European Ultimatum to Sabotaging Britain

The European Union wants Britain out, ASAP. No panic, bear, grin, and carry on. Seventeen million losers and conspirators voted one way, to Trump’s and other racists’ applause. A vote organized by hallucinating losers for other hallucinating losers, has turned as expected. It was organized by Europhobes, supposedly against Europhobia and against other, greater Europhobes, while served red-hot by counterfactual hatred organized by tax evading plutocrats who own all of British media. Thirty years of big lies bore fruit.

“Let’s be clear,” said German Chancellor Angela Merkel, “a blow has been struck against European unification“. The European group of all right-wing parties in the European Parliament condemned the British vote.

Great Britain has been sabotaging the “ever closer European Union”, for 43 years. Good riddance. Good riddance? Not so fast said Boris Johnson, the greedy future British PM:”Nothing will change in the short-term,” Boris hammered away. The well-fed Boris came out of his mansion, and was very loudly booed by a throng of Europhiles, while an impressive police curtain protected him.

Meanwhile, as I expected, Cameron delayed his resignation into Fall.

A saboteur sabotages better from inside. A real saboteur, complaining it really hates it there, will want to stay in the bowels of the ship, to keep on sabotaging.

As long as Great Britain stays in, it can sabotage the EU. Out, it may have to beg, and end up like Norway, paying twice as much per capita to the EU government, as Great Britain presently pays. Without Norway having any right to debate the measures taken. I believe that Boris Johnson will strive towards another referendum (just ask the Irish about how that is done). 

Oopss. Brexit: Britain Cut In Two. Beware Of Unintended & Intended Consequences

Meanwhile Trump landed from a Trump helicopter in Scotland, and declared himself delighted by Brexit, in a way sure to irritate there (Scotland voted 62% to remain in the European Union).

The European Union’s top leaders declared that they want the United Kingdom to leave the union “as soon as possible, however painful that process may be”. Moreover there will be “no renegotiation”.

The presidents of the European council, commission and parliament – Donald Tusk, Jean-Claude Juncker and Martin Schulz respectively – and Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands which holds the EU’s rotating presidency, said any further delay to Britain’s exit would “unnecessarily prolong uncertainty”.

After talks in Brussels, the four said they regretted, but respected, Britain’s decision.

“This is an unprecedented situation, but we are united in our response,” the European leaders said in a joint statement.

While the UK will remain a member until exit negotiations were concluded, the European leaders expect it to “give effect to this decision … as soon as possible” by triggering article 50 of the Lisbon treaty, which is effectively Britain’s formal letter of resignation (and starts a 24 months count-down).

Everything indicates that the United Kingdom will wait until November to activate Article 50 (the divorce with the EU). Nothing has been decided. Some parts of Great Britain voted 70% to 30% to LEAVE the European Union. Other parts of Great Britain voted 70% to 30% to REMAIN in the European Union.

Moreover, two-third of British Members of Parliament are for staying in the EU.

Verdict? New elections in Great Britain could be coming. However, it was mostly Labor voters voting with UKIP who caused the loss of “Remain”. That will cause the Tories pause.

In the 2000s Ireland, France and the Netherlands voted against the European Union.

What happened?

They voted again. Until Europe got the right answer.

An example is ongoing with Switzerland. In a referendum in 2014, Switzerland voted to reject the “free circulation of European citizens” which Switzerland had signed on, in exchange for 666 “bilaterals” (the treaties with Europe; OK, maybe not exactly 666 of them, but something like that). Bioth Norway and Switzerland belong to Schengen. Great Britain does not. Britain was always half out of the door, sabotaging, thanks in great part to its membership of the European MONETARY Union (EMU). Yes, unbelievably, Europhobic, British Pound clutching Britain, is a member of the EMU. Today.

The European Union started to take retorsion measures against Switzerland the next day (with cancellation of Erasmus effective immediately) and then gave an ultimatum expiring in 2017. Meanwhile the Swiss government did not apply the referendum. Guess what? A new “free circulation” referendum is coming, to abrogate the preceding one. At this point all and any political party in Switzerland will do anything to appease the European Union and turn around the February 9, 2014, referendum. It seems to me likely that this what Boris Johnson will try to do. But he will have a lot of hatred and delusion in the way.

The European leaders declared that the special settlement negotiated by David Cameron earlier this year was void and cannot be renegotiated. Various European leaders talked about the “EU 27”. Cameron will go to an emergency summit in Brussels on Tuesday, one day after France, Italy and Germany meet in Berlin. Merkel and Hollande talked right away.

The xenophobic, Islamophobic, hypernationalistic, Europhobic racist parties all over Europe are rejoicing, and clamoring for referenda. They want power, at the cost of disunion, war, economic or whatnot. Like Boris Johnson, they will do whatever it takes to “lead” us all to oblivion. At least self-described “liberal” American Europhobes (Krugman, etc.) can bathe in self-serving delight. So how come they claim not to love Trump? Don’t ask them, they will get angry. They want to have it all ways. Nothing makes people more angry than forcing their faces in their own contradictions (as Socrates already noticed, and exploited… Until they made him drink poison).

