Gluten, Poisons, Insuring the Stupidity of Crowds

I believe laws ought to be decided by We The People. The present governmental system with its oligarchic legislate and executive ought to be transitioned out of, and restricted to the details. (This is what Switzerland has been doing in the last 25 years, to immense social and economic success.)

When I propose this, skeptics often object that people are brazenly ignorant, turgidly stupid, and prone to fashionable madness. So my proposition would be worse than what we have now, they sneer.

There is some truth in all this. I will roll out an example: gluten. And explain why We The People indulge in this sort of hare-brained obsession. It’s actually a basic manipulation they are neutralized with, like a mouse by a piece of cheese deep in a trap.

This point of view, that the demos cannot be trusted, is nothing new, and why Aristotle proposed to the best to rule (Aristo-crat). In practice, he defined as the best were his personal buddies, and everybody who was seriously rich.

I will explain why We The People tend to be ignorant, stupid, and mad. Mostly, when People are treated as children, they compensate by leading with gusto where they can lead: in nowhere land, for nowhere men.

They are engaged in the mental equivalent of captive animals pacing back and forth in too small a cage.

The obsession with gluten, sodium benzoate all over foods, profits in foods, all help build a mental box in which to cage We The People.

It is fashionable to avoid gluten, a protein in wheat, rice, barley which makes them chewy. Many people claim that gluten makes them sick. The for-profit corporations created a non-gluten movement. They tend to replace gluten, a protein, by sugar(s). Never mind the well-established fact that those sugars make people sick with an impressive array of diseases.

Some studies claimed that gluten caused intestinal distress in some patients who did not truly have celiac disease.

The same scientists who suggested gluten sensitivity first, followed up with more rigorous studies… In which they found that non-celiac gluten sensitivity doesn’t exist.

Yet, 30% of people want to eat less gluten (they have been so persuaded by industry). Sales of gluten-free products are projected to be $15 billion by 2016. Only 1% of Americans suffer from celiac disease, yet 18% of adults now buy gluten-free foods. (No wonder, it’s full of sugars, and obese Americans need all the sugar they can get, so they have enough fuel to move!)

In several follow-ups, some by the same authors who had found the apparent gluten sensitivity, subjects cycled through high-gluten, low-gluten, and no-gluten (placebo) diets, without knowing which diet plan they were on. In the end, all of the diets — even the placebo diet — caused pain, bloating, nausea, and gas to a similar degree. Thus there are problematic foods, but it didn’t matter if the diet contained gluten. Gluten sensitivity was found NOT to exist.

“In contrast to our first study … we could find absolutely no specific response to gluten,” lead scientist Gibson wrote in his first follow-up paper. A third, larger study published this month has confirmed the findings.

However detailed studies found great sensitivity to FODMAPs.

So why people don’t worry about these? Because “Gluten-free” is an industry, and a new one, bringing new profits, whereas FODMAP avoidance would be a problem for industry.

I just saw one Monarch Butterfly. I used to see thousands, in just one day, on the same hill. Those Monarchs don’t go to Mexico, they migrate within the USA, from the Rockies, to California, back and forth. Why did they disappear? Insecticides, and, in particular those made from nicotine (a deadly poison in minute doses), or neonicotinoids. They are the same poisons which kill bees.

There again, this was scientifically established, but it’s ignored in the popular knowledge base, as it stands in the way of our masters.

In general one may wonder why poisons such as the mighty carcinogen benzene are deliberately introduced in food. My daughter has a very strong allergy to Sodium Benzoate, so she can be used as a Sodium Benzoate detector. When she turns all red, it means she was poisoned by the authorities.

Authorities? Well, after all, the FDA allows industrialists to put benzene in food, to kill the little beasties who would be otherwise found there. So, if you do not eat as much of that food as the little beasties, you will survive long enough to buy more, and more, and more, so it’s OK, with the FDA.

And it does not disrupt the Masters in the least, as they eat fresh food prepared by their chefs in their private jumbo jets, far above the minnows, while paying no tax, as the Google guys.

Why are people so gullible? Because the Masters made them gullible. Putin, a Master, made his population so stupid that it interprets its difficulties as caused by the West, and thus, the more Putin attacks, the more popular he gets (86% approval for Putin in Russia, latest polls).

This phenomenon has been seen before: after he killed millions of Ukrainians and Soviets, in obscure “purges”, Stalin was loved (especially by Western pseudo-intellectuals). Later Hitler became most popular as Germany met the apocalypse.

Conflict wakes up the fascist instinct, all becoming of one mind behind the leader. Uncertain, feeble Masters know this, so they create conflicts to get a following (whereas, as Ibn Khaldun pointed out, strong empires know peace inside).

Direct democracy would force We The People to become deciders, instead of stupidified followers in need of all-knowing leaders to make, or, rather, eschew, all the big decisions. Instead of believing obvious stupidities, We The People would examine them.

What we have now is an unexamined polis. Socrates famously, and stupidly, said that an unexamined life was not worth having (it’s stupid, as crocodiles, politicians and bankers demonstrate every day). What he should have said is that an unexamined polis is best not having.

