Plutocracy’s Evil Bend Is Why California High Speed Train Not Built

California politics has been captured by plutocrats, and the high speed train disaster is a consequence. Plutocrats are devious: they support the cause of their enemies, with friendly, concerned faces, and new language, while giving them cancer. They kill with a pat in the back, smiling.

Initially it was simple and obvious: as direct as possible between San Francisco and LA: downtown SF to SF airport, then 92 bridge (an enormous existing bridge), then straight to Altamont Pass next to the enormous freeway, then all the way down the straight I5 freeway through cheap wasteland. This is the way the original high speed network, in France, was built: straight in the wilderness. 

And it was the original, voter approved plan, decades ago. 

However California NIMBYs transformed the plan into a (slow) commuter rail… arguably, they said to serve cities, but truly their motivation was to torpedo the project, by making it impossibly expensive, complicated, and taking away its main reason for being: to be faster than plane, city center to city center. 

That the motivation of Democratic donors and pseudo-environmentalists was evil is demonstrated by their resistance to train electrification, where they delayed matters by decades… Plutocracy is strong in California and plutocracy loves private jets, not successful high speed trains for common folks: that would introduce the nice life to the masses, who deserve to suffer. 

Let them fly private, say the plutocrats, and they chuckle. The private jet industry in the US employs one million workers, makes 1% of the CO2 emissions of the US, and is entirely taxpayer subsidized. Whereas no electric train is in sight in San Francisco (they were a century ago)… Private jets can be readily observed, flying all over…

Patrice Ayme

Altamont Pass (it really looks like this; sequoia forests are 30 kilometers to the west, in the direction of the windmills). Plutocrats didn’t want the train to go that way, because it would have passed through the East Bay, population 2.5 million… Instead of being used as a commuter train to bring servants to the hyper wealthy Silicon Valley

P/S: For further edification one can consult a long article in the NYT:

How California’s Bullet Train Went Off the Rails
America’s first experiment with high-speed rail has become a multi-billion-dollar nightmare. Political compromises created a project so expensive that almost no one knows how it can be built as originally envisioned. (By Ralph Vartabedian; Oct. 9, 2022.)

LOS ANGELES — Building the nation’s first bullet train, which would connect Los Angeles and San Francisco, was always going to be a formidable technical challenge, pushing through the steep mountains and treacherous seismic faults of Southern California with a series of long tunnels and towering viaducts.

But the design for the nation’s most ambitious infrastructure project was never based on the easiest or most direct route. Instead, the train’s path out of Los Angeles was diverted across a second mountain range to the rapidly growing suburbs of the Mojave Desert — a route whose most salient advantage appeared to be that it ran through the district of a powerful Los Angeles county supervisor. [Who made a deal with a plutocrat who gave him a lease… adds the NYT… “If I get my lease, you get my vote was the deal,” Mr. Bauer, the most influential member of the train board said.]

The dogleg through the desert was only one of several times over the years when the project fell victim to political forces that have added billions of dollars in costs and called into question whether the project can ever be finished.

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.…

The state was warned repeatedly that its plans were too complex. SNCF, the French national railroad, was among bullet train operators from Europe and Japan that came to California in the early 2000s with hopes of getting a contract to help develop the system.

The company’s recommendations for a direct route out of Los Angeles and a focus on moving people between Los Angeles and San Francisco were cast aside, said Dan McNamara, a career project manager for SNCF.‌

The French company‌ ‌pulled out in 2011.

“There were so many things that went wrong,” Mr. McNamara said. “SNCF was very angry. They told the state they were leaving for North Africa, which was less politically dysfunctional. They went to Morocco and helped them build a high speed rail system.”

Morocco’s bullet train started service in 2018.

…But as with so many decisions on the project, other considerations won the day. There was heavy lobbying by Silicon Valley business interests and the city of San Jose, which saw the line as an economic boon and a link to lower cost housing in the Central Valley for tech employees. They argued for routing the train over the much higher Pacheco Pass — which would require 15 miles of expensive tunnels. [Instead of just half a mile with Altamont.]

Ecologically Fake, Plutocratically Correct

The present “ecological” policies of the West were made to fail. It was all a deep and subtle plot. Powers that be, dictators and financiers all tied in to fossil fuels, conspiredt to invest trillions in “renewables”… knowing full well that this couldn’t work as advertized. Intermittent renewables, absent nuclear and hydro, need fossil fuels as base power. This is why pseudo-“super green” California closed nuclear and is dismantling dams (which can be used as batteries for renewables). The present CA governor, who poses as an ecologist, emanates from the Getty Oil…

 

Official, admired “ecologists” were paid by the Kremlin dictatorship, for decades. The greatest revenue and source of military power of the Kremlin is also fossil fuels. Watch German ecologists, presently the government in Germany, close three perfectly safe, functional and fueled nuclear power plants in Germany. The “Greens” will replace those reactors with coal plants. 

 

So vicious are these pseudo-ecologists and Kremlin servants that they prefer to dispose of unused nuclear fuel, at great cost, ecological and financial… rather than letting that nuclear fuel be used in plants, making energy. It is as if they seeked the opportunity to make more CO2…. and help nuclear dictator Putin make more money to purchase electronics on the black market, to equip his rockets, and kill Ukrainian civilians.

 

Those devious plots are increasing considerably the production of CO2, now well above 50 gigatons per year. Thus they make the CO2 catastrophe worse, and thus foster wars, the first of which is the invasion of Ukraine, which is motivated by the fact that well irrigated Ukraine will stay a world sized breadbasket while other countries roast. Recently, Ukraine was providing enough grain to feed 400 million people. It could produce even more.

 

The CO2 catastrophe, wars and an enormous, stealthy yet indispensable fossil fuels infrastructure thanks to the  “renewables” trick will make the powers that be ever more powerful.  

 

As it is, after spending trillions which should have been spent on hydrogen and nuclear instead of sun and wind, “renewables” are less than 4% of the world primary energy production, and all they did was to make advanced countries more fossil fuels dependent: nuclear energy production has gone down 10% in the US, and much more in Europe, as enormous subsidies went to sun, wind and blah blah blah tricks to transfer more money to the wealthiest through “carbon” exchange tricks.

 

Not only do conspiracies drive history, but they are enacted through plots… Helped by disinformation and myths…Nothing new here. What’s new is nukes, CO2 levels not seen since before the dawn of humanity, the sixth extinction, and the various forms of pollution driving it…

Patrice Ayme

Let there be wind, say corrupt ecologists paid by Kremlin dictators and other tyrants.

Schröder, Merkel, Plutocracy: New York Times Censorship Series

As long as the West gives a billion dollars a day to Putin, by purchasing Russian hydrocarbons, Putin knows the West is not serious about opposing him. The Russian economy has become a war economy, with weapons factories going 24/7. Paradoxically, the Western sanctions help that way. So everybody is happy: Putin runs a stronger and more lethal dictatorship, and failed to conquer Ukraine in a clean manner, enabling him to destroy it completely instead… which is what he truly wants to do [1].

Corruption in politicians is a big problem. Politicians should be legally obligated not to profit from the office they have been elected, or selected for… For the rest of their lives.

Putin genocides in Chechnya and Ukraine are part and parcel of the general plutocratic problem which ruins the West, democracy, the climate, and even the biosphere. Putin was long the darling of the WEF, World Economic Forum and Davos. The WEF conspiracy to feed and empower the Russian oligarchy, headed by the KGB/FSB, dates from the 1990s. Putin should have become known as a genocidal tyrant after he killed one Chechen out of six.

However, Germany made itself fully dependent upon the genocidal tyrant, years after the genocide, and while fully cognisant of said genocide. It was apparently assumed by German leaders that greed would fix hate, and the will to kill. Now Germany and other European genocidal collaborators are sending more than a billion dollars a day to feed the genocidal tyrant’s war crime factory.

In light of this, and her personal, murky history, one may wonder whether Angela Merkel was not a double agent (truly working for Putin’s KGB). She declared that, when the KGB approached her, she brushed them off by telling them that “she talked too much”. This sounds like disinformation to me: Merkel knew that the fact that the KGB tried to recruit her would come up, so she planted plausible denial. She had junior dictatorial positions and became spokesperson for the Stalinian East German state. Putin and his Western enablers have to be stopped, arrested.

***

The preceding comment to an article about the corruption of Chancellor Gerhard Schröder,was censored by the New York Times. Why, we don’t know. Was it because I insinuated that Putin was an adored child and instrument of the WEF?

Censoring without good legal basis should be illegal, be it on Internet social media, or conventional media. Censorship can be used to steer public opinion, which is a violation of democracy. Moreover media can get to know some ideas and then steal them (personally observed many times). For example I will not be surprised that in a distant future, if higher ups decided she is past her expiration date, the same ideas will surface about Merkel (I had excoriated Schröder and his greed for years, as I had that of Obama, etc.)

