Abstract: The clown in chief gets all the tricolor flags out, parades in front of them celebrating himself, his blackness, while his debt reaches heavens. He just forgot to pay for it. He insists that “the USA is a AAA country, we all know this, make no mistake“. Meanwhile one of Obama’s killer toys causes sorrow, while strafing the natives on the other side of the planet, just because. All those events are causally related by the logic of the deliberately stupid.
The epic failure is global: even American left wing economist have bought the sycophantic line. The USA prefers oil & gas to… water itself, a choice which may leave the USA low and dry. Many American economists believe more of the same is the essence of the future, and they are wrong.
Well, there is no essence, but the Quantum, and it jumps around in unexpected way. Expect the unexpectable… But suspectable. With the Quantum, properly understood, the philosophy of suspicion has fused with the physics of probabilities.
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Great Triumph Of The Great Leader; He Made It To 50!
The leader celebrated his birthday in public, thousands in attendance, close to tears, there was singing. The great leader passed, discreetly waving, moved by the collective fervor, dozens of giant tricolor flags behind him, red, white… Adolf Hitler, of course.
And Barack Obama, de facto, August 4, 2011, apparently celebrating the passing of 100% GDP debt, and his abdication. Indeed the president had just renounced the pesky pretense of being master of his destiny, or leader of the USA. From now on, he would just watch, officially as a dozen Congress people would decide or apply automatic cuts, balanced between Medicare and whatever. When the “You guys” guy has run out of clichés, he is naked, and that’s what happens.
The two most important words in politics are: de facto. Out (of) fact. De facto, Obama is Tea Party. That he screams otherwise, despite the colossal evidence to the contrary, makes it even more so. De facto, Nixon was an extreme left winger, relatively speaking, by today’s lamentable standards.
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Mr. Obama, Where Is Your Hoover Dam?
The worth of the debt of the USA has been the object of collective hallucination on the part of worldwide investors and the American public and government. American debt is worth very little. Why? Because the USA WILL DEFAULT. It’s only a matter of time. A lot of time, but a foreseeable time.
The U. S. Federal debt, and U.S. consumer debt was used for … consumption. Still is. Consumption consumes, by definition. As Christ said on his cross:”All is consumed“. Meaning he was finished. If Christ was American, he would have paid for his cross with crushing debt.
70% of the U.S. economy is consumption. One guesses that, just to have sustainability, one ought to balance consumption, that is, destruction, and construction. But it is not so. Obama could not build a bridge, let alone the equivalent of one of the many giant dams which republican president Hoover saw built during his tenure. (For example Obama could have built a High Speed Rail line… But he did not. Although the Eastern corridor was ripe for an upgrade.)
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Hoover Did Public Works, FDR Made Even More, And Cleaned The Stables, BHO Did Nought:
The conflict between Hoover, an engineer by formation, and F.D. Roosevelt was extreme. FDR was a lawyer who had very high government responsibilities, such as Assistant Sec. of The Navy for seven years (but he was truly the man behind the Navy built-up, and especially the submarine force), and it was during World War One, when the German submarine force was terribly successful, for all too long, threatening to isolate Britain, and cut-off the USA from France. Then FDR was governor of New York state, and re-elected. A person of immense experience. His cousin Teddy, also another revolutionary U.S. president for this privileged family, stood-in as his father in law during his wedding (thus FDR was much closer to Teddy than is generally assumed, and was no doubt encouraged by his dashing mien).
Perfidiously, FDR ran against Hoover’s deficits. FDR wanted “immediate and drastic reductions of all public expenditures… abolishing useless commissions and offices, consolidating departments and bureaus, and eliminating extravagances”.
But FDR changed his tune, once elected: “I pledge you, I pledge myself to a New Deal for the American people… This is more than a political campaign. It is a call to arms.”
In a way FDR was the anti-Obama: he campaigned conservatively (except for the repeal of prohibition, which he called for), but reigned revolutionarily.
