ACE: No Conflict, No Change

Intensely Conflicting Debates, Thus Change: Why the Superiority of ACE, the Area Of Cultural Europe:

First, let me remind the reader that here by “Europe” is meant the European Cultural Area. This is vastly larger than “Europe” in the ridiculous sense given to this term usually. “Europa” was a Phoenician princess for an excellent reason: the Greeks knew very well how much they culturally owed to the Middle Earth. Let me rephrase this “European Cultural Area” as the AREA OF CULTURAL EUROPE (ACE)… for obvious acronymic reasons.

(The Mongols, back in their Mongolian capital of Karakorum, in the 13th Century, felt that they belonged to ACE; they had the concept; thus they recruited many Parisian artisans, including one who built the world’s fanciest fountain, flowing with precious liquids… Earlier, Genghis Khan top generals, pondering the situation from Hungary, remembering what had happened to their ancestors, the Huns, eight centuries prior, decided to not attack France, although their spearheads were on the Adriatic sea, and all European forces had been defeated, but for the French…)

ACE is a huge expanse of the world where physical geography was friendly to fast, secure, intense communications (through the steppe, the desert, the Sahel, the oceans, the seas, and the rivers; this maybe a factor explaining the less great genetic variability in Eurasia than in Africa, let me point out in passing).

The Area of Cultural Europe (ACE) is a gigantic crescent from Korea, to Ireland, back down to the Sahara, and all the way back to India. ACE is why the Koreans, the Mongols, and the Vietnamese use an alphabet.

No Suffering, No Meaning?

Now even the Chinese have to use an alphabet (something they have to do when typing, because one cannot have a keyboard with 2,500 common characters!). ACE got to the alphabet first. But it took 3,000 years, and the cooperation of many locations, from egypt to Phoenicia, to Sumer. For numeration, it took even longer, and the location of the invention spreads from Egypt to India, to Central Asia to Greece. 

China is adopting the alphabet, not because China is a European political colony, but because the alphabet was the best solution for a writing system. ACE is all about the best solutions. Finding best solutions is what the gigantic ACE produced, better than any other place in the world.

Pondering “How Did EUROPE Become So SUPERIOR?” Picard578 on February 23, 2017, said:

One important aspect in Europe’s domination was its fragmentation. Combination of cultural diversity and political fragmentation enabled it rapid advancement, which placed it into position to culturally and politically dominate the world. It did lead to conflicts, but without conflicts there is no change.

Patrice Ayme’: Greece was already fragmented, and the same argument, that fragmentation is good, was used to explain Greek superiority. Moreover, there are different types of fragmentation. It can be political, military, intellectual, economic.

Greek intellectual superiority was pretty much confined to Athens and Ionian cities. Sparta was an intellectual Black Hole, except in two ways: gender equality, and equality among “Equals” (top Spartans were called “Equals”).

Sparta went to all the way to destroy Athens, even allying itself with Persia to do so. In the end, Athens came close to destruction, Sparta collapsed into nothingness. However, the spirit of mental innovation of Greece got mangled in the process, and discouraged by the powers that be, all the more as the Macedonians established a sort of world dictatorship.

When one considers the peak mental periods of Athens and Ionian cities, one finds the same: great commercial energy, military power, extreme democracy, and enormous existential threats over the horizon. The great enemy of Greece was fascism from a giant plutocratic empire, Persia, and Greek innovation was first outlawed and then discouraged by even greater fascist imperial plutocrats: first from Macedonia, then from Rome, and finally from Arabia.

Extreme democracy caused an overabundance of mental productivity (any Athenian citizen, drawn by lot, could find himself at the head of the state, politically or judicially; thus Athenians paid a lot of attention to knowledge and wisdom, lest they be ridiculous when nominated).

Athenian total democracy was at her most mentally productive when she was an empire who got her wheat from the Black Sea, a 1,000 miles away.

Greece was rendered possible by the fact all Greeks spoke Greek (although Spartans’ Dorian accent was hard to understand; hard-to-communicate-with Spartans were too weird by half!)

Europe returned to greatness when the Franks established the Imperium Francorum whose Lingua Franca was Latin. (the franks were smart enough to speak Latin).

When the Imperium Francorum progressed quickly in all ways (from abrogation of slavery, nationalization of the church, mandatory education) it was indeed pretty much in continual strife. So the assertion that without conflicts there is no change, is indeed correct, and central to my own philosophy.

However, conflict has to be kept within bounds.

In 800 CE, the Franks officially proclaimed the “Renovation of the Roman Empire” (in the Tenth Century, the Parisians and Western Francia went their own way; but the empire can be viewed as ongoing to this day: all of the present European states, led by Francia which is still around, descend from the “Renovatio Imperium Romanorum, including Great Britain, which was reconquered in 1066 CE).