***

Here are extracts of

The Former Chancellor Who Became Putin’s Man in Germany
Gerhard Schröder, who is paid almost $1 million a year by Russian-controlled energy companies, has become a pariah. But he is also a symbol of Germany’s Russia policy. (April 23, 2022.)

HANOVER, Germany — On the evening of Dec. 9, 2005, 17 days after Gerhard Schröder left office as chancellor of Germany, he got a call on his cellphone. It was his friend President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia.

Mr. Putin was pressing Mr. Schröder to accept an offer to lead the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, the Russian-controlled company in charge of building the first undersea gas pipeline directly connecting Russia and Germany.

“Are you afraid to work for us?” Mr. Putin had joked. Mr. Schröder might well have been, given the appearance of possible impropriety — the pipeline he was now being asked to head had been agreed to in the final weeks of his chancellorship, with his strong support.

He took the job anyway.

Seventeen years later, the former chancellor, who recounted the events himself in a pair of rare interviews, remains as defiant as ever…

… Germany is deeply reliant on Russian gas, giving Mr. Putin coercive leverage over Europe while filling the Kremlin’s war chest.

That dependency grew out of a German belief — embraced by a long succession of chancellors, industry leaders, journalists and the public — that a Russia bound in trade would have too much to risk in conflict with Europe, making Germany more secure while also profiting its economy.

“He took advantage of the reputation and influence of the chancellor’s office and offered himself up as an agent for Russian interests to get rich,” said Norbert Röttgen, a conservative lawmaker, former minister and longtime Russia hawk.

…Mr. Schröder, now 78, spoke with undiminished swagger, cracking jokes but arguing in essence that, well, if he got rich, then so did his country. When it came to Russian gas, everyone was on board: “They all went along with it for the last 30 years,” he said. “But suddenly everyone knows better.”….

…Mr. Schröder is useful to the Russian leader as a cat’s paw to further his own interest in hooking Germany on cheap Russian gas.

Germany’s reliance on Russian gas surged to 55 percent before Russia’s attack on Ukraine began in February, from 39 percent in 2011, amounting to 200 million euros, or about $220 million, in energy payments every day to Russia.

It has helped make Mr. Putin perhaps one of the world’s richest men, has buoyed his otherwise feeble economy, and has enabled and emboldened him to pursue his aggression in Ukraine

Even as Mr. Putin was massing troops on the Ukraine border last fall, Mr. Schröder visited the Russian leader in Sochi, one of Mr. Putin’s favorite retreats, across from the Black Sea coast that Russian forces are now trying to rip from Ukraine.

Since Russia’s attack on Ukraine began, the entire staff of Mr. Schröder’s parliamentary office resigned in protest, including his chief of staff and speechwriter of 20 years, who had been with him since his days as chancellor.

He relinquished his honorary citizenship in Hanover before his home city could strip it from him — something it last did, posthumously, to Adolf Hitler.

But Mr. Schröder is undaunted. He remains chairman of the shareholder committee of Nord Stream, reportedly earning about $270,000 a year, and served as head of the supervisory board of Nord Stream 2…

Three weeks before Russia launched its attack on Ukraine, Gazprom — the Soviet energy ministry turned Russian state-controlled gas company, which owns 51 percent of Nord Stream and all of Nord Stream 2 — announced that Mr. Schröder would join its board, too… since 2017 he has also presided over the board of the Russian oil company Rosneft, earning another $600,000 a year, according to public records, on top of his monthly $9,000 government stipend as former chancellor.

But even his fiercest critics acknowledge that Mr. Schröder’s close and lucrative dealings with Russia are also emblematic of his country’s decades-old approach of engagement with Russia. Lobbied aggressively by Germany’s export industry and cheered on by labor unions, successive chancellors, including Ms. Merkel, collectively engineered Germany’s dependency on Russian energy.

“Schröder is the tip of the iceberg,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, a former ambassador to the United States and veteran diplomat. “But there is a whole iceberg below him.”

Matthias Warnig, the chief executive of Nord Stream 2, who took part in 19 of the meetings in the report, has acknowledged having been a former spy of the Stasi, the former secret police of Communist East Germany. Stasi records show that, in February 1988, both he and Mr. Putin, when he was stationed in Dresden as a K.G.B. officer, were awarded medals for their service. But Mr. Warnig has denied reports that he had recruited spies for Mr. Putin in their old days.

In February 2015, Mr. Schröder took Mr. Warnig to see Mr. Gabriel to discuss cooperation with Russia, according to the list of meetings provided in the report. He also accompanied Nord Stream 2 executives to see Mr. Steinmeier’s ambassadors to Moscow and Brussels at the time.

Steinmeier, who is Germany’s president told the NYT: added: “Should you put my visits and meetings in Russia in a different context, I want to inform you now that I will initiate legal steps.”

Is it why the NYT decided it shouldn’t publish my assertion of the obvious: Merkel a traitor?

Nord Stream 2 was approved in June 2015, the same year that Gazprom was also allowed under the Merkel government to buy Germany’s biggest strategic gas-storage facility, where it has kept levels of gas conspicuously low for the past year in what may have been preparation for providing leverage for Mr. Putin in his war.

But Mr. Schröder said he was unbothered by the growing dependency, or by American and Eastern European warnings about Mr. Putin weaponizing energy supplies.

German Chancellor Schröder explained the thesis that, while there may be masters and slaves, masters depend as much upon those they enslave, because they couldn’t be wealthy without them… So Putin may have enslaved Germany, but Putin needs his slave.

Just the boyfriend I needed! Chancellor Schröder, left, with Putin: make me rich, and you can kill whoever you want!

[1]  Khrushchev, an Ukrainian, was the mentor of Brezhnev, another Ukrainian. Putin is very aware of this, and apparently, ressents it (Putin has different ethnic roots).

Did Xi’s Great Reich Have World Criminal Intent?

Other title, to sound more serious:

DID XI’s COVID 19 DISSEMINATION POLICY HAVE A WORLD CRIMINAL INTENT?

All dictatorships  are criminal, in peacetime. But it is one thing, to be criminal inside one’s own country, and it is another, to project one’s criminality onto the world. At first sight, Xi’s regime did the modern equivalent of distributing smallpox blankets to the savages. And we are the savages. So we have been savaged.

At the very least, the West should be able to find out what happened. But Xi’s dictatorship has blocked inquiries. 

My old position on the subject was that the pandemic was made possible by the closed nature of the People Republic of China. But that position turns out to be too moderate. At some point, at the latest around January 7, 2020, Xi and his goons were aware of the danger posed by the new Coronavirus. Why the 7th of January? Because Xi then gave a discourse about the virus to his top goons. By January 23, the enormous city of Wuhan (bigger population than Sweden), and the province of Hubei (as populous as Turkey or Germany) were lockdowned. In particular, all flights were grounded. All land communications were cut out of Hubei, or within Hubei, between cities and villages.

[Vice-President Biden and Virusman Xi, 2013.] US Plutocracy made Hitler, to propel its own greed and empire, in the guise of good business, and jettisoned the German fascist states, when it became useful to do so… twice… US plutocracy also helped to make Xi, same idea. Xi changed the Chinese constitution after being encouraged in his way by Obama goons and US plutocrats, for years. But jettisoning the “Central State” (China) may prove harder… Lest we act now: Xi inherited his power from his dad, but he is still relatively weak, with enemies inside. To wait means a Chinese Kim style family. Virusman is still not as virulent as he will get, now is the time.

Meanwhile the WHO and its head, pushed and installed by Xi and his friends, kept on saying the virus couldn’t be transmitted human to human. Now this head of the WHO is the first who is not a physician, and comes from a country (Ethiopia) with tortured politics (the present leader of Ethiopia got a Nobel Peace Prize but is involved in a nasty civil war now). 

At the very least Xi’s dictatorship is guilty of CRIMINAL NEGLIGENCE; they committed acts, such as authorizing flights from Wuhan to the rest of the world, or claiming there was no human to human transmission, while knowing very well that such positioning endangered the rest of the world. And the result was hundreds of thousands dead worldwide, millions sick, and economic damage commensurate, so far with China’s entire yearly GDP.

When it arose after 1948, the Cold War with Russia was NOT caused by Stalin’s USSR being criminally negligent and bringing the death of hundreds of thousands of citizens of NATO countries [1]. In other words, the Cold War got launched, although there was no act of war (Casus Belli: Case Of War).

Xi and his goons knew, by early January, that there was human to human transmission. Had there been free press, free media in China, it would have been obvious there was a vicious SARS epidemic going on, at least a month earlier. Here is the problem of having a Closed Society. But, when the leadership of the Xi Reich decided to act decisively one way, to save massively lives inside China, while it and its agent (the WHO) decided to act the opposite for lives OUTSIDE China, one can only conclude there was a deliberate policy to inflict a pandemic onto the rest of the world.