If We The People was examining foods, it would find the following: the food industry uses massive, unsustainable amounts of antibiotics, pesticides, fungicides, poisons, and chemical fertilizers. They no doubt correlate with the multiplication of the occurrence of brain tumors by four since 1950. Parts of France, who supported agriculture for more than three millennia, are now so polluted, that the European Commission’s threatened sanctions have been approved by the Court of Justice of the European Union.

And why is that general poisoning going-on? Simple: the profiteers want to maximize profits. The food budget of We The People is a fixed amount. Beyond that we would be back in the pre-revolutionary mood of France (when a free market reform under Louis XIV’s PM Turgot allowed the price of bread to jump up).

So, to maximize profit margins, the profiteers have to reduce their costs, hence all the poisons, chemicals, etc. And gluten in all that? A red herring, a bone, the stupidified People can gnaw on, while augmenting the profiteers’ profits (there are state subventions for sugar). Their outrage and interest is carefully entertained: it’s a more sophisticated version of the panem et circenses (bread and circus) of the Romans.

All the silliness would disappear if We the People learned about the world enough to pretend to decide about its fate. Learning that the largest corporations avoid taxes, often completely, and that banks, which are truly agents of the state, are a state within the state, and a criminal one at that., would help to forget about imaginary celiac disease, or the one caused by too much sugars (FODMAPs).

And that’s exactly why the plutocrats will try their best to make sure this will not happen, by occupying the minds with the dumbest obsessions evil minds can find.

That was done for centuries in the Roman Empire, until all the mental energy of the Demos went to charioteers, culminating in the Nika Riots, an aborted revolution, in 532 CE, which burned half of Constantinople. The reason the Nika Riots were not a successful revolution is that We The People had become too dumb to understand what was truly happening. This is where we are headed now.

Patrice Ayme’

No Burning Curiosity, No Morality?

What Else Those Who Don’t Want To Hear About Burning Kittens, Don’t Want To Hear About?

A video was linked on Facebook, supposedly showing a burning kitten. Some have clamored for Facebook to withdraw the video. That’s pusillanimous.

For evil to triumph, all what has to happen is for good people not to want to know about it.

What’s next, pusillanimous people? Are you going to censor the expert goring of a lion by a buffalo?

Horn Thru Belly Puts Lion In Orbit

Shall we censor too, this gory violence against big kitty? He was just kindly eating the grounded fellow’s big rump.

(Contrarily to some PC description of that incident had it, there is no way the lion survived: the horn was only stopped by the tough hide after going nearly all the way through the kitty’s belly).

I am afraid all the people who ask for censorship are friends of Big Brother. What’s next, indeed? Each time a monk sets himself on fire, you will censor? What about respecting him enough to hear the case he is trying to make? Yes, showing the act is different from just entering that it happened, as a data point. More emotional content.

If one had shown people being gazed at Auschwitz, should people of upright character have asked Facebook to withdraw the video?

Well, I have news for you: that’s basically what Hitler’s Germans did: they censored everything. Hitler’s Germans did not want to see, they thought it would be immoral to see what was going on, they viewed as immoral those who wanted to show the immoralities.

If the Germans had seen the video of Auschwitz, there would have been no Auschwitz, and no Nazi regime, in a matter of weeks (this means the Allies were derelict in no advertising the extermination camps… But, of course, they had not seen the video, either. The democratic leaders knew the Nazis were evil, but did not guess that they were that evil… they did not want to know, either, as many of the leaders of the West had been accomplices of Nazism, prior).

I would personally love it that all crimes be made into videos, and put on Facebook. Start with the banksters.

For all the naïve, or ill informed, out there, burning a kitten is actually a crime, a prosecuted activity, by law. (Don’t try this at home, you would end in the slammer.)

I do not know where the kitten torture happened, but if the perpetrator could be identified, then he could be prosecuted (say as he crosses a border). Certainly in many EU countries, and in the USA, he could be prosecuted. (Cats and dogs are protected by special laws: however, torturing a mouse or a mole is perfectly legal.)

More than 3,000 people have died from ebola exponentiating: time for adult subjects, people. There is more serious stuff out there than perforated lions and burning kittens.u

Meanwhile Daesh (the so called, self-declared “Caliphate”, also known as ISIS; “Daesh” sounds in Arabic like “crushing under foot” and a period of trouble, so it’s a strongly pejorative propaganda trick which I recommend) has killed thousands of innocents.

Yet some selfish “pacifists” demonstrated in Washington when the top generals of the USA testified in Congress that they may advise the president to send ground troops in Iraq, if the situation changes (the French Republic has already troops on the ground in Kurdistan, fighting Daesh… while keeping a low profile).

Withdrawing that burning kitten video from the Internet will just allow the perpetrator to escape justice more easily. And it would set a very bad precedent.

Namely the precedent that, if it’s criminal, it should be hidden.

I am of the opposite persuasion: no information, no moralization.

BTW, I am also all for full beheading videos of journalists, and good Samaritans, to be shown (after appropriate and strong warnings). It puts the factual, thus correct, light on some religious philosophies.