Charlemagne himself saw the first raids of the Viking. (Ironically, six centuries earlier, the Franks themselves had appeared in history as raiders of Roman rivers, all the way down to Spain!) Soon, Vikings, Saracens and Mongols (Avars) would attack the empire from three sides. And they attacked for centuries, because Europe was so rich, while the defense budget was low.  

European defense was weak from lack of will: for centuries the Franks had been hyper aggressive, hell-bent as they were to succeed where the Romans had failed earlier, and conquer Eastern Europe.

After 800 CE, with the Roman empire officially reconstituted, the Franks got, correctly, worried about the main reason for the Romans’ failure: political fascism.

In theory leaders of the Franks (= kings) were elected (differently from the Roman emperors, where a formal election system did not exist). Another factor was that Frankish law insured equality of inheritance (even women could inherit if full, if they had no brother). Thus the Frankish/Renovated Roman empire found it hard to stay in one piece, politically.

The result was a politico-military mess which lasted until the European Union.

In Greece, political fragmentation was deadly to democracy: Athens was occupied by anti-democratic forces for more than 21 centuries: the Muslims got ejected from Athens only in 1834 CE.

Intellectual diversity and debate are crucial. That can be insured only within an empire of manners which are good enough. Debate should not turn to hatred and war (we see some of this in the US now).   

The lessons of ACE, the Area of Cultural Europe, are many. The first one is a meta-lesson: we should try to reproduce deliberately, worldwide, the ways which made ACE so innovative.

Patrice Ayme’

“Obama” Lost Already?

GIVING CHANGE WITH NO CHANGE GOES ONLY THAT FAR?

Lost Because There Is Not Enough Advocacy For Progress In The USA.

The president of the USA is usually presented as the “most powerful man in the world“. This is disinformation. “Weakest leader in the world” is more like it. The presidency of the USA is a weak office. Why? Because not only is the business of the USA, business, but the government of the USA is business.

I have been making the progressive case against Obama‘s policies. For four years (minus a week). Before he became president, Obama prevented Hank Paulson to force banks to cram down house mortgages. Result:

Obama Inflection Point; Corporate Profits Climb, Salaries Dive To New Lows

Plutocrat Paulson, Bush’s Treasury Secretary, ex-CEO of Goldman Sachs, understood that banks had to give something commensurate in exchange for the enormous public money they were getting. Otherwise, it was theft. Obama did not want to understand that.

Obama spent the next four years singing the praises of bankers, banksters, and financial criminals (latest in 2012; an ode to love for Buffet, famous for destroying Greece, in Newsweek, and Dimon, head of JP Morgan, on “The View”). Not cramming down the mortgages allowed the banks to keep on having “tiers one” capital they did not have, thus keeping on with their derivatives’ casino, starving the real economy, while getting 8,000 billions of “monetary base”, from the Fed (that forced the EU to join the game in 2011).

I am not focusing here on other grave ethical failings, such as worldwide killing by death panel ordered drones, a new high for the devil, a very dangerous precedent for fascist regimes.

That establishment of a “Terminator” like world is comparable, as an ethical jump, to the jump accomplished when extermination camps came to be viewed as a measure of progress.

That many “democrats” agree to killing people by robots without due process reminds me of German Socialists approving of Hitler because Adolf called himself a socialist. Just as Hitler focused on “will” (he was singularly deprived of it after 1942), Obama focused on “navigation” as an overall metaprinciple (now his “navigation without an ethical compass has led him into the shoals of public opinion). Being a full human leader requires to focus on full human ethics, not naked procedures (will, social navigation), as a suitable end to political means. 

I am focusing here on the economic side, and the ethics connected to it. As Matt Stoller puts it:

“Under Bush, economic inequality was bad, as 65 cents of every dollar of income growth went to the top 1 percent. Under Obama, however, that number is 93 cents out of every dollar. That’s right, under Barack Obama there is more economic inequality than under George W. Bush.

Financials Make 40% Of Corporate Profits

[Blue line: corporate profits, red line: main worth USA families, home equity.]

And if you look at the chart above, most of this shift happened in 2009-2010, when Democrats controlled Congress. This was not, in other words, the doing of the mean Republican Congress. And it’s not strictly a result of the financial crisis; after all, corporate profits did crash, like housing values did, but they also recovered, while housing values have not.

This is the shape of the system Obama has designed. It is intentional, it is the modern American order…”

The plutocracy is amplified by the desire of government officials, who are typically in the middle class, to join the 1% (who do not just live much better, but safer, with better… local government and services).

The third debate Obama-Romney was uneventful. After his huge win in the first debate, when Romney presented himself as the candidate with a plan, while Obama sounded like an apologetic butler, seemingly worried about blemishes on the floor, Romney needed just to not make mistakes.

