Degradation Of Civilization: Biden Calls Trump An “Arsonist” While Forests Burn From Mismanagement

Plutocratic media has claimed that the Federal government did nothing against the fires in California… After Trump spent years threatening to cut funding if California didn’t clean its forests (it didn’t and he didn’t).

In the ongoing Creek Fire, which burned more than 300,000 acres, the Federal Fire management authority has determined that the fuel was 80% to 90% beetle killed trees. Fuel loads are 2,000 (two-thousand) tons per acre (so 2 billion tons of CO2 were created by that particular fire alone… and Creek Fire is not extinguished, but still advancing! It is apparently trying to go across the entire Sierra Nevada, and is choking the other side!) Yes the drought and the beetle killing of the forests are caused by rising temperatures from man-made climate change. However these calamitous changes have got to be MITIGATED. I have pointed out that preciously nothing was done… to mitigate. 

A grant of a million dollars to make the local forest fire resistant was made to the town of Bear Creek. The idea was to remove brush and too many small trees over 125 acres… The grant was stopped by red tape, requests such as evaluating the impact on some birds, various plants, etc.

When I write this, making an aspect of Trump look objectively correct, some Trump Derangement Syndrome characters are sure to call me biased. So I got a reference from Trump hating, plutocratic NBC (NBC Universal is a joint venture between Comcast and GE, with Comcast holding a 51% majority stake. It is now a wholly psychologically owned subsidiary of the Chinese dictator Xi… Because of major common investments…)

Berry Creek Fire-Prevention Project Stymied by Red Tape. The Butte County community was leveled by the Bear Fire

[Associated Press • Published September 18, 2020 • Updated on September 18, 2020]  

BERRY CREEK, CALIFORNIA – SEPTEMBER 14: Cars destroyed by the Bear Fire sit in front of a burned home on September 14, 2020 in Berry Creek, California. The North Complex Fire, which includes the Bear Fire, has burned over 300,000 acres and has killed at least 15 people. Notice the ridiculous overabundance of trees, especially small ones. The area was choked by brush too. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)

The fire also destroyed around 2,000 structures… Associated Press: Two years before a deadly fire leveled Berry Creek and killed at least 11 people, the community was selected to receive an $836,000 state grant for pruning vegetation and clearing fuel from potential fire spots.

But the forest management project was never completed because of red tape, said local officials, who now wonder whether clearing the area of potential fuel might have changed the fortunes of Berry Creek, the San Francisco Chronicle reported Thursday.

“I can’t guarantee that it would’ve stopped the fire, but it would have given them a place to fight it,” said Bill Connelly, a Butte County supervisor representing the district that includes Berry Creek.

Of course plutocratic media accused Trump of everything. Trump is like this big cat which prevent plutocratic mice to play… So I sent the following comment to Krystoff of the New York Times, who had the decency to publish it. Of course not many of the Trump haters reading the New York Times approved it:

  The Federal government is actually sending Marines to deal with some of the fires, such as the Creek Fire. The Marines have been in training for a while. So it’s not correct to say the Federal Government does nothing. 

The Feds wanted to do more, they were stopped by the ignorant. At Point Reyes National Seashore, the National Park Service proposed to make prescribed burns in the cold and wet season. Marin County Politically Correct associations threatened to sue… Over air quality. 

Ironically, and tragically, prescribed burns, by doing away with brush up to thirty feet high would have prevented the ignition of trees thousands of years old… something terrible. What I called the Cathedral Forest, above the sea, burned, with its trees ten feet across… And it is entirely attributable to the Politically Correct types who think they have an education because they have a postgraduate degree and read biased media owned, or influenced, by the wealthiest families in the world (as all media are). 

In Yosemite national Park, prescribed burning has been used for thirty years, to protect giant sequoias and human structures, with great success. 

The “Democratic” candidate to the presidency accused President Trump to be an “arsonist”, who sets America “ablaze”. “If you give a climate arsonist four more years in the White House, why would anyone be surprised if we have more of America ablaze?” Biden said. This is not just the sort of talk which should be avoided, but it is also surreal, in light of the fact the Obama-Biden administration made the USA the number one producer of oil and natural gas in the world.

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It is a case of the arsonist (fracking Biden) accusing another to have caused the fire. I detest many of the positions Trump has to take to get votes from climate deniers. However closer inspection, as in the case of Obama, reveals the opposite of the discourse. The usage of coal has been decreasing at a faster rate under Trump than Obama-Biden… Obama and Biden increased fracking deliberately to make the US number one in fossil fuels…

Meanwhile most, four fifths (⅘), of the “profits” of the famous electric car company Tesla are actually Federal financial transfers… yes, under Trump… This is why Tesla, although by far the largest market capitalization car company in the world, was not integrated in the SP500 index of the largest companies, yet, because most of its money is given by Trump, so to speak… So much for the climate arsonist… Watch what they really did, not what they said. You can’t watch what they said. The preceding is science based, and also rests on my personal observations.

