Hurling Fascist And Judicial Charges At The Opposition Is Not Democratic

Europe is becoming a rudder without a ship. It’s useful to beat people to a pulp, but little else besides.

The so-called “right” is, at last, progressing everywhere. And it should: all the other parties are little else but plutocratic devices, designed by the same “elite” which brought Putin, inflation, deindustrialization impoverishment, and constant accusations that everybody else is a fascist. Europe is falling behind all its peers, including Australia, USA, Canada, Korea, China and India… Yes, I know, shocking… Even Putin’s tyranny is growing faster than decebrated Europe. Now to this Europe’s politicians have tended to reply: we prefer to degrow. Degrowing civilization are nothing new: Rome spent three century degrowing before military catastrophe. As Vladimir would say, this time it’s going to happen faster… Hey, Vlad wants to help: he has proposed to insure the defense of Europe, all of it… Already twenty years ago… European ingrates have spurned him…

In Italy blonde Georgia Meloni is governing very well. She used to be mocked because she barely finished high school. But she is obviously smart in a creative way instead of just being a knowledgeable parrot. Various insults were hurled at her: she was a fascist aspiring to Vladimir’s bed, she hated homosexuals, etc. The homosexual thingie was a falsification: some mild measures were taken to reinforce a law against having a woman carry a baby for money… But the law was as old as 2004 and exists in most European countries, for example France.

Giorgia Meloni, above, has been successful, so far, in great part because she took the plutocratic establishment by surprise. Also she is focusing on projects the plutocratic establishment finds hard to attack, such as limiting torrid African illegal administration by empowering African governments to do so. The plutocratic establishment has been using the massive illegal African hamster like immigration wave as a way to divide the population, arguing that Africans have terrible African governments and countries because of the African slave trade three centuries ago, etc… As if slavery was a European invention when in truth African slaves getting to Europe were immediately freed, even in fascist Medieval Spain… Bathilde had made slavery unlawful in 657 CE.

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The core of France’s Rassemblement National is made of workers and individuals who themselves and often by family tradition, voted on the left. Latest polls in France show that more than 45% of manual “workers” (“ouvriers”) intend to vote for Marine Le Pen’s party. For many decades, Marine’s party was represented as “fascist”. However her father had been the youngest member of Parliament. For decades, the establishment prosecuted father and daughter, who were both members of the European Parliament, not just the French Assembly, under the charge of employing employees to do something else than what they were paid to do. 

For years, the loud left wing accused them of criminality because of these far-fetched charges. However now the same charge is used against opposition newspapers owners and editorialists. 

The point? Accusing the opposition to be fascist and using the “justice” system against it is actually anti-democratic. 

All over Europe, authoritarian methods are now used, especially in matters relative to transportations and inhabitation. “Socialist” France is making it very difficult to inhabit a home and drive a car. One can’t even pay for rent in advance. Illegal too renting a non super ecological place. A small double panned apartment may cost thousands of dollars in electricity. Healthcare? Forget it. All the doctors have fled to expensive enclaves, like Switzerland. Somehow, doctors feel entitled to have a home and drive a car (the car better have self-driving features to avoid the automatic radars keen to catch speedsters, when speed varies from block to block… Without that fancy AI tech, fines will pile up and they depend exponentially upon time… and points will be withdrawn…)  

Europe is in a terrible crisis, and increasingly voters feel that any change will be better than this enfolding disaster. This time the plutocratic establishment is finding it hard to explain why the “right”, those who like to have a car, a house, reasonable heating and food bills, and not being harassed by laws, decrees, regulations and administrations, should not have the right to vote for people the plutocratic establishment profess to hate…. for “racist” reasons… the establishment howls… while not daring to try to explain why this obsession with racism is not itself racist…

In July, horror of horrors, Victor Orban and Hungary will assume the presidency of Europe… Hungary has been much hated because it pushed the winning theme, through the last three elections, that Hungary should make Hungarians happy…

The present state of Europe is best depicted by the following tragedy. An Afghan refugee in France. He had the political refugee status… Although he was an Islamist fanatic. During Ramadan, he sees two Algerian tourists. Algerians from Algeria are drinking alcohol in Bordeaux. So the Afghan goes to the presumably Muslim Algerians and order them to stop drinking. The Algerians tell him to mind his own business. The Afghan stabs both Algerians grieviously, killing one of the two.