FDR realized an enormous government intervention in the economy, and the cleanup of the banking system. Hoover thought enough enormous state sponsored works were in the pipeline. As events showed, FDR was right, and Hoover was wrong. Obama would have accused Hoover to be a far left wing liberal, and he would have found no words harsh enough for FDR.
FDR shut down the banking system on day one of his presidency. What did Obama do that day? He celebrated himself. On day one, Obama celebrated Benito Mussolini style, chin sky high in front of the multitude, as if visited by Zeus himself. It’s funny, this chin thing the great leaders have. The elevated chin detracts from the rest.
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FDR As Anti-Plutocrat:
The world has sunk in depression. Says FDR: “Primarily this is because rulers of the exchange of mankind’s goods have failed through their own stubbornness and their own incompetence, have admitted their failure, and have abdicated. Practices of the unscrupulous money changers stand indicted in the court of public opinion, rejected by the hearts and minds of men. True they have tried, but their efforts have been cast in the pattern of an outworn tradition. Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money. Stripped of the lure of profit by which to induce our people to follow their false leadership, they have resorted to exhortations, pleading tearfully for restored confidence….The money changers have fled from their high seats in the temple of our civilization. We may now restore that temple to the ancient truths. The measure of the restoration lies in the extent to which we apply social values more noble than mere monetary profit.“
Who speaks this way nowadays, among the dwarves who are supposed to lead? (OK, they only lead with more fund raising from their plutocratic owners.) This present situation is in part explained by the vast de-politization, decerebration of much of the populations of the leading Western countries (especially in the USA: FDR got support from a vast tradition of recrimination, protests and large unions, both of which have pretty much disappeared from decades of propaganda to make most people stupid enough to be led by the nose by the masters).
One may notice that “Faced by failure of credit they have proposed only the lending of more money”, is the main line of the USA and the EU. Greece was lent hundreds of billions… to pay the interest on her debt to private banks. But of course the banks, or more exactly the managements of these banks are co-responsible, and should take a cut. And if they need too much help from the People, the People should take possession of them (= nationalization). Instead of giving the crooked bankers money for nothing, so they can keep on with their “false leadership“, as FDR put it.
However, debt is complicated; interest payment of the U.S. debt was 451 billion in 2008. It is projected to be only 411 billion in 2011. Yes, the debt augmented considerably, but the payments went down. Because, as the economy tanked, interest rates went down.
As I have long argued, now is the time to borrow maximally to create jobs. The failed banks which should have been nationalized should now spearhead this effort.
In: http//krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/the-arithmetic-of-near-term-deficits-and-debt/, Krugman points out that borrowing trillions would cost nought. Now.
But of course it ought to be to create intelligent jobs, highest value jobs. In other words, create jobs for those who will rebel, adopt FDR’s ideas, and throw down the plutocrats. So the plutocrats are not keen: they say no to the infrastructure bank.
The unemployment is a political choice, not an accident. A choice of Obama and his sponsors. Obama has chosen his class. It’s the class of Bush, the class which views most people as crumbs. Anything else is a big lie.
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Quoting The Devil Approvingly:
Xinhua, the official newswire agency, wrote an editorial: “The days when the debt-ridden Uncle Sam could leisurely squander unlimited overseas borrowing appeared to be numbered… mounting debts and ridiculous political wrestling in Washington have damaged America’s image abroad…. All Americans, both beltway politicians and those on Main Street, have to do some serious soul-searching to bring their country back from a potential financial abyss.”
The editorial recommended “substantial cuts” to “bloated social welfare costs” and a “gigantic military expenditure.” This echoed China’s top general, Chen Bingde, who told a press conference last month that as America deals with “difficulties in its economy … it would be a better thing if the United States did not spend so much money on the military.” He said so while standing next to Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Earlier in the week the Beijing-based Dagong Global Credit Rating Co. dropped its rating of the United States from A+ to A with a negative outlook: “the defects in the (U.S.) political structure exposed in the bipartisan struggle indicate that the U.S. government has difficulty in ultimately resolving the sovereign debt crisis.”
