EUROPE TRIED HARD TO SAVE THE PLANET: Europe limited its CO2 emissions better than the rest of the world. Under the Kyoto Protocol, 37 industrialized nations and the European Union pledged to reduce their greenhouse-gas emissions by 5% measured against 1990 levels by the end of 2012.
This provided the rest of the world, not held back by such efforts, a competitive advantage. Who pays? Europe.
The Kyoto Treaty was not ratified by the USA, but exploited by its plutocracy: as China was (stupidly) exempted, under Kyoto, from emission mitigation, industries owned by American plutocrats were relocated there, to escape modern anti-pollution norms. Result?
Tyranny & Carbon Burning Cooking Biosphere
The Russian gas giant Gazprom announced that a giant (and very dangerous!) Liquid Natural Gas tanker, the Ob River, left Norway on November 7, accompanied by two nuclear icebreakers for nine days, breaking through thin winter ice. It saved twenty days on the trip. Notice that such LNG tankers carry the explosive power of a nuclear bomb, and going through the desolated Arctic may be safer. (Ob River can carry 150,000 cubic meters of gas and weights around 150,000 tons). Thus the North-East Arctic Passage was open for big time business, and, in …winter. The heat is on, indeed.
USA ADVANTAGE IS CAUSE NUMBER ONE OF PLANETARY WARMING:
As usual with important progressive treaties, ever since the SDN, the Society Of Nations, in 1919, the USA baits and maneuvers the other countries into economically, or politically disadvantageous positions, and then switches out at the last moment. The Versailles Treaty was an early example of this time honored technique (the SDN was supposed to impose the precautions that Versailles failed to give, but then the USA made the SDN fail, opening the way to Nazism). This classical bait & switch trick explains why the USA does not recognize Palestinians, the International Criminal Court, or the Rights of Children.
Non ratification of Kyoto advantaged the USA. It is particularly obvious with the development of shale oil and gas there. Never mind the tremendous ecological consequences. Canada had ratified Kyoto, but violated it completely, by developing tar sands. Canada formally left Kyoto last year, before being struck by sanctions.
As the Wall Street Journal observed on December 3, 2012, ecological considerations hold back the rest of the world in the fracking race. But not so in the USA, and this gives said USA a tremendous advantage. What the Wall Street Journal did not say is that the willingness of the USA to destroy the planet as it searches for comparative advantage, is a distant consequence of the thoughts and moods inherited from that tremendous accomplishment, the holocaust of the Native Americans. Exploitation, no holds barred: the gift that keeps on giving.
The American indigenes were eradicated through the imposition of a relentless exploitation mentality hidden under an indispensable thick hypocritical mood, the latter enabling the former. Not only are the exploitation mental machinery and its mood still major cultural components of the USA, but the continent is pretty much empty: the USA has more arable land than China, or India, with a fourth of the population. Moreover, some of the states with lots of fracking have little arable land too (Wyoming, North Dakota). Basically, they are throw-away states. After the last polluted farm or ranch has been surrendered to the fracking fumes, the land will be returned to wild critters and evil spirits, while the USA prepares for the world war, that the worldwide ecological devastation will bring.
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POLLUTION DENYING PROPAGANDA:
A tremendously crazy campaign was organized by the CO2 polluters, for years, in Anglo-Saxon countries. The well paid propagandists denied everything, using the Crazy Lie Technique: they claimed insanely, and the more insane, the better, that CO2 meant nothing, that the heat was NOT rising, that climate scientists invented the data, in a vast conspiracy called “Climategate“, that CO2 was not a pollutant, but, instead, the more, the better, etc…
Those crazy lies worked with its target audience, the ignorant, uncritical People of the USA. At least well enough to give a cover for the Congress of the USA, to affect to believe that those insanities ought to be given a serious hearing. This delaying technique allowed the polluters to gain more than two decades. Europeans fought back, by giving hypocritical Vice President Gore, the Nobel Peace Prize. If you can’t beat them, spoil them.
But now polls show that, even in the USA, the citizenry has come to believe that the heat is on, fro the whole planet, and that human pollution by heat trapping gases such as CO2 was the cause (by 65%). So the polluters had to change tac. They are inventing a new approach, and it seems to be working, even with many ecologists (as I discovered to my dismay in the last few weeks). Apparently there is a tremendous number of naïve ecologists out there, the same ecologists whose idiotic posturing allowed the Kyoto Protocol to fail, while the USA leveraged it for comparative advantage.