The news though, as far as I am concerned, were made by Obama, when he brazenly announced, in passing, out of the blue, that “sequestration is not going to happen“.

This was an astounding statement. The problem is not just that sequestration is the law. And that it is becoming effective in eight weeks or so. The problem is that:

Sequestration is a liberal’s heaven: it cuts down a huge chunk of the defense budget, and remove the Bush(-Obama) tax cuts for the rich. The deficit and (some of) the inequity disappear overnight.

Why would Obama be against it? If Obama is the “liberal”? (“Liberal” that is left, democratic, in USA semantics, the opposite of European semantics.) Why would Obama want to denigrate a law he helped passed, and that institutes a liberal’s heavens?

Is Obama a double agent?

Is he not a liberal then, and all the hysterical liberals who want us to vote for him just naive sheep rushing behind their shepherd as they enter the slaughterhouse?

So Obama is losing that election. If not in the votes, surely with his head. Surely losing his second term, if any, before he got started. Lost his head in an accident called democracy.

I forecasted as much little bit less than 4 years ago. Surely the old liberal Obama face had lost to the neoconservative Obama reality, immediately after he was elected. How did I know this?

The first thing is that Obama was mesmerized by Larry Summers, the financial derivatives’ enabler. Summers is a notoriously, officially delirious misogynistic bully, who, knowing no advanced science or mathematics, claimed women were genetically inferior at it (there are plenty of top women in science and math, up to the very highest level, for example Emmy Noether, who, sponsored by the mathematical giants Hilbert and Klein was spurned forever at Göttingen. Finally Hilbert had to get angry, and point that: the faculty is not a toilet. Noether’s work was very deep and some ot it is used for the very basics of quantum Field Theory).  

The day after his election as president, Obama went to work in the offices of a hedge fund in Chicago. November 5, 2008. That was an astounding fact. Hedge funds and their financial derivatives were front and central causative in the 2008 financial crisis. It was as if Obama understood nothing, nor did his advisers. Or maybe he wanted to make a blatant wink to the plutocracy, to the greatest sharks of the financial world, that he approved of their world, entirely, front and center, for all to see.

His apparently lobotomized supporters were completely clueless and celebrated all over like nice drunk maniacs. They are still celebrating, four years later. Michelle Obama asks: “Are you in? Tell Barack you are in!”. Simpler than that, no way: politics reduced to sexual allusions, or something equally primitive. We are in? Into what? Masochism? With Michelle as whip yielding dominatrix? OK, she obvioulsy fits the role quite well.

What hope could we have, when Obama embraced evil, and his supporters did high fives all over? With hedge funds’ managers?

So now, here we are, four years later; most of the money went to banks. 8 trillions (mostly from Quantitative Easing, which was used to “reimburse” TARP!). Total deficit added: 4 trillions, most of it from tax cuts (to the rich!), not from investment. The so called Bush tax cuts were legislated religiously by 4 year by the democratic Congress (led by plutocrat Pelosi).

Why don’t progressive call those cuts the Pelosi-Obama tax cuts for the rich? Because we are not rich, and it’s safer not to tell the truth?

Here are two comments of mine that the New York Times had the kindness to designate as “picks” (although most of my comments on Krugman’s blog are censored; I view Krugman’s policies as causative of much of the Obama’s faulty socio-economic program.)

***

The first comment was subsequent to Krugman’s editorial in which he said: “The U.S. economy finally seems to be recovering in earnest…it will still take years to restore full employment — and it has been a very long time coming. Why has the slump been so protracted?

The answer — backed by overwhelming evidence — is that this is what normally happens after a severe financial crisis.”

In other words Krugman still understands too little, too late. I sent this:

Oct. 21, 2012 at 8:46 p.m.

We are in the worst crisis, ever.

There is a fundamental employment crisis. There is an ecological crisis, without precedent in 65 million years, that puts the biosphere in question (and gasoline above $4 a gallon).

What is happening right now is just the beginning of the beginning of said crisis. Obama was called in to deliver change, and, thus stop the steady march behind the same old errors. However, a chorus of sycophants and plutocratic servants insisted nothing much had to be done… And Obama went along.

Right now the USA has a huge, primary deficit (Italy does not have a primary deficit), and the debt to GDP ratio of the Federal government is above 100% (only Italy and Greece, and of course Japan have higher debt to GDP numbers). Many on the pseudo-left say it does not matter. How come it matters anywhere else? And what is the plan to deal with those?

Guess what? The public wants change again, any change, as long as it’s not the same old same old: all the money to the banks, none for commoners.

***

Not surprisingly, Mitt Romney is claiming to be the one to bring change. The worst being is that he may right, frighteningly enough. It’s easier to bring more change than no change.

Krugman and company claims Obamacare will change everything, but I just don’t believe it, as it was written by the sharks themselves, the health care plutocrats, and it does not set-up what they fear and all other advanced countries have: a public health care core.

