Washington, Slave Master, Coverup, Spiritual Gangrene

When Big Ideas Are Needed, But Lacking, Extinction Is A Solution:

Obama gave his “Farewell Address” (the most interesting bits of which I could have written myself… or maybe I did, come to think of it, much earlier…). Yet, he made a snide remark about those who believe the whole US system is so corrupt, that decent people should not touch it. Well, he does not understand. Some political systems are so flawed, they cannot be incrementally improved.

That was true of Sparta and Athens, in the greatest age of Greece (for drastically opposite reasons which amounted to the same). The Greek political system (yes, there was such a thing), a set of moods and ways, was so unsustainable, it was threatened with extinction. And it sure got extinguished (Pericles, restricting Athenian nationality; Poleis, fighting all over, for often ridiculous reasons, were a serious problem).

The solution? Union. What Sparta refused to even talk about. We are in the same global, worldwide, situation as Greece, by the way, and the solution is the same. The one which was not seized, and could not be seized, because Greek civilization was too flawed in some of its moods (such as the one about honor…) Something to be said for Trump’s desire to sort it out peacefully with Russia…

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Much of the US system is, fundamentally flawed:

Especially in some its meta-features. Meaning? The Founding Fathers were lying in the matter of which civilization they truly wanted. Greed was foremost to them, and they hid that below big words. As long as this is not a well-known point, the entanglement between many of the worst flaws of the present civilization will stay unexamined.

If one lies too much, one cannot think enough. This is true of society, as it is of individuals.

One such ruling mood is the lack of examination that presided over the elaboration of the American Republic. The Founding Fathers stole, and brandished, a lot of their soaring rhetoric from philosophers (most of them French), precisely to hide the fact they were the exact opposite.

Slavery Made Washington, & America, Rich. So Did Holocaust. Refusing To Look At The Truth, Enabled These Behaviors, And Lives To This Day, as General Mood, The PC Mood. Gentleman In Black Is Colonel George Washington, On His Lands, 1753.

Thereupon, a great tradition of lying, fake news, dissemblance, was launched. (Somewhat related accusations can be directed towards the mother civilization, namely France; however, in France, a tradition of excoriating some presidents (called kings, centuries ago), or even a tradition of ferocious philosophical wars is firmly installed…)

Obama, in his “Farewell Address”, claimed “America” (the US, actually, there is imperialism, the Monroe Doctrine, in the over-claiming word “America”) is always improving (and exemplified this by the “smooth transition to a new administration”). Maybe. However, it’s like saying a plane trying to take-off sees its speed always improving. Right. Yet, one has to clear the trees. One hundred H bombs would cancel the “America” show, forever.

Obama talked as if the US would profit mightily from further incremental improvements, as if there was all the time in the world. However he himself admitted that the calamitous effects of “climate change” will be upon us soon, and that they may the only thing the next generation will be doing. (He left war out of it, but that’s how changes shows up, always.)

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The Evil Origins Of The American Republic,

the USA, have been carefully hidden, to enable the citizenry careful denial that such are some of the traits which animate them. Thus enabled, said citizens are free to pursue, or let their masters pursue, the same ways and means, slightly translated to new settings.

To progress, one has to question the origins, and one’s origins. Those are not questioned enough in the USA. Therefrom the origins of American “naivety”. American “naivety” is a cover-up. Being outwardly naive enables one to practice evil, while claiming, to high heavens, that one is nothing of the sort.

Obama evokes the “corrosive influence of money in our politics”, and he sheds ((crocodile) tears, no doubt feeling all the good money coming his way: all theater, George Washington’s style. Actually, he loves the money. Most of us, normal types, would.

What did I just suggest? That the slave mentality is one of the things that is being inherited (that’s the part of the Trump revolution others missed: those who voted for Trump, voted against the slave mentality imposed upon them, and that  they welcomed, for all too long!)

The results, of so much mental inertia, of course, could be catastrophic; whereas said mentality just enslaved some continents, while devastating others, we are now all the continents, all the Natives, squirming on the chopping block.

President Washington was a slave master. A slave investor. A slave driver. A vicious, conniving exploiter of his fellow-man, exploiting loopholes in law to keep on torturing his fellow-men, by the hundreds, on a very personal basis. Should he have the capital city named after him? Get to know him better, before jumping to the affirmative. As The Economist puts it in The first president, slave-owner. The spectre of slavery haunts George Washington’s house,

Jan 5th 2017, WASHINGTON, DC:

“When Washington was 11, he inherited 10 slaves from his father; when he died five decades later, he owned 123 of the 317 slaves who lived and worked at Mount Vernon. In that time the estate grew from a fairly modest farmhouse with 2,000 acres to a 21-room mansion and nearly 8,000 acres. It was in this way that the first president became rich: by buying, owning and sometimes selling people and by forcing them to work for him, under pain of flogging, beating or being sold away from their relatives and friends. There had hitherto been little acknowledgement at Mount Vernon of this dreadful blot on Washington’s reputation, or of the hundreds of black slaves who lived and worked there.”

This abominable stain on the start of the American Republic was covered-up for decades of fake news:

“Insofar as slavery was mentioned at all in the plantation house’s literature and by its guides, it was to talk up the second thoughts on owning people Washington claimed to have had in the second half of his life. He thought it better, he wrote in 1778, to “get quit of Negroes”… This apologetic view of Washington’s slave-owning is still espoused by many school textbooks and historians… many Americans were surprised when, at the Democratic National Convention in July, Michelle Obama alluded to the fact that slaves helped built the White House.”

Slavery was an elaborate abomination. It was the free market (of people, as usual) in all its splendor. No indecency was left unturned:

“…an exhibition on slavery, “Lives Bound Together: Slavery at [president] George Washington’s Mount Vernon”, describes the lives of 19 of the slaves who lived on the estate. Sambo Anderson, for example, a carpenter, born in West Africa, whom Washington appears to have purchased in the 1750s and freed in his will. His wife and children were owned by the estate of Martha Washington and handed on to her inheritors after her death. Anderson spent the rest of his life saving money, from his work as a beekeeper and hunter, in order to buy the liberty of a handful of his children and grandchildren.”

To this day, The Economist recognizes, a mood of cover-up, of hiding the truth, and of fake news dominate the exhibition of the First President’s disgusting being:

“Even in the slavery exhibition, there is little sense of the violence Washington visited on his slaves—the whippings and beatings, the slaughter of his slaves’ dogs he ordered to prevent them alerting their masters to the approach of his overseers.  Much is made of his growing misgivings about slavery. But there is too little recognition that this appears to have been at least in part motivated by economics; by growing less tobacco Washington reduced his demand for slave-labour.

For Washington’s slave-owning was not, as the experience of Mount Vernon might suggest, a painful footnote to a great life, but as central to it as anything he did. Washington’s zeal for efficiency, order and money-making are all part of his mythology; these qualities help explain his success. They were also the spirit in which he traded in and worked his slaves. He approached the business of buying slaves as he might livestock, insisting, “all of them to be strait limbed, & in every respect strong and healthy with good teeth”. He worked them into the ground, expecting that “every labourer (male and female) does as much in 24 hours as their strength, without endangering their health or constitution, will allow.””

Washington always refused to free his slaves, as Lafayette urged him to do, for years. They were friends; at the battle of Yorktown, when the British army had to surrender, there was one American army, but also two French armies, one of them headed by Lafayette, and one French fleet, which had defeated,and put to flight,  the British fleet. Understand that the tradition, the culture and the legal system Lafayette came from, had outlawed slavery more than 11 centuries prior. Washington came from a tradition, a culture, a legal system, which had reinstalled slavery, 160 years earlier, to maximize profits.  

