Foolish Parrots, Exploding Gas.

Abstract: Stupidity may be irresistible, but if avoidable, it it is always immoral.

 Are middle class supporters of Obaromcare so naïve, that they betray their own class? Or are they just from the Middle Ages?

 Are CO2 deniers traitors to their fatherland? What is sure is that gas exploitation at the most extreme depth gives an opportunity to the French oil giant Total, after a few quakes, to explode the North Sea. Playing with Pluto, the god of the underground, can be enlightening.

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FEUDALCARE?

 The Supreme Court Of the U.S. (SCOTUS) asked quite a few question about the ill fated Obaromcare, the Trojan Horse of the health care plutocracy, the pseudo-naïve attempt, by Obama, to implement the Heritage Foundation’s  prescription for the rich to take care of the poor (that was previously installed by Romney, in the state that he governed).

 Basically we have president Obama in the Supreme Court desperately defending Romney’s health care system. Pseudo leftists do not seem to have noticed the irony. Why not vote for Romney directly? Is not Obama himself, saying that Romney knows best?

 The Supreme Court forgot to ask the main question: why do you want to bring back feudalism? Or maybe SCOTUS was careful to forget asking the obvious. The right wingers want money for their lords, so they could not ask. The left wingers want their direct suzerain, Obama of Hawai’i, and other “liberal” lords to be pleased with them, so they did not ask either. They all want feudalism to come back.

 When private people are forced into contract with private entities, that’s called Feudalism. Indeed.

 Why did the French revolution happen? Why was the inventor of chemistry, the gentleman who discovered and named oxygen decapitated? Because he was a Fermier General. Fermiers Generaux were private individuals in charge of taxation. They brought in taxes, paid themselves (handsomely) in passing, and gave the proceeds to the government. They became very wealthy. (Lavoisier used his wealth to found his expensive lab, a sort of private CERN of the 18th century.)

 In the case of Obaromcare, a health tax is raised, and then given directly to private individuals or organizations. So it’s not really a tax, and they don’t call it a tax. It’s not a tax, because taxes are public things. It’s more like a tribute. It goes from the people to the Fermiers Generaux, and stay there.

 In Europe, there are health care taxes. In France those health care taxes go directly to Assurance Maladie, the French Medicare For All, they don’t go to some of the richest people in the world. Taxes are fine: they come from the public, they go to the public.

 But Obaromcare taxes go directly to those American plutocrats Obaromcare was organized around.

 True, the Heritage Foundation wants the time of hyper wealthy lords to come back. Is that good enough a reason, oh people of the pseudo left?  

 Another point: some of the naive have said that, should the individual stop being forced to purchase private (health) insurance, the premiums would skyrocket. The health plutocrats, anxious to enjoy Obaromcare, ASAP, have threatened the populus with that notion, and caused great alarm to their parrots on the, pseudo-left.

 Do the right honorable totally naive people really believe that anything else, except a colossal rise of premiums would happen? Could they show me where in Obaromcare this is excluded?

 Visualize the naivety: if all pay the hyper rich, all will have health insurance, they say, and they contently bleat. Why? Do they really think those who don’t have insurance now can afford it, but prefer to do without it?

 Obama, the objective ally of the health care plutocracy was careful to NOT set-up a public health insurance system to compete with the private health care lords. If he had set-up a tax to force everybody to pay for Medicare, that would have been constitutional: a tax, from the public, to the public. Not a tribute, from the serfs, to their lords.

 Last, and not least: why are so many so called self declared “liberals” goose stepping behind the ultra right wing plutocratic Heritage Foundation?  Do they have only a spinal cord? Or is that a spinal choir?

 Obaromcare would have been constitutional in the Middle Ages. Now we have republics. Paying taxes to the wealthiest is unlawful, in a republic.

 One wishes Obama could have learned some correct history at Punahou. However, I learned from one of his classmates and closest friends that this prestigious private school (tuition more than eighteen thousand dollars), covered all of European history, from the Ancient Greeks to World War Two, in just a year. Obviously no time to explain the socio-economic organization of the European Middle Ages, when the hyper rich took care of the health of the poor.

 This may explain why Obama appears not to know that he re-invented feudalism.

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 CO2 TERRORISM?

 OK, feudalism we know, nothing new, last time it lasted eight centuries or so. Just a question of time. If it pleases Americans or Saudis to prostrate themselves to great lords, so be it.

 However, the collapse of the biosphere that threatens everybody, is another matter entirely.