As the famous technology known as MIT just wrote: “Suppressing fires has failed. Here’s what California needs to do instead.
It’s time to reverse a century of fire-management policy. That will require sweeping regulatory reforms, and tons of money.” [1]

The world is complicated, insects are simple…  All too simple.

And all this environmental red tape, the birds, etc, California “Democratic” red tape was worrying about? All up in smoke. Actually sometimes the smoke smelled of bacon, from all the wildlife burned, including threatened species…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Here is more of what MIT just wrote:

Five of California’s 10 largest fires in modern history are all burning at once. Together, this year’s wildfires have already destroyed 4,200 buildings, forced hundreds of thousands of people to flee their homes, and scorched more than 3.2 million acres across the state.

That’s larger than Yellowstone and Yosemite National Parks combined, and nearly half the area of Massachusetts…

To anyone who lives here, or anyone who’s watching, the situation is maddening and seems utterly unsustainable. So what’s the solution?

There’s an overwhelming to-do list. But one of the clearest conclusions, as experts have been saying for years, is that California must begin to work with fires, not just fight them. That means reversing a century of US fire suppression policies and relying far more on deliberate, prescribed burns to clear out the vegetation that builds up into giant piles of fuel…

As much as 20 million acres of federal, state, or private land across California needs “fuel reduction treatment to reduce the risk of wildfire,” according to earlier assessments by the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection and other state agencies. That’s nearly two-thirds of the state’s 33 million acres of forests and trees, and six times the area that has burned so far this year…

If the goal is to burn up excess fuel, why not just let the wildfires rage? The problem is that runaway fires in overgrown forests don’t achieve the same results as controlled burns. These intense blazes can level vast stretches of the forest rather than simply clearing out the undergrowth and leaving the big trees standing, says Scott Stephens, a professor of fire science at UC Berkeley. Instead of restoring the health of the forests, large, uncontrolled fires often transform them into shrub land, where vegetation grows quickly and severe fires can rapidly return.

Hatred Against Trump About Immigration Is Counterfactual And Essence of Racism

It is racist to hate individuals from flimsy and apparently counterfactual justifications. This is true, even if the individual is a magistrate, or the president. I am an immigrant myself, but of the scrupulously legal type. There is evidence that Trump loves immigrants: he married and had beloved children with them. What Trump dislikes, as I do, is the sort of squalor found in parts of some “sanctuary cities”, for example Berkeley, California. 

Trump Immigration Ceremony, White House, August 25, 2020. It is racist to hate individuals from flimsy and apparently counterfactual justifications. A case in point is the PC mob hating the guy who married two immigrants and had four beloved children with them…. because, supposedly, according to the PC mob, he hates immigrants! The failure of PC logic is itself telling and frightening: who is the PC mob going to hate next?

While the Politically Correct, similar to Nancy Pelosi in her nine mansions, lives the high life on the hills, standards of living and health have sunk lower than anywhere in the world, a few miles away, among broken needles, excrements and filth… to the point ecologically unique natural lakes and lagoons are getting polluted. Systematically racist police policies keep the squalor away from the mansions: that distanciation between the PC high life and squalor for illegal immigrants and the underclass, is not “defunded”. For now. Should that fail, the truly rich can always move to Aspen, Jackson Hole, the many private islands they own in Hawaii or British Columbia, etc… As an immigrant, I was always looked down upon by the PC crowd, in a systematically racist way, so I appreciate a president who just doesn’t talk the talk, but marries the immigrants. 

A French Socialist Prime Minister once said:”France cannot welcome all of the world’s misery!” Indeed. And there are two good reasons for this: to preserve France (one of the world’s few high immigration country, like the USA)… but also to preserve the countries the immigrants come from. Indeed immigration should not be viewed as a crucial way to solve the problems of dysfunctional countries, or used as a way to exploit those countries, by stealing their best, most educated and brightest: those problems in those countries have to be fixed inside, otherwise only the best and brightest flee, preventing the resolution of the problems those countries suffer. Real progressives understand all of this.

Stop the hatred.

The preceding in black was sent and published by the New York Times. However, the global plutocratic propaganda media then realized its tragic mistake, and REMOVED MY COMMENT. They lie about saying comments are removed only if not civil. See the P/S.

Hatred is too easy, and resolves nothing.

