On The Immorality Of Little Minds Who Catch Fire So Easily That They Can’t Debate At All. Thus Can’t Be Human.

As soon as I have something significant to say, critters of the simpleton persuasion scream in the bushes that I am inflammatory, their world is on fire, I am a pyromaniac, I have to be cancelled, they can’t take it anymore.

Wait until I introduce them again to what I call the “1609 CALAMITY“… which originated their deplorable mentalities. How can one debate with those without skin? They can’t sit anywhere, they are raw. They can’t talk, they suffer too much. All they do is whine and cry when confronted to ideas and feelings out of their established mental order. That “conservatives” do this, fine: that is what “conservatives” are supposed to do, conserve their obdurate mental blocks in little cans, while clinging to a past which is dead and rotting. But progressives? The only explanation is that these progressives are not progressing!

Many pseudo-progressives and pseudo-left cannot suffer words, concepts, logic and facts not used, ordered, oriented, and embellished exactly the way they should be used, ordered, oriented, and embellished. On the face this means they are not genuine thinkers, but that they learned by rote the ways, means, discourses, logic and conceptology they are supposed to love, admire, live by, turn into a cult complete with the notion of heresy, and the hypocrisy one must abide to.

This is nothing new: wealthy plutocrats Marx and Engels got the ball rolling. Marx was deeply hurt by the Prussian state’s opening of the wine imports from Southern Germany. That put the vineyards  he was going to inherit from his father, a wealthy lawyer,  in jeopardy. Capitalist dream sinks, Das Kapital bad. So then Marx didn’t like capital and trade that much anymore… Except when provided by the wealthy industrialist heir Engels. Engels’ mother was the aristocrat Franziska Mauritia von Haar (1797–1873). The wealthy Engels family owned large cotton-textile mills in Barmen and Salford, both at the time expanding industrial metropoles.  Yes, in Germany and England, no less.

Mikhail Bakunin (died 1876) predicted the oppressive potential of Marx and Engels’ ideas, saying: “[i]t is a fallacy that Marxism’s flaws were exposed only after it was tried out in power. […] [Marx and Engels] were centralisers. While talking about ‘free associations of producers’, they advocated discipline and hierarchy“. Bakunin wrote this 50 years before the Stalinian terror imposed in the name of international socialism by an ex-monk turned “communist” gangster in chief. In other words it could be seen from the start that Marx and Engels were fascists advocating (their own) dictatorship… while enjoying high society parties, international tourism (Engels spoke nine languages), and even… fox hunting! To get rid of Bakunin, Marxists depicted him as an “anarchist”, and the word is definitively derogatory nowadays. Anarchists have much in common with US “Libertarians“.

This mix of the dictatorial and genocidal with the hypocritical is seen in the authors of the 1609 Calamity, which festered in Jamestown… and its successors and implementers such as president Jefferson. Of course, the Nazis were just the same, boasting they existed to protect minorities while actually planning to exterminate quite a few.

Much is made by snowflakes of the “inflammatory” discourses which compromise their mental capabilities and very existence. Pathetic and telling of their lack of education, let alone logical capability.

It gets to the point one cannot talk of anything, because all things interesting start with the most far-sighted points. So they are most disturbing, being out of neural network range, and will always sound inflammatory. They catch fire as if they were methane clathrates.

Methane clathrates are made of methane, CH4, surrounded by cages of water molecules, forming a white ice. There are gigantic quantities of it in cold oceanic waters, under pressure, all over the world. When the ocean warms up, they disintegrate, releasing methane. This is happening massively off the Siberian coast. Should the oceans warm up considerably, they would then release the methane clathrates catastrophically, causing tsunamis and accelerated planetary heating. Snowflake minds are similarly on the verge of catastrophic disintegration…

Take for example the assertion that Hitler may have been a Jew. Some will scream. Actually the Nazi sympathizer French writer and Medical Doctor, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, said this exactly to the Nazi ambassador in Paris, in 1944… at dinner (he was drunk).  It’s true on the face of it… and top Nazis knew it (as Frank, governor of Poland, hanged at Nuremberg, said). But Céline did not stop there, implicitly adding that it was why Hitler the Jew launched Germany in a devastating war which it could only lose; Hitler the Jew in denial was out to destroy the Germans. Provocative? Yes. Completely false and out of any relationship with the reality of what went on inside Hitler’s mind? Certainly not! Hitler could not prove he was not a Jew (according to the Nazi definition of “Jew”) So he transformed the village of his birth into a tank training field.

Or take the fact that Hirohito was Japan’s greatest war criminal. Even others than me are now saying this: Should the United States Be Blamed for Japan’s Historical Revisionism? In hindsight, exonerating Japan’s Emperor was a grave mistake. Well, it required very little insight. US warriors, during World War Two knew that Hirohito was culprit, and would have readily killed him, had they the opportunity.

Now we have the revered Dr. Fauci, who funded the research in gain of function of the spike protein in extremely dangerous bat coronaviruses, in Wuhan, China. Those viruses were discovered in 2012, because they had killed miners.

Or then look at the truth about the masks. Masks arguably make a bad situation worse in several ways (slow airflow over olfactory bulb neurons, plus failure to stop the virus, which is the same size as cigarette smoke…) Masks are also worse for children than no mask, healthwise. Still the US government is trying to impose masks on schoolchildren. Point that out, and the snowflakes will scream as they melt.

Real novelty is always outrageous. This happens in science, even now. A beautiful example if the mathematician Alexandre Grothendieck, often viewed as greatest in the 20th century. After he displeased authorities around 1970, with inflammatory discourses adverse to nuclear energy, he was fired, and got very few subsidies from CNRS, the French national science foundation. He retired in total seclusion, disappointed by many of his ex-colleagues and ex-students, refusing prizes because he had enough money for his needs, he said, having his food delivered, only going out to the post office. In 1984 he discovered, all by himself, something completely new, though, and very important, the “dessins d’enfant“.

If one utters a striking statement, it should be viewed, by civilized people, as the challenging start of a conversation. Because civilized people view debate as a moral imperative.

Real logic resists inflammation. That’s actually one of its defining properties. Especially as inflammation is generally in the eye of the beholder. Snowflakes made of methane which catch fire at the slightest spark contribute to global, planetary heating. Not just figuratively, but also literally. 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methane_clathrate

 “Let’s not confuse the progressives and the posers. We real progressives intrinsically provoke those who sleep in yesterday’s dreams.”

As Bakunin said, speaking of Marx and Engels, intolerance to any inflammatory discourse and liberty, is not going to end well.

This was true in the Nineteenth Century, as it was under the dying Roman Republic, and it is true now. Searching for truth requires provocation. There is no seriously new thinking without provocation, and putting the torch to some of yesteryear’s truths, as simple as that. And indeed, new thinking is always vague, initially, as dreaming is, and for the same reasons: we don’t know where to go, and what to feel, so we poke and put out feelers.

The world is on fire, literally, and all what little minds can think of, is that they should not overheat from overexertion. We hate inflammatory provocateurs, they bleat. Blindly repeating what our great and wealthy leaders want them to repeat. It’s the only correct behavior, they bleat, and they shuffle, all together, the way sheep do.
That is not the new morality the planet needs.