 There is grotesque propaganda by the oil plutocrats in the USA that stuffing the atmosphere and ocean exponentially with all sorts of greenhouse poisons does not matter. Most Americans are not inclined to disagree with their masters, so they approve with the drunken enthusiasm of those inclined to please the mighty.

 (Notice the analogy with the blind approval of the simple for Obaromcare, just decried. To please the master, the poodle barks enthusiastically. His force is their force, or so they feel, thus they bark.)

 A question the self described “climate skeptics” have is: how do you know for sure? All right, we are never sure of anything, so it’s a trick question. We all use faith, and that’s the truth. However the faith we use is more or less well founded.

 I am going to fly to Rome, I have faith that the plane is well taken care of, that the pilots are not crazy, and know whatever situation they may encounter.

 The naivety of CO2 deniers knows no bounds. Deliberate naivety is bad faith.

 And the proof of their bad faith? CO2 deniers have been told there was no proof that going from 280 ppm CO2 to 460 ppm of CO2 equivalent gases was certainly a problem. Just don’t eat fish: it’s full of mercury from coal burning. Right. We have the highest rate of CO2 equivalent in more than 30 million years, all of a sudden, and what? We worry?

 The truth about the threat of climate change? Various components of the American defense establishment have “climate change” departments, and have already warned “climate change” is a major security threat to the USA. CIA, Pentagon, name it, they talk not just about climate change, but about the coming wars it will bring. “Climate change” is obviously the greatest security threat.

 So I would dare to propose that CO2 deniers are actually traitors to the fatherland, not just dim witted parrots trained by their greedy plutocratic masters.

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 WE EXPLODE, YOU BURN:

 Will Total explode (part of) the North Sea? Ten years ago, Total basked in its technological superiority. It succeeded to exploit a very deep and very hot reservoir of “natural gas”, that is methane, CH4, the famous greenhouse gas that burns spontaneously in swamps. The reservoir was below 5,300 meters (3.5 miles) of very complicated rock, at the bottom of the ocean.

 The gas was mixed with acidic CO2, Hydrogen Sulfide, H2S, and light petroleum. The temperature was hundreds of degrees Celsius, the pressure an unbelievable 1,100 bars (one thousand one hundred times atmospheric pressure). Trouble surfaced in recent years: as the gas was extracted, the field imploded slowly, under the enormous pressure of surrounding rock. Quakes struck on the margins of the field. Finally Total, a month ago, started to lose control of an adjoining, disused well.

 So now methane is escaping. The 200 workers abandoned the giant platform, worth 8 billion Euros (more than 10 billion dollars). Sea and air exclusion zones were put in place. So far a strong wind is blowing the heavy methane away. Did I say there was still a flame on top, far above the gas?

 Some people in Aberdeen, Scotland, more than 200 kilometers away, are worried of a fuel air explosion… At the limit, under condition ideal to Pluto, with no wind for a few days, one could imagine a nuclear bomb strength explosion…

 This comes after the Chevron leak off Brazil. There is plenty of fossil fuel. But it’s going to cost too much. First, in environmental damage. Go smell the gas.

***

Patrice Ayme

Money Does Not Care

And Those Who Follow It Don’t Either

PHILOSOPHY SAYS OBAROMCARE WILL NEVER WORK

***

Paul Krugman wrote an editorial Hurray For Health Care, in the New York Times lauding the effort of Obama on health:

“Now, the “Affordable Health Care Act” — known to its foes as Obamacare, and to the cognoscenti as ObamaRomneycare — isn’t easy to love, since it’s very much a compromise, dictated by the perceived political need to change existing coverage and challenge entrenched interests as little as possible. But the perfect is the enemy of the good; for all its imperfections, this reform would do an enormous amount of good. And one indicator of just how good it is comes from the apparent inability of its opponents to make an honest case against it. “

Yes, maybe, but another interpretation is possible, and it’s much more sinister. Indeed the “entrenched interest” is a code word for the extractive, exploitative right wing. Krugman just said the “Affordable Health Care Act” was about challenging the “entrenched interests”, that is, the health care lobby, as little as possible. So the opponents cannot make a honest case against it because, deep inside, they are delighted by it. As simple as that.

Krugman situates the problem:

“The fact is that individual health insurance, as currently constituted, just doesn’t work. If insurers are left free to deny coverage at will — as they are in, say, California — they offer cheap policies to the young and healthy (and try to yank coverage if you get sick) but refuse to cover anyone likely to need expensive care. Yet simply requiring that insurers cover people with pre-existing conditions, as in New York, doesn’t work either: premiums are sky-high because only the sick buy insurance.

