Debating Crumbs Only Pigeons Do

Was this for children? Or was there a more sinister purpose? Why did some guy select a few, not necessarily important subjects for would-be presidents to debate? Why did the “moderator”, showing no moderation, present as fact a somewhat ludicrous story in the New York Times on Trump taxes planted the day before which claimed Trump paid “no taxes”? When Trump said that was not correct, he “paid millions”, Wallace did not accept the answer. Why Trump taxes, and only Trump taxes, not Biden’s, and not the Iraq war? The Commission on Presidential Debates divided the 90-minute event into six 15-minute segments. A Mr. Wallace selected six broad topics: Mr. Trump’s and Mr. Biden’s political records, the Supreme Court, the coronavirus, the economy, race and violence in cities, and the integrity of the election.

Wallace presented as a fact New York Times’ allegations about Trump taxes but avoided the somewhat symmetrical subject, namely how Biden avoided millions of taxes with his S corporation trick (and that’s no speculation as Biden produced his taxes) .

Too much of the debate was between Trump and Wallace. Trump took the bait, and that was a mistake. Where was Biden? Why was the Supreme Court a matter of debate? Biden refused to answer when asked directly if he was going to “pack the court” (name more than nine judges, as some have suggested). There was an asymmetry of questions: the softball questions went to Biden. Both candidates should be asked the same questions, to avoid this sort of bias, and then let to duke it out… instead of having Wallace try to talk over the US President… 

Biden called Trump a “racist”, a “clown”, a “liar”, “this guy”… Not as conclusions of arguments, but as if they were detached facts, in other words: insults. Biden interjected: “will you shut up, man”. The “shut up, ma” happened after Trump, following the “moderator”, reiterated the demand that Biden tell whether he would “pack” the Supreme Court” or not… Trump made the mistake of interjecting too many of Biden’s lies, or outrages, while Wallace tried to shut him down.

Servants of global plutocracy fight over crumbs because they are deprived of dignity

One should wonder why a moderator is useful in debates. Here the moderator, far from moderating, made the situation worse by a selection of topics and questions which advantaged Biden: speculating about the opinions of a judge democrats voted for less than three years ago should not have replaced questions about five decades of Biden’s political record. 

“Moderator” Chris Wallace actually condemned Trump for an executive order to lower the price of medical drugs … and then proceeded to talk about something else. Trump was reduced to interjecting that the Democrats never did such a thing when in power.

One may also wonder why candidates to the presidency need a moderator: if they can’t moderate themselves, how can they moderate the world? Other republics have organized presidential debates without moderators. 

There has been a decay of public discourse in the USA. This is not a debate anymore, but a flow of insults. This is much more dangerous than it looks. This is how the Roman Republic started to go down: the devolution of debate into the grossest insults, and no will to sincerity.

Even in a country such as France, the political debate has not gone so low that main actors have hurled accusations such as “racist”! Many self-described “democrats” have insisted that Trump was a “racist”. They repeated it so much, it has become self-evident (to them). When asked for evidence to support this terrible accusation, Biden referred several times to mysterious “dog whistles” and one can read in Trump hating literature the concept of “code words”, apparently anodyne words Trump would utter that racists recognize as their own (allegedly). 

So basically the accusations of racism against Trump are grounded on the accusations themselves. A variant of the technique has been to accuse Trump to have insulted soldiers. Mr. Biden rebuked the president for having reportedly referred to America’s fallen soldiers as “losers”… an obviously false report (New York Times again) the proof of which was supposedly that Trump had not visited a cemetery in France, out of spite for soldiers who fought Nazism… When the true reason was absolutely horrendous weather preventing helicopters to fly to the cemetery (there was no time for alternative transportation).  And the New York Times know the whole story, is a lie but still deliberately lies about it. Biden ran with it, knowing full well it’s a lie. All what this sort of lies do, is to augment the hatred (I will explain in a detached essay why lies make tribes, and hatred is the best cement… But playing that game can lead to civil war… and actually has, in the USA…) Similarly the New York Times accused Trump to have mentioned the “Proud Boys”, forgetting it’s Biden who mentioned “Proud Boys” first (Trump added he didn’t know who they were… Nor did I, I just made a search 20 hours later…)

So a debate where the big subjects were avoided… per the “moderator” choice of the subjects… And the biggest lies go on, untouched and unmentioned…

There were some news. When asked about the Green New Deal, Biden said “I am the Democratic Party… The Green New Deal is not my plan”. Sure didn’t take long to drop that one. Once again, regulation will not do as much as fundamental research. Trump correctly noticed he was funding electric cars. As they are, those are not (yet) good enough (developing green hydrogen will enable green electricity… not yet the case… even Elon Musk said he was running out of Lithium to make batteries…).  

The Biden candidacy is the global plutocratic candidacy. There is nothing progressive about it, it’s all a front. The democrats will boost back taxes (except for those who like the Bidens pay little because of loopholes), and boost corporate taxes, giving an excuse for setting corporations overseas again, collapsing 401K, and restarting the migration of US jobs overseas.

Why Sanders fell for the Biden swindle back to the past is a mystery. Sanders doesn’t look corrupt (he lives in three houses not three mansions like Biden; Sanders’ wife got involved in a somewhat shady story about a college, but that doesn’t compare with the many multimillion dollars shady deals swirling around just Hunter Biden). 

The fact that Chris Wallace set up the debate to maximally advantage Biden is a testimony to the fact of how difficult it is for any upper level participant in society to exist outside of the Deep State… If one is Wallace, there is nothing to lose, everything to gain.

***

Global Plutocratic Terror And Greed make a strong box minds can find impossible to exit; the case of Livius:

This is a phenomenon seen throughout history: the stronger the grip of plutocracy, the stronger the box of the state. One can appreciate better the few Roman historians who didn’t toe the party line… They had to be very subtle, as when Titius Livius (“Livy”) contradicted Augustus on the question of a triumph accorded to a Tribune, four centuries earlier (!) Augustus claimed the Tribune (who was later elected Consul) had not been a Tribune when he killed in single combat the Lars Tolumnius was the most famous king of the wealthy Etruscan city-state of Veii.

Instead Augustus claimed he had seen ancient inscriptions in a recess of a forbidden temple to the effect, that Cornelius Cossus, who was attributed the spolia opima, charging Lars, unhorsing him, forcing him to the ground with his shield, piercing him with his lance multiple times, stripping the arms and armor from the fallen king…. was truly a Consul at the time and not just a Military Tribune. This historical debate was all about refusing the spolia opima to a potential rival of Augustus, who deserved the spolia opima. Augustus refused the attribution to the rival, on the ground that he was not Consul at the time.

Livius relates the entire story and then goes into extravagant praise of Augustus claiming that Cornelius Cossus had got to have been Consul at the time, because he said so and nobody is as august as Augustus. The exaggerated praise resonates, nineteen centuries later, as a condemnation of the intellectual fascism Rome had fallen under.

***

The parody of a debate organized by Chris Wallace will resonate in the future, hopefully, as a condemnation of how strong the global plutocratic state had become: minds can’t get free themselves from it. Wallace allied himself with the shallow Biden, because Biden is the establishment… and there is escaping it. When someone as charged with condemnable history as Joe Biden runs for the ultimate magistracy, one should not ask softball questions grounded in gossip.

In any case, those who want real progress will not vote for Biden: it would be the same make-believe as before… and power to the same usual suspects. For example, the Obama administration picked winners and losers among “green” companies. This should not be the job of the government… which is to fund basic research and unprofitable infrastructure. Instead Obama cut hydrogen research, setting back this indispensable energy source by a full decade (and thus causing the California energy crisis).

Another example is tent cities, which are in part caused by dearth of construction. I used to contemplate in the distance what I called “Obamaville”, a tent city with guard dogs and drugs, with hundreds of homeless. It appeared during Obama’s reign, and was cleaned since. The sort of thing Pelosi doesn’t have to worry about.

The 1994 crime bill, written by Biden, supported by Clinton, is the cause of the mass incarceration of the famous Black Lives which are supposed to matter… Trump evoked it, but got side tracked right away (maybe next time he should come fresh to the debate, after spending a few days in the bunker as Biden did?)

To end on a more positive note, Biden claimed:”I am the Democratic Party!” Biden talked the talk of progress, I approve many of his suggestions like taxing the hyper wealthy, but I can see the usual dodges lurk, which make the hyper wealthy ever more powerful… But there is plenty of evidence a 28% corporate tax is not the way to reduce the power of the hyper powerful…. If one has not taken previously measures to bring the corporations back, first. Similarly, making the wealthy pay can’t happen if their tax and power dodges are not removed first. And many are global.

Patrice Ayme

Why The US 1979 Attack On Afghanistan? Hubris!

The US attacked Afghanistan in 1979? Most US citizens know only of 9/11, when US mercenary Bin Laden turned against its ex-employer the USA. Plutocratic propaganda “fact checking” will tell you all the precedent statements are unfounded or even know to be false; they are lying; the best way to see they are lying is that the Saudis could not have established an army of at least 35,000 Arabs Muslim Fundamentalist fighters without the approbation of Pakistan, itself a Washington puppet at the time)

National Security Adviser Harvard University (PhD) Zbigniew  Brzezinski, father of professional Trump hater and MSNBC talking head Harvard’s visiting fellow Mika Brzezinski: “Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secret until now, is completely different. Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.”

So the Afghan war was launched, millions died, millions got exiled, an entire country got tortured for now more than 40 years. But Harvard University (PhD) Zbigniew Brzezinski had no regrets:

Brzezinski: “Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter. We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire…. What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?”

