Accept Reality, Accept Wisdom, Truth Is Its Prophet: On Those Who Deny Columbus

History is an ocean of blood over which human hope has sailed. Removing all statues of historical figures will enable to forget that. So we are in a better position to ignore all of history. Thus, we can hope to rediscover experimentally mass slavery, systematic torture to death, mass cannibalism, as most American societies had prior to Columbus… since we can’t understand it theoretically! On our own. For our future. Claiming we are not what our ancestors were, and we still are. From Politically Correct to Political Con. Columbus left 39 men behind, on his first trip. They were certainly all killed, and probably eaten.

Los Angeles took down a statue of Columbus, as if he were Karl Marx (and his evil logic). True, the consequences of Columbus’ work is mixed. But Columbus’ basic logic, a route toward the Indies, to get to spices, while avoiding those imperialist Portuguese, was not evil…. It was just trade. Whereas lots of other logics venerated today, from Christianism to its pet, Islamism, are deeply evil.

Refusing history is refusing wisdom.

What Los Angeles should have done, was to explain what happened with Columbus. And to explain that it is US ideology, not Columbus ideology, which led to the holocaust of California “Indian” Natives… After 1848!

Accusing the Spaniards, or the Mexicans, to have massacred California Natives, as the Los Angeles supervisors implicitly did, by accusing Columbus, is the same old, white Anglo-Saxon supremacist holocaustic racism.

Los Angeles is ridiculous. Not just ridiculous, criminal.

Why criminal? Let me deploy my logic a little bit more. Because the Spaniards, and the Mexicans who followed them, those living consequences of Columbus, didn’t massacre the California Natives. Spanish ideology didn’t kill the Californians. Los Angeles supervisors claim it did. They are liars, or then criminally ignorant. The US logic, inherited the West Country men’s ideology… Of Elizabethan Age ideology…. As I pointed out in “Shakespeare Against Sade“, not all logics are the same, not all ideologies are the same, not all systems of mind are the same, they are more or less evil.

Oh, by the way, “Los Angeles” is Spanish, language of the invaders. To speak Spanish is to collaborate with the invasion, celebrating it. I propose to change to a Native Americans’ name. Ah, correct, I forgot, how silly of me, Native Americans were also invaders, colonizers, discoverers of America, so the Native Americans’ version of the Los Angeles name, should be replaced by growls and grunts of the wild beasts who preceded them…  

It’s not just the PC Americans who are grotesquely hypocritical collaborators of the West Country Men criminally invasive mentality. The European Court of Human Rights decided that to call Muhammad a PEDOPHILE, because he married a six  (6) year old, and had sex with her when she was nine (9) was a crime. So for the European Court of Human Rights, reality doesn’t apply to Muslims.

Refusing reality is refusing wisdom.

Refusing wisdom means total war, in the end. Because the present economy is completely unsustainable, with present technology. Only examining reality further will make life worth living, looking forward.

Patrice Ayme

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More details:

A statue of explorer Christopher Columbus that has stood for 45 years in downtown Los Angeles’ Grand Park was removed Saturday.

“The statue of Christopher Columbus rewrites a stained chapter of history that romanticizes expansions of European empires and exploitations of natural resources and of human beings,” said Los Angeles County Supervisor Hilda Solis, who authored the motion to replace Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples Day.

“We have all inherited this complex, difficult history.

Minimizing — or worse, ignoring — the pain of Los Angeles’ original inhabitants is a disservice to the truth. The removal of the Columbus statue in Grand Park is an act of restorative justice that honors and embraces the resilient spirit of our County’s original inhabitants. With its removal, we begin a new chapter of our history where we learn from past mistakes so we are no longer doomed to repeat them.”

Los Angeles’ area was discovered by Europeans around 1602 CE, generations after Columbus’ death, and then not visited by Europeans for another 166 years. Later, 11 Spanish-speaking families established themselves there. Among 5,000 Natives in the basin. By the time of the arrival of the Spanish in the 18th century A.D., there were 250,000 to 300,000 native people in California and 5,000 in the Los Angeles basin. Since contact with Europeans, the people in what became Los Angeles were known as Gabrielinos and Fernandeños, after the missions associated with them. Native Americans in North America were not massacred by followers of Columbus, but of the mood of the West Country Men

The removal event featured a news conference and a Native American ceremonial dance.

“This is a natural next step in the progression to eliminate the false narrative that Christopher Columbus discovered America,” Los Angeles City Councilman Mitch O’Farrell said earlier in the week. Maybe it will help: after all, the Vikings went all over north-east America. They couldn’t settle, because the Natives tried to exterminate them. By exterminating the Vikings, the Natives sealed their fate: interbreeding with the Viking would have made native Americans immunologically stronger.

“Columbus himself was personally responsible for committing atrocities and his actions set in motion the greatest genocide in recorded history. His image should not be celebrated anywhere.”

Well, certainly others than Columbus can be celebrated, such as Hypatia massacred by Saint Cyril. Saint Cyril is still a saint, that’s a much bigger problem than Columbus… Because Saint Cyril wanted to massacre non-Christians. Columbus didn’t particularly want to massacre Native Americans. Yes, in the end, there was a genocide. However a genocide, like all and any evil has a logic, and it is this logic that is evil. Columbus’ logic was not evil. Saint Cyril’s logic was evil. Celebrating Saint Cyril is celebrating his evil logic.  

PA

 

Alcohol, Sexism, Rape, Hypocrisy

Lots of females, and US Vice President Joe Biden (president of vice?), suddenly are all excited about the “rape culture”. Let’s have a toast to their health. Surely they realize they are joking? Did they realize they partake in that “rape culture”? This is a territory, where I prowl and predate: what to do to change the culture. Not just because I was there before (pre-date) but as a predator in the world of ideas.

I am 100% against “rape culture”, but even more against saying no, no, no, while actively collaborating with the exact opposite (as most hypocrites do). Much social activity in the West (and not just in the West) is engineered for rape (or sort-of rape, I-was-not-really-there cop-out) . Let’s say more: without the so-called “rape culture” most of the ostriches out there would not have any fun. And this is exactly why there was little progress on the “rape culture” ever since the concept and terminology appeared in the 1970s.

I will spare you, at least today, the gory psychobiology below all this, where it is explained why the happily enraged male pursues the delightedly scared female, prehistoric style. We are prehistoric creatures, because evolution created us over the aeons, and those time honed ways have a wisdom which millions of years of  survival certify.

Silence Is No Consent, But Drinking Factually Is

Instead, I will focus on two facts. First, there is a lot of sexism imposed on children as young as five years old (for example more in the USA than in France). Sexism consists in gender behavior not forced by psychobiology. Sexism leads to alienation, thus the “rape culture”. Sexism makes females weak, whiny, provocatively passive, too emotional while the males are made tough, resilient, brutal, domineering, coldly rational, ambitious etc. Sexism makes inter-gender interaction naturally violent, exploited and exploitative.

Sexism can be hidden (OK, not so hidden) in activities as simple as dancing (again, with stereotyped roles).

The second fact nurturing the “rape culture” is alcohol injection (“consumption”). To put it bluntly, young people get into the alcohol culture, to partake in the rape culture.

From Scientific American, 2001: Enzyme Lack Lowers Women’s Alcohol Tolerance

…”one of the reasons why alcohol harms women more than men: women, it appears, are deficient in an enzyme that helps metabolize alcohol. The findings appear in the 2001 April issue of Alcoholism: Clinical and Experimental Research. “It has been known for a long time that, in general, both women and female animals are more susceptible to the negative or toxic effects of alcohol,” team member Steven Schenker of the University of Texas at San Antonio says. “This is true for the liver, heart muscle and skeletal muscle, and it may be true for the pancreas and the brain. In other words, there is something about the female gender that makes them more susceptible to toxic amounts of alcohol.”