In truth, the US First President was a great beast of abomination (as I have pointed out in writing for more than eight years: see “Plutocracy Originated Slavery and Racism”). The Economist notices that Washington’s misgivings about slavery are given prominence in contemporaneous exhibitions. A type of Fake News. Fake News of the deepest type.

“Less prominent attention is paid to Washington’s lifelong efforts to protect the system that made him rich.  In 1783 he signed the first fugitive slave law, which authorised the recapture of escaped slaves in any state and the punishment of anyone found harbouring fugitive slaves. He also sought to circumvent anti-slavery law for his own purposes.

Pennsylvania’s Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery of 1780 ruled that any slave who entered the state with an owner and stayed longer than six months must be freed. Because Philadelphia was America’s seat of government at the time, this gave Washington a headache. His solution was to surreptitiously arrange for his slaves to be cycled in and out of the state every few months (“I request that these Sentiments and this advise may be known to none but yourself & Mrs. Washington” he wrote to his personal secretary in 1791). Only twelve weeks before he died, Washington was still trying to track down a slave who had escaped three years earlier, having learned that Martha Washington planned to give her away as a wedding present.”

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The Dark Side Created The USA In No Small Way:

To start with, just as slavery was central to President Washington’s successful life, slavery, and holocausts, were central to the success of the early American society, and its Republic: enslavement and extermination enabled to get rid of the American Natives, their control of the continent, and made the European colonists immensely rich.

Slavery, introduced in the first few years of the English colony, in 1619 CE, was unlawful in England (since the Frankish conquest of 1066 CE; slavery was unlawful in the Frankish/Roman empire since 655 CE!) Slavery was actually unlawful anywhere in Europe (out of the Muslim controlled area).

However, slavery made the cultivation of tobacco possible, to the point the English American colony became highly profitable.

By comparison, the French colony in Canada did not allow slavery, nor holocausts. Thus French Canada depended only upon trading furs with the American Natives: thus Canada was much less profitable than the slavery propelled English colonies.

The clashes with English authorities about “taxation without representation” were real. However, they were not the main bone of contention. The real, main problem was that real estate speculators and greedy colonists were eager to spread their colonization, and destruction of Native American societies, west of the Appalachians. Whereas the English authorities felt more decent, and wiser, to stop the holocaust (OK, certainly they also wanted to keep control). This was the main cause of the US war of independence, and no accident that a real estate speculator such as Colonel Washington played a central role.

Nor is it an accident that this fact is still covered-up (below the “taxation without representation argument”).

The Economist pondered that “panegyrics to Washington’s generosity and humanity leave little room for the horrors he oversaw. For an alternative view, your blogger asked a young black security guard at the slavery exhibition what he made of the first president’s much vaunted second thoughts on slavery. “You know, I’ve been studying this quite a bit since I started working here”, he said. “People say George Washington was against slavery. I say actions speak louder than words”.”

Indeed. Actually there is a remedy to all this.

Why should we pay attention to all this history? Because yesterday’s origins created today’s reality. Civilizations have moods and meta-moods. US religiosity is entangled with the desire of not wanting to know too much what is really going on. The Bible justified holocausts and enslavement, and the mood that, whatever good men do, it was ordered by God. That overall mentality is still in power, and enabled by the imperial manner of many an US institutions, and the aura they bathe in.

As the USA has become the world’s most influential power, the roots of the American mentality, greed, slavery and holocaust, should be carefully examined.

As whom many have depicted as a clown is going to be endowed by the immensely evil power of thousands of nuclear devices, each capable of annihilating a city in seconds, it is worth remembering how the whole empire got launched.

European conquered America, because they succeeded to do, what the Nazis (stupidly) dreamed they could do in Europe (Nazis had seen too many “Westerns”, and even absorbed all too well the idea that Westerns were fake news, to some extent, thus that Americans were not for real…) To put it even more bluntly, Nazism, for real, armed with the Bible, not the Swastika, is how the West, but also the Eastern Seaboard, and the fly-over country in between, was conquered.

The unexamined life may be too unworthy to keep on living.

And the obverse is true. A thoroughly examined life is much more worthy. Athens had only 60,000 citizens, yet dozens of them among civilization’s most prominent intellectuals. Total democracy endows with total power!

How? Any Athenian could pretend to the highest functions: they may be bestowed on him (many offices were drawn by lot). So all paid attention to what was going on. Obama had only to pay attention to what big money and gigantic power wanted him to do.

Was if why Obama shed a tear in his farewell address? Full of sorrow, for his departed soul, as he looks at the hopeful face of his youngest daughter? Remembering that he was the Faust in chief? President of all the little Fausts out there?

Time to study in greater depth the roots of our moods, lest we want to shed even more tears.  

Patrice Ayme’

Trump A Traitor?

This is what French billionaire (and newly found messianic Jew) pseudo-philosopher Bernard Henri Levy (BHL), wants you to think. BHL wants you to think Trump is a traitor and that BHL is just the opposite. Yet, BHL has been part of the powers that be, at the highest level, for his entire life, even more so than Donald Trump. After BHL made an editorial calling Trump a traitor, I was, naturally, titillated. A comment of mine was immediately blocked (censored). The following is a vast expansion of said comment. Basically BHL tries to drown Trump by inundating him with innuendos… Whereas, in truth, Trump’s major crime is that his dangerous rhetoric threatens the politico-financial milieu created by actors such as BHL. To enrich himself, BHL destroyed the African primary forest. Thus BHL has had much further consequences on world ethics, and lying as the new ethics, than Trump ever had. His hold on the media is frightening.

A foundational lie of modern plutocracy is that Obama and the Clintons are dedicated friends of the poor and downtrodden. Nothing of the sort. The government’s own statistics show it (look at the graph below).

If you don’t know what the Gini Coefficient is, that’s not alright.  It may mean you may have a life, but you cannot take an intelligent part in debating what ails the world. Thus, for the sake of general goodness and true progress, let me explain: when a dictator pushes the Gini up, he (and sometimes she) augments the plutocracy, the power of the few, the oligarchs, over the multitude. Here is the sad reality of Obama and Clinton from raw numbers of the Federal REserve Data (FRED): 

The Oligarchs Became Richest Ever Under Beloved Leader Obama I. Notice The Colossal Rise of the Gini Under The BelovedClintons & Their “Democratic” Congress. Contrary to repute, Gini stagnated under the evil G W Bush. So why are not Clinton and Bush viewed as even more evil? The ways of the simple are mysterious.

The Gini coefficient is a number between 0 and 1.  It is a number to evaluate how much the richest get (it could be income, wealth, education, health, etc.). A country with an income Gini coefficient of 0 means all income is distributed equally.  And a country with an income Gini coefficient of 1 means one person gets all the money.  This measure was created to show just how skewed goodies distribution was.

Sadly, yet eloquently, despite, or rather precisely because of Obama’s ideologue-strength desire to claim to want to redistribute income, he’s craftily managed to make the rich get richer while the poor got poorer. And this, at record levels. Thus, if you hated Bush that way, you should excoriate Obama.

By 2011, the USA had become one of the top (most unequal) countries in the world in wealth. Just surpassed by four dictatorships. This can be explained by the rise of financial manipulators and conspirators such as Bloomberg, a plutocrat many times the wealth of Trump, who supports Clinton (as his ilk always do).