Little minds’ ways and means is not the new morality the planet needs. It is the mentality that fascism needs. And why the planet is burning, as pseudo-ecologists refused the solutions at hand [1].

Patrice Ayme

***

[1] Burning entire ecological systems is how climate will change, as everybody watching the news can now guess . The blind opposition of pseudo-ecologists to nuclear power has much to do with that enfolding disaster, and much worse is coming soon. Civilian nuclear power has killed a minimal numbers of victims… as long as one excludes the Soviet plant of Chernobyl, which was completely illegal and insane in several ways. Whereas fossil fuels kill at least ten million persons a year through direct pollution.

Connoisseurs may detect a contradiction here, because, after proclaiming the greatness of Grothendieck, who was stridently anti-nuclear, I celebrate nuclear. But I also opposed some forms of nuclear energy at the time. For very good reasons. And Grothendieck would have changed his mind… And he did.

US Financed COVID Under Unsafe Conditions? Top Trump Hating Virologist Admits It Implicitly

US NIH Financed Gain Of Function on Lethal Corona Bat Viruses At The Wuhan Institute Of Virology. 

Senator Ron Paul, an MD, accused Dr. Fauci to have financed research in China at the Wuhan Institute of Virology, to make lethal bat coronaviruses even deadlier and more transmissible (Gain Of Function (GoF)). Senator Paul considered that Fauci’s answer “you don’t know what you are talking about, Senator!” was a lie, and reminded him he risked five years imprisonment for lying to Congress under oath. Reading carefully the Twitter thread from partisan virology professor Stuart Neil who ferociously attacks Senator Ron Paul, brings the fair minded to the opposite conclusion to the one intended by the eminent virologist. One just has to quote him. 

The virologist admits “The EcoHealth grant was judged by the [NIH] vetting committee to not involve GoF because the investigators were REPLACING a function in a virus that ALREADY HAD human tropism rather than giving a function to one that could not infect humans“. [Stuart’s own capital letters] In other words, Stuart Neil is splitting hair. Investigators were engineering a virus transmissible to people, they were not doing Gain Of Function (GoF) to gain transmissibility that did not exist, says virologist Neil because that transmissibility was already there. What the virologist doesn’t say is that the transmissibility was improved and that these viruses, found in a cave in 2012, were lethal to humans (they killed miners, that’s how they were found). 

The eminent virologist then adds that it was not gain of function… because the NIH said it was not gain of function, although he adds ominously, contradicting all he said: “Understandably this is a grey area. While I personally think the research was justifiable, there are legitimate concerns that such work needs to be contained in BSL3 and above, and we know some aspects (we do not know which despite innuendo) were performed at BSL2 in WIV” 

So bioengineering on ACE2 spikes for a dangerous virus at the Wuhan Institute of Virology funded by the US National Institute of Health had to be done with maximum bio security, but it was not.

I am pro-science max. I feel and think science should be financed ten times more. I approve of China’s gigantic efforts in science and technology. I also approve of, and I am all for, Gain of Function research, if done not too dangerously. However it was done dangerous at WIV, and the NIH knew it (or at least part of NIH knew it). As persons such as Dr. Fauci lied and dissembled about that deplorable situation, they engaged in various distracting shows throwing blame everywhere, but in the right direction: as was already known from a previous scientific commission, some of the most dangerous research on Earth was conducted at WIV under very unsafe conditions… And NIH financed it.

Fauci lied. On 7/27. 2021, a bipartisan powerful group of Senators started action on US funding of very dangerous biological research in China [1].

Patrice Ayme

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Gain Of Function research is a fundamental way forward, not just scientifically, but philosophically. It should not be the reserved province of all mighty clowns like Dr. Fauci, who did, indeed, lie.

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[1] The United States must complete a thorough review of existing and prior U.S. government support or funding for research collaboration with the People Republic of China related to gain-of-function, synthetic biology, biotechnology, or other research areas that pose dual-use concerns,” the senators said. “U.S. taxpayer funding should not support any collaboration with PRC entities that pose health, economic, or security risks for the United States.”

The senators said China “has demonstrated lax biosecurity standards, violated the International Health Regulations, attempted to steal intellectual property related to COVID-19 vaccines, and may be in violation of the Biological Weapons Convention,” arguing the U.S. “should not be partnering with or funding any country that exhibits these risk factors.”

RAND PAUL SENDS CRIMINAL REFERRAL SAYING FAUCI LIED ABOUT FUNDING GAIN-OF-FUNCTION

Islam Is What’s Wrong With Many Countries

The present Tunisian president, Kais Saied, was elected with 73% of the vote in 2019 (and 90% of the youth). A constitutional law professor, this independent candidate financed his campaign with $5000 (five thousand dollars). The president is often depicted as a so-called “populist”… He is in agreement with some Islamic laws Islamists love (penalizing homosexuality, and favoring men in inheritance). However he found impossible to govern with Ennahda, the Islamist Party, most prominent in Parliament.  

The president used his constitutional powers to suspend Parliament for 30 days on 26 July 2021. Some Western Do-Gooders West reflexively lamented that the last Arab speaking democracy, Tunisia, was now dead. Those Do-Gooders fail to understand that governance by Islamists, whether elected or not, is intrinsically dictatorial, abusive, and antinomic to progress. Practically this means that a dictatorial regime, as found say in Egypt, or even Saudi Arabia, may be more progressive in Muslim countries than an elected regime. Failing to understand this is demeaning to those cultures and a form of systemic racism [1].

The problem of Muslim countries is Islam, just as, should it still be the case, the problem of Western Europe and its colonies would be the Catholic Inquisition, should that abomination still endowed with power. As an aside, when English Lords wanted to burn Joan of Arc alive, they used the French arm of the Catholic Inquisition to prosecute her for heresy… And then got her burned alive for relapsing after taking an oath that she would never wear men’s clothing again… So in Joan’s horrible fate, we see many elements of the Catholic religion affecting its sister religion, Islam, today: a powerful Inquisition, the notion of heresy, rejecting and disrespecting the religion, political usage by terrorists (in Joan’s case, English plutocrats), and a woman thinking she is free to wear what she wants.   

Tunisian President Kais Saied after his election in 2019 with 72.71% of the vote. Obviously a constitutional law professor, not a young putschist

In areas conquered 13 centuries ago by Muslim armies, Islam occupies a dominant presence that Catholicism never acquired in the West. Catholicism was an instrument of control implemented by Roman emperors. Catholicism was a tool finely worked and named by emperor Constantine (“the Great”), in 323 CE, at Nicaea. Conveniently, laws against “heresy” enabled the state to punish those it did not like, whichever way the state decided to, by accusing them of… heresy. 

However secular law maintained a separate, and more fundamental existence in the Roman empire: Justinian’s Roman law refurbishment separated what was religious law from the bedrock of secular law. Published in 534 CE in Latin, it was promptly adopted by the Franks, the Imperium Francorum in the West, which had just incorporated mighty Burgundy, and viewed itself as the legitimate successor state of Rome. This Corpus Juris Civilis is used to this day by all secular states, and characterize them fundamentally.

Whereas, the main variants of Islam Sunni and Shia, condemn the secular state, and secular law. Sunni Islam imposes a violent sexist subjugation and infantilization of women. But the problem with Islam does not stop there: corrupt, powerful individuals can claim their opponents are not true believers, and then have a right and duty to kill them, at least so say the holy books. 