Now things are changing slowly: France just expelled her second Islamist violence and mayhem preacher… in five months, thanks to a new law. The fact is, many and presumably most, flee from Muslim countries because they flee Islamist terror. Europe should make sure it can’t implant itself… As in Gaza! This, and finding money to build an instant Defense Industrial Basis, DIB, for Ukraine… After all, even Vladimir could build himself a DIB in two years… Ah, but Vladimir believes in growth, even malignant growth…

Patrice Ayme

Is CREATIVE THINKING Somewhat EVIL? Are NEW THOUGHTS AGGRESSIONS?

Modern NEUROLOGY Teaches Us That: THINKING ANEW IS INTRINSICALLY AGGRESSIVE. Consequences.

The foundations of brain science were laid around the 20th century. One can deduce from the rough outline of neurobiology a surprisingly large amount of wisdom which may not have been certain previously… And which explains a lot of evil. In particular, why it’s so hard to think. Why? Because new thinking hurts and is subject to mental inertia. Both are obvious consequences of neurobiology.

Thus considering thinking in light of neurobiology explains why new ideas and new emotions hurt. And why they are so hard to accept. Neurobiology also explains why there is such a thing as mental inertia. Thinking at the very least consists in the activation of neural networks (maybe there is more to it, but we don’t need it here). Thinking needs facts.

“Fact” is a strange word. It curiously comes from Latin “facere”… to create, make. That’s curious, at first sight, because the modern idea of fact is that it’s something which just exists independently of human beings. So how could it be made or created? Did the etymology guess something common sense overlooked? Did etymology guess neurobiology? Well, yes.

Indeed, when considering a “fact”, what could possibly be made or created? At the simplest and most basic, a “fact” would involve electric activity from motor neurons… so we can move that finger or those eyeballs (to point towards a fact). 

At the most sophisticated, if the fact is new, new neural networks are made. Why? Because a NEW fact means a new association of ideas, sensations, emotions…. Thus new connection(s)… And new connection(s) in thinking have a direct neurobiological meaning. Connections in neurobiology literally mean new neurological formations enabling electrical or chemical impulses: axon, dendrite, etc… From these physiological facts  can be generated -I mean, facere, fabricated- a number of conclusions…

First, thinking new ideas and emoting differently hurts: having new thoughts means new connections, literally erecting new brain structures… Probably having to destroy old ones to make room… That’s all very energy consuming, and thus quite painful. And perhaps extremely very much so. So no wonder the public out there does not find new thinking attractive, pleasant and hilarious. Better keep on scrolling the same old same old…

Aristotle admitted the aggressive character of new thinking explicitly [1]. He articulated it around categories. Kategoria comes originally from against (kata) the agoria (public). This is an admission, by the initiator of the concept of how thinking works, that this most noble pursuit is an ADVERSARIAL process against the majority. [2]

Thinkers, new thinkers thinking things anew, need to be a funny lot, like Socrates, Aristotle to compensate and keep a sense of sanity. This is why Socrates made fun of the jury which was considering inflicting him the death penalty, by proposing free meals for him and his heirs…

And what of mental inertia? Routine brain activity consists in the activation of neural networks which get reinforced through Hebbian activity (the more synapses/neural networks are used the easier it is to use them… that explains the fascination of endless scrolling on Internet devices).  

Activating those existing networks is less energy consuming than creating new networks at the cost of destroying old ones… So brains keep on churning out the thoughts and emotions they are already endowed with…

***

Plato used to explain everything fundamentally with a theory of “forms”. Well, we found the “forms”: they are embodied in brain geometry… in particular neurological networks (the brain also has an elaborate, high dimensional neurological architecture of organs such as the hypothalamus, the pineal gland, the hippocampus, the amygdala, etc… Those react to, and cause further, neurological activity.)