The new trick by the gas polluters consists in saying that nothing can be done, against the rising CO2, we may as well accept it. The only hope is that the world population would crash massively and to have the culled rabble leading those much simpler lives poverty provides with: see the Simplicity Institute, “A Prosperous Way Down”, and a number of articles exposed in the site “Learning From Dogs”, such as “Unintended Consequences”.
The truth is much more prosaic:
THE CARBON TAX IS HATED BY POLLUTERS:
A worldwide Carbon Tax would reconstitute the free market as fair and balanced, giving a chance to alternative energy sources, without subsidies, or government programs. The Carbon Tax would just charge for the cost of the damage the heat trapping gas emissions cause, including the cost of repairing the entire biosphere back to health.
The Carbon Tax could be imposed asymmetrically. Say a car comes from China. One would evaluate how much coal was used in the industries providing the car maker and its parts makers, and their energy providers. Then one would add the bunker fuel used in the sea transport in the evaluation of how much fossil fuel has been used to bring the car to market overseas. One would apply that made to ALL goods. China does not have to cooperate.
The World Trade Organization has already determined such a tax is no custom duties, and does not violate its charter.
The Carbon Tax would be a nail in the coffin of fossil fuels. So, of course, carbonizators hate it.
Europe has been slowly taking measures against CO2 pollution, including increasing carbon taxes, here and there. One such law requires airline to pay a carbon tax (as all methods burning carbon should). So the Republican Congress of the USA wrote a counter law to force airlines from the USA to NOT obey the European law. Their counter law, their illegal, the planet destroying law of the right-wing extremists in the pockets of oil men, is now on Obama’s desk. Obama could, and should veto this planet destroying law. Will he? Will he find the moral fiber? Will the president of the USA find the ferocity that is needed, in the face of infamy?
Well, he will not, if all ecologists do is to say there are no solutions but those we would get after a world war that would kill 50 times more people than World War Two did (that is basically what the links above propose to do; in other words a non solution solution!) How did we get there?
Notice by the way that one of Obama’s predecessors, Franklin D. Roosevelt, in a somewhat similar situation, proved to be a coward. Instead of declaring war to Hitler, in summer 1939, he signed sanctions against the French Republic and the United Kingdom, for having declared war to the atrocious, mass murdering, racist Nazis. So self-interested cowardice is a well anchored tradition of the USA.
However, this time, as superstorm Sandy demonstrated, the consequence of collaborating with mass homicidal folly will be heavy for the USA. For one, Florida will, for sure, disappear below the waves.
The porous limestone bedrock of Florida will prevent the fabrication of polders there: Florida is not the Netherlands! Sea water will seep inside the rock, below any dam in Florida.
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REPRESENTATIVE DEMOCRACY IS NOT DEMOCRACY:
In Representative Democracy, somebody who knows nothing is put in charge of everything. In truth, Representative Democracy is more akin to what the Ancient Greeks called tyranny, the rule of one.
In the USA that knows-nothing is elected with lots of money. In France, with lots of bureaucracy.
So in the USA money rules, whereas in France bureaucrats do. Most other “democracies” are in between.
Notice that in Germany, which is doing better economically, having reformed its work market quite a bit, politicians have to be a bit more responsive to the masses, due to the use of a proportional voting system (somewhat diametrically opposed to the first-by-the-post British system). Proportional voting is more collegial: Merkel had to govern in the beginning with the Socialists, and is now running in the next elections against her former (Socialist) finance minister.
Some will smirk, but that Socialist gentleman is very strict and put a lot of heat on tax havens such as Switzerland forcing it to reveal thousands of tax thieves and irreversibly change its laws about banking secrecy. In other words, the proportional voting system can empower the People against the plutocracy. It’s better than the systems found in the more fascist, more militarized France, Britain and USA.
In Switzerland, a (“Con”)Federal Council of seven provides with a collegial direction to the entire country. That works obviously better than having an elected tyran. The problems found in large representative “democracies” are found there too, but on a much smaller scale.