Afghanistan in 1979, before the full US attack, on the left. Afghanistan in 201o, after 31 years of US led war.  Until the US DEEP STATE unleashed Muslim Fundamentalist terrorists in Afghanistan through Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan was a quickly modernizing, safe country, with little sexism. My parents, in geological missions to Afghanistan, visited it many times, and travelled all over (without bodyguards…) Picture sent by Don Kemmerling. US war in Afghanistan destroyed the country completely and made it drug dependent.

The US Deep State and its greedy plutocracy attacked Afghanistan in 1979 for reasons so shallow that there is bound to be another, deeper mechanism at work. And that is one well known of the Ancient Greeks, the reason which, perhaps more than any other, defeated Greek Democracy, hubris. Human beings are made to live dangerously. The leaders of America, visible or not, were bored. So, full of hubris, they organized for themselves a war which would pull them out of their routine. Beats golf, any day. They got away with it, from a general lack of morality and attention to detail.

Another reason is that individuals such as Mika Brzezinski are at the levers of command of US opinion making. Mika is a visiting fellow at the Harvard Institute of Politics. “MSNBC’S Morning Joe Hosts Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski Join Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of Politics as Fellows”. Harvard Kennedy School. The President and Fellows of Harvard College. Retrieved May 31, 2017 (the information was recently scrubbed, because it exposes the connection between plutocratic Harvard and plutocratic MSNBC).

The individuals at the helm of the US are used to get money and power for nothing. Rwanda, using their tool Kagame, produced cheaply, plenty of Coltan and other rare minerals indispensable for modern electronics (smartphones, etc.) The likes of Susan Rice, another daughter of a prestigious father, made it so that the war in Congo to get all these minerals out without paying Congolese tax could proceed for the best. Rice represented, in a lucrative manner, Kagame (himself formed in the USA, before being sent back to make war in Rwanda) in Washington. Only six million Congolese killed, long live Rice!

Then all the parrots out there repeat what they are told, but not in these words: global plutocracy is good for you, as long as you say, feel and think the right things.

Is there a way out? Time will tell. However historical precedent is not encouraging. If the Roman state collapsed, it was fundamentally because the Roman plutocracy preferred to deal with the barbarians than to empower, We The People. Potentially, Rome could have raised armies of millions of citizens, which would have crushed the tiny barbarian armies… But Roman plutocrats and their children preferred to marry barbarians than to resist them. Actually Roman plutocrats turned out to have been more hellish than the Barbarians: the Roman empire was reestablished,” renovated” by the Franks, ex-barbarians who were adoptive Romans, not by the original ancient Roman lineages (which had been physically destroyed by the victorious plutocrats…) 

William, Duke of Normandy, established in England the most modern state in the world at the time, in 1066 CE. The first thing he did was to outlaw slavery, per Frankish law, as he had to, because it was the law. Followed an amazing succession of smart measures. A bit of digging shows why: William was part of, and encouraged, a whole movement towards greater intellect in north-west France. Those individuals believed that Earth was circling the sun, and logic was god.

Similarly, the rise of ancient Greek democracies was preceded by serious intellectual forrays in deeper understanding. So, when looking at civilizations, one has to look at their intellectual classes to guess their future: Rome (for a long time) and China (several times)  went down because of insufficient mental performance. Similarly, when Western Europe recovered, it was led by its intellectuals… as early as the Fifth, Sixth, Seventh and Eight centuries…

In the case of Rome, one may wonder why the administration could not stop the plutocratic rot. This intellectual class was of a lesser sort: the Romans never created intellectuals of the same class as the Greeks. Even when the Roman Republic or the Roman empire were at their peaks, except for a few historians, Romans never produced an intellectual class. Greece did, and Rome employed them, rewarding them handsomely. This was the time of the billionaire (Greek) intellectuals. But those intellectuals were themselves of the lesser sort: they got wealthy, as long as they sang the praises of the collapsing empire, collapsing ecology, collapsing morals, and collapsing free speech… Everybody agreed that, as they put it then:”the world is getting old”.

Well, the world was not getting old, the Roman intellectual class had got senile. By the Eight Century, the Franks made universal schooling mandatory and a condition for religious establishments to operate. It was a time of basic inventions, to enable society to work without slaves…

America has never produced a serious intellectual class. The very wealth and influence of top US, or Chinese, universities is a warning sign: closer examination indeed shows full agreement with the plutocracies in power. 

So Americans don’t know that they saintly president Carter attacked Afghanistan in 1979. They don’t know that it had severe consequences (9/11 being a relatively minor one…). So why would they mind that Biden attacked Iraq? 

Better. One loses all credibility by pointing at such significant facts as murdering entire nations: smarts disqualify, among idiots, naturally enough. If one wants respectability nowadays, one has to go do the monkey on Tik Tok, gains millions of followers. Any text more than ten words taxes the minds of those who have none.

Patrice Ayme

DO IRAQI LIVES MATTER? Are Those Voting For Biden Voting For The “Supreme International Crime”?

Bush-Biden Attack On Baghdad Iraq, 2003: Shock and Awe!

Charles Manson was an American criminal and cult leader. In mid-1967, he formed what became known as the “Manson Family”. His followers committed nine murders at four locations in July and August 1969. The Los Angeles County district attorney believed that Manson intended to start a “race war“. In 1971, Manson was convicted of first-degree murder and conspiracy to commit murder for the deaths of seven people. The prosecution conceded that Manson never literally ordered the murders, but they contended that his ideology constituted an OVERT ACT OF CONSPIRACY. Manson was sentenced to the death penalty for this conspiracy. So Manson’s influence killed nine, and he was condemned to capital punishment. If he had conspired to kill three millions, would he have been nominated to the presidency?

As chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when the vote for a war of aggression against Iraq was cast, Biden was at the forefront of the effort to attack Iraq in 2002 and 2003. Biden had set-up a commission to invent reasons for invading Iraq.{“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“7cbd14bd-7bb3-494b-bbe7-69802f809141″],”srcRootClientId”:””} 

The US government called this sort of massacre, “Shock And Awe”. Plutocratic media has been removing pictures of the bombing of Baghdad by the US in 2003 recently. There is probably no desire to remember this tragedy where Biden was arguably the second most important perpetrator, in the drive towards war, only behind President W Bush himself… Of course Biden later tried to forget the whole thing, and the plutocratic media has helped him that way.

Please consider carefully what this establishment of a commission to invade Iraq means. Biden’s drive to war was not a silly off the cuff remark, or an out of context edited statement, or a silly tweet storm, or a joke. Justifying the invasion of Iraq by carefully invented, vicious lies was Biden’s purposeful main policy and activity for  at least ten months… The invasion of Iraq killed at least two million Iraqis. Upper estimates are up to 3.5 millions.  The war is in a quiet phase now, but it is still going on, and could flare up any time.

Around 10,000 US citizens died (nearly half of them soldiers; the US military used a lot of civilian contractors). And all this mayhem for what exactly? 

At first sight, the attack on Iraq was just to satisfy the inner urges of the three most crucial US leaders at that time (President W. Bush and his two “Democratic” accomplices, Biden and Pelosi.) I call this criminal. War criminal. As we will see, there is a much broader and deeper motivation. That motivation became clearer in the fullness of time. Actually the deep motivation for the Iraq invasion animated the most major US policy in the two decades following the US invasion and mayhem in Iraq. The mayhem and wholesale destruction was no happenstance, as it was made to appear. In truth, it was too well organized, not to have been a plan.

The day the war commenced, Biden told CNN: “There’s a lot of us who voted for giving the president the authority to take down Saddam Hussein if he didn’t disarm. And there are those who believe, at the end of the day, even though it wasn’t handled all that well, we still have to take him down.” Who are these “us” Biden is talking about? The “us” from the US Deep State…

Stephen Johnson, a US citizen, and a friend, intervened, to re-establish what passes in the USA for sanity, the madness of the crowd. He wrote: “Calling Biden a war criminal is plainly nuts, so you’re losing credibility with me.”

Well, I am driven by facts, not by whether people have faith in me, as if I were Jesus Christ, who needed the comfort of the crowd to feel good about himself. I have written extensively about the US aggression against Iraq for more than a decade. The Guardian gave a nice synopsis of my position in:

“Joe Biden championed the Iraq war. Will that come back to haunt him now?” By Mark Weisbrot”

“The Iraq war has been a prominent, even decisive issue, in recent US presidential elections. That will make Biden’s history a liability. Mon 17 Feb 2020

BIDEN DID VASTLY MORE THAN JUST VOTE FOR THE WAR. Yet his role in bringing about that war remains mostly unknown or misunderstood by the public.

When the war was debated and then authorized by the US Congress in 2002, Democrats controlled the Senate and Biden was chair of the Senate committee on foreign relations. Biden himself had enormous influence as chair and argued strongly in favor of the 2002 resolution granting President Bush the authority to invade Iraq.

“I do not believe this is a rush to war,” Biden said a few days before the vote. “I believe it is a march to peace and security. I believe that failure to overwhelmingly support this resolution is likely to enhance the prospects that war will occur …”

BUT HE HAD A POWER MUCH GREATER THAN HIS OWN WORDS. He was able to choose all 18 witnesses in the main Senate hearings on Iraq. And he mainly chose people who supported a pro-war position. They argued in favor of “regime change as the stated US policy” and warned of “a nuclear-armed Saddam sometime in this decade”. That Iraqis would “welcome the United States as liberators” And that Iraq “permits known al-Qaida members to live and move freely about in Iraq” and that “they are being supported”.

The lies about al-Qaida were perhaps the most transparently obvious of the falsehoods created to justify the Iraq war. As anyone familiar with the subject matter could testify, Saddam Hussein ran a secular government and had a hatred, which was mutual, for religious extremists like al-Qaida. But Biden did not choose from among the many expert witnesses who would have explained that to the Senate, and to the media.

