahead.

Calling people names is part of the entire degeneracy. A Trump supporter native to Portland Oregon, got shot to death in Portland, 8/29/20. The New York Times calls him “far right”. There is evidence to the contrary, from the founder of group “Patriot Prayer”… who had condemned in public discourse “White Supremacists”. But anybody disaggreeing with the plutocratically paid intellectual fascists at the New York Times is, by definition of the New York Times “far right”. Especially if all you want is a job, or cheaper drugs, or just a doctor. 

Senator Rand Paul was attacked by a mob which knew who he was. He called them “idiots” because they were asking him to say the name of the one who was victim of a “no-knock raid”. She was killed in return fire by the police in such a raid. Senator Paul introduced a bill to ban such raids (which are authorized in most countries, including France). Such mobs are obviously paid. They are no “idiots”, they are thugs.

One more frantic article in the New York Times about Trump’s racism, a well-known fact according to the NYT: How the G.O.P. Stretched Hard to Defend Trump on Race. Yet, not one concrete example of Trump racism. Instead the articles was full of passages proving Trump was NOT a racist, such as:

Was Trump an enemy of the White Race from way back? Here he is, associating with his friend Black Life matters

“Many on the other side love to incite division by claiming that President Trump is a racist,” Ben Carson, the housing secretary and the only African-American in the cabinet, said at the convention on Thursday night, shortly before Mr. Trump delivered his acceptance speech. “They could not be more wrong.”

Herschel Walker, a former football star and longtime friend of the president’s, said he was offended that anyone might hold that negative view of Mr. Trump. “I take it as a personal insult that people would think I’ve had a 37-year friendship with a racist,” 

However, not one word on the friendship between Trump and Michael Jackson. I sent a comment. It was, of course, censored by the NYT fascists. Next and even better, the article was swiftly removed from the electronic NYT front page (it should have stayed there 24 hours, but was withdrawn within 3 hours, within minutes of me sending my comment; yes, I spy on the vicious propagandists).

Here is my comment censored by the Times:

Racial justice is, first, a question of power. Words have little power, but work does. Once somebody works, that work can be leveraged into negotiating with powers that be. Trump, because he is favorable to the relocalization of the economy at home, was able to employ a higher percentage of blacks than were employed, for many decades. In other words, Trump augmented Black Power. Once Black Power is augmented, justice for all will follow more readily.

The claims that Trump is a racist are strident, and generally, self-referential. Trump is racist, Trump critics say, because it is well-known that Trump is a racist, we said it before, they opine, and the proof is “code words”, indistinct screams overheard, and the like. All this is as absurd as calling “anti-immigrant” Trump because he had four beloved children from marrying two immigrant women. 

Trump had a long, intense and enthusiastic friendship with Michael Jackson, going on vacation with him and letting his children play with Michael, as Trump’s son pointed out. That was at a time when Trump had already run against the ultra conservative globalization addict Ronald Reagan, and Reagan’s collaborators in the self-declared “Democratic Party”. Everything indicates that Trump’s friendship with Michael Jackson was sincere. How many white moguls have as many black friends as Trump?

***

Trump on Michael Jackson:

“I knew Michael Jackson very well, he was a very good friend. He lived in Trump Tower for a long period of time.” Jackson, who died in 2009, rented an apartment in Trump Tower, even honeymooning at the Manhattan building after his wedding to Elvis’s daughter Lisa Marie Presley.

“He was an unbelievably talented guy,” Trump told CNN’s Anderson Cooper. “He lost tremendous confidence because of honestly bad, bad, bad surgery. Believe it or not when you lose your confidence in something, you can even lose your talent.” Now Anderson Cooper is paid to look infuriated claiming that whatever Trump says is “riddled with falsehoods“. Yeah, which one exactly Cooper, aside from obvious jokes?

Race is best played like a violin by hypocrites, and liars. Many of the Nazis were strident racists, enacting racial laws they were themselves coming short of. For example Hitler converted, with his pen, 35,000 Jews to Arian status…. Hitler could not demonstrate he was not a Jew by official Nazi criterions!… So maybe he was one of them, hence his generosity. 

Who were the biggest racists in history, those whom the Nazis tried to duplicate? The Pures, of course. The Pures thought they were so Pure they were the very definition of Right, in the world of Wrong. In particular they knew everything about who had the correct racial attitude. When Hitler came around, they didn’t lift a finger until it was too late to present the catastrophe they secretly, or subconsciously wished for. The Pures are now known as the Puritans. They fester at the New York Times and other plutocratically owned media because they foster divisions with crazy racist anti-racial radically demented theories.

Whereas Trump augmented Black Power by providing blacks with work, the pseudo-democrats have been busy sending jobs and added value overseas, while their sponsors pocketed the profits, before redistributing some of them to their pet politicians, many of which made fortunes by being salaried politicians all their life, serving the international economic order. We were lied to for decades, time for something else!

At this point the climate argument is sure to be rolled out. Trump used to believe in catastrophic climate change… until he understood that he would never be elected by holding this opinion. Similarly, with Obama, the other way.

Reality is of course the opposite. Obama destroyed green hydrogen and fusion hydrogen (Congress had to intervene on the latter). Obama instituted massive fracking (Biden claims he will outlaw it; he is obviously lying). Trump re-established financing research on green hydrogen and fusion hydrogen. Meanwhile California is having blackouts, because of a plethora of renewables in combination with a lack of green hydrogen… 

Oh, let me try to enlighten the genuine idiots out there (by contrast with the paid thugs). Those who lie about who the racists are, and what racism is, are the same who lied, and lie, about fusion, green hydrogen, and fracking. Huge lying is a science, like any other science; experts in the art will infect public life. Under Obama, inequality grew to higher heights than ever before, and monopoly power was increased by deliberate decisions, presented as the exact opposite of what they truly were (such as the American Invent Act).