Ideas are fundamentally relationships between concepts which are themselves sets of other relationships… All of this can be modeled by neural networks organized in… categories.

***

A number of issues arise from the preceding, in light of the (remote) possibility for extraterrestrial civilization, and, more pragmatically, the (unavoidable) rise of Artificial Intelligence and Artificial Consciousness. In particular: is thinking intrinsically aggressive?

In short: yes.  Thinking is not just a placid form of mental engagement. It’s intrinsically violent, if well done.

One needs first to understand that, given a body of thought, new thinking will consist in modifying this body of thought. Hence to spend energy. For a life form, or any thought form, spending energy could bring deactivation, it is adversarial… and prevented by the occurrence of pain.

So, if we want adversity at all cost, we will prevent thinking and that in turn will bring more adversity. Can’t win…

Looks as if we will have to learn to live with evil. Looks as if humanism will have to revew its relationship with war… It also looks as if intellectuals (including yours truly!) are not as innocent as they claim to be…

Patrice Ayme

Aryan dreams… Verdun 1940 on the right…

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[1] Recognizing aggression for what it is is an act of honnesty and mental acuity. Aristotle fled Athens, telling that he wanted to spare the city another crime against philosophy (an allusion to Socrates’ death). So he recognized thinking was an aggressive act. So he Aristotle had committed aggression, he may as well flee. Whereas Socrates was in denial of his own aggressivity, and stood his ground.

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[2] So basically some Public P (it could be a nation, party, class, institution or a religion or civilization) says something Stupid S. Then A  comes with a piece of logic C, the kata-agoria, counter-public to demolish S and thus the brains of P.The Greek verb’s original sense of “accuse” had weakened to “assert, name” by the time Aristotle applied katēgoria to his 10 classes of “expressions that are in no way composite,”

Antagonistic has the same root: anti-agōn “assembly, mass of people brought together,” 

California, Switzerland, France, Or Why Direct Democracy Is Superior

French Prime Minister Elizabeth Borne succeeded the competitive exam to the Polytechnique school, and then came out among the best. Does that mean she has a good level in math, does that mean she is good politician? Merkel was a physicist (applied) with a PhD… But she shut down nuclear for lunatic reasons (tsunamis in the middle of Germany?), and choose instead coal and of course her colleague Putin (Merkel was a Russian speaking “Communist” government official of the DDR, and Putin was a German speaking Kremlin spy and special agent of the KGB inside the DDR, feeding the Red Army Faction, and its ilk… )

PM Borne has a master’s degree in mathematics by equivalence… Well, so what?
Borne saw solving partial differential equations…
A polytechnician is not a mathematician, at best a socially ambitious baby engineer. A competitive beast who tends to think that having a big competitive brain at 20 gives you mastery of real life.
And a vulgar mathematician is not necessarily a deep thinker. Borne’s statement on the need to reduce CO2 emissions in France, and the need to do in a few years what has not been done for decades reflects a singularly narrow-minded mentality…. typical of common mathematicians, namely a delirious non-observation of the real world… a trait too often characteristic of French pseudo-intellectuals, an escape from reality.
California has a higher GDP than Germany (from high tech). Switzerland has a GDP per capita equal to that of California (from high tech, big pharma). What these two states have in common is direct democracy and not just being run by a pseudo-mathematician with all the answers to the five or six equations she knows.

***

I rule, therefore you don’t need to think? Too much fascism does not make a country smartest. Look at all those flags and sabers…

Both Athens and Rome, when they flourished, were places of the highest intellect and thus the most superior technology… and the latter made them superior economically and militarily. France used to be democratically, and human rights superior to all during the period 500 CE-1610 CE (forgetting for a moment crusades, Cathars, Vaudois, inquisition and religious wars)… England’s democratic structures, implemented by the rogue Frenchmen thriving there during the Middle Ages, became clearly superior after 1688 CE, while France sank below her own horizon with the demented Sun king; however a closer examination shows that French peasants, however poor, owned their lands, and the British peasant didn’t. In 1789 CE, both France and the US adopted the equality of rights (the UK still doesn’t have it: look at the chamber of “Lords”, not just the clownish monarchy).