Biden’s selling points as a candidate often lead with his reputation for foreign policy experience and knowledge. But Iraq in 2002 was devastated by economic sanctions, had no weapons of mass destruction, and was known by even the most pro-war experts to have no missiles that could come close to the United States. The idea that this country on the other side of the world posed a security threat to America was more than far-fetched. The idea that the US could simply invade, topple the government, and take over the country without provoking enormous violence was also implausible. It’s not clear how anyone with foreign policy experience and expertise could have believed these ideas.

The Guardian adds: “Senator Dick Durbin, a Democrat, and still a Senator in 2020, was on the Senate intelligence committee at the time. Durbin was astounded by the difference between what he was hearing there and what was being fed to the public. “The American people were deceived into this war,” he said…

The resolution granting President Bush the authority to start the invasion of Iraq, which Biden pushed through the Senate, was a major part of that deception. So, too, was the restricted testimony that Biden allowed. The resolution itself contained deceptive language about a number of pretexts for the war, including al-Qaida and weapons of mass destruction that Iraq did not have.”

• Mark Weisbrot is co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research in Washington, DC. He is the director of Worth the Price? Joe Biden and the Launch of the Iraq War (2020)

Weisbrot finishes his article this way, re-hashing essays of mine written since 2003… But the truth is worth re-hashing, always, when it is most significant:

“The Iraq war has generally been seen as one of the worst US foreign policy blunders in decades. It fueled the spread of terrorism and destabilized the Middle East and parts of north Africa. “Isil is a direct outgrowth of al-Qaida in Iraq, that grew out of our invasion,” noted President Obama.

More than 4,500 US soldiers, and nearly as many US military contractors, lost their lives; tens of thousands were wounded, with hundreds of thousands more suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Estimates of Iraqi deaths run as high as 1 million.

At the very least, Biden should explain why he played such a major role in winning the authorization from Congress for President Bush to wage this disastrous war.”

***

Was Biden’s Attack On Iraq Criminal?

When considering if a criminal act happened during a violent action, one has to look at the motivation of the suspect. That’s called Mens Rea in Roman, and contemporary law. It is the intention or knowledge of wrongdoing that constitutes part of a crime, as opposed to the action or conduct of the accused. In the case of the legal person known as the USA, there was a blatant criminal motivation: fracking. Revealingly, the Obama-Biden administration made that motivation blatant.

The US attack on Iraq occurred without a clear UN mandate… because of the frantic efforts of the French Republic… which has the longest historical view: France was a driver of history against extravagant savagery, for 15 centuries.

Biden’s criminal act is not that of a simple vote and arguments in favor of invading Iraq, as Senator Hillary Clinton did. No, Biden invented the entire big lie which Bush used, and made the US media run with it. 

What are those who claim they intend to vote for Biden, and are exposed to the preceding say? It’s hard for Trump haters to accuse Trump this time (Trump opposed the Iraq invasion, so did I. I got insulted, lost all my friends, got banned from the New York Times… This is when my attitude to Trump started to change, because, to oppose the invasion of Iraq in 2003 from inside the USA, one needed to have more than guts, but also lots of brains and self-confidence)

They can’t accuse Trump, but they can blame the victim. Stephen Jones: “For the record, it was Saddam Hussein that first claimed he had WMDs. Unfortunately, few in the Cheney-Bush administration wanted peace over profits.”

Unwittingly, Mr. Jones proved my point. Which profits? Invading a country to exploit its resources is a very well defined war crime. Even for the brutal US Deep State, such a gross violation would have been too much, so it was never the real plan. So, if there couldn’t be any profit made in Iraq itself, the profits could only be made in the USA itself where Cheney, ex-CEO of oil fracking giant Halliburton was massively invested.

For the record too: Saddam lied for internal reasons, but he knew that the Americans knew he had NO Weapons of Mass Destruction whatsoever… And that was confirmed by the UN inspectors going all around Iraq and finding none. So the Bush administration claimed that the weapons, and the laboratories, were on trucks and were moving around. No doubt Biden and Pelosi smiled and clang champagne glasses together about that grotesque fairy tale lie, fostered by their errant boy, General Powell at the UN.

***

Nuremberg Jurisprudence: WAR OF AGGRESSION IS THE SUPREME INTERNATIONAL CRIME:

In the judgment of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg, which followed World War II, “War is essentially an evil thing. Its consequences are not confined to the belligerent states alone, but affect the whole world. TO INITIATE A WAR OF AGGRESSION, THEREFORE, IS NOT ONLY AN INTERNATIONAL CRIME; IT IS THE SUPREME INTERNATIONAL CRIME differing only from other war crimes in that it CONTAINS WITHIN ITSELF THE ACCUMULATED EVIL OF THE WHOLE.“[1][2] .

The United States of America is then asked to vote for an accomplice and perpetrator of the “Supreme International Crime”. 

***

Manson’s ideology led to the murder of nine people, from a criminal conspiracy. He was sentenced to death, but he didn’t plan or order the murders. 

How many people died in Iraq because of the US attack? Deliberately, the US military refused to count the bodies. Says even the plutocratic Washington Post, a Trump hating newspaper owned by global monopolist plutocrat Bezos: 

“15 years after the Iraq War began, the death toll is still murky”

By Philip Bump, March 20, 2018:

Tens of thousands of people died fighting in the Iraq War, which began 15 years ago Tuesday. Nearly 5,000 of them were U.S. service members. Tens of thousands were insurgents battling the transitional Iraqi government put in place after the ouster of Saddam Hussein.

But that figure obscures the actual number of deaths attributable to the conflict. During the war and during the Islamic State militant group’s occupation of as much as a third of the country in recent years, the number of deaths runs into the hundreds of thousands, including civilians killed as a result of violence and, more broadly, those who died because of the collapse of infrastructure and services in Iraq resulting from the ongoing conflict

The Washington Post, and top US universities are owned, directly or not, figuratively, or literally, by US plutocracy. US plutocracy wanted to attack Iraq, to become wealthier and more powerful, so it had interest to underestimate the number of people killed by the US attack. Iraq Body Count, for example, counts only the death appearing in English speaking papers (that’s around 300,000). Studies in The Lancet and New England Journal of Medicine, also infeodate to US and global plutocracy recognized around 700,000 killed by 2006 from the invasion. A general overview by (plutocratic) MIT explains why the numbers published are just a fraction of the real number of deaths (they stop there, lest they displease their wealthy sponsors). Even (plutocratic) Brown University agrees that when the large city of Mosul was retaken, dozens of thousands died. But they have not been counted, observes Brown: most civilian victims were pulverized or returned to the atmosphere after combustion, and their ashes dispersed. 

An Iraqi Kurdish intelligence report estimated that at least 40,000 civilians were killed in the bombardment of Mosul alone, with many more bodies still buried in the rubble.  A recent project to remove rubble and recover bodies in just one neighborhood found 3,353 more bodies, of whom only 20% were identified as ISIS fighters and 80% as civilians. Another 11,000 people in Mosul are still reported missing by their families.

All in all, the Iraq invasion led by Bush, Biden, and authorized by their accomplice Pelosi, killed at least 2.5 million people. Because Pelosi, as Ranking Member of the US Congress Intelligence Committee knew explicitly that the pretext for invading Iraq was a complete lie. Pelosi admitted her her lie on CNN in 2019.

Pelosi said Bush had a right to invade Iraq “because they won the election”. Pelosi justification? She said:”…I knew there were no nuclear weapons in Iraq. It just wasn’t there…. So, I knew it was a – a misrepresentation to the public…in my view, not a ground for impeachment. That was – they won the election. They made a representation. And to this day, people think – people think that that it was the right thing to do.”

Biden, though, maneuvered to invade Iraq before the election. Why did Biden want so much to invade Iraq? Official history doesn’t know. W Bush pretended he hated Saddam because Saddam had tried to kill his dad. But Biden never presented a motivation for his hatred. OK, OK, some will claim I do not know that Biden hated Iraq. They would say Biden just helped to kill ten percent of a country, because he could.

***

US FRACKING WAS THE MOTIVATION TO INVADE IRAQ:

When wars happen, it is often not clear why, in the heat of the moment. However, in the fullness of times, the real culprits are easier to reveal. However, sometimes, they stay hidden, because the mood in power is adverse to the truth. This needs a full essay: for example why Rome annihilated Carthage is still a hot potato: the plutocracy presently in power would prefer you not to know why, so it promotes in its plutocratic universities historians uninterested by a real explanation.

So why did the US invade Iraq? At the time US leaders claim that Iraqi oil would pay for the invasion (can’t do this, it’s a war crime!) That still did not explain how the US was supposed to profit from the invasion. 

{“type”:”block”,”srcClientIds”:[“a58ed73d-b0c8-45c4-9cbc-a26c5a2d70c1″],”srcRootClientId”:””}The truth is simple: Iraq, with the second oil reserves in the world, saw its oil production killed. In consequence, the price of oil shot up to heights never seen before (above $140 a barril). Capital investment in US FRACKING was profitable at or above $60 a barril. Wall Street was all for it. 

Shortly after the paroxysm of the Iraq war, the ingenue, Barack Obama arrived on the scene, talked of saving the climate, big time, and then proceeded to push US FRACKING as much as possible. Obama called fracking the “bridge fuel” to the “clean-energy future” (even the Washington Post in 2014 found this bridge fuel to the future “not so simple”). Soon the US was the greatest oil producer the world had ever seen, and soon the US was the world’s greatest gas producer the world had ever seen. Biden could only smile that the plot had worked as intended, and Trump haters could only conclude that Trump destroyed the climate.

*** 

Hatred in the service of greed is a common motivation:.

So what about these “Black Lives Matter” signs on the lawns? Do Iraq Lives Matter, too? So why are they not on the lawns, too? Two and a half million killed, does that speak loud enough? It does not? Never had math, never had history? Don’t know about Iraq? Why is that not SYSTEMIC RACISM AGAINST IRAQIS?