In the past scientists attributed this susceptibility to women’s smaller body size and their relatively higher percentage of fatty tissue. For this study, however, the researchers focused on what is known as first-pass metabolism. Before alcohol reaches the blood stream, it goes through the stomach, where so-called gastric alcohol dehydrogenase (ADH) isozymes break some of it down. “In an earlier study we found that women have less of this ADH activity than men do,” notes lead author Charles Lieber of the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. “Accordingly, women have a lesser first-pass metabolism and, therefore, for a given dose of alcohol, their blood level is higher than it is for men.”

Following up on that research, the team recently turned their attention to the makeup of ADH. They found that one of the enzyme’s three components, glutathione-dependent fomaldehyde dehydrogenase (x-ADH), is deficient in women, thus explaining their lower ADH activity levels. To Schenker, the take-home message is clear: “Women simply need to be more cautious than males in terms of the amount of drinking they do.”

There are other factors: women have more fat (in which alcohol does not dilute) and men have 20% more water (in which alcohol dilutes). In practice, a woman drinking alcohol in the same way as a male will always get more intoxicated, and often much more so. The Blood Alcohol Count (BAC) can be twice in a female relative to the male in the same equal social circumstances.

(By the way, the greater sensitivity to alcohol in women explains why so many women in the USA become alcohol addicts.)

Once the prey is incapacitated, all inhibitions down, the prey is there for the taking. Most “rapes” in the USA, involve alcohol.

“43% of the sexual victimization incidents involve alcohol consumption by victims and 69% involve alcohol consumption by the perpetrators.”

So let the prey know this. OK, sorry to be a party pooper. How are you going to have fun, looking forward? Screams against the “rape culture” especially in the USA, have become a cover-up for the alcohol culture. The more they scream against rape, the more they are getting drunk on their own fables, and their sorry sort.

I will taunt public opinion with the following proposition: young people get into alcohol, because they want to get laid. The rest is only habituation. Time to get sober, or let the hypocrisy, the show, and the fun, go on. They want no rape? Let them stop drinking, then, and we, or, rather, they can talk, and learn to talk, instead of just getting an uninhibited, inebriated ride on the most basic instincts .

Patrice Ayme’

Reciprocal Perversity

Reciprocal altruism is a well-known notion. What of reciprocal perversity?

Reciprocal altruism consists in a class of behaviors which are short-term adverse to an animal, yet profitable to others then, while, in the long-term, bringing a profit beyond the initial sacrifices consented.

In reciprocal altruism, overall profit blossoms. Reciprocal perversity brings the opposite effect: tit for tat escalates into Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD).

Reciprocal perversity is of the foremost importance. Indeed, when one looks at history, one sees not just a lot of altruism, but a lot of perversity. Civilization is all about industrial strength altruism. A well-functioning civilization is an altruism machine. It can also turn into a perversity machine (think of the Ottoman empire forbidding printing).

Indeed sometimes civilization are devastated by a foreign enemy. Yet most collapse into utter destruction involve perseverance into perversity. Into self-amplifying perversity. The Maya, Moche, and to a great extent, Rome’s the Sassanids’ and the Spanish Visigoths collapses being obvious examples of inner strifes being exploited by a foreign invader (the Islamists in the last three cases).

Large scale, civilizational scale viciousness, has often been in evidence, it is the most dramatic part of history, so often renewed: the Muslim invasion (in Spain), various Mongol attacks and, lately the vicious fascist regimes in Germany, Italy or Russia. China in the Twentieth Century was no walk in the park either. In all these cases mass perversity became the dominant behavior, self-amplifying, devouring the civilization: watch the most capable Roman leaders of the Late Empire being assassinated (Stilicho, Aetius, Boetius, etc.). Consider Qur’an 4; 145:

Hypocrites Are Among Those The Qur’an Condemns To The Fire: Surah 4, An-Nisa; Ayah 145

And then, there is the abominable situation we are living through now. Of course. The planet is endowed with the most perverse leadership, or lack thereof, ever. A leadership hell-bent to turn the entire planet into Jurassic Park. Without the animals. Nor the plants. Maybe without much of the plankton. In the next few decades. All the leadership the planet had before, was provided by evolution, which is intelligent and one could even say conscious (as animals are). Yet evolution was not satanic (doing evil deliberately). Doing evil deliberately implies covering that will to hurt. Most of the present leadership of the planet has the effective will to hurt or even destroy, the biosphere as we know it. Instead of practicing reciprocal altruism, our present leaders practice selfish viciousness, to a scale never seen before, since there are men, and they ponder morality. Since there are men, and they ponder morality, has there ever been a greater sin, than the will to destroy everything?

Confronted to such a perversity unique in the history of animality, one can only wonder. Wonder not just about how perversity arises, but how to detect it in the leaders who present themselves, all over, and seduce us with mellifluous chatter.

I do believe that the Dark Side, deliberately called upon, was one of the main architect of human evolution: it helped evolution speed up to physically destroy the less clever hominids. Eating the enemy beats waiting for it to be all discouraged, and fade out on its own.

Admitting the existence of the Dark Side is a key feature of Abrahamism. The religions of Christianism, Islamism, Buddhism and Confucianism criticize fiercely a number of behaviors. However leaders, and practitioners of those moral codes are often in complete violation with them. Such is the problem of hypocrisy, at the core of the main moral systems: their main proponents, to a great extent, lived in exact opposition to what they preached (consider “Saint” Constantine’s murderous activities; Buddha, to some extent, himself detect this deviationism into hurtfulness, against himself and the like, and thereafter, moderated himself).

One of the main engines of perversity is hypocrisy. Uncontrolled perversity and hypocrisy cannot be tolerated in an army. This is why it is so severely criticized in the Qur’an, and graced with “the fire”. (The Quran gives advice on how to detect hypocrites; I will try to improve on that in a future essay, by considering what one could call “neurological volume”.)

The two candidates for the presidency of the USA are plutocrats. It is of the essence to find how likely the depictions they make of their positions are far removed from the truth (hint: more so with the tightly controlled Clinton, watch her eyes controlling what effect she makes on crowds, than with the erratic Trump, who says it, as he feels it).

More generally, one needs to assert the same degree of truthiness, or lack thereof, among leaders and makers of world public opinion (say when we are presented with ecological solutions… which are often the exact opposite of what they are claimed to be… such as when president Obama presented the methanification (“natural gas“) of the USA through fracking as a “bridge fuel”. It is actually an ecological disaster on a planetary scale).

Only when We The People realizes how much we are lied to, will things move in the right direction. Polls show that 2/3 of Americans believe the USA heads in the wrong direction. Still, there the USA heads, because the entire society is entangled with perverse lies, let alone vicious conspiracies (such as multi-billionaire, state supported, hedge funds managers paying fewer taxes than the “nurses and truckers I saw on I-80“, as Hillary Clinton herself belatedly admitted… when Bernie Sanders was breathing down her neck. She may have “forgotten” this statement, since…). 

In the last few weeks of the Nazi Reich, just putting out a white flag brought the death penalty. Average Germans had no choice, but vicious choices. If they tried to surrender the place where they lived to the advancing United Nations armies, they risked their lives and those of their loved ones. Similarly, if they helped the desperate Nazis.

When a society becomes vicious enough, most actors therein, just to survive, have to turn vicious. This is why civilizational collapse proceeds generally through previously unimaginable horrors. Not only victims can turn against each other (as victims in Nazi death chambers would), but the main perpetrators have interest to live no one alive behind, so that vengeance would be impossible. Consider the so-called “Augustus” killing his young relative Caesarion (son of Cleopatra and Augustus great Uncle and adoptive father, Julius Caesar). Consider the utter destruction of Baghdad by the Mongol, Armenian, Frankish, Georgian and Chinese army in 1258 CE (total eradication of the Muslim population, end of Islam with brains, and its “House of Wisdom”). The perpetrators wanted no avenger looming in the future. Committing perverse acts leads to further, greater perversity: such was the main moral trajectory of the Nazis.