The solution — originally proposed, believe it or not, by analysts at the ultra-right-wing Heritage Foundation — is a three-legged stool of regulation and subsidies. As in New York, insurers are required to cover everyone; in return, everyone is required to buy insurance, so that healthy as well as sick people are in the risk pool. Finally, subsidies make those mandated insurance purchases affordable for lower-income families.”

Well that should  look good on paper, for the naive idiots who, apparently, Krugman believes his readers are.

“Affordability” indeed depends upon the health care plutocracy seeing the light and showing some restraint. Because nothing forbids it to keep on squeezing those who can pay, until everybody is poor and needs subsidies, themselves obtained through taxes or borrowing from the rich against interest. In other words, nothing prevents the runaway plutocratic train to keep on rolling ever faster. This is the likeliest economic development, which, believe it or not, neither Krugman, nor the president or his advisers seem to have prepared for.

But I must admit that the “analysts” at the “Heritage Foundation” are plenty smart enough to have foreseen what will happen. Namely their plutocratic sponsors will get richer, and thus the rewards will come their way some more.

Can philosophy help? Sure. The philosophical method is about big thinking, not getting bogged down in the details and debris, as ants are wont to do, per their nature. Notice that Obama uses the adjective “affordable“. Health care is like a hotel, as far as Obama and company are concerned. And the question is: “Is it affordable?”

I will use the following neologism, which, I hope audaciously, will be forgiven: Obaromcare.

Obaromcare was suggested by the “ultra right wing Heritage Foundation” because it is perfect for that branch of plutocracy that feeds off health care. Any vampire feeds off fresh blood, and Obaromcare brings 50 million new victims to suck dry… The subsidy thing changes nothing as it simply means more resources will be siphoned off the middle class, through taxes.

That the “Heritage Foundation” brought the idea should have been a hint to the clueless. Maybe the president and the honorable Paul Krugman should refresh their critical abilities by reading Homer, and learn to beware of the Greeks and the gifts they bear. That was the lesson of the Trojan Horse. Greek boys used to learn that kind of things, 28 centuries ago. Now big boys are going around, steering the world, and they take the world’s most expensive plane, Air Force One, to go watch a baseball game, in Ohio. If that’s not a collapse of the idea of civilization, what is?

Obaromcare will not be the first time in the history of civilization when the public is forced to serve the private, while claiming it’s a public service to do so. It’s actually very much an heritage of the oldest plutocratic tradition.

Philosophically speaking, Obaromcare is close to the definition of the most abject plutocracy. It’s a desperate attempt to give a veneer of respectability to the plutocratic notion that profit primes care. All other developed countries know that, care, per se, is a fundamental notion living in another dimension than profit. This is the essential point.

Will Obaromcare work? First one has to settle what “working” means. The present system works splendidly for the for profit health care industry. What Obaromcare will do, for sure, is to make the present system bigger, not change its nature.

So, for the average people and the larger economy, Obaromcare will probably not work, because profit is at the center of it all, and nothing will stand in its way anymore than it does today. Obaromcare may have already increased national health spending.

In other developed countries, the will to care is what masters the search for profit. In any case, the numbers are talking louder than propaganda: the cost of health care in the USA is ascending at a completely unsustainable pace.

Obama could have made a reform that would have worked, if he had put the private plans in competition with MEDICARE FOR ALL: opening the existing Medicare, by far the largest health plan in the USA, and public, for people more than 65. The idea was to allow anyone to pay for Medicare. Just by economy of scale, Medicare would have been cheaper, while making a profit… for the public (by opposition of making a profit by whom Krugman himself calls “entrenched interests”, the plutocrats).

But Obama did not boost the existing public plan, Medicare. Medicare has efficiencies of size (it’s by far the largest health plan in the USA), but it is handicapped by not having the full negotiating capabilities of negotiating for lower costs that its peers in other countries have. One would have expected a democratic president to give full negotiating capability to Medicare. But that did not happen.

As usual, all Obama did, with health care, as he did with the banks, or with the military-industrial complex, or with the energy or transportation policies, was to follow the money, and bleat.

It would seem that neither Obama, nor Krugman, their kind, or entourage, understand that the economy is more than a one dimensional object. It is true that the search for profit is one of the dimension of the economy. But it is not the only one. Caring is another, and it is what health care is all about.