Lying is a drug in those who practice it, and in those who listen to it. And that’s why both the practitioners and their audience will hate whoever tells the truth… Because, deep down inside, human beings love truth better, and feel remorse for embracing its opposite. Thus they want to destroy who reveals their embrace of falsehood. This is why SS officers were so keen to assassinate little Jewish children who entrusted them.

Patrice Ayme

Making Mars Breathable? Terraforming Mars Depends Upon Fusion Energy

CHANGE OF THINKING: MARS ALWAYS HOSTILE TO LIFE? YES, SURE, BUT TERRAFORMING LOOKS POSSIBLE, WITH WHAT WE DON’T HAVE YET, BUT DESPERATELY NEED, CONTROLLED THERMONUCLEAR FUSION:

Abstract: This essay says one thing, Mars never had life… And then rebounds by pointing out we can leverage that lack of potentially obnoxious Natives we would have to respect, presumably. With thermonuclear fusion, melting the ice caps, Mars could be made breathable… Partial pressure considerations of a manufactured atmosphere makes a breathable Mars easier to achieve than the MAVEN team has it.

***

Water Flowed… But How? Under The Ice?

There was clearly flowing water on Mars, estuaries, lakes. The natural first conclusion is then to believe that Mars was Earth-like in the distant past. There are three problems with this picture: the Sun used to be much less powerful, greenhouse gases should have been less on Mars, due to lower gravity… and lack of imagination.

A recent paper “Valley formation on early Mars by subglacial and fluvial erosion” opines that sub-glacial erosion is most likely:

Abstract:

The southern highlands of Mars are dissected by hundreds of valley networks, which are evidence that water once sculpted the surface. Characterizing the mechanisms of valley incision may constrain early Mars climate and the search for ancient life. Previous interpretations of the geological record require precipitation and surface water runoff to form the valley networks, in contradiction with climate simulations that predict a cold, icy ancient Mars. Here we present a global comparative study of valley network morphometry, using a principal-component-based analysis with physical models of fluvial, groundwater sapping and glacial and subglacial erosion. We found that valley formation involved all these processes, but that subglacial and fluvial erosion are the predominant mechanisms. This is supported by predictions from models of steady-state erosion and geomorphological comparisons to terrestrial analogues. The inference of subglacial channels among the valley networks supports the presence of ice sheets that covered the southern highlands during the time of valley network emplacement.

***

Sub-glacial erosion makes the apparition of life on Mars much less likely, in my opinion (and thus the position that Earth’s life started on Mars). That could come as a disappointment for exo-life fanatics. However, it should also come as a relief: if life didn’t start on Mars, the planet is sterile, and we have nothing to fear. There is no ecology to destroy, and we do not need to be isolated from potential Martian microbes. 

***

Martian Atmosphere Is Not Friendly:

Atmospheric pressure on Mars tends to a fraction of one percent of that on Earth. The highest pressure, in the lowest elevation Hellas impact crater, 7.2 kilometers below average elevation, is 1.4% of that of Earth.

As far as making Mars more life friendly, an obvious idea would be to crash comets into it. That should be feasible with foreseeable technology… Although de-orbiting comets from the Oort cloud may be controversial considering that Earth is the greatest gravitational attractor of the inner solar system.  

The seasonal Martian polar caps are made of air that freezes during winter. Depending on the time of year, more than a quarter of the martian atmosphere can be found lying on the ground around the poles. The atmosphere is 95% CO2; that’s why the seasonal polar caps are mostly made of dry ice.

An atmosphere that freezes in winter needs to be remedied by those with hedonistic, esthetical ethics… Let thermonuclear engineering follow.

As seasons come and go, carbon dioxide shifts back and forth–lying on the ground during cold months, floating through the air during warmer months. The world-wide air pressure rises and falls by 25%. For comparison, the air pressure inside a hurricane on Earth is often only a few percent lower than ambient. You can experience a full 25% difference in pressure by traveling from sea level to the top of a 9000 ft (3000 m) mountain. Just try running a 100 yard dash up there: it’s one of my preferred jokes, easy to realize for those having access to the Yosemite National Park, in Tuolumne Meadows. After 70 meters or so, the end of the world is near… (I do run at that altitude, but… slowly…)

The seasonal ice cap seems to be made of CO2 ice, one meter thick, above sixty degrees (60 degrees). The permanent ice cap is made of water ice three (3) kilometers thick. 

As it is, because average ground atmospheric pressure on Mars is 1% of Earth, ice doesn’t melt, but sublimates: it goes directly from solid to gas, and from one polar ice cap to the other. But boosting atmospheric pressure to half of Earth would be plenty enough to permit liquid water where it’s warm enough.

***

Abundance of carbon-bearing minerals and the occurrence of CO2 in polar ice using data from NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter and Mars Odyssey spacecraft, and used data on the loss of the Martian atmosphere to space by NASA’s MAVEN (Mars Atmosphere and Volatile Evolution) spacecraft have led th MAVEN team to conclude that terraforming Mars was not possible with present technology:.

