Free Mind Manifesto

Remember!

Every day passes, never to return,

Never to be erased.

Especially not in this mind of yours,

Which whatever you do, whatever you accept,

Whatever you opine, and whatever you hope, fear, or desire,

Will forever by those acts and influences, be engraved.

Meditate!

Every day you apparently wasted, by doing seemingly nothing,

Every day which saw you,

Unhappy, dejected, depressed, confused,

Better have been spent learning something, some enlightening doubt,

Which you never felt before.

Thus to free yourself of yesterday’s errors,

Or at least ceasing and desisting, from worshipping them.

Otherwise it’s as if your mind wouldn’t,

Be alive at all. You may as well be a clog in a machine.

***

Everything is in your minds’ hands,

Should you exert their mighty pull,

On all which surrounds you. Feelings, expectations, admiration.

True, what already happened to you, can’t  be changed,

But this heavy weight can be explained, dissected, deconstructed,

Its causes can be found.

And thereupon, its remedies, and healing antibodies.

 

What will happen to you, depends upon others too,

Who live now, and acted, forever before.

***

But right now, in this moment,

It is for you to decide, what,

Who and why, made you as you are.

Only then could you be as free as you may.

 

Think!

All right, it hurts. Train to enjoy overwhelming the pain!

Indeed, it’s not entirely up to you,

What you feel and what you think and care about.

Yet, therein the key to the universe:

You can try to control the contexts,

Which made you what you are,

What you want, and what you will.

 

Woman is not born free,

And becomes ever less so with advancing years,

Entangled in all the chains of whatever happened before,

Including those trains of thought,

We caught all too many times.

Lest a girl actively does something about it,

To vanquish the waves of conformism,

Is no ripe, low hanging fruit.

Morality is not just doing what feels right,

And what’s supposed to be right by the bleating herd.

Intelligence is not just doing what feels smart,

And what the herd finds to be oh so really smart.

Reject the cult of the herd, the Golden Calf.

Morality and intelligence are about,

Finding not just what they are, but where they came from.

How can we respond just to ourselves, when ourselves is a response to, a fabrication of, other people, other moods, alien, convoluted, systems of thought?
How can we assume responsibility for ourselves, when our minds are products of greater selves? Well, first, by figuring it all out.

Morality and intelligence are not just intuitive,

They are also about how they were born and why they persist.

Morality and intelligence are not just intuitive,

They can also be vain, corrupt, sciolistic, idiotic, tribal, alienating,

Vicious, perverse, hopeless, demeaning, self-defeating,

Sadomasochistic, demented.

Demented?

Watch August 1914, Brexit, or Nazism, the Shoah,

North Korea, Jihadism,

The Dark Ages’ destruction of books,

And of the intellectuals who wrote and read them.

At least, for the same crimes,

Qin’s Li Si, 李斯, was promptly punished, and cut in two,

Screaming the whole way.

Watch Trump Derangement Syndrome:

It’s not about what the simpletons scream of,

Wholeheartedly, simple-mindedly.

It’s all about Obama. From this betrayal, their pain comes.

How Obama replaced hope by dope,

Economy, democracy, by inequality, inequity, infamy.

But they don’t know it, because they don’t want to know it,

It would teach them too much, about themselves.

Wilfull ignorance is the best drug.

So they howl to the wind,

Right after the obvious scapegoat, a new blonde beast,.

Designated to satisfy, their impotent fury,

With a new explanation, easily grabbed, by mental retards.

Desire, will and freedom,

Are neither fully free nor willful.

And the less we examine,

Let alone try to control them,

The less we uncover, of those chains we carry,

The contexts that gave birth to them, forged them in inescapable bonds,

The less free and wilful we truly are.

Although the greater the certainty of our lack of doubt,

The greater the simplicity of the context we come from,

The less free and willful we can pretend to truly be.

***

Mind, properly made,

Iis nothing but a hierarchy of certainties, and probabilities,

Each illuminating the doubt of those above and below.

Minds are multiverse of values,

Mileage may, and will,

Vary, more, and less,

Than we can possibly imagine.

Vacating a mind is not enough, even Buddha found out.

A mind needs vacations,

Those found across the world of passions.

You want to be captain of your soul?

Wonder who made that ship, and how.

Want freedom? Want a will?

Get a mood,

And it better not be too friendly,

To whatever made you.

Patrice Ayme’
[Thanks to Eugen R for his inspiring Manifest of a Free Man].

How & Why Plutocracy Fosters Islamism

In Saudi Arabia, the co-founder of a web site, Raif Badawi, was condemned to ten years in jail. He was also condemned to pay a $270,000 fine, and to be whipped in public 1,000 times. Fifty strikes each week, for twenty weeks. Plus a life-long ban from any media. His wife and three children fled to Canada. The public whipping started in January 2015.

His crime? Supposedly, he criticized Islam. (Badawi actually criticized some Saudi clerics’ interpretation of Islam).

In 2013 Raif was cleared of apostasy (= being found to be a Muslim no more). That was so kind. Among the barbarians, apostasy carries the death sentence. Hey, it is in the Qur’an. Islam, the religion of eternal peace, six feet under. Religion of peace: if all say it, it’s got to be true.

Mr. Badawi’s lawyer was sentenced to 15 years in prison.

Master, Your Dark Side Is Strong. Making a Religion of Not Slandering Pluto, Under the Death Penalty, “That’s the Future”.