Because the paradox is this: by hating Trump counterfactually, media such as the New York Times promote hatred as the great filter of cognition. 

For example the NYT trumpeted several times in the same article that “Trump built 300 miles of wall”. They never mention, although they know it very well, that most of the existing wall with Mexico was built well before the Trump administration (even Mexico is for it, for a number of reasons). And in some places the wall is multiple, hundreds of meters wide! And so on. The most scandalous anti-immigrant policies (such as DACA; or the immigration justice system, with no appeals and judges with extravagant powers) were in place well before Trump. Trump just advertises a reality Bush and Obama kept discreet. That’s no necessarily bad, as knowing there is a problem, and what it is, must precede solving the problem.

Promoting hatred as the ultimate filter of cognition is what true racists do.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The most sedate parts of the mini-essay above were send and published as a comment to the article of the New York Times linked above. many readers approved of it, so they realized their mistake, and removed the comment, replacing it by:

Back to All Comments.

The comment you are looking for is currently unavailable.

[NYT is the “newspaper of record” in the USA. It’s the reference. I also used to consider it one of the best media in the world. That was before the Iraq invasion, which it supported, and I stridently condemned, for all the right reasons. After that the NYT blocked me from commenting for a decade and a half until the publisher passed the job to his son. Now they censor may be 50% of my comments. But it is the first time they publish one, and then un-publish it.

Biden-Trump In A Few Words

How sincere is Biden when he is promising more than Trump? Not very much: not only he can’t explain how he will finance in excess of the many trillions of emergency spending mostly directed at We The People which President Trump is presently disbursing during The Plague, but Biden is surrounding himself with some of the worst operators, some going back to the Clinton financial pollution presidency. The New York Times, in a spectacular U turn, is becoming aware of this, and published:

“Biden Faces Pressure From Left Over Influence Industry Ties“

Many of his aides and close allies are veteran Washington hands who have profited from advising big corporations. The Sanders-Warren wing of the party is not happy.”

“INFLUENCE” Industry? Really? Is that a euphemism? What about INFLUENCE CORRUPTION?

I sent a comment… And, amazingly, the New York Times published it! Here it is:

Aug. 1

Electoral politics selects for individuals who will say whatever it takes to get elected. It’s just greed for power. When I listen to Mr. Biden’s progressive discourses and compare them to his reality over the last four decades, I am mystified that so many “democrats” are so incredibly naive as to believe what Mr. Biden is saying.

In the 1980s, Biden was one of these many professional democratic politicians who made possible the right wing turn of the USA, by helping to convert Reagan’s oligarchic ideas into laws. It was more of the same in the 1990s, by passing a ferocious law which struck those who couldn’t afford expensive lawyers. Biden was the author of the law. My spouse worked two years to get a (black) gentleman a pardon from Obama. He had got a life sentence… for having a pipe in his pocket. He has four children. Speak of systemic racism. In preparation for the Iraq war, Mr. Biden set up a commission which came up with the idea of accusing Iraq of having WMDs. After resisting the suggestion, Bush used the lie and invaded Iraq. “People with both government and private sector experience” is a euphemism for plutocratic operators. Their real expertise is in how to rip off We the People. Real progressives may have fewer reasons to believe in the progressivism of Mr. Biden than that of Trump… who, at least, furiously opposed the Reagan plutocratic globalization of the 1980s… which had disastrous effects as so may good jobs and intellectual property went to China.

18 Recommended

Paul C from Terrytown, La, commented 4 hours ago

“So very true.”

***

OK, that was the end of the “few words”. Biden’s interface with plutocracy comes from people such as Mr. Ricchetti:

Lobbyist. Richetti at the White House under Clinton. Who elected him? Why is he reigning over us? One of the right arms of Clinton, and then Biden. Read the NYT on Richetti in the P/S below

Now for further analysis of the NYT article:

NYT: “Former Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is at odds with powerful elements of his party’s liberal base over the role former lobbyists might play in a potential Biden administration.“

Then the New York Times narrates a very telling tale:

“The vice president privately complained that his boss’s effort to slam shut the revolving door between K Street and the administration would deprive it of experienced talent, and he bristled when Mr. Obama’s aides tried to block him from hiring a well-connected Washington operator who had lobbied for pharmaceutical and insurance companies, credit agencies and others.“

To give an idea of the context, a powerful Democratic Senator had just been defeated in his latest re-election campaign… and just got a compensation from the pharmaceutical industry in excess of ten million dollars (details are in some of my essays written at the time).