Patrice Ayme’  

Propaganda: Cruel, But Efficient

I subscribe to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and The Economist (among others). Of the three, the New York Times is, by far, the most efficient propaganda tool of the hyper rich. It’s done in subtle ways. For example Krugman ran a blog post: “January 18, 2014, 12:11 pm. The Myth of the Deserving Rich.

You would think that Paul Krugman would show a graph of the growth of inequality that is recent. Problem: if he did, all fingers would point towards Barack Obama, the great Dark Trojan Horse. So Krugman shows an old graph that safely finishes with the Bush era. (Implicit message: Bush = Inequality.)

Here is a more recent graph about (after tax!) corporate profits.

Obama’s Plutocratic Wealth Breakthrough!

As you can see, corporate profits, even under plutophiles Clinton and Bush, just, in the end, tracked GDP.

However, under Obama, there has been a breakthrough in after tax inequality. True, Obama controls profits not, but he controls tax (and, looking at the fine print, one sees the jump occurred when the democrats had a super-majority in the Senate and Congress: no hiding behind the Bush!).

Why inequality has grown is not complicated: the hyper rich financiers stole the financial institutions that they were supposed to manage (2008 “Bush Crash”).

Instead of recovering the money from the thieves he was golfing with, Yes-We-Scam Obama found the money in the Public purse. The thieves got to keep what they stole (see Fuld and his two friends at Lehman Brothers, who stole a cool 5 billions between them, while taking out the world financial system).

The exact same trick was implemented in Europe, thanks to the ignorance of the flabbergasted public.

(That’s why the recently proclaimed banking Union in Europe piously asserts that it will not happen again: next time the hyper rich steals everything, they will pay for it, it’s a promise!)

Don’t expect Krugman to explain any of this to you, as long as pitchforks are not visible from his Princeton office. Speaking of Krugman, here he comes in that post I started to describe:

“Many influential people have a hard time thinking straight about inequality. Partly, of course, this is because of Upton Sinclair’s dictum: it’s hard for a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.

Part of it is because even acknowledging that inequality is a real problem implicitly opens the door to taking progressive policies seriously. But there’s also a factor that, while not entirely independent of the other two, is somewhat distinct; I think of it as the urge to sociologize.”

Sounds good? But what is this “sociologize”? And what with that old graph? Did Krugman saw nothing new ever since The One became president and had dinner with him?

Notice that the corporations’ “profits” in the graph I posted are what’s left after the CEO class has been paid pharaonic salaries. Marissa Maier, a blonde at Yahoo, just gave a severance package to a man she had recruited a year ago, for a fortune. It’s in excess, that severance, just that severance, not the signing bonus, of 42 million dollars.

Marissa has done well, and will receive her own colossal severance one of these days soon. Then, now that she is hyper rich, she can go to another hyper salaried CEO job, or do her duty and become a “philanthropist”, or a politician.

Did Barack Obama visit Marissa Meier’s Silicon Valley mansion? Of course. Slept there, ate there, beamed giant smile, etc. The whole gamut: people of wealth, and taste. That was when Marissa was at Google, an apparent subsidiary of the NSA. Hey, she was just at the White House, to talk about that with Barack. No blood, no foul.

By “socializing” Krugman means the theory that the poor  is poor, because it deserves to be poor, as it lives badly (dysfunctional families, drugs, unwillingness to learn, etc.). Krugman concludes disjointedly, by adopting some of what I said over the years:

“This is, by the way, why the Occupy slogan about the one percent is so brilliant. I would actually argue that the number should be even smaller. But one percent is an easy to remember number, and small enough to make it clear that we’re not talking about the upper middle class.

And that’s good. The myth of the deserving rich is, in its own way, as destructive as the myth of the undeserving poor.”

I sent the following comment, among the early ones.  Although more than 100 comments were published, mine was not. One has to know the New York Times is owned by the same plutocratic family since the Nineteenth Century.

Not publishing my comment allows the New York Times to claim I need to be watched, and carefully censored, as I am what it calls “unverified”. I am indeed, officially under a surveillance program at the New York Times! Here is my censored comment:

There are some people who earn their lives well, and then there is the plutocratic phenomenon.  The two concepts are distinct.

One would assume that most creatures contributing regularly to Krugman’s  blog live well enough to find the time to do so (I have contributed more than $10,000 to the New York Times’ coffers over the years).

The plutocratic phenomenon is something completely different. It has to do with the exponential growth of wealth and power. It can only be prevented by punishing taxes at the very top (the .1% and .01%). Eisenhower had a 93% tax bracket, at the very top.

As it is now all these myths Krugman talks about, and condemns, live on because plutocrats control the media, and are, unsurprisingly, plutophile.

For example, California Governor Brown organized, and won, a referendum to rise a tiny bit taxes on the 1%. Last week California papers had front page stories about the rich fleeing the state. In big black capital letters. Spending the time to read the article (it was basically the same article all over) showed nothing of the sort. But, to the common citizen in the street, what was impressed was the flight of the hyper rich due to a 1% augmentation of tax on the 1%…

That was, of course, a propaganda operation. The sob stories about the hyper rich selling their commercial centers to flee a 1% tax are just implausible.