Patrice Ayme

Biden’s work. US Bombing Kirkuk, Iraq 2003

Was It Criminal For The USA To Attack Afghanistan In 1979? And Why Still Unexamined? Comparing With The Nazis’ War of Aggression

On July 3 1979, Democratic president Jimmy Carter gave the secret order to attack the Democratic Republic of Afghanistan which had been created by a coup in 1978 which put an end to the Afghan monarchy. The idea of Carter’s advisers was to create a Vietnam for the Soviets on their doorstep, and put an end to the French collaboration in exploiting the considerable mineral resources of the country. My family was a direct witness of what happened.  

The US population is completely unaware of this, and, when exposed to it, tends to accuse the teller, rather than the facts (it’s a psychoprobe experiment I made many times). In an example of mass deliberately organized mass delusion of crowds

The US administration unleashed client regimes, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia. The Pakistani ISI (Inter Service Intelligence) and the SIA (Saudi Intelligence Agency; it’s know under several other names) were launched against Afghanistan. The latter recruited Bin Laden, and that’s actively denied by organizations such as FactCheck.Org, by quoting approvingly the perpetrators. In general, when even ex-FBI directors write memoirs with damaging information on the US Deep State, active disinformation blurs reality completely, and the public stops being interested. 

US Air Force bombs Tora Bora In Afghanistan, twenty-two years after Carter gave the order to fully attack Afghanistan. The Afghan War was an American show throughout: concept, financing, screenwriting and production.

Often the effort against Fundamental Islam seems so incompetent that cynics will believe it is deliberately so. Actually some CIA operators have basically said this, including Gary Berntsen, the CIA officer who directed the battle of Tora Bora represented above.

“I did not inform CIA headquarters that I was doing this. I did everything possible to initiate a battle without asking for their permission because I was very concerned that they wouldn’t authorize any of it… There would have been a slew of questions. I didn’t want any questions. I didn’t want to hear anything from anybody.

“And quite frankly I didn’t trust the seventh floor of the CIA to do the right thing, because they had not done the right thing for a number of years before that. And I didn’t care if I was fired or relieved either. I was just going to do it.”

the Afghan War to the Soviets: it is repeated all over in the media it owns and influences. The BBC, E-International Relations all keep the myth going.  Attributing the Afghan war to the Soviets…when it’s actually the US which started it… The Soviets were counterpunching. The Muslim adversaries can’t admit to that, they are caught in the lie, and that explains the rage of so many Muslims, including Bin Laden, who know it, but see it so efficiently denied by the world plutocratic media.  

 

In any case, the US mercenary Bin Laden, who had intervened in the Afghan war launched by Carter and pursued by Reagan, with an Arab army of 35,000, contributed to the death of millions of Afghans. How many millions? Several. The numbers are not published anymore and it’s hard to find serious evaluations with search engines… Please do not wonder why: Davos plutocracy likes to kill discreetly.

Confronted to the question Was It Criminal To Attack Afghanistan? The pre-cooked answer is to point out the fact that the Taliban refused to surrender Bin Laden and his accomplices after 9/11. That, indeed, was enough of a casus belli. Agreed. 

However, the full truth requires that for the sake of cognition and ethics, one needs to fully identify and sort out the causal webs which leads to action, and mental positioning. The Taliban… the “students” in Patchou… were themselves, the Pakistani government claims, creatures organized and financed by Saudi Arabia, which was anxious to foster Wahhabist Islam. Now, in the Twentieth Century, nothing the Saudis did was not approved if not outright instigated by Washington.   

Hence the conclusion, one way or another, is that the US Deep State was the fundamental cause of this Afghan mess. It is more than troubling that the opposition to Trump and the organizations supporting it (for example Fact.Check.Org), actively deny this.

What it means, then, is that they still approve enough of the war in Afghanistan enough to refuse to establish who, and what caused it. The war in Afghanistan was a butchery: several million people got killed. It was deliberately engineered in Washington to drag the Soviets in a war they couldn’t win. The Afghan war was a war of aggression in the name of… aggression. Meaning that the reasons for the aggression were both themselves aggression: one, against the USSR, just because they could, and the other, to foster an homicidal version of Islam trying to go back to its most obscurantist form. The interest of the latter was very simple: it would divide the world. Instead of worrying about increasing plutocracy, We The People would have to worry about homicidal fundamentalists…

It worked. And it has worked because it has not been explained to We The People. Homicidal Wahhabist Fundamentalism as a tool of plutocracy, fruit of a conspiracy? Ridiculous the pillars of the establishment will say: show me where it is written down. So we have to point out the obvious: conspiracies, con-spirare, breathing together, as in Davos, does not mean an explicit plot one writes down.

Conspiracy are precisely made to go undetected.

For example, Adolf Hitler did not leave personally one single sentence, not even one single word about the Holocaust he directed and ordered. His underlings did the same, although they had to persuade many top German officials to not get in the way of the mass murdering campaign, which contradicted the Nazis’ own laws. So they tried to do it verbally, or around magnificent tables laden with excellent victuals. The plan was that, if they won the war, the Nazis would simply never talk of the subject again, and nice Nazis would be elected president and their names would be Joachim Von Biden. 

For those who don’t get the joke, the Nazi Foreign Minister, Joachim Von Ribbentrop, was executed at Nuremberg for “war of aggression”. Now, the Nazis had good reasons to be angry against the Versailles Treaty: it had cut Germany in two, because it returned to the legitimate Natives vast lands the Germans had conquered over various Slavs and Austrians in the preceding two centuries. 

The United States of America, though, had not been cut in two by anybody, not even the Soviets. There was no deep hatred justifying entrapping the Soviets (whereas many Germans had good reasons to hate the Poles, Czecks, French…) Nor promoting Fundamentalist Islam of the worst type should have been a priority… for a honest civilization.

Both attacking the Soviets and promoting enraged Islam were part of a calculation to create a deliberate mess, similar to the mess the US created in 1914 by (discreetly, but crucially) supporting the homicidal dementia of the Kaiser, his goons, and the cornered German plutocracy underneath… And similar to the mess the USA created by supporting the worst demons of Germany, starting in 1919, and then directly financing Hitler (something Jew-hating plutocrat Henry Ford initiated).

Truth shall make you free, and lies shall enslave you. The truth of what happened in Afghanistan, and the responsibility of the US Deep State, has been completely hidden from the US public, turning Americans into slaves of some sort. This is a truly remarkable achievement of Deep State. It indicates how firmly in command the Deep State is of American minds. As mind molding is the task of the plutocratically owned media, SYSTEMIC PLUTOCRACY can celebrate its Afghan subterfuge as a colossal achievement [1]….

The US Deep State and its greedy plutocracy attacked Afghanistan in 1979 for reasons so shallow that there is bound to be another, deeper reason. And that is one well known of the Ancient Greeks, the reason which defeated Greece, hubris. Human beings are made to live dangerously. The leaders of America, visible or not, were bored, so, full of hubris, they organized themselves a war. Beats golf, any day. They got away with it.

Patrice Ayme.

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[1] Systemic Plutocracy hides behind a slew of mostly imaginary problems, such as systemic racism, police brutality, or right wing violent fascism… I have been victim of the three of them, by the way, and I think these issues should be remedied. However, they are not as grave as systemic racism… which spawns and then promote them… as distractions. In that sense the entire Afghan war was planned as a gigantic distraction… not just a trap for the Soviets, as ZBIGNIEW BRZEZINSKI, PRESIDENT CARTER’S NATIONAL SECURITY ADVISER, claimed it to be…   

 

ENTANGLEMENT AND COMMUNICATIONS AT A DISTANCE: POSSIBLE. It Seems to be a Technological, NOT a Scientific, Problem!

 Abstract: Usual arguments against faster than light communications are flawed. Moreover, a way to make such faster than light communications using Quantum Nonlocality is surfacing…

The title will make pontiffs scream, and deride me as beyond the “fringe”. But I am writing for the future, not the past. Pontificating physicists hold that instantaneous communication at a distance are impossible. However, a closer examination shows that there is NO deep, DEMONSTRATED scientific principles at work in the denial that superluminal communications are possible.

Instead the proponents of impossibility of faster than light pretend we have demonstrated that nothing more can be said beyond the strictest interpretation of CIQ, the Copenhagen Interpretation of the Quantum (this silliness started with an erroneous demonstration of the famous mathematician Von Neuman).

Such a matter of principle position is religiously superstitious, not based on experimentally demonstrated principles… And indications are that the preparation of Quantum Jumps/States can de detected, and reversed. If that is confirmed, it is entirely plausible that superluminal communications should be achievable by entangling particles which would have been transported classically previously… far apart, creating a superluminal telegraph.

***   

Doing physics correctly, and, more generally, doing thinking most correctly, consists in establishing what are the most significant facts and how to build the mightiest causal chains. A causal chain is mightier than another if it relates more significant facts.

Faster than light communications between mythological beings were natural. However in the 17C, Dutch astronomer Roemer discovered delays in the motion of Jupiter’s satellites best explained by a finite speed of light. Fizeau confirmed the finite light speed in the lab, using fast wheels with teeth, during the 19C… while the speed of light showed up in the equations of electromagnetism, Maxwell found out, to the point he concluded that electromagnetism was light. 

French astronomer Urbain Le Verrier determined in 1859 that the elliptical orbit of Mercury precesses at a significantly different rate from that predicted by Newtonian theory… in which the speed of gravitation was infinite, a simplification Newton found “absurd” to any “philosopher” versed in the observation of nature (how could there be any other?) Einstein and his collaborators integrated Laplace’s finite gravitational speed idea, in conjunction with the theory of Relativity, to produce a modified theory of gravitation, where gravitation travels at the speed of light.

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WANT BETTER PHYSICS? GET BETTER PHILOSOPHY!