“Eight years later, that same confidant, Steve Ricchetti, is helping to run Mr. Biden’s presidential campaign. Also involved to varying degrees are other advisers, operatives, fund-raisers and allies with deep connections to Washington’s lucrative lobbying, communications and strategic consulting industry.

That puts Mr. Biden at odds with powerful elements of his party’s liberal base. Increasingly, they are expressing concern that the military contractors, Wall Street banks and other major corporations that paid members of Mr. Biden’s inner circle while they were out of government could hold disproportionate power in a Biden administration.”

“It’s worrisome, broadly speaking, that a Biden administration could end up abiding by the unfortunate bipartisan norms of putting people in posts where they oversee industries or employers they just left,” said David Segal, co-founder of the liberal group Demand Progress.

His organization was among those that sent a letter to the Biden and Trump campaigns this week asking them not to appoint anyone to senior administration positions overseeing interests they served in the private sector.”

The corruption is deep. Obama had named as commerce secretary an hereditary billionairess. Her brother, also a multibillionaire, became “Democratic” governor of Illinois, after buying that position for roughly 200 million dollars, helped by the (plutocratically owned) “democratic media.

The objection that Trump does similar things is neither here nor there: the Trump networks are not as deep. When Trump deals with the “Democratic” governor, of, say, New Jersey, he is confronted with a DINO, a Democrat In Name Only, truly an extremely wealthy Goldman Sachs partner. Goldman Sachs led and managed the abrogation of President Roosevelt 1933 Banking Act (conveniently obscurantly nicknamed called “Glass Steagall”). Rubin, Clinton’s Treasury Secretary, was GS ex-CEO. Whatever Trump did, it pales in insignificance relative to this. New York Times:

“Mr. Ricchetti spent years as a registered lobbyist, and through a company called Ricchetti Consulting Group is being paid by both the Biden campaign and AT&T, his only corporate client over the last nine years. Anita Dunn, Mr. Biden’s chief campaign strategist, was also still doing work for AT&T last month.

As of Saturday Ms. Dunn is taking “an official leave” from her firm, which had been paid millions in recent years to help an airline advocacy group, while also providing communications advice to an Israeli spyware firm and the fugitive Nissan executive Carlos Ghosn, for whom the firm had been registered to lobby. It ended all those client relationships in the past year.

A leading candidate to become defense secretary, Michèle A. Flournoy, started a firm whose website lists work for financial services, technology and pharmaceutical companies. The former C.I.A. and Obama national security official Avril Haines, who consulted for the data-mining company Palantir, on Saturday resigned from Ms. Flournoy’s firm to begin work on Mr. Biden’s transition team.

None of these advisers are registered as lobbyists, reflecting a trend in which major corporate and foreign players hire former officials as consultants, or as legal counsel, allowing them to use their connections and expertise, while avoiding the notoriety and disclosure requirements that come with formal lobbying. This phenomenon was exacerbated by Mr. Obama’s lobbying policy.”

The New York Times brandishes a bit of naive hope at the bottom of its long article; only fools will pay attention:

“Ms. Warren proposed a plan that would expand the definition of lobbying to include consultants and lawyers who try to influence government, while barring corporate lobbyists from joining the government for six years. Supporters of Mr. Sanders and Ms. Warren are pushing Mr. Biden’s team to go further than he has on those issues.”

One may as well ask a Black Mamba to use its venom less, next time it strikes.

The basic story of Biden is that he spent his entire life, after the age of twenty-nine, getting elected, and making money from that. He was elected to the US Senate before the minimum age. Then he spent decades in the Senate, before becoming Obama’s VP. Now elected politicians’ salaries are measly. However right now, Biden lives in no less than three mansions.

Biden likes to depict himself as “average Joe”, but he recently admitted that, when he was in his twenties his salary was $40,000 ($340,000 in 2020 dollars). Biden’s father, Joe Sr., was raised in a life of privilege, complete with polo matches and hunting trips in the Adirondacks, thanks to the lucrative career of his own father, Joseph, who ran a division of American Oil. In other words, we are dealing here with small scale hereditary plutocracy, complete with fossil fuels.

Right, Trump was incomparably wealthier, when young. However Trump was always an enemy of the system: his family, originally from Germany, considered itself a victim of racism, and adopted a low profile which The Donald, a rebel, didn’t embrace. The result is that Trump opposed fiercely Reagan’s global plutocratization, which is the very worst beast around: Roman plutocracy used that very exact trick to deprive the Roman People of all its capabilities, rights, aspirations and self-esteem. Global plutocratization escapes the law, which is the foundation of any Republic. Once that is in place, you will not even have the time to kiss democracy goodbye.