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TWO MILLION JAPANESE VISITED PHARAOH TUTANKHAMEN
in expositions in Tokyo and Osaka. Why? Ancient Egypt played a crucial role in the invention of mathematics and the alphabet. Among others discoveries. Thus Egypt is part of the foundation of civilization. So is Mesopotamia.
Egypt and Mesopotamia, plus Iran and India conducted a sort of conference on progress, for millennia.
After crops were bioengineered in the area (“Fertile Crescent“), men and their cultivars colonized Western Europe. The original Italians did not just look like Iraqis, they were the real thing.
So is colonization a bad thing? No. it is actually hard to find a population anywhere in the world that did not descend from colonists.
And do Japanese descend from Egyptians, Mesopotamians and Greeks, just justifying their interest for Pharaohs with a personal touch?
Of course they do. because our civilization, which is also theirs, does. After all, the first axiomatic proof of the Pythagorean theorem is in Euclid (300 BCE), although it started to be discovered nearly 2,000 years prior, in Egypt and Babylon.
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NO CIVILIZATION, BUT CIVILIZATION, AND PROGRESS IS ITS PROPHET:
Some have talked about the clash of civilizations. But, in the grander scheme of things, there is now only one civilization. We count in 60 minutes in one hour, because arithmetic in base 60 was useful for the tremendous astronomical computations in Mesopotamia to determine the seasons, when to plant, and the floods of the great rivers (the higher the base, the more compact the computations). That was more than a millennium before Romans did anything more advanced than herding cows.
There is an astounding prolongation of systems of thought, and systems of moods, throughout the ages. For 10,000 years, civilization has proven to be a continual construction, in the Middle Earth, an initial condition onto itself (in the differential equation sense).
On a more minor theme, as climatic and hydraulic conditions became tougher in the Middle East, the place became ever more sympathetic to increasingly fascist regimes and the religion that fit them (the Abrahamic religion being exhibit number one).
However, superior technology, such as desalination installations (some soon available with solar cells, on a small scale) change the fascist equation. If there is no more need for vast centralized military organizations to provide with survival, the Middle East may hope for more democratic days.
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COCONUT REPUBLICS UNITE FOR TREATING PALESTINIANS AS NON HUMAN!
The USA voted with other coconut republics such as Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, and three other states, against the statute of “observer state” for Palestine at the United Nations.
138 nations voted to give the Palestinian state the same status as the Vatican. Even Switzerland voted FOR the Palestinian recognition.
Obama and his spokesman disapproved: “peace will only be achieved by face-to-face negotiations, not unilateral action”, apparently not remembering the famous negotiations between the Nazis and the Jews, that led to the killing of most European Jews. The final solution was to get rid of the Nazis, but it took five years and eight months of world war to do so.
The position of the White House, that Palestinians should lay as low as possible, and beg their Israeli masters discreetly, in private, reflects blindness to the fundamental principle of combative goodness.
It is all the more curious, as Obama and company claim to be Christians. The mythical Jesus Christ did not hesitate to confront the forces of evil, indifference and wealth, with ways sure to lead to arrest in the modern USA (and all sorts of subsequent persecutions).
Martyrs, saints, holy persons, peacemakers and Nobel Prize winners, and, more generally the principle of goodness, act unilaterally. Face to face, slave to master, as Palestinian to Israeli, the way the White House claims to want it, has nothing to do with goodness. The USA is now face to face with the company it keeps: Palau, the Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Panama, Israel, Harper’s ecocidal , Kyoto defiling Canada.
The Obama administration also does not know how to count: unilateral means one side, but when 138 independent nations throw 138 votes, that is not one sided. What was one sided was the USA and a handful of its ridiculously small and dependent client slave states it showers with money and influence.
Is that civilized behavior?
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WHY DOES CANADA HATE PALESTINIANS?
Canada, a geophobic state voted with the USA, against human rights in Palestine. everybody knows that one of the interest of Palestine becoming an observer state at the UN is to be able to haul Israel to the International Criminal Court. The ICC, in force in now 121 countries, targets genocide. Several activities of some past or present Israeli governments seem to be genocidal in character. (it is not in the interest of serious Israeli patriots to allow Israel to engage in genocide, a point may orthodox Jewish organizations have made forcefully!)
Canada is apparently not on USA payroll. But actually Canada’s present federal government and the oil plutocrats are accomplices in crime. Harper, the eco-destructing PM of Canada is anxious to have Obama allow his pipeline of twice cooked oil find an outlet somewhere (since British Columbia is not cooperative).