I am not an ostrich. My ancestors actually ate ostriches. And I cannot understand why ostriches would ask for ever more sand in their eyes. But then again, higher understanding determines who eats what. Or whom.

Patrice Ayme’

Biosphere Destruction. Not Just “Climate Change”

Psychological Change Needed

“Climate Change” is an ambiguous notion. It does not reflect reality. It neither respect the reality of what is happening nor the reality of what it is going to mean for common people.

The expression “climate change” is too close to positive emotions. Indeed, who does not want “change”? Or, for that matter, a “change of climate”?It’s the wrong emotional semantics.

Biosphere destruction is more like it. So let people evoke that, biosphere destruction, rather than the misleading euphemism “climate change”.

Warming Wave Hitting Alaska. Muir @ Glacier Bay

[1941 picture on the left, a more recent one on the right. ]

The truth about “climate change”? It’s not just about the climate and it’s beyond a change of clothing.

The  two pictures of the glacier above reminded me of an adventure I had in Alaska recently. I wanted to show my toddler the most accessible glacier in Alaska, at the neck between the Kenai peninsula and Alaska proper. I had been there in the past: one could drive nearly to the massive glacier, which was resting like a giant beast in a valley. I drove, and drove. Reached a parking. No more road. Clear blue water. Up on the mountains, several glaciers, in full retreat, could be seen. The famous glacier had completely disappeared.

In “Disintegrating Antarctica”, I did not mention the latest on Greenland. Several research teams announced that there are at least 100 deep hidden fjords penetrating Greenland. Many extends more than 100 kilometers.

That means melting in Greenland is going to go faster than expected in all previous models.

The average length, and undersea depth of glacier tongues were found much greater than previously estimated. A paper in Nature Geoscience reports that 107 marine-terminating glaciers are underlain by fjords extending on average 67 kilometers (42 miles) inland below sea level, a number 300 percent greater than previous assessments.

The excellent Paul Handover of “Learning  From Dogs” wonders upon “the nature of delusions”. He notices that people are less afraid of “climate change” in the English speaking countries.

One of the reason is the tremendous propaganda. I read recently a long article about Obsessive-Compulsive Disorders (OCD) in New Scientist. This main feature article was written by an eminent pundit, long editor of the science journal “Nature”, and other prestigious English speaking media (I am a subscriber to both NS and Nature).

He mentioned terrible OCD such as serial killing, or Winston Churchill (and others) feeling like jumping from high places to their deaths. He also said science showed people’s mad inclinations fit the “mania of their ages“.

The most recent instance of a mania the respected editor rolled out as inducing a flurry of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, worldwide ? Worrying about “Climate Change“. A mania of our age, he insisted. Presumably affecting yours truly, Barack Obama, Europe, the United Nations, and more than 97% of climate scientists.

I made a quick search, and found very long articles from the same character vaunting the merits of natural gas extraction, already 15 years ago, in… Nature. When one knows the influence and prestige of Nature, no wonder nothing of sufficient significance is made about “Biosphere Destruction”. I will leave to the imagination how the gentleman gets financed.

Another reason for doubting that biosphere destruction will affect negatively English speaking countries, is that, under the leadership of ravenous lords, the exploitative mentality, accompanied by whole sale destruction, as needed, as proven very profitable to the population of said countries. It’s natural to expect that this exploitative mentality will keep on bearing fruit.

Against giant money, the voices of the many are like those of mice.

Patrice Aymé

Note: Apparently a powerful El Nino, comparable to the largest one ever seen in 1997-98, is gathering steam in the Pacific.

Buoys show that an enormous blob of abnormally warm water, up to half a kilometer thick, is migrating eastward. This is the preferred warming mechanism for the planet, as it transfers great heat from the western Pacific to the much colder eastern Pacific. During maximum warming, the historical record seems to show continuous El Ninos.

Thus the probability seems around 2/3 that atmospheric heat records will be beaten next year (accompanied with floods, droughts, and other dynamic effects).

 

Propaganda From Subject Control

Another day, another clueless editorial of Paul Krugman about the socio-economic crisis. Krugman, in his embarrassing naivety, opposes, as all too many do, austerity versus [the attitude that it’s] “no time to worry about budget deficits and cut spending, which would only deepen the depression”. Sorry, reality is otherwise subtle.

[Funny Krugman calls it a depression now. I called it a Greater Depression, all along, precisely because the causes are so deep, and so deliberately misunderstood, I expected the depression to last indefinitely.]

I sent a comment. It was delayed from publication for nine hours, by the censors at the New York Times, and that made sure few people saw it (3 readers approved it). “Preferred commenters” of the New York Time such as Karen Garcia, were published right away (and approved by a thousand people). It’s not that Karen Garcia is wrong (she parrots some of the consequences that I have evoked for years).

The problem with Karen Garcia and other commenters and editorialists the NYT advertises, is that they describe epiphenomena as if they were fundamental, while not even guessing what the fundamental problems are.

Because I understand the fundamental causes, the NYT tries to make sure I am not read. A good way to insure the deepest debates are avoided, is to drown us with thousands of comments always from the same commenters, always late on the critical curve.

