Flaunting Wealth Is A Plutocratic Trick

 It is reported that Justice Clarence Thomas of the Supreme Court enjoys being a pet of billionaire Harlan Crow. Nothing surprising here: so-called “Justices”gaily frolick with the wealthy and mighty, and some of them are suspiciously rich.

Thomas enjoyed vacations on Harlan’s gigantic superyacht. Worldwide there are around 6,000 superyachts (more than 30 meters long). That’s more than ever, and their numbers are growing rapidly. Superyacht cost a huge amount of money to purchase, maintain and operate, they are a more spectacular symbol of wealth than private jets. Private jets are one percent of US CO2 emissions. They are government subsidized, in several ways, and typically cost nothing to those who use them, because of tax tricks. When this is pointed out, the standard retort is that the private jet industry employs more than one million US citizens. (Well, the slave industry used to employ even more… And got cancelled, although it was not in the business of killing the planet…)

Private aviation added 37 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere in 2016, more than the annual emissions of Hong Kong or Ireland. Since then emissions have multiplied. In Western Europe alone in 2022 the carbon dioxide from private jets was more than Uganda – a country of some 46 million people – produces in a year. Private jets should be banned, just as private slaves are banned, because they poison the biosphere, thus poison us all, something arguably more toxic than private slavery and Greenpeace agrees (finally!) 

In a typical show of contempt for We The People, influencer Kylie Jenner took a 17-minute flight between two regional airports in California. One Twitter user wrote, “kylie jenner is out here taking 3 minute flights with her private jet, but I’m the one who has to use paper straws.” Many plutocrats engage in such public narcistic energy consumption: it’s free advertizing of their unjust power, hence foster their allure, all the more with a zest of sulfur, and taxpayers pay for it [1].

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Why would powerful individuals want to flaunt their wealth? To become even more powerful! Flaunting power attracts followers! Power attracts power! The syndrome goes back to Rome when the wealthy organized ultra-expensive games, complete with tigers, elephants and pricey gladiators: game and fame financiers became loved by the rabble, thus influential.

Who are today’s wealthy trying to impress? Those they are trying to influence, and transform psychologically into begging pigeons! Not so much the average voter, with whom they don’t intersect. Instead the public of those who flaunt ultra wealth is the intermediate corps of influencers, journalists, politicians, regulators, judges, lawyers, professors, etc., all of those who make society go where the wealthiest want them to go. They all meet in parties and other social occasions, including vacations and fancy conferences… Those who do really well will be invited on the jets, the superyachts, or the grandly named “World Economic Forum”.

We are in an extreme wealth concentration, surpassing the so-called Gilded Age, when the US West was economically developed, through the immigration of millions. Differently from the Gilded Age, oligarchs now are much more powerful. They are full blown plutocrats, with the full power of evil: in the 1930s, and 1940s, they financed and directly invested with fascist dictators (Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Hirohito, Franco, etc…), before switching on them. Nowadays Western politics, propelled by oligarch influence, has been to finance and directly invest with nuclear armed superpowers (Russia, China).

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Private planes and yachts are extremely damaging to the environment. Some of these creatures fly private jets just a few minutes, instead of using ground transportation for a few miles. Ludicrous damage to the environment for fun is not a flaw as far as plutocrats are concerned, but a quality: it demonstrates their worth, and that the world is ruled by terrifying plutocrats ready to sacrifice all of the biosphere on the altar of (their own) evil glorified. 

The US became a middle class society after 1945, because 16 million young men had been armed physically and psychologically, and trained to kill in the name of liberty from oppression. It would have been dangerous to treat them unjustly. The GI Bill made sure that it won’t happen.

A lot of the erroneous policies followed by the planet, such as non-decarbonification or empowering dictators by making them provide all what democracies need, originate with this evil, the enormous influence of plutocrats… and for the good reason that they are the prime beneficiaries of it… Plutocrats, being evil, do best with their most evil colleagues, the tyrants. Be it only because they set the agenda. Recently Biden said the ultra rich paid only 3% tax on income. What does he propose to do about it? Persecute the middle class with adding 87,000 agents to the IRS as US president Biden proposed to do? Most of the billionaire tax evasion is perfectly legal: the billionaires paid the legislators to make it so. 

What to do? The ultra wealthy often borrow to buy themselves everything. So I proposed that: tax borrowing for personal use should be taxed as income above, say 20 million dollars.   

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DECAPITATE PLUTOCRACY:

For centuries, the Roman Republic had a 100% wealth tax above around 50 million dollars of total wealth. Because of globalization that Roman Republican anti-plutocratic tax failed after the Second Punic war: possessions overseas were not taxed by Rome! Plutocrats then grabbed land from the empoverished middle class.

