US Health Greed Is A Category Error

While the Democrats criminally prosecute their main opponent with the allegation of spying, a first in a representative democracy, it is appropriate to consider what the Democrats claimed has been their greatest achievement in decades… Healthcare.

Democrats were extremely at fault when they set up the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare). ACA was a complete lie. The entire idea, inspired by free enterprise, was a category error. Obama said health care would profit from… competition in the marketplace. Patients were supposed to go to “exchanges” and purchase the best product with an eye on affordability… as if health was a stock exchange.

Obama called this ACA his “signature achievement”. Later, confronted with the abysmal failure, millions of US citizens dead, Obama fanatics claimed that Obama did not have a supermajority, so Obama could not fix healthcare. That was a lie. (Besides Republicans in the past set up the HMO system under Nixon, and Medicare Part D under G W Bush… So there is no proof Republicans are what prevents Democrats from acting…)

Obama claimed that the act of smart purchase would solve the healthcare affordability and availability crisis. Obama claimed healthcare was just a question of the free market: augment the competition, and the price of healthcare will go down… As it does for… cars (price of cars has been going up, in spite of many more models out there than ever before).

Obamacare is what is called in philosophy a category error. Obama claimed that health was all about buying and selling. Care was supposed to be improved by… competition, that is, greed. 

In truth all countries with universal health coverage have eliminated competition for basic healthcare…. and for profit health care insurance. Obamacare ended up financing private insurance with public funds, ensuring that the US healthcare system, per capita, is 50% more expensive than any other system, with the disastrous outcome of a collapse of US life spans. Such a collapse was only seen before in the ex-Soviet Union

The complexity of the US healthcare system was only increased by Obamacare, and complexity means cost: where France has just one computerized individual health card for all and any patient, the “carte vitale” used for all health transactions, with all medical records and drugs on it, the US has… 10,000 different health plans! 

Another problem in the US is outright greed: many top administrators are paid fortunes in the US system, sometimes hundreds of millions. The equivalent jobs in other countries simply don’t exist.  

Obama’s lunacy was a combination of insufficient ability for study, and greedy gullibility: he just did what the health insurers told him to do. Now Obama has three mansions, all in locales for the wealthy, two on expensive islands… so, as far as he is concerned, he is ahead and you are losers. This may sound harsh, but Obama literally had the Vice President of a health insurer write down “Obamacare”. To be more corrupt than that, one has to visit Putin’s Kremlin.

But then, as the Biden Ukraine related tapes say:”We are OK, because we never paid the big guy directly“…

Obama explained on Netflix in 2023, that’s the way it is… There are winners and leaders (like himself), and then there is the great abject mass below… Those without mansions, and who can’t afford healthcare… more than ever, thanks to the system Obama installed, Obamacare… Should we call it more authentically: Obamagreed? 

With Democrats like that, the US public got completely trumped.

Patrice Ayme

Heil Zuck! Heil Bill! Your Pet President Will Do As You Say!

There is this shocking video just out of Barack Obama. Now Obama is supposedly an ex-civil servant. Somebody who is supposed to serve the public. Instead, Obama spent his presidency consulting plutocrats to find out what they recommended to do (as the plutocrats control the media, they conditioned the general public to opine that, if Obama was getting his advice from plutocrats, he was getting advice from the world’s wisest people… Nevermind that many of these plutocrats became wealthy thanks to governmental plots, some of them more than a century old). Obama is still best friend with plutocrats, but Obama wants everybody to know that the advice was not all one way. It’s also in the best interest of plutocrats to pretend that Obama was not just a puppet, but capable of opinion on his own.

Bill Gates (III) founded Microsoft, thanks to his mom being on the Board of IBM (which gave college dropout Bill a golden contract). Now one of the world’s wealthiest men, showered by Obama with honors and responsibilities, Bill Gates wants the world to know that he calls Obama for advice… On nothing (how to treat their mysterious, capricious, superficial spouses happy). So get that: Gates wants us all to know he calls Obama to get advice on the most stupid stuff imaginable.

In truth, of course, it’s the reverse, and the exact opposite which most significantly happened: Bill gave important advice to so-called Barack on important stuff. Just as PM Thatcher was made by the Murdoch family (yeah, they came from Perth, Australia, small world isn’t it? There, they controlled media…).

I was touched when Melinda asked me to introduce her at her #MomentofLift book tour stop in Seattle tonight. I wanted to do right by her but wasn’t sure what the best approach was — so I turned to someone with some expertise in this area… pic.twitter.com/AYKp6MPC6E

— Bill Gates (@BillGates) May 10, 2019

And when Barrack needed more friends, to get advice from, it was not Bill, it was Elon, or it was Warren, or it was Jeff, or Marc… How many times did Marc go to the Elysee Palace? Can he count that far? Probably not, you see, marc has plenty of PhDs, but he studied just a few months in College… And then, of course there are all those plutocrats smart enough to stay out of the lights.
They breathed together (conspirare), or at least, phoned together… we have the proof now and they are so arrogant that they think that, by flaunting their relationship, the joke is on us….

Billionaires deserve the “Medal of Freedom” (that’s the child ribbon and star offered by Obama)Obama) to those who own the world, precisely because only them have freedom, and we have to watch while they destroy the world, claiming to save it, as the mighty maniacs enjoy to add insult to injury and annihilation…

The instantaneously wealthy banker who leads France has sent his goons to Marc’s Facebook in the San Francisco Bay to figure out together how to mold the minds through the Internet. I am not making this up, it was published just yesterday:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/facebook-to-give-special-access-to-french-regulators-1542049089?mod=article_inline

Hey, Barrack was going there every two weeks, why not macron, then. Aren’t they all friends? A Palo Alto friend of mine was suffering below the presidential helicopters every two weeks… If Marc the Ignorant doesn’t like what you publish, Marc the Ignorant will delete you:

Facebook Deletion Center, Berlin, Germany. There Botticelli gets condemned and executed by Ignorant and Unappreciative hypocritical robot pigeons paid crumbs by Facebook, with Macron, Obama, Trump, NSA, CIA, and company watching over. Of course, they don’t really care about censoring Middle Ages paintings, they are just doing this, according to the Red Herring technique, which the pigeons invented without even noticing. Heil Zuck!

I have been already deleted many times, in many Internet outlets… More than one thousand and one (1,001) times… For just thinking better and more progressive. Many deletions were outright mysterious. The top was when The Guardian in London (long secretly financed by the friend of Barack, Bill) banned me, after telling me I was Jihadist… As Hitler said, paraphrasing, the bigger the lie, the more it works.

George Orwell’ 1984 has arrived. What is cleared is that all the characters mentioned above have hijacked the Republic.

What to do? Simple, the Roman Republic did it (until the Roman plutocrats hijacked it). Limit wealth absolutely, limit political power absolutely. Presidents, plutocrats and elected representatives have way way way too much power. They could burn the entire planet in way less time than it took to burn Notre Dame. This Davos crowd is the number one culprit of the mass extinction out there. When the planet gets out of control, all too soon, they should be sent to the guillotine of public condemnation.

Obama, thanks to his control of media, has augmented enormously the CO2 emissions of the USA, relative to what they should have been, by deliberately augmenting fracking in the USA. Yes, most US citizens enjoy the ride (and so do I: my state of the art car is large by Euro standards). Obama’s friends told him to just call fracking a “bridge fuel”. So US citizens adore their funny Obama, and their fuel. More fuel than ever. More fuel than any other country.

How long will the laughter last?

Not too long.

When the sea starts to go up an inch per year, question will come. But then of course, a distracting nuclear war could come in handy…. Right now Obama’s and Gates’ kindergarten jokes and spirit are enough to keep the naive out there in check. But when that’s not enough anymore, watch out…

Patrice Ayme

 

Obama’s Fault

For eight years, I have been writing that it was Obama’s fault. I had seen Obama go “work” at a “Hedge Fund”, on November 5, 2008 (Did Obama EVER work, let alone think?) You may be elected to be a Saint to fight evil, and, next day, go work for Satan, for all to see.