“Our results suggest that there is not enough CO2 remaining on Mars to provide significant greenhouse warming were the gas to be put into the atmosphere; in addition, most of the CO2 gas is not accessible and could not be readily mobilized. As a result, terraforming Mars is not possible using present-day technology,” said the MAVEN team

MAVEN reasoned thus: Although Mars has significant quantities of water ice that could be used to create water vapor, itself a mighty greenhouse gas, previous analyses show that water cannot provide significant warming by itself; temperatures do not allow enough water to persist as vapor without first having significant warming by CO2, according to the team. Also, while other gases such as the introduction of chloroflorocarbons or other fluorine-based compounds have been proposed to raise the atmospheric temperature, these gases are short-lived and would require large-scale manufacturing processes, so they were not considered in the MAVEN study. But that’s only for the 2020s… If we got lots of power at our disposal, everything changes.

Same Problem As Usual. Terraforming Mars Is Imaginable, Thanks to Fusion:

So the solution, long term, will be to use thermonuclear fusion to melt the ice caps, and extract CO2 from the ground… that should bring a pressure equal to roughly 11,000 meters on Earth…  and then more nuclear fusion to split the oxygen and carbon of the CO2.

An oxygen laden atmosphere, besides being breathable, would create ozone (O3), protecting the ground from UVs. Notice in passing that in this proposed scheme, Martian atmosphere is actually breathable. Indeed PARTIAL oxygen pressure at ground level is only like 13,000 meters or so… if the atmosphere were PURE oxygen…  

Of course, we could get bio-engineered plants from Bryophyte phyla—small plants like mosses, liverworts, and hornworts—and the Tracheophyta phyla—vascular plants such as ferns and horsetail. The most promising candidate are of the genus Poa, a group of perennial grasses with hundreds of different species. One could start in enclosed domes, feasible with robots and infinite energy… That is, fusion.

As usual, one meets thermonuclear fusion as the great solution to great things. It is hard to see how one could stop the Climate Crisis Catastrophe on Earth without it. Scientific rumor has it that the melt of Greenland is already irreversible: the present pulse of GreenHouse Gases (GHG) is happening two orders of magnitude faster than the fastest it occurs naturally…. What that means in practice is that most of the nonlinear effects are ineluctable, they are coming, but nobody believes it, because of the inertia in the system.

Thus, when we think about colonizing Mars, one thinks also about how to stabilize spaceship Earth. Ah, yes, because it’s completely unstable as it is now. Those who influentially disagree generally sit in spacious mansions, and have private jets, and sing like John Lennon:”It’s going to be alright…” . No, we need revolutions, it’s not going to be all right without hard work, and even harder thinking.

Well, thus, only if we work hard, on the right things. Martian preoccupations one of them. Want to learn? Play.

Play with Mars. Having no life there helps. So bad news are good news. Mars lost its atmosphere to Coronal Mass Ejections, thus to thermonuclear fusion. ironically, life may have NOT got started on Mars because of not enough thermonuclear fusion. It’s a thermonuclear fusion mess… Intelligence can fix it.

Patrice Ayme

Systemic Racism In Action: All About No Debate, No Common Decency, Fake Outrage

I was in an aisle of a large food store (Safeway). I heard a voice raised in anger. I looked. A tall white blonde blue eyed woman was berating an older brown black haired woman. The blonde was insisting she had been disrespected: “stay away from me!”. The brown woman, whom I didn’t see initially because she was so far from the blonde, excused herself:”But my small daughter is behind you!” The blonde insisted ever more:”You are rude, follow the signs!” “But I am following the signs, there are none here, I just need to be with my daughter! I am sorry!” The brown woman was more than six feet away from the enraged blonde. The back of the store there was more than ten feet across. The little daughter, less than ten years old was ten feet behind the blonde, getting distressed. This was baffling. The blonde talked even louder, addressing the brown woman:”You are incredibly disrespectful!”. That was the cherry on the cake! Not only she was preventing, out of sheer bulk, a mother to be reunited with her child, for no good reason whatsoever, but her, the offender, claimed to be offended! The spite was obvious. 

I recognize racism when I see it. And I have seen it a lot. I then did what I would not have done two months ago. I moved forward, and addressed the blonde:”YOU ARE A KAREN!”. This is a denomination for racist white women keen to call authorities to bolster their racism with fake claims of outrageous behaviors they pretend to have been the victim of, when it is truly the opposite. The blonde standing in the way of the brown skin lady to prevent reunion with her daughter, on a ten feet wide alley, and claiming to have been disrespected was a case in point.

She was stunned. Who dared to attack the obviously superior race, supreme adjudicator of offended reality? That had never happened before! And I added:’’ AND YOU ARE A RACIST!”

The blonde actually went to complain with the store manager, who politely listened to her, and then, full of simmering rage, she had a sort of a melt down, but nobody helped her. To her credit, as nobody behaved as if her cause was worth fighting for, the blonde woman may have perceived, however vaguely, that her demand for an enormous amount of vital space around herself from the brown mother was a parody of systemic racism

This happened in Berkeley, California, a noisily pseudo-progressive NIMBY town. Some wealthy neighborhoods, full of “Black Lives Matter” signs, require people to not call the police. The blonde probably ostentatiously hates Trump, because that is the cover to her everyday racism. She was shocked that her bluff had been called for all to see. The scandal she waged became the instrument of her public revelation for what she truly was, for all to see, including herself.

A proper debate does not switch to claiming invented disrespect. The brown skinned woman was very polite and apologetic. And very explanatory. She explained she had followed the arrows, there were no more arrows, just her daughter out there. The brown Hispanic lady was used to appease the domineering white race. Everybody had masks on, even the little girl, well below the age when it’s required. The blonde insisted on a ten foot space, apparently, and imagined outrage. What she was truly doing was humiliating the brown lady.