Out of all this came a mood: no interaction can go faster than light. For weird reasons, all crows crowing the same, and mental confusion, the mentality which evolved in the herd of most physicists was that causality would be destroyed were any communication went faster than light. 

But a mood is no proof. 

Detailed considerations of the logics used by the herd found them coming short. Basically, Relativity is local, whereas communications at a distance are… at a distance, by definition (a philosophical point)… Thus, relativity does not apply, or at least, does not apply as an ABSOLUTE principle in the matter of causality: 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2020/08/25/kill-locality-to-save-causality-and-objective-reality/

This is the Standard CIQ, the Copenhagen Interpretation of Quantum is seriously nuts. Here it is above. So crazy many physicists prefer to it it the thoroughly demented Many Worlds Interpretation (MIW), which says an infinity of worlds is created during each interaction. An infinity of infinites infinitely happening? Not serious!

Quantum Physics says there is such a thing as QUANTUM ENTANGLEMENT. The basic reason is that Quantum Physics computes with waves. Those waves wave in various spaces, depending on the configuration of the situation (which are Hilbert spaces, and called “configuration spaces”, because they depict the configuration of the situation). What these spaces are supposed to is controversial (Schrodinger Cat Paradox): we need a theory ordering those spaces, but never mind…

After an interaction in some cases, two particles, Alice (A) and Bob (B), can be created which are “Quantum Entangled” (Schrodinger chose the word “entangled”, in English!) What “entangled” means is that the computation of what happens, probably, with these two particles, A and B, is described by a SINGLE wave.  A measurement consists of analyzing, thus destroying this common wave [1]. THUS, measuring a feature of A creates the same feature in B. The problem is that A and B can be ten light years away [2].

Popper and Einstein discovered this “EPR” situation. Ironically enough, Einstein, one of the founders of Quantum Physics, and an expert in fields, which are local, found Quantum Physics in contradiction with Locality. It is described that Einstein found that “spooky” interaction at a distance. However what Albert said in German was spukhafte Fernwirkung, which rather means “ghostly”, unreal… But in truth if the interaction at a distance didn’t happen, things as simple as angular momentum conservation would be violated. So it has to be there. And it is, experiments have confirmed.

Many self-described mainstream herd physicists insist that at-a-distance communications are impossible. However, their reasoning are faulty. First, as I said the argument that at a distance, faster than light would destroy causality is not correct, it rests on a shallow interpretation of Relativity, and a category mistake. But then those same physicists use what they view as the definitive argument that it cannot be done with present technology:

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How To Achieve Communications At A Distance: A Technological, Not Scientific Problem:

Suppose we could make it so that a particular feature of A (say spin in the x direction) would always come out the same. Then it would be the same at B, and thus we could communicate. Mainstream physicists say: oh, but God plays with dice, and it is impossible to prepare Quantum States. How do they know this? Oh, because Homo Erectus couldn’t do it, and was a friend of “God”? God or Godot? 

However that is purely a technological question. Scientists at Yale, professor Devoret and his laboratory, have claimed they can see Quantum Jumps being prepared, and can reverse those preparations.  This hints that we may be able to select Quantum States by deliberate action. All what’s left then to do to achieve at a distance communications is to select pairs of particle A and B with such states where we could entangle them. 

Some will sneer this is just one APPLIED physics lab. Now it turns out that as a recent Nature article has it, Quantum Tunneling takes time (it takes no time in strict CIQ). There again, it smacks of inner, SUB QUANTIC machinery at work (Sub Quantum Physical Reality, SQPR pointing its entangling nose…)

***

So the impossibility of communications at a distance boils down to just one thing: the belief that God plays dice with the universe, as a matter of faith (ironically, Albert Einstein was explicitly against the notion, as he invented it, just to decry it; I say ironically as many of the disbelievers in superluminality on principle pretend to worship Einstein…).

How do those believers know that their faith is correct? Because they are on a personal basis with Dog?

Quantum entanglement experiments have been realized between an atom, say, and a photon. The Yale experimenters detected the preparation of a Quantum State Jump, and claimed they could reverse the preparation. Philosophically speaking, supposing the Yale experiments are thoroughly confirmed, as the nonlocality was, this means that the establishment of supraluminal networks is a matter of when, not if.

To go further in the philosophy of nature, this further demolishes the “It From Bit” philosophy of Wheeler and others. Wheeler was a famous physicist and Feynman PhD advisor… and also advisor of the guy who invented the Many World Interpretation…

To be more specific: what I allege above is that the state of the art of the edge of most probable science shows that superluminal communications is becoming just a technological problem (namely finding the right classically transportable materials to entangle and store).

But I am not pretending that that we will be capable of superluminally transport mass-energy. So, if what I am saying is right, a distinction would appear between pure information and mass-energy: information could go faster than light, but not mass-energy… at least for the foreseeable future (many thinkers have insisted there was no distinction between information and mass-energy, because, prior to this analysis, there was no way to transport information without transporting mass-energy).

I fear for my reputation not: Science advances, but the logic of mussels does not.

Patrice Ayme

***

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P/S: In SQPR theory, the Quantum Interaction proceeds at finite speed. Thus, so will communications using the EPR and prepared states, as suggested above. But the speed will be much higher than light. Of course establishing such superluminal networks will be cosmically difficult.

***

[1] Analysis comes from thoroughly dissecting: from the Greek, ana “up, back, throughout” + lysis “a loosening, a cutting through”… No wonder the deepest thinkers are deeply resented for their thoroughly cutting…

***

[2] Distant particles which have interacted in the past, but not yet measured, remain connected, instantaneously sharing their physical states no matter how great the distance which separates them. This connection is known as Quantum Entanglement, and it underpins the way Quantum Physics turns locality into globality, the infinitesimally small do the grand and cosmic. .

Einstein thought Quantum Mechanics was ‘spooky’ because of the instantaneousness of the apparent remote interaction between two entangled particles, which seemed incompatible with some elements of Relativity.

Later, CERN Theoretical Physics head, Sir John Bell, formalised the Bohm variant of the EPR concept of nonlocal interaction by describing a strong form of entanglement exhibiting this spookiness. Bell entanglement is being harnessed in practical applications like quantum computing and cryptography.

Degradation Of Civilization: Biden Calls Trump An “Arsonist” While Forests Burn From Mismanagement

Plutocratic media has claimed that the Federal government did nothing against the fires in California… After Trump spent years threatening to cut funding if California didn’t clean its forests (it didn’t and he didn’t).

In the ongoing Creek Fire, which burned more than 300,000 acres, the Federal Fire management authority has determined that the fuel was 80% to 90% beetle killed trees. Fuel loads are 2,000 (two-thousand) tons per acre (so 2 billion tons of CO2 were created by that particular fire alone… and Creek Fire is not extinguished, but still advancing! It is apparently trying to go across the entire Sierra Nevada, and is choking the other side!) Yes the drought and the beetle killing of the forests are caused by rising temperatures from man-made climate change. However these calamitous changes have got to be MITIGATED. I have pointed out that preciously nothing was done… to mitigate. 

A grant of a million dollars to make the local forest fire resistant was made to the town of Bear Creek. The idea was to remove brush and too many small trees over 125 acres… The grant was stopped by red tape, requests such as evaluating the impact on some birds, various plants, etc.

When I write this, making an aspect of Trump look objectively correct, some Trump Derangement Syndrome characters are sure to call me biased. So I got a reference from Trump hating, plutocratic NBC (NBC Universal is a joint venture between Comcast and GE, with Comcast holding a 51% majority stake. It is now a wholly psychologically owned subsidiary of the Chinese dictator Xi… Because of major common investments…)

Berry Creek Fire-Prevention Project Stymied by Red Tape. The Butte County community was leveled by the Bear Fire

[Associated Press • Published September 18, 2020 • Updated on September 18, 2020]  

BERRY CREEK, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 14: Cars destroyed by the Bear Fire sit in front of a burned home on September 14, 2020 in Berry Creek, California. The North Complex Fire, which includes the Bear Fire, has burned over 300,000 acres and has killed at least 15 people. Notice the ridiculous overabundance of trees, especially small ones. The area was choked by brush too. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The fire also destroyed around 2,000 structures… Associated Press: Two years before a deadly fire leveled Berry Creek and killed at least 11 people, the community was selected to receive an $836,000 state grant for pruning vegetation and clearing fuel from potential fire spots.

But the forest management project was never completed because of red tape, said local officials, who now wonder whether clearing the area of potential fuel might have changed the fortunes of Berry Creek, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.

“I can’t guarantee that it would’ve stopped the fire, but it would have given them a place to fight it,” said Bill Connelly, a Butte County supervisor representing the district that includes Berry Creek.

Of course plutocratic media accused Trump of everything. Trump is like this big cat which prevent plutocratic mice to play… So I sent the following comment to Krystoff of the New York Times, who had the decency to publish it. Of course not many of the Trump haters reading the New York Times approved it:

  The Federal government is actually sending Marines to deal with some of the fires, such as the Creek Fire. The Marines have been in training for a while. So it’s not correct to say the Federal Government does nothing. 

The Feds wanted to do more, they were stopped by the ignorant. At Point Reyes National Seashore, the National Park Service proposed to make prescribed burns in the cold and wet season. Marin County Politically Correct associations threatened to sue… Over air quality. 

Ironically, and tragically, prescribed burns, by doing away with brush up to thirty feet high would have prevented the ignition of trees thousands of years old… something terrible. What I called the Cathedral Forest, above the sea, burned, with its trees ten feet across… And it is entirely attributable to the Politically Correct types who think they have an education because they have a postgraduate degree and read biased media owned, or influenced, by the wealthiest families in the world (as all media are). 

In Yosemite national Park, prescribed burning has been used for thirty years, to protect giant sequoias and human structures, with great success. 