This deep mentality of arbitrary violence enables and fosters a tradition of corruption. The preceding secular dictator in Tunisia, although leading a corruptocracy, could order a modicum of economic realization. Not so with the Islamists anywhere who are more keen to impose their Sharia than anything else. In other words, Islamists are the root cause of autocracy, one can’t fix the latter with the former. 

Patrice Ayme

***

[The preceding was a comment of mine courageously published by New York Times. 7/26/2021]

[1] I do not approve of dictatorships in Turkey, Iran and Syria. The reason there is that the present dictators or would-be dictators represent a considerable aggravation of the former situation. Algeria, Morocco, Pakistan are rather stagnant, corrupt and flirting with fate; I disapprove, but not stridently.

Oman, UAE, Qatar, Kuwait are arguably, works in progress. Egypt’s Sisi and Saud MBS have difficult situations to deal with… Sudan, Libya, Yemen are too conflicted to be commented upon…

In general, Europe has a moral duty with helping to develop North Africa, from more than three millennia of common existence… that Europe has neglected, preferring to develop the likes of Turkey and China, instead…

Caviar Liberalism Segregates Housing

Berkeley was the birthplace of the caviar liberal mentality, a place where privileged liberals went to expensive restaurants, crowed in delight about it, having dinner where Bill Clinton did, and struck progressive poses among themselves… While carefully excluding those less wealthy and influential. The more privileged they got, the more “liberal” they posed… As long as their neighborhoods could stay segregated. The university itself led that mentality, by exploiting all sorts of teaching assistants and untenured lecturers, refusing, for decades, to let them form unions, as the university refused to consider that these workers were employees. Many of them had to work for no pay, because Berkeley was such an advanced, glorious place, beyond any suspicion. I had direct experience of this as a victim, for years.

The truth then was quite the opposite of the human rights picture that caviar liberals wanted to projectl: Berkeley and its sister cities refused to build low, or even middle income housing… it would “block the views”… that, and alleging developers would make profits, were the best argument the pseudo-liberals could find, while even fully employed school teachers had to live in miserable conditions. Berkeley and some of the adjoining cities have recently lifted total interdictions on multistory buildings (which is what middle income housing means there). But market demand still forces prices around ten times, per area, above national average. The only solution is massive construction. All Bay Area cities, dominated by wealthy caviar liberals, obstinately refuse it, they are all millionaires, thanks to housing.  

Caviar liberalism is the objective accomplice and servant of the oligarchical plutocracy which rules the world. The first step in sociological progress is to make caviar liberals aware of their hypocritical status. 

Patrice Ayme

***

Housing prices in Berkeley nearly quadrupled in the last two decades. However, salaries, especially of the non-upper class, did not quadruple. Actually, they stayed stagnant

The Case-Shiller Index for “San Francisco” covers the counties of San Francisco, San Mateo (northern part of Silicon Valley), Alameda and Contra Costa (East Bay), including Berkeley and its sister cities, and Marin (North Bay). It doesn’t cover the southern part of Silicon Valley, including San Jose, which is even more outrageously expensive, and the largest portions of the North Bay (Wine Country counties of Sonoma and Napa) and Solano County.

***

P/S: The preceding was (except for the last sentence) a comment to a NYT article which condemned Berkeley as the birthplace of housing segregation, a point I have long made, in various essays, and sent to the NYT in various comments. So let me congratulate myself for an alert well done.

The NYT has links to various laws and ways explaining the California housing crisis in the way I have long advocated: a crowning achievement of caviar liberalism… originating in Berkeley, as I have long said. And this is no coincidence: Stanford is honest about its elitism, and tries to compensate for it. UC Berkeley, 30 miles north, is the opposite: dishonest about its elitism, and unwilling to compensate for it (as it does not exist, hey! Never mind the tuition for undergraduates at UC Berkeley is a quarter of the median US family income… for California residents… non CA residents pay three quarters of median US family income, just for attending classes, before room and board…)

Here is an extract from

It’s Hard to Have Faith in a State That Can’t Even House Its People. July 26, 2021, by Ned Resnikoff.

Mr. Resnikoff is policy manager for the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California, San Francisco.

Even if you don’t live in California, you’ve probably seen the pictures of tents lining Venice Beach. Or maybe you’ve seen photographs of Oakland’s sprawling homeless encampments, or the crowds of people living on the street in Los Angeles’s Skid Row neighborhood. Those images, while stark, do not come close to capturing the scope of the state’s homelessness crisis.

Numbers come a little closer. California is home to nearly 12 percent of the country’s total population but, as of January 2020, 28 percent of its unhoused population, according to federal statistics. More than half of the country’s unsheltered homeless population resides in California. All told, the federal government’s most recent point-in-time count tells us that roughly 161,548 Californians were homeless as of just one night in early 2020, 113,660 of whom were unsheltered — and this was before Covid-19 plunged the United States into crisis.

The political implications of mass homelessness cut deep, cut to the very foundations of our democratic system, in fact. Widespread homelessness is both a symptom of democratic decline and a harbinger of worse to come.

It should never have gotten this bad. Homelessness is solvable. Its primary driver is housing unaffordability (not a sudden recent increase in mental illness or substance use disorder, despite claims to the contrary), and so the solution has always been more housing, particularly for those who don’t currently have it. But California has allowed homelessness to metastasize over the past few decades. As the humanitarian crisis has gotten worse, it has become a political crisis. Homelessness is one of the major themes in this year’s campaign to recall Gov. Gavin Newsom, and a growing number of commentators have cited it as evidence that the “California dream” is dying.

As I pointed out in the past, segregated housing we have now started as segregated racism, and so-called “red zoning”… which is more active than ever.

“The structural factors that threaten U.S. democracy have directly contributed to homelessness in California. Take structural racism. In his landmark book “The Color of Law,” Richard Rothstein outlined how the government spent decades segregating neighborhoods as a matter of public policy, stifling Black homeownership and pushing Black Americans and other people of color into zones of concentrated urban poverty.

California was an early innovator in racist housing policies: Berkeley was most likely the birthplace of single-family zoning, which constricts housing supply and pushes up the cost of housing. This policy puts it out of reach for low-income households, in particular the people of color it was intended to keep out.

More than a century after it was first enacted, Berkeley is now in the process of undoing single-family zoning. But at both the city and the state level, other racist policies remain on the books. Some of them are baked into the state’s Constitution, which the voters amended in 1950 to restrict development of low-income public housing. And California’s decades-long effort to keep low-income Black residents out of adequate housing continues to bear fruit: today, Black people make up 6.5 percent of the state’s overall population, but 40 percent of its homeless population.

… Even as the homelessness crisis has grown out of the same factors as the crisis of democracy, it has directly contributed to democratic decay. California’s continual failure to make inroads against widespread homelessness risks fomenting anger, cynicism and disaffection with the state’s political system. A state that appears powerless to address fundamental problems does not make a very persuasive case for its own survival. As such, state and local policymakers need to take homelessness seriously as not only a humanitarian disaster, but a threat to liberal democracy.“

California was long the world’s dream center. It got carried away with a herd of good looking do-gooder laws which served the privileged white elite, enabling a segregated society. Some of these caviar liberals I know advised presidents, and not just US presidents. It is high time to point this hypocrisy out, and recognize it as the origin of multiple crises, so that the correct strategies can be put into place. Getting rid of corrupt, hyper-wealthy caviar liberals such as billionaire Feinstein, near billionaire Pelosi, Newsom with his eleven companies created by the plutocratic Gettys, and getting rid of many others, nearly as corrupt… is the necessary first step towards truth and transparency.