Engaging common sense sincerely is the primary human characteristic. Refusing this and claiming one has been gravely offended is a trick to deny, instead, this fundamental human approach. This has also been the bottom problem of the police and justice system in the USA.   

I was witness to this, in a microcosme…  

Patrice Ayme

Fewer Nail Salons, More Global Heating Mitigation? Federal Reserve Bank Will Target Higher Inflation… At Last!

This is a historic day, the day when the central bank recognized there are bigger issues than inflation. There always have been. Rome didn’t go down from inflation, but from the unemployment and un-empowerment which preceded inflation by centuries. Roman inflation in the Third Century was a big problem, but it originated from much bigger and deeper problems, and first the lack of democracy and the mass unemployment and mass un-empowerment of the Roman plebs.

Emperor Diocletian was able to fix inflation where it really hurt state and society with a command economy, and that worked well: Roman provinces were doing great economically… until they got invaded. Archeology has revealed this to be the case all over, from Italia, to Gallia, to Africa, and even to Syria, which got invaded two centuries later than the former three.

So Rip out and throw away all the economic textbooks of the last fifty years: they were wrong.

The revamp towards higher inflation and a more active economy (as requested by US President Trump!) is designed to address the “reality of a quite difficult macroeconomic context of low interest rates, low inflation, relatively low productivity, slow growth and those kinds of things,” said Fed Chairman Jerome Powell during a conference broadcast online. “We’ve really got to work to find every scrap of leverage in helping stabilize the economy.”

I have asked heavens to target much higher inflation, for decades. In the so-called “glorious thirties”, which ended in the mid 1970s, the economy, the technology, the quality housing were all growing fast… propelled by inflation well above 2%.

How much above 2% is not clear because the ways of measuring inflation vary, and have changed from introducing “hedonistic” factors. However, the following graph is telling enough:

Enough inflation, enough real GDP growth (here the ten year treasury is used as a proxy of inflation, and it’s much better than the all too tweaked and humanized, even hedonized CPI)

Also inflation has been very strong in some areas (say health care, medical drugs; quality education), or then tweaked, twisted and tortured (measuring real estate cost from rents instead of face value, etc.)

One of my main reason to favor higher inflation is that, well done, it accelerates the speed of money and the speed of technology, while weeding out obsolete habits.

***

Catastrophic Climate Change, CCC, is upon us, so forest fire mitigation has to become primordial:

Larry Minikes informed me that: “In July, [California Governor] Newsom announced the delivery of $285M worth of dozen Huey Hawk (Blackhawk) helicopters to replace our aged Vietnam-era Bell helicopters. I believe they were ordered in February. The new Hawks can each carry a fire crew plus 1000 gallons of water and are certified for night flying, which the Bell are not. However, as I am reading, pilots are not yet fully certified so they could not be used at this time”.

I did not know about the new helicopters, and Newssom’s initiative. Especially flying at night is good. They better rush, because the maximal fire season is not yet here. Systematic racism against domineering brush would be most welcome, by burning it during the cold, wet months. Some of this brush was/is ridiculous: one has to tunnel through it. It does not have to be done everywhere. That could employ a number of qualified professionals, same technique as counterfires. 

Doing preventive burning in patches would be enough, more effective for large fire prevention, and best to preserve plant and animal diversity. This was done in places like Yosemite already starting long ago, after huge fires, and it was done with reasonable success. Goats should be unleashed: there are enough mountain lions to keep the numbers down should they escape. Bovines are not ideal, but way better than nothing.

The 747-400 supertanker can drop 74 tons of water (20,000 gallons)… What is clear, as we both agree, is that much more, and more innovatively, needs to be done, right away. This should become part of a more general economic reorientation as part of an adaptation to the massive climate catastrophe around the corner. Burning the forests is how much of the change will happen, and will accelerate it, so we need to learn to slow it down as much as possible… And learn to acquire the mentality to divert enough economic activity to do this. 

Less nail salons, more prescribed burning. The responsibility in California is higher: redwoods disappeared from Europe, but they are the highest carbon storage form of life per surface. They also release huge quantities of oxygen, which may come handy if more seas die, with all their plankton… They are one of the answers to global heating: also they are fire and heat resistant.

So we have to change the world economy. And accelerate it. So, inflation, welcome!

In practice it means more loans to engage in more progress. Focusing in quality ecologically correct housing, should be a must, and priority.

Patrice Ayme

Hatred Against Trump About Immigration Is Counterfactual And Essence of Racism

It is racist to hate individuals from flimsy and apparently counterfactual justifications. This is true, even if the individual is a magistrate, or the president. I am an immigrant myself, but of the scrupulously legal type. There is evidence that Trump loves immigrants: he married and had beloved children with them. What Trump dislikes, as I do, is the sort of squalor found in parts of some “sanctuary cities”, for example Berkeley, California. 

Trump Immigration Ceremony, White House, August 25, 2020. It is racist to hate individuals from flimsy and apparently counterfactual justifications. A case in point is the PC mob hating the guy who married two immigrants and had four beloved children with them…. because, supposedly, according to the PC mob, he hates immigrants! The failure of PC logic is itself telling and frightening: who is the PC mob going to hate next?

While the Politically Correct, similar to Nancy Pelosi in her nine mansions, lives the high life on the hills, standards of living and health have sunk lower than anywhere in the world, a few miles away, among broken needles, excrements and filth… to the point ecologically unique natural lakes and lagoons are getting polluted. Systematically racist police policies keep the squalor away from the mansions: that distanciation between the PC high life and squalor for illegal immigrants and the underclass, is not “defunded”. For now. Should that fail, the truly rich can always move to Aspen, Jackson Hole, the many private islands they own in Hawaii or British Columbia, etc… As an immigrant, I was always looked down upon by the PC crowd, in a systematically racist way, so I appreciate a president who just doesn’t talk the talk, but marries the immigrants. 