The markets have broken national sovereignty, all over. Obamacare eschewed that lesson, all too long.

The last case being rolled out this week: Mr. Clean, Close-To-The People, humble Prime Minister of China, the guy with the glasses and the modest white shirt, turns out, according to the New York Times, and not  to my surprise, to have accumulated, through various members of his family, including his elderly mother, a fortune of no less than 2.7 billion dollars.

The dictatorship of the People has turned into the dictatorship of the Plutocrats. The New York Times just got censored in China for pointing out that this supposedly clean PM was a plutocrat hiding behind the rest of his family, a trick massively used in the USA! Ironically the New York Times censors me about denouncing plutocracy, and gets censored in turn, for the same reason! What goes around, comes around, just like hurricane-north-eastener…

***

Krugman again: “Mitt Romney … has a five-point plan to restore prosperity. And some voters, alas, seem to believe what he’s saying. So President Obama has now responded with his own plan, a little blue booklet containing 27 policy proposals. How do these two plans stack up?

Mr. Romney is faking it. His real plan seems to be to foster economic recovery through magic… So, is Mr. Obama offering an inspiring vision for economic recovery? No, he isn’t. His economic agenda is relatively small-bore — a bunch of modest if sensible proposals rather than a big push… The point is that America is still suffering from an overall lack of demand, the result of the severe debt and financial crisis that broke out before Mr. Obama took office.”

I sent the following comment (also a NYT pick, as that august paper seems to be about two minds about me!)

Most probably, Obama’s “plan” is too little, too late. Progressives ought to have protested strongly as soon as Obama had selected his economic team, led by financial derivatives advocate Larry Summers. But they did not.

According to the sycophants of the democratic party a la Obama, there were at least 14 weeks with a supermajority in the Senate and 4 years of majority in Congress (in 2012, the French Socialists have taken enormous decisions in 14 weeks, including 75% tax margin and a financial transaction tax!)

So Obama had, and has nearly no ideas, in any case, very small, that’s why he could not do anything with his supermajority, not even removing Bush’s tax cuts. And the lack of ideas is throughout the progressive establishment. Maybe Romney’s plan is impossible and scary (it sure looks this way). However it does something that allowed Obama to be elected four years ago: it makes people dream of change.

The essay below suggests non trivial ideas of the progressive type:
https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2012/10/17/ideas-for-democrats/

The main idea is to push Research and Development massively. Take an example: Infra Red Photo Voltaics. They exist already in the lab, but are extremely inefficient. Having them would augment enormously the efficiency of photovoltaics (I think about 40% of the sun’s energy comes as infrared). Make a crash program. A fundamental, basic research crash program. Not something perverse like Solyandra, Space X, Tesla, Fisker, A123.  

And protect the basic research by extremely fierce protection of Intellectual Property.

***

WILL DO-NOTHING PRESIDENT SNATCH VICTORY FROM JAWS OF DEFEAT?

We don’t know what Obama wanted to do, when he embarked on his exalted adventure. As a candidate, four years ago, he ran in full compatibility with this site. I was happy. However Obama governed, mostly, against this site, breaking my sensitive little heart. I cried a river, and now the seas are rising faster than ever.

So it is with human destinies: one wants to do one thing, and often one ends up doing the opposite. For the best reasons, which turned, in the fullness of time, to be the worst.

Obama’s main metaprinciple, as explained in his best selling memoirs, and re-iterated since, is “navigation“, rather than haughtier principle. However a civilizational leader does not just navigate, but creates. When an elected leader is backed up by serious philosophers, such as Pericles, that gives results (the “open society“) one remembers.

Obama wanted to become a president who did great things. But that was in total contradiction with his navigational metaprinciple. Great leaders don’t just navigate, they force destiny.

What Obama implemented, in practice, was Bush III (except in foreign policy, where, by espousing Franco-Britannia in Libya he has been much smarter, and sharply opposed to the treacherous Bush). we do not want to be naive like Paul Krugman: “Think instead about the 45 million Americans who either will or won’t receive essential health care, depending on who wins on Nov. 6. “

Krugman is rich, he lives in a mansion, he shuttles all the time first class around the world, he is big time. It did not dawn on his teeny tiny brain that soon hundreds of millions of “Americans” will not be able to afford that health care, because, like the captain of the Titanic refused to think about icebergs, the Oblablablists refused to think about cost. the reform that mattered for health care was cost, first: make health care cheaper, then the state could afford for everybody to have it. For that one just had to allow the (three) public health care systems to bargain with private providers, fully (as in other countries).

In “the Progressive Case Against Obama”, Stoller argues, as I long have, that the election of Romney would wake up the opposition to the Bush-Obama-Romney order exemplified by Krugman: 8,000 billions to the banks, and the likes of Elon Musk (Tesla, Space X), 4,000 billions of supplementary debt in 4 years.

