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). 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cost of brainlessness is war. 

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

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

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

Patrice Ayme

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

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

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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.

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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

A Civilization Whose Media Is Controlled By A Few Is Despicable

The New York Times wants us to worry about the cruelty directed to avian dinosaurs. Why chicken? Why not rats tortured by rat poison, dying over hours in indicible suffering? Aren’t rats closer to humans than chicken? Being too concerned by animal welfare was the mark of the Nazis: they passed very advanced animal welfare laws. That enabled them to present themselves as “humane”. It was a cover-up, a change of conversation.

On April 21, 1933, almost immediately after the Nazis came to power, the parliament began to pass laws for the regulation of animal slaughter. On April 21, a law was passed concerning the slaughter of animals; no animals were to be slaughtered without anesthetic. Those Nazis were obviously keen to project an image of goodness.

It is scornful to let a few wealthy families, who all know each other, control the world media. Therein the source of monothinking… And its erroneous outcomes. The climate catastrophe could have been mitigated. But it’s not going to be. Record beating temperatures in North Eastern Siberia (the world’s coldest place, outside of Antarctica) were recently measured: 38 Celsius, more than 100 Fahrenheit, more than Houston, Texas… The mad greenhouse is supposed to cook the polar regions, as it starts rampaging. And it is. So Siberia is burning, unleashing gigantic quantities of CO2 and methane. Two weeks ago, the area on fire was as large as Switzerland, and affecting air quality in North America.

So far, so funny. But when global HEATING goes nonlinear, it’s going to be even less funny than the COVID virus… (Picture NASA, July 2, 2020)

Nicholas Kristof of New York Times in his blog, Saturday 11, 2020:

I noted in my last newsletter that I was wondering, as we pull down controversial statues, what our great-grandchildren will find bewilderingly immoral about our own times — and about us. Some of you sent in your thoughts, and the thought nagged me enough that it became my Sunday column.

I think our descendants will find our passivity on climate change unforgivable. They’ll be staggered by our indifference to human suffering. And I think they’ll be baffled by our systematic cruelty to animals, especially poultry and livestock. Read the column and then post in the comments about other moral blind spots of our time that I missed.

I sent this:

A characteristic of the recent indignation of the upper middle class reminds me of the Puritans or old: namely, they think they are so pure, and they are not. But, to make sure that they feel pure, all howling the same way, while enjoying the spoils, they accuse The Devil… namely Trump.

However, Trump is a newcomer in politics, and he did not originate most of the well installed evils in place. An obvious evil is the housing crisis, and it came directly from NIMBYism (Not In My Back Yard). Where I have lived for decades, the NIMBYists argued that non single family housing had to be demolished, because it spoiled the views. Even billionaire Feinstein (married to a Senator) said this.

What upper class “democrats” didn’t say was that, by strangling supply, they caused enormous price appreciation of their houses, and homelessness. Better to talk about “systemic racism”,as it accuses We The People to be vicious, perverse, and… despicable. Besides, it accuses of what we are not, thus confusing us.

Meanwhile public transportation was also strangled to make IPOs (Uber, etc.) while Google (etc.) enjoy their own private transportation bus system (using regular bus stops which they stole for themselves, as they generally did not pay for them).

Another despicable manoeuver? Obamacare was rolled out: 25 million new insured (getting government money to pay for it), but small people can’t see their doctors anymore, although they pay private corporations for insurance they don’t get the fruits of (I have used Obamacare for real: it’s a rip-off). Single family housing is also causative of the climate catastrophe, by the way…

***

Not holding my breath that the employees of the conspiracy of the world’s wealthiest men will dare to publish such a contribution to global thinking (the most sedate, cogent, and polite parts above constituted comments to the New York Times; they were all censored; this puts a question towards the honesty of individuals such as mr. Kristof: he reads individual comments. Then he blocks them because, well, his salary depends upon it… La grande excuse des pires salauds à travers les ages: my salary made me do it…)   … They don’t want us to think thoughts we are not supposed to have. Bleating, they like.