Friday Standard & Poor followed Dagong, with the same terms. Xinhua noted approvingly that this “proved what its Chinese counterpart has done is nothing but telling the global investors the ugly truth.”
Well all this boils down to child in chief Obama having not faced reality: he had total control, and, while the deficit exploded, he did nothing. No new taxes, for Obama, and knocking off many pre-existing taxes. Moreover, Obama invested in nothing. Oops, I forgot that big investment, the biggest of them all, Afghanistan.
Nowadays, investing a trillion into the real economy would cost nothing in GDP (because interests have collapsed, as Krugman explains).
One has to understand that, without investments, debt becomes unserviceable. One GROWS out of debt. The Russian debt to France was paid back, only because Russia grew out of it, 90 years later. Yes, 90. The American Federal debt of WWII was never paid back, really, but grown out of.
Debt and investment are separated by fools only.
Since Obama gets orders from banks, he cannot order them to invest in the real economy, that would contravene his orders. So he wants to create an infrastructure bank, a way to compromise, so he hopes audaciously. But Geithner, the creature of Wall Street, does not want to do so. Indeed, an infrastructure bank would make Wall Street lose its tight grip on the U.S. economy…. And thus on U.S. society (thus exposing Wall Street plotters and thieves to prosecution).
Indeed, Wall Street controls his boy Geithner; with them, the world is his oyster. And so on. Around it goes. A few dogs chasing money around in the wind, their mission in life. Applying social values more noble than mere monetary profit to themselves totally escapes this crowd of plotters.
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The Violent Truth; A Drunk Is Under The Bridge:
The USA has not been taking care of itself. It’s like the old, sick, depressed, confused, overweight smelly drunk lying in urine for too long below a bridge. Nobody took care of the bridge, either, and now that work of art is falling apart, threatening to crush the drunkard. Who will dare to do something? Why should that scene be worth anything? That is the scene of American debt.
The president just showed he was a child who abdicated all responsibility, abdicating, as he did, in favor of Congress, where “supercommittees” are going to be created to decide of all what’s important. Including, supposedly, defense. By the way both the French and British parliaments approved the Libyan war. At least the semblance of representative democracy are been kept. There. In the USA, Congress did not vote on Libya.
What’s next? A super dictatorship? A bipartisan dictatorship? President plays golf, looking real cool, the child cannot do his job, so supercommittees of the bipartisan party rule?
Anybody travelling the USA can observe that the country is decrepit, and increasingly so. Out there in the boondocks, much of what people live in was built at the earliest, 50 years ago. But it was not built with good timber, as in the Middle Ages, or good stone, as in Renaissance Europe. Instead much was built in plywood, a mix of wood pulp and glue. It is now falling apart, and mold pervades it. Let alone the fire hazard.
Obama called a “stimulus” to rush money so that fire departments would not be closed, all over the USA. But even in Silicon Valley, the richest part, at least one police department closed, and a fire department of a major city of the valley of silicon soon will.
Meanwhile Afghans object to the invasion force in their midst. They are arming themselves. 38 imperial troopers went down when their chopper was shot down on takeoff. A few hours later, two French legionaires got killed, and five wounded, in a good old fashion assault against Taliban fortifications. A colonial war, without the colonization. Brute force, for nothing, just the heck of it.
Concludes the valorous soldiers war chief child Obama: “Their death is a reminder of the extraordinary sacrifice made by the men and women of our military and their families. We will draw inspiration from their lives, and continue the work of securing our country and standing up for the values that they embodied ”
Which kind of lives are those? Going to the other side of the earth, fighting to death, for the Islamist drug lords in Kabul?