Obama & Democratic Congress Cut Taxes On Richest Taxpayers At The Beginning Of Obama’s Reign. [They also transferred trillions to the richest under ‘Quantitative Easing’, but that’s not in the graph above!]

And this is exactly how many Trump supporters are feeling like: the victims of a giant conspiracy, complete with lying media, pseudo-liberal economists, and pseudo-philosophers railing against We The People. 

‘Something Is Going On, And You Don’t Know What It Is, Mr. Jones’ (Bob Dylan)

The last few times I saw Bernard Henri Levy (BHL) on TV, 2016, he talked to no end about “Jewishness”, and the “genius of Judaism”. He had even just written a book about it. The French audience stayed ominously scornful. When he rose to leave the stage of the famous debate show ONPC, nobody, not even one person in the audience of hundreds, applauded (although BHL was the major guest of the evening). Nobody was amused.

Why? When the ugly face of religious war is surfacing in France again, fanatics of this, that, or the other cult, are intuitively disliked: they don’t seem like offering anything but strife. Many, among We The People, rightly perceive racism, which consists in treating people differently because of their origins.

Indeed, BHL does not like Trump to “emphasize Jewishness“. “Emphasizing Jewishness” is a crime if Trump does it, says BHL, yet a blessing when BHL goes ballistic about it. BHL should read carefully “Night” of Elie Wiesel, where the latter (one of many Jews to do so, including philosopher Hannah Arendt) considers that exaggerated “Jewishness” was a factor in the satanic brew which brought the Shoah. Indeed. There are rarely single causes, most often, web of causes.

The critiques of BHL against Trump, much of them hearsay or wild deliberate misinterpretations, may, or may not be justified. They would be justified if the facts were really as depicted, not just well-founded as industrial strength hearsay. Even then, Trump is a blabber box, who sometimes warns his audience that he may not know what he is talking about, and that his opinion may change in the future. This is an unusual approach for a politician, it strikes many as sincere… And it is. Yes, it’s frightening, but it’s intrinsic to the present system of government we have: a few people, elected or not, fairly or not, have too much power.

The final complaint of BHL against Trump is infidelity. “Infidelity to America.” Whines he:

“The implications of Trump’s election would be truly terrifying. The problem would not only be his vulgarity, sexism, racism, and defiant ignorance. It would be his possible infidelity to America itself. The party of Eisenhower and Reagan has been commandeered by a corrupt demagogue who betrays not only his country’s ideals, but also its fundamental national interest.

American vertigo. Global disaster.”

That’s rich. Eisenhower passed a 93% tax on the wealthiest. BHL himself is the exact opposite: he is one of the wealthiest, stealing wealth from the poorest (Africans, poor French taxpayers). BHL co-opted the entire French state under both Mitterrand and his successor Chirac to extract his father’s company from bankruptcy, and make himself a billionaire. BHL got the help of billionaire Pinault, to intercede with president Chirac, and pass the appropriate law in the French National Assembly. BHL’s life is a testimony to the sort of entanglement of political power and the hyper wealthy, which disgusts so much so many of Trump (and Sanders!) supporters. Ironically, BHL has been in very close, loud and clear relationships with many of the world’s leading politicians, in a way he hints Trump also does with Putin.  

So why does a plutocrat such as BHL dislikes Trump so much? Because Trump said many times that the plutocrats who do not presently pay taxes, for example hedge fund managers, will, should he become president. BHL is scared that this mood, this mood of taxing the wealthy, will propagate (even in France, the wealthiest legally escape tax in many ways made to strike the poor hard). 

Policies Engineered by US Leaders Since Reagan’s Reign Are Obviously Wrong. Time For A Vast Change We Can See. European Parrots May Follow.

In his editorial BHL claims Trump’s call to renegotiate some debt would reduce the US to Argentinian status. Yet, some debt could be renegotiated: after all, president Roosevelt devalued the dollar and cut US national debt by 33%, the day he got to power.

That a pillar, and prime recipient of the present established order, such as BHL, does not like Trump is hardly surprising.  Trump has stated, loud and clear that he would severely modify the established order, making lots of bad actors, and free riders, pay. Trump want bad actors and free riders, from Amazon Inc. to hedge fund managers, to sanctimonious members of NATO who don’t pay for their own defense, to pay for the advantages they enjoy.

That so many of the “vulgum” BHL despises so much, so explicitly, are ready to vote against the established order, is refreshing. I would have preferred Sanders. Individuals such as BHL, who found the money in the coffers of states, they needed to cut the entire forests of some African countries, to buy themselves palaces all over the world, and dominate the media relentlessly, should get their comeuppance.

Trump demolished Jeb Bush by calling him a “liar” about the invasion of Iraq. Bush could not find a way to reply to that. Not just once, or twice, did Trump call Bush a liar, but hundreds of times. And Trump insisted with outright blustering anger that the entire government of Jeb’s brother G W Bush had lied too. And it worked: average right-wing Republicans, by voting for Trump, agreed that the Bush family was a family of liars. It is telling of the sorry state of US  politics that no American politicians had ever made such a furious denunciation of the Iraq invasion prior to that. (Yes, Clinton, as a crucial Senator, voted for the Iraq invasion, to help her friend G. W. Bush; Trump will accuse her to be either a liar or an idiot, or both, on this subject.)

Of this, this alone, real progressives should be grateful. And what of the wall Trump wants to build? Some will whine. Well, the wall already exists. Just look at that Gini above. That’s just the one on income. The one on wealth is way worse. And the one on after tax income jumped after Obama became president, because democrats decided to help the economy by taxing the wealthiest less, and pumping into them trillions through the Federal Reserve (“Quantitative Easing”)

In Africa, huge crocodiles look like friendly trunks, placidly laying there in the water. Lying there or laying there? That is the question many animals are not able to solve. Trump may not be the friend of the common person. However BHL has spent his entire life trying to demonstrate, to himself, that he was a good person. When obviously, he knows perfectly well that he is exactly the sort of crook the world is sick with, doing the sort of things which should be rewarded in the future not with billions, as he was, but with long prison sentences.

I am not for Trump. I am not advocating to be trumped by Trump. The choice between the insufferable Trump and the corrupt Clinton illustrates perfectly well the abysmal nature of representative politics. But I am certainly against liars, and lying in general. Much of what was presented as “progress” in the West since the Fall of the Berlin Wall was actually addictive lying. Yes, GDP went up, in the UK, or the US. But mostly GDP of the rich: watch Irish GDP going up 26% a year, thank to tax evasion.

The lie? That this sort of industrial strength legal tax evasion has nothing to do with most people’s lives getting ever harder. Lying is addictive because, with humans, perception, even perception of happiness, is (nearly) everything. When We The People lives the lie that exploitation is redemption, they live happy.

Increasingly it feels as if lying were most of the industry of the West: contemplate the fact that Obama and Clinton, who brought up the US Gini (on both income and wealth) up to heights never seen before, are really viewed by the losers they stole as their best friends. At some point though, those who do not view We The People as vulgar, may win. A different regime of truth will apply.

So is Trump a traitor? Let’s hope so. He would betray his class, as he already betrayed the Neoconservatives (who were all about invading Iraq).  When one looks at history on the largest scale, one can see that revolutions are often led by plutocrats who betrayed their own class (the Gracchi, and Caesar were from the very top of Roman society; they were assassinated; had they lived, the Roman Republic may well have survived, and progress forged ahead without the Dark Ages; a queen of the Franks outlawed slavery in the Seventh Century; several otherwise vicious Russian leaders propped Russia forward; and so on).