A Civilization Whose Media Is Controlled By A Few Is Despicable… and also idiotic. That’s why they die… but it can take a while…

Patrice Ayme

Krugman’s New Trade Theory Would Be Idiotic, Were It Not So Criminal, Enslaving Us All To China

A problem preventing progress in the USA, thus the world is that plutocracy masters (and owns) the media, the universities, the international prizes, international organizations, and the intellectual discourse, even the haughtiest (as I have argued all top philosophy is in its grip, over as a vaccine against progress, rather than as a treatment against progress).

A famous example, the self-described “Conscience of a Liberal”, Paul Krugman. I stopped arguing with him, a few years ago, because I was tired of his censorship, and I was hoping Trump would demolish Krugman’s great work, GLOBAL PLUTOCRACY, and becoming all slaves to China. Krugman got the Nobel for his “New Trade Theory”. There have been Trade theories and practices since before the Bronze Age Era, the civilization of which collapsed spectacularly, and simultaneously, 33 centuries ago. 

Trade is engaged into for a myriad of complex reasons, from the point of a lance poking one’s behind, to “comparative advantage”. Trade was a matter of survival for hundreds of thousands of years, as local tribes couldn’t get that obsidian, or flintlock from far away, that is, necessary material to make superior weaponry. So much of trade theory consists into rediscovering the obvious and long-well-known. 

Even if it worked, NTT would work only between similarly sized countries. But China is much bigger, 40 tiimes bigger than the average country in population. I guess Krugman is reading that her for the first time…. And because it’s a dictatorship organized by US plutocrats, another type of dictators, decorated fro freedom by Obama, China is alway first, an advantage NTT venerates…

In NTT Krugman focused on returns afforded by scale. The bigger the industrial corporation, the cheaper quality/price it can fabricate goods. Krugman loves to talk in non understandable ways, here is on his own work: “The idea that trade might reflect an overlay of increasing-returns specialization on comparative advantage was not there at all: instead, the ruling idea was that increasing returns would simply alter the pattern of comparative advantage.” Whatever, the “Conscience of a Liberal” tries to obscure his evil work with what he calls “wonkish”.

New trade theory suggests that the ability of firms to gain economies of scale (unit cost reductions associated with a large scale of output) can have important implications for international trade… namely you will wallop the competition.

New trade theory suggests that: 

a)through its impact on economies of scale, trade can increase the variety of goods available to consumers and decrease the average cost of those goods.

b) in those industries when output required to attain economies of scale represents a significant proportion of total world demand, the global market may only be able to support a small number of enterprises.

c) Government may play a role in assisting its home based companies. This implies that all jobs will go to China, a dictatorship. Indeed, Chinese companies can achieve the largest scale: their interior market is nearly five times the US. Also it’s OK that China intervenes to assist its own behemoths: see point c).

Reading this, Stalin may have ordered Krugman send to Siberia for plagiarism. Stalin used to say:”Quantity is its own quality”. (He was referring to T34 tanks and planes, many of them from the US…) My point? none of this is new. What’s new is for richly educated economists (as they serve the rich) to discover those old truths.

As most Western European countries have no scale, they are just Hong Kong without financials, they will only be nations of “consumers”. But where will their money come from? Will they have to sell their children to the Chinese dictatorship?

“Variety And Reducing Costs” (one more lie!)

Without trade, nations might not be able to produce those products where economies of scale are important. With trade, markets are large enough to support the production necessary to achieve economies of scale. So, trade is mutually beneficial because it allows for the specialization of production, the realization of scale economies, and the production of a greater variety of products at lower prices.

NTT is either geographically challenged idiotic… Or takes us for geographically challenged idiots. His idiotic reasoning works only if the trading partners are all of the same size, roughly, and of the same political nature. But they are not. The average country population is only 35 millions, and the median country population is less than ten million, a fraction of one percent of the size of China. 

NTT is correct that the pattern of trade we observe in the world economy may be the result of first mover advantages (the economic and strategic advantages that accrue to early entrants into an industry) and economies of scale.

New trade theory suggests that for those products where economies of scale are significant and represent a substantial proportion of world demand, first movers can gain a scale based cost advantage that later entrants find difficult to match. The US and China have been acting accordingly, while piously preaching the opposite, namely economic liberalism, open borders. An excellent example is SpaceX, launched under Bush, which received billions under Obama, under the table (and above the table, from Trump). Now Space X excellent products will destroy all and any aerospace industry, worldwide… except in the countries which decide to have their own aerospace (China, Russia, India… others not clear…).  