A French Socialist Prime Minister once said:”France cannot welcome all of the world’s misery!” Indeed. And there are two good reasons for this: to preserve France (one of the world’s few high immigration country, like the USA)… but also to preserve the countries the immigrants come from. Indeed immigration should not be viewed as a crucial way to solve the problems of dysfunctional countries, or used as a way to exploit those countries, by stealing their best, most educated and brightest: those problems in those countries have to be fixed inside, otherwise only the best and brightest flee, preventing the resolution of the problems those countries suffer. Real progressives understand all of this.

Stop the hatred.

The preceding in black was sent and published by the New York Times. However, the global plutocratic propaganda media then realized its tragic mistake, and REMOVED MY COMMENT. They lie about saying comments are removed only if not civil. See the P/S.

Hatred is too easy, and resolves nothing.

Because the paradox is this: by hating Trump counterfactually, media such as the New York Times promote hatred as the great filter of cognition. 

For example the NYT trumpeted several times in the same article that “Trump built 300 miles of wall”. They never mention, although they know it very well, that most of the existing wall with Mexico was built well before the Trump administration (even Mexico is for it, for a number of reasons). And in some places the wall is multiple, hundreds of meters wide! And so on. The most scandalous anti-immigrant policies (such as DACA; or the immigration justice system, with no appeals and judges with extravagant powers) were in place well before Trump. Trump just advertises a reality Bush and Obama kept discreet. That’s no necessarily bad, as knowing there is a problem, and what it is, must precede solving the problem.

Promoting hatred as the ultimate filter of cognition is what true racists do.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The most sedate parts of the mini-essay above were send and published as a comment to the article of the New York Times linked above. many readers approved of it, so they realized their mistake, and removed the comment, replacing it by:

Back to All Comments.

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[NYT is the “newspaper of record” in the USA. It’s the reference. I also used to consider it one of the best media in the world. That was before the Iraq invasion, which it supported, and I stridently condemned, for all the right reasons. After that the NYT blocked me from commenting for a decade and a half until the publisher passed the job to his son. Now they censor may be 50% of my comments. But it is the first time they publish one, and then un-publish it.

Kill Locality To Save Causality And Objective Reality

Henri Poincaré’s Relativity was a Relativity of “Local Time”: Henri defined the two concepts, Relativity and Local Time, making electromagnetism the core of mechanics. However, the present Quantum Mechanics we have, CIQ, the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum, born after Poincaré died, is RELATIVE to the Hilbert Space it uses for a particular computation. That’s one Relativity too far. Because it is not clear which Hilbert Space we must choose: a number of related paradoxes arise, the Schrodinger Cat, Wigner’s Friend, etc.   

In 1964, John Bell published an article called ‘On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox’ in which he showed that “LOCAL” hidden variable theories conflict with observation. Bell writes: ‘The paradox of Einstein, Podolsky and Rosen was advanced as an argument that quantum mechanics could not be a complete theory but should be supplemented by additional variables. These additional variables were to restore to the theory causality and locality. In this note that idea will be formulated mathematically and shown to be incompatible with the statistical predictions of quantum mechanics. It is the requirement of locality, or more precisely that the result of a measurement on one system be unaffected by operations on a distant system with which it has interacted in the past, that creates the essential difficulty.’ [1]

Reality is one. The Eagle’s perception of the universe is the same as ours… with just five time the visual acuity…

The philosophical question is why should “causality” and “locality” both be saved? Couldn’t we just eliminate one of them? The obvious one to eliminate is locality. The idea of nonlocality is all over human mythology. Non-causality, not so much [2]. Most physicists couldn’t bear to eliminate “locality” because their great guru, Albert Einstein, and his prolific, revered followers, had decreed that nothing whatsoever could go faster than light. Unfortunately for them, reality decided otherwise. So the relativistic lemmings decided to do away with reality. In their version, reality is whatever they decide it to be. The analogy with the core principle of the global plutocratic media and power take over is no happenstance [3]. 

Philosophically this is irritating, and I am irritated. Make no mistake: I know that accelerating a mass beyond the speed of light seems impossible, because of a well-known equation… And I found a deeper reason relating directly to the slowing down of accelerated clocks. I also know, and do not intend to indulge, in arguments where space itself is accelerating.

What irritates me is this: the speed of light is a LOCAL concept. “Spooky” 

ACTION-AT-A-DISTANCE, Spukhafte Fernwirkung, to speak like Einstein, is NON-LOCAL. 

How can one use a local concept (constancy of lightspeed; limitation from thereof) to disprove a non-local concept? One has to do what is known in mathematics as “integration”. All differential geometers know that this is rich in surprises…  

In particular, if one is present with any curvature in space at a point, the speed of light will vary along loops originating at that point. That’s what having “curvature at that point” boils down to. So the speed of light is… relative. That’s the whole idea of “GENERAL” Relativity. When a fanatical believer of the consistency and constancy of the speed of light is tossed in a Black Hole by yours truly, as justly deserved, it will forever fade away slowly with the frozen expression of the dumbfounded [4]…  

In any case the physically minded lemmings out there spurned nonlocality (defined as anything faster than light, supraluminal). Instead, they asserted locality, and were thus reduced to putting causality, and even reality, in doubt. Out of that sprung the multiworlds, multiverse, multiminds, multireality description of… reality. Most theoretical physicists, according to polls, are OK with reality being observer dependent. 