Just as the greenhouse effect launched by man feeds on itself, so does perversity always. This is why democracies have to strike their own perpetrators hard. From time to time. The French Republic did well to condemn to death the famous Marshalls (Petain), hero of Verdun, and condemn and execute many others, including ex-Prime Minister (Laval), World War One heroes, and a celebrated writer (Brasillach), for fascism, racism and treason, in 1944-46.

Next time France gets invaded, collaborators may evoke the precedent (of up to 50,000 executions which happened for betrayal of the Republic and, or human rights; the official number, found in De Gaulle’s memoirs, volume 3, is 11,000) to justify greater moderation in their action.

None of this is pie in the sky, something which happened in the past and will never happen again. Quite the exact opposite. The threat form perversity unchained has never been greater. (A small living example is the blossoming, worldwide, of the financial plutocracy engineered by the Clintons, and ever since pushed further by ulterior agents.)

The present technologies we have are completely unsustainable (just contemplate phosphates destroying the seas, insecticides destroying the pollinators, drinkable water running out, greenhouse gases building up, acidic seas, etc.). Sustainably, and limited to the present technologies, the human population would have to be strictly less than one billion. The transition from more than eight billions to less than one, will be rather perverse. The nice solution is to develop more advanced technologies (and, foremost, advanced robotics, which could help considerably with making agriculture more sustainable, say by destroying noxious insects one by one; or thermonuclear fusion, which would allow to conquer the solar system, terminate fossil fuels, and make obnoxious stuff off-Earth).

The perverse solution, the one chosen today, is to let perversity run its course, by electing ever more perverse leadership by perverse individuals, or perverse systems of thought (“Austerity”, Globalization of Plutocracy, Salafism, various hyper-nationalisms). And this is exactly why the two main candidates to the job of president of the USA are so perverse. It is a case of evolutionary adaptation to an increasingly perverse environment.

How could Mutually Assured Destruction, MAD have evolved, biologically? Well, the devil is in the little details that, ultimately, one species, or tribe, or race, gets completely eradicated, and the other, not quite so much. Often this results in opening vast ecological niches to survivors, favoring their descendents, and even further speciation out of their descendancy. Watch nasty little mammals eating morbidly cold dinosaurs’ progeny (not proven, but likely).

Thus MAD is one of the main engines of evolution.

Patrice Ayme’

Internet & Academic Morality Not Yet Here

Internet Etiquette Is Not Internet Morality. Academia, Tribes Fighting Like Rats:

Morality is technology dependent. Always has been, always will be. Indeed, morality, the mores, are the behaviors which have proven sustainable. As technology varies, so does sustainability.

Having a rapacious attitude can also be sustained for centuries. Many said that about Rome. It was viewed to be the case of the Assyrian civilization, around 27 centuries ago. The Aztecs similarly had made moral, even divine to cut their enemies in pieces and eat them.

Right, Yet Order Zero Approach, Because, In the Next Step, Righteousness Itself Has to Be Interrogated, Though

The USA’s morality is founded not just on “Jesus” and his “Bible”, but also on the most sacred “philosophers” of the so-called (Anglo-Saxon!) Enlightenment. In the USA, to be “enlightened” traditionally means to believe in the established order, racist, enslaving, and the so-called “free market” with its “invisible hand” (Pluto!). One has to be an “empiricist”, following “pragmatism” (and that means having no moral principles, but for those of the Bible).

So, naturally enough, having defied the philosophical foundation of the USA, I was immediately “banned” from a “philosophy” site.

This is not the first time this happens. Once a site where Searle, a “philosopher” famous for his “Chinese Room” thought experiment, banned me. Searle’s site claimed I was culprit of “intellectual property theft”, because the site claimed it owned all and any of my ideas, once they were published there. I was also accused of “fantastic Logic”. Part of the truth, of course is that the Chinese Room is itself a duplication of the so-called “Turing Test” which (idiotically) claims a computer to be intelligent if it can pass for a human in a conversation. Searle, a professor at a university where I taught, use to force his students to buy his fantastically overpriced tiny and worthless books. The same university is now involved into a tidal wave of sexual harassment cases: a professor forcing students to buy his fantastically overpriced books is also a rapist, methinks.

Another of my crime, yesterday was to claim that Kuhn, author of “The Structure Of Scientific Revolutions”, a revered figure of American philosophy of science, never said anything special.

Instead I was told that  philosophy is “Discursive Rational Argumentation”. This is highly redundant: ratio (from which reason comes), comes from “logic”, which itself means discourse, which is not different from “argumentation”.

Instead I hold that philosophy is “Disruptive Rational Art”

Insults themselves can be an art: Obama flew to Saudi Arabia, flying 12,000 kilometers. He was welcomed by the governor of Riyadh. No minister, no king.

Saudi ire is mostly caused by the US rapprochement with Iran, although Obama’s artful inefficiency is also a legitimate cause of irritation. (Not to say Iran is innocent: Iranian psychology is a study in the deepest contradictions imaginable, due to the rape of Iranian civilization by much beloved Arabian engineered Islam; a classical case of the Stockholm syndrome, which should be re-baptized as the Iranian syndrome…)

The alliance between the US presidency and the king of Saudi Arabia dates from 1945. It has proven quite sustainable, although it’s a spiral descending as a co-dependency with hell.  In a way, the USA did with Saudi Arabia what it did with Hitler: encourage the worst, and milk it (the argument that Britain, Germany and France have done the same is entirely valid… but they followed the US lead, and their reward is Wahhabist terror all over Europe).

The Internet is a new technology. It empowers completely new behaviors: potentially all can communicate with all, and talk about anything. Thus it requires, and will evolve, a new morality. But there are many possibilities. Some good, some evil.

The Internet allows intellectual exchanges, gifts we make to each other called ideas. The wisest behavior, among intellectuals, in tentative debate, consist in getting inspired by the best ideas others have to offer, and forget the rest. This is the best first order approach.

However when the most impactful ideas are deleterious, such as a stealth advocacy of slavery or greed, it is another matter entirely. When John Locke teaches hypocrisy as the highest mood (condemning slavery in his writing, while investing in it and fostering it, in his actions), he deserves strident condemnation.

I am banned from many sites, from the Huffington Post, to the Guardian (for the unexpected sin of “blogging the Qur’an!”). I view “banning” and censoring unwise. The New York Times, since before the invasion of Iraq, has literally censored thousands of my comments (I have been a full subscriber for decades). Said comments’ positions were later embraced by the New York Times.

I have never banned anybody from my site (including Jihadists, Fundamentalists, and the occasional Nazi). I put just one crazed maniac in moderation, and he gave up. I systematically contradict offensive material, though, in appropriate, thus scathing, terms (it’s generally enough to make miscreants give up).

I don’t “make things up”. Except for the occasional rare joke. I don’t make things up, to the best of my knowledge, I never do, and never did, because reality, my way, always beats fiction (especially fiction the way others have it, which puts me to sleep).

Mary Beard, a professional Roman historian, in her SPQR, brazenly claims the Common Wisdom that Marcus Aurelius was the first emperor in a long while to have a live official son, but a cursory research reveals that Hadrian (likely), and Antoninus Pius (certainly) had two official sons. I did not make it up.

The devil starts with getting the details wrong… and learning to live with that.

Long ago at Stanford I was scolded by the finest and brightest, for “meditating” on Black Hole theory. My “meditation” became standard lore only recently. I had a somewhat similar experience in pure mathematics. Ultimately, what motivates academics and scientists, and philosophers the most, is their own advancement, and that means the advancement of their tribe. Richard Feynman discovered this, he said, after being elected to the American Academy of Sciences. He decided that was not acceptable, and resigned.

My answer to these academic shenanigans? Do more of what I always did, and damn the torpedoes. I am not writing for a career, but for the issues themselves. My career belongs to the future, after I am gone.