[Obama bowing to Arabia’s top Pluto. I used the picture 6 years ago, it’s worth recycling, as Obama confirmed in 2012, that “slandering the Prophet” equates with a “Holocaust”. Aside: the French novelist Hollenbeck published, the day before the Charlie Hebdo attack “Soumission” a novel about France under Islam… “Islam” means “submission“. ]

Obama has been back-pedaling on the so-called “prophet” in the last few days, reminding us of the fact that France was the USA’s “oldest ally”. A fact. In truth, not just an ally, but the doctor who rescued the USA from the London based tyrant.

When a tyrant, the Shah of Iran was in power, he executed many drug traffickers, every week. So that creep said. After Khomeini and his gang got to power, there was no need for such convoluted logic: executing people for insulting Islam was much more efficient, and glorious: it’s in the Qur’an. Fake drug charges disappeared.

My dad, a geologist, met with the Shah more than once: the NIOC, the National Iran Oil Company, did not have the technology to explore for unobvious oil and gas, but TOTAL did. My dad was told to bow, and avert his eyes. He did neither. The Shah lived with it: he needed new oil.

When savagery from a state is tolerated, it’s not just democracy that is threatened. It’s our lives. The planet has become too small for the lunatics and fanatics to be safely ignored, when they control a state.

Hitler proved this thoroughly. The Nazis thought the French would ignore them, and leave them a free hand to the East, as the Brits had agreed to do in 1935. However France marched to war, and, in retrospect men of good faith regret that France did not do it earlier (didn’t because Britain agreed to go to war against Hitler, if France did, only in spring 1939; that was in the appendix of the Franco-Polish defense treaty).

The two madmen shooters who killed top French intellectuals were programmed by Al Qaeda in Yemen. They said it several times during their terror streak, both to passerbys and in a deliberate, calm phone interview with BMF TV (American services were the first to point out the eldest had been in Yemen for terrorist training).

A third criminal madman, connected to the two who “killed” Charlie Hebdo, took over a “Hyper Kacher”, a Jewish supermarket in Paris, killing four. After speaking on the phone, he forgot to hang up, and he was recorded explaining to his Jewish victims that he was applying the “loi du Talion” (an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, etc.). Although he had been born in Paris, and was of African descent, he claimed that colonialism had killed his children and his combatants (all imaginary: French soldiers basically fought no wars in Black Africa: Black Africa got pacified pretty pacifically).

The criminal proclaimed his will to kill a baby aged 11 months. He killed four (including a 21 year old, gentle Tunisian, who had arrived in France, a year ago) and wounded seven.

All together, the terrorist had Kalashnikovs, machine gun-pistols, RPGs, grenades, explosives, and several handguns. Stun grenades were not enough to neutralize them: they kept firing, even after being thrown on the ground by shockwaves.

PLUTOCRACY IS STARVING CIVILIZATION TO DEATH:

How come so mad? How come so resentful? One can look at the unemployment rate in Europe, and observe the diminished prospects of Europeans. But that was truly a sleeper cell planted by Al Qaeda, among some French born, but thoroughly ignorant, uneducated, uncivilized youth.

Deeper down, thus, one observes the failure of the school system, and not just in France, but throughout most of Europe, and even the West.

In the 1950s, schools in France, Britain, the USA, were the best in the world. The best schools enabled young people to get the best jobs. Not so anymore. No wonder the young are angry.

Why don’t the states have the mean to provide with good schools, and good jobs?

Let’s do the schools first.

Because the states do not have the financial means to provide We The People with the best education.

So Imams financed by Saudi Arabia are in charge. OK, they came in illegally. Why don’t we issue an ultimatum to Saudi Arabia? Because it, and its even wealthier and more powerful masters, are in charge.

But why don’t the states have the means? Because the wealthy are refusing to pay enough tax, and they have made sure that a few thousands opinion and legislation makers.

This was seen before: under Marcus Aurelius, the plutocrats refused to pay enough tax for all the legions needed to keep two German nations, the Marcomanni, at bay. They were threatening to break through Austria, march on Italy, cut the empire in two. But the wealthiest Romans did not care. Marcus Aurelius had to sell the imperial palace cutlery to finance the army.

The problem with the plutocrats (who held most of the Senate in their mental grip) went from bad to worse, and was the proximal cause of Rome’s downfall. To save money, the Roman army took to contract with German armies for defense. (Finally, in 400 CE, the Franks were outright put in command and control of the entire North-West of the empire.)

We have a similar situation nowadays.

The great Roman emperor Trajan, initially a Spanish born general, financed his “alimenta”, a program of educative welfare for disadvantaged youth. How? With a global estate tax. Something a bit similar to what Piketty (and yours truly, for a decade) have proposed.

Under Trajan, the army was strong. Trajan conquered Dacia (in the middle of Eastern Europe; successors withdrew from it; the Franks came back, seven centuries later Europanizing, and “Christianizing”, the Frankish way, all the way to Ukraine. Trajan also visited the Persian Gulf.

However, after Trajan’s death, plutocracy, the system of thought that the base and wealthy ought to rule, came back with a vengeance.

This is quite a bit what is happening nowadays: after the interruption of World War Two, where a giant army came to power (see Ike, and JFK presidents in the 1950s and 1960s, two warriors), and being savagely interrupted by the Roosevelts, the spirit of plutocracy is back with a vengeance

The states are weak, because the plutocrats want them weak.

So the schools are weak.

And how come are there so few jobs in Europe? Neither Europe’s crackdown on CO2 (thus energy), not the soporific effect of the welfare state explains everything.

The rule of tax avoiding giant corporations of the USA explains much. And do they conspire? Of course they do. Looking at maps of where Airbus sells planes is telling: it’s basically everywhere, but for the USA. The USA and the countries submitted to it are under clear orders not to purchase the Franco-European planes.

Much of the electronic industry (transistors, integrated circuits, even the PC) were actually pioneered in France (for example, mass production of transistors in France started within days of the announcement of its invention in the USA!)