It is not a question of being anti-capitalist. Civilization is entangled with capital. No capital, no civilization. That’s why I distinguish between “capitalism” & plutocratic phenomenon

The progressive left got completely anesthetized by their brown guy’s accession to power. It was a case of racist intoxication:”Look Obama is black, he does miracles!” In truth, Obama is not even black, but brownish. The progressive left did not help Obama, the USA or the world by falling asleep, or going crazy in the Oblabla personality cult. Quite the contrary.

Now the den of thieves, Wall Street is getting a foretaste of its own medicine, by threatening to go under water, what it wanted all along, in its secret desire for self destruction. A North Easter is meeting a hurricane. Never happened before.

Obama’s policy, just as that of all his predecessors, and Romney’s is hell bound to make the USA stay on top, as the world’s greatest CO2 polluter (much of China works for the USA). The latest idea from the American hyper exploitation mood, is to export USA coal to China. Washington and New York will keep on going that way, and only them going deep under water will stop them, apparently. Admittedly, the progress of hurricane Sandy is a good sign of the Biblical flooding to come. Probably too complicated for their ethically deprived tiny brains to comprehend.

But there is a much better case to be made than Obama’s ignominious defeat. Unfortunately it would depend upon another “Obama” than the one we got to know, suddenly rising from his ashes.

In that progressive and optimistic case, Obama wins, and then a suddenly liberal Obama comes to his senses, and refuses to negotiate about “sequestration”. By January 1, 2013, a progressive paradise would dawn. The Bush-Obama tax cuts would disappear, and there would be savage cuts in defense. The rich would be taxed a bit more, the deficit would disappear overnight.

Even the hurricane-North-Easter “Frankenstorm” is giving an occasion for Obama to pose as commander in chief. Obama saved by god. The least god could do, after being evoked so many times. Hey, maybe the hurricane could wake up the citizens of the USA to the fact that they have been ecological pigs.

Of all the possibilities, that is what I would prefer. By far. That, and Obama sequestering the right in its own contradictions.

Dream and hope never dies…

***

Patrice Ayme

WANT CHANGE? THEN SACRIFICE.

 

THE STIMULUS PACKAGE HAS TO BE ACCOMPANIED BY A DEFICIT REDUCING CARBON DISCOURAGEMENT PACKAGE. ANYTHING ELSE IS SO MUCH OH BLA BLA.

***

Abstract: If Americans want change, they have to change their way of life. Listening religiously to the fanatic, Rick Warren, will not help. What will help is not an hair shirt, or the hypocrisy of the Christian superstition, and its implicit immorality, but taxing carbon.

***

Overview: It is hoped everywhere that the mistakes of the Great Depression of the Thirties will not be repeated. The first mistake of the Great Depression was an international economic war, started by the USA, to get out of its own bubble (that had been deliberately created). So far, the present crisis originated in a repeat, by the USA, of bubble economics (actually a whole slew of successive bubbles were engineered by Rubin-Clinton-Greenspan-Bush, each bigger than the preceding one). So far, though, the international economic war has not been repeated (because it was such an obvious mistake).

The second mistake of the Great Depression was not enough stimulus spending by the USA. And not any at all by France and Germany, who argued that they had not created any bubble, and were innocent, so, irritated to no end by the USA’s profligate and abusive ways, they refused to cooperate early on, and that was a huge mistake. Germany reversed itself in 1933, with the Nazi revolution (Nazi’s Germany had terrible finances, hidden from the general population by spoiling the Jews and other opponents; by the way, this is a historical warning towards those who do not want to bother with sharing sacrifices and mitigating deficits).

So far this time, the USA has done zero stimulus although the economy is in free fall (due to the cut-off in state spending, as governors adjust their spending to their shrinking revenues). So far, all the money has been sent to the plutocrats and banks, so they will consent to do their fiduciary duty of keeping the economy going. That’s not stimulus spending, but LIFE SUPPORT spending. Moreover, a lot of this economic life that is supported is the life of the plutocracy, not the economic life of the country. (A lot of it is wasted in the usual plutocratic way, on the extravagant plutocratic lifestyle, with bankrupt institutions operating private jet fleets, supporting millionaires athletes, all on tax payers’ dime etc…) Far from being envious of their rich, the American people tend to celebrate them, as they feel rich through them by proxy; or, at least they were scrupulously programmed that way; to this day, some of the failed institutions that stole everybody teach “money management” in schools, and this is similar, some will no doubt say,  to having Dr. Mengele teach a class in ethics.

Thus, as we explained a few months ago (“Huge Crisis, Huge Answer”) an enormous economic stimulus is needed now. And, as chance will have it, the infrastructure really needs it: the USA is full of crumbling, obsolete infrastructure. Only military bands are doing OK, as the Defense secretary (Gates) would point out.