In return that outrage will make it easier to pursue further outrages in the USA themselves, such as further fracking. (Although the principle of fracking, per se, does not have to be eco-destructing, the way it is practiced now, it certainly is so… Besides the fact that it leads to further CO2 emissions.)
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CAN’T JEWS & PALESTINIANS LEARN HISTORY WELL?
Petty reaction of Israel after Palestine was officially admitted by the UN to be an observer, 65 years, to the day, after the UN created the Palestinian state: Israel broadcast its decision to develop E1, a 12 square kilometers area that will cut off Palestinian East Jerusalem from the rest of Palestine.
Indeed the Israelis are mimicking the Nazi idea of erecting insurmountable walls around their ghettos. Israeli walls are chosen to be vastly superior, though.
The story of Israel is mighty strange; what came to be known as Jews were apparently those Israelis who were deported to Babylon, where they wrote the Bible. Meanwhile other Israelites, more cooperative, had not been deported. When the Jews in Babylon were allowed to come back and rebuild the temple, the relationship with the collaborators who had stayed home were not too good, and those were called Samaritans. Now, of course the Israelites have been chosen by their gods, like all people and all the gods they invent for themselves. However Jews believed it a bit more than usual, and perhaps too much.
Whereas the Celts let go of their bloody gods after the Romans, slowly, and Caesar, quickly, conquered them, the Jews clang to their “jealous” god ferociously, beyond reason. The result were two ferocious wars with Rome. The first one killed a million, the second, 65 years later, under Hadrian, resulted in the dispersion of the Jews. Emperor Hadrian’s government had tried to outlaw circumcision, on the ground that it was a primitive sexual mutilation. After that third savage war, between Jews and Rome, the Jews were outlawed in Jerusalem. The Samaritans kept on prospering.
Yet, in the Fifth Century, the increasingly insanely mass murdering theocratic state based in Constantinople (the one islam is the intellectual heir of) was in a collision course with anything not “Catholic Orthodox“. Intellectuals had to flee to Zoroastrian Persia. The Samaritans chose unwisely to fight. The result is that only a handful of them survive today.
We are all, we humans living on Earth now, descendants of colons, and our ex-gods were made to justify colonization. Judaism and Islam, both sitting on top of Mount Zion, are striking examples. Israelis and Palestinians have to admit this, this flaw they have in common, this crazy colonizing god, if they want to look inside each other, and themselves, as they have to do, should they elect to survive.
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OBAMA’S USA MAKES LAWS TO CARBONIZE THE EARTH:
The European Union legislated a tax on carbon emissions for all aircraft flying into European countries, a part of the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). However, Obama signed a bill from the fanatical climate denying Tea Party republican Congress that, somehow, shields USA airlines from paying that European carbon tax, when landing in… Europe.
Maybe the USA believes that Europe is still divided, as it was in 1939? I have news for Washington: playing the Germans against the French is so much yesterday!
Obama’s pollution bill gives the US transportation secretary the power to exempt US airlines from the tax. An unusual bill, as it allows US airlines to ignore EU laws. It’s as if Obama signed a law allowing US corporations to ignore British law. Or to ignore German law. And also French law. Besides Spanish and Italian law. Who does Obama believes he is? It’s fine to ignore the laws of other nations outside of their territory, but here, the president of the USA orders its minions to flout the laws of 28 countries on their territories.
Has the Commander in Chief of the USA become the Outlaw In Chief? Ordering robots to kill civilians in friendly countries upon recommendation of a secretive Death Panel at White House was not enough? Is Outlaw-in-Chief, Destroyer of the Earth, the place in history Obama strives for? Does Obama want to live in infamy for centuries to come? It increasingly looks like it, and being surrounded by salivating admirers all the time goes a long way to elucidate the trance of delusion that may end up smearing Obama’s name for centuries to come.
White House spokesman Clark Stevens, in an orgasm of hypocrisy:“the Obama administration is firmly committed to reducing harmful carbon pollution from civil aviation both domestically and internationally, but, as we have said on many occasions, the application of the EU ETS to non-EU air carriers is the wrong way to achieve that objective.” Obama had tepidly admitted that the USA had not done enough on climate change. This shows he firmly intents to keep it that way. How difficult is it for him to get the republicans getting used to his veto powers?