***

I hope this answer in more details’ Paul Handover from learningfromdogs.com, recent query:
Paul: “I think I read in one of your recent posts that, on balance, you are in favour of Pres. Trump. Could you articulate that in more detail? (And I’m not taking a position here. Just trying to become more informed from someone, I suspect, knows a whole lot more about American politics that I.)”

I was indeed involved with US presidential politics in connection with Obama… I got there from family history much older than Obama’s relationship with his wife. Obama meant well, but he couldn’t get any traction: didn’t know enough, and not nasty enough.

The only thing Obama was right on, and I was wrong was Space X. Obama believed in Musk, and I didn’t. This is no small potatoes: technology does not just drive civilization, it is its savior. One day it has to be, and this day has arrived: consider the CO2 problem. China has the greatest renewable energy park, and has been making recently the largest coal investments ever. Why? Well, because we don’t have miracle batteries yet (although Musk and others are trying their best; the world’s biggest battery company is Chinese…)… and because we don’t seem in any hurry to make hydrogen fusion work (although on that point Trump has been significantly better than Obama).

So Biden? It’s more of the same same old. Same old smoke and mirrors. Whatever we need,  we don’t need this.  Right now Trump is presiding over an unrecognizable US economy, where renters and mortgage holders don’t have to pay either rents or mortgages… Lenin would have been stunned that a capitalist president would make such changes… However it had already been the same story with the two Roosevelts.

One thing Lenin was deeply leery of was global plutocratization…. although US plutocrats such as the Harriman brothers, pillars of the Democratic party, developed the Baku oil for the USSR… And not just that. Lenin joked that the capitalists were so greedy, they would sell the rope to hang them with… But the Harrimans became (literally), Heroes of the Soviet Union… And they had the last laugh, playing Hitler against Stalin, and reciprocally.

Having sincere leaders is the least we can ask for.  With Biden we get a huge lie, and it already shows so much, even the New York Times is starting to see it. It is a charming progress that the New York Times is coming close to admit that this is so. meanwhile, all those progressives who want to be stabbed in the back one more time, have the option to vote for the most professional politician in Washington, Biden Junior, son of Biden Senior, son of Biden…

Is this Saudi Arabia?

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: Ricchetti started his career at the same time as Biden, around 1982… After three years in government, or so, using the so-called “Revolving Door”, which should be the Revolting Door, he came to be in charge of “Congress Communications” for a large private company. Stealth was essential. NYT on Steve Ricchetti:

“Mr. Ricchetti — a self-effacing fixer likely to occupy a top position if Mr. Biden is elected — personifies the prevalence of influence industry veterans in Mr. Biden’s orbit that concerns progressives.

He rose to prominence as a liaison to the Senate under President Bill Clinton. He left the White House in 1995 and opened a lobbying shop where he specialized in health care, with a goal, a person close to him said, of getting back into government once he had set up his family financially.

He was recruited to return to the White House in 1998 by the then-White House chief of staff, John D. Podesta. Mr. Ricchetti sold his firm to Mr. Podesta’s brother Tony, until recently one of the town’s best-known lobbyists.

In 2001, after Mr. Clinton left office, Mr. Ricchetti opened a new boutique lobbying firm, Ricchetti Inc.”

Trump Was A Warning To Plutocracy. Warren Is What Is Really Needed!

EINOs: Elite In Name Only. This is the entire problem. No more than 10,000 people decide of the fate of the USA, the West, Civilization, eight billion people, and even the fate of the biosphere. 10,000 have captured the planet. Who are these experts in heist? Who are these gods? Mostly a self-nominated elite. OK, not all from the same place: after all, Putin was nominated by the KGB, and Xi Jinping is the son of Xi Zhongxun, nominated by the Politburo.

Yet certainly China’s elite became part of global plutocracy. Here is an example: corrupt armies ransacked Congo for rare earths enabling China to make phones for Apple, which “optimized” its own taxes into quasi-nothingness, by a combination of Caribbean tax havens and an EU-illegal deal with Ireland.   

It is this global plutocracy which rules the world. It talks one way… precisely to be able to act the opposite. Biden is the centerfold of this, even more than the transparent Obama, and the blatant Clinton. In the 1990s, time and time again, Biden fostered the plutocratic coup against civilization, the crux being the destruction of the Banking Act of 1933, thus giving free reins to the world financial plutocracy.

All is tied up: Obama fostered a fracking rampage thus the US produces twice more fossil fuels than Russia or Saudis, poisoning Earth… But 1% of US CO2 is from US subsidized private jets.

Only one way out: as the Roman Republic did. Put an ABSOLUTE limit on wealth. As Warren suggests to do (de facto). Warren’s revolution can defeat Trump’s revolt.