Effective propaganda is subtle enough to not be seen by Common Wisdom. Thus we have to keep on digging in to find out how it is that the serfs willingly serve the great Lords.

This was my censored comment. At first sight, it does not look that terrible. The question is: what was so subterraneously, unconsciously terrible in my comment above that was worth censoring?

The fact that, having got a subscription for decades, at the same street address, the New York Times persists in calling me “unverified” is a lie? And that all can see this lie, as I allude to the extravagant cost of my decades of subscription to the NYT?

Or is it the terrible fact that had had to be censored, the sob stories about the hyper wealthy fleeing California. And claiming that they are obviously planted?

Or did I gravely sin when I proposed to follow republican president Eisenhower’s leadership?… And tax the hyper wealthy 93%?

Einstein famously said, a little bit fast, albeit in the context of Quantum Theory: ”Subtle is the Lord, but he is not cruel!”

Well. Einstein was not inclined to be so forgiving for the Germans who had killed the Jews. At least that’s the way Einstein put it to his dear friend Physics Nobel laureate Max Born, when the latter returned to Germany from England. Einstein was not happy that Born acted as if everything had been forgiven.

By refusing to forgive, Albert Einstein recognized something which is true: cruelty is a central part of the human character. Those who deny that are not just stupid, but dishonest and dangerous. Same as the righteous, pseudo-“liberal”, but truly plutophile, New York Times. (That has been splendidly embodied by frantic NYT propaganda for the plutophile health trick set in Massachusetts by Romney, now known as… Obamacare.)

Plutocracy is a phenomenon that rises mechanically when taxes at the top are not colossal enough (Apple pays 2% global tax, the local bookstore, if it has not been devoured by tax dodging Amazon yet, around 30%). Then plutocracy becomes an obvious injustice. Yet, primates are genetically engineered to hate injustice.

So how does the injustice persist? Through sophisticated tricks, as above, motivated by sheer cruelty, will to power, and viciousness. It’s cruel and vicious to censor my rather innocuous comment, but it’s of the essence of those who crave power.

Subtle are the plutocrats, and they are cruel. Cruelty is actually the essence of plutocracy. Welcome to reality.

Patrice Ayme

American Circus

Propaganda & Poverty Go Together Well: No Isegoria, Plenty of Propaganda.

Athenians, as they built up their superlative direct democracy, starting with Solon, attached extreme importance to isegoria (or isogeria), the equality of every citizen in addressing the National Assembly. That ought to have been daunting: Athens did not have the Internet.

Imprinting the weak and meek to do their job, with enthusiasm, without any whining, and go around the mighty, eyes down, praising the great, is how plutocrats want them. In the USA, it’s a total success. Who would have thought, in a country that used to be rebellious, and where the event of May 1, long ago, started the workers’ May First tradition, worldwide… except where it originated. What better symbol of the subjugation of the citizens of the USA?

Here is what taxes are used for:

Plutocratic Salaries Tell The Rabble What Values Are Worthy

[These are the highest paid state employee in every state.] Sport apes are paid fortunes. The brother of Michelle Obama is paid about 20 times the family income, just to coach ball to youngsters.

More than 41 of the 50 states’ highest paid public employees are sport trainers. Either state university’s football (27), state basketball (13) or state hockey (1) programs. The remaining 10 hyper wealthy public paid propagandists are either college presidents, medical school/law school deans or a plastic surgeon in the medical school (Nevada).

Tapping a ball for a college can earn more than 4 million dollar a year in salary in the USA. But then, 50 million USA citizens go without health care. (Obama will change that by fining the poor he can catch, thanks to the IRS, CIA, NSA, or whatever secret organization at his disposal, and the money will go directly to his gorilla of a hyper wealthy, ball jerking brother in law. All Americans respect this very much, and I just made 100 millions dedicated enemies, writing this, and it will be called “racist”. Well, I welcome their hatred, as FDR said.)

This indifference to isegoria is why and how Obamacare was, and could be, planned in secret, behind closed doors. That indifference has been imprinted too.

This indifference to public debate is also how and why the minimum salary, in the USA, over the last few decades, went down, from $22 an hour to around $8. (I am using constant 2014 dollars.)

That’s a diminution of two-thirds. Much had to do with the Progressives being unwilling to progress (and focusing instead on not calling greedy apes… greedy apes).

Paul Krugman in the “War Over Poverty”, observes that “Suddenly, or so it seems, progressives have stopped apologizing for their efforts on behalf of the poor, and have started trumpeting them instead. And conservatives find themselves on the defensive.”

Let’s hope that sticks. It would represent a change of mood. One of the reason that the holocaust of the Jews happened was the weak, meek, pleading, reasonable, subservient attitude of Jews, when Hitler rolled around.

Compare with France during the Dreyfus Affair:  a full intellectual civil war was conducted with unrelenting ferocity on the part of intellectual progressives, against the “Jew” haters. Zola made it so that he went to jail, for about a year. And came out as a winner (although he died of carbon monoxide poisoning soon after, in an accident).