The greatest, oldest, most human, and most noble trading, is that of ideas.

And where do ideas come from? Not just the pulling of oxen, but the spur of the moment. This is why Internet spontaneity is sacred. Academia was a grove Plato liked. With the Internet, the grove is the world.

Patrice Ayme’

Summers Summits Summits of Hypocrisy

Some people all they want is power, and will do whatever it takes to get it. Larry Summers is the ultimate example of this. Summers version 2015 just found that the mood is changing, and condemns 100% Summers, version 1990s, when he was Secretary of the Treasury under that class act, Bill Clinton (from dirt poor to dirty rich).

Two immediate family members of Summers were Nobel Prizes in economy.

Summers was part of a clique of young PhDs in economics who studied how to get rich and influential at MIT and Harvard around 1979. Paul Krugman, one of them, lauds them all the time. I sent a scathing comment on the whole mood of economics as the golden calf. It did not get published.

FDR’s Powerful Family Crest: Who Plants, Preserves

FDR planted a mighty tree, the separation of money creation from financial conspiracy. Larry Summers uprooted it.

Here is my suggestion for Larry Summers’ Family Crest: Who Uproots, Destroys. Summers uprooted the financing of the real economy, and thus destroyed it. As corruption went up, innovation (true innovation, science based) went down.

Corruption is a barrier to innovation, warns Alina Mungiu-Pippidi, in Nature. Greater scrutiny of public spending is needed if science and technology are to fulfil their potential, she intones. However, there is more pernicious than that: when private spending and practice is deregulated by government.

After, deregulation of private practice is how, around 1620, slavery was made lawful in the future USA.

Another of the Harvard-MIT economist conspirators was Mario Draghi.

All these plotters literally knew each other, saw each other, talked to each other, learned form each other… How to please their masters. Mario Draghi got his PhD from MIT, in 1979. Later Draghi became vice chairman at the financial conspiracy outfit Goldman Sachs, and “trustee” at various USA plutocratic institutions of high repute (Brookings, Princeton, etc.).

Draghi is now in charge of giving money to giant private European banks. So they can become richer: then the money will trickle down to European pigeons, and they can thrive, eating the crumbs.

American plutocrats know and trust Draghi. Europeans don’t know anything about him, except they believe he is European (I know better: plutocrats belong to Hades, not the real world).

Larry Summers was put in charge of removing all regulations that this traitor to the plutocratic principle, or, more exactly, trickle down, Franklin Roosevelt, had instituted in 1933.

What had FDR done?

Basically banks create money. So they are agents of the government. Thus they ought not to intervene all over the economy, and, in particular, finance, without important limits to their powers.

Summers removed these limits.

The effect on High Finance was absolute power, thus absolute corruption.

The green light given to bankers to corrupt all of society had an effect on other mighty economic actors.

Those worthies felt a green light had also been given to them, implicitly: if the bankers could use their money creation capacity mandated by the government, to enrich themselves and their friends to infinity, why not the same for all?

Why could not fossil fuel plutocrats corrupt scientists and the media, and claim it was totally OK to augment CO2 in the atmosphere by

The democrats were in power in Congress starting in 2006: they did not stop Bush. The democrats were in absolute power just after Obama got elected: they pursued the program of rescue of the plutocracy, complete with tax cuts for the hyper rich.

Obama, to get elected, needed to mobilize those who do not usually vote, because they do not believe that whatever they do will change anything.

Nowadays so-called “democrats” in the USA are in a bind: to get their champion elected, they need the champion to mobilize those Obama mobilized, and who got very little in exchange.

Moreover, the plutocracy got entrenched in the meantime. To change this would require a revolution. Re-evolving.

Re-evolution is something the People may support, if it believed in it. To avoid it, it’s called “Populism” (sounds like Nazism, Socialism, Communism, Liberalism, Nationalism, Islamism, all pejorative notions).

Fast forward to the New York Times. A long ode to Summers called “Establishment Populism Rising.” by Thomas B. Edsall. Here is how it starts:

“Larry Summers, who withdrew his candidacy for the chairmanship of the Federal Reserve under pressure from the liberal wing of the Democratic Party in 2013, has emerged as the party’s dominant economic policy strategist. The former Treasury secretary’s evolving message has won over many of his former critics.

Summers’s ascendance is a reflection of the abandonment by much of the party establishment of neo-liberal thinking, premised on the belief that unregulated markets and global trade would produce growth beneficial to worker and C.E.O. alike.

Summers’s analysis of current economic conditions suggests that free market capitalism, as now structured, is producing major distortions. These distortions, in his view, have resulted in gains of $1 trillion annually to those at the top of the pyramid, and losses of $1 trillion every year to those in the bottom 80 percent.”

One has to pinch oneself. Summers has of course zero credibility. Trusting him on economics and social questions would be trusting an enemy. Summers put the entire planet on the wrong trajectory. He is part of a coterie mainly centralized on Harvard, which insisted on raping, pillaging, and letting Russia being devoured by plutocrats created ex-nihilo, because, for Harvard types, plutocracy is an absolute good, just as for Saint Louis Catholicism was an absolute good worth killing the world for.

The destruction of the Russian economy (more exactly a lowering of Price Purchase parity, within Russia, of at least 40%) was just one facet of their maelstrom of destruction these USA based public-private plutocrats visited on the world.

The result, in the case of Russia, is the rise of Putin, someone who advocates using nuclear weapons on Warsaw if his conventional attacks get in trouble. Why? Because, as the entire West propaganda and governments lauded, for more than twenty years (time flies), the Rubin-Goldman-Sachs-Summers-Clinton-Greenspan view of the world, Putin just got mad with rage. Rightly so.

But the damage is not confined to Putin. All over the world, from Xi to Assad, to all and any politicians in Brazil, Larry Summers and his ilk preached. They preached that corruption and plutocratization ought to have no limits, as long as the gullibility of We The People went along.

“Forgive your enemies, but never forget their names.”

— President J.F. Kennedy.

The elite is fearing the hatred, which is growing. Even in the naturally rich USA. The rapacious elite wants to marshal the anger, to drive it to a safe place. Safe for itself to keep on enjoying Earth a little bit more, as its feudal domain. It is a race between knowledge and folly.

Patrice Ayme’

Sometimes All You Need Is War

“All You Need Is Love” is worse than hypocrisy. It is the wrong strategy, especially in the worst cases:

War is not fashionable among moral exhibitionists. However, as the Romans noticed more than 2,000 years ago, those who really love peace, prepare for war (Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum).

After the dictatorship of Kaiser Wilhelm II suddenly attacked the world on August 1, 1914, Earl Grey the British Foreign Minister, went to the Commons, and made an excellent speech about joining the war to defend civilization. Bertrand Russell, the philosopher, understood none of it (because like Keynes, or the Kaiser, Russell was on the plutocratic side).

War can be a horrible thing. Even for warriors:

HMS Queen Mary Exploding @ Jutland Battle. Traumatizing Churchill?

[Explosion of the British battle cruiser “HMS Queen Mary” during the Battle of Jutland on 31 May 1916. Of the 1,266 crew members, only 20 were rescued. Several British capital ships exploded within minutes during a formidable artillery exchange; the top British admiral in the leading battleship quipped: “Something seems to be wrong with our bloody ships, today.” However, the Royal Navy prevailed, and the German Navy never confronted it again in force.]

Churchill was a serious warrior. It’s not just that he had an anchor tattooed on his arm. He was involved in the Boer War, and was Lord Of the Admiralty (head of the Royal Navy) in World War One. The short of it: fiercely led by Winston, the Royal Navy kept the Kaiser’s Fleet bottled in Germany, and when it tried to come out, it was defeated.

That strangled the Prussian fascists’ war economy, although our frienemies the plutocrats of the USA sold, for a good price, all sorts of war materials to the world conquering Kaiser, through the hypocritically “neutral” Netherlands.