Why has Europe been incapable of defending itself? Look at who heads it: J-C Junker is now head of the European Commission. Under him the top 200 plutocratic corporations of the USA are conducting, through Luxembourg, a tax evasion amounting to more than 9% of the Federal budget of the USA (100 billion dollars). They hide this by claiming they are “philanthropist”, and making spectacular, well publicized gestures.

I don’t know how, and how much, Junker is paid. But he should be arrested, for indirectly fostering poor schools, lack of police, dearth of jobs, and thus, Islamism.

We have seen people like that in World War Two: they made a lot of money, and yielded a lot of power, as long as their sponsors the Nazis, had a big army.

Some may squirm that I explained that plutocrats, because they want power, don’t want to pay taxes, so, indirectly, they help Islamists and other enemies of freedom and democracy. This tactical, or strategic, alliance is clear.

But there is more than that. Islamists are enemies of dictatorship, because they want to be dictators and get all the milk, honey, nice flowing waters, and virgins with “deep dark eyes”, that the Qur’an promised.

Here is our friend the Qur’an:

“O YE WHO BELIEVE! Obey Allah, and obey the messenger and OBEY THOSE OF YOU WHO ARE IN POWER.” (Qur’an’s fascist principle, Shura 4; verse 59).

In other words, obey authority as a matter of religion. This makes the Qur’an intrinsically hostile to democracy. Just as plutocracy is. Both are ideologies to justify the rule of a few.

“Je Suis Charlie”

Patrice Ayme’

Free Scotland From Thieves

Scotland: Off With Pluto?

For 35 years, increasingly deranged British politicians have been pushing for ever more selfishness, ever more power for money, and their hatred for the Union. In truth, all what they did was to foster increasingly lucrative financial plots based in London, the world’s premier center of the sort of money changing activities which should be destroyed like the Ebola virus.

This is not just about finance: London’s friendliness to plutocrats, that is, all satanic proclivities, have favored the likes of Assad and Putin, bloody dictators who are threatening civilization.

Vade Retro Plutocrats!

The British Parliament friendliness to the galaxy of evil orbiting Assad as the black hole he is, undercut the strike France and the USA were preparing against that monster. This, in turn led to a further disintegration of the Middle East into savagery, and incited Putin to invade Eastern Europe with tanks.

Now it’s payback time.

So London feels that the Union is the enemy, and money can solve everything? Then why should Scotland stay in an Union with London, taking orders from that blustering kleptocracy, while seeing its own oil money go south?

Scotland is conducting an independence referendum on September 18. All the enthusiasm is on the side of the independentists, and the polls are tight. Facing them, the high finance supremacists in London have called all their propagandists to present arguments to keep Scotland in chains.

Naturally, the pseudo-progressive Krugman, ultimate weapon of hyper finance, has been rolled out. One can see the hour is grave. For years I have insisted that Krugman, whether he realizes it, or not, is truly a double agent for Wall Street banks (after all, all he proposes is to send more public money to private banks).

Krugman used his New York Times pulpit to hurl disingenuous arguments at a free Scotland. Krugman: “Scots, What’s The Heck? The Very Bad Economics Of Independence” is a new low in anti-European propaganda. Krugman goes all out, using the oldest fascist trick: huge, irrational fear. Says he: “I have a message for the Scots: Be afraid, be very afraid. The risks of going it alone are huge.”

Is there something about Wall Street goons we do not know? because yes, it has everything to do with Wall Street, see below. Then Krugman forgets that Scotland is in Europe, and compares it to… Canada… Before enouncing in passing that “Canada pays a price for its independence”. This astounding Freudian slip reveals that, in Krugman’s mind, to be free means to be enslaved to New York banks. Canada should do like Krugman, be dependent upon Wall Street, and be paid that way. This is what Krugman’s liberal conscience says.

I will presently demolish Krugman’s false ideas, while exposing his crass ignorance. I will not bother to repeat Krugman’s unhinged disinformation: that would give it some consideration, and be confusing, as it deserves none. Instead, I will tell the truth. Raw.

(To be fully honest, Krugman published (part of) my critique; as usual the Times censors did their best to attenuate it, with various behind the scenes tricks.)

Krugman makes the argument that Scotland could not share the Pound with the rump UK, that it would be disaster. His reasoning is a piece of Wall Street banks’ religion. Wall Street propagandists identify the 2008 crisis with a “Euro crisis”. Naturlich, there was not such a thing, not anymore than there was a Jewish crisis when Hitler came to power. Hitler had a crisis, not the Jews. Similarly the banks have a crisis, not the Euro.

Indeed, since 2008 there is a crisis of the giant banks, or, more generally, of the fractional reserve system, and it’s part of the Plutocratic take-over.

But the Euro has little, if anything, to do with it. Actually the Euro spared the European countries from a devastating devaluation, and destruction by the rampaging banks and their associated politicians, judges, and the rest of the oligarchies. Corrupt them all.

For an inkling of the imaginable scale of corruption, watch Brazil: an ex-director of Petrobras, the Brazilian fossil fuel companies, risking 30 years in jail, is admitting that dozens of top politicians and lawmakers were paid 3% on all contracts for a ten year period, under presidents Lula and Roussef.

The Euro was a savior, and not a destructor, contrarily to what Krugman says. So why is Krugman insisting it’s a terrible thing? Moreover Scotland ought not, and will not, share the Pound, after a transition period. However, that’s not a problem. Why?

In the long run, the Pound is NOT supposed to exist. The Pound is just an ephemeral currency doomed to vanish (and not because it went down 10% in the last few days).