Caviar Liberals, not Republicans, is why we cannot progress. To fight an adversary frontally is just war. But, while one tries to fight for progress, racist caviar liberals stab in the back, while claiming dastardly you matter to them, and they just patted you in the back!

Three Types Of Tax Criminality: Legal, Illegal, And Unprovable. “Democratic Party” Corruptocrats Sponsor The Latter

Mathematical logic discovered three types of propositions: true, false, and unprovable. This conceptology applies to politics, and tax avoidance. The definition of the ultra-wealthy is that they pay, basically, no taxes… and it cannot be proven they paid no taxes. Some “Democrats” make a loud noise about increasing the budget of the tax agency, the IRS… “Catch all the miscreants!” This is, typically, disingenuous: the same “Democrats” organized the world tax system so that the wealthy, especially if fiscally in the US, pay no taxes. There is legal tax cheating, and illegal tax cheating: everybody knows this. But there is also an intermediate zone, unknowable tax evasion. The legal cheating enables potentially illegal tax evasion which considerably leverages the legal cheating. In other words legal cheating also creates convenient massive dark and grey matter which make the IRS job very costly, if at all possible, when dealing with wealthy tax evaders, and their armies of lawyers and accountants. So the IRS is discouraged to pursue the wealthiest, it just does not have, and could never get, the means to do so.

The obvious example is given by Delaware. The laws of the state of Delaware, thanks to a long serving “democratic” Senator, prevent the IRS from knowing what is going on… Delaware does not require companies to identify their beneficial owners when formed. Thus, although it is technically illegal for US citizens to use Delaware as a tax haven, it does not matter how much money the IRS has to find out if tax evasion has been committed or not: a wealthy cheater is protected in Delaware by inexpugnable secrecy. Any tax haven overseas is easier for the IRS to figure out than the “Diamond State”. 

This is why more than one million companies and two-thirds of the Fortune 500 and 90% of startups are based in Delaware… That’s right: more companies than people call Delaware home. In the present situation it is not just that it is easier for the IRS to persecute small taxpayers, it is nearly impossible to figure out what the truly wealthy really earn. That should be fixed first.

Patrice Ayme

New triangular trade. The highest wealth value system involves “art”, old castles and other. Nowadays, Biden will sell you a painting for half a million, what the White House called “the right [for Biden] to make a living”. “Art” acts as a currency which escapes currency trading laws… That makes art very valuable to those who organize the planet, the plutocrats and their employed corruptocrats…

P/S: The preceding is a slightly extended version of a comment sent to Paul Krugman who published it immediately …are we friends again? Good. The Economist argued that the USA is “the Biggest Tax Loophole Of All”. Having launched and led the battle against offshore tax evasion, America is now part of the problem. 

Said the Economist:

“The Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act (FATCA), passed in 2010, is the main shackle that America puts on other countries. It requires financial institutions abroad to report details of their American clients’ accounts or face punishing withholding taxes on American-sourced payments. America’s central role in global finance means most comply.

FATCA has spawned the Common Reporting Standard (CRS), a transparency initiative overseen by the OECD club of 34 countries that is emerging as a standard for the exchange of data for tax purposes. So far 96 countries, including Switzerland, once favoured by rich taxophobes, have signed up and will soon start swapping information. The OECD is also leading efforts to force multinationals to reveal more about where and how profits are made, and the deals they cut with individual governments, in order to curb aggressive tax-planning.

Because it has signed a host of bilateral data-sharing deals, America sees no need to join the CRS. But its reciprocation is patchy. It passes on names and interest earned, but not account balances; it does not look through the corporate structures that own many bank accounts to reveal the true “beneficial” owner; and data are only shared with countries that meet a host of privacy and technical standards…”

FATCA and CRS became weapons to impose domination of the USA, thus of the US based plutocracy which employs the US government.

Hillary and Bill Clinton set up two shell companies listed at “1209 North Orange Street” in 2008 and 2013. The names of the companies, but not their location, weret made public in tax filings released by Hillary Clinton in 2015.  “1209 North Orange Street”  is the locale for 300,000 anonymous shell companies.

One of the Clintons’ “1209 North Orange Street” companies is WJC, LLC, which was set up by Bill Clinton in 2008 as a pass-through for his consulting fees.

Another company at the same location, ZFS Holdings, LLC, was set up in February 2013, one week after Hillary Clinton left the State Department. Hillary Clinton received $5.5 million from her book publisher, Simon & Schuster, through the company. The Clinton Foundation also has three shell companies in Delaware, according to its financial disclosures released in 2015.

While campaigning in 2008, President Obama slammed the “Ugland House,” a five-story building in the Cayman Islands that is reportedly home to over 18,000 companies.

“That’s either the biggest building in the world, or the biggest tax scam on record,” said Obama. “Some of you may have just heard about these disclosures about outrageous tax havens and loopholes that super-rich people across the world are exploiting in Panama and elsewhere,” said Hillary Clinton during her campaign in 2016. She added: “Now some of this behavior is clearly against the law, and anyone who violates the law anywhere should be held accountable. But it’s also scandalous how much is actually legal.“

Individuals with Trump Derangement will want to talk about him. But Trump’s tax situations are different. I used to be critical of Trump’s activities many decades ago. However, in the meantime I saw the dearth of housing in the most developed metropolises, the devastation it caused (homelessness, and distorted, racist housing markets)…. and I came to understand wealthy developers were necessary evils. However the “Democratic” Party (I belong to) has still not seen the light, and the dearth of ecologically and sociologically correct housing is the most blatant failure of the so-called “West” at this point… And has to do with the dominance of plutocrats, especially of the real estate variety.

Burning The Natives Tied In Mentality With Burning The Planet

There are a planetary crises with too much CO2, too much oxides of nitrogen, too many fluor based greenhouses gases, too many phosphates, too much devastating insecticides, too much plastics, too many heavy metals extracted, too much deforestation, etc. Emblematic species such as the Western Monarch, a migratory butterfly, of which there were millions a few years ago, are getting exterminated before our eyes.

The leading crisis is the carbon dioxide crisis which heats up the atmosphere and acidifies the oceans. The US has led in the wrong way: per capita the USA emits twice the CO2 that Europe emits, and 3 times what France emits. No excuse for this: the USA is the wealthiest country…

But US citizens have been unwilling to reduce their creature comforts, even a little [1]. It is even more striking to realize that, per capita, Canada and Australia, also giant and extremely wealthy countries, pollute even more than the USA. The obvious explanation is that, in these three places, the Natives were de facto basically exterminated. It is this exploitative mentality of burning everything and those we don’t like, to gain personal advantage, which those three giant countries have in common.