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The preceding commented on the New York Times “Joe Biden and the Party of Davos

As a pillar of the ancien régime, Biden is ill-placed to overturn Trump’s revolution,” opined Roger Cohen in the New York Times.

My, my, my… How the Times they are changing. Just a little while ago, Trump was reviled, and not hating him, a grave moral failure, let alone a revolution. Calling Biden and the revered Obama ancien régime was a sin. Biden was arguably the most prominent engineer of plutocratic legislative installment in the 1990s: he reversed women rights, instituted mass imprisonment, demolished the Banking Act of 1933. [1]

 

Obama: “Can you believe those idiots? They really think we are not on the same side! I just smile, and they believe me!” Trump:”yeah, well, we better give those losers a bit of slack!”

Truth is Trump is not that bad, especially considering what the ancien régime has done, and not done. The US unemployment rate just reached (May 2019) a 50 years’ low. Trump brought tariff on 200 billion dollars worth of Chinese goods to 25%. Seeing those facts, global plutocracy screams high treason. I say: why doesn’t the European Union not do the same? Because it’s neither European, nor an Union?

Cohen goes on:

“Is Donald Trump an aberration? If he is, Joe Biden is the perfect Democratic candidate to defeat him next year, the steady hand that can restore decency, steer a middle course between Wall Street and Main Street, and reinvigorate the shaken liberal democratic order.

I don’t think Trump is an aberration. On the contrary, he’s the face, however duplicitous, of a revolution against the Party of Davos, the network of elites whose economic and cultural prescriptions came to be seen by myriad voters across the United States and Europe as camouflage for a self-serving heist. Biden has been a regular attendee at Davos.”

The present economic expansion is the longest ever. Trump has argued with the Fed about letting the economy run; the Fed has argued it “wants to take the punchbowl away”. The Fed is clearly wrong in a globalized economy… Now, of course, Trump has been de-globalizing more than a bit… As needed…Now here is Cohen going on with more of what I have been saying for a few years. Actually I said it, years before Obama enraged Trump enough, and made him realize anybody could become president, as long as they lied big enough, deep enough, and frequently enough, that Trump decided to run for president. As I pointed out in August 2016:

“USA As A Police State

Many rage against Donald Trump, while singing the praises of Obama. They overlook that the Donald duck is what the Obama cat dragged home.”

Therein the graph of the incarceration rate in the USA, much of it having to do with Biden’s work, as the head of the relevant Senatorial committee in the 1990s:

Thanks to Biden’s reforms, incarceration doubled. Under Reagan, it’s the Democrats who passed the laws to incarcerate, as all the end all, be all laws needed…

Here is Roger Cohen again: [Trump] “could say the unsayable. He could disrupt. He could restore violence to a wan political stage of PowerPoint slides. He could take on the China that had put millions of people to work on the cheap in its factories and so, from the Midwest to the British Midlands, de-industrialized much of the West.

If people felt like nobodies, felt abandoned, felt there was not only growing inequality in wealth but inequality of recognition, felt their very language had been anesthetized by all-knowing elites more at home in global capitals than in the provinces of their own countries, then somebody could speak for liberalism’s disappeared — and maybe even win. Steve Bannon saw this. Trump grasped this and did win, not as the creator of a movement but as the media-savvy messenger of a groundswell.”

This revolution is not an American phenomenon. It is much wider…”

Roger Cohen observes the obvious:

There’s been a movement in people’s minds, a radical change in the way people live, perceive and conduct their politics. The old paradigm won’t work… whatever Biden’s early lead in polls. He’s ill-placed, as a pillar of the ancien régime, to overturn the revolution. This is not personal. It’s societal.

For all his Scranton blue-collar beginnings, Biden will be pilloried as a faithful servant of the Party of Davos that secured impunity for the financiers behind the 2008 meltdown, a heady growth in inequality, China appeasement and the arrogance of money-wooed Democrats estranged from their working-class constituency. Unfiltered politics, technology’s dubious gift, will hurt him. These politics prize agility more than honor. The world has moved on. Whither I’m not sure, but it has. Things shift. That’s the way of the world — inexorable as biology.

One of the most significant exchanges so far of the fight for the 2020 Democratic nomination came in the last few days when Biden said of China: “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” To which Bernie Sanders shot back that the United States had lost three million manufacturing jobs to the 2000 China trade deal. “It’s wrong,” he tweeted, “to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors.”