Did Xi’s Dictatorship have criminal intent? Looks like it. Plutocratic sycophants go around and say a new cold war, this time with a Chinese dictatorship, would be a terrible mistake. Methinks that it would be a worse mistake to do nothing. The casual disregard of most of humanity by Xi is a warning. Let’s not forget his dad was from a regime which didn’t mind to kill dozens of millions to get its way.

What to do?

***

Ideally, overthrow the dictatorship… But remember what happened with Sparta, Athens and Persia: 

The situation we have with Xi’s Great Reich is similar with the Direct Democracy of Athens facing the fascist Persian plutocracy. What happened then is that Persia attacked and was defeated in two separate wars it launched. Then Athens tried to free Egypt, its ancient trading partner, in a long war it lost. Persia gained time, and then Sparta attacked Athens, and after thirty years, won, thanks to massive Persian financial intervention (Persia paid and made a Spartan fleet which was the proximal cause of Spartan victory).

What is the exact analogy? China as Persia, Russia as Persia, and the rather more than less degenerated West as Athens. Now Russia is getting hit hard by the Corochinavirus. And, differently from Sparta which was a fascist, racist, lethally murderous regime, Russia, is, nominally, a Republic with a permanent feature, strongman Putin, reminiscent of Pericles. Pericles had an excellent second wife, the philosopher Aspasia, but, he was, overall, a small-man fool (long story involving Pericles’ war plans conducive to a devastating epidemic, as happened; and also self-contradicting, self-destroying, and Athens’ destroying xenophobia). Now Putin has no Aspasia, a state-of the art thinker, instead he goes to talk with monks, who are state-of-the-middle-ages thinkers…

Thus, it’s important to not drive too much of a wedge between Russia and the rest of the West… (I am an old enemy of Putin, who couldn’t resist capturing Putin, land occupied by the Ancient Greeks for a millennium before the Huns came from Mongolia, causing invasions all over).

***

Shutting down Xi should be easy:

Bring back as much of the essential economic activities of the West presently conducted inside China until such a level that full war can be conducted the next day. Yes, full war. That means, for example, that the countless drugs presently made in China including the active principles of many antibiotics, and even hydroxychloroquine, should be brought back (even the hydroxychloroquine “made” in India uses an active principle from China). All dual purposes technologies should be exported to China when and only when they are militarily obsolete. 

This will require a refoundation of the US patent system, devastated by Obama and his China friendly plutocratic monopolistic goons… many of them billionaires giving the appearance of a soul to the “Democratic” Party.

As far as a global trading system is concerned, doing without the Chinese dictatorship would not just be salutary, it would be easy. First we can collaborate with India, a giant democracy, soon even larger in population than China… And historically, India was a crucial part of the Middle Earth supercivilization, the Indo-Euro-African ensemble. There is all of South America, all of Africa, to trade with. Trading to the obsessive extent we have been doing, with the Chinese dictatorship has only encouraged the rise of a more malignant form, the Xi regime. The Xi regime is the most aggressive regime based in Beijing since the Mongols ruled China (and tried to invade Japan and Indonesia…)

***

The kindness towards dictator Xi went in parallel with the kindness towards our own plutocrats

… which the Obama puppet regime displayed. Admiring a big strongman is conducive to admiring the smaller monopolists collaborating with him. Reminder; this is what happened with Hitler: without his US plutocrats to feed him, finance him and arm him, Hitler would have been nothing. IBM having the entire monopoly of computing inside Hitler’s Reich is enough of a proof. The same. Or similar happened with hundreds of other major US-Nazi industries. We have a similar situation with Xi Reich. It should be discontinued. 

As the Romans used to say: Si vis pacem, para bellum! If want peace, prepare war. Time to prepare war with Xi. After all, war with us is what he has been conducting (with much help from his friends the Western plutocrats). Not true? Prove it. We will soon have millions of corpses to point at, and the king of China has to explain to us why it’s not his fault, when everything points to the contrary. 

Do we want the world to live, threatened by such a lunatic?

Patrice Ayme   

***
***

[1] If the Cold War was launched without Casus Belli, one may ask if the Cold War was not an over reaction. No, as far as the US plutocracy was concerned, for three reasons:

1. The Cold War was designed to cover the tracks of the US leadership (FDR + Deep State + US plutocracy behind both)… which had given half of Europe to Stalin.
2. The aim of giving half of Europe to a stupid dictatorship was tantamount to keeping the other half of Europe, the old main center of civilization, hence creativity, under watch by the Stalin watchdog. Hence, instead of focusing on the problem of plutocracy and exactly what just happened within Europe (crafty promotion of German fascism and Nazism by US plutocracy), the European intellectual class launched itself in idle pursuits.
3. It launched a kabuki theater of fighting pseudo problems (like the Vietnam War: the US and Vietnam are now allies)… instead of the real problem, namely who is pulling the strings in the West.  

Idiots Say: “Idiocy Is Great!”

They are “young”, a fleeting notion in humans, and they scoff:”I want to go out and have fun! Why should I care that a few old folks may die?” Fun? What fun? Why at happened to the struggle against Nazism? Was not that a struggle to cancel those who wanted to help “natural selection” and kill whom they viewed as the weak? What do those “young” mean by “fun”? Is killing old people fun, then? Getting together and inebriating, namely drugging their brains out of commission? OK, I admit that if I had a brain as deranged as theirs, I would probably try to shut it down using alcohol, marihuana, opiates, glues and what not, too!

In France, one of their own, one of these “young”, described as a party girl, died from COVID 19. She was 16. In California a teen, age 14, died. In Illinois, Cook County, a ten month old infant died. A principal of a school, not even 40 years old, died in New York.

OK, easy for me to say: I was never a party girl, or a party animal. Why? Out of self-respect for my mind, which has always spurned mobs, and herd thinking (speaking of herd, how is that “herd immunity” working for you, you the COVID, Boris Johnson? Your government was idiotically promoting “herd immunity“, two weeks ago… Conclusion: COVID exploded in the UK. That it exploded in France for the same reason, weeks earlier, is not excuse…)   

So tell me, brainless youth scofflaws who think death and suffering happens only to others? “What is the difference between you and young Nazis? Young Nazis also wanted to have fun, gathering, flocking, and bellowing, all together.”

The “youth” is not smart, because the “youth” has been brainwashed to admire brainless plutocrats such as muscle man Kobe Bryant… Bryant was notorious to fly all around, despising climate and people. Well, fog killed him… But he dragged children in his death. Actually I know 40 something lawyer who claimed she had the worst day in her life when Kobe died. She was crying all over Facebook. What about Kobe’s 13 year old daughter, and her friend on the same flight?

A week ago, I met a flock of twenty-somethings on top of a hill in a park. They were going up as a tight group, two dozens of them, talking loud. They were abreast of a fire road, I squeezed along them, up wind (because I am smart). One of them said aloud:”And they tell us if we cough here, they will die down there in the valley!” They all laughed. The first houses were several miles away.

Result? The Bay Area parks parking lots were ordered closed yesterday.

This is of course a fleeting moment: soon the “youth” will see the error of their ways, if they don’t already.

***

Want an example of scientific idiocy? Consider other scientists and media hacks trashing the research of superstar professor Didier Raoult. Here are examples:

“Raoult’s critics have pointed to problems with the protocol of his testing and worrying side effects of the drug… At least one person has already died in the US after self-medicating with a non-pharmaceutical version of the drug used for cleaning fish tanks.”

Both statements are commonly reproduced all over the same idiotic media which was trashing Trump as racist and keen to distract from impeachment, after he called a public health emergency and closed the border to China, January 31… and idiotic. The product to clean aquariums is a chemical combination with phosphate, made to kill all life. Of course, if one swallows it, one dies. The “side effects” of “the drug” are nothing. I took both drugs many times and for quite a long time, both to fight malaria and pneumonia. My mom had a heart problem, perhaps in part for using quinine, but she used it for ten years, both for malaria and another medical condition. This being said, right, quinine can attack the cardiac muscle. 

The idiocy of such comments show the hatred bias of those who proffer them. Another common barb at Raoult is that his studies are “observational”, not “double blind”. But actually Raoult had controls (2 groups outside of his 24 patients; now he has an 80 patients study out, same results). 

Unphased by the clamoring negativists full of hatred, Trump requisitioned sixteen million (16 x 10^6) doses of hydroxychloroquine from three pharmaceutical companies (March 30, 2020 press conference). Contrarily to what the rabid anti-Trumpers have been claiming, the evidence that this Raoult drug works is great (and dates more than a decade).

***

Idiots love idiocy. This love for idiocy is often the main reason why they’re idiots. Pointing out idiocies to idiots, who are idiots by choice and will, make them more idiotic, because they crave idiocy, and want to splurge. 