Here is one of the perpetually “featured commenter” of  the NYT: “Karen Garcia is a trusted commenter New Paltz, NY

It’s not that economics failed. It’s that the cult of Mammon succeeded. The rich control all of us via such legalized bribery scams as Citizens United. The rich ensure that the austerity dogma is broadcast by their six media conglomerates, and that only two sides of one big business party are allowed to exist. Wherever they detect an opportunity vacuum, wherever they smell another distressed pocket of humanity, they pounce. A study by some Northwestern University researchers reveals that while the wealthy (they like to call themselves “thought leaders”) intellectually accept Keynesian economics, they’re de facto Scrooges.

Some findings: –Only 16% of millionaires think climate change is “very important.”

— While two-thirds of Americans favor single payer health care, less than a third of the wealthy do.

— The rich favor more government spending in only three areas: science, infrastructure, and education. Investment opportunities abound for charter schools, privatized toll roads, university research programs — all funded on the public dime for private profit.

— Only 19% of the wealthy believe the government should create jobs for the unemployed (as opposed to 68% of the general public). Less than half favor raising the minimum wage. Less than half think it is the government’s job to see that nobody goes without food, clothing and shelter. It’s not that economics failed. It’s that we’re living in a nightmare reality show called “Plutocrats Gone Wild.”

Karen Garcia is a trusted commenter New Paltz, NY:

Here’s the link to the Northwestern study cited above: http://faculty.wcas.northwestern.edu/~jnd260/cab/CAB2012%20-%20Page1.pdf

One of its authors, Benjamin Page, also collaborated with Martin Gilens of Princeton on the just-released preview of a forthcoming report which concludes the USA is well on its way to becoming an oligarchy. That paper is here: http://www.princeton.edu/~mgilens/Gilens%20homepage%20materials/Gilens%2…“

On one hand, I am proud to be a commenter NOT trusted by the plutocratic owners of the New York Times. On the other, that means that my deeper critiques go unnoticed.

The “Garcias” the NYT submits us to, look very “lefty”. And I approve Garcia’s message above. But, just as with Krugman, that talk does not have much teeth (being very late on my curves).

Indeed: how did the cult of Mammon arise? That “Garcia”, in her zillions of “featured comments” has never said, and never will, not any more than Krugman (except, of course, when, and only when, everybody knows about it: Garcia and Krugman use the concept of “plutocrats” now… but did not, for years).

The rise of Mammon has to do with the, leverage, government guaranteed, unsupervised Public-Private Fractional Reserve System, and the Public-Private Central Bank. Instituting a world wide hedging casino also helped. All together allowed financiers to get immensely rich, and, thus, powerful.

That Krugman will not tell you, and nor will “Garcia”. Quite the opposite. Too technical. Krugman insisted for years that the futures’ market had no effect on the real economy. Clueless max (I sent him plenty of comments to enlighten him, but I am still waiting for results!)

Krugman asked a number of rhetorical questions in “Why Did Economics Fail?”. He made clear that it is not “economics” that failed. I answered them:

Krugman: Why inadequate demand?

Because there was not enough money for the real economy (a good way to get there is by cutting the incomes a normal people). Why not enough money? Because banks create money, through credit.

Banks extended that money to financial co-conspirators, the hedge fund managers and other financial and future commodity traders, quite a few of them in house. One could not do this in the past as these activities, using all the money in the world to run a casino, did not exist in the past.

That basic problem has not been fixed. It requires re-instating a modernized version of the Banking Act of 1933. The casino-that-uses-all-the-money-in-the-world ought to be dismantled, too.

Krugman: “this was no time to worry about budget deficits and cut spending, which would only deepen the depression.”

Yes, I have called it the Greater Depression, and so it is in term of unemployment and GDP, as, in many countries, the numbers are worse than in the 1930s.

When budget deficits are caused by hedge fund managers paying less taxes than janitors, or because corrupt bankers funneled money to co-conspirators to build airports, or towns in the middle of nowhere, and the banks have to be rescued, we should worry about deficits.

When spending has to do with crony capitalism, we should worry about deficits.

Krugman: “why didn’t we use the economic knowledge we had?”

Because the plutocrats are not after repairing the economy. They are after their own profits first, destroying democracy second. To get to the latter, the more high unemployment and poverty, the better. Whether the plutocrats in command are aware of this desire of them, is irrelevant. They have it, deep inside.

Naturally, the hyper wealthy tend to reward economists that support their views, and since the wealthier the university, the higher the salaries and the more they are connected to plutocracy central, the desire of the Plutos became the teaching of the most respected economists, the mainstream economic thought.

***

REFRESHING OURSELVES WITH THE ROMAN PERSPECTIVE:

In imperial Rome, and Constantinople, plutocrats feared revolution, and the return of the Republic.

(That fear extended all the way to 17C England and France; Anne of Austria, reigning queen of France, mother of Louis XIV, faced by the Parliament’s deputies told them it was “evil to prefer the government of a republic to that of a monarchy… We are not in a republic.”) .