In an epic struggle against corruption, tribune Tiberius Gracchus passed a law in 133 BCE to make sure the old redistribution law outlawing hyper wealth was enforced. Plutocrats (calling themselves “the best”, “Optimates”) reacted with fury, assassinating Tiberius, delaying the implementation of the law, and then having killed the Gracchi, also assassinated their fellow-travelers, and more than 5,000 of the partisans of land reform, the lex agraria. A similar law was imposed just once by Consul Caesar in 59 BCE, over the Senate’s enraged resistance, and the Senate hated Caesar thereafter. In a quick succession of massacres and civil war, much of the population of Rome was killed, and finally Augustus, Caesar’s grand nephew and adoptive son, established his military dictatorship masquerading as a decaying republic. 

Rome died as a republic over the next few centuries… The blow in the Occident was the religious war battle of Frigidus in 394 CE, when the Occidental Roman army was destroyed, enabling the Barbarian invasions. Then, all over after 540 CE, emperor Justinian inebriated by the recovery of North Africa, but then enfeebled by volcanism and the plague, thoroughly destroyed Rome, thanks to delirious war conducted by his general Belisarius…

But then part of the spirit of the Roman Republic was revived… And now has gone urbi et orbi… Although the direct descendants (France, Europe, Anglo-Saxons) are more faithful to the best of the republic than ersatzes such as the Putinodrome, or People Republic Of China… The problem remains, and it is the core of how civilizations collapse most often, plutocracy survived in command, even though representative democracy grew back… And now plutocracy is more powerful than ever.

Rome collapsed… Until she was “renovated” as the Franks put it. And here we are! A plutocracy chain reaction, unbound, is what brought Rome down. Since then we have been experiencing controlled plutocracy… Until now, when, clearly, the evil-power os out off bonds and threatening not just civilization, humanity but also the biosphere itself!

And, since it is the plutocracy which is control and empowered for example, strongman Xi or tyrant Putin, it is the plutocracy which is culprit, and should charged and executed…. supposing, all too optimistically, that We the People can find enough residual power, somewhere, to do so.

Some may object that, should plutocracy be made illegal, we would not have around business geniuses such as Elon Musk… Well, not really: Musk’s businesses grew mostly from government subsidies and other people’s money. His personal wealth got leveraged just once in the growing of SpaceX until around 2009 (and then a NASA contract saved SpaceX). I do not propose to do away with adventurous capitalism, and not even of the subsidized sort… As long as public control can be exerted. For example, the US government (“We The People”) could bankrupt SpaceX overnight, simply by withdrawing financial support and, or, closing down various authorizations (like the one of launching rockets).

Closing down the world plutocratic influential web is something else, a good thing. Shutting down entrepreneurs would be a bad thing. The worldwide plutocratic web is ubiquitous, all over all minds, and extremely insidious.

As all formidable tasks, shutting down plutocracy must be done one step at a time. The first step is that plutocrats can’t enjoy yachts and private jets anymore. That should be easy, with the appropriate legislation on how much personal CO2 one can emit. Thereafter, limit non-business personal borrowing….

Patrice Ayme

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[1] The case of strict business flying, as when Elon Musk shuttles between distant businesses during the day, could be made, but under strict and drastic supervision, with thorough justifications which could be automated by, say, AI.

Nuclear War Is An Argument In Favor Of Civilian Nuclear Power!

That sounds counter-intuitive. However, “renewables” would shut down during nuclear winter, making a bad situation way worse. Those who hate nuclear civilian energy apparently never thought carefully about nuclear war, nuclear winter, and V7 volcanic eruptions. Or then they do as if they never heard of them: these large scale, “renewables” extinguishing catastrophes are not over their mental horizons. After trying to addict us to Putin, now shallow thinkers and the emotionally frayed, may prepare for us an even more ominous fate… 

Indeed “renewables” partisans, meaning getting energy from sun and wind, as in the High Middle Ages, never seem to contemplate what will happen when it doesn’t shine and blow. One such occasion is nuclear war and its accompanying “nuclear winter”. “Nuclear winter” is an ancient notion which got reinvigorated recently with new simulations (in the famous scientific journal Nature, August 2022). 

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Volcanic eruptions can have drastic impacts on atmospheric composition and climate. They, furious igneous province volcanism, caused the greatest mass extinction ever. Powerful explosive eruptions can inject large amounts of SO2, ash, water vapor and various other chemical species into the stratosphere. Volcanic SO2 injected into the stratosphere is chemically converted to sulfuric acid vapor H2 SO4 over a timescale of days to months, causing substantial new particle formation and aerosol growth by condensation. This can be long lasting, with particle concentrations remaining substantially enhanced for several years in the case of tropical eruptions: Krakatoa’s magnificent sunsets were well documented, worldwide, for three years after 1883.