Where does this love for idiocy come from? Laziness is a big factor; thinking is hard, energetically expensive, because it’s expensive to reorganize one’s brain neural networks

Idiots don’t just find intelligence more expensive that they can afford, they hate intelligence, and that entices them to become ever more idiotic: idiots are smart enough to feel that idiocy is the greatest remedy to that intelligence they are unable to experience!

Honorable commenter Ronald Scheckelhoff observes: “I think that in some cases the mechanics of untruth are machinated by lies, but in other cases by disinterest, and in still other cases by ignorance, so it’s quite a stew of causes that’s driving the current crop of bad decisions.”

Laziness is indeed an important driver of generalized stupidity. Thinking is hard, entertainment easy. That’s why people prefer to admire Kobe, a basketball player, a ethically corrupt, not so gentle man, who had his family fly in pea soup so thick police helicopters were grounded, and cars could only be driven very slowly. Ethically corrupt? He got children killed, flying in that pea soup: the helicopter couldn’t land, too much fog, it was put on a holding pattern. 

The arrogant Kobe had been well-known, for a decade, for flying all over, spitting on We The People and common sense. Several media production made fun of him that way. That was so well known, a video cartoon was produced in which Kobe crashed in his helicopter, but still had a bad attitude even after the crash, pulling his tongue out while clutching his trophies…

***

Kobe was an ethical disaster, a model exactly of not what to follow, precisely because he was not smart. This demonstrates, not that this was necessary, that basketball stars don’t have to be smart. No elementary thinking is necessary in this activity, to be a tremendous success making the females juice up, and the teens hope they get lucky too… But then the question is why are such idiots brandished as what the youth should emulate? No wonder, then that the “youth” think it’s OK to kill everybody (else). 

Suggesting that whom, and what, one admires or is fascinated by, is an ethical problem may sound to some as far fetched. But actually the notion is not new, and was implicit in many past ethical systems (for example Judeo-Christo-Islamism).

Want a better world? 

Start with better role models to adulate, and thus, emulate. And better fields to admire, and long to contribute to. We need to understand biology better, not to refine the art of oversized specimens apt to put the ball into baskets.

Patrice Ayme

What If Obama Were On Trial? Well, He Should Be! On Obama-Biden Firing Ukraine Prosecutor

I used as (first part of the) title, the title of an editorial of the New York Times January 26, 2020. Consider Trump’s impeachment from some other angles, says Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist. I usually like Kristof, but here it’s open season on him after he refused to post my comment (or will publish it in 2 days, which comes down to the same). After some padding over 30 lines or so, Kristof grandly declares: 

“In practical terms, this amounts to: What if it were Obama who had been caught in this Ukraine scandal?…. Progressives may be scoffing that this exercise is unrealistic: Obama was meticulous in avoiding scandal and ethical conflicts.”

Thus Kristof makes clear that it is NOT something which happened… As a matter of course. This is high level disinformation on Kristof’s part: there is plenty of evidence to the contrary, but it is found in (some) foreign media (“Consortium News”), and it’s hidden from the US public. To keep it hidden from those reading NYT comments, my comment, a comment from a fanatical progressive, but also fair, balanced and clever, was censored.

To go on imprinting on such a grotesque lie, the grandiosity of Saint Obama, the New York Times in its plutocratic wisdom decided NOT to publish my comment. Indeed, Obama is little more than a stooge for plutocracy, including the literally dirtiest sort, the financial and fossil fuel/fracking plutocracy (fracking is Wall Street burning planet for profit). Obama is going to be rolled out if the old stooge Biden, or the new stooge Buttigieg, falter. The latter possible development would mean that Sanders (probably) or Warren (possibly) is going to be candidate. That’s when the biggest stooge of them all would be rolled out.

Most of the plutocrats don’t pay taxes. One could even view this as their definition: plutocrats have so much power that the laws are arranged to serve them. Consider subsidies on private jets, making 1% of US CO2… Of course the establishment is not just terrified of a Sanders presidency. It fears even more every day that Sanders keeps on advertising and explaining his “Democratic Socialism”. So it’s important, for the established plutocracy, that Obama damages Sanders… thus that Obama’s astounding aura remains intact. 

Well, maybe one didn’t look at what was impeachable in Obama’s actions. Obama apparently ordered personally drone strikes (instead of leaving the decisions to professionals themselves part of a hierarchy in oversight position). The president directly ordered the killing of US citizens without trial for Islamist propaganda (rather than murder). At least one of these US citizens was not adult, but 16 years old.

(Analogy to the decay of the Roman Republic: Cicero, self-proclaimed defender of the Republic, seemed to consider that extra-judicial execution were the way to go. He used them as Consul during the “Conspiracy of Catiline”. Much later, more stupidly, and dangerously, he tried to use such a denial of justice against Marcus Antonius…)

Second and more importantly, there is the interference in Ukraine. VP Joe Biden said loud and clear for all to hear, that he didn’t interfere in other countries policies. However, more recently he was on tape boasting of the exact opposite… in connection with the Burisma Holdings investigation.

Here is my terrible anti-plutocratic comment, which the New York Times depicts as lacking “civility”:

Vice President Joe Biden warned Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko that, if he did not fire the very experienced Procuror General Viktor MykolayovychShokin, the Obama administration was prepared to withhold $1 billion in loan guarantees. Biden: “I looked at them and said, ‘I’m leaving in six hours. If the prosecutor is not fired, you’re not getting the money.’ They said:”Son of a bitch” He got fired. And they put in place someone who was solid.” 

The Ukrainian Parliament refused initially to accept the resignation of the procuror general Viktor Mykolayovych Shokin. The “solid” man was Yuriy Lutsenko a Ukrainian MP who was forced to resign in 2010, and condemned to 4 years in jail for corruption. Lutsenko has no law degree. Considering the later point, a special law was passed. Biden claimed, on tape, that he was following Obama’s orders.

***

For skeptics, here is Biden on tape, bragging about firing the prosecutor who was inquiring about the embezzlement (at least 40 million dollars) of Hunter Biden’s company, Burisma Holdings:

https://www.wsj.com/video/opinion-joe-biden-forced-ukraine-to-fire-prosecutor-for-aid-money/C1C51BB8-3988-4070-869F-CAD3CA0E81D8.html

***

It’s incredible to know that journalists and editorialists at the New York Times can look at themselves in a mirror, and not blush. What do they think they do as they foster plutocracy, using the basest method, that of the Big Lie? On the same Sunday edition (26 Jan 2020) where my comment was censored, there were interviews of whom the NYT views as the most important six Democratic candidates. Two were very wealthy multimillionaires, many times over. Two other were multibillionaires. The latter two, Bloomberg and Styer, have already spent, together eight times the total spending war chest of Trump. Yes they spent eight times, already, what Trump will spend in the future. Plus they get free advertising in the New York Times. Bernie Sanders in all this? He gets scathing editorial after scathing editorial, while Bloomberg gets lauded…

Patrice Ayme

***

***

I got the electronic version of Kristof editorial, early on, Saturday. It had a long section explaining all the bad things Trump did NOT do. I sent my comment, it was censored. Then the NYT went on publishing more than 1,000 comments…. But also modifying Kristof’s editorial before it went to print by removing the section explaining all what Trump didn’t do (but has been accused of doing by the lying anti-Trumpists)

If The USA Had Been Decent, Would The Nazis Have Disturbed The Peace?

History follows some paths. There could have been others. Just as with thought experiments in physics, inquiring minds inquire best by weighting the factors, making thought experiments in history (all historians have always done this, to an extent or the other, connecting the dots). The most interesting and instructive weighting of the facts occur when one changes nearly nothing, and one changes events slightly according to not just plausible, but probable scenarios. (The military learns much by running “what ifs” scenarios, and does this all the time [1]). It turns out that history is full of butterfly effects, where a small fluttering somewhere has giant effect after a while (the weather is notoriously that way with a three week horizon). Therein a morale: if one wants history to enfold optimally, looking forward, one should not neglect the utmost precautions. Including the fact that too much precaution can kill precaution, if one doesn’t understand the underground logic at hand.

This is what happened in Nazi Germany, when the army command tried to reintroduce rationality: it didn’t work, because they had missed the evil design of the Anglo-Saxon Deep State, and its attached plutocracy.

Ludwig Beck, a real hero in his belated struggle against Hitler, but too trusting of the Anglo-Saxon elite. Beck was chief of the German army and, from pro-Nazi, turned into an anti-Nazi conscious of the madness of Hitler and Al. He directed his subordinates, including the top admirals, to propose to the Americans and the British to announce that the USA and the UK would side with France in case of conflict with the Nazis. He was going to use this as a pretext to make a coup against the Nazis. Instead the US and UK warned Hitler of the conspiracy. Fired by Hitler, who couldn’t do more than that, as Beck’s prestige was immense, he organized behind the scene the coup of 1944. He was asked to commit suicide.