To prevent the return of the Respublica, Roman plutocrats made sure that most people were unemployed in Italy in general, and especially in the world’s largest city, Rome. Unemployed people are powerless (idleness can’t strike), and unemployed people dependent upon the “philanthropy” of the richest (a phenomenon in plain evidence in the USA, where filthy plutocratic tax free plotting conspirators have to be called “philanthropists”, especially when they capture the educational, social, or health care systems).

We The People have been trained to behave like pigeons feeding in the hands of some of the basest individuals in the universe (that’s typically how they got to be so rich: look at the dynastic, government  leech Carlos Slim in Mexico, second richest man in the world, if you don’t want to look at the hyper well connected Gates, ever since he was in the womb).

There is every reason to believe that the same phenomenon as in Rome and Constantinople is at work now. Actually, in the ideal plutocrats’ world, this debasement of man by wealth is the only thing that should work.

To underestimate the Dark Side, and to exclude it from economic theory, is missing out half of the motivational universe of the genus Homo. But it goes well with underestimating the venality of economists. And then economists can turn around and pretend to predict what’s good and bad for entire nations.

All what this achieves is the rise of plutocrats determined to outdo themselves and their “partners” (a word the Mafiosi around the Kremlin love to use). Hence the rise of the Kochs and Putins. Hence the decay of the biosphere.

The decay of the biosphere is used as a decoy, a sacrificial pawn, that attract attention. It’s made into a debate where the population is invited to lose all sense of reason and evidence.

How does that work? Take an example: the snowpack in the high mountains of California is 18% of normal (April 2014); California’s reservoirs are half full (instead of 100%). It’s obviously a crisis. But then plutocrats roll out their well-paid deniers (Putin does the same, even inside the USA!), and they flood the media with their insults to reason and evidence.

That creates a secondary crisis, more general than the first one, as now people are invited to deny reason and evidence.

While We The People waste energy debating individuals of extreme bad faith, the real problems such as why is it that Putin has 40 billion in Switzerland alone, and why is it that all the media and political systems are controlled by so few? (See the references of “Garcia” above, or mine in earlier essays). How can that be compatible with democracy?

And how come the rich is not taxed enough to prevent the chain reaction of the plutocratic phenomenon? Well, because we have been obsessing about trivialities, or red-herrings.

In other words, false debates hide the real ones. And control is achieved that way. Thus Krugman’s droning propaganda at giving ever more money to precisely the banks and individuals who created the Greater Depression of 2008, and calling that the antidote to austerity. (Of course he does not put it that way.)

Censorship and media manipulation are more subtle in the USA, than in Erdogan’s and Putin’s Great Reichs. Thus, they are not seen by most… And are even more efficient.

Patrice Aymé

American Circus

Propaganda & Poverty Go Together Well: No Isegoria, Plenty of Propaganda.

Athenians, as they built up their superlative direct democracy, starting with Solon, attached extreme importance to isegoria (or isogeria), the equality of every citizen in addressing the National Assembly. That ought to have been daunting: Athens did not have the Internet.

Imprinting the weak and meek to do their job, with enthusiasm, without any whining, and go around the mighty, eyes down, praising the great, is how plutocrats want them. In the USA, it’s a total success. Who would have thought, in a country that used to be rebellious, and where the event of May 1, long ago, started the workers’ May First tradition, worldwide… except where it originated. What better symbol of the subjugation of the citizens of the USA?

Here is what taxes are used for:

Plutocratic Salaries Tell The Rabble What Values Are Worthy

[These are the highest paid state employee in every state.] Sport apes are paid fortunes. The brother of Michelle Obama is paid about 20 times the family income, just to coach ball to youngsters.

More than 41 of the 50 states’ highest paid public employees are sport trainers. Either state university’s football (27), state basketball (13) or state hockey (1) programs. The remaining 10 hyper wealthy public paid propagandists are either college presidents, medical school/law school deans or a plastic surgeon in the medical school (Nevada).

Tapping a ball for a college can earn more than 4 million dollar a year in salary in the USA. But then, 50 million USA citizens go without health care. (Obama will change that by fining the poor he can catch, thanks to the IRS, CIA, NSA, or whatever secret organization at his disposal, and the money will go directly to his gorilla of a hyper wealthy, ball jerking brother in law. All Americans respect this very much, and I just made 100 millions dedicated enemies, writing this, and it will be called “racist”. Well, I welcome their hatred, as FDR said.)

This indifference to isegoria is why and how Obamacare was, and could be, planned in secret, behind closed doors. That indifference has been imprinted too.

This indifference to public debate is also how and why the minimum salary, in the USA, over the last few decades, went down, from $22 an hour to around $8. (I am using constant 2014 dollars.)

That’s a diminution of two-thirds. Much had to do with the Progressives being unwilling to progress (and focusing instead on not calling greedy apes… greedy apes).

Paul Krugman in the “War Over Poverty”, observes that “Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.”

Let’s hope that sticks. It would represent a change of mood. One of the reason that the holocaust of the Jews happened was the weak, meek, pleading, reasonable, subservient attitude of Jews, when Hitler rolled around.