I have been writing about this for eight lonely years, but now, finally, the Main Stream Thinking is catching up:

Obama Is A Financial Plutocracy Agent. Just Look At The Facts

[Obama had also control of the Congress. Or, more exactly, the Democratic Party, truly the Demoncratic Party, had control of Congress. Congress was headed by Nancy Pelosi, a woman who made a colossal fortune from politics, and was head of Congress since 2006. Congress is truly the National Assembly, and passes laws. So Obama and his Demoncrats controlled all, so what did the do? They did what Demons do: they lied. Donald Trump is already demonstrating that a US president with a simple majority can govern (or, at least, govern the EU). Obama had a supermajority.]

Yannis Varoufakis is a university professor in economics who taught in the UK, Australia (where he became a citizen!), Belgium Sweden, and of course, Greece. By 2004, he started to advise the Greek government on how to get out of the crushing debt engineered by the crafty lying plutocrats (Goldman-Sachs, etc.) When the extreme left took control of the Greek government, Varoufakis became the finance minister of Greece. Varoufakis confronted the European Central Bank, the devilish instrument of the obdurate right-wing Merkel and the crooked semi-fascist French President, Sarkozy. Varoufakis won, and saved Greece, in no small part because he went directly to Greek and European public opinion, and shamed the financial fascists to do the decent thing (besides winning a plebisciste).

However, the resentful plutocrats asked for Varoufakis’ head in exchange for giving the far-left (present) Prime Minister of Greece, Alexis Tsipras, was he needed. There is much more on this, and for the better, now that the Trump Revolution is launched in the USA: suddenly everybody is thinking like Varoufakis. Varoufakis first, then Tsipras, then France running deficits in violation of Brussels’ orders, then the Brexit vote, then Trump. Varoufakis was a hero, because, alone against all, having all to lose, but for the glory of being right, he dared. Compare to Obama’s mental frailty. (To put it politely…)

I have made for years, and most recently in: Obama is a (stealth) regressive, not a progressive, the remark that net investment by governments of the G7 is the lowest in at least 60 years.

I called TARP, Transferring Assets To Rich People. Crooked Hillary and the misinforming Obama administration then pretended that TARP had been fully reimbursed. Maybe it was, but what was reimbursed was reimbursed thanks to Quantitative Easing (where the Federal Reserve bought at inflated prices assets of the richest).

Meanwhile Trump is concentrating on interesting change. No more talk about Mexicans, Wall, even Obamacare… And Trump does not “wish” to “prosecute Hillary” as the Clintons “have suffered a lot already in many ways“… “I want to move forward,” Trump said. “I don’t want to move back. I don’t want to hurt the Clintons, I really don’t.”

Yes, OK, but history is prologue, as the other one said.

Why did I say that Trump presided over Europe already?

The European Commission suddenly wants Eurozone countries to boost spending by 0.5 percent of GDP next year. It’s, at the very least, a belated gesture to counter Trump-style anti-establishment revolts on the continent. Or maybe there is a more sinister explanation: the European leaders in Brussels have suddenly understood that their masters in Washington, the Goldman-Sachs government of Clinton-Obama, have lost (momentary) control. So, suddenly they do what is right.

The European Commission’s wishful proposal is an acknowledgment that Eurozone spending restraints don’t work for the European continent as a whole (the UK engaged in massive deficit spending around 5%, year after year, while doing ultra massive immigration of the order of .5% of the population, year after year; that brought a boom, except for little Englanders, who got even at the voting booths…)

To make a sustainable difference, however, wealthy countries (mostly Germany) would have to help struggling ones.

Rules that require the 18 countries of the Eurozone to limit deficits make overall policy way too tight. The Eurozone’s combined budget deficit should be just 1.6 percent of GDP next year, even though unemployment remains above 10 percent. Lack of transfers exacerbates the divergence between the member states. Countries like Italy, where youth unemployment is nearly 40 percent, are forced to keep skimping on investment… to the point that Italy cannot even have a sustainable economy (crucial repairs are not done, from antique monuments to recently ravaged earthquake zones). Meanwhile wealthy Germany is still bathing in absurd surpluses, which, instead of being directed at helping to make plenty of little Germans, serve in part to shelter migrants (just because Germanydid not join the France, yet, in re-establishing a Republics in Syria and all over Africa…)

Whatever happens next, don’t forget it was all Obama’s fault. Or the fault of those who pulled his strings (and are now scrambling to pull Trump’s!) Next a more interesting subject: can we have, as NASA claims, propulsion without fuel? Classical Physics says that  question is insane. But conventional wisdom also says Obama did great, and is a friend of the small fry.

Obama goes around, suggesting he will play a sort of philosophical role after his presidency. Assuredly an ambitious goal for a puppet of financial vultures. Well, real philosophers are introspection experts. Since when do puppets acquire introspection? That, surely, would be new physics.

Patrice Ayme’

Obama “Lack Of Supermajority” Lie

The simplest, and most efficient, way of thinking is by not lying. Lying consistently requires to know both some elements of reality and the lies one adorned them with. Lying is neurologically taxing.

The so-called “Democrats” lied about why they did nothing in the early part of Obama’s reign. They claimed it was because of the Republicans, a nebulous reason. Indeed, the so-called Democrats are Republicans in disguise, and they did not do anything for “We The People“, because they identify as “We The Plutocrats” (“WE”, as Hillary Clinton admitted to Goldman Sachs partners, as she talked to them, admitting she was as good as a Goldman Sachs partner).

The main difference between Republicans and Democrats seems to be that the Democrats lie better, so they can afford to foster more regressive policies.

Diane Feinstein, one of Hillary Clinton’s main support, was a pure politician her entire life. Feinstein claims to be worth around 50 million dollars. She will conveniently forget to tell you her husband is at least a billionaire. We are demoncrats, and the demon, the devil, Pluto, made us lie, so please forget it. (And how come, as a pure politician earning no more than $160,000, she made 50 million dollars?) These people rule the world, not just the USA: Feinstein’s husband, Richard Blum, was a major investor in China… while his wife prepared and reigned, over pertinent legislation.

Sometimes, of course, one should lie. Say, if a dying child is anxious, full care requires lying with no limits whatsoever. Just tell the child she better sleep and will be refreshed when she wakes up.

However, in a politico-social context, lying is never a good idea. If one is on the side of We The People. Reciprocally, lying is how plutocrats rule. And they go all the way, inventing religions to justify their horrors (the most famous cases being Christianism and Islam, both set-up by dictators, respectively Saint Constantine, Roman emperor, self-described “13th Apostle“, and Prophet Muhammad, self-described “Messenger of God“; the latter imitating the former).

Obama was the do-nothing president. OK, Obama did a lot for plutocrats, transferring trillions of federal debt to the richest people and corporations in the world. As I called it ironically, TARP, Transferin Assets To the Richest People. But Obama did nothing much for “We The People“, besides very effective lip service. To justify doing nothing, to his supporters, from day one, Obama accused the “Republicans”. He just could not convince them, Republicans, he said. That was true, but it was also a lie. A true lie. Obama did not need to convince any Republicans. Not a single one. He was in control. In total control. (But is a child in control? Of course not: a child does not know enough. A fortiori a puppet of Goldman Sachs, Gates, Apple, etc. )

Lying Has Helped Rulers For Millennia, But It Does Not Help Civilization

The Nazis used, and advertised, the big lie technique because they believed they had achieved a superior understanding of the human condition, so it did not matter what ways they used to implement their rule. There were enormous lies implemented by self-described “democrats” in the last 24 years. Passing laws in the service of what turned out to be plutocrats who have names: Hillary Clinton considered major plutocrats (Gates, Cook, etc.) as potential Vice Presidential choices (before she realized that would compromise her chances too much) .

While Obama claimed he could not do anything without the Republicans, the democrats had a majority in the House of Representatives, and the democrats had a majority in the US Senate. So was Obama lying? (Silly question, sorry.)

No, say demoncrats. US Senate tradition (since 1993!) is that one can talk and talk and talk and talk in the Senate, and block any bill. Once Democratic Senator Byrd talked around 24 hours. Continuously.

However, filibusters can be overruled when one has 60 votes in the US Senate, a SUPERMAJORITY. Obama had such a supermajority, for many months perhaps six months. He could have also forced a 12 months bullet proof supermajority by forcing two ailing democratic  senators to resign

In January 2009, there were 56 Senate Democrats and two independent senators who caucused with Democrats. This combined total of 58 included Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.), whose health was failing and was unable to be at the Senate everyday. As a practical matter, in the early months of Obama’s presidency, the Senate Democratic caucus had 57 members on the floor for day-to-day legislating.