The question was asked: If the US joined the League of Nations, would WWII have occurred?

Let me change the question slightly into: If the US had respected its parent, France, and practiced other aspects of basic decency of a civilized nation, as its Gallic parent had tried to instill to it, would WWII have occurred? Or, otherwise said: If The USA had Been Decent, Would The Nazis Have Disturbed the Peace?

The short of it: no.

World War Two happened because the French Republic had more than enough with the Nazis. The French had been itching to go destroy Hitler since the latter invaded Spain in 1936 (with the help of the rogue Franco, and fascist Italy). However, after agreeing to come to the rescue of the Spanish Republic, the French, led by PM Jewish Socialist Blum, were submitted to scathing threats from London and Washington, so they didn’t. Then there was the Munich circus, followed by Hilter invading Czechoslovakia, Austria… 

After the fall of Spain (early 1939), the French stiffened the Polish spine, and added a chastised Great Britain in the appendix to the Franco-Polish treaty (“entente cordiale would apply…) Cornered, an enraged Hitler made his ultra secret alliance with fellow dictator Stalin official. Surely, now confronting fascist Japan, Italy, Germany and the USSR, the French won’t attack? But the French were undeterred. At that point the Nazis were stuck. They couldn’t lose face: Hitler knew that the German generals had nearly staged a coup already.

What could have stopped the war? Those German generals: they had all the power. Had the USA declared it sided with France, the generals would have known they were facing the infernal trio of France, Britain and their progeny, the USA, and, thus, Germany couldn’t win. So they had to stage a coup to save Germany, as they explained in 1937 to the Anglo-Saxon ambassadors.

However the position of the USA in 1939 relative to Nazism was not clear: plutocrat FDR detested egalitarian, socialist France, and wanted to grab all her colonies to make them part of the US empire. Moreover US plutocrats were roaming all over Germany doing excellent business under Hitler, owning a large part of it: IBM had the monopoly of computing, for example, a gift of Hitler (see “IBM and the Holocaust”). Finally, the US was a racist country, and much of Nazism was copied from US themes.

***

The very idea of League of Nation was born in France in 1916 (and then co-opted by hyper racist Wilson). So the entire US “isolationist” posture, which didn’t apply to Nazi Germany (the “Third Reich” was full of US plutocrats, US investments, US tech, etc.) was more directed against France, and an excuse for the US to deal with Germany as a new “Wild West“… like the myth of the “crippling” reparations, launched by racist plutocrat Keynes, who was enraged that Eastern Europe had been freed from Germany by Versailles… (the reparations were so little “crippling” that the French are still rebuilding, more than a century after the fascist German invaders dismantled even treasures of the Middle Ages…)

To be in the League, per se, would not have been enough, to prevent WW2. However, had the USA being just decent with its parent, France, the German generals would have seen their defeat was unavoidable, as the USA was siding with France.

And guess what, as I already said, but it’s worth repeating? The German generals, and admirals, led by a fierce colonel who wanted to overthrow Hitler, and, initially more loosely, by chief of staff Ludwig Beck, who was pro-Nazi in 1930 [2], asked, as early as 1937, the UK and US, to do just that, declare they would side with France. But they didn’t. Instead, the Anglo-Saxons told Hitler… And FDR recalled his friend Dodd, US ambassador in Berlin, an ex-history professor, viewed as too friendly to his French peer, and a determined anti-Nazi. FDR replaced Dodd by a pro-Nazi, and did the same in Britain, installing the notoriously pro-fascist plutocrat mafioso Joe Kennedy as ambassador there… (More details on the Dodd-Francois-Poncet interaction in the book “The Garden of the Beasts”…)

The German generals, as a collective mind, were not smart enough to realize they were going to become victims of the greatest bait and switch imaginable… Although the same exactly had happened to Germany in WW1… (The USA encouraged the Kaiser to attack, and then sustained him, until it became clear that France and Britain were going to win, then switched sides…)

Nowadays, the Germans have finally figured it all out, deep inside… Just as the Brits lost it completely… History is the ride that never ends…

The most amazing part of this subject is that many individuals who believe they know it well, actually keep on repeating the basic Nazi themes (hence my re-education program)…

And, even more interesting, those themes often only partly originated in Germany… Keynes launched the idea that returning Eastern Europe to self-determination was a racial and economic mistake. Even the famous “stab in the back” theme the Nazis used as a pretext against Communists, Socialists, and Jews, had been uttered first by a British general who had lashed back sarcastically at war criminal general and principal original Nazi, Ludendorff… Ludendorff ran away with that theme…  A way to bury his own war crimes under fresh layers of invented indignation…

The myth of the “crippling reparations” exacted by France and Belgium in a spirit of wanton revenge was launched… And survives to this day. Actually the “reparations” amounted to only 5 trillion of 2018 Euros. One out of twenty Frenchman had been killed, in a war cold bloodily launched by fascist Germany. So, roughly the “reparation” amounted to 800,000 Euros by dead Frenchman. That gross computation doesn’t count 4.3 million wounded, including hundreds of thousands mutilated for life. The industrial north east of France had been eradicated in deliberate devastation designed to cripple France. 

Ah, relevance for today? If one can’t still see the manipulations of the plutocrats and their associated Deep State, a century ago, how could one see them today?

Indeed, the fact the deep maneuvers of the US Deep State and its sponsor, US plutocracy, the billionaires and their descendants hidden in Foundations, Boards, Institutes, “Charities”, “Think Tanks”, plutocratic universities and the like, have not been exposed in full, doesn’t just explain the amazing (however ephemeral) success of the monstrosity known as Nazism.

More fundamentally, the obliviousness, and lack of interest, in the maneuvers of the Deep State and its sponsor, Anglo-Saxon plutocracy, explains much of the rise of global plutocracy and its attendant inequality, poverty, drug abuse, decay in education, healthcare and many basic services observed since…

Patrice Ayme

***

***

P/S: If I use the expression “Deep State” in the plutophile New York Times, it will censor the comment: We The People in the present day USA have been imprinted to believe that, should they see a conspiracy somewhere, and a fortiori a machine to create conspiracies, one is deranged… BTW, it’s the US Senate which blocked the entry of the USA in the League of Nations… Roughly simultaneously, all the documents revealing the theft of German property by the US government, and its transfer to US plutocrats, conveniently burned with a building in Washington in 1921 (so US Plutos stayed in control of German property they had stolen, thereafter… enabling them to steer Nazis) .

For the mood at work, have a glance at this, from 1943:

https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/1943-10-01/enemy-owned-property-restitution-or-confiscation

***

[1] Famously, re-runs of the 1940 Battle of France and Midway, give opposite results to what happened. In both cases, huge forces which should have been detected were not.

***

[2] Ludwig Beck, in a series of memos to the top Nazis and Hitler in May 1938: “The French army is and remains intact and is at the moment the strongest in Europe… The military-economic situation of Germany is bad, worse than in 1917–1918. In its current military, military-political and military-economic condition, Germany cannot expose itself to the risk of a long war…

Furthermore the chief of the German general staff cannot “accept these estimates of the military power of France and England…Germany, whether alone or in alliance with Italy, is not in a position militarily to match England or France“. The May Crisis of 21–22 May 1938 further convinced Beck of the dangers of going to war in 1938, and led him to increase his efforts to stop a war that he felt Germany could not win. In November 1938, Beck informed a friend that, from the time of the May Crisis, the only consideration in his mind was “How can I prevent a war?”

On 29 July 1938, Beck wrote a memo stating the German Army had the duty to prepare for possible wars with foreign enemies and “for an internal conflict which need only take place in Berlin” [against the Nazis, that is]. The 29 July 1938 memo is considered the start of Beck’s efforts to overthrow the Nazi regime. However, Beck would resign too early, and alone, and Hitler manipulated him in keeping the resignation secret…

Biden Family Corruption: So Common A Thing Democrats & Their Pluto Media Didn’t Notice

REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS NEITHER: Biden, Or When Main Stream Media Refuses To See Blatant Corruption.

[This is not a pro-Trump essay; indeed, as the essay makes clear, Biden’s presidential bid is over for mentally retarded corruption; and my candidate is Warren; this is definitively an anti-plutocratic, anti-corruption, anti-representative democracy essay, though.]

Biden’s Son Was Director Of A Giant Ukrainian Company, While His Dad Asked the Prosecutor Of Said Company, To Be Fired. But Most of Biden’s Son Business Was With China: 

Biden is frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination. His son Hunter was on the board of a Ukrainian gas company while his father was US vice-president. Doesn’t that sound like corruption to you? Instead Pluto media focuses on Trump inquiring!

There are two classes in this world: the owners and deciders of the planet… And the rest of us. 