The US, Australia and Canada are also highly successful countries and thus give a bad example to the rest of the planet: if you want to be most successful, exploit your environment, covering up the destruction you impose, behind lip service and homilies to the opposite. That message is heard by other giant countries, in particular China, India, Brazil. US politicians reject a carbon tax, so the fossil fuel supremacy is allowed to go on unchecked. (Pseudo) Ecologists do not help by refusing some clean energy alternatives: nuclear and hydrogen.

Patrice Ayme

Half Dome should be right and lower than the sun, but the smoke obscures it. Interestingly, I am planning to go to the Sierra Nevada next week, and where I planned to run, there are fires, one of them I could see the pyrocumulus yesterday from 200 miles away as it crossed into the next state over (Nevada). That particular fire, the Tamarack fire, has been burning since July 4, 18 days ago. The other two wilderness runs I contemplated, in the same area also have their own fires… The Pacific Crest Trail is blocked by fires. To the north California suffers two enormous fires, and the one in Oregon has already burned an area larger than London, sending smoke around the planet… Some of the fire fighting has become silly: California used FIRE TRAINS (!), carrying thousands of tons of water, to fight fire from railroad bridges… Burn, planet, burn…

***

[1] Instead, US citizens have opted for ever bigger houses (2,500 square feet, average; 250 square meters) and ever bigger trucks and SUVs. Biden gives them more subsidies for batteries made in China, for their giant, tank-like electric cars and trucks… Biden calls that being an ecologist (his friends fill their pockets with electric cars investments)… while switching cars to electric does not solve the CO2 free energy production problem.

***

The preceding essay was a comment sent to the New York Times to an essay bemoaning the state of Yosemite (National Park)… A park I have literally run all over. I approved of the essay, and my comment was immediately published. My, my, my… Times have changed (perturbed by my critique of the Iraq invasion, and the pseudo-progressive, truly de facto fascist, in Mussolini’s Professor Gentile sense, Obama administration. the NYT had cancelled me for a decade…

Science The Only Way Out Of Fossil Fuels

Abstract: Some fashionable academics advocate violence to get rid of fossil fuels. That’s a category error: fossil fuels are not used from lack of violence, but from lack of alternatives which ecologists have been willing to use. Those alternatives have not been used, in great part because most persons presenting themselves as ecologists are against nuclear, and never heard of hydrogen. Also they are naïve about getting huge quantities of ore out of atrocious regimes, providing batteries, or what’s needed to make them thanks to dictators and human traffickers enslaving children, or abusing millions. Other technologies, such as carbon capture (although used successfully in precise places for special geological reasons) simply cannot be deployed now as a mass solution (although the Chinese energy plan pretends they carbon capture will be deployed on 980 gigawatts… that’s a lie, we don’t have the tech; Chinese planners say this, to keep building one new coal plant a week…). The wind power and battery route seems unsustainable as a world solution from needing too much special toxic elements.

The only sustainable solution is better minds and better science, thus a better educational system producing better youth. Out of it will arise better energy systems and then fossil fuels, which have been used for 80,000 years, will be dropped. violence is not the solution out of our ecological crises, only future science is. 

*** 

The science on climate change due to CO2 increase has been clear for four decades. Yet despite decades of expensive world conferences, mass street protests, petition campaigns, and homilies to world peace, we are still facing a booming fossil fuel industry, rising seas, rising greenhouse gases emission levels, rising temperatures, dying seas and acidifying oceans. With the stakes so high, why haven’t we moved beyond peaceful protest? Could it be that… There is no other solution than keep on keeping on, and that, after all, the stakes are not that high?

The answers are not those US, Canadian, Australian and many other ecologists want to hear. France uses just a quarter of the CO2 emissions as Australia, per person. However, France uses nuclear and carbon pricing massively. Small cars too. And living in some of the densest cities on Earth (Paris in particular is that way). Plus sky high taxes and government spending relative to GDO, highest in the world. This powerful brew has been concocted while French know-how went down… Brute force has its down sides…  

A very close friend of mine, head of drilling at an oil giant (!), conducted, thanks to his technical knowledge, very efficient eco-sabotage against heavy equipment of a massive construction company in the Calanques (it was around 40 years ago!) The authorities never found who did it. This violent action gained time, enforced protection, and enabled the ultimate creation of the Calanques National Park, a UNESCO world heritage site (aside from stunning scenery, it has world famous undersea-access prehistoric sites). So I know and approve of justifiable eco violence… But not the sort Malm is advocating… which is grotesque, counterproductive, indiscriminate, hypocritical, a lie… and constitute mass murder, even genocide, as civilization cannot work without fossil fuels at this point…

***

In the ridiculous manifesto “How to Blow Up A Pipeline”, claimed saboteur of SUV tires and coal mines, Andreas Malm, a Marxist-like climate change opportunist from Lund University in Sweden, makes a call for the climate movement to escalate its tactics into violence in the face of ecological collapse [1].. We need, he claims, to force fossil fuel extraction to stop– by destroying its tools… start blowing up some oil pipelines. Now, as I point out in the note, and millions of words of my writing testify, I am no shrinking violet… And was personally advocating for ecological violence, in specific and extremely justified cases, when Malm was not even born… But “specific and extremely justified” is the important qualifier. Ecological lessons from Sweden, a country who could not help clear the environment from the Nazis, and got wealthy from them, always smack of consummate hypocrisy.

Sweden has lots of forest, lots of hydro power, and is very wealthy (by dealing with, and profiting from, Hitler… and escaping WW2 devastation). 

In his core section, “Breaking the Spell” (p 65-132) Malm argues for direct violence as ethical. Malm accepts the prevailing view that property damage is a form of violence, but distinguishes violence to property and violence to people. He makes the utilitarian argument that given the failure of corporations and governments to act, the climate movement must begin to escalate its tactics to shut down the fossil fuel infrastructure. He does not seem to realize that shutting down energy shuts down civilization, thus lives. Because he misses the point: there is no alternative to fossil fuels, except a cocktail of nuclear, hydrogen and renewables… That most ecologists reject… allowing them to be de facto for fossil fuels while claiming to be against them..

*** 

We cannot blow up all the pipelines, that’s fantasy. Because we cannot get rid of fossil fuels, at this particular juncture.If we did, that would be criminal: think about all the innocents dying from cold or failing machinery.  I do not like fossil fuels, and I have screamed about planetary heating for decades… but things have to be kept in perspective. 

Saying that “nothing else worked” is tantamount to beating one’s head on a wall, because nothing else worked. Other methods to reduce fossil fuel usage exist: France does with one third of US per capita CO2 production than the USA. Europe with less than half, per capita, per year. 

French CO2 is around the world average. But this hides the fact that more than half the world population emits neglectable amounts of CO2. As that half starts to produce more power, be it only for irrigation, desalination, air conditioning, food production from adaptation to a heating planet, or just living better, they will need energy.

A solution is photovoltaics, but they will need storage, thus the infernal cycle of more precious metals, for batteries, which cannot clearly be done… So we need to develop hydrogen massively… and safe nuclear, thermonuclear or fission. So it is an engineering and science problem.