In April 2009, Pennsylvania’s Arlen Specter switched parties. This meant there were 57 Democrats, and two independents who caucused with Democrats, for a caucus of 59.

On June 30 2009, Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) was sworn in, after a lengthy recount and legal fight. At that point, the Democratic caucus reached 60, but two of its members, Kennedy and Byrd, were SOMETIMES unavailable for votes.

In August 2009, Kennedy died, and Democratic caucus again stood at 59.

In September 2009, Sen. Paul Kirk (D-Mass.) filled up Kennedy’s vacancy, bringing the caucus back to 60. At this point, the democrats were back with a SUPERMAJORITY. Senator Byrd’s health continued to deteriorate. A forceful president with a progressive agenda could have made him resign. But Obama had no progressive agenda whatsoever. Neither did his helpers and sycophants. The leading ones are all establishment, they are happy wioth the establishment.

In January 2010, Sen. Scott Brown (R-Mass.) replaced Kirk on January 19, 2010, bringing the Democratic caucus back down to 59 again.

In June 2010, Sen. Byrd died. Byrd’s replacement, a Democrat, Carte Goodwin, was sworn two weeks later. So the caucus stayed at 59.

Obama said, it’s all the fault of the Republicans, and here is this Obamacare, my “signature achievement“, plutocrats will take care of you, as long as I send them your tax dollars.

When FDR became president, he enforced a progressive agenda on his first day. In the first month, Obama did just one progressive thing: sign, with great fanfare, the evacuation of arbitrary detention at Guantanamo. Well, not really. Guantanamo is still in operation, eight years later, with people inside, arbitrarily detained. The Do-Nothing president really did nothing. His true signature achievement. (Except for arbitrary drone lethal strikes, for all to see, a new judicial precedent, and savagely hunting those who reveal some bad actions of the US government, some of them unlawful.)

A progressive president needs a supermajority only for a couple of hours. In the early twentieth century, one morning, in a couple of hours, two laws passed: one set-up the Income Tax Law, setting up the IRS. The other law passed within the hour was the Foundation Law.  

The reigning democrats are lying. They are Republicans in disguise. Republicans brought up on a Reagan psychological diet.

In the last debate Hillary Clinton attacked Trump, because Trump had attacked then reigning president Ronald Reagan in 1987… with exactly the same position Trump has today.

Need I say more?

Yes, I do. I pointed out the preceding, at the time, in 2009, as it happened. Much later, the “Tea Party” was created later. So I got to be called “Tea Party”. Last week, some people on the Internet, in public, called me a “liar, racist, xenophobe”, and added even more flattering qualifiers, for daring to say that Obama had a supermajority, for many months, in the beginning of his presidency. Some added that I reiterated “Republican talking points“. Whatever. (If politicians adopt my ideas, i am not going to complain.)

I follow the truth, an attempt to espouse reality. Politically I am somewhat on the left of Bernie Sanders, but also in the future, and that means, on the side of Mother Earth. I know Obama, and wish this will help him to stop lying. The truth is that Obama wanted more progress than he got, because most “Democrats” are rather “Demoncrats”: just ask how come some of them made hundreds of millions during their strictly political careers. Say ask the two top California democrats, Nancy Pelosi, who headed Congress for six years, and Diane Feinstein, the Senior Senator of California. Pelosi is the richest US representative. She is married to an investment banker, Paul Pelosi, the sort of people Obama helped, Clinton breathe with (Goldman Sachs). Obama will say he did a lot to crack down on bankers. Right. And another lie. Another true lie: the Obama administration cracked down on commercial banking, and on banking for “We The People”. (Worldwide, it turned out, as American jurisdiction is brandished that way.)  Meanwhile, investment banking was helped, thanks to the pernicious pretext that banking needed help (yes, commercial banking needed help as Quantitative Easing made it unprofitable, while derivatives were allowed to run amok, same as before, profiting investment bankers…)

“Democrats” never envisioned any progressive law under Obama-Biden. Obama passed several laws that were such a give-away to the wealthiest families, through their banks, that the GOP would never have dreamed to try to pass them before, so outrageously pro-wealth those laws were.
Later, when asked what happened, the Obama administration claimed it was all the fault of the GOP, because Obama did not have a “supermajority”. The retort was not only besides the point and a red herring, but it was also a lie. But it transformed Democrat public opinion into anger against the GOP.

There are system of lies, just like there are systems of thought, and the least plutocracy can do, is to lie systematically. To lie, or not to be, that is the existential question which defines plutocracy.

The road to hell is paved with lies.

Patrice Ayme’

Neat Suggestion For Net Neutrality

Under Obama, the US spy networks were given full power. Paying no, or little taxes, with the full resources of the USA behind them, they were mandated, as modern-day corsairs, to seize the world. They did (in spite of the Snowden scare; Snowden revealed the entanglement between the imperial machinery of the USA and the US Internet companies).

This Internet coup is a Obama’s great achievement, proving how great and just the brown president has been for the powers that be, over the powers that don’t deserve to be.

Here is the market capitalization of the forty largest French companies (the “CAC 40”), versus that of GAFA (Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon):

Thanks Oh Great, Wise, Respected Obama, For Having Made The USA Mightier Than Ever With Your Mighty Espionage Agents

[Was the satanic Bush a smaller devil? One shudders at the question. Just asking…]

As you can see, GAFA, those four companies, Google-Apple-Facebook-Amazon, under the presidency of Barack Obama, became everything, while the French Republic stagnated between being and nothingness. This is a general pattern, with all countries. It has to do with GAFA being above all and any local laws. And there are no global laws to speak of. (The Chinese joke that GAFA is the new world empire; well, new, not really.) In particular GAFA eschews most taxes, so stand above all and any companies and firms, worldwide.

Donald Trump, hated by GAFA, has said that he would make GAFA pay taxes. Said Trump, speaking of GAFA, and, in particular, Amazon:”Oh, God, would they have problems if I became president”. But what of the rest of the world? How can the world get out of this pickle?

First GAFA should pay taxes (France wants Google to pay billions in overdue taxes, Great Britain, though, asks for only a tenth of what the French Treasury is asking. Why? Because Great Britain is onto the plot, and understands that GAFA is one way for its overlord, the USA, to seize world control, and will be rewarded for getting on the program!)

To force GAFA to pay taxes, they should be threatened with exclusion. Now, of course, that would require guts. First, suffering of being accused of “anti-Americanism” by the soon to disappear in the oubliettes of history, Barack Obama, the great enabler of GAFA. (The US already makes war against the French economy, so it may as well come up to the surface!)

Unfortunately for, say, the French, GAFA uses massively treacherous countries without much industry such as Great Britain (full of subordinate tax havens, more than a dozen treasure isles which charge no income or wealth tax), and Ireland (top corporate tax rate, 12.5% in contrast with France 33% and the USA’s 35%!)

So going to war against GAFA means that the French would have to go to war with Ireland and the British Virgin Islands (hence the UK!) If the traditional parties don’t have this sort of guts, maybe Marine le Pen will… (She will be accused of dreadful “populism”, just as the Donald is, for doing something against the multibillionaire plutocrats of GAFA, and their demonic little helpers…)

Could we try something less bloody? Well, GAFA spy on people, and then tweak what they see on the Internet, accordingly. GAFA, and its ilk know you have a health problem, so they suggest businesses associated to treatment or relief from that condition. I have noticed search engines such as Google manipulate searches according to what they think i should see. Worse: Microsoft’s Bing censors completely some of my essays. For example “Violence In The Holy Qur’an” cannot be found on Bing (even looked directly by title and author) This sort of censorship is deliberate: the essay consists essentially of 10,000 words from quoting entire verses of the Qur’an. (The English paper, The Guardian, accused me to be someone who “blogged” the Qur’an, to justify censoring me!)

If these Internet manipulations were completely unlawful, all the time, the business model of GAFA and their ilk would collapse. Of course, one does not want to be that cruel (what would Obama do?)

But here is an idea nevertheless. Why are not GAFA (and its ilk) required, by LAW, to present a neutral web if asked to do so by someone using the Internet? As I said, one does not want to be too cruel with the corsairs of modern communications: after all, they have some public utility, as they (vaguely) innovate.