Nowadays, France is definitively less democratic than California and Switzerland, and it shows in the ability of France to pay her own bills...

***

Partial French version:

Une maitrise (master) en mathématiques par équivalence… Bon, et alors?

Borne a vu résoudre des équations différentielles partielles…

Un polytechnicien n’est pas un mathématicien, au mieux un bébé ingénieur socialement ambitieux. Une bête à concours qui tend à penser qu’avoir un gros cerveau compétitif à 20 ans donne la maitrise du reel.

Et un vulgaire mathématicien n’est pas nécessairement un penseur profond. La déclaration de Borne sur la nécessité de réduire les émissions de CO2 en France, et la nécessité de faire en quelques années ce qui n’a pas été fait depuis des décennies reflètent une mentalité singulierement bornée…. typique des mathématiciens communs, à savoir une non-observation délirante du monde réel… un trait trop souvent caractéristique des pseudo-intellectuels français, une fuite hors du réel.

La Californie a un PIB supérieur à l’Allemagne. La Suisse a un PIB par habitant égal à celui de la Californie. Ce que ces deux États ont en commun, c’est la démocratie directe et ne pas être simplement dirigé par une pseudo-mathématicienne avec toutes les réponses aux cinq ou six équations qu’elle connait.

Patrice Ayme

2022 Nobel Prize In Economics Given To Banking Inequity, And Financial Catastrophes

To impose an evil notion, namely that the banking system is a just pillar of society, there is nothing like celebrating its greatest priest with the ultimate prize. That intuitively says that his religion, private oligarchic banking, backed up by the state, is the greatest. 

 

Thus, giving the 2022 Nobel Prize to the chief central banker, Ben Bernanke, is a propaganda trick: the establishment, and in particular the financial oligarchy, gives itself a pat in the back, an academic applause, the nobility of the Nobel. 

 

All the assertions celebrated in that particular prize, and presented as new, shattering discoveries, are trivial, and well known, since there are bankers and they lend. In the modern era, that’s at least as old as the republic of Florence, nine centuries ago... Bernanke discovered that banking has to do with trust? What a discovery! A Neanderthal lending to another, 300,000 years ago, knew this…

 

Now of course the Nobel prize had been given earlier to Milton Friedman for the exact opposite discourse, which was obviously wrong. But then Friedman was tied to the Reagan establishment. Now we are more into straight plutocracy, and banking has to be venerated as an instrument of social justice: no plutocrats have been injured during the making of this financial movie, two huge central banking crises in two decades. 

 

Bernanke banking is the culmination of humanity and morality! That Nobel celebration of central banking augmentation of obscene inequity of the last two decades must persuade the naive that these crises, in which most people have been irreversibly hurt, did not happen: was not a prize given to celebrate how they were, after all, avoided? So inequity was just an illusion? And certainly of little significance? This is what the Nobel folks want you to believe. No doubt they can be in turn feted, invited to plutocratic universities and wealthy think tanks, rub shoulders with billonaires…

Patrice Ayme

New height of impudence as Economy Nobel was given to the guy who saved humanity from the fires he himself lit. What’s next? Giving the Peace Prize to Putin for Puting to eternal sleep hundreds of thousands of people?

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). 

***

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. 

***

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…

Biden Helps Wealthy Elite Education Get Wealthier, More Privileged

Biden canceled, by executive order,  the debt of many students… with a (past) yearly income of no more than $250,000 (4 times the US median family income!) 

The move may cost simple minded US taxpayers more than $300 billion in money they effectively lent out that will never be repaid. For some obscure reason, this is viewed as progressive by many “Democrats“. Reaction of the perplexed New York Times:

“But critics — including some members of Mr. Biden’s own party — said the move was deeply unfair.”