Patrice Ayme

***[1]. If Malm had really committed eco-terrorism, he would be more discrete about it. I have known eco-terrorists. They were extremely efficient, sabotaging heavy equipment to stop a development, the area concerned is now the Calanques National Park in France (I am saying this as the main organizer was the head of drilling at Total, the French oil giant!!!!!!!!!!!! This friend of mine committed suicide later…). Malm is a scholar of human ecology, teaching at Lund University. He is the author of The Progress of this Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World and Fossil Capital: The Rise of Steam Power and the Roots of Global Warming, which won the Isaac and Tamara Deutscher Memorial Prize. So Malm is establishment… Need I say more? The establishment is excellent at promoting buffoons who want to destroy it, thus making people believe that only buffoons with idiotic ideas and reprehensible anger want to destroy it…

This undermining the opposition of the plutocratic governance by ridicule it itself promotes is a variant of the classical method of the “agent provocateur”. Malm is there to incite people to cuddle pipelines…

Waning Dinosaurs, Victim Of Their Success In A Warm Climate?

The question of the disappearance of the dinosaurs is closely entangled with the deepest philosophical questions (and already were so at the time of the Ancient Greece or China, where as recently as a few years ago dinosaur bones were mistaken for dragon remains, and finished as soup…) Do smarts have to do with it?

An old, all too old, idea is that, if dinosaurs had no gone extinct, mammals in general and homo in particular would not have arisen… Dinosaurs would have kept on eating mammals. Instead highest intelligence would have arisen from dinosaurs. Some scientists have claimed that, based on the size of T Rex’s brain, it was as smart as a chimp. But that dinosaurs prevented the rise of primates, let alone mammals, is a complete absurdity, as it blatantly contradicts logic and facts.

Instead, one can turn the argument on its head: maybe mammals caused, ultimately the disappearance of dinosaurs… With the little help from three well-known catastrophes…

Indeed here is the general scheme I propose: mammalian reptiles are arguably older than dinosaurs… They may have arisen directly from the previous mass extinction 250 million years ago. Then, as the climate became balmier for around 150 million years, dinosaurs could evolve… in a less demanding way. Dinosaurs were mesotherms: they generated some internal heat, and they often had some sorts of feathers for insulation. Still they were not fully generating their own heat in 36 C-96 F to 40 C, 100F range as mammals and birds do.

An analogy is aircraft carriers: the latest class of US supercarriers is on the verge of service. USS Gerald Ford (WW2 naval aviator who became president) is undergoing its last trials, which consist in giant submarine explosions next to the ship to check for shock resistance. The Ford is the same size and mass as the earlier carriers the last of which was built 35 years ago. However, Ford carries three times the electric power of the preceding Nimitz class. Ford is more energized than Nimitz. That enables Ford to do things Nimitz could not have done.

By being higher temperature constantly, thus much more energized, constantly, mammals and birds were constantly dangerous to dinosaurs.

Imagine this: the planet cooling, a whiff of a cold blast. What would dinosaurs do? Go sluggish, we know they were expert at that: some were living next to the poles and were probably used to semi-hibernation (as many bear species in cold climes do today). One can imagine the dinosaurs’ nests raided, during a cold worldwide “nuclear winter” by enterprising mammals and birds. Well before the mass extinction event of 66 million years ago, there were primates, and they survived the mass extinction (some fossils are from 100,000 years afterwards). Several species of the genus Purgatorius are known (see below).

The advantage and characteristic of the most powerful philosophy is to love, discern and use the biggest, strongest arguments. For example why two different inflation mechanisms in cosmic evolution… One of them all too much an apparent copy of the Bible… Yes, really! Do away with that latter Judaic inspiration, and simplify matters with an expanding but much older universe, using the only cosmic expansion we can see instead of a superluminal expansion ad hoc to save the Bible? That (philosophical) argument is so simple, I have no doubt it will impose itself, and everybody will forget that I originated it… Once the philosophical argument has been found, an educated guess, the scientific method can move in and check the details.

So back to dinosaurs, plesiosaurs, and pterosaurs. The pterosaurs were highly evolved, and much better fliers than the birds: whereas birds appeared around 150 million years ago, pterosaurs appeared 80 million years prior (230 million years ago), and birds probably hid in the forests, flying between the trees, thanks to their feathers, for as long as it took (namely 84 million years) to not become pterosaurs’ dinners (or then they live in climes too cold for pterosaurs… we have evidence of this). Still, then, in spite of their tremendous aerial mastery, and their four limb capability to launch their enormous masses in the air, the enormous flying dragons disappeared with the dinosaurs…. Probably victims of that same evolutionary trap, the balmy Jurassic-Cretaceous climate. Sluggish cold pterosaurs’ eggs eaten by rats or the like? That’s my (gory) vision of what happened. Here is, from the prestigious scientific journal Nature, June 29, 2021:

Dinosaur biodiversity declined well before the asteroid impact, influenced by ecological and environmental pressures

Abstract
The question why non-avian dinosaurs went extinct 66 million years ago (Ma) remains unresolved because of the coarseness of the fossil record. A sudden extinction caused by an asteroid is the most accepted hypothesis but it is debated whether dinosaurs were in decline or not before the impact. We analyse the speciation-extinction dynamics for six key dinosaur families, and find a decline across dinosaurs, where diversification shifted to a declining-diversity pattern ~76 Ma. We investigate the influence of ecological and physical factors, and find that the decline of dinosaurs was likely driven by global climate cooling and herbivorous diversity drop. The latter is likely due to hadrosaurs outcompeting other herbivores. We also estimate that extinction risk is related to species age during the decline, suggesting a lack of evolutionary novelty or adaptation to changing environments. These results support an environmentally driven decline of non-avian dinosaurs well before the asteroid impact.

Dinosaurs were dying, and had been dying out for millions of years, out-competed in a cooling climate by hot, conniving primates, warm energizer rabbits and hot, angry birds:

If I added the planetary temperature graph, it would look a bit like the collapsing diversification rate on the right…

Introduction
The most famous mass extinction was the disappearance of non-avian dinosaurs at the end of the Cretaceous, 66 million years ago (Mya), after ruling the Earth for 170 million years1,2,3. The best-supported extinction model is the impact of a large asteroid in the Yucatán Peninsula (Chicxulub, Mexico), which set off a global cataclysm and environmental upheaval4,5. Although evidence for an end-Cretaceous impact is indisputable6, most scientific debate has focused on whether the extinction was geologically abrupt or gradual7,8,9,10,11, whether it was caused by factors intrinsic to dinosaurs12,13,14,15 or by extrinsic physical drivers16,17,18 or both acting in concert19,20. If extrinsic events had a role, the question is whether this driver was terrestrial or extra-terrestrial21,22,23. It has proved harder to posit a convincing killing model that explains exactly how the dinosaurs, as well as many other groups24,25, vanished. And yet other groups of animals and plants survived through this singular, short-term crisis26,27. Could some groups have been teetering on the brink already? Furthermore, the extinctions coincide with a period of long-term environmental changes that resulted in remarkably high sea levels, cooling climates and the spread of new habitat types on land, as well as massive volcanic activity at the end of the Cretaceous16,19,20.

That there was an impact at the time, there is no doubt. That there was massive Large Igneous Province (LIP) at the time, there is no doubt. A LIP, the Siberian Traps, caused the even more massive mass extinction, 250 million years ago. Remarkably the bolide (I suspect a comet) impacted just when the Dekkan Traps were at their eruptive maximum (or so it seems at this point, 2021). It always seemed to me that one impactor the size of the one on Yucatan, was not enough. However, if the bolide was a comet, it may well have disintegrated in several fragments prior to impact, as happened with Jupiter and Shoemaker-Levy comet (which broke up in seven main fragments).