President Roosevelt stimulated when he came to office, but not enough, and then he backtracked in 1937, plunging the USA in a recession. Only the enormously massive military command economy of the Second World War, after Pearl Harbor, definitively pulled the USA out of its economic depression.

Roosevelt backtracked, because he was afraid of the deficit. Indeed stimulating or investing by the government creates a short term deficit. Nevertheless, long term, deficit spending in good investments ought to be called investing, not spending, and that is a practice one should indulge in, and if it’s really very long term, only the government can be that investor. Thus, if possible, it is important to use every opportunity to stimulate while mitigating deficits.

Another problem is that stimulating a heart attack patient is not enough. Ultimately, one has to make the heart good. This means that the US economy has to be repositioned differently. The USA has terrible habits, and one can tweak the stimulus package to reduce them, true. Stimulating is about encouraging. But a frontal assault has to be tried too, by discouraging activities one wants to reduce, should one want real change. This is what Europe did onto herself, long ago (and she is picking the ripe fruits now, and extending its strategy, although Poland, and especially German Chancellor Merkel, have caused problems, because they are greedy, and full of coal).

Fortunately, as the Europeans have shown in the past, all this can be solved in one stroke, by putting progressively a huge carbon tax. As long as Americans do not want this, they do not want real change. All the change they will get is more of the same: preachers coming to the fore, telling them fear and terror are what supports morality, and why don’t you send another 30,000 soldiers in Afghanistan, to kill and get killed. After all a pipe line runs through it.
***

American People want change they can believe in, and they assuredly will get still another dose of Christian propaganda they want to believe in, and ought not to. Rick Warren, the man who claims to be good by fear only, will soon preach to them in the context of the “inauguration” of the new presidency. A great honor. No doubt a great lesson to learn.

So what does Warren preach? That fear is good, the main argument of the Catholic Inquisition in the Middle Ages. A natural consequence, of course, is that bombing the heck out of the Middle East is good: it generates fear, and, if everybody were like Warren, fearing fear itself, it would generate goodness.   

Warren believes that only superstition brings morality, he does not have a clue about genuine ALTRUISM.

Warren says: “If there is no God, if I am simply complicated ooze, then the truth is, YOUR LIFE DOES NOT MATTER, my life doesn’t matter… If life is just random chance, then nothing really does matter and there is no morality—it’s survival of the fittest. IF SURVIVAL OF THE FITTEST MEANS ME KILLING YOU TO SURVIVE, SO BE IT.” (Debate with Newsweek and Sam Harris, April 2007.)

Yes that is what that great moralist, Rick Warren says: “If survival of the fittest means me killing you to survive, so be it.” Yes, that is what he said, and he said variants of this all over his printed works. So, if there is no God, Warren is ready to kill you. Warren really, really wants to kill you, but God stops him, because Warren fears punishment. WARREN IS ALL ABOUT WAR, that makes him precious in Afghanistan. 

Which brings the question: if you do not believe in Warren’s God exactly, say you are a Muslim, is Warren ready to kill you too? After all, in quite a few places in the Bible, Jesus himself asks to bring the unbeliever in front of him, and kill him (although he also suggests more indirect methods, like throwing the miscreant in the sea with a stone attached to his neck). Change we can believe in. The more it changes, the more it’s like the Inquisition.

Now, were Americans inclined to opt for a really new regime, they would tax their own bad habits: instead of finding more than 350 million dollars per F 22 fighter plane, they would find money for schools.

True, Warren has the change one can believe in: since 1956, Americans are under God, take an oath, and all they need to know is that Christian version of the Qur’an called the Bible. True the Bible is vastly superior to the Qur’an: it came before the Qur’an and inspired it (especially about killing the unbelievers). The Bible is longer, and was written by Jews (although edited by Roman imperial officers). No need for elaborated knowledge, no need for schools. Just enough engineers for the F 22 (a plane so sophisticated it could not fly one mission in Iraq or Afghanistan). The Bible will do the rest. Rick Warren: the change you can believe in.

What does this all have to do with the stimulus plan? Simple: America’s meta-strategy, since 1945, has been to manage a world empire, by stealing everybody else. In the beginning the quotient of profit over expense was handsome, because fascism had destroyed Europe and the USA had given half of Europe to Stalin at Yalta (thus writing off Europe as a power). Also Japanese fascism had destroyed much of South East Asia, China, Korea and Japan. US semisecret maneuvers then revitalized Muslim fundamentalism, the drug trade (South America, South Asia, to finance US plutocratic black operations), and massive corruption and guerilla movements which were used as weapons both against Europeans and democratic progressives worldwide, to transfer power from those “anti-American” elements to American plutocrats. So far, so good: the American people profited handsomely. For two generations. But now the bill is coming due, and its moral, social, and economic price is high. And the later one gets out of that rut, the higher the price.