So, say, every time one turns on one of the GAFA, or other Internet manipulators, one should be offered, manually, the option of a neutral web.

Simple. Drastic.

The right to neutral information is basic to enable democracy. Without it, there is no democracy. The present rule of GAFA, and their present manners, is a complete denial of democracy. Time to fight. When the philosopher Demosthenes called the Greeks to fight the (gold mines propelled) the Macedonian plutocrats, who were quickly increasing in power, he was not listened to. It sounded alarmist to go fight the rich and nasty. When it turned out Demosthenes was finally observed to be right, it was too late. Democracy was destroyed in Greece, for the next 23 centuries. And it all originated from a philosophical debate where Aristotle was prominent.

We are what we know. And we are nought if we know not. The neutral Internet is not obsolete, it’s a human right. Are those obsolete? Hmm… Wait…

Patrice Ayme’

 

Obama Closes Yosemite

OK, only part thereof. Something Europeans miss totally about the USA, is that it is an empire, a military empire, and obeying orders from above is view as the essence of morality. Yes, the Roman army worked exactly like that, for many centuries… Until it did not. This is what gives to the Trump phenomenon an interesting, not to say disquieting, perspective: as Americans view respecting orders from above the essence of morality (as the Prussian pseudo-philosopher Immanuel Kant ordered) one may wonder what will happen with President Donald Trump? Will Americans goose step behind him as they did with G. W. Bush? 

So President Obama shows up in Yosemite, and a gigantic expanse of cliffs is “closed”, a kilometer high, several kilometers across. What fascinated me was the obedient tune many climbers sounded in a climbing site I read. It was as if God had ordered them to do something, and they felt honored. In a place like France, the order would have been so unenforceable, it would not even have been tried. Many individuals would have made a MORAL point of disobeying it.  

This Entire Landscape Is The Area Which Was Closed To Climbing When Obama Visited For Three Days

To give the scale, of this piece of the North Rim of Yosemite Valley, the exposed landscape in the picture  is more than 4,000 feet (1,200 meters) high. I have climbed and run all over it, from left to right, and above, and beyond. Differently from Socrates, who engaged in combat during epic battles, I am reduced to meeker pursuits, to get to examine myself.

What is good about being an obedient little fascist, is that one never has to examine oneself: following Immanuel Kant, one can define one’s morality as following orders. And this is exactly what the Nazis dis, and explained to whoever wanted to listen to them. (The jury of Eichmann in Jerusalem was not impressed by Eichmann explaining he had been moral by obeying Kant, and condemned him to hang. The Israelis had learned a few important things in WW II!)

Now this sort of orders given to an American population eager to please its masters, is not an happenstance: it’s training graciously provided by the Deep State, another occasion for Americans, in this case rather young Americans (most climbers don’t make old bones) to obey orders. I sent the following comment, fully expecting racist, tribal, hypernationalistic abuse of the sort which passes for normal in the Anglo-Saxon world this days, regarding France (and I was not disappointed). Yes, philosophy rests on experiments, just like science:  

I love the way Americans take orders, thus showing they are not worthy to lead the world, civilizationally speaking, as they effectively do. This sort of self-humiliation would NEVER work in France. Instead little American sheep take unconstitutional orders with alacrity, pride and total obedience. They should be ashamed of themselves, instead, and the rest of the world should be afraid. Very afraid. Indeed, who is this Obama? An employee of We The People! Wake up, People, instead of just goose stepping proudly in the sunset of the dignity of the human spirit. The meaning and appeal of real climbing is freedom. Taking orders, the exact opposite.

I know perfectly well that the essence of the USA is the military thing: the Indians did not go away nicely. They resisted. The army exterminated them. General Jackson, commander of the US Army decided to attack them, and Congress was too scared to contradict him. Hence the Cherokee “March of Tears”. The famous Tocqueville saw it, in front of his very eyes, but, as this was outside of his philosophical understanding, did not draw any conclusion on the American character, from that experience (I obviously do). Maybe one of the reason Tocqueville is so popular in the United States is, precisely, that he did not draw any conclusion of the holocaust of the Native American over a full quarter of the US, precisely when he visited them. That makes Tocqueville an All-American boy: very smart on what’s less significant, mute on what is most significant.

Here is the order: “climbing areas will be closed over the weekend. Please see below for area closures for Thursday evening (6/16, tonight) through Sunday afternoon (6/19). There will also be other areas closed Friday evening through Saturday evening. We will keep you updated on the official word for the Friday/Saturday closures.

“All climbing routes from and including Church Bowl east to Washington Column (Washington Column itself remains open) will be closed from Thursday sunset through Sunday afternoon. This includes Bishops Terrace, Royal Arches, Serenity Crack, Son’s of Yesterday.”

Thank you for your cooperation in these temporary closures.

http://www.nps.gov/yose/planyourvisit/climbingclosures.htm“

The reactions I got were the usual abuse, insults and lies (deeply believed to be the truth): France was accused to be a Nazi bastion of cheese eating surrender monkeys. Always amusing from the country which, besides Germany, did the most for Adolf Hitler. OK, I plead guilty for provocation, but what is science, but for teasing out, provoking through experiments the true nature of things, be they human or mineral.

I also understand that Obama has little choice in these matters, or so he feels: the instinct of obedience, called also “peer pressure”, is strong in the empire. And Obama was selected, because he felt it, deep in his bones, to help him “navigate”, as he put it. Thus, when Obama became president, he obeyed. Obama obeyed the powers that be. The empire was safe with him. Thus, some are disappointed by Obama, worldwide, but he is loved in the US: “change you can believe in” was very very small. And next year, the meek progress Obamacare ephemerally proposed will blow-up (it’s already doing so). As the “health corridors” expire with the Obama presidency. But don’t worry: President Trump and his art of the deal, will have to pick up the pieces, and dozens of young Americans are ready to goose-step behind him, lauding all and any “closures” that the government may decide to order.

Patrice Ayme’

Peace From Strength

In the last few weeks, I came across complaints that Obama asked Europeans to pay for defense (a request Trump made forcefully), or that Obama doubled the number of special forces in Syria.

I see nothing wrong with Obama’s request or Obama helping justice in Syria. I see everything wrong with those who plead for weakness. Bemoaning the World is no panacea.

Meanwhile France sold 12 Barracuda submarines to Australia (doubling the size of its submarine fleet). French Barracudas are nuclear powered, 97 meters long, and can fire normal torpadoes, Exocet sea-skimming missiles, but also nukes.

The Australian version will be nuke-less. Australia selected French military shipbuilder DCNS Group to build a $40 billion submarine fleet. An Asia-Pacific arms race is now driven (in part) by China’s claimed territory in the South China Sea, in places much closer to other countries’s shores.

95% Of Allied Strength Was French, Then. The USA Was “Neutral” (That Is, De Facto, Nazi Supporting From Trade & Investment With The Enemy)

The Shortfin Barracuda design—offering stealth technology developed for French nuclear submarines—was chosen after a lengthy evaluation against offerings from Germany and Japan. This ended Japan’s drive to win its first major arms deal since relaxing a post-World War II military export ban.

DCNS said its design uses a top-secret pump-jet propulsion stealth technology (only France, the US and UK have the technology, which is now deployed on some new Russian subs). Part of the accord is that France would not sell the technology to Australia’s potential enemies.

This is a strategic move by the French Republic. France has departments and armed forces across the Indian Ocean and the Pacific ocean, from one side, to the other. “Hats off to the Franco-Australian partnership.” said French Prime Minister Manuel Valls posted on Facebook.

The US was not in the running. The US does not make silent diesel electric subs. But it fears them. The Australian Navy recommendation to the Cabinet was supported by US Submarine experts  –The new Short fin Barracuda  is the quietest attack submarine in the world (no propeller) and it has the best sonar. A little while ago a much more noisy Chinese sub emerged in an American fleet. In 2015, a Chinese sub simulated an attack on the nuclear US carrier Ronald Reagan. A Barracuda, in turn, could hunt such Chinese submarines.

A nuclear-powered French submarine successfully conducted a simulated attack on the aircraft carrier USS Roosevelt. It “sank” the carrier and several of its support ships in the simulation. Oops.

Australia will be using US combat systems in these new subs over the next 50 years of the French contract.