Disappearing the Pound is what the Brits signed on, when they got into the European Union. That they don’t understand this is a testimony to a lack of reading skills: it’s written black on white in the European Constitution.

OK, Britain does not have a written Constitution, so maybe the politicos there are not used to read such a document?

ALL EU countries are supposed to adopt the Euro. So Krugman’s whining is entirely inapplicable, and just demonstrates his gross ignorance of the EU Constitution (a few countries are provisionally allowed to go on with their own currency, or just peg themselves to the Euro, as Denmark does).

Obviously Scotland could go, and will go with the Pound for a while, as it is the present Scottish currency: London does not own the Pound exclusively.

Then discard the Pound Scotland will, like the old paper it is. As it is what the European Constitution says.

The United Kingdom Nuclear Strategic submarines are supposed to get out of Scotland by 2020 (that’s part of the framework proposed by the Scottish Independence Party).

That gives plenty of time for Scotland to elaborate a currency, and peg it to the Euro. Easy as pie. Many countries do this, including Switzerland.

Contrary to what ignorant American propagandists such as Krugman assert, the NCBs, the National Central Banks, print Euros. And guess what? They can also “print” as many Euros as they want.

Krugman always makes a big deal that Spain could not print as many Euros as Britain could print Pounds. That Spain decided not to do so, was a Spanish, not European decision. As it turned out, it was not needed. In recent months, Spanish long bonds were viewed as more valuable than long bonds from the USA.

So Krugman’s screaming against the Euro falls flat on his face. I guess it hurts, so he is screaming louder than ever.

The Euro is a major currency: more than half a billion people are either in the Eurozone, or enjoy a currency pegged to the Euro. That’s a more direct empire than the Dollar of the USA itself enjoys. As more and more countries stock up on Euros, the possibility of a world trade system shunning the Dollar keeps on increasing.

Keynes, Krugman’s hero, would have been very happy about this. Keynes had been tricked at Bretton Woods, in 1944: to make the Dollar into the world’s reserve currency, the USA forged false documents which the foreign delegations signed unwittingly.

Keynes knew that the Americans made it so to impose their currency to the world, as a cheap way to hardwire their supremacy. So here we are, and Krugman is one of the many attack dogs against the Euro.

It’s natural that people who depend upon Wall Street (as Princeton professors) do not like the Euro: the stronger financial Europe gets, the weaker Wall Street and its conspiracies.

There London comes in as a crucial part in the world plutocratic machine. Many of the financial practices In London are unlawful in Paris, Frankfurt, but also… New York. That’s why the branch of AIG, the AMERICAN International Group, whose dramatic derivatives trading crashed the world in 2008, was based in London, not New York. What they were doing in London would have been unlawful in New York.

So the plutocrats hates the Scottish Independence movement. Scottish independence would clearly weaken London (it would lose access to Scottish oil and gas, to start with; the British nuclear submarines would have to ask… France for hospitality: the British nuclear deterrent is exclusively based in Scottish fjords).

That den of crooks known as London would receive a huge blow to its prestige if Scotland . All the more as Northern Ireland and Wales may well follow. One may ask why the rump UK deserves a permanent UN Security Council seat, while its nuclear sub sulk in Britany’s Brest (that would be the second time the British Navy would flee to Britany in 15 centuries!).

Krugman’s objection to Scottish Independence is not the only fraudulent scheme the higher plutocratic circle have devised against those who don’t want to spend their lives on their knees, adoring “The City” of London.

Higher European circles are vassals of Wall Street (which gives them juicy jobs and contracts in return). Accordingly, just like an unreal Krugman barks against Scotland, pro-Wall Street Eurocrats loudly bellow that Scotland’s membership in the EU will not happen. That’s how mad and corrupt some Eurocrats have become.

They can say whatever. Decisions in the EU are taken by the governments of the nation-states, also known as the Paris-Berlin axis. (It’s fashionable to say all decisions are taken in Berlin, but that’s just a carefully maintained illusion.)

Thanks to those nuclear subs, and many other messy aspects of a divorce, I am sure that Scotland’s government will persuade London that it is in its best interest to help Scotland become a member of the EU.

The European Union, as I have said many times, just as the SDN (now known as the United Nations) is, fundamentally, a French idea. The reason that France gets this sort of ideas is that France was always the center, being at the center (and that’s actually why the Franks, originally German, went down there to start an empire). Nothing new, just a question of geography, it was already true in Neanderthal times: the three main trans-European routes between the Mediterranean and the Northern Seas go through France.

So the real question about Scotland becoming instantaneously the 29^th European Union member boils down to the opinion of the French elite. And what’s the important fact here? Before it got united with England, Scotland was united with France. France, thus the EU, will be delighted to welcome Scotland back.

The vicious clowns in London have, ever since the Iron Lady left the scene, become ever more irrationally anti-European. In particular, London refused to join Schengen, the passport free union between the countries at the core of Europe.

Just as it would be highly inconvenient to propagandist Krugman to change currencies when he goes from Manhattan (when he is finished talking on TV) back to Princeton, it would be also inconvenient that he would have his passport scrutinized. Yet, although downtown Paris and downtown London are only two hours of train ride apart, the arrogant servants of Mammon in London force what they call “subjects” to change currency and have their passports inspected.

Full European citizens do not have to do so, as they switch between their countries of Spain, France, Italy, Germany, etc. Notice that Switzerland and Norway are also in the Schengen Area (no passport controls).

London is welcoming to Russian plutocrats, not to vulgar Europeans.

Out of 59 Scottish MP, only one is a so called “Conservative” (the word “Conservative” is misleading: they would sell their mother, if they could make a buck that way; actually they are more like anti-civilizational revolutionaries). There are more pandas in Scotland, the joke goes, than conservatives. Thus Scotland has already divorced herself from the mad financial piracy in London and its obsequious sycophants.