Not only economic, I would add. China is set on an implacable course to run the world in the second half of this century. If that is not precisely what you want for your children, thinking that “they’re not competition for us” is precisely the wrong place to start. It’s lazy thinking

Cohen then evokes Macron, who went one carbon tax too far. Macron was preoccupied by the end of the world. The Gilets Jaunes replied they were preoccupied by the end of the month. Cohen, optimistically said that Macron learned. Our banker learned? Of course not really. All Macron learned was to fly, one burning cathedral at a time, just dumping enough Pluto baggage, to get over the next hill.

And finally Cohen draw the conclusion I have drawn in the past:

“…among Democratic contenders, Elizabeth Warren is listening most closely. Her proposed tax on the super wealthy reflects that — while billionaires, like China, get a pass from Biden. Trump is not an aberration. Only the innovative will beat him.”

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From Repression To Barbarization:

Other opinion makers at the New York Times are also condemning Biden, even if they don’t say it aloud, but use euphemisms. In “Imprisoned for Trying to Save His Son. Mass incarceration was America’s biggest mistake over the last half-century.” Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, on May 4, 2019,

“America’s biggest mistake over the last half-century arguably had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam or Iraq, or with Watergate or Donald Trump. Rather, I’d say that it was mass incarceration, fueled by the war on drugs.

The United States used to have incarceration rates similar to those of Europe — and then, beginning in about 1970, we increased the number of people behind bars sevenfold. About as many Americans now have a criminal record as have a college degree. Mass incarceration shattered America’s family structure, magnified race gaps, left millions of people marginalized — and has been brutally unfair.

Years ago I wrote about a case that still haunts me. Dicky Joe Jackson was a Texas trucker whose 2-year-old son, Cole, needed a bone-marrow transplant to save his life. The family raised $50,000 through community fund-raisers, but this wasn’t enough — so Jackson tried to earn the remainder by transporting meth in his truck for a distributor. He was caught and sentenced to life in prison.

The prosecutor himself thought the sentence unjust, saying of Jackson: “He didn’t know of any other way to take care of his kid.”“

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Mass incarceration was itself a manifestation of a much deeper disease: the control of the USA by its wealthiest class, even when civilization was. and is, at stake. Those who know too little history will say the USA declared war TO Hitler. No. Hitler declared war TO the US (Dec 11, 1941). The USA had the plan to NOT go to war in 1942. Fortunately, the stupid fascists couldn’t resist.

USA’s worst lie, and worst mistake, for those who care about lives, humanity,  and its standards: not to recognize the value system which led it to fight too late against Nazism, or even more basic, that the deepest flaws of US society, still in power today, led it to not declare war to Hitler. Obscuring this vile story hides US Pluto power (US plutocracy!

It’s all tied up together into an all too evil mood…

No more than 10,000 people decide of the fate of the USA, the West, Civilization, eight billion people, and even the fate of the biosphere. 10,000 have captured the planet. Some could argue that they are busy destroying the planet, precisely to hide their heist, by fostering great destruction, making it impossible to understand who, what, started the holocaust, the burning of everything…

Anyway, good to see the Times they are changing…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Relative to Biden, Obama was just a poser: his Obamacare, however helpful it has been to the healthcare plutocracy, pales in insignificance relative to Biden’s hellish reforms of the 1990s… 

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2013/11/03/obamascare/

Of course TARP was very much in the spirit of Biden’s finance reforms of the 1990s:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2009/01/25/tarp-transfer-of-assets-to-rich-people/

Advanced Machiavellian Insulting

“Machiavellian Intelligence” is a recent scientific concept. However, Machiavellian Intelligence has been practiced by various animals for at least 400 million years. What is Machiavellian Intelligence? Any form of intelligence which uses a Theory of Mind to predict, and sometimes, as we will see below, dictate, the behavior of others (this is my definition, which generalizes the usual one, which is confined to large social groups).

Any animal with a sufficiently advanced intelligence acts, relative to other animals, with a Theory of what the Mind of the other is. For short, philosophers call that a Theory of Mind.

Elaborated originally when studying primates, the “Machiavellian intelligence hypothesis” (Byrne and Whiten 1988, 1997) is that the large brains of humans grew over the millennia because of intense social competition for reproduction (now of course, food is even more important than reproduction… and survival, more than food… So limiting to a social group, and sex, is silly.)

However, considered in my much more general sense, Machiavellian intelligence has existed probably since the first fishes ambled on land, if not before (such fishes nowadays, such as Mudskippers spend some time threatening and fighting each other for their piece of mud… It is of such animals and their ilk, we are talking about today).

Insults Depend Upon A Theory of the Mind of the Other. Insults Can Be Noble, Let Alone Well Deserved. However, They Are First A Way To Change Minds, Often For the Worst

For example the mother crocodile which charges or, actually, any animal making a mock charge, uses a Theory of Mind (they know they may scare away the enemy, because the enemy will be afraid; thus they know something about the mind of the enemy, and they conceive of fear ).  