This is obviously grotesque.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] John S Bell. “On the Einstein Podolsky Rosen paradox”. In: Physics 1.3 (1964), p. 195. 

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[2] A well-known argument against “God” is to ask who, what, caused “God”? The Christian theologian answer is that God is the ultimate cause… That answer makes monotheism acausal, thus irrational…  But the Greco-Roman instigators of Christianism saw that one coming, so they found an excellent answer: as the Gospel of John has it, the “Logos” itself (what you need to describe cause). Nowadays lemming Quantum physicists give another answer: logos is relative… 

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[3] The madness who has seized academic theoretical physicists communicated to the humanities, and from there to the streets… and the global plutocracy… This is how the Zeitgeist, l’esprit du temps, is created. 

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[4] Albert Einstein himself admitted, discreetly, that the speed of light varies in General Relativity… That’s the whole idea…

To Stop The Fires, Seed The Clouds

The remnants of a hurricane are approaching Northern California. The “Democratic” clowns who govern California are in despair. All their tiny brains know is that, a week ago, under similar circumstances, thick clouds rolled in, and 12,000 lightning strikes, a state record, by a long shot, launched 600 fires… Because rain didn’t fall. And now a repetition threatens. Another dry lightning set of thunderstorms. What to do? The governmental rodents are running around in circles: the cat is coming, the cat is coming: let’s close all the parks. Well, if they had bigger brains, they would have found a solution.

I sent this to Trump and Newsom (the governor of California): Mr. President/Governor: another dry lightning storm is approaching Northern California. Why don’t suggest to seed the clouds to force rain down to prevent further fires and drown the existing ones under a deluge? Should be done but California’s government seems unawares!

The fires in Northern California are catastrophic: one million acres, half a million hectares, burned in a few days. 3,000 years old trees destroyed, by the thousands…

Smoke of the Bay Area fires as seen from Bear Valley, 300 kilometers away, August 20, 2020. Multi millenia trees up in smoke…

On one hand, there is Catastrophic Climate Change, due to human pollution… But then there is also lack of mitigation. I know extremely well some of the areas just destroyed by fire, which were among the most exquisite places on Earth. 

Those places used to be frequented by goats, camels, cattle, elks, mastodonts. Also Native Americans took such good care of the forests, astonished Spaniards could go through them at a full gallop. There were a few elks at Point Reyes, but not enough (I was charged twice by large elks on the exact Woodward Trail with the horrible fire of the same name). There was a whole controversy about those non-fenced elks… Should they be allowed to roam? Ranchers were against it. Mountain lions fed on them (the 6 foot tall male elks could perfectly defend themselves, that’s why I got charged, they had confused me with lions, something natural at dusk… Now the fire is roaming and the elks are burning, so all is fine, as far as US political vultures are concerned. Thousand year old Douglas Firs, some three hundred feet tall are burning, it’s perfect. As long as Eva Longoria, a stupid actress, can talk 30% longer than Bernie Sanders at the Democratic Convention, “Democrats” will be fine….  

The air quality in Northern California is so bad, I have seen people nearly dying of asthma attack… 300 kilometers from the fires (where the photo above was taken by me). All parks are closed.

This sheer madness, was avoidable. In my cherished Point Reyes, with its cathedral forest, thousand years old trees are burning because the governor didn’t have the money, foresight, energy, or scientific advisers to send crews to burn the brush (which can be ten feet tall) during the rainy season. So all the forests are burning, people are gasping or dying, because, basically, Trump told them to clean them and how to do it, but those learned advice could only be charlatanism, because his opponents, who are in command in California, say Trump is a charlatan. So all Trump says is charlatanism. So if Trump says burn the brush, good anti-racist “Democrats” shall not burn the brush: it’s obviously a plot from Moscow. So the self-proclaimed “Democrats” controlling California didn’t do anything, they are just happy ruling and being sanctimonious. And now one has world famous trees, older than Roman civilization, burning… and unbreathable air, up to thousands of miles away…

Trump Derangement Syndrome is the illness which keeps on giving sadistic pleasure to simpletons… Up in smoke… And this is no light accusation: cloud seeding works. China (and even the US) has used it very successfully, against drought. What I proposed here is to seed the remnants of a hurricane. It did not happen: the deluge dropped over other states, not on the infernos where it was most needed.

Patrice Ayme

Space Colonization For Real. And Why Humanity Needs It, To Keep On Being Human.

It’s fashionable among intellectuals of the lesser sort to spite technology. Of course, that’s perfectly idiotic, hypocritical, and base: they would not even exist without the technology and the capability to use it, which our ancestors developed, already millions of years ago… As a species. Yes, the arrogant thinker, thinking where no thought has been thought before, on which all of civilization rests, is a direct biological creation of exponentiating technology. That, and apple pie.

Arrogance is great, as long as it bears fruit, such as thoughts the commons find astounding,and one could not have had them otherwise. . But arrogance for the sake of denial bears no fruit.

Water at the poles of the Moon, where it condensates in perpetual shadows. (Artist representation).

What’s the spatial bodies we can hope to colonize? Well, it used to look real hard. If one had to lift water from Earth to space… We didn’t have the capability of launching all this water cheaply enough.

Friend Stephen Jones observed:

“Mars is our only potential candidate to colonize. Beyond our own solar system? Nope. We will never reach another solar system.”

Well, indeed, we need water, and lots of energy. Fifty years ago, it looked as if there was only one planet with water in the Solar System: Earth. Now we have found so much that we have to demonstrate life did NOT evolve out there in the Solar System. The same is true, even more so, with exoplanets. 