It’s high time to separate Scotland formally from the organized financial criminality in London to show the world inhuman plutocracy is not omnipotent, and can be rejected. The time is past due. London and its 100 tax havens can go to hell, to conspire further with Putin and Assad, among the flames, smoke, and mirrors. Hopefully the gross and pathetic lies of Wall Street servants with ready access to Big Brother propaganda will not change this.

Let Wall Street’s devoted cockroaches roar in vain. Free Scotland! Vote Yes!

Patrice Ayme’

Hitler’s Book

Masked henchmen took over government buildings in Eastern Ukraine, and beg Putin to invade. European and American governments claim the protesters are paid. Earlier the Ukrainian government had accused Russia special forces to have killed 96 protesters in the Maidan (“Freedom”) protests.

Last week, Gazprom, the Russian gas monopoly, doubled the natural gas prices in Ukraine, making them the priciest in the world. Ukraine engaged legal action.

Meanwhile, April7, a Russian marine shot to death an unarmed Ukrainian officer who was trying to leave Crimea. (It’s not the first Ukrainian officer assassinated.)

Darius: What Putin Dreams To Be

Putin follows Hitler’s book: he does not want to allow the free elections on May 25th in Ukraine: he has the choice for president between the ex-PM, a woman he had jailed so that she would die (but she survived, just, and is back after weeks in a hospital in England), and the chocolate maker whom he barred to sell chocolate in Russia.

Preventing free elections is exactly what Hitler did with Austria in 1938: through a skillful usage of his henchmen, Hitler evacuated the legal government of Austria to cancell the free referendum in Spring 1938.

Then, using various terror techniques, Hitler organized his own annexation referendum, which he won at 97% (the exact same percentage as in Crimea, not doubt a blink of Putin to Nazi history; say whatever you want, Vladimir can have a sense of humor).

In 1954, the Allied powers determined that Chancellor-President Hitler and his henchmen had contrived the entire coup-occupation-annexation-referendum, and decided that Austria, far from collaborating, had been a victim of Nazism.

Putin hopes that he can follow the same strategy, and somehow, win where Hitler lost. However, Hitler conducted his three annexations of 1938, without a single person killed. Whereas the people killed by Putin’s henchmen are now well above 100.

Putin has posed in front of a giant banner proclaiming that “Crimea is in my heart.”

“You have to ask yourself, what else is in his heart,” Carl Bildt, Swedish foreign minister, tweeted after a meeting of EU foreign ministers on Saturday, April 5, 2014. Notice that Sweden is officially “neutral”. (Actually until 1943, it supported Hitler, thank to its high grade iron ore, that it sold to the Nazi dictator for a handsome price.)

“We should be very firm on international law and the rules that apply,” Bildt, who has previously served as a mediator in the mid-1990s Balkan conflict, explained. Putin annexed the Crimea about one hundred times faster than Hitler annexed Austria.

Meanwhile a purported leaked conversation posted on YouTube between two Russian ambassadors discusses which parts of the world they would like to annex after Crimea.

It claims to be a telephone call between Igor Chubarov, Russia‘s ambassador to Eritrea, and Sergei Bakharev, the ambassador to Zimbabwe and Malawi.

“We’ve got Crimea, but that’s not fucking all folks. In the future we’ll damn well take your Catalonia and Venice, and also Scotland and Alaska,” making the word for Scotland sounds in Russian like “Cattleland” (the Scotland independence party wants to disarm its nuclear weapons, unilaterally).

Chubarov says Russia will annex for “all those fucking border countries“, such as Estonia, as well as Romania and Bulgaria.

It’s a mood, a very nasty mood, not just a bad joke, and it will keep on growing, until those who do not want to be submitted to an Oriental potentate have to resist with the stringent means.

There is a race between fear and greed in Putin’s heart. Right now, greed is dominant.

To make the situation worse, Putin is an idiot: whatever he does, the worse it’s going to be for Russia, on the general course he has embarked himself on, the exact same one as Hitler in 1938.

Putin is no Vladimir I, the Prince of Kiev who converted to Christianity in Crimea in 998 CE, after conquering said peninsula (which centuries before, and for a millennium, had been Greek). Nor is he Darius The Great. Darius, although a very great leader, a real genius, to whom we owe a lot of positive ideas, to this day, was also a tyrant. He tried to submit Greece, and the Athenians crushed him at Marathon.

Athens had 80,000 citizens. Persia, 25% of the world population, was 80 million. This, on the face of it, shows that one determined free man is worth more than one thousand slaves.

Patrice Aymé

Notes: A professional Russian historian compared Putin to Hitler along the lines found in:

https://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2014/03/16/1938/. He was fired.

http://www.kyivpost.com/content/ukraine/kyiv-university-invites-russian-professor-who-compared-putin-to-hitler-338449.html.

Kyiv Taras Shevchenko University wants to employ Russian historian Andrey Zubov, who has been threatened with dismissal for his heavy criticism of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s policy towards Ukraine.

The very serious German finance minister, the longest serving MP, is confined to a wheel chair, after having being shot by a crazed maniac, long ago. “We’ve seen this before in history,” Mr. Schäuble told a group of students in Berlin. “Hitler took over the Sudetenland with these types of tactics.”.

P/S: The West did not start the war in Ukraine. Only fear of disaster will stop Putin, so the West has to look scary enough, right away. To look scary enough, the West has to show that it is ready to suffer extensively to prevent Putin behaving as if Ukraine were his child, and that he can impose on that child abuse, corporal punishment, or even the death penalty.