Compare with France during the Dreyfus Affair:  a full intellectual civil war was conducted with unrelenting ferocity on the part of intellectual progressives, against the “Jew” haters. Zola made it so that he went to jail, for about a year. And came out as a winner (although he died of carbon monoxide poisoning soon after, in an accident).

Progressive intellectuals fight for truth. French intellectuals, during the Dreyfus Affair, knew all too well that, if they did not fight for innocent Jews, their friends, acquaintances, and fellow citizens, and if they did not fight for veracity, equity and justice, other innocents would soon be attacked.

So how come the situation of the poor has evolved the way it did in the USA? It was done insensibly, just as the inception of slavery, after 1620, in violation of European and English law, was done insensibly.

Surely the powerful, supposedly “liberal” media in the USA could have denounced the increasing push towards making the poor, poorer? Governor Brown in California, thanks to new taxes on the rich, sees the coffers of the state filling up 20% higher than expected, and the highest budget ever (109 billion dollars). Surely he will reverse the school cuts? No word on that yet.

One of the causes of the increasing inequality in the USA is simply that those who control public opinion in the USA, are, in general, very wealthy, or sympathetic to wealth.

Thus is carefully nurtured a strong pro-plutocratic bias in the media.

Thanks to all these media owners, managers, pundits, and celebrities. All of them extravagantly rich.

This is why the likes of Oprah Winfrey make billions:  it’s not about the market working its wonders. After all, Ms. Big Chest’s career was decided by higher ups, just as higher ups bought the plutophile Huffington Post to make it more than way, earning Ms. Huffington one cool billion in the process…

These avalanches of wealth bring to the fore preachers of the grandeur of whatever it is that has nothing to do with the war on poverty. Those who interface with the Public are made hyper rich so that they will have solidarity with the hyper rich who paid them, or pay them, or endow them with power. Hyper rich media talking heads are like living adverts for the plutocracy and all the Dark values it stands on.

This is why Oprah Winfrey knows how to make the USA cry about that fact she could not buy in Zurich that 45,000 dollar bag, or the entire store, instantaneously, as she wanted, or not.

Or this is why Oprah Winfrey made the world cry because the employees of Hermes Paris insulted her by opening the store after hour, just for her, at her strident request, with a je ne sais quoi of intolerable Gallic insolence.

The Oprah opera is carefully tuned to make all Americans feel the pain of plutocrats. Especially when the plutocrats are confronted to the lowest salaried employees they can find, as Oprah was in Zurich and Paris.

That same effect, the total molding of public opinion by the owners of a country, is characteristic of all and any banana republics. It makes it unlikely that a civilized debate will get society out of the plutocratic comfort zone. Thus, insensibly, inequality and poverty augment.

That is, as long as the poor do not use the only remedy that works in a case like that: violence. That is why the French Revolution of 1789 had to use violence (and so did the American Revolution, a bit earlier: the only way to release Pennsylvania from Lord Penn’s grip, was the hard way, he was not going to be talked into it).

Pay attention to this: plutocracy can buy the People. The case of Rome show an alarming point: welfare programs can comfort plutocratization.

We The People get paid, just like prostitutes get paid. With a difference: prostitutes, generally, have a choice, but We The People seized at the throat by plutocracy, do not.

In Rome, the method of paying the People with panem, circenses et alimenti (bread, entertainment, food stamps) was inaugurated. Even the wondrous public baths could be accessed with one of the lowest domination coins, and distributions of money by potentates occurred.

To be elected, a would-be politician organized games (Cicero spurned the method, and could not afford it anyway, but he was Rome’s most gifted orator).

In the USA, something similar is already going on. Consider the link provided by John Rogers, a commenter on this site. Public money is used to organize the games, and the management is paid directly from the public purse, when not indirectly through the plutocratic university system.

Robinson, the elder brother of Michelle Obama, got a six-year contract with a base salary of $750,000 at Oregon State, the Oregonian reported in 2008. By sheer coincidence Obama, his brother in law, was elected president.

The same wonderful sort of coincidence had made Michelle Obama a director of companies, and a highly paid hospital administrator, in charge of community outreach (same as Oprah Winfrey!), just when her husband became USA senator.

Oregon State is a public university. This is just about guys playing with a ball instead of studying. It works well: Robinson himself, a 6 foot six basket ball player, went to Princeton University to play ball. After he had done that, he was given a MBA, and became a big time investment banker.

The prime qualifications for that is to be a unknowing brute with no wisdom or ethics whatsoever. Throwing balls through hoops in a way of education helps that way. Probably one’s brain is all messed up from all the shocks. Next, one can smoke pot for years, like Obama’s Choom Gang, and one is dumb enough to spend one’s life being obeying orders from the white masters.

So Robinson made ten million dollars a year or so, following a career similar, but much more modest than Paulson ( a football player, who, once his brain got scrambled enough, became head of Goldman Sachs, and later, as Secretary of the Treasury under Bush, established the economic policy of Barack Obama, namely the rescue of banks, no strings attached!)

Paulson bought for himself an island, with seven villages on it. Somewhere in the USA. Obscene maniacs such as these would now have to pay 75% tax in France. Under President Eisenhower, it was 93%. Now, thanks to Obama’s 90,000 pages tax codes, they pay around nothing.