Official Implications Of New Trade Theory:

Nations may benefit from trade even when they do not differ in resource endowments or technology (so the Europeans have been persuaded to open to China and the US, because they may benefit… just like a fly may benefit from being devoured by a spider).

A country may dominate in the export of a good simply because it was lucky enough to have one or more firms among the first to produce that good (as we Americans are always first we shall DOMINATE, because we dominated first). Bing first becomes a respected form of comparative advantage (watch Tesla opening a giant plant in Germany next year).

An extension of the theory is the implication that governments should consider strategic trade policies that nurture and protect firms and industries where first mover advantages and economies of scale are important.

If progressives want to progress towards human rights and a better planet, they will have to learn to realize they have been led by crooks who made “theories” to justify the disappearance of local employment, dignity, education and income, fostering instead exploitation by a dictatorship.

Does Krugman realize what an abominable role new Trade Theory has played in the imposition of global plutocracy? Apparently not. He spews, editorial after editorial, horrible insults about Donald Trump… But, remove the insults, and the substantial thing he complains about is less “New Trade”, a euphemism for selling the world to China, in exchange for getting cheaper goods, which presumably we will pay for with money produced by China, as China produces everything…

In many countries, dozens of thousands of death happened, during the Corochinavirus, because everything, including masks, were made in China. Thanks, NTT and its comparative advantage to… China. China had no more death than Sweden (China lies, of course) All these deaths in these other countries would not have happened if we had the right NECESSARY TRADE THEORY.

As long as the crooks and even their crooqkery, have not been detected… where is the hope?

Patrice Ayme

    

 

Trump Haters Hate Hydroxychloroquine Too

Hate is the gift which keeps on giving to haters, and the worst it gets, the more they thrive.

It’s telling that hydroxychloroquine (HCQ) has become a political issue. Hatred has grown so much that one is considered a stupid pro-Trump racist, if one falls for HCQ. Everyday, the New York Times comes out with a new anti-Trump article accusing him of promoting hydroxychloroquine (he has “promoted” all plausible and potential COVID treatments)…. But the anti-Trump plutocrats have a good reason to hate the cheap HCQ. And it has nothing they want to crow about.

There are many other anti-Trump articles, from all sorts of angles, but the  anti-Trump-anti-HCQ article of the day is a tradition, at the New York Times. Like Goebbels they keep repeating the same lie: there is no evidence that HCQ, etc… Aldous Huxley — ‘Sixty-two thousand four hundred repetitions make one truth.‘

Most of the plutocratically owned press (sorry about the pleonasm) the one which hates Trump, has made that drug, HCQ, a political issue by observing that it was “promoted by President Trump and others”… Then they add that there is no evidence that it can prevent or treat Covid-19. It reminds one of priests singing the same song everyday. 

Actually there is plenty of evidence that HCQ could work, the only question is how well (the evidence is, disappointingly, not too well; whereas it is very effective for some diseases; however for malaria its effectiveness went down, as the parasite mutated)… for no less than three classes of reasons:

a) Hydroxychloroquine is an immune moderator, that’s how it works against Lupus. The worst problem with COVID seems to be a crazed immune system, overreacting (although the virus is itself bad, it infects neurons directly, it seems, as rabies does?).

b) for other reasons, HCQ hinders the virus. The effects are quite modest, but strong enough to be used in comparison to developing therapeutics in the world’s largest study in vitro… Stanford, part of this study published that some drugs “worked twenty times better than HCQ”. A difference between these potential drugs and HCQ, is that HCQ has been used by more than two billion people (I, and Raoult, both from Senegal, used it for years. The NYT no doubt will tell me that’s why I insist to be fair and balanced about Trump… For relaxation, they will censor ten of my pro-HCQ comments…)

c) HCQ has been demonstrated to reduce viral loads. d) In countries (Russia, India, Turkey) where HCQ is used massively, the death rates are spectacularly lower.