But there is an even bigger factor which seems indubitable: the biosphere was cooling. And we are talking drastic cooling, as much as seven (7) degrees centigrade over the Atlantic… for comparison, the Atlantic was only five degree C lower in temperature during the last glacial maximum, when monster glaciers kilometers high crushed New York…   

So I propose (and have long proposed, see Trapped By Super Traps) three layers in the dinosaur extinction:

1) The surface of the planet was cooling, and had been for dozens of millions of years. (Such large cooling, over dozens of millions of years are probably related to plate tectonic preventing warm water to get to the poles; this is why Antarctica got covered by ice, from the closing by the Indonesia island arc, simultaneous with the closing of Mesoamerica; once the poles ice up, the albedo of the planet shoots up, as solar radiation is sent back to space by ice and snow

2) Dekkan Traps had been erupting, for millions of years, causing all sorts of mayhem, from poisonous gases, sometimes heating the atmosphere, sometimes cooling it, acidifying the seas.

3) … with the impact of bolide(s) being the coup de grâce, driven by warm blooded hunger (the latest my idea).

From the Nature article:

The Late Cretaceous was a greenhouse world, characterized by high temperatures and reduced latitudinal temperature gradients^72,73, which likely contributed to a flat latitudinal diversity gradient in dinosaurs⁷⁴. Peak warmth was attained in the Cenomanian-Turonian (100–90 Ma) with sea-surface temperatures reaching ≥30 °C in the tropics and the southern latitudes^72,73,75. After this interval, sea-surface and deep-water temperatures decreased to the cooler greenhouse of the Campanian–Maastrichtian (80–66 Ma)^72,73,76. This important cooling (~7 °C in North Atlantic⁷⁷, and ~10 °C in southern latitudes⁷⁶), which intensified during the Maastrichtian until the K/Pg event, could have impacted dinosaur diversity. However, other factors, such as Cretaceous geological changes^17,41 or floristic turnover^78,79 should not be discarded.

… These results imply that warm periods favoured dinosaur diversification whereas cooler periods led to enhanced extinctions, as observed in the latest Late Cretaceous⁷⁷. This result is particularly in agreement with a recent analysis of multiple tetrapod phylogenies showing the significant effect of Cenozoic cooling on diversification slowdowns, which is linked to the metabolic theory of biodiversity⁶³. As dinosaurs were probably mesothermic organisms⁸⁵ with varying thermoregulation abilities in different groups⁸⁶, their activities were probably partially constrained by environmental temperatures. This is particularly true of larger dinosaurs, which almost certainly relied substantially on mass homeothermy to maintain constant body temperatures. It is likely that climatic deterioration would have made such a thermoregulatory strategy more difficult, and that global climate cooling was an important driver of the dinosaur diversity decline as indicated by the MBD diversification model. A physiological explanation for the cooling-driven extinction could be the hypothesis that if sex determination in dinosaurs was temperature dependent, as in crocodiles and turtles, sex switching of embryos could have contributed to diversity loss with a cooling global climate at the end of the Cretaceous⁸⁷.

So basically the essay is saying in a thorough way what I also said… With, in my case, the twist that predation by fast, hot species may have been the ultimate factor. 

A few years ago I was talking with a friend of mine, a top paleontologist (he is the top editor of the subject at Science, chair of a paleontology department in a most prestigious university, and head of a museum…). And also an extinction-by-bolide advocate. When I exposed the preceding to him, he said: “Oh, but then you are saying that the bolide gave the coup de grâce… So the bolide caused the extinction…” No, not quite. The house was on fire (that’s the 25 million years cooling), then got full of lethal smoke (that’s the Deccan Traps), then a beam fell on the unfortunate half passed out dinosaurs (that’s the bolide), trapping its leg, but even then the coup de grâce happened when the rats ate alive the trapped beast…

Causation is often a complicated matter, more of a causal web than a causal chain.

As long as the planetary climate was cooling the mesothermic (middle-temperature) creatures were doomed, from competition from warm mammals and hot avian, high metabolism dinosaurs (the birds). Paradoxically the very success of say, Pterosaurs, caused their doom. Pterosaurs were such efficient fliers that they did not need the highest metabolism, high temperatures of avian dinosaurs: Pterosaurs fell victim of a sort of evolutionary hubris. 

But wait a minute, some may say, what about dinosaurs in Alaska? Yes, certainly. Polar dinosaurs are an archeological fact.

Dinosaurs certainly could not migrate out of the way of Antarctic or Alaskan winter, the distances are immense, no non-flying animal could cover them. Evidence of adaptation to Arctic conditions, such as smaller size, are clear. Predators, such as in Troodon, a feathery, eight-foot-long dinosaur genus with large eyes, to see in the polar night, showed that they spent the winter there. So then what of brutal winter caused by an impacting comet or massive eruption, why couldn’t dinosaurs resist to it? If they could resist to winter? As I said, a sudden drop of say twenty centigrade all over, would have made life very difficult. We know, from fossil evidence that dinosaurs became sluggish in winter, they stopped growing. So a “nuclear winter” would have made them go comatose big time, and the frantic hot blooded critters would have viewed dinosaurs as living refrigerators, full of ready to eat meals… Actually feathered dinosaurs found in Australia, at that time, more than 100 million years ago, by the South Pole had dark feathers (in summer)… and shared their ecology with flight capable birds… not pterosaurs… This observation, if it holds, shows that pterosaurs, which are suspected to have been warm blooded, and furry (with sort-of hair), were not as warm blooded as birds. In any case the K-T extinction was massive, and many bird and mammals species went extinct. The slight difference in sluggishness may be all one needs to get an explanation for the disappearance of dinosaurs and pterosaurs, etc.. When the going gets tough, the toughs get going…

Here is one of our potential ancestors, Purgatorius, below, an omnivorous primate, getting smarter, hunting meat, was around while dinosaurs roamed. Purgatorius is highly evolved, so it is likely that primates got started well before 100 million years ago. 

As the long sharp teeth above show, our ancestors were omnivorous… And that means that, if dinosaurs were too sluggish, they, or their young or eggs, were dinner. So it is entirely possible that, in the end, we, or at least our fellow warm blooded relatives, are the ultimate cause of the dinosaurs’ disappearance…

Patrice Ayme

Governmental All Encompassing Censorship Made Official. Thanks To Tech Monopolies, It Said.

White House press secretary Jen Psaki said people who are removed from one social media platform for spreading misinformation should face the same consequences across the board of the “Free Speech” society.

“You shouldn’t be banned from one platform and not others for providing misinformation out there,” she said during a White House press briefing on Friday.

Psaki also said social media companies, such as Facebook, should “publicly” share information about the “impact” of misinformation.

Except who decides what “misinformation” is? And what grave misinformation is? Biden, who spread misinformation for a decade so that the USA would go invade and occupy Iraq, kill dozen of thousands and practice waterboarding there? … For reasons having to do with the price of oil and just imperial ire?