Indeed, borrowers will be assessed based on the income they reported in 2021 or 2020. This means that individuals who could be making millions from their degrees will not have to reimburse their debts. NYT:

“Jason Furman, a Harvard economist and former top economist for President Barack Obama, said the plan “would unnecessarily provide tens of thousands of dollars to many high-income households in a way that goes well beyond even what he promised in the heat of a Democratic primary when the problem facing the country was low inflation — not high inflation.”

The Republican National Committee released a statement slamming the program as “Biden’s bailout for the wealthy.”

Senator Ben Sasse, Republican of Nebraska, said the plan “forces blue-collar workers to subsidize white-collar graduate students. Instead of demanding accountability from an underperforming higher-education sector that pushes so many young Americans into massive debt, the administration’s unilateral plan baptizes a broken system.”

What is going on here? The usual: Obama-like figures are promoted, so they can lead where the establishment wants to go. Individuals who owe everything to the system and are put in commanding positions: the New York, in the same article, provides unwittingly a striking example:

“I was standing in my dorm room when I heard this, and I just let out a scream,” said Marlene Ramirez, 25, who relied on Pell grants and other aid to pay for her undergraduate studies.

Ms. Ramirez, the first in her family to go to college, used the grants to cover two years of study at a community college, then transferred to the University of California, Los Angeles. After graduating in 2020 with a bachelor’s degree in anthropology, she still has $25,000 in federal loans that she had used to cover her housing and living expenses.

“This will almost wipe that out,” said Ms. Ramirez, who is finishing a master’s degree at the London School of Economics. “I’m shaking right now. This is life changing.”

The screaming, no nerves, no decency, so self-examination Ramirez is the sort of enthusiatic simple minded underlings who act as the best soldiers to the establishment. The LSE is one of the top MBA schools in the world. People coming out of that seat in the C suite right away. Next year, Ramirez, grateful to the plutocracy, will be earning millions and ordering lumberjacks around. It is of course easy to find out that Ramirez will earn an MBA from the LSE. She deserves no loan forgiveness, and especially not as a future grandmaster of the universe, firing all the little people, and hopping around the world in private jets, Obama style.

Elections are coming. Biden, by striking what endoctrinated-by-the-wealthy pseudo-progressives view as… “progressive”, activates the enthusiasm of his excited but deluded electorate. This has no cost… Because Biden’s executive order will be shot down by the courts, and Biden knows this…

The Democratic Party excels at running the world’s plutocracy, with an international oligarchy always grabbing more power… while claiming to be in the opposition, and for the little guy. This has been going on for a century. For a while, the likes of Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, Stalin, even Hirohito, profited. But the same class always grew in power, while, and by, feeding the delusion that they are doing the opposite of what they are truly doing, Relatively speaking, Machiavel sounds like a toddler.

Patrice Ayme

***

Tech points: a) Penn Wharton budget modelers report that the cost of Biden’s debt cancellation could be as much as a tillion dollars…

b) President Biden extended a Trump-era pause on payments… (yes, Trump again! Much of Biden is Trump… under an antagonistic sugar pill cover… )

President Biden’s executive order means the federal student loan balances of millions of people could fall by as much as $20,000. Here are answers to some common questions about how it will work:

Who qualifies for loan cancellation? Individuals who are single and earn $125,000 or less will qualify for the $10,000 in debt cancellation. If you’re married and file your taxes jointly or are a head of household, you qualify if your income is $250,000 or below. If you received a Pell Grant and meet these income requirements, you could qualify for an extra $10,000 in debt cancellation.

***

One vicious effect is ensuring the march forward of elite hyper expensive education which further feeds the inequality they depend upon. Even the NYT again perceives the problem:

Many economists warned the move could have damaging consequences for students and taxpayers in the future, by encouraging colleges and universities to raise prices with the federal government footing the bill.

Mr. Biden’s plan, including its limits on future loan repayment by borrowers, “would be a massive subsidy to the exact sector that created this mess with ever-rising tuition and fees,” said Melissa Kearney, a University of Maryland economist who directs the Aspen Economic Strategy Group. “We should be taking steps to rein in higher-ed pricing, not further subsidize higher-ed tuition and living expenses.”

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.