Maybe Trump is a piece of trash. Yet, when he got people to vote for him by decrying the “wrong system” he admitted he was a product of, and he was “wrong” and “part of the establishment”, Trump says important things, and set-up a different mood. A better mood that the one of embracing lies, just because they feel good.

The future is here: it looks just like the past. Lying is its cement, generously provided by the ruling class. Decrying lying is nothing new: the Cathars insisted that most of Christianism was a gigantic lie. Maybe the part of the universe humans lived in was controlled by Evil. That would explain the “Catholic Orthodox” church’s nature. The Cathars were, obviously, and in retrospect right. They were most believed in the most democratic and republican part of Europe, the giant county of Toulouse and surrounding areas. The establishment was not amused, and kill both the Cathars and their books, to the last (millions died, one million in France alone).

At some point, history did not repeat and real progress was made. First by analyzing the past. The time has come to analyze with more subtlety than ever.

Patrice Ayme’

Trump A Demagogue? So What?

“We empowered a demagogue” laments the New York Times ostensibly bleeding heart liberal, the kind Mr. Kristof, in his false “Mea Culpa” editorial, “My Shared Shame: How The Media Made Trump”. By this, Mr. Kristof means that Mr. Trump is a bad person. However, Mr. Kristof’s choice of the word “demagogue” is revealing. (Actually it’s not really his choice: “demagogue” is not Mr. Kristof’s invention: he just repeats like a parrot the most prominent slogan of the worldwide campaign of insults against Trump).

Trump a demagogue? Is Mr. Sanders a “demagogue”, too? (As much of the financial and right-wing press has it: for The Economist and the Financial Times, Trump and Sanders are both “demagogues” and that’s their main flaw.)

To understand fully the word “demagogue” one has to understand a bit of Greek, and a bigger bit of Greek history.

The Hellenistic Kingdom Mood, And Aristotle, Had A Devastating Influence On Rome, Thus On Western Civilization, Thus Us, Ever Since

What does demos mean? And what does agogos mean? Both words are Greek. Agogos means “leader”, Demos means “people”. In ancient Greek “demagogos” meant “leader of the People”. A demagogue was viewed as bad in the Hellenistic Kingdoms period, because kinship was good, and We The People was bad. We inherited 2,000 years of dictatorship from the Hellenistic Kingdoms’ mood.

The latter point is the key: thanks to Aristotle’s devastating influence, monarchies and tyrannies became the ideal political regimes (for the next 2,000 years). I explained the whole thing in “Aristotle Destroyed Democracy”. Aristotle was the senior, most respected figure, of an impressive number of mass criminals who were his personal friends, students and followers: Alexander the Great, Antipater, Craterus, etc.

The practical result was that the entire Greek world became subjected to monarchies and tyrannies. With the sole exception of Massilia (modern Marseilles) whose small empire stayed democratic and independent (in spite of being at war with no less than Carthage based in Barcelona!) Marseilles would fall only after Julius Caesar besieged it (in one of Julius’ particularly ridiculous exploits). But the fact only Massilia stayed democratic tells volumes (OK, when Greece, attempted to go back to democracy, plutocratizing Rome crushed it, culminating with the devastation of Corinth in 146 BCE).

So the deeper question is this: since when has “leader of the People” become a crime in the US? Was president FDR a “demagogue”? What is the president of the USA supposed to be? What is the problem? Is the president supposed NOT to be a “leader”? Or to NOT be a leader of the “People”?

Is the President of the US supposed to be a follower? Of whom? The plutocrats? Is the president of the USA supposed to take Air Force One every few weeks, to get money from the Silicon Valley plutocrats, and ask them for instructions?

The ascent of Trump is precisely tied to the opinion that the office of the President of the USA is not anymore that of the leader of the people. Instead the president has become the leader of the 1%, exclusively. Thus, the more one complains that Trump is a “demagogue”, the more one presents him as precisely what the country, and maybe even the world, needs: somebody who wants to lead We The People, not just the 1%.

[Mr. Kristof allowed a shortened version of this comment to be published… After sitting on it for 12 hours. Delayed publication is akin to censorship, as the comment was published in 777th position instead of being among the first. So Mr. Kristof is not as kind and open as he wants to depict himself.]

A hard day may be coming for global plutocrats ruling as they do thanks to their globalization tricks. And I am not exactly naive. Andy Grove, founder of Intel, shared the general opinion that much of globalization was just theft & destitution fostering an ominous future (the Hungarian immigrant to the USA who was one of the founders of Intel). He pointed out, an essay he wrote in 2010 that Silicon Valley was squandering its competitive edge in innovation by neglecting strong job growth in the United States.

Mr. Grove observed that: …”it was cheaper and thus more profitable for companies to hire workers and build factories in Asia than in the United States. But… lower Asian costs masked the high price of offshoring as measured by lost jobs and lost expertise. Silicon Valley misjudged the severity of those losses, he wrote, because of a “misplaced faith in the power of start-ups to create U.S. jobs.”

Silicon Valley makes its money from start-ups. However, that phase of a business is different from the scale-up phase, when technology goes from prototypes to mass production. Both phases are important. Only scale-up is an engine for mass job growth — and scale-up is vanishing in the United States (especially with jobs connected to Silicon Valley). “Without scaling,” Mr. Grove wrote, “we don’t just lose jobs — we lose our hold on new technologies” and “ultimately damage our capacity to innovate…

The underlying problem isn’t simply lower Asian costs. It’s our own misplaced faith in the power of startups to create U.S. jobs. Americans love the idea of the guys in the garage inventing something that changes the world. New York Times columnist Thomas L. Friedman recently encapsulated this view in a piece called “Start-Ups, Not Bailouts.” His argument: Let tired old companies that do commodity manufacturing die if they have to. If Washington really wants to create jobs, he wrote, it should back startups.

Friedman is wrong. Startups are a wonderful thing, but they cannot by themselves increase tech employment.”

However, American-based manufacturing is not on the agenda of Silicon Valley or the political agenda of the United States. Venture capitalists actually told me it was obsolete (before stepping in their private jets). That omission, according to Mr. Grove, is a result of another “unquestioned truism”: “that the free market is the best of all economic systems — the freer the better.” To Mr. Grove, or Mr. Trump, or yours truly, that belief is flawed.

Andy Grove: “Scaling used to work well in Silicon Valley. Entrepreneurs came up with an invention. Investors gave them money to build their business. If the founders and their investors were lucky, the company grew and had an initial public offering, which brought in money that financed further growth.” 

The triumph of free-market principles over planned economies in the 20th century, Mr. Grove said, did not make those principles infallible or immutable. There was room for improvement, he argued, for what he called “job-centric” economics and politics. In a job-centric system, job creation would be the nation’s No. 1 objective, with the government setting priorities and arraying the forces necessary to achieve the goal, and with businesses operating not only in their immediate profit interest but also in the interests of “employees, and employees yet to be hired.”

As even the New York Times now admits, the situation has degenerated since 2010. Although the employment rate halved, in a slave state, everybody is employed. But neither the economy, nor the society, let alone progress and civilization are doing better.

“Insecure, low-paying, part-time and dead-end jobs are prevalent. On the campaign trail, large groups of Americans are motivated and manipulated on the basis of real and perceived social and economic inequities.