Progressive intellectuals fight for truth. French intellectuals, during the Dreyfus Affair, knew all too well that, if they did not fight for innocent Jews, their friends, acquaintances, and fellow citizens, and if they did not fight for veracity, equity and justice, other innocents would soon be attacked.

So how come the situation of the poor has evolved the way it did in the USA? It was done insensibly, just as the inception of slavery, after 1620, in violation of European and English law, was done insensibly.

Surely the powerful, supposedly “liberal” media in the USA could have denounced the increasing push towards making the poor, poorer? Governor Brown in California, thanks to new taxes on the rich, sees the coffers of the state filling up 20% higher than expected, and the highest budget ever (109 billion dollars). Surely he will reverse the school cuts? No word on that yet.

One of the causes of the increasing inequality in the USA is simply that those who control public opinion in the USA, are, in general, very wealthy, or sympathetic to wealth.

Thus is carefully nurtured a strong pro-plutocratic bias in the media.

Thanks to all these media owners, managers, pundits, and celebrities. All of them extravagantly rich.

This is why the likes of Oprah Winfrey make billions:  it’s not about the market working its wonders. After all, Ms. Big Chest’s career was decided by higher ups, just as higher ups bought the plutophile Huffington Post to make it more than way, earning Ms. Huffington one cool billion in the process…

These avalanches of wealth bring to the fore preachers of the grandeur of whatever it is that has nothing to do with the war on poverty. Those who interface with the Public are made hyper rich so that they will have solidarity with the hyper rich who paid them, or pay them, or endow them with power. Hyper rich media talking heads are like living adverts for the plutocracy and all the Dark values it stands on.

This is why Oprah Winfrey knows how to make the USA cry about that fact she could not buy in Zurich that 45,000 dollar bag, or the entire store, instantaneously, as she wanted, or not.

Or this is why Oprah Winfrey made the world cry because the employees of Hermes Paris insulted her by opening the store after hour, just for her, at her strident request, with a je ne sais quoi of intolerable Gallic insolence.

The Oprah opera is carefully tuned to make all Americans feel the pain of plutocrats. Especially when the plutocrats are confronted to the lowest salaried employees they can find, as Oprah was in Zurich and Paris.

That same effect, the total molding of public opinion by the owners of a country, is characteristic of all and any banana republics. It makes it unlikely that a civilized debate will get society out of the plutocratic comfort zone. Thus, insensibly, inequality and poverty augment.

That is, as long as the poor do not use the only remedy that works in a case like that: violence. That is why the French Revolution of 1789 had to use violence (and so did the American Revolution, a bit earlier: the only way to release Pennsylvania from Lord Penn’s grip, was the hard way, he was not going to be talked into it).

Pay attention to this: plutocracy can buy the People. The case of Rome show an alarming point: welfare programs can comfort plutocratization.

We The People get paid, just like prostitutes get paid. With a difference: prostitutes, generally, have a choice, but We The People seized at the throat by plutocracy, do not.

In Rome, the method of paying the People with panem, circenses et alimenti (bread, entertainment, food stamps) was inaugurated. Even the wondrous public baths could be accessed with one of the lowest domination coins, and distributions of money by potentates occurred.

To be elected, a would-be politician organized games (Cicero spurned the method, and could not afford it anyway, but he was Rome’s most gifted orator).

In the USA, something similar is already going on. Consider the link provided by John Rogers, a commenter on this site. Public money is used to organize the games, and the management is paid directly from the public purse, when not indirectly through the plutocratic university system.

Robinson, the elder brother of Michelle Obama, got a six-year contract with a base salary of $750,000 at Oregon State, the Oregonian reported in 2008. By sheer coincidence Obama, his brother in law, was elected president.

The same wonderful sort of coincidence had made Michelle Obama a director of companies, and a highly paid hospital administrator, in charge of community outreach (same as Oprah Winfrey!), just when her husband became USA senator.

Oregon State is a public university. This is just about guys playing with a ball instead of studying. It works well: Robinson himself, a 6 foot six basket ball player, went to Princeton University to play ball. After he had done that, he was given a MBA, and became a big time investment banker.

The prime qualifications for that is to be a unknowing brute with no wisdom or ethics whatsoever. Throwing balls through hoops in a way of education helps that way. Probably one’s brain is all messed up from all the shocks. Next, one can smoke pot for years, like Obama’s Choom Gang, and one is dumb enough to spend one’s life being obeying orders from the white masters.

So Robinson made ten million dollars a year or so, following a career similar, but much more modest than Paulson ( a football player, who, once his brain got scrambled enough, became head of Goldman Sachs, and later, as Secretary of the Treasury under Bush, established the economic policy of Barack Obama, namely the rescue of banks, no strings attached!)

Paulson bought for himself an island, with seven villages on it. Somewhere in the USA. Obscene maniacs such as these would now have to pay 75% tax in France. Under President Eisenhower, it was 93%. Now, thanks to Obama’s 90,000 pages tax codes, they pay around nothing.

In general, all over the USA, the public purse is used to pay extravagantly for sport figures, and thus make children understand that being a brute is what pays. It works. At least, for plutocrats. For the poor too: they are getting poorer every year, and have been imprinted to be happy that way.