Now we know that Mars, Europa, Enceladus, Ganymede, Pluto… have lots of water. Europa may have more than Earth (we don’t know how deep its ocean is). Some asteroids, comets, the poles of Mercury have water. It’s also very likely that the Moon water is usable. The largest asteroid, a spherical dwarf planet, Ceres, is a water rich body, with eruption of brine in several places. Once we have water, all we need is energy to make livable quarters. NASA is fully aware of all this.

Ceres is an ocean world where water and ammonia reacted with silicate rocks. As the ocean froze, salts and other telltale minerals concentrated into deposits that are now exposed in many locations across the surface. The Dawn spacecraft, which orbited it ever closer, also found organics in several locations on Ceres’ surface.

Altogether, Ceres seems to be approximately 40% or 50% water by volume, compared to 0.1% for Earth, and 73% rock by mass. So no more lifting water up there in space: it’s there already. We just need to get there, with lots of (nuclear) energy…

And how to get there? Well Elon Musk’s SpaceX has landed one particular rocket six times already (crushing down the price to orbit: it would take just one million dollars to repair and refurbish tat rocket, SpaceX says…). His Starship is supposed to be as reusable as an helicopter (revolutionizing point to point transport on Earth, no doubt) [1]. 

But the ultimate grail is portable thermonuclear fusion… Give us this, oh Lord, and the galaxy is ours… Nobody knows is that is feasible: the Sun is not big by accident. Thermonuclear fusion works better, the bigger the reactor. we are trying to do in a room what a gigantic Brown Dwarf can barely achieve. And Red Dwarf stars are eminently unstable… 

IF portable fusion is feasible, we will conquer the entire Solar System, and missions to proximal stars are imaginable, if we master hibernation (all sorts of rodents do it, after all…)

The philosophical question is why bother? 

Why to conquer space? The answer is simple: because it raises the bar of our understanding.  

An example? NASA just announced that its perpetually deferred new space telescope the James Webb, will be launched even later than last forecast (Fall 2021 now). Why? It’s immensely complex. To fit inside the fairing of the Ariane V rocket (or any rocket), it has to be folded. The mirror system and the solar shield enfold themselves in 180 different operations… This has to work 100% on 180 operations, as the telescope will be at the L1 Lagrangian point, where Earth and Sun gravitational attractions balance each other, 600,000 kilometers away, twice the distance of the Moon.  

So this telescope is perhaps the most complex machine ever. It uses several new and finicky technologies… And so it is throughout space exploration. New tech, all over. Mastering space forces us to master those technologies. We are in a debate with space, and it teaches us a lot, this demanding master.

Look at the blackouts and fires in California: both are all about energy management. Yes, there was not enough energy to take care of the forests. Now there is not enough energy to fight fires burning into groves of 3,000 year old trees. Space teaches us to optimize energy management… in particular of creating, and using energy as efficiently as possible.

Space forces tech to go higher, better. And only new tech will save us, the Earth, and our high mental and spiritual standards… 

Space is not a luxury, it’s not just a refuge from disaster, or reality. It is the future, because humanity is a force that goes. Up.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Supporting Elon Musk directly and indirectly, I was against: it looked like a case of celebritism. Now I am happy to report I was in error (as I already said). Supporting Elon Musk with beaucoup dollars is actually the best thing Barack Obama ever did. What characterizes Musk is the boldness of vision, the “ALL HOPE AHEAD!” attitude, what Charles Quint called :”PLUS OULTRE!”

Musk’s Starship, if he gets it to work, will revolutionize transportation (the Pentagon is going to be very interested). If there is no will to reach much higher, there is no way to change much deeper, this is true all over. If there is no will for a different, better world, there is no way, and there is not even any thought going that way. Instead, the “Inch’Allah” way rules all… Suivez la direction de mon regard…

Plutocratic Globalization Is The Number One Enemy Of We The People

It’s called PLUTOCRATIC GLOBALIZATION, and it destroyed the Roman Republic… turning it into the evil oligarchic empire invented by Augustus, which could only get worse, and did.

The wealthiest Romans called themselves the “Optimates”, the best, proceeding to make wars all over, subduing (democratic) Carthage, (free) Numentia (in Spain), and all of Greece, including Rome’s ally, Athens. Compare with the present “Democratic” Party in the USA. Joe Biden, average Joe, invented (he was the head of the Senate Foreign Commission) the argument to invade Iraq, a war crime, and crime against humanity, which killed at least two million Iraqis. Now we have the same plutocratic corporations who give millions to “Black Lives Matter” while employing enslaved Uyghurs in China under Xi, a dictator that Gates and Buffet, pillar of the “Democratic” party, have themselves contributed to install.

Did we see that before? Recently, not just Rome? Yes. The “Democratic” Party helped, financed, and conspired with Adolf Hitler. Who was most important in the “Democratic” Party in most of the Twentieth Century? The Harriman Brothers, sons of the guy who owned US railroads. They developed the Baku oil fields for Stalin. they did everything for Hitler. One of the Harrimans got the highest decoration from Stalin, and the highest from Hitler. Hitler himself had been launched, in all ways but learning German, by Henry Ford.

What to do now? First bring back all essential jobs to the West.