Thus the Biden spokeswoman said, and repeated later, that, if someone is banned on a social platform, thus, by a private company, that person should be banned on ALL other platforms, by all other private companies. Thus, since I was banned for life from a few social platforms already 12 years ago, and some were then much larger than Facebook, I should be banned on all? And what of the New York Times which banned me for years, and has now, under new management, reinstated me? Are they illegal according to the Biden White House? 

[In the picture above, the health minister of the UK is kissing the multimillionaire woman he made his deputy, on taxpayers’ salary.]

All these bans against yours truly arose because yours truly had the impudence of correcting misinformation found on these platforms. The sort of misinformation which brought the death of millions throughout the Middle East. Misinformation can be in the eye of the beholder, at first sight at least. Daunting opinions viewed initially as “misinformation” can lead to productive debate out of which new truths can arise.

One “leftist” platform I was banned from was the Daily Kos…  that particular platform was founded by Kos, an ex CIA officer (about as left as US pseudo-progressives can go)… At the time I was called a “troll” there, for expressing dissatisfaction about Obamacare, finding it insufficient (and I was hated for telling the truth). But also I claimed the Democratic Party was manipulated by its wealthy sponsors… That was one “misinformation” too far… I did not even point out that a “leftist” site founded by the CIA seems to be an intrinsic contradiction: I was careful to not indicate to all these pseudo-leftists that they were basically CIA agents… unbeknownst to themselves… Or so they claimed.

Armed with a bachelor degree in English, but a competitive swimmer, Jen Psaki became close to Obama in 2008, serving as his secretary. I like the personal aspect of these things. Psaki was named Deputy Press Secretary. On  9 September 22, 2011, Psaki left her Obama position to become senior vice president and managing director at the Washington, D.C., office of public relations firm Global Strategy Group. She returned later to Obama, and then CNN. Psaki is a full member of the Deep State. She is apparently on three different salaries right now, earning perhaps more than half a million dollars a year for…violating the Constitution? This kind of career entangling personal relations should be unlawful, because they trade in access to the power of the few, and transcend the electoral process.

In Britain the Health Minister, Hancock, offered a taxpayer paid job to a similar multimillionaire public relation woman as his deputy. He was also having sex with her in his office and it was documented on government video. The Prime Minister’s office declared that the video was of public interest and should be released. Hancock resigned for not respecting his own office stringent social distanciation orders during COVID. The fact that multimillionaire influencers without any respect for the constitution fester in all Western capitals contribute to a lowering of what common people feel the constitution is about.

Biden has blamed misinformation for stalling U.S. vaccine rates, and suggested, “They’re killing people… they are murderers” when asked what his message was to the social networks for allowing misleading claims to spread.

“‘Misinformation’ is covered by the First Amendment. Under the First Amendment, all information, no matter how wrong, is protected by the First Amendment. That is why, for example, Holocaust deniers can say what they say (and why in countries such as France and Germany specific laws make the holocaust of the Jews  by the Nazis, or that of the Armenians by the Turks, a crime). Justice Holmes’s exception for falsely yelling fire in a crowded theater carves out the exception it does because the 100% certain consequence that will follow is that there will be an immediate stampede and, as a result, immediate death. 

Publicizing military information in wartime is also an exception to free speech. However, right now, misinformation on vaccines is greatly from derelict teaching by the state at school level. The First Amendment has to protect misinformation, otherwise, someone would have to decide what constitutes misinformation… And also because in some cases we don’t know how misinformed misinformation is. Saying that existing COVID vaccines are 100% safe is apparently itself misinformation (as health authorities have given warnings, most of them directed at the Astrazeneca-Oxford vaccine). 

As it is the government clearly cannot be given the power of determining what disinformation and misinformation are: that’s a direct route to dictatorship. But the Deep State has made the argument that a private company like Facebook is not subject to the First Amendment – which, of course, applies only to the government – Private companies can decide that someone is spewing false information and can decide not to give that person their time and means, their platform and access to their users.

However, first of all Facebook, with nearly three billion users, is not a private company anymore, but a world public utility, the world’s most prominent monopoly. The Facebook’s leader has been welcomed in the presence of ultimate leaders and palaces, all over the planet. If there was a world monopoly ever, Facebook is it; even the oil giants of the 1950s never had that sort of power. 

Secondly there is judicial precedent saying that using private companies to do, or say what the government wants in matters of opinion, is unconstitutional. Third, the platforms are not private companies anymore when they do what the government is suggesting them to do. That the government claims to be merely suggesting that the platforms ban people who spread misinformation but not requiring the platforms to do so, is a distinction without a difference… especially as the White House admitted they “worked closely”.

In other words, no isegoria and no parrhesia... This is outright sinister.

The way out is to establish an independent court of truth, debate and plausibility which would just give explanations, debates, recommendations and stars.

Patrice Ayme

Debate rejuvenates society, just as fire rejuvenates a forest, by letting eternal truths stand bigger and stronger, by clearing the brush:

The Islamist “Mistake” In Afghanistan, Imperium Americum, And The Civilizational Clock

America’s rhetoric has always been for progress and human rights: Jefferson, owning 200 slaves, some of them nearly as white as himself, and his own children, was an expert at this. Talk one way, act the opposite. In truth the roots of the mentality of the USA are exploitative and genocidal. That does not mean we should stay stuck in that way, and we did not. The five thousand US Navy sailors who died in the Guadalcanal campaign, in a few weeks, when two US aircraft carriers were sunk, were, indeed, fighting fascism. In one family, in that single battle, five brothers died.

However, US plutocracy had sold oil to Hirohito and his generals, enabling them to invade Korea, Manchuria, China, Vietnam, and Asia in general, for decades. Similarly, Mussolini, Hitler, and even Stalin were fed in all sorts of ways by US plutocracy. The result of this mess was US domination.

It is indeed troubling that many on the so-called left, full of rage, embrace overseas horrible versions of what they condemn at home, although the domestic versions are quasi innocuous. That is nothing new: European Communists embraced the dictator Stalin (and his ally Hitler). People get carried away by anger.

The mistake in Afghanistan was embracing an Islamist Constitution: at Islamism, the Taliban is better. Instead the civilizational clock should have been put back to 1979, to the secular republic that president Jimmy Carter attacked on July 3, 1979. But there may have been a secret US will to fail: after all, Islamism keeps the world divided.

The British, then the US, from the 1920s, weaponized Islamism to get access to oil, undisturbed by populism.

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: David Brooks (NYT) published my preceding comment above, bringing the following reaction:. 

Afghan Papers, New York:

@Patrice Ayme Brilliant analysis, thank you!

***

October 26, 1942, Santa Cruz islands battle, US Navy aircraft carrier Hornet under the first attack of the day, already on fire, hit by several bombs. A few weeks earlier in the same area, the aircraft carrier Wasp was also sunk. Hit by many bombs, two suicide bombers, nine torpedoes, and four hundred five inch rounds at least, during three separate coordinated attacks, Hornet would sink that day. The thousands men on board believed they were fighting evil, and they were. Imperial fascist Japan suffered 2.5 million killed in World War Two, mostly underfed troops… But inflicted more than 40 million fatalities on others, mostly Chinese civilians… Thanks to California oil from Getty and company, which made possible the invasion of China… The plane diving at the Hornet in the picture above is a suicide bomber, which would hit the carrier just where it is pointed at, aft of the island.