Biden, as a US Senator, a professional politician, made sure in the 1980s, that Reagan’s oligarchic laws passed, by the elite, for the elite, against We The People. In the 1990s, Biden passed laws which sent millions of minorities in prison on drug charges (the “new Jim Crow“), while the upper crust was using those same drugs and flaunting it (see Obama writing, even boasting that he used cocaine).

The elite was not bothered by the Biden laws, they were not applied to them… whereas it should have been the opposite, as leaders, by definition, lead, and, if they lead in drug usage for all to see, they should be punished for wrong leadership through example, as some of the hanged Nazis at Nuremberg, who were hanged, just for writing the wrong thing. (And it was right to hang them for wrong leadership.)   

The Vice President of the USA says the circular logo. Actually, his son, Hunter… who loved to pose as if he really was the VP (there are many pictures of Hunter giving various speeches behind that sign, as if he were really the US VP)

Hunter, Biden’s son, related that he talked to his dad about Burisma Holdings, a Ukrainian natural gas company he was directing. According to Hunter, Joe said about Burisma: “I hope you know what you are doing”… and Hunter:”Yes, dad I know”. The second had no expertise in energy. He went to China, did the same, made a billion, and several of his business associates in other countries, were arrested. 

In 2013, then-Vice President Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden flew aboard Air Force Two to China. Twelve days later, Hunter Biden’s firm signed a $1 billion private equity deal with a subsidiary of the Chinese government’s Bank of China. The deal was later expanded to $1.5 billion. The Chinese government funded a business that it co-owned along with the son of a sitting vice president. Hunter Biden, a lawyer, had little expertise in private equity (a lawyer confided that they had to employ Hunter, an incompetent lawyer, because he was the VP’s son).

Biden is not alarmed by China. Biden shrugged off concerns over the China threat on democracy. “Come on, man,” Biden said. “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what, they’re not competition for us.” Biden had used nearly the same terms to qualify the threat posed by billionaires and plutocrats…. And of course; China fed the Biden family business, China has not meaning, but for plutocrats exporting work there. 

The lucrative deal of Biden with the government of China (=Chinese plutocracy) was hidden until the publication of the book, “Secret Empires”. No one knew the deal took place, because the MSM didn’t want to look at… itself. However, Biden’s son was pretty blatant: see him pose behind the VP of the USA logo above. The Ukrainian gas company paid him $50,000 a month (600 K a year). 

***

I am quoting extensively Peter Schweizer in the postscript. One will see that even extreme tech has been compromised (nuclear energy). Right, the French government has done just as bad… with China (surprise).

I am not trying to shoot down Biden: he is clearly finished, Warren will be the Democratic candidate. Biden is finished because of his family corruption.

Biden is also finished because of something else: he is mentally deficient. Biden said in an interview that there were “720 million women” in the USA. Biden is so obsessed with China, he confuses it with the USA! Then he hesitated, mumbled, pondered, and reconfirmed that there indeed “720 million women” in the USA… Biden: best yes man for plutocracy

But then the question: how come Democrats in the street fell for a corrupt mental retard? Same general reason why so many still admire monsters such as Louis XIV or Napoleon? (I am not mentioning Bismarck, because Bismarck did good things on his own.)

So-called “representative democracy” puts too much power in too few hands: it’s intrinsically oligarchic (olig-arch from the Greek, few rule). The corruption is all over. Look at France. French Attorney General François Molins requested in mid-July the referral to the Court of Justice of the Republic of former Prime Minister Edouard Balladur and his former defense minister François Léotard in the Karachi corruption case (submarines against under the table cash for an electoral campaign). That was 23 years ago (and people, including French citizens, got killed in that case, dozens of them).

“Representative democracy” has to be used to some extent, but, overall, politics is too serious to be left to professional prostitutes alone to do as they please: direct, real democracy has to counterbalance representation.

Patrice Ayme

***

***

Peter Schweizer, the author of “Secret Empires: How the American Political Class Hides Corruption and Enriches Family and Friends” (Harper), says:

“Without the aid of subpoena power, here’s what we know. The businesses of Hunter Biden and his partners created a series of LLCs involved in multibillion-dollar private equity deals with companies owned by the Chinese government.

The centerpiece of these deals is Rosemont Seneca Partners, an investment firm controlled by Hunter Biden and his associates: Chris Heinz, who is John Kerry’s stepson, and Heinz’s longtime associate Devon Archer [Heinz makes good ketchup, making Chris wealthy]. The trio founded Rosemont Seneca in 2009 and quickly began making deals through a series of overlapping entities under the Rosemont name.

Less than a year after opening Rosemont Seneca’s doors, Hunter Biden and Archer were in China meeting with top Chinese officials. To assist in their new venture, they partnered with a Massachusetts-based consultancy called the Thornton Group, headed by James Bulger, son of former Massachusetts state Sen. Billy Bulger. James Bulger has the dubious honor of being named after his uncle, the notorious mob hitman James “Whitey” Bulger.

The Thornton Group’s account of the meeting on their Chinese-language Web site is telling: Chinese executives “extended their warm welcome” to the “Thornton Group, with its US partner Rosemont Seneca chairman Hunter Biden (second son of the now Vice President Joe Biden).”

The purpose of the meetings was to “explore the possibility of commercial cooperation and opportunity.” Curiously, details about the meeting did not appear on their English-language Web site.

The timing of this meeting was also notable. It occurred just hours before Hunter Biden’s father, the vice president, met with Chinese President Hu Jintao in Washington as part of the Nuclear Security Summit.

Twelve days after Hunter stepped off Air Force Two in Beijing, his company signed a historic deal with the Bank of China, the state-owned financial behemoth often used as a tool of the Chinese government. The Bank of China had created a first-of-its-kind investment fund called Bohai Harvest RST (BHR). According to BHR, one of its founding partners was none other than Rosemont Seneca Partners LLC.

It was an unprecedented arrangement: the government of one of America’s fiercest competitors going into business with the son of one of America’s most powerful decisionmakers.

Chris Heinz claims neither he nor Rosemont Seneca Partners, the firm he had part ownership of, had any role in the deal with Bohai Harvest. Nonetheless, Biden, Archer and the Rosemont name became increasingly involved with China. Archer became the vice chairman of Bohai Harvest, helping oversee some of the fund’s investments.

Troublingly, some of those investments had major implications for national security.

In December 2014, BHR became an “anchor investor” in the IPO of China General Nuclear Power Corp. (CGN), a state-owned energy company involved in the construction of nuclear reactors. In April 2016, the US Justice Department would charge CGN with stealing nuclear secrets from the United States — actions prosecutors said could cause “significant damage to our national security.”

Of particular interest to CGN were sensitive, American-made components that, according to experts, resembled components used by the US on its nuclear submarines.

That Hunter Biden had no experience in China, and little in private equity, didn’t dissuade the Chinese government from giving his company a business opportunity in place of established global financial brands like Morgan Stanley or Goldman Sachs. In fact, the Chinese government wasn’t done funding deals with Hunter Biden.

Also in December 2014, a Chinese state-backed conglomerate called Gemini Investments Limited was negotiating and sealing deals with Hunter Biden’s Rosemont on several fronts. That month, it made a $34 million investment into a fund managed by Rosemont.

The following August, Rosemont Realty, another sister company of Rosemont Seneca, announced that Gemini Investments was buying a 75 percent stake in the company. The terms of the deal included a $3 billion commitment from the Chinese, who were eager to purchase new US properties. Shortly after the sale, Rosemont Realty was rechristened Gemini Rosemont.

Chinese executives lauded the deal.

“Rosemont, with its comprehensive real-estate platform and superior performance history, was precisely the investment opportunity Gemini Investments was looking for in order to invest in the US real estate market,” declared Li Ming, Sino-Ocean Land Holdings Limited and Gemini Investments chairman. “We look forward to a strong and successful partnership.”

The plan was to use Chinese money to acquire more properties in the United States. “We see great opportunities to continue acquiring high-quality real estate in the US market,” one company executive said. “The possibilities for this venture are tremendous.”

Finally, in 2015, BHR joined forces with a subsidiary of Chinese state-owned military aviation contractor Aviation Industry Corporation of China (AVIC) to buy American precision-parts manufacturer Henniges. Because Henniges manufactured technology with possible military applications, the transaction required approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. CFIUS reviews are required for business transactions that have potential national security implications.

The Biden-Bank of China fact-pattern is arresting in its bravura and scale. Moreover, it turns out that the Biden dealings didn’t just take place in China, but in Ukraine, as well.

Consider the facts. On April 16, 2014, White House records show that Devon Archer, Hunter Biden’s business partner in the Rosemont Seneca deals, made a private visit to the White House for a meeting with Vice President Biden. Five days later, on April 21, Joe Biden landed in Kiev for a series of high-level meetings with Ukrainian officials. The vice president was bringing with him highly welcomed terms of a United States Agency for International Development program to assist the Ukrainian natural-gas industry and promises of more US financial assistance and loans. Soon the United States and the International Monetary Fund would be pumping more than $1 billion into the Ukrainian economy.