France and Britain were furious, but could not do anything, as the largest ethnic group in the USA was that of Americans of German descent (there are more of them than people of partly sub-Saharan descent, to this day, about 50 million).

France and Britain were not too sure what fancy would catch next their rogue child the USA. After campaigning on the theme “All We Need Is Peace”, president Wilson, ex from Princeton University, apparently felt declaring war to fascism was a better deal, and duly came to the rescue of victory, so it could be stolen from those who had fought the war.

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WORLD WAR ONE: A PHYRRIC VICTORY FOR FRANCE AND BRITAIN:

Pyrrhus was an Hellenistic adventurer, a plutocrat, a self-styled king, whose services, as an excellent general, complete with an army, were for sale. The Greek cities of Southern Italy got the bad idea to recruit him (it was a bad idea, because the better idea would have been to negotiate with the Roman Republic).

Pyrrhus used elephants and the best professionally trained army, He won his battles against Rome. However, he noticed (paraphrasing):’A few more victories like that, and I will have lost the war’.

The USA won World War One. Nobody else did.

Both France and Britain came out exhausted from World War One. About half of French men had been killed or wounded. 27% of the 18 to 28 year old French were killed in combat. France suffered the highest proportion of dead and wounded of all the powers involved. (Except for Serbia, which lost 33% of its entire population, after the Austro-Hungarian army surged back and forth through Serbia, like a tsunami.)

The British upper class, which leads the country, was full of contradictions: after all the Kaiser, just having fled to its accomplice the Netherlands (naturally) was the grandson of Queen Victoria.

Lord Keynes, a top British diplomat, and money shuffler, came out with a piece of racist trash, “The Economic Consequences of Peace”, which argued that, considering what he viewed as the inferior racial status of Poles, dismembering the imperial exploitation-occupation system set-up by German plutocracy would have an adverse effect on economic activity. (an argument ignorant intellectuals of Jewish descent such as Paul Krugman keep on brainlessly repeating, not knowing they approve Auschwitz, doing so!)

The French leadership was cynical. Blocked by the Anglo-Americans, the French Republic could not obtain the guarantees it needed.

All France got was part of her property on the left bank of the Rhine, and the heart of France (on the grandest historical scale, the entire west bank of the Rhine was Gallic, or, and Frankish; the various partitioning of the left bank were just tricks to enfeeble mighty Francia: even now, with the entire left bank, France would be 100 million strong…)

So France came out of WWI not sure of her allies, and Britain not sure of herself. Only the USA was doing great, guided by pragmatic deal making, and disposing of Germany as if it was its private reserve.

Dr. Schacht, who could be viewed as an agent of JP Morgan (not just the bank, but the man), launched the “Second Reich” (“Weimar”, not really a republic) into hyper-inflation, to pursue war against France by other means. The French reacted by invading (something Krugman, the Jew who has learned nothing important, still finds “unbelievable”). Etc.

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ANGLO-AMERICAN COLLABORATION WITH NAZISM:

Churchill himself changed enormously. Churchill was pro-Nazi to the point of threatening the French Republic in 1929 with the… Royal Air Force… If the French kept of harassing Germany’s Second Reich (official name of ‘Weimar’!) about its secret re-armament, which violated the Versailles Treaty.

To avoid French eyes, Germany had been re-arming using not just British pets such as Portugal, but even the… Soviet Union; this sorts of situation puts to rest the theory that all there was wrong about Germany was Nazism: at the time, in 1929, the Nazis were not important as a party… But Nazi MENTALITY was already ruling. Actually it had started to rule, even before Hitler was born, as reading Nietzsche’s cogent critiques show all too well…

Churchill himself was Anglo-American (one of his parent was American, the other British).

The exploitation spirit which reigned over Britain and the USA is very old. It was launched in full by the “West Country Men” of the Elizabethan Age. (Initially Elizabeth I got the idea of endowing such men with immense powers, to go, pillage and exploit, using military might that came in handy to defeat the Gran Armada of Spain; that spirit lives to this day: see the private armies people such as Bill Gates invest in secretly, through… Monsanto; the strategy was used in WWIII, with the Flying Tigers, in Vietnam, and recently in Iraq, by Bush, with Black Water/Xe/Academi… the private army now secretly financed by Gates).

This went on until 1936 (in 1935, the British gov. organized a “Naval Treaty” with Hitler, which violated the Versailles Treaty). Hence the fiasco of Munich in 1938, when France was made understand she had to go alone against fascist Germany and Italy (this would have allowed the plutocratic Anglosphere to accuse France again of wanting to attack Germany all the time).

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BRITAIN UNDERSTANDS IN 1939 THAT KEYNES WAS WRONG:

The UK aligned itself behind France only in 1939, after Spain fell to Hitler’s pet, Franco, and after Hitler invaded all of Czechoslovakia (and not just the Sudeten land)…).

Churchill turned around completely by 1939… But then he became hysterical and did not want to wait for the new planes to reach mass production (he wanted to mass produce obsolete types).

However, Churchill did not allow the assassination, or, let’s say, execution, of Hitler (many top German generals would have been happy to help, and had actually contacted Brits and Americans… who then betrayed them!)

That was a moral mistake. Maybe. Although it could be argued that, differently from World War One, Germany needed a thorough spanking as a civilization, and only being completely crushed, and literally decimated in May 1945, was what the doctor ordered, to express the Nazism out…

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ALL YOU NEED IS MIND:

“All You Need Is Love” was, with all due respect, mental masturbation of the worst type.

The Beatles (Lennon, PBUH) put “All You Need With Love”) to the sound of the Marseillaise, playing in the arms, the embrace, of the Pitts, Prime Minsters, father and son, who launched a 25 year war against “Liberty Equality Fraternity”.

The Pitts were opposed in Parliament, but their extreme anger at France carried the day, and led to a generation of wars, all around Europe, and the death of more than ten million.

So John Lennon, without knowing anything about it, sided with the enemies of the Marseillaise, and thus for the partisans of that 26 year war, which was a terrible mistake, as Lloyd George, Prime Minister of Britain, admitted a century later.

Lennon should have read more. Getting the Member of the British Empire medal, was not all there was (he realized this later, and returned his MBE).

Make no mistake, I love the “All You Need Is Love” song, but I despise, and condemn the message.

As I have explained in all directions, Britain was certainly at fault in 1789-1792. As the British armies and Navy, plus the Prussians, Austrians, Russians who invaded France at the call of British plutocrats, invaded France, All The French, And Humanity, needed, was the Marseillaise, and spill the blood of the invaders as happened at Valmy (September 21, 1792) and soon Toulon…

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WANT GOODNESS? AVOID HYPOCRISY.

Everybody wants goodness to triumph, to the points that some of the greatest tyrants of history, such as Saint Louis, Luther, Louis XIV, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mussolini, Hitler, Mao, spoke of little else.

Homo is the altruistic animal.

However, it’s also the Dark Side animal. And, to a great extent, the more altruism, the greater the population, and, from this rich soil, the greater the Dark Side.

How to optimize goodness then become a logical problem, even for the most loving minded.

A good rule? Avoid hypocrisy. It gets in the way of truth, thus logic, thus efficient altruism. And make no mistake: loving plutocrats will not help. Ignoring them will not be much better, as they will not ignore you. To get out of the fall into plutocracy will require war. Jihad, as the Islamists say.

Patrice Ayme’

Save Kobani, Remember Ibn Khaldun

Before the Syrian civil war, 400,000 people lived in, and around the Kurdish city of Kobani. The region is now mostly under Islamic State, aka “Caliphate”, ISIL, Daech, control. Hundreds of villages around have been evacuated. The Turkish border is along the city, just to the north. An estimated 180,000 from the region fled to Turkey in recent weeks. But many civilians are still stuck inside Kobani.

Defenders have only light weapons. The Islamists used bigger and better weapons, such as infantry hiding behind and around modern tanks.