PLUTOCRACY: NEW WORLD ORDER

Western Intelligence, Oriental Despotism; Redux? Democratic Occident, Fascist Orient, & Vice Versed?

Obama just  nominated Commerce Secretary the billionaire heiress who discovered him, and introduced him to the Rubin-Summers-Goldman-Sachs-Citigroup conspiracy. Penny Priztker was condemned to pay a 460 million dollar fine by the Federal government in 2001, for financial malfeasance. 460 million, that’s more than Mitt Romney’s fortune… a fortune which made small rank and file democrats huff and puff, in indignation, a few months ago, just like their mighty masters told them to do (plutocrats such as the Pritzkers are the real thing, and Obama, their boy, not to say, servant).

Now, if the 460 million dollars fine felon becomes chief of commerce, that’s fine, as long as the masters of the people don’t ask the People to huff and puff about the fine. The finer the fine, the finer the master, say the little People, and they bleat, satisfied. As a grateful, and hopeful, Obama put it:”Priztker is one of the most eminent personalities of our country“. When Pluto reigns, down is up.

When Common Decency Is A Hindrance

Plutocracy is the New World Order. The New World Thinking. The New World Emoting.

To get some perspective on this, it’s good to have a retrospective look at the greatest plutocratic realms of the past, and ponder why extremely wealthy fascism rose, increasingly, in the Orient, while clever democracy rose, occasionally, in the West. And sometimes fell, disastrously, for reasons related.

It turns out that, when Rome became fascist and plutocratic, it turned to, and into, Oriental despotism, and criminals, indeed, came to command and control. Criminality became morality.

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PERSIA REIGNED WITH ALL CRAFTS; YET NOT SMART ENOUGH:

Establishing  giant, metastatic empires in the Orient is nothing new: the Hittites tried it, they proceeded to invade Lebanon and the rich valleys behind, Egyptian territory. However young Pharaoh Ramses II, defeated them at Qadesh, next to present day Damascus. Through courageous combat in that battle which defined his long rule, Ramses rescued victory from the jaws of defeat, somewhat miraculously.

Ramses lost ground, though, and later made a loving peace with his enemies. Then, the Hittites having been destroyed by the mysterious coalition of the Peoples of the Sea, the Assyrians tried to impose their own giant metastatic empire, using the harshest methods. That brought them so many enemies that they got invaded from all quarters, annihilated as a nation first, and an army, later.

Then the union of Medes and Persians, thanks to three remarkable leaders, established a giant fascist empire, from Ethiopia to Central Asia, Libya to India. The third emperor, Darius, besides being excellent at sword-play in the dark, and a great general, proved capable of using a free market economy, switching to so called Keynesianism, and then a command and control economy, as needed. Darius established a giant “Royal” road network (ancestral to the one the Romans would build, four centuries later).

A Persian Pony Express, with posts every five miles, would bring news from distant corners of the empire in a week. Darius went on to invade the Scythians, land of the Amazons, present day Ukraine.

Darius’ Persia was the greatest empire, so far, larger than the present day continental USA. It became so, thanks to a great variety of methods of socio-economic governance. Some of these methods would later be used by the West, massively. Not just the communication network, the free market, the command and control, but also a crafty diplomacy of seduction, cooptation and local autonomy (that’s how the Ionian Greeks and Phoenicians became collaborators of Persia; whereas Alexander would annihilate Tyr).

However, unbelievably, tiny Athens broke the Persian empire, inaugurating the next great event, still on-going, the rise of the West. Again and again, minuscule Greek armies routed the juggernauts of professional giant armies. Again and again, small democracies proved superior to large fascist foes. I claimed that mental superiority entailed military superiority.

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FREE IN THE WEST, SLAVES IN THE EAST:

Herodotus explained the Greeks’ military superiority: free men are more motivated in battle, as they fight for themselves, he said. But it’s not clear that elite Persian soldiers did not feel free. They no doubt felt rather free, but not as much.

I hold something slightly different, a new dimension of understanding: free men, living in an “open society” are not just more motivated, but, simply, more intelligent. Yes, intelligent.

Yet how come that the free men tended to be in the West, and the subjugated ones, in the East? And this for 4,000 years, defining the “West” as anything west of Mount Lebanon. Why did so much of the Mediterranean turn out propitious to freedom and individual initiative? What of the enormous Celto-German forests, from Spain to the Baltics?

Two factors played a role:

1) Trade, with the big man, the leader being the ship owner-captain (Tyr, Phoenicia, Crete, Athens, Carthage, etc.). This required to excel at technology and adaptative intelligence, confronting nature.

2) Small owner-peasants. The West’s agricultural system did better thanks to small, free owner-peasants.  The owner peasant was captain of his own plot of land, and found himself in a situation roughly similar to the ship captain. Such people worked hard, and thought hard about outwitting nature. All of Germany was this way, until the military encroachment of Rome in the beginning of its plutocratic phase, brought, by reaction, a militarization of German society (this is what archeology shows).

A demographic core of owner-peasants was the core of the success of the Roman republic, and its successors, the Imperium Francorum, and France, or anything working along French lines (most of Europe). When enjoying this basic culture, of free, independent peasants, the West did very well. Why so? Because thinking by oneself, for oneself, makes one more intelligent.

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WHY THE ORIENT IS DUMBER:

The Orient did better when the peasants could cultivate. That meant, when they had water. That was not obvious in the increasingly parched lands, from the Maghreb to India. First, there, one needed to bring water to agricultural lands. Whereas in the West, both water and arable land were in the same place, not so in the East. In the East water was on rocky mountains, arable lands in parts of plains at the bottom of said mountains. To bring the former to the latter, one needed great hydraulic works. Underground canalizations, sometimes fifty feet deep, could extend dozens of miles.