This is a good new sign of French-American cooperation: a century ago, the French produced 75mm guns in the USA (and used the occasion to teach the Americans high precision chain manufacturing, popularized later by the Ford Model T).

Meanwhile, the French-built “Sarcophagus” is ready to slip over the damaged Chernobyl nuclear reactor and its melted core…

Some will whine: why are the French and the Americans so war minded?

Because evil in the service of goodness is what Jesus recommended. Is not that (part of) the gory message of the cross?

Earlier the Romans had:”Si vis pacem, para bellum” (“If want peace, prepare war”). That worked splendidly, until the weapons of the barbarians became better than that of the Romans. The Franks, Viking like, were pillaging their way up rivers in Spain. What did the Romans do? They became real smart. Instead of just keeping on fighting the Franks, some Roman generals befriended them and gave them a written law (the Salic Law). Next Constantine, after fighting them a bit, allied with them, and conquered the empire.

So why did Roman weapons become less good? Because of Roman corruption (also known as plutocratization). Under the Republic, Romans were engineers. Under the fascist empire, money was disbursed for making the rich richer. A bit like in Flint, Michigan. Here is the letter of Michael Moore to President Obama:

Dear President Obama —

Finally, after months of us begging you to come to Flint, you’ve decided to visit next Wednesday. I know this will make many people happy and grateful. But, as one who voted for you twice and was thrilled beyond belief over your election, I’m sorry to tell you your visit is too little too late.

You say you’re coming to “listen to the people of Flint.” Sir, they’ve been poisoned for two damn years. You’ve known about it since October. There’s nothing t…o listen to. Unless you’re bringing the entire U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to dig up and replace the 75,000 lead pipes, plus the Attorney General to arrest Governor Rick Snyder, then this is just another photo-op and half-baked list of new promises we don’t need. If you’re coming to make one of those “we need to rebuild America’s infrastructure” speeches, don’t bother. This is NOT an infrastructure problem – it’s a hate crime and mass poisoning of Black and poor people that NEVER would happen if this were Bloomfield Hills or Grosse Pointe or any other white town. It was done in order to give a billion-dollar tax cut to the rich. Every child here now has some form of permanent brain damage. There is NOTHING you can do to reverse that for them. There is no cure. Again, they are Black, they are poor. Do you have a cure for that? Because THAT’s the only reason why this has happened. Flint’s infrastructure was just fine (or what passes for fine these days in the USA). This poisoning happened because the governor said “Cut services!” — and so one of the first services he cut was to seal off the clean drinking water pipeline from the Great Lakes and make the poor and the Black of Flint drink dirty water from the drainage ditch you and others call “the Flint River.” We haven’t called it that for years. I’d drink my own piss before I’d drink out of that sewer.

We don’t need any more visits from politicians, even one as beloved as you. We don’t need any more promises of testing. We don’t need any more token digging up of pipes made rancid by the Flint River water that flowed through them (of the 75,000 pipes that need replacing, a total of 39 – 39!! – have been dug up and removed since you met with the mayor in the White House back in January). Meanwhile the poisoning continues on daily basis, even with the Lake Huron water that has been restored because it’s flowing through lead-damaged pipes with a new chemical that now burns people’s skin.

So unless you’re bringing the U.S. Army with you to save 100,000 of your fellow Americans, and unless you’re going to arrest the governor of Michigan who has now killed more Americans than ISIS, you might as well stay home. The riots here, I’m certain, will begin sometime soon. That’s what you or I would do if someone was poisoning OUR kids and the government refused to stop it, right?

With respect, admiration and profound disappointment,

Michael Moore

Flint native

Michigan resident

Obama supporter

We need strength. And it starts with the strength of emotions and ideas. And those have to be supported by the strength of expression. Only then can one move with more practical forms of strength. The rise of infamy always comes from preliminary weakness.

In 1940, Hitler craftily thought that the French Republic was led by bleeding hearts. So the Nazi dictator attacked an old German (de facto) ally, the Netherlands. With cruel savagery, flattening entire Dutch cities. It worked splendidly: the bleeding heart French, instead of letting the Dutch take some of their own Nazi medicine, threw their mobile tank reserve, seven divisions, to come to the rescue of the selfish Dutch. Then Hitler launched a full left wing attack, and France found itself as flat footed as Sparta had been, when Thebes used the same trick, 24 centuries earlier…

Patrice Ayme’

Grand Ayatollah Obama, Islamist In Chief

Is Literal Christianism compatible with civilization? No. Not at all. “Literal” means, according to the mythical “Jesus” his “New Testament”, AND also the Old Testament (“Jesus” “said” this explicitly; Jesus insisted that the Old Testament was part of his message, maybe because he did not want to be condemned to death right away).

The Old Testament shows a jealous, mass-homicidal, cruel, non-sensical, sexist and demented God ruling the heavens. “Believers” are supposed to take order from that crazy monster in heavens. Literal Islam reveres the same exact God (and actually Islam reveres “The Book”, that is, The Bible, and whom he calls the “prophet” Jesus).

Literal Islam (by literal I mean straight out of Islamist texts) is NOT compatible with civilization, either. For the exact same overall reason as Literal Christianism is not compatible with civilization (that’s exactly why the Franks, and then later again, after it grew back, the Enlightenment, knocked Literal Christianism down). Literal Christianism’s implementation has been outlawed everywhere in the West. For the same reason, the same should be done for Literal Islam. Obama went to a mosque, and preached the world what Islam was, according to him, as if he were an authority in matter of Islam, to the point of telling us exactly what Islam is. I comment, you decide.

I Condemn Literal Abrahamism, But I Love Beautiful Mosque, & I Respect, Or Even Adopt, Whatever I Think Is Respectable In Islam

Obama: “…since 9/11, but more recently, since the attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, you [The “Muslims”] ’ve seen too often people conflating the horrific acts of terrorism with the beliefs of an entire faith.”

All too often, what? Notice that Obama is here coming to the defense of “the beliefs of an entire faith“. However, the first amendment to the US Constitution states “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof“. Is Obama establishing Islam, as president of the USA, by claiming that Islamist terrorism  has nothing to do with the beliefs of Islam?

The Qur’an (= The Recitation) consists in 80,000 words which are orders from “God”. Some, clearly, order to kill some categories of people. As far as I can see, the “terrorists” are implementing these orders, and this is also what the “terrorists” believe. The “terrorists” are, first of all, believers in an entire faith, warts and all. Missing that point, is missing how “terrorism” seduces disgruntled youth.

There are hundreds of beliefs in Islam which contradicts democracy, or even the simplest humanity. Consider Hadith 041; 6985: this Hadith, and several similar to this one, supposedly proffered by Muhammad, ask to kill all the Jews. Only then would God proceed with the Final Judgment. This is one of the central beliefs of Islam. By claiming, implicitly, that Hadith 041; 6985 has nothing to do with terrorism, is Obama saying that killing all the Jews has nothing to do with terrorism?

Obama sees a vast oppression against Muslims, all around the USA. Says Obama: “Around the country, women wearing the hijab — just like Sabah — have been targeted… Some of them are parents, and they talked about how their children were asking, are we going to be forced out of the country, or, are we going to be rounded up?  Why do people treat us like that?… I’ve had people write to me and say, I feel like I’m a second-class citizen.  I’ve had mothers write and say, “my heart cries every night,” thinking about how her daughter might be treated at school.”

Wow, wow, wow. Talk about hysteria. Whatever “targeted” means. Obama is depicting Muslim women “targeted around the country”, which is, as far as I can see, counterfactual anti-Americanism. It’s ironical that the President, who has condemned “anti-Americanism”, with truculence, where it is perfectly justified, engages in it, by inventing ‘facts’ trotting in his head.

I have seen pretend “women” wearing integral veils in the USA, and nobody bothered them, although it should be unlawful in the USA.  The integral veil is explicitly unlawful in more and more countries, because it’s used, as in Algeria in 1950s, to carry bombs. Several African countries made it unlawful recently. To boot, Africa is really hot, and when I lived for decades, I never saw an integral veil. The apparition of those is directly related to the inception of religious “Islamist” war.

Obama: “So let’s start with this fact:  For more than a thousand years, people have been drawn to Islam’s message of peace.  And the very word itself, Islam, comes from salam — peace.”