Conclusion: Nearly all of the USA’s culture, the media, and all what people obsess about, has been organized to create a society that is inimical to the poor, and thus, increasingly, to itself.

It’s going to take more than fighting the Republican party to get out of this circus.
What is needed is a radical change of philosophy.

Patrice Ayme

Crazy Lie Technique

The Economist, the celebrated British tabloid, teaches economy thus: it siphons its European profits behind a mangy door of a second floor apartment in a poor part of Luxembourg. Would it be economical to pay taxes in the countries where The Economist is sold? Tax havens is where the good life is at, and The Economist just contrived a list to prove that.

Major profiteers and corporations do the same all over the world: they hide profits in tax havens they enabled through subtle conspiracies and deep propaganda. Why is the insanity allowed to go on? Not just because of corrupted politicians. Also because plutocratic agents made common people too confused to realize they are robbed blind. Instilling insanity is the plutocrats’ first barrier against common sense and decency.

Propaganda fabricates the spines of the sheeple (sheep-people). Here is a spectacular example. The “Economist Intelligence Unit crunched hard numbers” to answer this: “Which country will be the best for a baby born in 2013?” Here is its somewhat deranged answer:

Better Serving Emirs, Without Health Care?
Intelligent To Make Us Crazy & Stupid?

First of all notice that, among the first 15 countries, none is a major military power. In other words, these 15 countries depend upon the military superpowers for their protection. That is nothing to encourage, lest one wants to repeat World War II.

We saw what this kind of parasitism brought in 1939-1940: the pro-Hitlerian antics of Sweden, Switzerland, Belgium and the Netherlands caused the loss of France, enabling 50 million Europeans to die subsequently; as a telling aside, Dutch Jews were killed nearly to the last person. 

Observe that sexist Muslim Fundamentalist regimes, with their subjugation of women, score high in The Economist’s esteem. This sadomasochism theme, unsaid, runs deep.

Among other amusements, Cyprus is one of the better places to live, according to The Economist Intelligence. Cyprus is an island cut in two, a few years ago, when Turkey attacked militarily by sea and in the air, invading it with its army, twice (well named operations Attila). Cyprus survives, without a peace treaty, the butt of Turkish hostility. Another full war, with more atrocities, is entirely possible as Turkey increasingly veers towards Islamism. But, according to the mental retards at The Economist Intelligence, Cyprus ranks higher than Japan, France and Britain, none of which is under foreign occupation. Maybe The Economist Intelligence finds lethal atrocities of the massive type one of the better spices in life?

So? What else? Why to live in a place that could be wracked by war again, just off Syria, with so many who have lost their property and can never again where they were born? Cyprus is a tax haven. Tax avoidance, the meat of life, according to Economist Intelligence!

According to The Economist Intelligence, Singapore is deemed safe, while the acceleration of sea level rise is 60% higher than the most pessimistic official forecasts (countries such as the Belgium or the Netherlands are spending already much to fight the advancing sea). For those unawares, Singapore, a tax haven, is barely built above high tide.

The Economist self glorifies, as it pontificates that “the Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU), a sister company of The Economist, has this time turned deadly serious. It earnestly attempts to measure which country will provide the best opportunities for a healthy, safe and prosperous life in the years ahead.”

So the other times, The Economist admits that it was not “deadly serious“? It was just seriously deadly, as when it  supported Pinochet? I sent the following to The Economist, and they published it:

The Economist’s biases comes in many guises. The Economist now tells us that tiny Israel, hated on all sides, surrounded by a ghetto like wall, and with the high likelihood to be plunged into five or six horrendous wars, nuclear or not, with impacts all over its minuscule vegetated territory, scores higher for a “healthy, safe and prosperous life” than all major West European countries?

Does The Economist know how to spell C R A Z Y?

And Switzerland, a small enclave stuck between France, Germany and Italy, does particularly well? As if it were on another planet? Whereas, in truth, Swiss schemes are highly dependent upon whether the EU and the USA are going to let them happen, looking forward. 

And Ireland, which lives partly from being an outrageous tax heaven (like Switzerland with its Vereins) will keep on being a tax heaven, thus staying rich, while keeping on getting subsidies from its poorer, but ten to fifteen times larger European neighbors?

And Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan are much safer than Italy? The Chinese plutocrats will not go silly in the next 50 years? The Chinese leaders will not abide by the deep desires of their underground Lord? Just in case The Economist does not know, let it be reminded that the People Republic of China reserves itself the right to recover Taiwan, anytime, by force, and that, should there be problems within the PRC, it will be only natural to distract the sheeple with a good foreign war.

“Crunching numbers” is good, thinking, better.

This incident offers a troubling two dimensional space: along one dimension, The Economist is really stupid, along the other, The Economist is launched into a multi-dimensional propaganda operation, no holds barred. Notice that in The Economist’s classification, tax heavens score high. Notice also that the large countries, which are taking increasing measures against tax cheats, are scoring low. An argument The Economist uses, even against the USA, is that they owe large debts.