Chancellor Bismarck understood this perfectly well in the 1860s, when he created a national health care system for Prussia. That universal health coverage was extended after 1871 to the entire “Second Reich“. That system was so good that, after Loraine and Alsace got reintegrated inside France in 1918, they kept the Bismarck system (and have it to some extent, to this day).

The conflation of the notion of economy and the obsession with profit, shows up in the Obama’s administration naïve approach to whatever, including in its approach to space exploration: it believes, with some extreme right wing politicians, that the search for profits will render space easily accessible. According to this plutophiles, the economy responds only to profit, so augment the opportunity for profit, augment activity.

So the Obama administration has been heaping vast amounts of taxpayer money and property towards Elon Musk, a non American born immigrant based in the Silicon Valley, who, stupidly, believes that his primitive technology (already used by the Nazis 70 years ago) will open up space to his conniving mind.

That general drift is reminiscent of Solyndra, a solar company founded by friends (and financiers) of Obama in the Silicon Valley. The White House sank 550 million dollars of taxpayer money in Solyndra, although that was clearly none of its business. But it was the business of Silicon valley financiers Obama goees visit with his big plane every few weeks. Then the president goes from mansion to mansion, and is introduced to hordes of plutocrats and their broods, who have paid of the order of the median family income in the USA to do so. A four year old can give $40,000 to Obama, but then Obama gives 500 millions to her daddy’s “investment”. Hey, it’s all the same money, freshly laundered taxpayer money.  

The space technology ignorant Musk got in just one contract 1.6 billion from NASA. And many other supports, such as untold secret transfer of technology, that is, of public American property, to a white South African. Some famous astronauts (ex-senator and first american in space Glenn, Cernan, etc.) are furious about it.

On the side, the Obama administration supports Musk, with taxpayer money, for making electric cars for the rich. Musk has got to have good musk: Obama never misses a photo opportunity with him. Musk: smells good. General situation: smells bad.

Basically the same scheme is repeated for Obaromcare health care, as with Solyndra, or Musk, on a much grander scale. Public money for the privates, unlimited. In a few years people like Krugman will say:  We could have never guessed. We just did exactly what the “ultra conservative Heritage Foundation” told us to do. What could go wrong?

None of the 36  countries which have better health care systems than the USA have followed the money to build their health care system. For the very good reason given above: money does not care.  

Once care has been made the master motivation of its own house, health care, care can dictate lots of behaviors which enhance care and that the search for profit cannot dictate.

For example most forms of advertizing by private health care companies is unlawful in Europe (and European authorities are suggesting to crack down on more subtle forms of lobbying). In the USA, lobbying and advertizing has become more costly than research and development, explaining, at least partly, why the development of new drugs and cures has stagnated in recent years.

Here is the classification of health care systems from the World Health Organization:

1         France

2         Italy

3         San Marino

4         Andorra

5         Malta

6         Singapore

7         Spain

8         Oman

9         Austria

10        Japan

11        Norway

12        Portugal

13        Monaco

14        Greece

15        Iceland

16        Luxembourg

17        Netherlands

18        United  Kingdom

19        Ireland

20        Switzerland

21        Belgium

22        Colombia

23        Sweden

24        Cyprus

25        Germany

26        Saudi Arabia

27        United  Arab  Emirates

28        Israel

29        Morocco

30        Canada

31        Finland

32        Australia

33        Chile

34        Denmark

35        Dominica

36        Costa Rica

37        United States of America

So we saw that the motivational space of an economy has at least two neurological dimensions: profit, and care.

Are there others? Sure. Any motivation of human beings will be a factor in house-management (“eco-nomy”). Sex, of course is one, and so are many obsessions. And Will to Power and plain old Curiosity are also important. And so is also the Will to Vice (for a demonstration of that, have a close look at Afghanistan). In particular, pathological lying.

Obama and Krugman pretend to think that Wall Street is a hospital. Is that a medical condition, or something even worse?

***

Patrice Ayme

P/S: (I immediately sent a comment to Kruman’s sycophantic utterances, but the censorship system at the New York Times put me at the end of the line, and a barrage of sycophants at the front. It seems they censored me completely, not to give the idea the great liberals who lead us just follow the money. Of course, the NYT is a private outfit. but, when it reveals itself less honest than Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal, it’s not a good sign that so many people on the left proclaim it be respectable! Maybe they should meditate some that many followers of Hitler were from the left, and that Hitler’s “ultra conservative” re-foundation was designed to appeal to them, and PC them into it.)