Contrarily to what plutocratic propaganda has claimed, industrial production was coming back to the USA. Say that, and they will tell you, those self-declared “progressives” and “democrats”, that you are a racist. So reality is racist? Manufacturing is the essence of POWER. When plutocracy wants to keep on ruling, it aims first at reducing the POWER of WE THE PEOPLE

Italy and Rome especially, had been forbidden, first, to work, then to own weapons, and finally even to serve in the army… Roman plutocrats were afraid of a coup against themselves. It worked, until there was strictly no army left (September 394 CE, exactly) . What to do? The plutocrats negotiated with the Barbarians, jut like now advocates of Sharia are allowed to sit in the US Congress (and have infected some city halls in France, where they promote the subjugation of women).

So the first thing to do is to bring back the essential jobs to the USA and Europe, from China where the plutocrats have exported them. In the COVID 19 crisis, France, Europe and the US had to organize air bridges from China for swabs, masks, Personal Protection Equipment.

Instead the “Democratic” Party chose a guy elected Senator before he was able to serve… who then served Reagan global plutocratization (all Reagan laws were passed by “Democrats”), and whose son, not a financial guy, got a one billion and a half dollar deal from China (and also diamonds, he had to admit during divorce proceedings). Pelosi is also a war criminal: she knew, she admitted recently, as Ranking Member of the Congress Intelligence Committee, that she knew there was strictly not one weapon of mass destruction in Iraq.

Having filthy, immensely corrupt politicians, is what brought Rome down. Feinstein, who stumbled into the San francisco city hall because of an assassination, has now a personal fortune of more than one billion dollars (yes, 10^9 dollars, billion with a b). How? She headed the Foreign Com. of the Senate when Biden did not. Her husband organized the deals with China.

But all people know is what they read in the media. The New York Times, owned by the same Jewish family, since the nineteenth century, knew about the Holocaust… But stayed silent, because greed is most important. They are doing the same now. Bezos owns whores and prostitute all over, including the Washington Post, telling their outrageous lies… Obamas and Clinton have now immense fortunes… And individuals such as your truly get shut down by the tech monopolies… They told me they had to, because otherwise they won’t be able to sell in some countries…

Human beings are not nice, this is how humanity is kept in check. Civilization has enabled evil to be leveraged, that’s called Pluto-Kratia, Evil-Power.
It worked in the past. It will not now, because the power evil can muster is too great.

Patrice Ayme

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The preceding was a comment on the following article from my friend ian Miller (but word press has messed up their site, so i couldn’t “reblog”):

The Recent Economy up to Covid-19

Posted on August 19, 2020

In the previous post I noted that Keynesian economics tended to fail because governments overlooked the second half of the prescription: when the going got strong, it was necessary to “pay back” the debt, or at least reduce the money supply. That results in politicians being party poopers, restraining the good times and what politician wants that with an election coming? The net result was with too much money floating around, we had the rather unexpected result of inflation coupled with stagnation/recession. More money would not solve that. Friedman had the answer, perhaps: stop government priming the economy and correct structural deficiencies. That was not followed either – Friedman had no more success than Keynes in getting politicians to behave. What resulted was the likes of Reagan reducing government expenditure, lowering taxes, and maintaining and expanding the government deficit. Then the US Federal Reserve set the tone by reducing the money supply, even though it knew that would send unemployment soaring. They simply did not care. Anything went in the name of “economic efficiency”. 

What was undefined was “efficiency.” To answer that we have to ask what is the purpose of the economy? To the bankers it seems to be to make nice profits for banks, but surely it is more than the keeping of tidy books. For some, it is to maximize wealth, especially for themselves. For some it is to generate the means of enabling people to live in a pleasant place and live alongside nature. For others it is to enable all people to get the best out of life. Under the new economics of Reagan and others, the emphasis was on the “basics”: get the government out of the economy because they don’t know what they are doing, focus on low and stable inflation, let the rich get richer, following which the wealth would trickle down. Except the evidence is, it didn’t.  Then when it became clear that squeezing the money supply, while it might have helped make the books tidier, was generating unemployment that was too great, so central banks switched to using interest rates as their primary tool. Which gets us to where the bankers are now. Interest rates have got to the point where depositing in banks is only good for security, as long as the bank does not go belly up.

What actually happened was that when the corporations noted that the government did not care about employment it fired its workers, thereby saving money on benefits, etc. and moved manufacturing to low wage countries. Basic manufacturing, like clothes, were exported to places like Indonesia or Bangla Desh, and more difficult manufacturing to China. That undoubtedly increased the wealth of the rich, but it sent the workers into low-paying jobs in the service industries. Meanwhile, there was a somewhat unrecognized crisis in the academic community, and in particular the physics community. Funding had dropped and we had a large number of highly educated unemployed. The physicists, in particular, were good at computer modeling, and they got jobs in banks to create new “financial products”. The banks made huge profits until about 2008. The problem with these “products”. which were sliced and diced debt, were based on the assumption that nothing significant could go wrong, but in the US, for political reasons, a huge number of houses were sold to people who had no hope of repaying the mortgages. Oops. 

We have sort of recovered from that, but the legacy is that thanks to COVID 19 the debt levels of so many countries is extraordinarily high, interest rates are ridiculously low they cannot go lower, so there is no incentive to save. Money goes into assets, which merely inflates the price of the assets. Stock at $100 is worth that if you can sell it for that, but at the end of a period of time, you have to look at the overall returns on investment. In a bubble, everyone makes money until the music stops, then the losses are concentrated on the then holders. COVID has forced the nervous investors to cash out and the stock market fell, but it is coming back because of the quantitative easing. So what happens when the quantitative easing stops and the bonds are cashed out?What is clear is that we cannot look to the past for ways to get out of this. We have to try something new, but what? If you look at our leaders, do any of them have a solution to what happens after quantitative easing? Or do they have their heads in the sand and assume that will be for another electoral cycle?