In Turkey Hydroxychloroquine plus AZT, the Raoult treatment, is used massively at the first symptoms. The results are spectacular. Turkey has 170,000 cases of coronavirus, for a population of 82 millions. By comparison, Great Britain has had more than 40,000 DEAD (actually final government counting turns out 40% higher after a few weeks… So expect 50K soon). The Indian research body, ICMR uses it for the healthcare workers (HCWs) who are at an elevated risk of contracting Covid-19.

The ICMR study indicates that “simply initiating HCQ prophylaxis did not reduce the odds of acquiring Covid-19 infection among HCWs. However, with the intake of four or more maintenance doses of HCQ, the protective effect started emerging. A significant reduction of about 80 per cent in the odds of Covid-19 infection in the HCWs was identified with the intake of six or more doses of HCQ prophylaxis. This dose-response relationship added strength to the study outcomes.“

It goes without saying that, if HCQ plus a macrolide (antiviral) antibiotic mitigates COVID, the biotech stocks are worth much less, and they trade indeed according to fake studies on HCQ.

Many of the great priests of the Demo-Plutocratic Party are wheelers and dealers. They want those biotech stocks to go ever higher. So down with the twenty dollar treatment removing most of the problem! And Trump fixing it! They want Trump to lose so that all jobs can be sent to China again!

In the last few weeks one doctor made a BILLION dollars from investing in Biotech (yes, 10^9 dollars). I don’t doubt the august doctor hates Trump, who is all what’s between him and another billion. After he turned out that The Lancet and NEJM authors were at best greedy monkeys (the self-dealing of the study was obvious) and their anti-HCQ “study” collapsed, biotech stocks collapsed in turn 15%! (I’m tracking very closely, don’t ask…)

So the Lancet just published a “study” which was grotesquely self-dealing… But the French government full of corrupt manslaughtering idiots, immediately forbid HCQ. France has become a very fascist country recently, with even going on beaches, parks and mountains outlawed, even if they were out of your door. Everyday is about the mood and caprices of the ex-banker of M&A, the young king, Macron I.

Meanwhile, Germany, next door, by reacting intelligently and locally rather than by being led by a corrupt young fascist banker-Fuhrer, had a death rate 20% of that of France. See, the Germans have become five times more intelligent than the French, as measured by COVID! It took a while, but there is hope! The German situation is a consequence of being led by a physicist, and local democracy (regional governments took the best decisions).

Meanwhile, the New York Times will keep on wishing with all its might that as many US citizens as possible die from COVID, as long as Trump goes down too… That’s because they want the return of their gilded age, with all jobs in the Chinese dictatorship… That’s why they support the New Jim Crow laws author that much (those laws date from 1994, when Senator Biden led the charge… Black Lives Matter is officially against them, so I don’t see how they could support their author).

People go around and ponder human nature. How come? Lincoln! Definition of goodness! Killed only a million Americans! OK, not his fault! Better Angels, come around! Let’s celebrate the intrinsic goodness of man, and of its butchers in particular, as long as they are our butchers! And what of the worst angels? When do they come around? What if hatred was an exponential phenomenon? Last night a 22 year old white youth was killed in Vallejo, California. He was unarmed, kneeling, hands up, a youth advocate from San Francisco. When the looting is alleged, the shooting starts (that statement is viewed as racist by the haters, by the way, that’s why I use it). The police officer shot five times, through his windshield: death can’t wait. Black lives matter! Do white lives matter too? Or do people have to be painted particular to be worth of racial considerations?

Hate is the gift which keeps on giving, and the worst it gets, the happier the haters.

Patrice Ayme

P/S: There has been a whole slew of anti-HCQ papers. Those I read were grossly incompetent, violating blatantly the “scientific method”. For example by comparing HCQ patients with non-HCQ patients… For just two days. After these two days, the non-HCQ were switched to HCQ, and the conclusion was that HCQ had no advantage… The data of two enormous studies published in the New England Journal of Medicine and The Lancet, came from a private company called Surgisphere, which claims to have granular patient-level information shared by 1,200 hospitals and health facilities on six continents (list not available). The founder and chief executive of Surgisphere, Dr. Sapan Desai, was listed as an author on both papers… Oops.