Conditions have worsened in other ways. In 2010, one of the arguments against Mr. Grove’s critique was that exporting jobs did not matter as long as much of the corporate profits stayed in the United States. But just as American companies have bolstered their profits by exporting jobs, many now do so by shifting profits overseas through tax-avoidance maneuvers.

The result is a high-profit, low-prosperity nation. “All of us in business,” Mr. Grove wrote, “have a responsibility to maintain the industrial base on which we depend and the society whose adaptability — and stability — we may have taken for granted.” Silicon Valley and much of corporate America have yet to live up to that principle.”

So the argument counter-Grove was that plutocracy was OK, as long as it was all American (an argument Trump long disagreed with, BTW). But, clearly, it’s not the case anymore. Instead the US government has become the back-up to global plutocratic corporations (watch Obama flying to Argentina to encourage the new US pawn there, just elected… after making economic war against left leaning Argentinian governments ever since Argentina refused to take orders: the first beneficiary are New York vulture funds).

Sanders, the other “demagogue” just defeated Clinton (the establishment insider plutocrat) in three states out of the US mainstream: Washington State, Hawai’i and Alaska (with 3/4 of the votes). Interestingly, and differently from all the other past or present primary contenders, Clinton is implicated in several inquiries from the FBI, Department of Justice, etc. At least she is not terrorized like Maria Carey, who cancelled her concerts in Belgium (other singers did not).

Mr. Grove: “… the imperative for change is real and the choice is simple. If we want to remain a leading economy, we change on our own, or change will continue to be forced upon us.” Trump and Sanders say nothing else.

Yesterday, a dove penetrated inside my house, flew around, collided a bit with something, and then exited the window with precision, before perching on a eucalyptus branch, looking at me dazzlingly. I have seen it many times before, but generally it stays outside. Last night, I dreamed of seeing a pigeon fly at an angle into a wall. I asked it why it did that, so deliberately. It replied: “Did you see the state of the biosphere?” I suggested a more constructive actions. And it’s how it is going to happen: at some point, all the biosphere we depend upon will revolt (and after Zika, we have now Lassa fever, which is very close to Ebola).

Our corruption is not just an economic and social problem, a political problem, and a civilizational problem, as it was under Aristotle.  It is a problem for the entire planet.

“We empowered a demagogue“, laments Mr. Kristof. His true calling, and that of the Main Stream Media, was to empower plutocrats, and their obsequious servants. How sad they are.

Patrice Ayme’

Torture To Death: Christ’s Crux

Patrice Ayme’: The angry, cruel, somewhat demented, child murdering, jealous, holocaust-prone god of Judaism-Christianism-Islamism justifies bloody despots. (So does Literal Islam, and even much more so, but that’s besides the point here. What is interrogated here is the origin of Christianism’s, and thus Islamism’s, hyper-violence)

Chris Snuggs: “Christianism does not belong in the same basket as Islam. Disregard how men have perverted both; just compare what they ARE, what their fundamental message is.”

PA: Agreed… If one forget that they are not at the same stage of development, and if one uses a stochastic filter. Stochastic comes from the word for “aim” in Greek. It’s used to mean “probability theory”. So the idea is to look at the New Testament, and take, so to speak, the average statement, ignoring those where (the mythical) “Christ” speaks about swords and all that… Sword, as an instrument to foster faith. Force, the Sword, is what made Christianism seductive to Constantine. He was a forceful man. He steamed his wife, alive, killed his nephew, and had his meritorious, accomplished, most famous general and admiral of a son, executed.

Force & the Sword, Justified & Practiced by God, Is The Christian Mood Which Seduced Constantine, Because So Was His Calling

[Roman Emperor Constantine’s statue at York Minster, Britannia, his birth place.]

Here is a sample I have often used:

Luke 19:27: “But as for these enemies of mine, who did not want me to reign over them, bring them here and slaughter them before me.”

Some will play it down: ‘Oh, it’s just one sentence!’ Others turn this around, and sneer, when one criticizes Islam’s violence:’Oh, there are also violent statements in Christianism!’. Both COUNTER-IDEAS miss the point: just as one horrible scream can create a terrible mood, so can a horrible statement. PPP Torture Is Intrinsic To Christ’s Business Model [Final Judgment.]

And, by the way, there are actually multiple statements of the greatest of horror, and an insistence that horror was prescribed, ordered, glorified, organized, instituted by god himself. It’s not by accident that the very symbol of Christianism is the worse torture known to man. Even Christ could not figure it out. Well, my child, lonely nailed on your cross, I did: “VIOLENCE IS THE PRICE OF LOVE’. And it was fun to figure it out.

Judaism, its child, Christianism, and its grandchild, Islamism were all war religions. Judaism appears shortly before King David, the enlightened founder of the Greater Israel. (At least so says the Bible written by captives in Babylon, more than half a millennium later.) Christianism, or more exactly what he called “Orthodox Catholicism” (= “Orthodox Universalism”) was imposed by Roman emperor Constantine, who was one of the greatest warriors in history, second to none. As a teenager, the special force like, privileged youth Constantine already terrified the imperial court. Emperor Galerius, the “animalistic, semi-barbarian” persecutor of Christians, tried to get rid of Constantine with a number of dangerous challenges, including suicidal cavalry charge, and fighting a lion in single combat.

Constantine became the single emperor of the entire empire, after many decades of multiple emperors governing in a more or less collegial manner (there were up to 6 emperors at a time, mostly because of the problem of distance in the far-flung empire!).

Christianism is a system of thoughts. But it’s also a system of moods. Systems of thought can be subtle: Islam, for example comes equipped with two meta-principles: Taquiyah (lying to unbelievers as religious principle) and the Abrogation Principle.

Christianism did not have Taquiyah: early Christians obstinately refused to lie, and diminish their god, or their faith, in any way, to the bafflement and anger of other Romans. But Christianism definitively has the Abrogation Principle; when god feels it is good medicine to torture to death his own son, who did nothing wrong, definitively the message that it is good to torture to death people who have done nothing much.

Systems of moods are even more subtle than systems of ideas, because they do not say things directly and explicitly. The mood in Christianism is, basically, that it’s OK to kill, horribly, for no good reason: after all, man is created in the image of god.

Now is there anything more significant to torture to death the innocent? Should we call torturing to death the innocent the most prominent, the most significant, the most particular, the most peculiar, and marking art of the Christian god?

As I insisted, most human beings have known and practiced love. Human beings don’t need lessons on love, as if it were an alien planet never seen before.

But human beings have not known, and, or, practiced, nor justified, excused and become familiar with, torture to death. Christianism not only justified torture to death of the innocent, but made it the crux of its entire system of mood. Torture to death is the clé de voûte, the keystone, the part without which the entire edifice of Christianism collapses.

Judgment And Torture Constitute Christ’s Business Model

And indeed, the last executions and torture to death of Christianism in Western Europe happened during the Nineteenth Century. In the preceding century, Voltaire had railed against the execution by “slow fire” of quite a few people, from a senile Jesuit to an eighteen year old a Jewish girl. The People was upset because of the Lisbon quake cum tsunami, which caused massive, irreparable damage. The girl was burned slowly just because she was Jewish.

Literal Christianism set up the mood which Literal Islamism inherited. Both originated with the guy who steamed his wife (and is a saint of the Orthodox branch of Christianism. Yes, this had deep consequences, including economic.

In the preceding, torture to death was vilified as Christianism’s ugliest mood. However, it does not stop there. The mythical Jesus, a rabbi, approved of the entire Old Testament. And that includes the mood of being willing to kill one’s own child to please one’s boss (“god”).