The next day, there was a public announcement that Archer had been asked to join the board of Burisma, a Ukrainian natural-gas company. Three weeks after that, on May 13, it was announced that Hunter Biden would join, too. Neither Biden nor Archer had any background or experience in the energy sector.

The younger Biden, for his part, tried to put the best possible face on the deal. He claimed that by joining the board of the natural-gas producer, he would “contribute to the economy and benefit the people of Ukraine.”

The choice of Hunter Biden to handle transparency and corporate governance for Burisma is curious, because Biden had little if any experience in Ukrainian law, or professional legal counsel, period. But that didn’t stop Burisma from paying the younger Biden what The New York Times has reported was as much as $50,000 a month while the company was under investigation by officials in both Ukraine and abroad.

Joe Biden’s trip to Kiev in March 2016, and his threats to withhold $1 billion in foreign aid if Ukrainian officials didn’t dismiss the country’s top prosecutor, Victor Shokin, take on added meaning when you consider that Shokin’s office had been leading an investigation into Burisma’s owner.

According to a recent New York Times report, Biden helped recruit an American consulting firm as well as former Deputy Attorney General John Buretta to help Burisma fight corruption charges. In an interview with the Kyiv Post, Buretta described his negotiations with Yuriy Lutsenko. Lutsenko became Ukraine’s general prosecutor after Joe Biden had lobbied for his predecessor’s removal. Apparently, the negotiations worked as the case was dismissed in the fall of 2016.

Joe Biden later bragged about his efforts to get Shokin removed, though he claims Shokin’s removal was needed due to his mishandling of a number of cases in Ukraine. Hunter Biden insists he never spoke to his father about the investigation into Burisma.

Will the Senate investigate Joe and Hunter Biden’s actions in China and Ukraine? We don’t know, but they should. If a two-year investigation of President Trump, Russia and the Trump family was justified to ensure the president isn’t compromised, an investigation into Joe Biden, China, Ukraine and the Biden family is imperative.”

Schweizer’s newest project is The Drill Down, an investigative video project dedicated to exposing cronyism and corruption.

Notre-Dame, Lead, Deep State, Deep Lies, As Usual

In a fancy article, Notre-Dame’s Toxic Fallout, By Elian Peltier, James Glanz, Weiyi Cai and Jeremy White, Sept. 14, 2019
complete with moving flames devouring the work of 850 years, the New York Times made “clear that the French authorities had indications that lead exposure could be a grave problem within 48 hours of the fire.

But it took a month before city officials conducted the first lead tests at a school close to Notre-Dame. Even today, city and regional health officials have not tested every school in the proximity of the cathedral.

The tests showed levels of lead dust above the French regulatory standard for buildings hosting children in at least 18 day care centers, preschools and primary schools.”

One can learn a lot from isolated very public incidents and how our leading structures handle them. They define a mood, the ruling mood… Of the planet. Distinctions between France and the USA… or Britain for that matter, and also Germany are illusory… and that’s a good thing.

Let me mention thus in passing, once again, one of my master ideas: the relationship between France, Britain, Germany, the USA (and their ideological satellites, including Australia and Italy) is not as in between Greek city-states, or Greece and Rome. Indeed Greek city-states had just one language, but various origins. And Rome was still something else, tracing itself to Ilion (Troy). Whereas, in the “West”, all can be traced to Celts, Romans and Greece, through the gauntlet of the Franks (Imperium Francorum, by 800 CE the Renovated Roman Empire, RRE).

All this to say that France and the USA have very similar psychologies. So when one of those two acts insane, it throws a light, the same light, onto the other. Thus the Notre-Dame story is not just a warning about France, but one about the USA. In both cases it says something about the Deep State… The Deep State of France and the USA being roughly the same, highly dissatisfying to someone as yours truly… New York Times:

“PARIS. The April fire that engulfed Notre-Dame contaminated the cathedral site with clouds of toxic dust and exposed nearby schools, day care centers, public parks and other parts of Paris to alarming levels of lead.

The lead came from the cathedral’s incinerated roof and spire, and it created a public health threat that stirred increasing anxiety in Paris throughout the summer.

Five months after the fire, the French authorities have refused to fully disclose the results of their testing for lead contamination, sowing public confusion, while issuing reassuring statements intended to play down the risks.

Their delays and denials have opened the authorities to accusations that they put reconstruction of the cathedral — which President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to complete in five years — ahead of the health of thousands of people.

A comprehensive investigation by The New York Times has helped fill out an emerging picture of a failed official response. It found significant lapses by the French authorities in alerting the public to health risks, even as their understanding of the danger became clearer.”

Notre-Dame Burning, Or When the Modern Deep State proves itself less competent than the Middle Ages… Why are the same clowns in charge of thermonuclear weapons?

The Deep State, whether French, British, EU, or US, is always afraid to make people afraid… even in cases where people should be not just afraid, but made to be afraid. Not being afraid of what one should be afraid of, when being afraid would force people to fix a lethal problem, and when being afraid is the only way to make people fix the problem, is not just stupid and immoral, but it’s deeply undemocratic. 

Democracy, representative, or direct, without transparency is lunacy and invites larceny.

We are not living in normal times. We are definitively out of any sort of normalcy, if one defines as normal, anything seen since there were dinosaurs, and plesiosaurs and eagle like plane-sized flying pterosaurs… The planet’s biosphere is on the brink of collapse, from mass extinctions, the CO2 crisis, global warming, sea level rise, countless biocides, pesticides, fertilizers, gender-bending chemicals, aerosol air and heavy metal pollution, the nitrogen cycle crisis, plus nuclear proliferation and thus war, around the corner. 

Transparency is crucial, as it fosters full, and thus honest thinking. To try to figure it out and serialize the problems. One would hope that the headquarters of what is arguably the oldest center of modern civilization, Paris, would be aware of the need for transparency, thus debate and advancing intelligence.

But the leaders of France have become timid, full of self-doubt, ever since Washington told them in 1933 that run-away growth, devaluation, debt, and especially Adolf Hitler and his Nazi clowns, was nothing to worry about… And would France stop being so aggressive. Now France has a young and inexperienced leader, Macron, who affects to believe he will augment democracy in France by halving the number of Members of Parliament. even the Brexiting clowns on the other side of the Channel with their suspended Parliament, have not reached deep down such an abyss of stupid anti-democracy… Although suspended the British parliament has 650 MPs, roughly twice what Macron wants.

“We are facing a widespread issue around lead,” Ms. Souyris, the city’s Socialist deputy mayor in charge of health, said. “It goes beyond Notre-Dame, but since there is no norm for public spaces, we need a bigger plan against lead in Paris.’’

One theory about the decay of Roman civilization and its state, is that they got contaminated by lead. And thus became idiotic. Could that apply to Paris? Could that help to explain mental shortcomings of the government there? Lead induced idiocy in one of the most ridiculously expensive real estate in the world? 

My take on all of this?

Well, all those responsible of having partaken in lead contamination, knowing about it, and doing nothing timely enough, should be severely punished, and the higher, the more punished they should be. After all, I saw the enormous lead panache coming out of Notre-Dame, spreading west over Paris, I saw it on TV, live, from California, and Macron, who was on the scene, should have exerted the noodle material between his two ears too. And if that jelly doesn’t work good enough, why is it in charge of deciding whether he can, or not, kill 50 million people in twenty minutes?

The idea is to punish hard, after they deliberately persist in their errors, those who have the effrontery to believe that they can lead the world, all by themselves, with the help of tons of secrecy. Hard punishment should make the present unsustainable political system insufferable, even to the parasites who presently suck on it with wild abandon.

The preceding should not be construed as a wild attack on France, while I neglect the Brexit monstrosity next door. The lead scandal shows that too few have too much power in how they move the state (in France as anywhere else). Brexit shows even more of the same: that the control of British media by a very small oligarchy which doesn’t pay taxes, and is determined not to pay taxes in the future, risks creating the sort of anger wars are made of [1].

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1]:  113,000 potential taxpayers are living in Britain while also being a ‘non-domiciled’ in the U.K…. as far as taxes are concerned. Those extremely wealthy individuals control the UK media. EU member states have until 31 December 2019 to make this sort of blatant tax avoidance scheme by plutocrats illegal in their own national law.