The “Democratic” candidate to the presidency accused President Trump to be an “arsonist”, who sets America “ablaze”. “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” Biden said. This is not just the sort of talk which should be avoided, but it is also surreal, in light of the fact the Obama-Biden administration made the USA the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

***

It is a case of the arsonist (fracking Biden) accusing another to have caused the fire. I detest many of the positions Trump has to take to get votes from climate deniers. However closer inspection, as in the case of Obama, reveals the opposite of the discourse. The usage of coal has been decreasing at a faster rate under Trump than Obama-Biden… Obama and Biden increased fracking deliberately to make the US number one in fossil fuels…

Meanwhile most, four fifths (⅘), of the “profits” of the famous electric car company Tesla are actually Federal financial transfers… yes, under Trump… This is why Tesla, although by far the largest market capitalization car company in the world, was not integrated in the SP500 index of the largest companies, yet, because most of its money is given by Trump, so to speak… So much for the climate arsonist… Watch what they really did, not what they said. You can’t watch what they said. The preceding is science based, and also rests on my personal observations.

As the famous technology known as MIT just wrote: “Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead.
It’s time to reverse a century of fire-management policy. That will require sweeping regulatory reforms, and tons of money.” [1]

The world is complicated, insects are simple…  All too simple.

And all this environmental red tape, the birds, etc, California “Democratic” red tape was worrying about? All up in smoke. Actually sometimes the smoke smelled of bacon, from all the wildlife burned, including threatened species…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Here is more of what MIT just wrote:

Five of California’s 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year’s wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and scorched more than 3.2 million acres across the state.

That’s larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks combined, and nearly half the area of Massachusetts…

To anyone who lives here, or anyone who’s watching, the situation is maddening and seems utterly unsustainable. So what’s the solution?

There’s an overwhelming to-do list. But one of the clearest conclusions, as experts have been saying for years, is that California must begin to work with fires, not just fight them. That means reversing a century of US fire suppression policies and relying far more on deliberate, prescribed burns to clear out the vegetation that builds up into giant piles of fuel…

As much as 20 million acres of federal, state, or private land across California needs “fuel reduction treatment to reduce the risk of wildfire,” according to earlier assessments by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and other state agencies. That’s nearly two-thirds of the state’s 33 million acres of forests and trees, and six times the area that has burned so far this year…

If the goal is to burn up excess fuel, why not just let the wildfires rage? The problem is that runaway fires in overgrown forests don’t achieve the same results as controlled burns. These intense blazes can level vast stretches of the forest rather than simply clearing out the undergrowth and leaving the big trees standing, says Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. Instead of restoring the health of the forests, large, uncontrolled fires often transform them into shrub land, where vegetation grows quickly and severe fires can rapidly return.

How Fake Anglo-Saxon Mental Supremacy Was Established: Gross Lies. The Case Of Newton Turned Into God

Authorities want to make us believe that the spiritual ancestors of today’s rulers invented everything. Often they are even the genetic ancestors, but that is besides the point: by extolling imaginary predecessors, Anglo-Saxon supremacists have installed an aura of supremacy… for the systems of thought they installed and rule with, enabling them to reign effortlessly.

Now this is deep and systematic. Even Anglo-Saxon intellectuals who pretend to be against the system are part of the plot. An easy hint is who feeds and powers them: if it is the establishment, and the establishment likes them, that’s a warning sign.

Most of the world’s top historical minds who contributed to most of humanity’s mental progress got serious difficulties with the establishment, because new ideas threaten old oligarchies always: if what was always known is suddenly found to be wrong… what about the ruling establishment? Could possibly be the ruling establishment wrong too? This is why the genuine geniuses of creative thinking always smell of Lucifer, Lux-ferre, light carrying… As far as public opinion is concerned.

Socrates’ execution is famous, but just earlier Aspasia’s son had been executed (Aspasia was the philosopher telling Pericles what to say), so would be Demosthenes (fleeing Macedonian henchmen), Archimedes assassinated by a Roman soldier (for doing geometry in the sand), Hypatia (raped, flayed and dragged alive until dead, courtesy of the local Christians), or Boetius… And so were executed or terrified most Muslim intellectuals… Not to mention countless French intellectuals in the early Sixteenth Century, Bruno (burned alive in 1600 CE for suggesting exoplanets and solar systems around stars), Kepler (his mom was tried for witchcraft), Galileo and Descartes fleeing France (just for reasoning in public, after inventing algebraic geometry), and so on. Yes, the examples extend all the way to the Twentieth Century.

Most of these top thinkers had this in common: they had unusual careers, typically outside of the mainstream, and they lived dangerously. Because of this, they are often belittled to this day: little thinkers paid by the establishment tend to have resentment towards the great minds who had the courage to discover the bulk of human knowledge, because great minds are not small employees.

***

Kepler’s work was necessary for Newton to contribute to human understanding. But Kepler’s work, on the face of it, was much harder than Newton’s. By the way, Kepler thought gravitation went as the inverse of the distance. The true law is the square of that. That was found by Bullaldius. All astronomers had an intuitive understanding, originating with Buridan’s explicit texts, that the gravitational force, in combination with the laws of motion, gave planetary orbits. The idea was published by 1350 CE. Newton proved most of the detailed mathematical reasoning (but arguably not all, he missed what came to be known as “Gauss theorem”… Although he tried to prove it). Great, but not the end all be all, as White Anglo-Saxon Supremacists pretend…

Richard Dawkins FRS (Fellow Royal Society), FRSL is a British ethologist, evolutionary biologist, and author. He is an emeritus fellow of New College, Oxford, and was the University of Oxford’s Professor for Public Understanding of Science from 1995 until 2008. Dawkins first came to prominence with his 1976 book The Selfish Gene, which popularised the gene-centred view of evolution and introduced the term meme. He just penned the following opinion, typical of white Anglo-Saxon supremacists:

Richard Dawkins, @RichardDawkins

“In 1665 Cambridge University closed because of plague. Isaac Newton retreated to rural Lincolnshire. During his 2 years in lockdown he worked out calculus, the true meaning of colour, gravitation, planetary orbits & the 3 Laws of Motion. Will 2020 be someone’s Annus Mirabilis?”

That statement of Dawkins sounds innocent enough: everybody agrees Newton invented everything he is famous for, and that’s a lot, as described by Dawkins. Yeah, except that most of what is attributed to Newton was actually not discovered by Newton. It is propaganda, to make us believe a WASP (White Anglo-Saxon Protestant) was this unfathomable genius. That is done by attributing to him centuries of discoveries, and turning the history of humanity into systemic racism.

Indeed, Newton didn’t invent calculus: Fermat did. (at most Newton invented a geometric way to solve some problems of calculus pertaining to orbits; using geometry to solve calculus problems was inaugurated by Buridan’s students… in the 1300s…).

And Newton didn’t find the second law of motion (which implies the first): Buridan did, three centuries before Newton (nowadays some Anglo-Saxons recognize that the law was known before Newton). The gravitation law was from French astronomer Bullaldius/Boulliau, Newton said it himself. And planetary orbits were Kepler’s great work, with his three law of planetary orbits!

So what did Newton do? Mostly he tried to prove that the law of motions plus the gravitation force as the inverse square of the distance implied Kepler’s laws. That’s great, but not of the order of Descartes’ Algebraic Geometry, or Fermat’s Calculus. To add insult to injury the notation of Leibnitz for calculus is used to this day… while Newton’s geometric calculus is ignored (that may be a mistake…) Newton and Leibnitz had a quarrel about this…

To establish their model of civilization, the English  propaganda has know no bounds: Sir Francis Drake, a great explorer, savior of England when confronting the Great Armada, was also a corsair mandated by the Queen, and a slave trader operating slave ships for profit. Not just that, but that plutocrat was one of the original “West Country men” who devastated Ireland. That mood and methods were then exported to America, where they established systemic racism as jurisprudence.

And central to propaganda was to establish English mental supremacy, for the entire planet to be awed by. As the great rival was France, the other Western superpower of the Middle Ages, many French discoveries were attributed to Englishmen. An example is Emilie Du Chatelet, who discovered and demonstrated energy… thus rising above Newton, who confused energy and momentum (discovered circa 1340 CE by Buridan; momentum is mv, energy is 1/2 mvv). This is a case of sexism hobbling civilization.

Another case is Denis Papin. Papin, who was a French physicist who trained with the best minds of his day, was a university professor of engineering. Papin fabricated the first powerful steam engine, and one capable of propelling a boat. After Papin’s death, Watt was born, and Watt, an inventor out of many, perfected the steam engine. So the unit of power is called a Watt because many people in England spent a lot of time trying (and succeeding) to steal Papin’s invention: the efforts of thieves should not go to waste. In the latest twist, British propaganda now calls Papin a British scientist… in truth Papin’s boat was built in Germany where he was professor, and, after steaming a hundred miles was destroyed by monks, who are professionals in fighting Lucifer…

An even more spectacular case is Lamarck, who published his establishment of the theory of evolution (from studying mollusk fossils with a microscope, for decades), before Darwin was born. Napoleon, and the Christian churches hated Lamarck, who was outlawed in english universities (Lyell and Darwin had to go to Scotland to be taught Lamarck’s discoveries). To this day, the disdain for Lamarck is a duty shared by those who want to teach in Anglo-Saxon universities, otherwise one would be called a charlatan.

Those who want to fight systemic racism have learned recently that they are made to revere false idols. Yes, and it did not happen by accident, but by intelligent design.