Then the Americans plutocrats (who bought enough of the US Congress, long ago) applied the same solutions internally: in 1956 Americans were ordered to trust God, and take an oath (“under God”). This happened more than twenty years after Adolf Hitler introduced similar theocratic reforms in Germany. This is what brought the rise of the likes of Rick Warren, and general decerebration. (In the nineteenth century, the great preachers of the USA were … atheists! So the USA is devolving, as befits a country that does not believe in evolution!) The plutocratic idea was the oft practiced one that, the stupider the people are, the more easily led they are. Unfortunately, why the USA was getting ever more stupid, the other countries were getting ever more intelligent. At some point, the stupid, however rich, cannot rule the intelligent, however poor.

Thus it is becoming ever more expensive to maintain the USA’s world empire, while less and less revenue goes from the empire to the USA itself. The USA had increasingly to choose between guns and schools, and chose the guns. That is where we are at.

It reminds one of the space shuttle Columbia trying to correct for increasing drag from its left wing, progressively eaten by the hot hypersonic gases that had penetrated it. For twenty minutes, it worked, although with more and more difficulty (flaps deflection got maximum, and attitude jets were firing to the maximum). Then, suddenly, the three hydraulic lines in the left wing, eaten by the fiery gases, failed. The shuttle’s flaps then flapped in the hypersonic wind, and the ship soon tumbled out of control, soon losing its left wing, and exposing its titanium back to hypersonic plasma. After a while, the titanium combusted, the cargo bay failed, and the shuttle disintegrated. Then the forward cabin, where the live and impotent crew was, rotated out of control, exposing its own vulnerable back, and burned before it could reach lower speeds and altitudes that would have allowed the crew to eject and parachute.

All this because of a hole in the wing that could have been addressed. The hole could have been stuffed with wet sleeping bags, and other debris, and the shuttle could have been programmed for very hard decelerating turns to cut down speed while it still had wings. But, instead, NASA opted for faith and ignorance (although, after the shuttle became silent, the debris impact was reminded right away). Right now, the USA is still opting for faith and ignorance. Faith in Obama, faith in Warren, ignorance about the basics of the human condition.

Obama is just one man, but it is amazing how many of his supporters are now asleep, hoping he will do all the work. Instead the supporters should tax themselves, that would give them an excuse to tax the rich, and the plutocracy even more. Oh yeah, some people will say that taxing would be a mistake. They forget that, at this point, only Obama’s FEDERAL government is willing to spend.

The USA is now engaged in two large wars. One it has already lost, in Iraq. Oh, some people will say: we won. Well, just wait. If you think you can go to a country, kill around 5% of the population, and they will love you back, you have got to be Rick Warren, and believe that fear generates morality. Instead, in normal people, people not brainwashed by Rick Warren, fear and suffering generate rage. It’s actually a ridiculously illogical position to have: the USA went nuts because 3,000 Americans were killed on 9-11 by enraged Saudis, so they went on to kill the equivalent to 5% of a country that had nothing to do with it (Iraq was at war with Al Qaeda). 5% of the USA, that’s 16 million people. Some, all enraged by 9-11, have been to the school of life so little that they think they would love back Iraq if Iraqis had come and killed 16 millions to get rid of G. W.  Bush?

The other war, in Afghanistan, is in the process of being lost. It is a much graver conflict, because it involves enormous fundamentalist forces, ex employees and friends of the CIA and the like, who, like bin Laden, worked for the American imperial machine, know it very well, and absolutely hate it. The USA thought judicious to finance their thermonuclear nuclear weapons (for all sorts of Machiavellian reasons: just like the USA loves Europe subdued and divided, it loves India terrorized, and South Asia divided. Too bad, one cannot do the same with China… Wait…)

Thus it’s time for change. The first line of change is ENERGY. After all, Hitler started World War Two because he wanted POLISH OIL, and France was not going to let him have Polish Oil. So France signed a treaty with the Polish colonels, and added Great Britain in an appendix. The USA devours way too much of the world’s energy. It’s a STRATEGIC threat to the USA itself. This has to change. BUT ENERGY WASTE BY THE USA WILL NOT CHANGE AS LONG AS CARBON BASED ENERGY IS CHEAP IN THE USA. Why? Because carbon base energy is ever more efficient, so ALTERNATIVE ENERGIES CANNOT COMPETE IN A TIMELY MANNER.

An example: BMW, by improving their engines with micro precision injection and more electronics, just boosted efficiency of their gasoline engines by 8%. Europeans react to this sort of improvement of the carbon engineering by augmenting carbon taxes ever more (making operating a BMW ever more expensive, although some BMW sold in Europe get above 55 miles per gallon highway). In the midst of the oil crisis of last summer France boosted its titanic energy taxes even higher (compensation for the poor were also boosted).