Standing up for which values? Fighting for the Islamist Constitution of Afghanistan? And how does spending a trillion dollar a year on “defense” (in the Hindu Kusch, killing the natives) will help defend the USA? Bin laden was recruited and trained by the CIA (and its Saudi subsidiary). So if one wants to go bomb and kill the origins of bin Laden, no needs not to go all the way to the other side of the Earth. The 9/11 commandos were trained in Germany and the USA, so why not to go attack that instead?
Standing up for which values? Everything indicates that the topmost values of the leaders of the USA are corruption, collusion, connivance and confusion, in this order.
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Debt For Nothing (Continuing):
One thing is clear: the USA ought to change from a fiscal and judicial context favorable to consumption, to one favorable to investment. Getting in debt for consumption is very different from getting in debt for investment. That is why I am bullish on Europe. And those who are bearish on Europe are wrong: The euro is just a bait. Sure it was good to eat, it was meant to be. There is a hook inside that delicious euro, a federal hook, and it’s starting to hurt. Pain does not prove that there will be no gain.
Even Greece has some recent infrastructure to show you (subway!) than the USA, and more of it. The only serious bridge (re)built in the USA right now the Oakland-San Francisco bay bridge. It has been made in China, for more than 20 years, an humiliation.
By comparison, a French private company built the world tallest bridge, the 3.5 mile long Viaduct de Millaut, in just three years. French, not Chinese engineering, employing French, not Chinese engineers! Economics without industry is only ruin of society.
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The Empty Suit Is A Right Wing Cataclysm:
Under Obama the total federal deficit exploded. Under his watch, the Federal deficit went completely out of control.
It is a subtle thing, because much is hidden. Looked at it one way, the debt augmented 45% under Obama, in absolute value, from 10 trillion to 14.5 trillion (August 2011). The face value, official debt went from 80% of GDP (end of Bush II) to more than 100% of GDP. Soon we will be above 120% of GDP, the maximum, ever attained by the USA, during World War Two.
Of course, World War Two was a giant investment: the USA ended up owning the world, except China, the USSR (and Eastern Europe that Uncle Sam offered to Uncle Joe, with negotiating skills reminiscent of Obama).
However, many items are not counted in the 14.5 trillion. Some items pertaining to TARP (giving or lending money to the bankers who ruined the country; when it’s a gift, it’s counted in the deficit, when it’s lent, it’s not). Some pertaining to whatever. The total potential debt of the USA is more than 70 trillion dollars. And increasing fast.
Contrarily to what is said by the plutocratically sponsored politicians, debt is increasing fast, not because there were not enough cuts, but because there were too many cuts. What counts is not the value of debt, but the debt-valuable investment ratio. So I say.
Because the USA confuses economic activity with consuming consumption, that ratio stays bad, and the recent decisions, the recent abdication of Obama, guarantee that it will get way worse.
As the rating agency S & P pointed out, the politic positioning of the ill named “Republicans” makes it unlikely that taxes will be raised. Obama made the so called republicans’ beds, as he did nothing, when he could, and should have.
Differently from Italy, where the Italian government owes its debt to the Italian People, the USA owes its debt to foreigners, as Xinhua pointed out. Foreigners own approximately 50% of all the federal U.S. debt held by the public.
This means that, if foreigners feel that the USA cannot be trusted anymore, as a place of investment, the Federal government will suddenly be 20% short in the budget it has at its disposal. It could only compensate for that by making foreigners offers they cannot refuse. meaning very high interest rates (as happened with Greece).
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The Empty Suit: Right Of The Tea Party?
That is the only question which is amusing enough. An article in the New York Times, “The Madman Theory“, points out that, Nixon was a “de facto liberal”. Although, at the times, he was evil personified as far as half of the USA was concerned, and most of the planet. Obama, in comparison, is, de facto, the most right wing president, ever. His mouth may be on the left, but his hands are on the extreme right.