Simplicius: OK, as usual, you evoked some of the great minds and things we Anglo-Saxons tend to have never heard of: Buridan, Fermat, Papin, Du Châtelet, Lamarck… All French. And then Algebraic Geometry, Energy…

PA: Descartes invented how to describe geometry algebraically. Then Fermat developed Calculus, all the way to showing differentiation and integration were inverse to each other… As far as so many of the deepest thinkers being French, that comes from two things: First, France, or more exactly the Francia of the Franks was the creator of Europe (named by the Franks). Both Germany (by 800 CE) and Britain (1066) were Frankish creations. In either case, slavery was made unlawful. Second, France had three times the population of England. 

The case of Du Châtelet should be famous: here is a woman and she establishes what is perhaps the most important concept in physics. Buridan: momentum. Du Châtelet: energy. Sorry, but Newton’s discoveries pale in comparison (by the way, she died young, from childbirth; had she lived longer her contributions may have been even more amazing; she was an excellent philosopher of science).

Simplicius: Why would we, simple folks, care about who established the great scientific advances? Somebody did. So what?

PA: Which societies advance human understanding is crucial. Most do not, most of the time. We want to save humanity, going forward, and that means discovering what makes us more intelligent. Moreover in the case of England versus France, I detailed the fact that their colonization models in America were different. The French approach was governmental, and determined not to force the Natives. The English model was that of the “West Country Men”, as refined in England: exterminate, maximize profits.

Simplicius: What does who invented what have to do with how colonization was performed?

PA: The “West Country Men” model weaponized systemic racism. Racism is the idea that some human beings are biologically superior to others. By attributing all the discoveries to Englishmen, the Englishman is established as a higher species, or at least one which invents everything. In particular, the British plutocracy invented the most superior system of thought pertaining to civilization. So the “West Country Men” mentality, keen to line alleyways with Irish skulls, came to rule America. A practical consequence was the eradication of the Indians. 

Simplicius: Is not that all so yesterday? 

PA: Far from it. The mentality that greed and higher profits should rule is itself ruling, because it has ruled for four centuries, and penetrated the institutions. Trump came along and said: ‘Down with profits in China, bring back the jobs!’ The establishment, which uses the maximization of profits as its most superior moral principle, hated him for it. They hated him for it to the point they started to degrade the political process. An example is Biden calling Trump an “arsonist”, while it is the Obama-Biden administration which developed fracking, and was very loud about it. 

Claiming England had a superior model of civilization in its civilization relative to France (let alone Spain or Portugal) is claiming that the world should go on with that system of civilization… which is the dominant system of civilization, worldwide. The real situation is of course very complex. For example at this point the Brexiter Boris Johnson is applying old French like methods… While the European Union is officially led by greed is right, that is the “West Country Men” way… with the caveat that the COVID pandemic has proven that old fashion governmentalism, the French way, as practiced successfully by China… saves lives. So maybe then, Trump was right all along, and both France and Germany have decided to operate the same U turn towards more industrialization, planning and self sufficiency. 

Simplicius: OK, please, I have a headache! Let’s stop here! So then your point is that, by extolling Englishmen as great geniuses, when in fact they are not as great as that, one extolls English plutocracy and its systems of thought, moods and mentality, and that this is bad for civilization and the planet, promoting systemic racism, among other things. Got it.   

PA: It also distorts the refined history of systems of thought. And that’s not neglectable, because it teaches us how humanity learned to think better.  

Simplicius: Once again I don’t understand why correct attribution of the origins of systems of thought are relevant to the common person.

PA: It works this way: thinkers such as Dawkins go to school and are conditioned to believe the greatest minds are Anglo-Saxon. So they are naturally inclined to believe anything Anglo-Saxon is mentally superior, and this is what they teach in turn to the intellectual class of reporters, lawyers, doctors, engineers, CEOs, boards of directors, etc.

Those who want to fight systemic racism have learned recently that they are made to revere false idols. Yes, and it did not happen by accident, but by intelligent design. And yes it starts with the apparently innocent divinization of  Sir Francis Drake, Isaac Newton, or James Watt…

There is no innocence in the world of logic, contrarily to repute…

Patrice Ayme

 

“1619”: PLUTOCRACY ORIGINATED SLAVERY AND RACISM (PA 2008)

English Plutocracy Created Slavery And Justified It With Racism:
Where did the idea of focusing on the year 1619 CE come from? As far as I know, I inaugurated it. Here is a typical old post of mine, from Wednesday, November 5, 2008. As one can see below, many of these ideas have been co-opted by Black Lives Matter, professional progressives, and media such as the New York Times. I am pulling rank here, because global plutocrats, their servants and their barking dogs have distorted and modified a lot of the original concepts, and neutered or neutralized and thoroughly omitted the more incisive aspects. For example, all talk about “systemic racism“. But where did “systemic racism” come from? From systemic plutocracy. A plutocracy so bad, it invented something even the evil Roman empire did not have: racism. These aspects of my considerations have disappeared, making “systemic racism” a headless chicken… which will be soon drained of its blood, and will collapse twitching, and will soon be forgotten as a false leader, a youthful error without understanding an excess narrated by furious idiots, signifying nothing. As intended by those who manipulate the media.

I don’t generally reproduce my old posts, as it’s a bit too narcistic and it stunts creativity. However, as I have harshly criticized the global plutocratic corporations enslaving Chinese  political prisoners while funding Black Lives Matter, to efficiently cover their tracks, and because I refute none of my old ideals, and stick with the concepts, here it is:

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PLUTOCRACY ORIGINATED SLAVERY AND RACISM.

THE HEAD OF THE DEADLY SNAKE HAS NOT BEEN CUT OFF YET.

The racial Civil War started 147 years ago. Some will say it ended with Obama’s election… thus nicely forgetting that Africans were enslaved in English America 390 years ago, in 1619 CE. The 1619 Project was to make America into a slavery boosted commonwealth for the wealthy. American judges soon found that “colored” people were not entitled to full human rights.

But what about the plutocratic civil war? The one of the rich against the people? Is that finished too? As it turns out, the racial war is a particular case of that war of the rich against the poor. God, in the fourteenth century had told the Pope that Africans could be enslaved, and the Pope dutifully wrote a bull recommending that, and the invasion of Africa. That was most pleasing to the plutocrats in Portugal. Like in Iraq with the oil nowadays, there was money to be made in Africa with sugarcane. In the Americas, it’s the rich who acquired millions of African slaves, to produce very profitable tobacco. Those slaves were extremely expensive to purchase: the rich in America committed the crime of slavery, it’s not everybody who did it. Most people had nothing to do with it.

President Washington got started in the military and real estate, playing the Brits, the French, the Indians, and the average Joe, against each other, in a masterful game. Washington finished as a big slave master, and the richest man in the USA. He resisted his friend Lafayette’s entreaties to outlaw slavery. Twelve US presidents owned slaves (yes, more than 25%).

It’s not just the Bush team that came short in recent years, but the entire plutocracy has finally shown its ugly face for everybody to contemplate. Flushed by increasing bubbles, the plutocracy became ever more arrogant, so arrogant, it had decided to conquer the world physically, or at least where the oil was. As the American people initially applauded the decision, the plutocracy became ever more arrogant, and engaged in ever more dangerous and abusive financial practices. Thus it finally tripped in Iraq, and in banking corruption unbound. Apparently not satisfied with the enslavement of Africans, now most Americans had also to be treated as means to ever greater riches. It’s no coincidence that the people have chosen one who would have been looked at as a slave a little while ago: the entire American people has good reason to feel enslaved now. Most Americans feel black, in more ways than one.

The Plutocracy forced God fundamentalism on the people (“In God We Trust” was imposed in 1956). Thus God could tell Bush to invade Iraq. So, sure the Bush team was going from blunder to blunder, but that was a method of government, born of total contempt. It was taken for granted that the plutocracy would keep on governing: by making people naive and uncritical. Even at this late hour, plutocracy has asked for a trillion dollars for itself, so it could pay its bonuses past and present (those total more than 110 billions, according to respected newspapers).

Thus there is a bigger picture than slavery and racism. Slavery and racism originated in Pluto’s world. They were literally political and psychological derivatives that plutocracy used as an exoskeleton. The greater war of the rich against the poor is far from won: many mass psychological structures of the USA support the plutocracy, not the People. Just look at the coins; they do not trust the People (“E Pluribus Unum” was the original slogan of the USA). Instead the coins order us to trust “God”, the one that brought us slavery and the invasion of Iraq.

Well, it may be time to remember that Rome did not have racism, but Rome had plutocracy, and ultimately, that plutocracy destroyed Rome.

Patrice Ayme.

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More recently, five years ago:

PLUTOCRACY IMPLIES SLAVERY

Why Climb? To Study Life In Full!

I have climbed a lot, for decades, from the age of 6. Each climb is a life, with its potential death attached. It doesn’t matter how easy: the easier climbs kill more, because there are more of them, and one’s guard is down, because they are easy. Also easier climbs are harder to protect, because the hardest climbs would not go without some protection. 

Never let the guard down, expect danger from the expected and unexpected, try to keep a safety margin because sometimes it will erode or disappear, all of a sudden. Some deranged feminists working for The Man, have argued that climbing was “toxic masculinity” . As we will show, all that they are promoting is toxic weakness and lethargic non-examination.

Girls do it as well… The lady is climbing solo, no rope. One mistake, death. Any serious mountain climber ends up climbing solo, because sometimes having a rope is too much of a drag, or pointless (no anchors), or too time consuming (I have climbed down entire quasi-vertical mountains fast, solo, because doing it with a rope would have been ten times slower and thus increase the danger ten times…)

Climbing teaches to master one’s hubris. It forces the otherwise arrogant, uninformed human mind to listen to the universe, to take instructions from it, to become one with the universe. 