What The Economist “forgets” to say is that the large countries, which defend the West, owe large debts, because they pay rent to tax cheats (including, but not limited to tax cheating plutocrats, tax cheating countries such as those glorified by The Economist, and tax cheating corporations, such as the one that owns The Economist).

In passing, The Economist mentions that the Netherlands, a sneaky tax haven, is the only Eurozone country worth living in. Just in case Luxembourg does not work anymore, the Netherlands, which is 30 times larger, should be able to shelter The Economist from big bad Franco-Germano-British taxes. (Netherlands population: 17 million, UK + FRA + DEU = 210 million.)

The Economist’s analysis of the best places in which to be born started with another piece of classical propaganda. That great plutocratic philosopher, Warren Buffet, one of the world’s richest and deepest men (Buffet splurged with various manipulations that turned Greece into a colossal profits him and his associates) was quoted extensively as opining that he was who he was, that splendor of a vulture, because he was born in the right country, as the right time.

The Economist Intelligent Unit is intelligent enough to pose as exemplary the USA in general, and its plutocracy in the 1930s, and in the 2010s, while talking about the good life.

Hitler famously explained in “Mein Kampf” how Big Lies work: “little people use little lies all the time, they do not expect big ones…“By using Big Lies, Hitler succeeded to persuade the Volk of things that were not true, as he pursued what he viewed as higher aims, that he knew the Volk would disagree with, such as preparing for a world war in 1945 or the extermination of the Jews.

If most Germans had learned about either of these secret aims of Hitler, they would have been horrified and would have viewed Hitler as insanely dangerous… So, knowing this, he lied, big time.

However, as time went by, Hitler became a mental investment most Germans believed in, and the more they invested in him, the more they believed. (A phenomenon well known in the stock markets, as all too many people tend to fall in love with their investments… however bad those turn out to be.) In the end complete collective insanity took over, as the book Soldaten, relating secret recordings of German POWs, shows (Soldaten is also in English with same title).

Now we have something new, that even Hitler did not think about: the Crazy Lie. The Crazy Lie technique makes people accepting of modes of apprehending reality that prevent them to think seriously.

The Crazy Lie Technique is, first, emotional. The Economist used to support Pinochet’s dictatorship for its economic prowess (paid in part with around 5,000 killed and 31,947 officially tortured). Some will say: that was then. Indeed. The USA helped or led, and paid terrorists right wingers to make a coup in a democracy that never had any coup (the USA was furious about losing control of Chilean copper).

Chili was, is, a European foundation. What happened to it was horrible, but The Economist applauded, just as Milton Friedman applauded. Many in the Pinochet junta were on CIA pay roll, while heating up their electrical pincers.

By posing the United Arab Emirates as what we need to emulate, The Economist is actually sinking even lower than it did under Pinochet. The UAE has no European foundation. The UAE is a sordid medieval pluto-theocracy. Some emir, son of his father, is chosen by his medieval tyrannical peers to be the chief, just as was the case in Transylvania 8 centuries ago.

Differently from Middle Age France, though, more than 80% of the UAE’s inhabitants are NOT citizens. They are basically salaried slaves. Health spending proportionally to UAE GDP is only 2.8%, the 181th rank in the world (there are only 193 nations in the UN; as Emirati citizens get health care, that means that non Emirati, the slaves, get none). The UAE enjoys four billionaires with worth around ten billion dollars. Out of a million Emirati (among 4.5 million foreign slaves, servants & mercenaries).

The UAE is Sunni Muslim, and it faces hated Shiah Iran just across the sea of the Arabic, I mean, Persian Gulf. The UAE is basically a Western Plutocratic outpost, not exactly what the Iranian theocrats fancy. Fortunately for the thousands of Persian rockets at the ready, the hundreds of huge towers of the UAE (culminating up to half a mile high in Dubai!) offer themselves as ready targets.

To warn Iran off, the French were requested by the UAE to open a sea-air base, with half a brigade of the French Foreign Legion in residence. Thus the Camp de la Paix came to be.

War with Iran is more likely than not. Although crumbling towers and fireworks among great explosions promises a good show, by assimilating this to the good life, the Economist Intelligence Unit apparently advocates massive lethal sadomasochism as the dominant pursuit of our desires.

Not all is dark in the UAE; it is a place that strives very hard, from pretty bad initial conditions (aside from having the world’s 7th highest oil reserves). But here what I target is the cult that Anglo-Saxon plutocratic media such as The Economist, and the Financial Times enjoy.

Both of the much admired tabloids ferry their revenue through Luxembourg for tax avoidance, which, on that scale, surely is satanic.

So why convey the insane idea that the United Arab Emirates provides with a healthier (2.8% of GDP on health, remember) and safer (obvious target for Iranian nukes) life? Just out of love for plutocrats? Not, not just that. What is taught here is insanity itself.

What is taught is an erosion of intelligence. The Economist Intelligence Unit is out to destroy intelligence.

Teaching people that “crunching numbers” leads to the mathematical conclusion that the UAE provides with much nicer prospects than Japan, France, Britain, Italy or Spain, is so crazy that the notion can only be accepted by suspending one’s critical and intellectual capabilities.