Pinatubo, a VE6 eruption in 1991, injected 10 million tons of SO2 in the high atmosphere (according to simulations, not direct measuremnts), The stratospheric veil Pinatubo created lowered temperatures worldwide by one degree Celsius, slowing down the human GreenHouse Gas catastrophe.

In 1815, Mount Tambora in Indonesia next to Bali, unleashed the largest known volcanic eruption in documented history. The volcano’s elevation reached more than 4,300 meters (14,100 feet) high. Now it’s only 2850 meters: it lost its upper mile. The region, over thousands of miles, was plunged in total darkness for four days. In the following months, Tambora’s ash and sulfur dioxide clouds rose and spread worldwide, blocking enough sunlight to produce “the year without a summer”— in 1816 that resulted in massive crop failures and famine across the globe. Europe froze in July and August. Tambora was a VE7 volcanic eruption. VE7s volcanic eruptions occur every 125 years on average (over the last 100,000 years. Better: every 10,000 years or so, on average, earth is graced with a VE8 eruption.

Under a volcanic blanket, there is no more solar, and no more wind either, both being activated by solar energy which can’t reach the ground when it’s blocked in the stratosphere (above 12 kilometers altitude). 

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Some may object that Vulcan will be favorable in the next few centuries, and produce no VE7 eruption, out of deference for humanity. Maybe. However one will also need Mars to be favorable, and organize no nuclear war. As the Russian dictator’s hysteria has shown, one little tyrant can blackmail the entire planet into nuclear submission, or at least try to. 

Many scientists have considered that fires ignited by hundreds or thousands of nuclear explosions would release millions of tons of soot, blocking sunlight and inducing global environmental effects. I am not as pessimistic as they are (soot should not get as high as SO2 from Pinatubo, Krakatoa or Tambora). However, what the most recent studies by the most prominent “nuclear winter” study group claim to show is the following: 

A few years after a nuclear war between the United States, its allies, and Russia, the global average calories produced would drop by about 90%—leaving an estimated 5 billion dead from the famine, the research group reported. A worst-case war between India and Pakistan could drop calorie production to 50% and cause 2 billion deaths. The team tried to simulate the impact of food-saving emergency strategies, such as converting livestock feed and household waste to food. But in the larger war scenarios, those efforts did little to save lives.

An obvious solution to nuclear winter in the most advanced economies would be to produce food in shelters, using hydroponics and artificial lighting. However, that requires lots of energy… which will then not be available from renewables!  

In general, the AWE (Absolute Worth Energy) of modern technology has been ramping up: it costs more and more total absolute energy to make increasingly sophisticated machines, such as a smart phones or flying machines. Data themselves are requiring more and more energy: giant servers are installed in Arctic regions to reduce the cost of cooling them, etc.

Intermittent blow and shine renewables are leading to war, but have not experienced full world war yet. Instead intermittent blow and shine renewables are cannibalizing the entire energy sector, trillions of subsidies at a time… precisely because humanity has not experienced a VE7 or nuclear winter recently…

So we see that depending upon intermittent blow and shine renewables to too great an extent is a strategic error (strategos means general in Greek). Worse even it freezes us in the present situation: a huge dependency (84%!) on fossil fuels, and a rising dependency on “renewables”. As the invasion of Ukraine has shown, the world economy is highly dependent, for food and energy upon peace and transportation.

The solution, once again, is to develop nuclear technologies, without forgetting Thorium (which could warm up Norway, as its name indicates). Thorium, which is fertile, not fissile, has a great, and safe, future. It can’t be weaponized. 

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It is thrilling to see that pseudo-ecologists and various other hypocritical peaceniks, in their urge to foster their pathetic view of the universe, are causing the very conditions they claim to be determined to avoid. 

Indeed, the policies pseudo-ecologists promote, the toxic mix of fossil fuels, wind and sun make the world increasingly dependent upon… fossil fuels  (total coal usage is at its highest ever in 2022, and projected to rise further in 2023!). One of the reasons the Kremlin dictator attacked is that he believed Europe could not be without Russian fossil fuels, and thus would submit to his will. 

Fossil fuels are dictator friendly, because they are capital intensive (hence plutocrat friendly, and plutocrats love dictators, being themselves of the same ilk)… and yet require relatively few highly skilled workers (geologists, engineers, technicians)… Nuclear is also capital intensive, but requires a huge academic background (especially in the present situation: deploying high temperature reactors, or Thorium reactors, optimally, bring in the need for massive fundamental research)… Thus nuclear energy deployment would be brain intensive… exactly what the world’s plutocratic order doesn’t like.