In human beings, Machiavellian Intelligence can reach heights unsuspected by traditional scholarship.

Consider insults. The very principle of insulting depends upon having a Theory of Mind. Generally insults are viewed first as the mark of anger, the products of gross and primitive minds. But there is much more to it. Insults can be proffered to change the mind of the adversary in a very deep way.

I got severely insulted on the Internet in recent months. The perpetrators have TDS, Trump Derangement Syndrome, according to which whoever did not agree with what they were injected with, is most evil. The plutocratically owned Main Stream Media (including “public” outfits for sale, such as NPR and PBS) decreed that all heretics, those who dared exert some choices regarding the Main Stream Media’s contempt for Trump and all his views, were racist, homophobic, anti-Muslim, Lesbian, Transexual hater, “Alt-Right”, “red”, combative and generally atrocious. One did not have to be a supporter of Trump to attract a frenzy of insults. Being a simple supporter of the Truth, in any way, was deemed enough for a deluge of insults.

I must confess that I supported the Truth really a lot, partly in the hope of studying the flow of insulters, and also studying what it was the insulters hope to achieve. The more I supported Truth, the more enraged the insulters got. TDS went exponential. I found that sad, as a simple human being with simple feelings, for people I used to consider friendly, or, at least, decent, yet, the more I got insulted, the more very interesting I found the entire exercise, as a philosopher trending towards ever more sophistication..

Even people whom I have known face to face, accused me to be a “racist”, an “antisemite”, or a “racist troll”. Several of these people  knew that my family is multiracial, from three continents. That my parents and closest family fought the Nazis in uniform or in the resistance, taking huge risks, that they were even hunted by Gestapo. Some even knew that some members of my family has been tight with Obama for more than four decades (and they adulate Obama, whom they never met, as if he was the new Golden Calf).

In spite of evidence to the contrary, and without supporting sophisticated reasoning for hurling such infamy, the insults kept coming, and were widely advertized in “social networks”. Someone important explained to me that the insulters were mostly posing to reassure their allies, and employers (in the “liberal” media) that there was no way they knew a monster such as me.

But then I discovered this:

Something insulters want, and all too often get, is for their preys to become according to their insults.

Facebook friend John Michael Gartland agreed: That’s just what I was thinking. Others I exposed the idea to had an “eureka moment”.

So insults flow from a Theory of Mind. “Fighting words” (a legal notion) are there to incite coming to blows. It is a form of mental manipulation. But what I revealed above is a more subtle form.

Say you know somebody who is not a racist, not a xenophobe, not a liar. Still, suppose that person is insulted, and called, publicly, a “racist”, “xenophobe”, “liar”, and other derogatory terms, relentlessly. What to do to get out of it if denials only excite the insulters to further abuse? Paradoxically, the natural reaction is to scoff and embrace the deplorable condition which is unjustly conferred, the natural reaction is to embrace it: that immediately drops the charges of bad faith, covering-up (cowering-up?), and lying.

Thus accepting what was meant as an insult as a quality one possesses, diminishes the neurological workload of the one who is insulted. Embracing the insult, accepting to be mentally conformed to the insult, is, literally energy saving. Thus a strong motivator. It reduces the adversary’s capacity to annoy… thus the pain. 

(A famous example of proudly adopting insults as one’s own cocky characteristic was given by Gauls and Romans. The Romans called the Celts “cocks”, because, the Romans alleged, Celts liked too much colorful clothing, a flamboyant attitude, a domineering stance, and were too proud, noisy, and aggressive. The Celto-Germans turned all around these Roman insults, into characteristics they were proud of, and adopted the name “Gallia”, the birds by that name… As their own definition!)

Also, having received already the punishment, of being condemned as what insults define one as, why not enjoy its fruits? And if it irritates so much the insulters, why not to strike back at them with what infuriates them so much?

Such is one of the infernal loops which foster conflicts: insults confer behavioral characteristics, as soon as the object of the insults lower neurological stress by accepting them as a truth to be proud of, or live with. Thus, confronted to insults, replying with just “esprit”, tack to tack, as Voltaire (and many others) used to, is not always the wisest behavior. Insults are how the creeps transfer their inferiority to ourselves. Let’s go higher, with superior ideas, to crush the insulters, as the roaches they are.

To the violence haters and insulters propose, impose and live by, we have an alternative: intelligent, honest debate, going boldly where they can’t want to. Nothing infuriates them more.

Patrice Ayme’