Why climb? Why live? Each climb, well done, should feel like a life… because it’s a life. But mostly it reveals unknown powers. Ours, and those of the universe…

Once I was torn off a mountain by an enormous rock avalanche, the largest I have ever seen: my double ropes had been hit by rocks… Also I was running a one hundred meters wide ice gully… in rock climbing shoes, not proper ice equipment, and the belay was horrendously bad. I  faced certain death: the ice gully below, the most notorious in the Chamonix area, is a mile high… I remember the event, it was as if it happened three seconds ago, although it was three decades… Miraculously, I was able to wedge myself between an ice wall and a rockwall along the side of the gully… and stopped! At the time I was an excellent Yosemite chimney climber… After this I stopped mountain climbing proper for years. But the fact remains that I discovered my brain could mobilize absolutely superhuman strength. When I remember exactly what happened, if someone else than myself described it, I would not believe it. 

The original superstar solo female super climber was the Algerian born French climber Catherine Destivelle (she is now in her sixties), who climbed all over the world, at the highest level. She nearly died falling off a peak she had just made the first ascent of… while taking a victory photograph, she went backwards too much, and fell off until the end of the rope to her partner… in icy, lonely Antarctica (self-rescue was more than problematic). Another time she got broken up falling in a rimaye, a Bergschrund, in Chamonix. Somehow she stopped on her way to oblivion.

So I learned something from what should have been my end, I could never have learned in books, because I don’t believe in superstitious religions: sometimes the thoroughly impossible happens. For a hard core rationalist such as yours truly, this is an astounding lesson, nearly as astounding as the miracle of life itself.  

The entire pillar next to the gully, the Bonatti Pillar, on which I made a first ascent, later entirely collapsed.

Many more lessons can be learned from climbing, or activities similar to it: mountain running, which I still practice between smothering smoke clouds, requires similar neurology. In mountain running one of the dangers is to trip and head head first towards a rock, or off a cliff, it happened to me more than once… although emergency reflexes saved me with fractions of seconds to spare… In general, whereas danger in climbing can appear in seconds, in mountain running, it can appear in hundredths of a second, and one needs to think with one’s body much faster than in climbing. 

What are older folks going to do? Well one can climb into very old age, and of course the best climbers are the oldest, as climbing is a survival school. And to replace mountain running, there is always hiking. There is actually a rule among professional mountain runners: if you can’t see the top of a rise, you walk (high angle running is less efficient an walking).

I have argued earlier that climbing makes us into gods. The picture accompanying the essay is of Ueli Steck, a Swiss climber who died, soloing up a similar face, in a similar way: he fell off, maybe because of wind slab, on Nuptse, the mountain facing Everest. At least climbing sure makes us feel that way, like gods, when done maximally. We need divine powers, to muster all we need to resist gravity. Even time loses meaning, for example, in solo climbing: we become a force that goes, beyond smarts, a second can feel like a lifetime. Each climb is an occasion of contemplating life in its entirety.

We, and the universe. To be human beings in full, we need to be reminded all the time of the following: we are at our best, when we are one with the universe. Be it from a relationship with a pet, or from enjoying a landscape, or experiencing a wilderness, nothing replaces reality, and especially not virtual reality.

In the case of climbing, becoming one with the universe is a requirement, because death is the alternative poor execution leads to. Other dangerous sports such as sailing, diving, surfing, require this mind meld with the universe too. Being one with the universe forces our wisdom to work, and to learn, in the most exacting circumstances, that of the universe in full…

Socrates opinionated that the unexamined life was not worth living. Socrates promoted daily investigation of virtue or morality. However, examining his life in turn, we can see that the philosopher examined himself in battle, and was not found wanting. Socrates killed four enemies in combat. He also saved a friend during a dreadful retreat, and fought rear guard actions, to great risk for his own life after the Athenian army had been defeated.

These are extreme circumstances. Extreme circumstances enable us to see until the ends of what we really want, meant, and are. Combat is indeed helpful to find out about ourselves and the universe, it reveals lesser minds, and raise others above their own existences. Examining life is important, but the important examinations go to uncomfortable depths and have a hefty price.

So what is the most important? Gathering more wisdom, or denying a deeper grasp on reality? As usual, the devil is in the details of the consequences of whatever we do.

But, ultimately, even the most placid love depends upon enough wisdom to experience it, and project it. We are not called “Homo Sapiens” for no reason. The deepest reason is that even our roughest emotions should be wise, and they become wise because they are informed and have been examined…

Patrice Ayme

 

Back To The Jurassic In A Hurry: 500 Part Per Million Of Greenhouse Gases

Greenhouse gases (GHG) used to be 280 parts per million. Now they are around 500 ppm (including CH4, Nitrogen oxides, chlorofluorocarbons, etc.). This is more GHG than in at least thirty  million years, when the Earth was much warmer, and it is similar to CO2 densities during the Jurassic.

So we are presently transiting to a Jurassic climate. The transition to the Jurassic climate is happening at a rate many orders of magnitude faster than changes in the past. This implies that most forests of the Earth , desiccating and incapable to adapt fast enough, are going to burn… worldwide. This generalized combustion has a drastic potential consequence: generalized hypoxia.

So we should talk about climate catastrophe rather than climate change, and global heating rather than global warming: recent fires got helped by temperatures dozen of degrees higher than normal, in part from compression of the air due to record breaking winds. This is why parts of the Pacific Northwest which never burn are now burning. This will extend to Canada, Alaska, Siberia and already did in recent years. The catastrophic massive release of frozen methane hydrates could happen any time (it already does, but not as bad as it is going to get). It has up to one hundred times more warming power than CO2 (fires release it by billions of tons).

What is the way out? Well, hydrogen is the solution, in two ways, but has not been deployed as it could be. A decade ago, thermonuclear fusion, on the verge of becoming a solution, was starved for funding, and so was green hydrogen (the then energy secretary, Obama’s Steven Chu, prefered investing in batteries, it was more lucrative for his little greedy self).

Green hydrogen enables to store energy for renewables, avoiding blackouts which cut electricity to pumps to fight fires

We, Spaceship Earth, went from 275 ppm of GreenHouse Gases (GHG) in 1750 CE to 500 ppm in 2020. That doesn’t mean we double the Greenhouse, because the main GHG gas is… water vapor (H2O). What we can guess the best at this point is the EXCESS radiative forcing since 1750 CE, and that’s already nearly 3 Watts per square meter… Equivalent to a million and a half nuclear reactors at full power…

Climate forcing is a fascinating subject, with vast areas without a high level of scientific understanding (LOSU). However we know enough to realize forceful mitigation has to be engaged in immediately.

Joan Katsareas from Philadelphia, PA wrote back: “Thank you @Patrice Ayme for sharing your knowledge of the causes and extent of the climate crisis. I will be seeking out more information on hydrogen as a solution.”

@Joan Katsareas Thank you for thanking me, that is much appreciated. Hydrogen is indeed the overall solution we need at this point. Actually Australia, in collaboration with Japan, is building a gigantic, 15 Gigawatts, project in north west Australia, AREH, the Asian Renewable Energy Hub, to convert renewables from sun and wind into hydrogen products which will then be shipped to Japan. The same needs to be done all over, it would collapse the price of “green hydrogen” (99% of the US hydrogen is from fossil fuels).

In the case of thermonuclear fusion, the  international thermonuclear experimental reactor (ITER) being built in France was slowed down by ten years, from reduced funding, and uses obsolete magnets (superconducting, but not High Temperature Superconductors, which can now be engineered with more compact and powerful fields). A massive effort would bring a positive energy thermonuclear reactor within 10 years… But that effort has not been made… except in China, the usual suspect, where a project, the China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR), aims at an energy gain of 12 and a total power equivalent to a fission nuclear reactor. Its detailed engineering has been launched for a while (it’s supposedly symbiotic with the European DEMO project, which will produced as much as a large power station and will be connected to the grid. That too has been delayed, to the 2050s, although it’s feasible now).  The USA needs to launch a similar project, right away.

We face ecological constraints incomparably more severe than those of the Roman state. Rome did not solve its paltry problems, and let them fester: they had to do mostly with a dearth of metals, and the Franks solved them readily. This hindered the Roman economy. The situation we are facing, the threat of a runaway greenhouse is a terminal existential threat.

Look at Venus, we can look at our sparkling neighbor when the forests have finished burning, and the smoke dissipates (we were told it could be months). Once Venus probably had a vast ocean, and probably, life. But it died from a brutal greenhouse generated by Large Igneous Provinces (LIP). The same happened on Earth, on a smaller scale, more than once, in particular with the Permian Triassic mass extinction, which destroyed 95% of known species..

Now the rumor has it that indeed some life may have survived in the atmosphere.  This is not a joke. Consider: Life on Venus? Astronomers See a Signal in Its Clouds. The detection of a gas in the planet’s atmosphere could turn scientists’ gaze to a planet long overlooked in the search for extraterrestrial life.

Life on Venus? Ah, science, all those possibilities… We never imagined we would ever think possible.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: I argued in the past, before anybody else, that the dinosaur-pterosaurs-plesiosaurs extinction, and extinction of anything bigger than 20 kilograms was due to volcanism (I was at UC Berkeley when the two Alvarez were, and they seemed too full of themselves with the iridium layer, and I like to contradict certainties…)

How would LIP volcanism set forests on fire? Well, by the same exact mechanism as now: through a massive CO2 driven greenhouse, what may have terminated the Venusians…

In this perspective climate cooling, for millions of years, visible in the graph above, would have disrupted those species which were not equipped to generate enough heat, and then the LIP accelerated into a vast holocaust…

The end with general burning and acidic oceans is hard to duplicate with a bolide, so the impactophiles have argued that the bolide magically impacted the most CO2 generating rock imaginable… Maybe. But an enormous LIP does all that CO2 production/destruction of the oceans, effortlessly… A friend of mine who is the biggest of the big in this academic domain, he decides who publishes, replied to me that the 66 million year old Dekkan LIP is too small… To which I replied that we don’t know what lays below the ocean…