So here we are. If you want change you can only believe in, then go listen religiously to Rick Warren’s religious, implicitly murderous, ooze as the perfect inaugural for Obama. If you want change that will work, TAX CARBON. The rest is so much Oblabla.
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Patrice Ayme.
Patrice Ayme.com

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P/S 1: What Obama said to defend his choice of selecting the immoralist, Rick Warren, for making an “invocation” at his inauguration:

“Let me start by talking about my own views. I think that it is no secret that I am a fierce advocate for equality for gay and lesbian Americans. It is something that I have been consistent on, and something that I contend — intend to continue to be consistent on during my presidency. What I’ve also said is that it is important for America to come together, even though we may have disagreements on certain SOCIAL issues. And I would note that a couple of years ago, I was invited to Rick Warren’s church to speak, despite his awareness that I held views that were entirely contrary to his when it came to gay and lesbian rights, when it came to issues like abortion. Nevertheless, I had an opportunity to speak. And that dialogue, I think, is part of what my campaign’s been all about; that we’re not going to agree on every single issue, but what we have to do is to be able to create an atmosphere when we — where we can disagree without being disagreeable and then focus on those things that we hold in common as Americans.”

Obama seems confused about what is social and what is philosophical. Besides, all the Christian add-ons to the secular presidency are violations of the separation of church and state. In particular, there is no “so help me God” in the United States of America Constitution. Neither is there any “SO HELP ME DOG”. If the would be US president came, rose his hand to take the oath of office, and said: “SO HELP ME DOG!”, he would be viewed as mentally imbalanced. What is the difference between DOG and GOD? According to Warren, both bark and bite. As we saw, and as history shows, for its luminaries such as Warren, CHRISTIANITY IS JUST A DEVICE TO HAVE NO MORALITY, BUT FEAR ITSELF. We have explicit Inquisition texts detailing why “TERROR” (sic!) is good (to be produced some other time). Fear, though, may work in Washington, but it will not work in Afghanistan-Pakistan. Time to think outside of the coffin of Christianity.

Oh, why does Obama talks so much about sex in connection with Warren? Because Warren believes that people who do not believe like him will go to hell. That means the Jews will go to hell (it goes without saying), and people who are not having sex the way Warren claims they should have sex, will go to hell. Why does Warren worry so much about other people’s sexual activities? It is, fundamentally, just a way to hide his more murderous proclivities, obviously. It’s a big, red, sex herring. The bottom line is that Warren’s immoralist propaganda is all about having a (lack of a) moral system that is compatible with bombing the Middle East.

P/S 2: There is plenty of evidence though, that, far from being cowed by fear, as Rick Warren is, the Afghans are getting ever more determined to resist to violence by violence. So far, they have not been winning the violence race, true, because the USA has used aerial bombardment massively, out-exploding the resistance. But give them time… The USA is caught in its usual vicious loop of feeding its own military-industrial complex rather than common sense and sophisticated morality. But now, differently from the past, the US economy is losing control, and, a bit like that crippled space shuttle, a catastrophic event is not unimaginable… Incantation and evocation are only social distractions, as doom closes in… Philosophical rectitude is one, and is not necessarily “cool”. It’s just right.

P/S 3: The Federal highway funds have a deficit of 107 billion dollars at this point (two thirds of Obama’s proposed health plan). That means general tax revenue is used to subsidize roads. This is because the tiny 18.4 cents Federal tax on gasoline is insufficient, even to pay for roads. In Europe, gasoline tax is typically above six dollars a gallon (it was $ 6.50 per gallon on diesel in Great Britain in June 2008).

P/S 4: “Fanatic”, a Latin word, comes from “Fanum”, the temple, and the concept was invented to depict people such as Mr. Warren. Warren is a fanatic. Socialize with fanatics if you wish, but that tells us something about your moral system, or, rather, lack of one.

P/S 5: Raising energy taxes will force US industry to become as efficient, thus as competitive, as the Europeans and the Japanese. China has understood this: it tries to enforce European efficiency rules (making it unlawful to import US cars, because they are not efficient enough). Thus, far from being an attack against the US economy, raising energy taxes is an help.

P/S 6: F 22 “Raptors” (130 of them) have never flown a combat mission in the Middle East, because they have no flying enemy to shoot down there (and perhaps for other reasons).  

P/S 7: I have read hundreds of pages of Adolf Hitler, and never found a place were he implicitly threatened to kill anybody (but we know what happened: to see the threats, one had to read very carefully between the lines). Whereas Warren is explicitly threatening people with murder (should his God not be there to hold him back). OK, one, Hitler was a politician, subjected to higher standards, and the other, Warren has nothing to do with politics, so he can say whatever he wants… Oh, wait!