Yet, it does not stop there. Just as the cross is an add-on not found in old Judaism, Christianism is full of would-be cannibalism (“drink, because this is my blood”, “eat, because this is my flesh”). Would be cannibalism? Well, no wonder the Crusaders roasted children when they got hungry. History is not just an exacting teacher. Like the Christian god, history has no qualms, it just is.

And history is not just about facts and ideas. It is also about moods. Christianism went hand in hand with plutocracy, because it was all the excuse plutocracy needed to reign by the sword. And love was the screen behind which it hid its vicious rule.

How and why Christianism became supreme, as Constantine’s Catholicism, goes a long way to explain, and excuse, Literal Islam. This is the main reason to consider this agonizing corpse.

Patrice Ayme’

From Nasty Moods, Nasty Wars

Who Is In Charge? A Calculus Of Nasty Moods?

Under the tables, tensions keep on rising. Long encouraged by the tolerance of the USA, China is engaged in a dangerous game on the South China Sea. China ought to pay more attention to the weather: foul weather and a tornado on the Yang Tze sank a luxury boat in minutes, killing more than 620. Accidents happen. Meanwhile, the Korean dictator piles up nukes, and so to the Islamists, in Pakistan. And Putin chuckles a lot.

Under The Mongols, China Went All The Way To Indonesia. Back Into That Mood?

***

What The USA Calls Corruption Overseas, It Calls Business, in the USA:

In the USA, a few billion dollars for the selection

Of the “Commander-In-Chief”

Is business as usual, and no mischief

One calls it a presidential election

In the USA, when from the wealthiest, universities receive

Billions, plutocrats in your face do not deceive

In the USA the public buys plutocrats stadiums

This is no corruption, but the proper medium

Yet when under some tables, circulate a few millions

Learn! Only the USA decides who needs the billions

For its own banksters and greedy minions

To incite some countries to build soccer stadiums

A crime it is, for the USA, FBI, IRS, no tedium

Anything else against Washington Empire a crime

It is, and back deep into the grime

You of the whole world belong

Serving our USA plutocracy you should, all along

If you want a fortune in millions

American politics serve, Bushes and all Clintons

***

A Mood Of Nasty Outrageous Force Growing:

Of course the Russians see these methods being used. They see it works, they see it worked: Switzerland used to be number one in money management for wealth. USA law enforcement indicted Swiss High Finance, and now the USA High Finance is again number one, as it should.

So Putin decides 88 persons cannot enter Russia, including the French philosopher BHL, and European MPs. He just does not like the way they think. Never mind that BHL had an invitation for a debate on Russian TV.

Of course the Chinese plutocrats see these methods, and think: why not us? Why don’t we do something similar? Use our force, and the outrage we can muster. So they build outrageous islands in the South China Sea (“Reclamation”), and claim they own it.

The Philippine president, visiting Japan, compare China’s expansionism to Nazi Germany’s.

Fundamentally, Nazi Germany was doing what it thought the USA wanted it, or enabled, or allowed it to do (the Nazis were financed, fueled, and diplomatically supported by American plutocrats).

At this point, the People Republic of China has pretty much got a green light from the USA too. And the FIFA, or Swiss sort of prosecution have only showed China that the proper way is the outrageous usage of force and mass hypocrisy.

On the face of it, politics, in the USA is as corrupt as possible: it is actually legal to spend billions to elect officials, all the way up to the president… So called “representatives”, “Senators”, etc.

Tens of times, very officially the president went to sleep at plutocrats home, and people paid hundreds of thousands, if not millions, a day, to be in the presence.

But that’s not corruption, just American style politics.

***

If You Want War, Prepare A Mood, Say A Mood Which Rewards Aggression:

The Romans said: if you want peace, prepare for war. History says: if you want war, prepare a vast mood, conducive to it. Thucydides concluded his history of (part of) the tragic Peloponnesian War by said it originated from a mood. Similarly, the First World War, and the Second World War were driven by a mood reigning in Germany at the time. And guess what? Both in the First and Second World War, it was egged on by the USA.

By not bringing the spirit of the laws to bear on its banksters, but on the game the rest of the world plays, the USA is playing a dangerous ball game. And that may just be what many officials of the USA, maybe egged on by the plutocrats they talk to, are financed by, dine, play, and sleep with, are exactly doing at this point. Between two rounds of golf, they go FIFA hunting, while civilization is smoldering. Not that they can smell anything funny. Evil is best operated by the clueless.

From nasty moods, nasty wars and naughty profits, chuckle the plutocrats. Yes, sometimes. And sometimes not.

Patrice Ayme’

 

I Mood Therefore I Think

SYSTEMS OF MOOD ARE CRUCIALLY ENTANGLED WITH IDEAS:

***

***

MOODS COME BEFORE IDEAS:

  The philosopher Foucault became professor at the most prestigious Collège de France in 1970 as a “Historian of Systems of Thought“. That was an admission, by the power that be, that there are such things as Systems of Thought, and that they are most important. I don’t know if Foucault did that much of a good job (I find his analysis of the Franks extensive but rather superficial, and worst, rather conventional; but, at least Foucault had the merit to think that the founders of the West were worth studying).

  The idea the Collège de France had,  of studying Systems of Thought, is crucial. (By the way the CdF was founded in 1530 CE, all its lectures are free, and the professors the foremost world experts.) All comes from there. Even the hardest sciences.

  Just as one studies arithmetic, or organic chemistry, one could, or should study any system of thought, from fly fishing to Islam. They have lots in common.

  Foucault’s “genealogy of knowledge“, was similar to Nietzsche‘s “genealogy of morals“. A colleague of Foucault was Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His phrase: “No preconceived notions, but the idea of free thought” is burned in golden letters above the main hall of the building of Collège de France. But is free thinking an idea, or a mood?

  Ideas are central to logic, but what do they do? They connect notions, that’s all what logic is, and that’s the job of axons in the brain, basically. Yet, the axonal network is only part and parcel of the brain.

  In a related effort at understanding, David Hume held that reason alone cannot move us to action. Action come from passion. Reason alone is merely the “slave of the passions,” i.e., reason pursues abstract and causal relations solely in order to achieve passions’ goals and that reason provides no impulse of its own. (Treatise Of Human Nature.)

  My opinion is more extreme. Just as in Quantum Physics, particle and wave are entangled concepts, logic and passion are also entangled in Brain Physics, at any single moment, or during each other’s blossoming.

 Not only are moods involved in thinking, but moods have to be attributed to entities involved in logic, for conceiving better what is going on. If nothing else, I observed this with top mathematicians and physicists, who I had the good fortune to observe in their natural environment for quite a while.

  These creators view themselves as the most rational people in the world, but they are pretty much dominated by passions, not just as a motivations, but also as a way, the way, of thinking. When addressing terms in equations, Fields medal level mathematicians will talk about, “these guys”. Top mathematicians need to make mathematics into an anthropological milieu, with mathematical terms running around in their heads like little beings, with moods of their own… I would even venture to say that it is this animation of mathematics that makes the top mathematicians: they are at the zoo, herding terms from equations.

  Modern brain imagery and studies show that neurons and neuroglia are entangled deeply together. Clearly neurons embody logical connections, and glias partake in entangled emotional support. Both make (their won, but entangled) networks.