This is not correct. First of all, Islam generally arrived in most places with dozens of thousands of slashing swords of vast moving cavalry armies. To pretend otherwise is either to be grossly ignorant of history, or a liar, or both (because one pretends to know what one does not know). I have explained this, many times. Just as I have explained many times that “Islam” means SUBMISSION, it does not mean peace, it means SUBMISSION. Obama should read me more carefully. Or then read Houellebecq who wrote the best-seller “Submission”.  Instead of quoting myself, I will quote Wikipedia:

‘Islam is a verbal noun originating from the triliteral root s-l-m which forms a large class of words mostly relating to concepts of wholeness, submission, safeness and peace.[23] In a religious context it means “voluntary submission to God”.[24][25] Islām is the verbal noun of Form IV of the root, and means “submission” or “surrender”.’

Obama knows this, and if he is following the gutter interpretation of the word “Islam”, it’s deliberate disinformation. (He is harping on the Common Misinformation that “Islam is the religion of peace”…)

Obama: …”like so many faiths, Islam is rooted in a commitment to compassion and mercy and justice and charity.  Whoever wants to enter paradise, the Prophet Muhammad taught, “let him treat people the way he would love to be treated.”

All “faiths” have to be rooted in compassion, mercy, justice and charity, because so are human beings. One catches flies with honey, not by scaring them. Even Nazism caught its flies, its adherents, with honey. Lots of honey. Nazism was all about minority rights, justice, compassion (for those who deserved it). So compassion, mercy, justice and charity are a given in all religions. Aztec philosophers explained to the Conquistadores that the Aztec faith was much more charitable, human, merciful than Christianism (an irrelevant rejoinder, as the Conquistadores used Christianism as just another reason to massacre the Aztecs).

“Like so many faiths Islam is rooted in goodness?” Goodness is a Trojan Horse. Of around 10,000 “faiths” known, more than 99% encouraged human sacrifices (including the ancient Celtic, Punic, Aztec religions. Notice that religious barbarity does not mean primitivism in all ways: the Celts’ metallurgy was the world’s best, but they had the bad idea to burn Roman soldiers alive).

And “Islam”, Literal Islam, explicitly say, in hundreds of places, that those who kill in the name of God will go directly to Paradise (they will not have to go through the “Final Judgment”).

Obama: “Groups like al Qaeda and ISIL, they’re not the first extremists in history to misuse God’s name.  We’ve seen it before, across faiths.  But right now, there is a organized extremist element that draws selectively from Islamic texts, twists them in an attempt to justify their killing and their terror.”

“Draws selectively from Islamic Texts”? Tu quoque (And you too). The problem is that what they draw selectively are orders from God to kill categories of people (mostly, as one can see on TV everyday, other “Muslims”, who are “misinterpreting” the sacred texts, allegedly…) If you go see an organized crime boss, and he flatters you for half an hour, then to finally say:”Kill him!”, the important part of the discourse is “Kill him”. It’s actually why Obama is surrounded by a small army, wherever he goes. Because of this very short order, possibly floating around: “Kill him!”. Obama is well protected against this order of Islamist texts, ‘kill him’, he will have secret service protection for at least a decade. The rest of us? Who cares?

Then Obama draws selectively from the Qur’an, doing exactly what Al Qaeda and ISIL do, according to him. There are magnificent sentences, or even ideas, in the Qur’an (most of them not original). Says Obama:

“O mankind,” the Koran teaches, we have “made you peoples and tribes that you may know one another.”

Obama then says Jefferson was accused to be a “Muslim”. The generation of rebels just before the Founding Fathers in America, believed in “Nature’s God” and were anti-Christian (following Spinoza and the rest of the Enlightenment). Muslims, like Christians, are Abrahamists. They believe that a particular God who feels it’s cool to order parents to kill their children should be revered (and revered, just because of that particular trait: it’s spanking gone lethally insane, of the highest order of dementia). More civilized, or simply normal people, disagree strongly with finding the desire to order parents to kill their children admirable. Abrahamism could arise only in a land with too many children, prehistoric men, in the last 20 million years, would have considered that a religion which suggests to kill children is impossible, because defending children is mission number one of what defines humanity.

Jefferson, however admirable his discourses, was a great destroyer of Indians, and a pedophile who made pregnant children he had enslaved (in spite of the ultimatum of the French police in Paris).

Speaking of France, was Obama’s speech bad in all ways? No, he tried to make some medicine go down with the sugar coat:

Obama: “…there are Jews who’ve lived in places like France for centuries who now feel obliged to leave because they feel themselves under assault –sometimes by Muslims.  We have to be consistent in condemning hateful rhetoric and violence against everyone.(Applause.)  And that includes against Muslims here in the United States of America.  (Applause.)

    So none of us can be silent.  We can’t be bystanders to bigotry.  And together, we’ve got to show that America truly protects all faiths.”

Where is it in the Constitution that “America protects all faiths?” Certainly not: starting with Roman law more than 2,000 years ago, religions requiring human sacrifices are not protected, but, instead, outlawed. (The argument can be made that Literal Islam is a human sacrifice religion.)

After this flickering of the flame of truth, all too soon scorched by it, Obama gravely relapses through hopeless confusion:

“ Groups like ISIL are desperate for legitimacy.  They try to portray themselves as religious leaders and holy warriors who speak for Islam.  I refuse to give them legitimacy.  We must never give them that legitimacy.  (Applause.)  They’re not defending Islam.  They’re not defending Muslims.”

Grand Ayatollah Obama knows Islam better than the Muslims of the Islamist State, and refuses to “give them legitimacy”. And Obama sails away:

 The vast majority of the people they kill are innocent Muslim men, women and children.  (Applause.)

    And, by the way, the notion that America is at war with Islam ignores the fact that the world’s religions are a part of who we are.  We can’t be at war with any other religion because the world’s religions are a part of the very fabric of the United States, our national character.  (Applause.)

    So the best way for us to fight terrorism is to deny these organizations legitimacy and to show that here in the United States of America, we do not suppress Islam; we celebrate and lift up the success of Muslim Americans.  That’s how we show the lie that they’re trying to propagate.  (Applause.)  We shouldn’t play into terrorist propaganda.  And we can’t suggest that Islam itself is at the root of the problem.  That betrays our values.”

Grand Ayatollah Obama knows that we “can’t suggest that Islam itself is at the root of the problem.  That betrays our values.” Apparently, our core value have to do with sheer lunacy. Reading the Qur’an front to back, in a non-censored edition shows it to be as violent as the most violent book of the Marquis de Sade. Except Sade is meant to describe the activities of plutocrats, in a parodies, whereas, when the God of the Qur’an condemns people to atrocious torture to death, again and again and again, He is serious; it’s a religious order. And implicitly enjoins his followers to do the same. See “Violence in the Holy Qur’an“.

Once again, the question is: what is Islam? Islam according to Grand Ayatollah Obama, or Sufi Islam from West Africa, is completely different from Literal, Salafist, Wahhabist Islam. But only the latter is simple to describe, because it’s in the texts, and one can ferret it, armed with the Principle of Abrogation.

Then Obama’s discourse comes close to Orwellian double-speak:

“…across our country and around the world, Muslim leaders are roundly and repeatedly and consistently condemning terrorism.  And around the globe, Muslims who’ve dared to speak out have often been targeted and even killed.  So those voices are there; we just have to amplify them more.”

What? We want to amplify them more, so we can target and even kill them, more?

A French study on French Islamist terrorists is just out: there are more than 8,000 now, who are known to security agencies. That’s double the number of a year ago. 20% are children. 38% are converts. All together, they have generally been recruited by… professional recruiters, and other “Muslim” leaders.

Bearing on, Obama turns into pseudo-Islamist scholar:

“These are the voices of Muslim clerics who teach that Islam prohibits terrorism, for the Koran says whoever kills an innocent, it is as if he has killed all mankind.  (Applause.)  These are the voices of Muslim scholars, some of whom join us today, who know Islam has a tradition of respect for other faiths; and Muslim teachers who point out that the first word revealed in the Koran — igra — means “read” — to seek knowledge, to question assumptions.  (Applause.)”

Absent an explicit denunciation of Taquiyah and the Principle of Abrogation, to describe the Qur’an that way,is all Taquiyah (lying to non-Muslims in matter of Islam).