The more dependent upon dictators the world is, the greater the danger of war, thus, nuclear war (nukes make bigger booms). The more fragile the world economy is, the more susceptible to blackmail by bellicose dictators the world is… And the more brainless from too much pseudo-ecology, pseudo-democracy, pseudo-philanthropy by self-obsessed sharks, the world is, the more trouble there will be. 

The cost of brainlessness is war. 

Make no mistake, as the hypocritical Obama would say, I am all for solar power (wind, not so much)… As long as it is accompanied by (green and, or nuclear) hydrogen and nuclear power… Only thus can we significantly reduce our dependence on fossil fuels (which are used for all sorts of plastics, not just burning). The needed balance between intermittents (plus hydrogen!) and nuclear should be such that, in the case of complete failure of blow and shine for months (from a VE8 or a strong nuclear winter), the civilian nuclear sector could marginally hope to provide enough power for the basic services, including food production.

No, pseudo-ecologists and partisans of the return to the Neolithic, you can’t put nuclear energy back into the bottle as in one of these movies which constitute most of the culture you have. Nuclear energy has been militarized, and was launched by French partisans of world peace as early as 1938, because the Curies, who were as intellectual (Nobel prize winners!) and humanistic (early development of nuclear medicine; communists and fanatical partisan of world peace) understood that it was moral to nuke the Nazis, and that it could turn in an existential necessity.

Want world ethics? Want planetary safety? Put more real intelligence in charge. 

Patrice Ayme

Tonga Volcano Ash as seen from the International Space Station, January 2022. The top plume of that 10 megaton explosion reached 55 kilometers. That was a VE5! A VE7 (like Tambora, every 125 years on average) could explode with 1000 Megatons at its worst moment. Ash would be one hundred times more… Multiply all this by ten for a VE8… Recently the frequencies of VE7s has been augmented. A so far unidentified VE7 or two, (or an impactor?) affected very adversely the reconquest activities of the Roman empire in the Sixth Century…

We Need An AWEsome Economy

MONEY CAN BE DEFINED THROUGH PHYSICS, MAKING ECONOMY REAL:

Xenophon defined Eco-nomy: it’s House-management. Now our house, Earth, is on the fire: we have a CO2 crisis, heating up the atmosphere, and lethally acidifying the oceans; and there are also several other extinction crises, unfolding their termination shocks now [1]. 

Models vastly underestimate the potential imminent damage to planet Earth because what they can’t compute with, they ignore (such as the possible sudden and catastrophic melting of the under sea level areas of Antarctica… which is most of it…). I am charitable, saying this: methinks truly that academics do not want to displease too much the governments which feed them, by searching too enthusiastically for the real truth: this is why the UN’s IPCC deliberately underestimated the CO2 and greenhouse crises [2].   

The immediate conclusion is that we need to decarbonize primary energy production (84% fossil fuels). But we can’t do that only with ancient energy sources such as sun and wind. 

So the only solution is to invest in various new technologies which have not been invented or developed yet. We need to evaluate how much they really cost [3].

More generally we need to change currency… Because our present currencies have no meaning in terms of their true energy cost, or in terms of how much they cost our biosphere, or in terms of their human cost. We need a currency reflecting how much real energy content a product or service contains (the product could be a solid state physics PhD; or a pound of coal which costs little to produce, yet much to burn, thanks to its nefarious consequences).

This currency, called Absolute Worth Energy, would evaluate the energy content of every single product or service, from first principles of physics. Enormous computing power and subtle theories would enable us to evaluate exactly how much various aspects of civilization cost.

So the cost of things would be based on how much they cost the planet. Economics would become a more exact science by adopting, similarly to physics, energy as its fundamental unit, a unit independent of man. Economics would have AWE as its fundamental unit. Economics would acquire meaning.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Under various shocks entire oceanic zones are becoming devoid of any life. A foretaste of things to come, obviously. A big reason is our inability, and unwillingness of our powerful masters, to compute how much cost is associated with the ways they impose on us. 

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[2] The fossil fuel industry and its finance and power connections still rule the world: consder the Ukraine crisis. If oil was one dollar a barril, dictator Putin would have no army, and no blackmail.

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[3]. Not just how many Uyghurs killed per battery made in the Chinese dictatorship… but also how much coral could be killed by New Caledonia nickel extraction, and how much it would cost in energy to reconstitute the destroyed ecosystems.

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P/S: This is slightly elongated version of a comment to Krugman: Paul Krugman, When Do We Need New Economic Theories? Feb. 8, 2022. Paul published it right away… Thanks!

How many million years to arrive at this exquisite complexity? How much would it cost to remake it from scratch if it disappeared?