We have known for a long time that Obama is way to the right of Nixon. I knew this on the day after his election as president: he went to work at a hedge fund in Chicago. That he does want to admit what it means makes it even more so. He is a bad negotiator, intentionally, beyond grotesque: he bears witness against himself.
Now Obama wants to make a billion, that’s Obama’s declared aim in life. Chin up! Higher! Mussolini is jealous! Further! The audacity of dope.
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Anders Brievik’s Massacre In Norway:
I am for immigration. In a sense, I have been emigrating my entire life, I know how it feels when one does not belong. Sometimes it’s OK not to belong, and it helps the country one does not belong to spiritually, by opening to it new knowledge, enriching wisdom.
However, there is integration and integration, and integration ought not to be confused with disintegration. Examples abound, in history, where a civilization collapsed under a migratory flux. Immigration without integration at all is only disintegration of civilization, let alone explosion of edification.
Meaning? Norway brought 550,000 nationalized (OK, “naturalized”) immigrants in 15 years (that is more than 11% of the population). Out of that, officially, about half were extra-European Muslim (thus harder to integrate). That is way too much, way too fast. Dubai would not have naturalized one of them (OK, Dubai is racist, but also, prudent).
This crazed immigration does not explain the insane maniac’s convoluted thinking process. It just made it unavoidable. I was myself bombed by an extreme right wing French commando of Breivik like characters, long ago.
That is actually ironical: Breivik had serious deficiencies in his fascist, racist culture: there is an old, fascist, not to say racist current in France, which helped inspire even Hitler. Breivik wanted to change the “multiculturalist” regime in France (Sarko, multicultural, really?)
Breivik wanted to set up a nuclear device on the Eiffel Tower. It was completely silly, as the overall principle of France is integration, not multiculturalism. (The French principle of integration was weakened in the last few decades under withering criticism by the Americano-Northern European cultural multiculturalist opportunism, but that critique is now in full disarray, and retreat, so one suspects that French integrationism is going to return with a vengeance, as the Qaddafi clan can testify.)
Much of French ancestry can be traced to North Africa and the Middle East (Arab, Berbers, Jews), genetic tests show. (OK, and Italians descend from Iraqi agricultural immigrants, 7,000 years ago!)
Overall, a peculiar culture, now identified with the United Nations and Human Rights, a culture which one should call Paleolithic, triumphed. A paleolithic moral diet.
At least it triumphed ever since slavery was outlawed in 660 CE (forgetting about lamentable episodes such as most Crusades, “Saint” Louis the Cruel Butcher, the insane Religious wars, and the confused immoral Louis XIV). So, if Breivik was talking about culture, against and swallowing hard core Islam, France is where the successful imperialism is. The French like culture is triumphing worldwide, much more than any other cultural current, at this very moment, as the head of the UN go teach the Syrian dictator human rights.
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Frack Me Up!
European bashing is a strange thing. American economists, even “left” wing economists (Krugman, Stiglitz, Johnson) do it a lot. It seems to me that the Europeans are trying harder than the Americans to get their house in better order. The USA was economically fortunate to have plenty of energy, for 150 years, at least. In places, as it still does in some parts of Iraq today, crude oil was gathering in lakes at the surface. Starting in Pennsylvania, the gods made the USA the world’s first producer of oil, for most of the age of oil. That was extended, after 1945, by a pact with Middle East feudal devils.
Now all American hopes are in fracking. Fracking consists in injecting one truck of pure acid underground, mixed with ten trucks of water, adding many agents meant to kill all life (in case it survived the acid!)
But how well will fracking work? In truth, nobody knows. But the entire USA has bet that it will work, that cheap energy will keep on coming. Top economists take this for granted. If it does not, the economical disaster will be enormous, because the USA expects to keep on going with an energetically inefficient economy. If fracking backfires (literally) the USA will roast.