And this suspension of rationality and criticism is what The Economist teaches.

So we are supposed to join the plutocratic cult that Singapore is a much better place to be born than the USA. Or that the United Arab Emirates, a rabidly sexist medieval pluto-theocracy where most inhabitants are foreign slaves, just a handful of minutes away for the thousands of missiles of the hated Iranians, is obviously much safer and healthier than… the French Republic (of course!)

After I wrote most of this essay Lord Justice Brian Leveson, mandated by PM Cameron, came up with his report on the UK press. Leveson writes: “Most responsible corporate entities would be appalled that employees were or could be involved in the commission of crime in order to further their business. Not so at the News Of The World” (the now-shuttered tabloid that was owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp, owner of the WSJ, Fox news, New York Post, etc., and powerful enough to be a part instigator of the war in Iraq, hence Murdoch’s nickname: Murderoch).

“Lord Justice” observes that the press “did not fullfill its role of guardian of the nation“. (Hey, The Economist spits on the nation!) The ‘Right Honourable Lord Justice’ recommends that the press  should create its own regulator, backed by legislation to make sure it meets certain standards of independence and effectiveness.

What we contemplate in The Economist is a further problem. What to do when crazy lies are created, just to erode reason? The problem is not restricted to the plutocratic cult, but other cults, as the Islamist one.

Egypt’s Muslim Fundamentalist parliament is rushing to pass Islamist legislation, making the Sharia into law. Never mind that Egypt thrived without Islam, a military-industrial superstition, for 4,000 years. Egypt was 100% Christian, for centuries. The word “Copt” itself is the Arabization of the word for Egyptian in Greek. In other words, to use some humor, the Muslims stole Egypt from the Egyptians, and are still at it, because, well, truth is secondary.  There are up to 20 million Copts in Egypt (Islamists will tell you that’s a lie).

Plutocracy and superstition reign best upon decerebrated chickens. So the chicken they decerebrate. Nowadays, though, the tsunami threatening civilization is not a few meters high, but kilometers high. Even the plutocrats and other exploiters will be destroyed by it, with most of the biosphere.

What we need is legislating for more truth. I proposed to make TRUTH as a new branch of government. After all, experiments show that equity, thus justice, is fundamental to primates. But what is equity without truth? What is a primate without truth? TRUTH & REASON ARE ESSENTIAL TO HUMAN RIGHTS.

What is essential ought to be legislated, thus civilization is enabled.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: Last, but not least, morality, at the scale of nations, makes happy (at variable scales of time). And safe. Thus morality is a crucial component for tomorrow’s health and happiness (although what ‘morrow’ means will vary considerably: Germany was punished on the scale of generations, Sweden never was, the USA already self punished, in part, with the Secession War, but more works need to be done).

Notice that I excluded not just the medievalists countries, or those waiting for heavy military action, but also the tax cheats from the list: Switzerland, the Netherlands, Belgium, Singapore, Hong Kong (also disqualified as owned by a dictatorship). Others have also to disqualified on even worse moral grounds.

I do not contest that Australia and Canada are good countries to be born. If one’s aim is wealth and comfort, in the next few years. However the ecological policies of these countries are so greedy as to endanger the planet’s ecology. They contribute massively to fossil fuel burning. One wants to keep in mind that the unfolding catastrophe of heat trapping gases pollution will be terminated by a massive world war, not just flooding, droughts, hurricanes, mass extinctions, rising heat, and collapse of oxygen production.

Being born in countries where one’s moral system will be tweaked towards tolerance for mass criminality is not, regrettably a criterion that The Economist put as an input. But it is neither willing, nor able, to do so.

Anti-French Racism III, The Origins

THE REAL CRIMES?

HISTORICAL PROBLEMS AMERICAN OLIGARCHS HAVE WITH FRANCE:

Abstract: Not only did France create the USA, but French philosophy and law have been insisting, even before the birth of the USA, that American oligarchs should uphold ever higher civilizational standards.

However this French arrogance has interfered with the pursuit of happiness of said oligarchs, starting with the insistence that they should give up on slavery.

As the New World is turning into an old world, American reactionaries have reacted hysterically, as demonstrated with the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (because the aims were what, exactly? Put Iran in power in Iraq, and start a war with Pakistan?)

The oligarchs also demonstrated that they would rather return to savagery, for example by reinstating the sort of law practiced during the Middle Ages. Living in the woods too long would do that to you.

***

***

As the grotesque interference of the New York oligarchy with the French presidential election keeps on going, like a chicken running around without a head, a pornography of brute arrogance, it is natural to ponder where the rage comes from.

We are living in a strange world where plutocrats are trying to subjugate the democracies brazenly. The tax debate in the USA is typical. By using legal tricks, the 400 richest taxpayers in the USA pay only an average of 17% tax (this is a fraction of the historical average; whereas many in the upper middle class pay 50%, when local and state taxes are added to Federal tax).