Turkish tanks have been staying just outside, but have not intervened yet.

Erdogan, the new Turkish president (and strongman of Turkey) knows that its Western Allies, in Europe and NATO, wants him to order its tanks to roll inside Syria, and kill the Islamists.

Kurds inside Turkey have been furious against Erdogan’s inaction and demonstrated violently. More than a dozen died, just in one night. The Kurds know that Ankara fears and dislikes them: naturally Armenia and Kurdistan, nations which are several times older than Ottoman Turkey, ought to be made into free states recognized by the United Nations. Ankara, in that way, is similar to Putin’s Kremlin.

Thus Erdogan, all too happy to find an excuse to let a lot of Kurds die, does not want to intervene, he says, as long as its Western Allies do not formally establish a “No Fly” zone over Northern Syria. He claims to be afraid that Assad’s Air Force will intervene (Turkey has only heavy F16s not necessarily capable against more recent Russian fighters).

Hypocritically the USA claims that Erdogan is an hypocrite, because he should have noticed there is a de facto “No Fly” zone over Northern Syria. But, of course, Erdogan wins that one: he wants a FORMAL declaration, just to MAKE SURE.

For Erdogan to decide to use his army to help the Kurds is a huge decision, smacking of a near contradiction. For Washington, “No Fly” is just a signature on an order.

Erdogan is also peeved that he is asked to send ground forces officially and massively, into combat, while its Allies crow that they would not do such a thing, on a matter of principle (although the Western Allies do officially have “advisers” on the ground).

The question is this: If the USA and company are proud of refusing to fight on the ground, claiming that’s Politically Correct, why would they expect Turkey to do any differently?

The latest airstrikes were spectacular, they looked like mini nukes. And they may well work. And Kobani, were many Kurdish civilians are apparently still stuck, maybe saved. And it better be (although Erdogan announced it will fall, and so did some of its Allies).

However, moral superiority is where winning a war is at.

Moral superiority starts with moral coherence. So don’t ask the Turkish army to do the dirty work, while claiming urbi et orbi, that it is not Politically Correct, to do said dirty work.

The Tunisian born historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldun (1332-1406 CE), comes to the rescue here, to explain what is going on. Khaldun was from an upper class political and judicial Arab family who had just been expelled from Andalusia by the Reconquista.

This to say that his cultural background was rich, as is often the case with superior thinkers.

Ibn Khaldun explained his way, and correctly the growth of plutocracy (he nearly said what I said). He also disserted at length on the nature of (some) empires.

Basically Khaldun said empires were about peace (this is certainly true for the large empires which lasted long. Here is an example: before the Goths stormed the core of the Greco-Roman empire, around 250 CE, the region had known 300 years of Pax Romana).

Thus, says Ibn Khaldun, the empire becomes so peaceful inside, that it is forced to recruit barbarians, outside, to defend it. Certainly, the Greco-Roman empire switched to that model after Princeps Augustus decided he was best defended by devoted, and very well paid, German troops.

Ibn Khaldun no doubt had the vivid example of the Muslim plutocrats in Spain calling to the rescue savages from Africa such as the Almoravides; I mentioned in “Walls Of Common Lies” that the ferocity of the Almoravides explains much of the bad moods that arose later in Europe, against, well, Islamists.

Ibn Khaldun thought that the high point of a civilization entails a period of decay (from the growth of a luxury economy, something I rephrase as the growth of plutocracy). The next cohesive group that conquers the diminishing civilization comes from the barbarians who were asked to defend it.

Then Khaldun says the barbarians then become refined, repeating the cycle; this is no doubt the story of the Muslim empire.

However, Khaldun’s cycles do not apply to Europe. Yes, indeed, the Franks became more refined: some Roman lawyers wrote in Latin a law for the Franks, a Lex Sallica, and Roman generals (starting with Constantine), incorporated them as the elite of the Roman army.

Yet, the Franks did not repeat the cycle… As they have clung to power ever since: all the present Western regimes descend from the Frankish empire (except for Russia’s Putin, and it shows; right, he is not really Western).

How did the Franks not repeat the cycle? By staying sufficiently barbarian; by cutting regularly, by force, the growth of plutocracy (hence the French passion for revolution). Equality under inheritance and near-equality in gender (and thus near equality in the inheritance of women… Although not as much as in Sparta), led to constant wars among factions, and wealthy, powerful families, thus preventing the growth of full blown plutocracy (that took nearly a millennium to blossom… And was soon under threat of multiple revolutions).

By the Fourth Century, the Franks fought their wars by themselves, and for themselves (although the French used a majority of German and Polish forces in the ill fated attack on Moscow in 1812, and then again, more successfully, massive amounts of African troops in the Twentieth Century against Prussian racist fascism… Including my own dad).

What Ibn Khaldun did not say was that the peace inside a vast empire is not just a benefit (as it sure was in Rome, or China, or India). Torpor inside was also a plutocratic trick to put to sleep an increasingly subjugated population.

When the West asks Turkey to send ground troops while refusing to send its own, it is therefore engaged in a plutocratic trick so old, that Ibn Khaldun already had described it, black on white, more than 6 centuries ago. It’s already bad enough that the Kurds are asked to fight with inferior weapons.

There is nothing wrong, but everything good, to fight the Islamists to death. And if it causes dormant cells and sympathizers to engage in terrorism, so much the better: being terrorized of irking terrorists is exactly how terrorism works.

And if fighting plutocrats in the Middle Earth makes Western youth impatient to fight those plutocrats who rule at home, that will be an even more striking progress.

Wanting to crush infamy, is an absolute good. Infamous is the belief that it does not matter what happens to children who live a few hours away. Protecting children is an absolute good. Protecting children, even other people’s children, carries  primordial moral weight.

Patrice Ayme’

Book Hypocrisy @ Face Value

Sue is so pleased she never joined Facebook. I guess she does not particularly fancy the Arab revolutions (allegedly cause, or at least boosted by the Internet “social networks”, including Facebook). What about a bit more geo-historical perspective, ladies and gentlemen?

The present essay tries to depict better my position on the burning issue of burning kittens. Should people of outstanding moral values condemn Facebook for letting people publish videos of burning kittens there, and hide the face of those who burn said kitten? (I am, in general, for showing crimes; a crime one does not see, one cannot prosecute! Not showing crime was how the Nazis could run 5,000 extermination camps!)

As Alex Jones (who supported Scottish Independence, as Paul Handover did) puts it in “The question of liberty, control and censorship”:

“Because Facebook is happy to host content involving the torture of animals I closed my Facebook account, a subject I wrote about on Liberated Way here and here.  Paul Handover of Learning from Dogs indicated he was closing his Facebook account over the content on animal torture on Facebook, and said why in his own article, suggesting readers might consider doing the same thing. Patrice Ayme in his WordPress article condemned me and Paul Handover as supporting censorship by closing our accounts with Facebook, which brings me to my views on censorship, liberty and control… Censorship is a tool, it is neither good or bad…”

Well, I believe censorship is always bad.

In the Roman civilization, all the latter censors were emperors. And I do believe that, from this intellectual fascism, the decay of civilization, and, in particular Rome’s incapacity to adapt to a sustainable economy, and its horrendous dictatorial theocracy, proceeded.

I joined Facebook early on, but then I observed it seemed to be more about sex, narcissism, and various obsessive-compulsive disorders in slightly deranged people who believed that a picture of their pet canary drinking was world news. So I long ignored it, in spite of entreaties by some individuals who said I should advertise my work on Facebook.

But I spited the FB mania, all the more when I saw celebrities, or plutocrats connected to IT get 60,000 “friends” on their first day on FB. And then cashing on that (literally making huge amounts of money).

Then there were a number of local revolutions, culminating with the “Arab Spring”. That definitively changed my mind. If “social networks” could be used for revolutions, they were good.