Basically, there are statements to the contrary elsewhere in the Qur’an, and the Abrogation Principle and precise datation of the statements abrogate the preceding. All Muslim scholars know this, but Grand Ayatollah Obama behaves as if he did not. (In truth he does, of course, but an electable politician who can’t lie, can’t think.)

RULE & DIVIDE, SAY PLUTOCRATS:

Plutocrats, by defending implicitly Literal Islam, create an constant abscess, pain, and raging conflict which distracts the world from the fact it’s led by a few. I was talking to a Saudi friend yesterday, and she told me with the utmost assurance that the upper reaches of Saudi Arabia, the top Saudis were positively, absolutely totally, dedicated atheists, agnostics, etc. But, of course, only in safe private. In public, they are just the exact opposite.

Thus the Wahhabist Islam in Saudi Arabia is just a show. Interpreted literally, though, Islam is the perfect religion to get mental retards to explode themselves in suicide missions, because, if they believe in Literal Islam, doing this is the best way to go to paradise. And they believe, so they explode.

And it’s perfect for plutocrats, because, this way, everybody talks about interpretations of a religion which rose in the desert before the Middle Ages, instead of whom it is who really rules the USA (and thus the world).

Meanwhile a UN panel will conclude Wikileaks founder Julian Assange is being “arbitrarily detained” in the UK, the Swedish foreign ministry said.

Assange leaked to the world internal documents which were top secret, showing US forces annihilating journalists and their would-be rescuers, among other things. One can imagine that Assange would have revealed a tape of Nazis shooting and killing, civilians and their would-be rescuers, and then having Sweden accused Assange of rape (Sweden was Nazi Germany’s most important willing collaborator in World War Two; it provided Hitler with its most important weapon, and its crucial high grade iron).

Who did Assange “rape”? Somebody who organized a party, for Assange, two days after the alleged “rape”… The rape was alleged later. And who is the accuser? She had been earlier arrested in Cuba as a CIA operative. (In a way the story is allegorically true: Assange “raped” the CIA!)

No wonder the Grand Ayatollah Obama cherry picks the Qur’an: anything but talking about what he is really responsible of. Like the witch hunt against WikiLeaks, for revealing American war crimes. OK, a little injection of “God” should help here.

Grand Ayatollah Obama ended thus his sacred discourse:

“May God’s peace be upon you.  May God bless the United States of America.  Thank you very much, everybody.”

That’s an improvement: I use to rail GAO (Grand Ayatollah Obama) for ordering “God” to bless the USA. But now GAO has sat on his rump long enough, and meditated upon that point, apparently. GAO has decided that, indeed, to order “God” to “Bless the USA” puts him, implicitly, above “God”. And that, somehow, was not “cool”. GAO wants to be “cool”. So now GAO suggests to God what to do. Progress. This is the sort of progress we have learned to expect from GAO. Changes we can believe in. Tini-tiny ridiculous little changes.

Patrice Ayme’

Is Oligarchy Intrinsically Evil?

Yes and no. Unjustifiable Oligarchy Is Intrinsically Evil. Unfortunately, be it in China, Russia, the USA, the EU, and nearly all states, this is what we are enjoying now. Here is a little recapitulation of why it’s deeply inhuman, and unfathomably stupid. Considering the mental crisis out there, it’s something to fix as a priority.

Oligarchy is the rule of the few (oligo in Greek). The fundamental problems of the concept of oligarchy are two:

First, the rule of the few is fundamentally anti-humanistic. Human beings evolved in smallish groups. Various experiments have shown people cannot know more than around 150 people. Beyond that human neurology cannot handle it.

Second, in these small human groups, brains were made to be used in parallel: everybody think, their thinking is considered more or less equally, and the best ideas blossom out of debates. One can see this, if one thinks carefully. Moreover, an experimental proof has recently surfaced. It has been discovered, last year, that the most important decision making in baboon societies, where to go, is made DEMOCRATICALLY.

The Problem Was Not Just With Hitler. All Present Regimes Have It, More Or Less. One People, One Kingdom, One Guide. However One Brain For Tens of Millions Proves, Unsurprisingly, Brainless

Let me give a few details on research recently published. It was made possible by fitting all the 25 adults of a baboon troop with GPS receptors endowed with a precision of 30 centimeters (a “foot”), recorded every second. It is well known that alpha males often dominate the rest of the troop for acquiring food or mates (they are also prominent for defending the troop) . However, and that is stunning, the alpha males do not  monopolize the decision-making for the all-important function of determining where to go!

A new distinction has appeared in baboon society: the “INITIATORS”. Just as there are alpha males (and alpha females, often mothers of alpha males), there are baboons who specialize in showing the way.

Notice the difference with today’s human society where the alpha males (those Obama, and not just Obama, calls the “leaders”), and the “initiators” are the same who lead the way to implementing new ideas.

In all of the world’s countries, politicians dominate. Even in the USA. The USA has the world’s largest government in money spent, as it spends more, than the entire GDP of Russia. It is actually about as large as Germany’s GDP. In fiscal year 2015, the federal budget is $3.8 trillion. These trillions of dollars make up about 21 percent of the U.S. economy. Much of them are distributed at the discretion of a handful of politicians, who, in turn decide who to finance (Elon Musk’s Space X, Tesla, and Sun City being examples of firms partly financed by the state) or who not to prosecute (the various technology monopolies being another example; in another times, under other governments, they would have been broken up).

Another way to think about it is that one fifth of the U.S. economy is directly controlled by the a few politicians. (Or maybe just one, the president!) That’s about 65 million people whose livelihood depends only upon the government of the USA, at the whim of just… one man.

Instead of going into detailed examples, as I often do, squeezed between bronchitis, antibiotics and a lack of time, I will just evoke fateful choices presidents of the USA made recently. To wit: deregulating finance (Clinton), invading Iraq, without, moreover, imposing order there (Bush), letting the derivative madness and banks run amok (Clinton-Bush), a liberal killer drones policy (early Obama), dropping fuel cell research (Obama), privatizing space (Obama), cutting down taxes on the hyper rich (Bush-first term Obama) etc. Obama did just one notable positive (besides following France on Libya): breaking the incredibly disgusting practice of American health insurance companies to insurance only healthy people… (OK, that was a tiny, but decisive step.)

Instead I will wax philosophical, going back to Socrates. The executed philosopher spent a lot of his philosophical time whining that Athenian Direct Democracy could not work. Socrates’ arguments were correct: if you want a good general, you should not elect him because somebody who talked well wanted to be a general.

The Roman Empire, followed by the European Middle Ages, and especially France, the successor state of Rome, found a solution. What I call “Democratic Institutions”. Those are meritocracies of expertise, organized as oligarchies. Guilds were examples in the Middle Ages. Medical Associations, for centuries, have decided who was a medical doctor in good standing, and who was not. Similarly for masons (free or not), architects, barbers, etc.

Philippe Le Bel arrested all the Templar at daybreak on Friday, 13 October 1307. It was a beautiful, and the first, example of a national police in action. The police of a state is another democratic institution.

Direct Democracy has to work hand in hand with Democratic Institutions. One cannot just decide what is the truth, just because it happens to be popular. Otherwise Kim Kardashian’s buns would be the only truth to be had.

But one has to keep in mind that Oligarchy is intrinsically anti-human. Not just anti-humanistic. It is deeply averse not just to our species, not just to our genus, but even to the order of primates.

And why is that? Because intelligence has been the evolutive strategy which has propelled the humanoids to supremacy over the biosphere, and now made us strong enough to be the main factor influencing it. Intelligence is higher, the higher, better, more subtle, richer, more powerful the ideas it produces are. Such ideas are born from the minds of the many, because they need debates, the equivalent of sex for ideas, to advance towards greater understanding.

Direct Democracy enables initiators all over, initiators of ideas, it’s the best enabler higher civilization ever had. And believing that oligarchy is better, the greatest enemy civilization has: not only it ends up promoting plutocracy, but, first of all, and worst of all, stupidity itself.

Notice this, though: most of the world society and economy is organized along oligarchic lines (although they are often hidden in suitably dark pools). It’s time to turn politics on its head.

Patrice Ayme’

Glacial Pace, Cool Lies, Melting Leadership

Obama went to Alaska and named Denali (the tall one in the local language) Denali. Denali, the tallest mountain that far north on Earth, is endowed with the tallest glaciated face anywhere on Earth, its north face being around 5,000 meters high (it had been named for a USA president who was killed by an anarchist, in those times when hatred for the mighty ran rampant).