  The mood behind Damasio’s  Somatic Markers Hypothesis, and similar work, supports all this. Damasio pointed out that Descartes made an error by concentrating just on logic, and forgetting emotions in the scaffolding of logic. But I go much further, be it only because I point out that, on (meta)logical grounds alone, emotion, and only emotion, can provide logics with the universes they need to exist.

  Thus we need to dig deeper. To study thought, we need to study the passions, which often come as culturally imprinted Systems Of Mood.

***

AMERICAN ROBOTS DREAM OF FINANCIAL SHEEP; USA WEALTH ADMIRATION MOOD:

  Systems of mood are all over civilization. For centuries, Christians and Muslims screamed:”God Is Great!” Often while slicing each other up. They were both expressing, and reinforcing, a mood. A large part of this mood was apparently that slicing each other up, was the best of all possible worlds. (A more careful consideration shows that the most enthusiastic God Is Great screamers were part of military aristocracies which profited handsomely from the political systems that God Is Great served so well… Thus God/Allah was part of a mutually reinforcing triangle of oppression)

  When Obama became president, he arrived with the mood that financiers were most admirable: his “friend” Jamie Dimon, he much “admired for his gigantic portfolio, which he [Obama] could certainly not manage“.  It’s not just that Obama wants apparently a lucrative job of consultant at JP Morgan. It’s worse than that: he is sincere.

  Dimon was born and raised a financial plutocrat, third generation (at least). Dimon made his most important financial investment in a plot with the central bank of the USA, which was so famous, among banksters, that it got its own name, the “Jamie deal” (buying Bear-Stearns for peanuts, thanks to his always so generous friends, Ms and Mr. American Taxpayers!)

  Obama is still deep in his mood of admiring Lord Dimon.

  On May 15, 2012, episode of ABC’s The View, Obama responded to JPMorgan Chase’s recent $5 billion (or is it 9 billions?) trading losses by defending Dimon against allegations of irresponsibility, saying, “first of all, JP Morgan is one of the best managed banks there is. Jamie Dimon, the head of it, is one of the smartest bankers we’ve got”.

  Notice the imparted mood: Dimon is not just the “first of all“, but “we” all own Dimon as a sort of national treasure… Dimon got the treasury, the Fed, and apparently the president, by the balls (if any), but Dimon “we’ve got”! He is ours! Lucky us: we owned Dimon all along, we just did not notice. Dimon is our man, he works for us. Soon we will dreaming we sleep in the 17 rooms mansion he had in Chicago …It reminds me of the song of the Temptations: “Just my imagination![running away from me]“…

  Well, “best managed” is not the “first of all” of Dimon. On the face of it, very few banks, worldwide, have been as badly managed as JP Morgan. How many banks, worldwide, may have got maybe 100 billion of subsidies from taxpayers? Very few. Out of 8,000 USA banks, or so, nearly none needed taxpayer help. Same in Europe with more than another 10,000 banks. And certainly at most a handful of banks, worldwide got help on the scale of JP Morgan (OK, Dimon, a screamer, screamed that he did not need the help; watch what they do, not what they scream about).

  Obama should, please try to get out of his bankster admiration mood. Dimon is using taxpayer money. That’s the “first of all“, about Dimon, for those who approach the situation with the right mood, the objective mood. 

  Let’s Paul Krugman say it. Dimon is “the point man in Wall Street’s fight to delay, water down and/or repeal financial reform. He has been particularly vocal in his opposition to the so-called Volcker Rule, which would prevent banks with government-guaranteed deposits from engaging in “proprietary trading”, basically speculating with depositors’ money. Just trust us, the JPMorgan chief has in effect been saying; everything’s under control. Apparently not.”

  The key point, notes Krugman, “is not that the bet[s] went bad; it is that institutions playing a key role in the financial system have no business making such bets, least of all when those institutions are backed by taxpayer guarantees”.

  And, a fortiori, when those plutocrats’ heavens use taxpayer money directly, which is exactly what expanding the “monetary base” or “quantitative easing” amounts to. (Krugman did not mention these, because he is partial to them… He has to. But he knows…)

  Someone like Obama is desperately into the mood of believing Warren Buffet is his father, or something like that. Dreams of his father.

  Yes, fathers are important, in the plutocratic universe: Dimon got a gold plated career from the start; his father, a stockbroker, executive VP at American Express helped… Although the fact that Obama’s father was at Harvard, also helped him, no doubt, Harvard having instituted the prerogative of inheritance as part of its global reach of plotting pseudo intellectuals.

  I documented in “Sage of Obama” Obama’s mood of embarrassing adulation of riches. That deep desire to confuse financial wealth and wisdom, shared by all too many Americans (millions of whom partake in calling Buffet, a miserable financial conspirator, who, in a just world, would be the object of a warrant of arrest from Interpol, the “Sage of Omaha“).

  In Mexico, by the same token, we have Carlos Slim, plutocrat, son of plutocrat, and made much richer, as all real plutocrats, by being serviced by the state. Slim bought Telmex, Telecommunication Mexico, from the state, for not much, allowing him now to control now 90% of telecoms there, while charging some of the highest rates in the world. A conspiracy theorist may believe that happened because many politicians and bureaucrats got paid under the table. That is why conspiracy theorists are the enemies of philanthropists.

  Indeed, there again, the only reason Slim is not in jail is that the mood has been carefully sown that he is a “philanthropist“, and that such titans can only be admired (and they could never have conspired to buy Telmex because, just because, we told you, everybody knows, that conspiracy theorists are crazy.)

  Obama tasted of wealth enough when he was a child, to want much more. Something about having four in-house servants… That put him in the mood of respecting wealth. A mood that became much more extensive in the USA after Ronald Reagan was elected king.

  Being a prisoner of such a mood of adulation of the richest, one could not expect Obama to prosecute banksters with the vigor presidents Reagan and Bush Senior had shown with the Saving & Loans conspiracy.

  Contrarily to its ill repute of being cool and remote, science is completely entangled with systems of mood. Examples are found in fundamental physics (Big Bang, Foundations Quantum). reciprocally, science can be brought to bear on Systems of Mood. OGMs and the attitude relative to nuclear energy are two obvious examples.

***

THE NEOLITHIC OUGHT TO BE FELT AS THE REIGN OF GENETICALLY MODIFIED ORGANISMS:

  A tale of two moods. Some are going around, hysterically decrying GMOs, feeling very progressive (the headquarters of the anti-GMO agitation being France, although that may change now that the Socialists are in power). I personally think that any GMO that could potentially, and plausibly, gravely threaten the environment should be outlawed. That’s a good mood to have, indeed.

  And yet, another, even better mood to have, is to realize that, without GMOs we would still be in a pre-Neolithic state. And that Earth could carry, optimistically, only a few million people (and they would be eating each other a lot).

  Indeed nearly all we eat, plants, nuts, fruits, animals, are Genetically Modified Organisms. So we should feel gratified to enjoy GMOs. (The most correct and deepest mood in that arena of thought.)

  Considering that civilization would never have appeared without GMOs, a meta-mood ought to be called upon: to be against GMOs is uncivilized.

  So in connection with GMOs, three moods are justified:

1) Potentially dangerous GMOs ought to be outlawed. (Caution!)

2) No GMOs, no civilization. (Gratitude!)

3) Throwing all and any GMOs out with rage is inhuman, the royal road to total destruction. (Defiance Against Chimps On A Rampage!)

***

FUNDAMENTAL MOOD BEHIND SCIENCE: OFF WITH THEIR HEADS!