What did the Social Networks do? They disseminated information. In other words, the truth. That’s good.

Some will say that could be done through other tribunes. Indeed, I sent articles, or comments to more established electronic media: the Huffington Post blocked me after 6 (completely innocuous) comments. It probably read my site, found I detested plutocracy, and barred me.

The “European Tribune” was even more blatant. I was actually physically threatened there, and banned the same day… for alleging that some big bankers had supported Hitler. The site manager told me many bankers were reading the site, and he was told to shut me down.

For similar economico-political reasons, the New York Times has censored more than 1,000 of my comments, and ponders every single one, sometimes for more than 12 hours, before publishing them (thus insuring no one reads them, while claiming they did not censor).

At least on Facebook, I am free to rant about plutocracy, and was never blocked.

Of course FB is despicable. If one publishes a picture there of a bare breasted statue, 2,000 year old, like the Venus de Milo, they will close the account.

Yet, by closing it for puny reasons, you close information, even revolution.

1.3 BILLION people are on facebook. How many people are on my site? Well, not enough. How many people are on Paul’s plus Alex’s? 2,700.

Puny reasons? Of course. It’s even worse. It’s hypocritical. Not just ineffectual. I was watching a line of people around city blocks, 5 abreast, at 7 am, anxiously waiting for the latest iphone.

Thousands of people. Some had spent the night, waiting for the latest gimmick. All on Facebook. How does the iphone, or, in general, smartphones work?

With Coltan. Where does much Coltan come from, keeping the prices low? Congo. Illegally. Thank the dictator of Rwanda, Kagame, and his Anglo-Saxon puppet masters. Never heard of him? Indeed, not a kitten.

Five million burned kittens? Will you close the smartphone account? Vote with your pocketbook?

No, stand reassured, good people. Only 5 million dead Africans, and counting (although Obama has started lately squeezing Kagame a little bit, out of Congo, under French and UN pressure). With the full complicity of Susan Rice, national Security Adviser (and a long story all by herself).

Susan Rice? A very rich woman, whose father was on the board of the Federal Central Bank, the Fed.,  Obama’s National Security Adviser very friendly with plenty of African dictators from Rwanda to Ethiopia (and having millions invested at some point in gas pipelines from Canada…). All too complicated, too dreadful to consider? Most people feel that way: back to crying about kittens.

And let’s not forget to protect the kitten burning maniacs, by protesting the showing of their pictures in the social media.

Hypo-Crisy means criticizing less than it deserves. Yes, FB is terrible, yes they are hypocrites, yes, the plutocrats associated to Facebook ought to be in the 99% tax bracket. Yes, indeed. But the average guy who lives off the cell phone like a leech, to save ten bucks, has collaborated with the death of millions.

And how did the collaboration start? By refusing to get the information. All burning kittens, 99%, and then making sure the perpetrators prosper on the burning kitten channel, as long as the good people persuaded of their own goodness avert their eyes, and then fork out cash for the world’s richest company, which pays only 2% tax, whereas the local bookstore, soon to burn down, from all the burning kittens running around, and the 35% tax the pro-plutocratic government insists the bookstore ought to be paying.

Before we get brains, we need eyes. And how could those who cannot even book the world at face value, think about it fairly? Plus, direct, real democracy, where all laws get voted by the people, and only the people, is only possible if, and only if, We The People get all, and the best, information.

Hence, those who advocate censorship reject real democracy. Instead they believe that higher human beings, the Big Brothers (let’s give them a name), have the right, and even the duty, to determine who and what, we, the Plebs, can be allowed to look at.

Ban censorship. In democracy We The People are free, free to know all.

Patrice Ayme’

Go Ogle You

Mandela claimed he was mean and tough, and no saint. That self knowledge was put to excellent use in a spotless, civilization improving career.

Hitler used to say he was a man of peace, a rescuer of minorities. Gandhi presented himself as a saint, an Hindu saint, hater of the British to the point he presented himself as Hitler’s friend. Gandhi’s erroneous trains of moods and thoughts wrecked India, and now we are waiting for the other, nuclear, shoe to drop.

Generally, the more they speak one way, the more it is to hide the fact they act the opposite.

Don’t Be Evil, I Want To Eat You

That’s why, when Google chose as motto, “DON’T BE EVIL“, it was clear the opposite was practiced.

The tech giant has been long walloped in hypocrisy: his founders would make a loud show of driving hybrid cars, to save the planet, while discreetly ordering, not just normal corporate jets, but outright private jumbo jets, to travel in great CO2 style.

So how come two young guys have suddenly dozens of billions of dollars at their command? Just by practicing “don’t be evil“? Christ would have told us the opposite was most likely (remember Christ said a camel was more likely to go through the eye of a needle, than the rich to heavens).

So it’s no surprise that Google is funding groups advancing the agenda of the Koch brothers. Only the naive ought to be surprised.

How could it be otherwise?

Who founded Google and launched it big? The usual suspects. Sequoia capital, Morgan-Stanley, Goldman Sachs, and the usual operators of the Dark Plutocracy  (Summers, Clinton administration, his pet Sheryl Sandberg, etc.). The algorithm was invented by Stanford University (from which it is still leased for around 100 million dollars  a year).

Two Stanford students activated the algorithm, and became “Google founders“. There had been other search engines before, and since.

Nothing special about Google, except who was behind it. As we know now, and I long suspected, and wrote about, the USA’s plutocracy’ intelligence organizations, sucking on the juiciest parts of the world, were a big part of it.

So here you have two young nobodies, one from Russia, and they are given riches beyond comprehension. Why? Just to show Russians that, when you obey the USA, and conform, you will own the world?

No, not just that. But also because absolute money, so absolute power, corrupts absolutely.

The plutocracy that heads the USA needed a tech giant led by the absolutely corrupt. That’s why colossal amounts of money are directed at the gullible with vicious morals.

Vicious morals? We now know that Google acts viciously (it cooperates with the Chinese dictatorship’s censorship, not just the NSA). But the stealthy will-to-viciousness should have been obvious, from the motto alone.

I have been involved in more than one start-up in Silicon Valley, and i have met with several venture capitalists. I can imagine the scene from her: Of, do those two algorithm guys look hungry enough? Could they do whatever, so they can own the big private jet?

On the founders of Google: check for all this. So we fund, and organize that for profit intelligence organization, complete with “backdoors“. Go-ogle.

Organizations that received “substantial” funding from Google for the first time over the past year include Grover Norquist’s Americans for Tax Reform, the Federalist Society, the American Conservative Union (best known for its CPAC conference) and the political arm of the Heritage Foundation that led the charge to shut down the government over the Affordable Care Act: Heritage Action.

In 2013, Google also funded the corporate lobby group, the American Legislative Exchange Council, although that group is not listed as receiving “substantial” funding in the list published by Google.

Google is preparing for what it is helping to bring, a Tea Party controlled USA (Obamacare was part of the plan). So it’s bringing in Republican coordinators. “A brassy, well-connected New York Republican who served seven years in the House, Ms. Susan Molinari is paid handsomely” as Google’s chief Washington lobbyist, said the New York Times. She should be: she was used as cute blonde bimbo talking head by CBS, before.

Says the New York Times: “based on comparisons with trade group lobbyists, Ms. Molinari is probably paid into seven figures in salary and stock. Representatives of the pharmaceutical and cable industries, for example, which each spent close to Google’s $18 million in lobbying in 2012, earned salaries of $2 million to $3 million…Her father is Guy Molinari, the former Staten Island borough president and a former five-term member of Congress, and her husband is Bill Paxon, also a former member of Congress and now a lobbyist.”

Such is the plutocratic web in the USA: thoroughly corrupt politicians enabling the powers that be. Just in the last year, Google funded for the first time ten right wing fanatical groups. Google spent a record $18.2 million on lobbying in 2012 in Washington alone.

As usual with the plutocratic organizations and celebrities who lead the USA, Google has a distinctively progressive image.