Such extensive works meant armies of workers and maintenance people. And also standing armies to establish and protect the necessary order. Plus a field army to roam around the empire, and keep the static defenses obedient.

In other words, food on the carpet in the parched, basin and range Orient meant a large fascist system to make it possible, and everybody enslaved to it, in a military organization (Christianity and Islam, both oriental religions, kept much of this essential psychological character: fascist god on top, giving absolute, even capricious  orders to its slaves below).

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ALL TOGETHER NOW, DOWN THE ROMAN ROAD TO HELL?

What consequences today? Western countries do not depend upon small owner-peasants anymore, but upon giant farms, or agribusinesses, for food procurement. Even trade has become unbalanced: production on one end of the Earth, increasing unemployment, at the other end.

Giant agribusinesses, and unbalanced trade became facts of empire in Rome, and lasted centuries. It was a deliberate plot of Roman plutocracy. At some point, six senatorial families owned most of North Africa. Seneca, Nero’s tutor, the plutocratic philosopher of note, used to boast that he had no idea how many giant properties he owned on the various continents.

That delocalization and globalization made Rome, and Italy into an empty shell of its former self. As those who had the power, the senatorial families, wished. What they feared first, was a proud, potent, empowered People.

(Part of) Italy would resurrect as independent republics, more than a millennium later.

What’s the morality of the story? Men have a strong instinct for doing things right. In a plutocratic system, though, men who do things wrong get rewarded, and this goes on, until the situation exponentiates and breaks down. Thus plutocratic systems are intrinsically pathological: they reward criminals. Not just criminal according to the laws of men, but criminals according to the laws of nature.

In the Orient, life is harder, less natural, militarization exploits part of the Dark Side, because human beings, by living there, live in a less optimal situation. In the West, the rise of plutocracy did not have these excuses.

The Romans knew this well. The Roman republic was the product of a revolution against Tarquinus Superbus, the king of Rome, of Etruscan origin. So the founding act of five centuries of Roman republic was an anti-plutocratic revolt. Same for Athens (several times, during the same centuries).

The Romans passed a strong anti-plutocratic law. That law limited, by force the size of a family’s fortune; it fixed an upper bound on how much one could own. The Second Punic war saw the death, on the battlefield, of too many of the best leading Romans. Meanwhile the conspirators of wealth, back behind the walls of the fortified cities, as Hannibal was roaming the countryside, established a New World order of rents.

When Carthage got defeated, those men of greed kept on pushing, and tried to grab control of the state. After several wars of distraction against Macedonia, Carthage, Numantia, Corinth, etc. it became clear that was what was going on to thousands of the best Romans, led by top nobles (in mind and ancestry), the Gracchi.

The Gracchis mostly tried to impose the wealth limitation law. They also succeeded to impose a land redistribution (an unthinkable socialist measure in the post Thatcher-Reagan world!). Yet, the Gracchi and their supporters lost a civil war. All got killed, by the private armies of the plutocrats. By 100 BCE, when Caesar was born, the dice had long been thrown. Only extreme measures could address the situation (extreme measures that Caesar and Cicero, on the good side, would try).

Now what? Losing democracy, means, ultimately, that we will lose not just freedom, but intelligence itself. It is difficult to imagine how the Americans will pull out of their present death spiral into furthering the wealth of the .1%. When bandits are called “philanthropists”, all values have been inverted in a country: gangsters are in control, the mafia has got metastatic. It will go on, all inverted, until it explodes, or get trampled over. The commerce chief will be a certified felon.

The situation in Europe is not as desperate: conditions for a revolt exist. Although Goldman Sachs has its servants in place all over, the Italians threw out one of them, a Goldman Sachs partner, Mario Monti, at the first chance they got.

Some may sneer, as they notice that, once again I used “Orient” and “Occident” according to old Greco-Roman semantics. What of the true Orient, the far-out East, China and company? Well, I will hide behind my usual observation: it’s Western culture that conquered the world. Present day China’s ideology has very little that is specifically Chinese, besides what the West and China had in common, such as the more or less free market. The idea of “People” (Populus) and “Republic” (Respublica) are Roman. So the very title of China, the “People Republic of China” is, well, (Greco-)Roman.

The dangers threatening China, accordingly, like those threatening us, are those that devastated the Roman republic. For the reasons exposed above, the development in the West, of a more advanced civilization was first, thus why everybody adopted it later.  Rome was first to rise as high as it did. But, the greater the rise, the greater the fall. By 700 CE, the fall of Rome had been so great, that China had risen higher, on many indicators. The West, invaded by hordes of savages for more than six hundred years (beyond even 400 CE to 1000 CE) was fighting for survival.

Plutocracy as a New World Order is not just the end of many things. In the fullness of time, plutocracy is the end of everything.

Even the Will to Power. Slave masters are not so masterful. After all, they are enslaved to their slaves.

When Rome went down, Roman plutocrats whined that the “world was getting old“. By this they meant that resources were being exhausted. Unbeknownst to them, they were the cause of this aging, of this lack of renewal. Its stupidity plutocratic civilization could not find a way out of the box it had built. It needed really new technologies; it did not have the brains to discover them. And it could not have acquired these brains without losing control.

Right now, the world is not getting old, it’s getting killed. And that’s worst.

***

Patrice Ayme

FRANKLY FREE.

WHEN FREEDOM FRIED FASCISM.

“Freedom” fries or “French” fries are synonymous. Indeed “Frank”, a word that gave “Imperium Francorum” abbreviated as “Francia” (modern “France”), meant FREE. Ferocious and free. The initial Salic law of the Franks gave more rights to them than to plain Roman citizens, reinforcing the meaning of “Frank” as free.