Recent Globalization Meant Plutocratization, So It has Got To Go

There have been many globalizations of trade in sizable parts of the world before: unable to feed itself in small and desiccated Attica, Athens imported its wheat from the Black Sea and paid for it with high tech wares made in her factories. The philosopher Demosthenes was the owner of such a high tech small company. 

The city of Rome became huge. Unable to feed itself, it imported its food from overseas. Its metals, including for making currency, came from Spain, its swords and helmets were made by Gauls. However, Roman globalization soon took a sinister turn: wealthy Romans learned to escape the Roman absolute limit on wealth by fiscal optimization.

When Roman oligarchs became wealthy enough, by plundering overseas, just like Russian oligarchs who plunder inside Russia (mostly, but not only), they used their gigantic wealths to buy all they needed in Rome, in particular all arable land, and not just tribunes, and votes. Rome became an evil-power: pluto-kratia. Democrats (under this name) and Populares (Marius and his nephew Caesar) fought the plutocrats to death. But they lost. In the end, after generations of massacres, the population was greatly diminished, the Roman army, hiding behind the young Octavian, took power, and gigantic immigration from the Eastern Mediterranean replaced the ancient dead Romans [1].

The present globalization has much to do with the globalization which killed the Roman Republic and its direct democracy [2]. Immense fortunes have been made by the wealthiest, whose definition is that they pay little or no tax, and buy themselves politicians, laws, media, and conspiracies and plots all over the planet.

First thing to do is to tax the plutocrats, worldwide! (Biden just announced the wealthiest Americans paid only 8% tax, a very small fraction of what average US taxpayers pay!)

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The preceding comment was censored by Paul Krugman and The New York Times: perhaps because it identified globalization and plutocratization, a terrible  thought crime… Noble Nobel Krugman, famous for his celebration of globalization and his ilk explicitly say, and Krugman repeated that the end of globalization will cause us all to be less wealthy (as if we were all wealthy!) I was not surprised by this censorship, so I sent another comment, which was published, after being delayed 12 hours (so that nobody would read it while the NYT can claim that it doesn’t censor!) Here it is in a fuller version below. The version sent to the NYT was weaker, and didn’t have the first paragraph below. NYT is a crucial part of the world plutocracy presently bombing Ukraine… When I undermine that effort, and this link between the WEF/Davos and Putin, I get censored…

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The price of globalization through plutocratization, which we benefited from, according to plutocratic propaganda, was right… for the world’s wealthiest people, our masters and owners. They particularly liked the fact they could buy democracy on the cheap that way. 

Our freedom is surely worth paying a bit of it through lesser GDP, especially considering most of that GDP has been going to oligarchs…  

Russian oligarchs are a product of this system, globalization through plutocratization, same as Rome, with Putin playing a role similar to Jugurtha, the homicidal Numidian usurper.

Globalization through plutocratization made dictators in Russia and China very powerful. Xi made alliances with many US oligarchs and developed a murderous surveillance tyranny in close cooperation with the biggest global tach firms. All of this without paying taxes, claiming to be tax free foundations and advising, or controlling even the mightiest states, even in an educational role (foxes teaching chicken the ways of the world).

As this global corruption festered, pressing issues such as nuclear weapons and the CO2 crisis were not addressed beyond smoke, mirrors and windmills…

Evil-power, plutocracy, is a corruption of hearts, desires, and even pleasure. Plutocrats take pleasure in other people’s misery: this is why Putin goes around, saying that his war in Ukraine is going according to plan: what Putin wants is flattened cities. As they hog resources for their clans, global plutocrats want to flatten the rest of the planet, knowing well that increasingly more miserable conditions will lead to war, the unspeakable evil. 

A detailed analysis of what went wrong with Carthage shows the same pattern. Carthage was an oligarchic democracy (one could say). Out of rage and anxiety from Roman gathering might, Carthage expanded forcefully in Spain. That was led by the Barca family (think Barcelone). So doing the Barcas, those ancient plutocrats cum generals, spurned Carthaginian legal control, and made the confrontation with the Roman Republic worse.