Propaganda works.

To Be Evil, first claim you are not. “Don’t Be evil”. Then persuade your prey it ought not to be evil, either, making it unable to even suspect it has to defend itself. Then Go Ogle everybody.

***

Patrice Ayme

USA: Den Of Thieves?

Hey, it’s not me saying it, but the New York Times! Finally waking up to the obvious. That’s courageous, as the greatest, and wealthiest of all the dens of thieves in the world, Plutocracy Central, is New York City itself.

John A. Cassara, a former special agent for the Treasury Department, wrote in the New York Pravda: Delaware, Den of Thieves? November 1, 2013:

“OUTSIDE of crimes of passion, criminal activity is typically motivated by greed.

As a special agent for the Treasury Department, I investigated financial crimes like money laundering and terrorism financing. I trained foreign police forces to “follow the money” and track the flow of capital across borders.

During these training sessions, I’d often hear this: “My agency has a financial crimes investigation. The money trail leads to the American state of Delaware. We can’t get any information and don’t know what to do. We are going to have to close our investigation. Can you help?”

The question embarrassed me. There was nothing I could do.

In the years I was assigned to Treasury’s Financial Crimes Enforcement Network, or Fincen, I observed many formal requests for assistance having to do with companies associated with Delaware, Nevada or Wyoming. These states have a tawdry image: they have become nearly synonymous with underground financing, tax evasion and other bad deeds facilitated by anonymous shell companies — or by companies lacking information on their “beneficial owners,” the person or entity that actually controls the company, not the (often meaningless) name under which the company is registered.

Our State and Treasury Departments routinely identify countries that are havens for financial crimes. But, whether because of shortsightedness or hypocrisy, we overlook the financial crimes that are abetted in our own country by lax state laws. While the problem is concentrated in Delaware, there has been a “race to the bottom” by other states that have enacted corporate secrecy laws to try to attract incorporation fees.”

The hypocrisy has, indeed, been colossal. The Clintons, for example, on the face of it, are among the planet’s most corrupt politicians. Just watch their fortune. Try to explain the difference with the king of Zimbabwe.

Yet, thanks to relentless propaganda, the Clintons are among the most admired American citizens. Why so? Because the same propaganda machinery  that make Clintons thrive is the one that makes made in USA plutocrats thrive, and if one can one’s soul grovel for the former, one sure will for the later.

This week we learn for example that the owners Google, Oracle and their kind would come down from the sky, and make Obamacare work. Saved by plutocrats again! So now, whatever good Obamacare is capable of doing, the indelible impression will be left, that the world’s richest men saved it. Verily those thieves are philanthropists!

The USA is plutocracy central. It can be seen in many ways. Not just the profusion of legal tax evasion and “optimization”. It can be seen statistically.

Consider this. France, or Germany, have a percentage of millionaires comparable to that of the USA. But the USA has, by far, a much greater number of multi-billionaires than France. Actually the USA has the greatest density of billionaires in the world.

It’s not that Americans are more industrious: otherwise French multimillionaire density would be lower. It’s that (legal) tax evasion is much greater in the USA… and it kicks in mostly for the hyper rich (who literally own the country and its politicians).

Many are the tricks, for example borrowing (against stock collateral; not taxed), instead of earning (taxed). Those tricks are tolerated, or even instigated, by the very political and propaganda machinery that the plutocrats control.

In truth the USA is the world greatest tax haven for the global plutocracy, and not just because of the foundation law and countless tax write-offs for the hyper rich inside the USA, to profit American multibillionaires. The USA also behaves like a philanthropic organization for worldwide multi-billionaires. The USA is plutophile.

The idea is simple. By allowing global plutocrats to evade taxes in the USA, then they will enrich the United States, and help further their American colleagues by reciprocating exclusive, mutually benefiting arrangements. That’s why formal requests for help from foreign IRS are blocked in the USA. Ultimately, the Pentagon and the intelligence system of the USA (NSA, CIA, etc.) protect Plutocracy Global.

The USA is the blackhole at the center of the worldwide galaxy of tax havens. That’s exactly why no light comes out. Of those worldwide tax havens USA billionaires themselves profit, through specially written tax laws (watch Apple, Amazon, and other major corporations paying only 2-3% tax, whereas the local bookstore pays 35% tax). Everybody knows about it, but don’t expect Obama Wealth Care to talk about it. Or Sugar Bowl’s Pelosi to evoke it.  When sitting on a branch, do not talk about saws. Or why the plutocrats who lead us by the nose don’t like to talk about equality.

Here is Mr. Cassara again:

“The Financial Action Task Force, an international body that sets standards for the fight against money laundering, terrorist financing and other threats to the international financial system, has repeatedly criticized America for failing to comply with a guideline requiring the disclosure of beneficial ownership information. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, with which the task force is affiliated, has championed international standards for financial transparency, but cannot compel compliance.

Watchdog groups like the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project, Global Financial Integrity and Global Witness say that anonymous companies registered in the United States have become the vehicle of choice for drug dealers, organized criminals and corrupt politicians to evade taxes and launder illicit funds. A study by researchers at Brigham Young University, the University of Texas and Griffith University in Australia concluded that America was the second easiest country, after Kenya, in which to incorporate a shell company.”

Now that Switzerland has been domesticated, it is high time to handle Delaware and Wyoming! Or, more generally, the entire tax code of the USA. However, there will be resistance.

Many behave as if New York City was the universe. And it’s all too true. Yet, let see what happens after we cut finance supreme down to size. From 25% down to 8% that is. Right now, finance is 25% of the profits of the economy in the USA. Historically, the average stands below 8%.

25% of the income of the state of Delaware comes from protection money paid by corporations.

Why has globalization become such a bad thing? Around a century ago, problems arose mostly from the excesses of exploitative colonialism. Exploitative colonialism, at its worst, caused the extermination of most of the natives of entire continents. That was as diabolical as diabolical can be, so it fully deserves to be described as rabid plutocracy.

After the termination of colonialism the old fashion way, complete with its more or less civilized imperial administrations, a much leaner form of exploitation arose. Old style administration chained the plutocrats: they had to play by the rules. After the departure of transnational (“imperial“) administrations, there were no more rules. Or, more exactly, the plutocrats made the rules. And here we are.

Cassara: “Domestic law enforcement agencies are as stymied as foreign ones. In one case I worked on, American investigators had to give up their examination of a Nevada-based corporation that had received more than 3,700 suspicious wire transfers totaling $81 million over two years. The case did not result in prosecution because the investigators could not definitively identify the owners.

Anonymous corporations are not only favored tools of criminals, but they also facilitate corruption, particularly in the developing world. A recent World Bank study found that the United States was the favored destination for corrupt foreign politicians opening phantom companies to conceal their ill-gotten gains.”

That’s what we are at.

Globalization has become plutocratization. Time for a global correction. And that means striking where the head of the snake is. In the USA. Not just in Delaware, Wyoming and Nevada.

The top Democrats on the House Financial Services Committee, proposed legislation requiring United States corporations to disclose to the Treasury Department their beneficial owners. British Prime Minister Cameron, going further, announced that a planned national registry of companies’ true owners would be open to the public, not just to law enforcement.

Global plutocracy, especially of the Anglo-Saxon sort, was the force that made the difference with Nazism. Why? Because plutocracy rotted the head of Western civilization. The body stayed vigorous, and more than one million young Western soldiers courageously died on the battlefield… Civilization was saved, but is again encountering problems, actually the greatest ever. Yes, ever. Never was the biosphere in question before.

Not really understanding how that war was a racket (as the head of army of the USA, Major General Smedley Butler had put it eloquently years before the Second World War).

Right now mysterious kabuki wars against foreign co-conspirators have been replaced by an outright War Against The Poor. It’s all very simple. To get out of it, let’s treat Delaware as if it were Switzerland, a few years back.

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Patrice Ayme