It was hilarious to see ignorant members of the US Congress submitting to their leader, the self described “Decider”, by trying to escape the concept of France while using the very conceptual root, freedom, which gave rise to the word French.

Talking without knowing is like breathing without air: an ominous fate.

The Franks were so free that they insisted their ancestors had escaped from the burning Troy. That made them as prestigious as Rome (supposedly founded by a Trojan). More importantly, it made the Franks born critiques and adversaries of the Greco-Roman civilization.

The Greco-Roman civilization was not conquered. It collapsed under its own errors, in the same way, at least three times. Three times it saw fascism rise, and was unable to stop it. Why? Because it was too fascist to start with. And it was too fascist because it had subhuman populations: the slaves and the women (today the US has the poor, those without health insurance, etc…).

The Franks would shatter the Greco-Roman founding principles of slavery and sexism. Troy was attacked by Greece because a woman had used her freedom of choice. To choose Troy rather than Greece as model and inspiration was to chose women as equal.

Indeed seven Merovingian queens soon ruled. One of them was one of the handful of the most important head of states civilization ever knew. Perhaps the most important, period. Her statue is in the Jardin du Luxembourg in Paris. Bathilde outlawed slavery (~ 660 CE). A US president, Lincoln, discovered that was a good idea around 1863 CE. Excuse us, we are the slows: not enough freedom on our fries…

Thus the Franks proclaimed themselves to be free of the Greco-Roman erroneous preconceptions that were too friendly to fascism, right from the start. Those preconceptions had perverted the Greco-Roman valuation system. That made the purely Greek version of that moral system weak and unable to overwhelm the rough fascist values of the Macedonians. And then unable to persuade the Roman elite either.

Rejecting sexism and slavery allowed the Franks to launch civilization with the very best foundations. They had not been seen since Crete (Crete was very anti sexist, with its female toreadors, and Crete was very equalitarian, as shown by its lack of walls and fortifications; instead archeology finds plenty of the crushed blend of materials characteristic of tsunami debris, followed by civil strife).

The concept of freedom for all had eluded both Greeks and Romans, and its absence ultimately caused their social, economic, and technological demise through mental stagnation. The remedy the autocrat Constantine, his son Constantius II and their successors found, the ultimate fascism they called Catholic Orthodoxy, brought the apocalypse of total mental fascism. The Dark Ages.

Aristotle claimed slavery was needed, because they, the ancient Greeks, did not have robots. But they sure had luxury.

Look at the Acropolis. Pretty, but it may have destroyed Athens (she diverted the Dorian League defense funds to build it, causing serious resentment that old fascists in Sparta used to their advantage).

Charlemagne lived very modestly for someone at the head of a giant empire of more than 300 counties (many dozens of times larger than the Athenian empire at its ephemeral apex). So it had long been, and would long be for all the Franks: they lived well, but without excess. That was the “cost” of freedom for all (Buddha would have said that was not a cost). We are far from the armies of slaves of the early Christian bishops, and the extravagance of the Roman urban centers of old.

But then there were millions of free Franks who were motivated to try to improve their conditions through technology. The Carolingian epoch was characterized by great advances in biotechnology (new breeds of horses, invention of nutritious beans), and engineering (deep furrows, and plenty of horse related tech, water and wind mills; by 1,000 CE, the Frankish economy was the most energy intensive in the world, etc…).

The Franks’ meta principle of more freedom for all thus (re)founded Western civilization as a hotbed of technical and philosophical innovation. That allowed civilization to advance again, by freeing it from social and ecological constraints that had bogged down the Greco-Romans.

So now we know the founding principle of Western civilization, FREEDOM, and that it gave its very name to the people who imposed it on Europe.

What was the founding principle of English speaking America? Some will say it did not need any, because, after all, it’s a descendant regime of the Franks (as is all of Europe, even Russia, when the main cultural flows are carefully traced back). So freedom would also be America’s founding principle, and indeed, US citizens often speak of their country as the “land of free” (in other words, the land of the Franks).

But is that truly true? We will see. Doubts are fed when one is reminded of the two groups that truly founded English America, and thus the fundamental principles of its mentality. Real freedom implies to be mentally fierce. It means not aspiring to be submitted to God or man. The Franks were neither. The Franks knew the Bible very well (Carlus Magnus’ nickname -and excuse for his Pagan and creative behavior- was “King David”). But, as would be descendants of the Trojans, they claimed to be of older mental stock, and they did not submit to that amusing, but much newer story book. Instead, they submitted the Bible to them. They embraced all of life to dominate it, and wore extremely colorful clothing.

 

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Patrice Ayme.

***

P/S: 1) The immense mass of the Roman urban population was fed (by giant agricultural businesses owned by the hyper rich senatorial class and manned by slaves), but it did not direct its own fate. So it was not motivated to improve it in any way. Apathy dominated all mental realms. By the sixth century, in Constantinople, the masses, the demos, were only excited by watching spectator sports. Truer democracy existed only in the West among the Franks (and that is why emperor Justinian left them alone as he reconquered the Western empire). 

2) The Greco-Roman civilization had subhuman populations: the slaves and the women (race, although exceptionally a factor (Sparta, that died off) was not dominant as a criterion of sub humanity: it was about how they talked, not the color of the skin). Today the US has the extremely poor under class, those without health insurance, etc; this has followed a tradition of exploiting various sub populations… Rome used torture only against slaves. Recently the US leadership proposed to use it even against citizens. What counts is using the principle of “sub humanity”. Not only does it make society unfair and fascist, it makes it mentally lazy, because those on top stay there, not because they are there because they strove to be better, but because they were born there.