Notice the analogy with the USA failure to recognize Palestinian statehood at the United Nations (as authorized in 1948, finally implemented in 2012!) It’s exactly the same mental attitude: doing something is viewed as worse than doing nothing. The White House is firmly committed to oh blah blah and will do strictly nothing that fosters progress significantly. It’s all about talking one way, so as to do the opposite.
One can only surmise that this same general attitude holds for places such as Egypt (towards which billions of USA taxpayer dollars are directed, while democracy fails under the call to prayer).
Obama says that he “leads from behind“. This is unconventional semantics for lagging behind, desperately clinging to the past. Is Obama just the robot president, programmed from behind?
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INTELLECTUAL OVERSTRETCH IS WORSE THAN GEOGRAPHICAL OVERSTRETCH:
Let me point out this about the USA’s detestation of the Carbon Tax. Starting with Roman Emperor Augustus, the great-nephew of Iulius Caesar, the theory of Imperial Overstretched reigned supreme. It has been repeated ever since by many parrots: if a state spreads too much, it hits a state of diminishing returns, leading to collapse.
In truth, the theory is wrong. Completely wrong. At least, completly wrong in the case of Rome, as it turned out. And the proof that it was wrong is called Europe. Caesar did not believe in the silly theory Augustus would later embrace. Caesar was set to act accordingly at the time of his assassination. The Franks agreed with Caesar, and made an effort for more than three centuries, to create the short, highly defendable border in Eastern Europe that Caesar wanted. So doing, the Merovingian and Caroligian Franks created Europe.
Although various Muslims (for a millennium), Vikings, and Mongols (thrice) attacked Europe fiercely, Frankish Europe operating as one continent proved highly defendable (which Augustus’ Rome spread along the Mediterranean proved, time and time again, NOT to be!). Thus Augustus, and his successors were wrong, with their rigid, all too long “limes“. Caesar and the Franks were right: a short and mobile frontier, with the strong intellectual component that republicanism (even Christian Republicanism, that took over around 400 CE!) was more stable, cheap, sturdy, and full of hope.
Indeed there are more ways to stretch than purely geographical. Christianity itself is an example of spiritual empire: it spread much of Romanitas far out, where Roman armies never got. For example in Ethiopia, or Mongolia.
Similarly an ideology can be very powerful, and stretch imperially, dragging armies behind. The Roman ideology, already obvious with the Roman king Tarquinus Superbus, was very universal (“catholic” in Greek), as befit a melting pot such as nascent Rome.
Yet, in the end, the spirit of plutocracy smothered the spirit of the universal republic that had made Rome’s success. The Franks succeeded to conquer northern and eastern Europe, precisely because, although somewhat plutocratic, their civilization was much less so than the Late Roman empire. (If one could invent a political Gini Index, one would find it, and the economic Gini, were much lower under the Franks than under the Roman empire: decisions and powers were much less centralized.)
So what now? The spirit of the universal republic, prolongation of that of republican Rome (pre-slavery), thrives at the United Nations (and this game the leader of the Palestinian, Abbas, is fully playing).
Why does the USA often stands as an outlier, with what are unfolding as catastrophic consequences, such as the sinking of the Kyoto Protocol? Why did the USA set back the mitigation of the heat trapping catastrophe by at least a quarter of a century after its extent became obvious? That is reminiscent of the long refusal by the USA to do anything about the massacres the Nazis were engaging in, years after such a horrible situation had become completely obvious.
The problem with the USA is that the Biblical, relentless exploitative mentality (basically killing all the Indians, and the like) was highly successful. But its time as something that profited the European colonists in America is now passed. The exploitative mentality, no holds barred, is imperially overstretched.
At this point the exploitative mentality of the USA is not just out-maneuvering the French, and Europeans, as it did, manipulating the Nazis, the Soviets, the Muslims, and the rest of the world, over the last century.
The relentless exploitative mentality festering in the USA, but historically so central to its success as an empire, has stretched itself all too thin. The relentless exploitative mentality is now trying to out-maneuver the air, the sea, the biosphere, physics and geology itself (see Florida above). And yet, clearly, fracking all in its way, is not the way. It is the way to infamy. How naïve. How costly, and deadly, all too soon to be revealed.
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Patrice Ayme
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