Naming Denali by its name needed to be done, and, in Obama was up to the task. Obama is best at demolishing open doors, when not pursuing the world terror assassination campaign by drones which does not just dishonor the West, but saps its foundations. (I am not saying I am hysterically against assassinations, torture, and that every assassination ordered by Obama is unwise. But the question of due process, excellent information, and perfect targeting is crucial; moreover, having a plan beyond imposing terror is paramount; not the case here).

Obama Approaching A Glacier Which May Be Gone In 5 Years Thanks To His Affirmative Inaction

I personally have seen enormous glaciers which are now gone, both in Alaska, and in the Alps.

Obama uttered many truths in Alaska. We know this method: drowning reality under a torrent of little truths, and common place truisms. Obama seems to have realized that he was the did-nothing prez. This is better than Clinton, who, having deregulated the banks, was the did-terrible prez, or Bush II, viewed by a sizable part of the world as a war criminal, for his invasion and destabilization of Mesopotamia. Yet, even Bush did something good, and durable: Medicare Part D. One can forget a bad man who did a big, good thing. Obama just put a band aid on the gangrene of USA health care, and did preciously nothing about anthropogenic climate change.

At the Exit glacier, the president walked past signs that mark the year the glacier reached at that point. The glacier has receded two kilometers (1.25 mile) in the past 200 years. It is now the only glacier accessible by car and foot in the Kenai peninsula (which contains the largest icecap in the USA).

Pointing to the signs, the president considered the speed at which glacier retreats is accelerating. “It is spectacular, though,” glancing back at the view. “We want to make sure our grandkids can see it.”

This is slick disinformation. Grandkids? Are you kidding me? In truth, it’s absolutely certain that the grandkids will NOT see that glacier, except if the Obama daughters rush through the reproductive process. As I related in a preceding essay, a few years ago, I went back to Alaska, to show to my own toddler a giant glacier I remembered to be easily accessible by car and a little flat walk. I could not recognize the landscape: the glacier was completely gone, and had been replaced by tall trees. It was astounding. I was contemplating the same transformation of ice into trees this summer in the Alps. Going through a forest I had known as a formidable glacier.

Obama is a Harvard lawyer. People around him are politicians (often also with a legal background), financial types, more lawyers, banksters (real or potential), conspiracy consultants, managers, celebrities, etc. So it is with most politicians around the world. Those people have little education in physics. One does not even know if they understand the basics involved in pushing a car. Apparently, they don’t. Push hard on a car without the hand brake, and it will not move much, if at all.

Once I was in the Sierra Nevada, on a small road at 10,000 feet. California route 108, to be specific. Said road can get extremely windy and steep as it reaches Sonora Pass. It’s a trap: in the lower reaches route 108 is wide enough to accommodate the largest imaginable trucks. A truck driver armed with GPS had got his truck, a tractor-trailer, high enough to be unable to go back. Still hoping for the best, he forged ahead, until its giant vehicle was unable to take a hairpin, and, still hoping that brute force would solve everything, the driver succeeded to get completely across the road in two places, with many of its enormous wheels secured among very large boulders, both for the cab and the trailer. A large traffic jam ensued. As the closest imaginable rescue laid dozens of miles away, and going around, supposing one could back up, would require a detour of 200 kilometers (in the mountains!), it was time  to think creatively.

While dozens of people were milling around, I noticed an imaginable path, by displacing boulders, and filling some gaps with stones. It helped that we were close to timberline, and trees were few. Getting to work with my spouse, we soon cleared and engineered enough of the land to pass through. Other vehicles followed.

This little incident has nagged me for years: why did not the other drivers think about it? OK, my spouse and I have a maximal background in physics, but still, one is talking about basic common sense here. Why did no one else think of making a different road?

Obama’s road, and that of the other politicians, from Cameron to Hollande, let alone Putin, or Xi, is to say what sounds good (Merkel may be an exception; but then she is a physics PhD too). It sounds good to speak about the “grandkids”: Commandant Cousteau started that one: save the planet for the grandkids.

The ideas there are that the world ecology decays slowly under our assaults, and that it may be in our selfish interest to let it be, but nefarious within two generations. In other words: the future is slow.

Our great leaders, the supremacists of self-endowed selfishness, just don’t have enough of a feeling for physics to understand climate change (once again with the possible exception of physicist Merkel, who has engaged Germany on a one-way trip to renewable energy… in a cloud of coal dust).

INERTIA and MOMENTUM were discovered by Buridan a Fourteenth Century Parisian mathematician-physicist-philosopher-politician-academic (although the discovery is erroneously attributed to Newton, who blossomed 350 years later). Buridan had a gigantic following of students, including Albert of Saxony, Oresme, the Oxford Calculators. Those students used graphs (a world’s first), and demonstrated non-trivial theorems of calculus.

Somehow, Aristotelian physics was as wrong as possible about dynamics. Aristotle and his clownish parrots believed that one needed a force to persist with motion, completely ignoring air resistance. Aristotle should have ridden a horse at a full gallop, and discover air resistance. If one believes in Aristotelian physics, there is no problem with the climate: just reduce the CO2, and the climate changes comes to a halt. Apparently our great leaders are at this level of education.

Buridan gave the formula for momentum (which he called impetus): (MASS) X (VELOCITY). Given a constant force, impetus would augment proportionally to speed. This is what came to be called “Newton’s Second Law”.

At this point human modification of the atmosphere, from stuffing it with CO2 and other gases, has made the lower atmosphere into a thicker blanket, imprisoning heat close to the ground. This is applying a constant heating force (aka thermal forcing) to the ground and the ocean, both of which are heating at increasing depth.

The climate is the largest object, so far, on which humanity has applied force. The force applied is immense, the greatest force which humanity has ever exerted. Yet, because the climate is so massive, it takes much time to accelerate: the variation of climate change is low.

Pushing the climate hard is similar, but much worse, than pushing an enormous object, say a truck: initially, it does not move. But when it does, it’s suicidal to try to stop it by standing in front.

Can we stop applying the force? No. Not within existing technology. We cannot extract the excess CO2 in the atmosphere. Making plants grow to absorb the CO2 cannot work. First, recent studies on the Amazon show that present vegetation is not adapted to the present density of CO2. It grows faster, but then dies faster. Second, and most importantly, the mathematics don’t work.

1ppm ~ 2 Gt. 3 ppm: 6 Gt. Total CO2 atmosphere: 750 Gt. So CO2 augments by roughly 1% a year. Yet, total anthropogenic emissions are at least 35 Gt, and perhaps as much as 50Gt (a number I consider correct). So most of the CO2 from burning fossils disappears (probably in the ocean, where the reserves are of the order of 40,000 Gt; thus we are augmenting total carbon storage there by 1% in ten years; not dramatic, but the CO2 converts in carbonic acid, and the acidity is going up).

In any case the excess carbon we send in the atmosphere is of the order of 7% of the total carbon in the atmosphere. We cannot neutralize this by growing plants: that would require to grow the biomass by 50Gt a year, 50 billion tons a year, year after year. A grotesque proposal.

Do the math, ignorant leaders! Shoot, I forgot you had no math at school, beyond the basics, except for Merkel; the total annual primary production of biomass is just over 100 billion tonnes Carbon per year. However, because the biosphere was balanced until the massive extraction and burning of fossils, in the last 150 years, as much was being destroyed (through burial). Now we are talking about creating 50 billion tons of biomass a year. Where are we going to put them? On brand new, specially built mountains sized skyscrapers? (Don’t laugh, it’s the future.)

Even then, supposing we could miraculously stop the augmentation of concentration of CO2, under the present anthropogenic gazes concentration (around 450 ppm), we are well above the stage where all ice melts from the Arctic. So that is going to happen. In turn it will release further presently still frozen carbon storage, making it a increasingly non-linear augmentation (of the catastrophe).

There is exactly one method that will stop the greenhouse madness, and it’s the simplest. Talking to no end about complicated schemes is diabolical, as even the Pope pointed out.

Our present leaders will be judged severely by history. Not only they are dinosaurs, but they make sure that we are going back to the Jurassic all too soon.

Patrice Ayme’