In general, all over the USA, the public purse is used to pay extravagantly for sport figures, and thus make children understand that being a brute is what pays. It works. At least, for plutocrats. For the poor too: they are getting poorer every year, and have been imprinted to be happy that way.

Conclusion: Nearly all of the USA’s culture, the media, and all what people obsess about, has been organized to create a society that is inimical to the poor, and thus, increasingly, to itself.

It’s going to take more than fighting the Republican party to get out of this circus.
What is needed is a radical change of philosophy.

Patrice Ayme

Elite Censorship

Abstract: In the guise of “moderation”, the New York Times decides what is fit to know. Some data threatening established lies crucial to the established order are systematically censored therein. And that’s worse than dumb.

Human beings are knowledge creatures. Manipulate what they know, turn them into pigeons, and they will come eat in your hand. Main Stream Media knows this all too well. Distortion of data is why the clear and present “Greater Depression” is turning into something worse than the “Great Depression” of the 1930s.

The refusal of looking at reality is what enabled the catastrophic, ongoing, austerity drive. In a self reinforcing loop, much of the austerity is now directed towards the cognitive part of the economy.

Austerity Exploding Up

“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” (European Commission, 2010.)
In truth, what do we see? What the graph above shows: unemployment in Europe is exploding up. Yet, in truth, providing jobs, is the primary object of economy. An economy does not exist only to make financial capital happy.

Progress has to start with truth, in full, thus reality. That’s why censorship is a bad idea, be it in Pyongyang, Beijing, Moscow, or New York. In states of law, the law ought to be enough. The rule of little chiefs has no place in republics, wherever practice has given institutions a fiduciary role.
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GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE MINDS OUT.
Paul Krugman, main New York Times editorial, Mars 1, 2013:
“We’re just a few weeks away from a milestone I suspect most of Washington would like to forget: the start of the Iraq war. What I remember from that time is the utter impenetrability of the elite prowar consensus. If you tried to point out that the Bush administration was obviously cooking up a bogus case for war, one that didn’t bear even casual scrutiny; if you pointed out that the risks and likely costs of war were huge; well, you were dismissed as ignorant and irresponsible.

It didn’t seem to matter what evidence critics of the rush to war presented: Anyone who opposed the war was, by definition, a foolish hippie. Remarkably, that judgment didn’t change even after everything the war’s critics predicted came true. Those who cheered on this disastrous venture continued to be regarded as “credible” on national security (why is John McCain still a fixture of the Sunday talk shows?), while those who opposed it remained suspect.

And, even more remarkably, a very similar story has played out over the past three years, this time about economic policy.”

In 2010, Olli Rehn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olli_Rehn declared that
“Europe’s recovery in the real economy has taken hold and is becoming self-sustaining.” For a reality check, see the unemployment rate above. It seems to be sort of exponentiating. But the bankers are safe, don’t worry.

The Rehn of economic terror is currently serving as European Commissioner for Economic and Monetary Affairs and the Euro and vice president of the European Commission. Such people are intimately tied to the plutocratic system. Many of these worthies go back and forth with the likes of Goldman Sachs. They never had it so good.

Jack Lew, just named treasury secretary, inventor of the “Sequester” was a great chief at Citigroup where he proceeded to help lose about 50 billion dollars, and was compensated for his troubles by seven figures of taxpayers’ money.

Mario Monti, unelected Italian PM went, with most of his government, to report to his wealthy masters at Davos. It was obviously deliberate: elections were coming, the Italian people were encouraged to acknowledge their masters too, just like their PM. Instead, to general surprise, they voted massively for Beppe Grillo, an outsider critical of the powers that be, once condemned for manslaughter. When going to the slaughterhouse, better to chose an expert.

Back to Krugman’s editorial. The Iraq war has been an unqualified disaster in slow motion. The computation of the neofascists (aka “neoconservatives”) had been that the conquest of Iraq would pay for itself, as the conquest of the West and other parts had.

This did not happen, because the British and American armies were unable to win. Instead they had to give power to the Shiites and agree to leave.

The only positive, for the West, has been that any potential enemy now knows it should not assume that the West would always behave in a civilized, or even in a predictable, manner (that was one the miscomputations of Hitler: he had claimed, loud und klar, that the democracies could never decide anything tough, so he was stunned, literally speechless, after he received the war declarations of Britain and France).

Actually many of the American neofascists explained that such was their computation: make the USA look crazed and dangerous. Recognizing now that the Iraq war was a mistake would be rejecting that last “positive”.

In economic policy, Krugman is rightly indignant of the disaster in Europe (that friends of the wealthy are anxious to duplicate in the USA, see the “Sequester” that started today).

Major economic indicators in some countries, such as Spain or Great Britain, are already worse than in the Great Depression of the 1930s, and are pointing down further (except in tax havens such as Ireland).

UK Flat Line GDP: Greater Depression Today

Britain is doing worse than in 1930s. Cameron is blossoming into a total failure.