  Science has been distinctively unpopular under tyrants. Examples abound: Imperial Rome, which was crafty enough to cover its anti-intellectual mien with extravagant generosity to philosophers obsequious to the plutocratic system. The Catholic Church in the Middle Ages, Stalin, Hitler, were also great enemies of science…

  Science and technologies are often the butt of fierce moods. Some people have written to me of their hatred for the LHC at CERN (which just discovered the Higgs field). Some even identified CERN (a French acronym) with Hitler’s weapon programs, in the vain hope to ruffle me in the wall street Journal comments.

  I will explain in a future essay that the mood against nuclear energy is actually a mood that contradicts the reality that our planet is life giving because Earth is the largest fission nuclear reactor in the universe we know of.

  Once this fact gets to be well known and understood by the world’s masses, no doubt the mood about nuclear energy will change, from revulsion to adoration. Nuclear energy! Our savior! Our creator! Our shield! Our continent churner! Our CO2 storage device!

  Why so much hatred against new knowledge? Because new ideas threaten the established order, which is, first of all, a mental order. The mood that what we know leaves much to be desired, is intrinsically threatening to all and any established authority. If we know more than the authority why is it not us the authority? If we do not ask this question, the authorities certainly will, thus suspect and dislike us.

***

STRANGE MOODS EVERYWHERE, ONE, OR MORE, PER TRIBE:

  The Big Bang is another mood. Never has so much rested on so little. It just, feels good. Just like Genesis. Same mood, Fiat Lux.

  As far as I am concerned, established observations are compatible with a 100 billion years old universe. (Not 13.7 billions! They get to 13.7 billion by macerating the data with a special Big Bang sauce) But of course, the mood among the Very Serious Scientists is that, if you say such a thing, you are ignorant. The VSS are not known for condescending to be fully honest with the public.

  Never mind that Big Bang theory necessitates the Inflationary Universe, zillions of new universes everywhere, all the time. On the face of it, that’s the most insane idea, ever. Well, if you think so, you are just not in the right mood, and we know of no conference nor seminar you will ever be invited to. VSS are not in the mood to talk to you.

  Once I gave a seminar (at Stanford) on Black Holes (in a joint math-physics seminar), and I explained that the theory crucially depended up hypothetical Quantum effects, that I made explicit, and which were usually ignored. Thus the logic had unexamined bifurcations, and the standard Black Hole theory could not be viewed as conclusive. A (future) Fields Medal accused me of “meditation“. He was in the mood of embracing only what it was fashionable to embrace (sure it helped him to get the Fields Medal).

  The Big Bang has a great advantage: precisely because it rests on a great mystery (universes out of nothing, everywhere!) that deep revelation is impenetrable to the masses, and thus unites, and empowers the priesthood.

Along similar lines, the Nicean version of Christianism insisted that 1 = 3 (the mystery of the “Trinity”, justly derided by Arians, Copts, and, later, Muslims).

  The more absurd the belief, the more mysterious, the more distinguishing, unifying and empowering to the oligarchy that holds it. Such is the mystification mood.

  And I do say such a thing, because I lived in many cultures, and I have seen many, where dozens of millions of people are very much into the mood of deliberately believing into something stupid. They are in the mood of imposing upon themselves a crazy mood.

  Why?

  Simply because distinctively outrageous moods define, enforce and encourage an even more rewarding mood, the tribal mood. Tribes made humanity possible. They made the many into a super organism. The tribal instinct is tied to deep psychobiology to make it not just irresistible, but something to crave for.

  This why there are these insane moods supporting the local sport team (whatever sport, whatever team, whatever locale it is).

  The tribal mood is why the British view themselves as living in democracy, while refusing to live in republic, or with a written constitution, and call “Glorious Revolution“, the ignominious invasion that gave rise to the present rather plutocratic regime. Britain: not a thing public (res publica), but public rule (demokratia)? There again we find the mood of the absurdity that binds.

  On a less quaint note, an Israeli commission of eminent jurists suggested to validate all West Bank settlements, even the wildest, and less authorized. In other words, the ancient Israeli jurists are trying their best to make Israel hated worldwide. Why? Because hatred is a mood that reinforces the tribe. Moods within moods. 

***

MORE NUCLEAR MOODS:

  General Electric and Hitachi have applied for a licence to make a Uranium laser enrichment plant, a new technique that would allow to make nuclear bombs cheaper and more discreetly. There was great anxiety about releasing the details. An expert pointed out in the journal Nature, though that the main secret was already out: namely that Uranium laser enrichment worked. The details are less important than the mood: it can be done.

  Similarly, in World War Two, the top Nazi physicists were not in the mood of believing that one could make nuclear bombs, so they did not push for such a program. Whereas the French war Ministry was sure, as early as January 1938, in great part because of (Nobel laureate) Irene Joliot-Curie’s fierce temperament, that a nuclear bomb could be made.

  Similarly, Japanese scientists conveyed to their fascist government the mood that nuclear bombs were possible, and the Japanese military started no less than three different nuclear bomb programs, in an effort to nuke before being nuked.

  And of course, in the USA, Einstein wrote to president FDR, in the summer 1940, conveying his certainty that a bomb could be made (now that the French nuclear scientists had escaped to England). After the war, Churchill, suspecting French nuclear scientists were commies, eager to tell all to Stalin, wanted to jail them all (another funny mood; instead the PM was defeated in elections). In truth, French intellectuals, led, once again by Irene Joliot-Curie, confirmed to their dismay that, after all, Stalin was just another fascist, and were not in the mood of collaborating in any further bomb program, now that the Nazis had been defeated. The French military cooperated with Israeli scientists instead, to develop bombs. Israelis, for some reason, were in the mood…

***

THOROUGH THOUGHTFULNESS STARTS WITH HONEST MOODS:  

  Some will say: “Wait a minute! are you not regressing? Did not Socrates say that the correct way of thinking was by piling up little reasonings such as: ‘Socrates Is A Man, All Men Are Mortal, Therefore Socrates Is Mortal’?

  All I can say is that I have seen lions hunting, and their reasonings, on the fly, were much more clever than that. (The antelopes were pretty smart too.) This sort of reasonings a la Socrates were amusements. A 2 year old can understand them (I enjoy a two year old). The obsessions with these infantile reasoning covered up the truth. Athens’ truth. The truth of the plutocratic friends Socrates lived from, as Rousseau would later live off rich women.

  The truth was that Socrates was a man, because he was not a slave. That was the real mood of Athens, and, to be obsessive about: [(a>b>c)>(a>c)] was just a way to change the conversation, from the mature, to the infantile.

  Fundamentally a contradiction of moods stabbed through the heart all of Athens’ logical systems, just as it would with the Roman republic later, with the same result: collapse. Athens’ principal mood, the mood of the rule of a free people resting upon the mood enforcing the massive enslavement of others, for no good reason, but happenstance, was itself a happenstance waiting for no good.

  Everybody is dominated by moods, but nobody with contradictory moods goes very far. And the same holds for societies. No logic in the world will change that. Why? Because logic always needs a universe in which to unfold. And that is provided by moods (the Incompleteness Theorems in metamathematics say nothing else).  

  Those who want to think better will work on their moods first. It’s harder than to work on ideas. Philosophers will view any, all packaged, already prepared mood, with even more suspicion than an unexamined idea. The unexamined mood is not worth having. Yes, I always lived that way. Early on in life, I acquired the mood of respecting, somewhat, but not trusting, at all, the naïve way the natives felt about their perception of their universe.

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Patrice Ayme