How could fracking backfire? Well, the process of creating fractures underground is renewed many times in the same well. The deadly acidic mix is pushed down, then regurgitated, brought back up to the surface, and gas is extracted, until pressure drops, and a new deadly acidic mix is prepared, pushed down again.
As this cycle is repeated, fractures keep on propagating. Most of the well is horizontal (the drilling bit can be steered). A drawing shows that, after a while, fractures should reach up, and contaminate the water table. And that is where the economics fail, because water is much more precious than oil, or gas. One cannot drink oil, and one cannot breathe gas.
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Desalination Requires Energy:
Desalination plants can bring water in: Barcelona built a massive plant quickly to lessen its imports of water from the French Hautes Alpes, 700 kilometers away. But Barcelona is on the sea. Huge European companies are selling desalination plants all around the world, and no doubt some progress will be done using renewable energy, such as solar, more than now.
However, desalination plants need clean sea water, and a lot of energy. Therein a vicious circle: if your energy destroys your water, you lose both water, and energy.
The main fact of economics: it’s all about energy management.
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What Is The Essence Of Quantum Physics?
Quantum (De Broglie) hypothesis: Any natural phenomenon evolves according to a wave associated to it, which determines its existence. Its wavelength is inversely proportional to its momentum, and proportional to Planck constant.
The Quantum (De Broglie) hypothesis has various spectacular consequences, such as the penetration of forbidden regions, as waves do not stop on a dime (this is the tunnel effect).
The point is that the Quantum is all about waves, existence waves, no less. And those waves are globally determined by the geometry that can be reached (in the wavy sense of reaching, which entails penetration, as I just said, a phenomenon already known in classical electromagnetism).
When one starts to think in a Quantum way, a lot of the real world is illuminated anew.
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Existence Is Quantum, Or Is Not:
So what to think of philosophers who talk about existence, time, nothingness, and know no Quantum Physics? Well, they have an excuse, if they were contemporaries of the birth of the Quantum. But their philosophies do not have that excuse, nowadays.
Now, if we want to think about the world, truly, we have to follow, and respect, the Quantum paradigm.
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Does Authority Rest On Guns, Ultimately, Always?
To a great extent. However, there is something as proximal reason. The Nazis did not have as much guns as the German army. They resolved that by seducing the army. Actually, the Nazis were nearly all about seduction. OK, they killed 10,000 opponents in 1932. However, they told voters that they represented a new order, a new hope, and they were audacious, that was guaranteed. If Germans voters had known what the Nazis were really in the bed of the plutocracy (they claimed the opposite, the Nazis claimed they would submit the filthy rich), and that the Nazis truly planned another world war, German voters would not have voted for them in national and regional elections, and referendums.
Meanwhile the Nazis, and, in particular, Hitler, seduced the army chiefs. With the army wrapped around their little finger, they had big guns, indeed. But they got them through love.
The Germans were seduced with very big lies, quite a bit as Obama seduced those who wanted change in the USA, and all he did was more of the same, more plutocracy, more military-industrial complex, more debt for nothing, more loopholes for the hyper rich, and his hedge fund friends. Alright Obama talks against his billionaires and his hedge fund sponsors. So did Hitler, on an astronomical scale, and, truly, he did the opposite.
The louder Hitler was, the more suspicious one should have been. Hitler used to holler about his desire to protect peace and minorities. Such were his great themes. This has been forgotten now, so Hitler’s seduction of the masses is now mysterious.
All what was in the way of peace and minorities, Hitler screamed, was the Versailles Treaty (a colossal lie, generally repeated ad nauseam by pseudo intellectuals, to this day).
Lies, spring, eternal. The leopard does not have dots because they are pretty, but because they are confusing, and masks the true shape of the flesh eating monster. Voracity comes with camouflage.
One does not have to chose between love and guns. Love can bring control of the guns. Love can commandeer guns. Love too, is authority.
But authority without truth is, ultimately, only the ruin of power.
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Patrice Ayme
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