Plutocratization, especially when global, brings war. It brought it to Rome, it brought it to 1914, it brought it to us. In all cases, the origin of the global plutocratization was unbridled globalization, escaping the control of local laws, hence civilization.

Patrice Ayme

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[1] We have genetic proof of this, since 2019… Published in Science. Here is an extract: 

By the founding of Rome, the genetic composition of the region approximated that of modern Mediterranean populations. During the Imperial period, Rome’s population received net immigration from the Near East, followed by an increase in genetic contributions from Europe. These ancestry shifts mirrored the geopolitical affiliations of Rome and were accompanied by marked interindividual diversity, reflecting gene flow from across the Mediterranean, Europe, and North Africa.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.aay6826

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[2] https://www.resilience.org/stories/2018-05-29/new-data-reveal-the-hidden-mechanisms-of-the-collapse-of-the-roman-empire/

I wrote a lot on the subject, for decades…

Metal pollution in Greenland from the economic and technological activity of Roman civilization. One can ssee clearly the rise of activity corresponding to the growth of the Roman Republic, then the collapse due to the civil wars brought by the fight to death between plutocration and the democrats (Romans used that exact word: democrats… They also use massively “oligarchs” to qualify whom I prefer to call “plutocrats” (evil oligarchs). One can see the collapse of the fascist empire and its attempted recovery, from more fascism, starting with Diocletian… Circa 300 CE. On the far right one can see the Merovingian then Carolingian Frankish recovery, with the peak by Charlemagne’s coronation as Roman emperor… The Franks had conquered Eastern Europe, all the way to Ukraine…

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?

Saving The Animals, Thus Ourselves

Animals die in great numbers trying to cross human transportation systems. When one provides the animals with crossings, they rush to use them (so are used even before they are finished, by a Noah’s ark of species). Respecting nature is not just about the beauty and naturalness it provides us with, it is about respecting how we became who we are, at our best. We have to learn to share the planet with animals. Not just because we are smart, but also because they are smart and our smarts evolved from interacting with their smarts. So interacting with wild animals is smart all around… and it has made our species smarter! Wildlife interaction is how we evolved our smarts. Not book smarts, but the deepest smarts.

Hence by respecting animals, we respect how we became human… and it keeps on being human to do so.
Economy means managing the house, in particular, managing earth, which is our common house. As the greenhouse heating proceeds at an accelerating pace, we then have to reserve an increasing part of our economic activity to save the animals by helping them to cope with the changes we have brought.
Morality comes from the mores, the old ways, the ways which perdured, and thus, insure survival. Having a natural environment, full of animals, is the ultimate morality. If we can’t save them, how can we learn to save ourselves? So it is not just smart and economic to save the animals, but also moral. The money engaged so far is quite small. But the price of an unbalanced environment tottering towards ruin, is incomparably higher. For a nice article with nice videos of animals using their smarts crossing freeways and roads, consider:

As a badger digs, say for ground squirrels whose borrows have many exits, could not it be that the coyote would seize a fleeing squirrel, and share the meal? This is basic economics and strategy, and it turns out that coyotes and badgers have figured out that behavior, and cooperate together. The next question would be this: do the individuals concerned figure it out by themselves, as cephalopods do, or is the behavior culturally instigated, namely both badgers and coyotes learn elements of interspecific cooperation from teaching by their elders? I believe the latter.

After all, I trained the (wild) nesting birds on my balcony to benignantly ignore my weird and intrusive ways… which thus had to learn to be a bit more respectful than they usually are. But of course these ways tend to incite the red tail hawks to not land on this particular balcony on a determined culinary mission (as they have been seen doing…) And the birds know this [1].

Saving the animals is first of all about saving us… Not just our sense of beauty.

Patrice Ayme

[1] Hummingbirds set their nests below hawks’ nests, as this protects them from gays. Local hawks do attack nests of birds who are big enough (like gays, crows, etc).And I have seen them pass 10 feet from me, eyeing me suspiciously… Their feathers can be two feet long…

https://www.audubon.org/news/why-hawk-hummingbirds-best-friend