I commented on the Krugman editorial. As Krugman had dared to evoke the Iraq war, so did I. Here is what I said:

“Wealth from monopoly and ridiculously low taxes for the plutocrats, austerity for everybody else, is bringing massive cuts in education and science. Having cut to the bone, plutocrats, their servants and sycophants are now sucking the brains out. Hey, if the rabble is stupid enough, it will salute its masters smartly!

Examples of this disaster abound: the European Union elected leaders, led by the right wing, the regressive Cameron and Merkel just cut the EU science budget by 13%! In the name of austerity. In the USA, the sequester promises cuts to science (NSF, NIH) of 5.1%. Over the next 6 months. In the name of austerity.

Cameron, before becoming PM of the UK promised that Britain would regain technological leadership. But Cameron, is, truly, fundamentally a very wealthy heir. Truly, he wants a richer elite, and a poorer plebs. So what did he do? Besides introducing astronomical tuition to British “public” universities, he reduced the science budget of the UK by 7.6%. In the first year.

Austerity is just the latest Trojan Horse of those who brought us run-away banking. It’s just the power of a small class of people who know each other, worldwide, and are preying on the rest of humanity.
No morality stand in their way, not even putting the entire biosphere in danger. The only way we are going to save the planet is through great advances in science and efficient technology. Otherwise mayhem is guaranteed. Among other nefarious consequences.

Donald Rumsfeld used to shake Saddam Hussein’s hand, when the former used to manipulate the latter, in the 1970s. The USA decided a secret war in Afghanistan in 1979, on July 3. See what president Carter’s National Security adviser, Brzezinski, declared:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/01/21/usa-attack-against-afghanistan/

A consequence was 9/11. Three million Afghans dead, another. Bad actions can have terrible fall-out.”

These observations of mine were censored by the thinkers at the New York Times. Nothing really new here. I have been sending comments to the New York Times for more than a decade, more than 1,000 of my judicious observations were censored. I knew that, by evoking the early history of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, I exposed myself to traditional New York Times censorship. In 2003, overall, the New York Times was for the Iraq war (with the exception of Krugman).

The official line about 9/11 is that the sky was blue over an unsuspecting USA, and suddenly planes jetted in, piloted by very bad men from Afghanistan.

Never mind that 15 out of 19 were Saudi Arabs, and none from Afghanistan! That qualifies as irrelevant details.
Any data contradicting that idyllic picture is indeed viewed as deeply anti-American. Apparently reality has an anti-American bias.

The day following that act of censorship, Krugman wrote a related post about European elites pontificating in 2010 that austerity worked, and the European crisis was over. By then I knew I had been censored, so I re-sent the exact same comment, omitting the last paragraph about Rumsfeld, and Carter’s attack on Afghanistan. It was immediately published.

So what happened to “the truth shall make you free”? Why is the New York Times so authoritarian? Why to censor me systematically when I mentioned that the debt of the USA, according to the government of the USA, the IMF, etc, was 111%?

The NYT’s official line is that the Federal debt is less than 80% because it has decided that the Social Security Fund is NOT a creditor of the government of the USA. In other words the New York Times is part of a vast conspiracy that deliberately masks the fact that more than 5 trillion dollars is owed to CREDITORS, the Social Security Trust Fund and Medicare. Then the establishment turns around and say Social Security is going to get broke!

This is confusing, to say the least. Until one realizes that there is one, and only one elite, and that it is the effective arm of the plutocracy. This is why Obama was so ineffective in the first two years: he had to depend upon a Congress and Senate, let alone a Main Stream Media that was as much part of the same elite as the Koch brothers, the Rockefellers, Bilderberg and Davos conferences circles.

I often read pathetic wishes from small destitute people, for the return of Nancy Pelosi, the professional pseudo-progressive elitist, to head Congress. Drinking Pelosi’s Napa wine, skiing at Pelosi’s Sugar bowl resort (cost: $85!) Something to excite progressives, if elite enough!

In truth, the TRUTH SHALL MAKE YOU SMART.

Smarts are what the pseudo left elite fears most. The truth, from smarts. To be found out as those who speak one way, and act just the opposite. And that is why the New York Times has censored me more than 1,000 times, but the Wall Street Journal (where I commented more than 1,000 times) has never censored me. Not once. Nor did “The Economist”, ever.

Official progressives are afraid, because avowed progressivism is their business, whereas in truth they just belong to the elite, and the elite, right now, means the worldwide plutocracy. That’s why massive austerity cuts are implemented when billionaire financiers are taxed less, relatively speaking, than janitors (this is an allusion to so called “carry interest” used by hedge fund managers and the like).

Can one be truly progressive when one is truly afraid of reality? Of course not. Progress comes from the manipulation of reality, and that requires to know what reality is. First. So one can make one’s mind about it, before bringing one’s mind to bear on the problem(s) .

Manipulating histories about hostilities in the Middle East informs energy policies and macro-ethics, looking forward. It also exculpates, as Krugman said, the bad actors of past policies, and, worse, exculpates some cognitive and logical methods used by past, present, and future mass criminality. it is certainly not the way to progress.

If the New York Times wants to keep on pretending it is about reality, its censorship bureau should be put out of business.
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Patrice Ayme