Why isn’t this advertised more? Consider France: the media there is owned by plutocrats too, just as in the UK, and they have huge tax avoidance schemes in place as laws in the tax system. If the Pluts were stupid enough to call attention to the non-dom reason for Brexit, they would bring along a mood questioning tax avoidance schemes in general…. and in particular, the schemes contrived in the legal system they profit from…

As Africa Gets Colonized, So Do We

Abstract: Formal “decolonization” worked splendidly… for global plutocracy (with few exceptions). Otherwise, decolonization is a myth. Worse: a crime the way it was accomplished, in all too many places. Nowhere is that more blatant than in Africa, where regimes after regimes are horror shows, and should be viewed as having run out of excuses. And therein a lesson for the whole planet. And in particular for the whole “left” and other pseudo-intellectuals of the simplistic type, who have been more busy collaborating with a system they set-up, rather than fighting it.

***

On April 18, at 6;50 am, heading for Turin Airport, I headed towards the Montgenèvre  pass. Montgenèvre is probably where Hannibal crossed the Alps, as it is the lowest pass. However the famous general suffering huge losses at the hands of the uncooperative Natives, the Allobroges… He lost at least a third of his army, nearly all his elephants. Those Allobroges with whom the Romans, under Augustus, would draw a treaty, two centuries after Hannibal, making them part of the Roman empire… as an independent kingdom: Augustus was so proud of himself, he mad a gigantic monument, still overlooking the Tyrrhenian Sea. (The world owes to Briancon, the Roman Brigantum, the word “brigand”, depicting well the rapport between Rome and the Briancon area…)

In some places, all what is left are ancient baobabs, from desiccation, and abuse of the land. Baobabs like many African things, starting with the land itself, are enormous. Unfortunately, most of African ecology gets ravaged as we speak. The problem is not sourced just in Africa, we are all part of the problem, thus, the solution.

Along the road, suddenly ten Africans, Subsaharan African, black as charcoal, walking… All French speakers. They came, illegally, from south of the Sahara desert, crossed Libya, and the Mediterranean Sea, thanks to smugglers. Once in Italy, charities gave them clothes, addresses and cell phones, with subscriptions working in France and Italy. Train transportation was provided. From Sicily to deep inside the Alps, at the foot of formidable passes enjoying more than ten meters of snow over the last few months. Only one road goes through, passing in a tunnel below the Montgenèvre,  the world’s oldest ski resort. There are kilometers of tunnels on the “Italian” side. This is the road those outlaws took, obviously hidden in smugglers’ cars (the border between France and Italy is not enforced, but the French Gendarmerie has descended upon some technically Italian towns to make anti illegal immigrant raids, to loud protests from the Ligua Norte (a pseudo-independentist party)…. That whole area of “Italy” was French until Louis XIV gave it to the enemies he had created for himself by throwing 2 million protestants out, and making his grandson king of Spain… The fury of some Italian politicians is explained by their desire to see Africans go to France, instead of enjoying Italy.

Those smugglers through that one French Alps’ pass don’t view themselves as smugglers, but as friends of man, as charities. Yet, ultimately they are the accomplices of horrible regimes in Africa, themselves set-up by global plutocrats and the Western governments which served them (no relief to be obtained from China, which is arguably doing worse, under the guise of helping, as French and US politicians recently pointed out).

Of course, should I be stuck in Subsaharan Africa (as I used to be), I would also walk through the desert, and swim across the sea. Why?Far from the pleasant land I used to know, Subsaharan Africa is in danger of becoming a vast “shithole”, as Trump may have noticed in private… we are well into the process of following it down the toilet. And this we will presently address.

***

A superficially absurd question in Quora, which turns out to be very deep:”Why aren’t the French colonies in Africa liberated? Why don’t they ask for their independence?

My answer:

Silly question, superficially: there are technically no colonies in Africa, at the present time. Or pretty much anywhere else. However, the reality is just the opposite. “Independence” and decolonization was pretty much a sham. It was more of a delegalization, and the creation of a wild west, with Natives to exploit freely, far from law and prying eyes.

Indeed, it’s not France, the French Republic which has the colonies (as it used to be). The truth is worse. Much of the world has been colonized. By global plutocrats, immensely wealthy men (typically men), conspiring with local leaders (“elected” or not).

When the French Republic was in nominal control of much of Africa, there were laws, rules and regulations, of a Republican, democratic character. Roads, trains, schools (mandatory, secular) were built, covered the land. Through Subsaharan Africa, one could find an hospital every one hundred kilometers, in populated areas (which was ruinous for France, from the point of view of some pro-independence French politicians… Most of Africa didn’t ask for independence, it was hurled at them by French racists).

For example, most of the Ivory Coast forest was protected from destruction. After nominal “independence”, very wealthy men came from the north, made deals with the local potentates, and freely exploited the African environment.

They were free, the rest were enslaved. Not just diamonds for Al Qaeda in Sierra Leone, forest in Ivory Coast, oil off Nigeria and Gabon, etc.

Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabists, decided to extend their influence worldwide with a Salafist project flushed with oil money. This completely changed the nature of Islam in Subsaharan Africa, sending the (gigantic) region into a turmoil that profited the Saudis, version 1970s… but few other people besides. Subsaharan Africa became partly a mental colony of Saudi Arabia, with disastrous consequences for economy, society, peace, wisdom, and knowledge.

Sadly, degradation is contagious. As exterior individuals became free to plunder Africa, African natives themselves duplicated the plunder, all the more as the top leaders were part of the conspiracy (consider the assassination of Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba in Congo, to be replaced by CIA pawn Mobutu). The later example shows it’s not just the French and the Saudis. For example the (quasi) dictatorship in Rwanda intervened in Congo, to grab rare earths, with discrete, ignored US support, bringing the death of 5 million Congolese citizens (and cheaper electronics for the rest of the world, and the fortunes of many a US plutocrat).

The problem was ignored: individuals such as Bernard Henri Levy, who became a billionaire by plundering African forests, is also an influential intellectual in Paris, or Morocco, and respected not just by left wing but right wing presidents… who financed him. He also controls (nearly) all media.

Worldwide plutocrats own most media, so they colonize us all. After they have made up our minds, the way they like it, we are free to opt to serve them further.

Just as the plundering of Africa, post “independence” has been contagious, and the natives have joined in the plundering, so it is, worldwide: the more the hyper wealthy plunder the planet and control minds, the more average people don’t care. That’s how the sense of citizenship was lost when the Roman Republic became Augustus’ dictatorship (the Roman “empire”, or, technically, “Principate”).

For the preceding to happen, it was necessary that the self-described “left” or “progressive” be completely blind to the preceding. Worse: much of the naive “left” is controlled by plutocracy.

Is there hope? Just a little. French billionaire Vincent Bolloré, a ten billion dollar billionaire, was arrested and detained on Tuesday near Paris over allegations that he indirectly influenced election outcomes for governments in West Africa and secured lucrative port contracts for his company in return. A Bolloré Group subsidiary allegedly undercharged for work, helping two African presidents win power in return for lucrative contracts.

According to a report by the BBC, Bolloré, 66, who is the head of the Bolloré Group, was taken into custody as part of an ongoing investigation into how his company obtained contracts to operate the Lome and Conakry ports in Togo and Guinea respectively. Now he has been charged. All, I repeat, all, billionaires who had to do with Africa, should be charged. That may not seem fair, not according to the “state of law” but all billionaires have overridden the legal process in the last few decades (at least in Africa). (Weirdly, Trump, whose pseudo-progressives love to hate, to change the conversation, gets a pass for now, being the less bad of them all, as he tries to change things, and didn’t become wealthy from corruption, as, say, Xi, Putin, Berlusconi, and an immense cortege of those lurking in the swamp between politics and greed…) 

The spirit of the law, worldwide, has been confiscated by the .1%. It’s not just Africa. We are all been colonized, or, more exactly, possessed (much of French Africa was more administered than colonized, in the sense that few “colons” ever came).

It’s high time to do something about ourselves becoming the property of others (consider the social networks and the virtual slavery they exploit us with). Because otherwise our future will be as bad, or worse, than the worst colonization (and there were very bad colonies, for example Congo, personal property of the Belgian king, where millions were enslaved).

Ah, a few technical points to finish: the French military interventions in Africa, from Rwanda to Mauretania, were, and are, not akin to “colonialism”: just the opposite (they tend to be all UN approved). They are efforts to free Africa from outrageous exploitation and plunders by (“religious”) gangs, or the likes of Gaddafi (who tried to physically invade Subsaharan Africa, before being stopped by the French military).

Part of the disaster that Subsaharan Africa has become has to do with demographic explosion (itself a consequence from the lack of intelligent administration, education and good healthcare). Many countries went from six millions in the 1960s (when the French administration left), to 45 millions now. In many countries, women have eight children (many to be tempted by violent Jihadism)

No ecology can sustain this, especially one which was borderline to start with. Thus, now dozens of millions of Africans from Subsaharan Africa are plotting to go to France, and try to do it at immense risks of lives and limbs (most of them fail, raped, drowned, eaten by Saharan hyenas, enslaved, or desiccating in the desert… but thousands a month make it to France…)

Something needs to be done, something drastic, and it won’t come from the old playbook…

Patrice Aymé