Obama, now that he does not control Congress, claims to want to mitigate that, by making some of these outrageous tricks illegal (which he could have done in five minutes the day he became president, but he was too busy lifting his chin up). It costs him nothing to try it now, as wall Street knows well, and he may even seduce some of the clueless, and hide cost savings with Medicare, Medicaid, whatever is anti-Reagan out there, behind a cloud of rhetoric blowing the other way.

The financial pirates scream to high heavens, that this would be the end of the economy as we know it, and their lackeys in Congress concur. Indeed: if you want to call piracy an economy, it would be a step towards the end of that, and the intrusion of more democracy.

 In Great Britain, “News Of The World” is a part of the worldwide Murdoch media and propaganda empire, Newscorp (Murdoch, aka Murderoch, the ardent propagandist for the invasion of Iraq). “News Of The World” hacked the phone of Milly Dowler, a 13-year-old schoolgirl abducted in 2002, apparently interfering with the investigation in her disappearance, erasing evidence. She was later found murdered.

Not content with doing the same with victims of terrorism and families of soldiers, the Murderoch people even collaborated with murder suspects, providing sophisticated equipment to allow them, the murder suspects, to spy on the detectives inquiring on them. Newscorp also admitted to paying police.

In a pirouette, James Murdoch, son of Rupert Murdoch, announced that “News Of The World” would be terminated Sunday (but Newscorp owns “the Sun”, which has no Sunday edition… so far).

The scandal should reveal, even to the dumbest, an aspect of what I have been talking about, in terms even the dumbest can visualize. Interfering with murder inquiries is seriously criminal business. SO IS WAR MONGERING.

There is a web of conspiracies, plots and corruption between the plutocracy, the politicians and law enforcement, including. This is not new. The Murdochs’ empire is one example out of many. It overplayed its hand with the Strauss-Kahn affair, but this is a small peccadillo, relatively to their enormous propaganda for various wars, which killed millions. Literally.

Clearly, inquiring whether the Murdoch empire is compatible with democracy in the West should be put on the front burner. But Murdoch made a career of supporting so called “conservatives”, in many countries, so the powers that be are in no rush to withdraw the propaganda support they enjoy.

In the USA, the hotel Sofitel director insisted that Nafissatou Diallo, one of his maid, was above any suspicion. However, it turned out that  she was such a notorious prostitute pulling tricks inside his hotel, that she kept on pulling them, even under police protection. The Sofitel chain is owned by friends of Sarkozy, the bling bling president, and twice more people intended to vote for Strauss-Kahn than for Sarkozy, in the next French presidential election.

(No, I did not forget my main thesis that Cyrus Vance was financed by Wall Street, and enjoys the support of a so called “finance committee”, and thinks and acts accordingly: ‘united plutocrats of the world’ is a sad reality. All too many rich capitalist owners and partisans of the rule of financial piracy are one and the same.)

Where does the anti-French racism in the USA come from? Even Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal admitted that “Francophobes” were one of the main forces in evidence.

OK, the American plutocrats hate France for showing that there is a less plutocratic way to do things, and it works better. But are there causes lurking deeper in the American subconscious?

The USA was created, thanks to a French war against Great Britain. Without a massive war against Britain, the USA would never have become independent. Americans would be celebrating Kate and William, and Pennsylvania would be a duchy.

The French  intervention happened in three stages: first agitation among American colonists, then, after the rebellion started, sending weapons (as France is presently doing in Libya, including by sending ammunition, anti-tank weapons, missiles, and tanks! The Russians were not happy, but France told them to shut up.)

90% of American cartridges were made in France, during the Revolutionary War. Finally, France outright declared war, and was lucky enough to defeat the British fleet, thus blocking any relief for the main British army at Yorktown, which the French army and Washington’s rag tag rebels were besieging. The British army had to surrender, and the French forced it to submit to Washington. (After the courageous aircraft carrier Yorktown was sunk at Midway, having contributed crucially to the destruction of the elite Japanese carrier fleet, tellingly, American propagandists were careful to name new carriers in meaningless fashion, such as “Ronald Reagan”, the guy who acted with a chimp; much safer to remember chimps, than how one came to be!)

The French war which created the USA cost a fortune (many trillions of constant dollars). Its true cost had been hidden by the King, in secret books, but the French economy, overwhelmed by debt, and a volcano, collapsed, and the King had to convoke a special national assembly (“General States”), which then turned itself into a Constituent Assembly, bringing the French Revolution (La Fayette, head of the French army, refused to fire on the protesters).

In any case, the USA ought to say:”Mom!” when addressing France. That hurts. So France is not often so properly respected, as the USA insists to behave as an unruly teenager who demeans his mother, just because.

Or is there more to it? When the American revolutionary leaders came to Paris to get support and instruction, they were told, by the King’s police, that they could not have slaves, that was against French law. They had to pay their slaves, and treat them as employees, not slaves. And let those employees go, if they so wished.

In other words, the American oligarchs were told that they were not civilized. No doubt a big, bad American humiliation, to this day not properly digested.

After the war, La Fayette tried to persuade his friend Washington to free his slaves, but Washington, while professing to admire La Fayette’s noble spirit, did not. Mr. Jefferson, third president of the USA, a three pence philosopher with beautiful words he stole from others, pretended he would free his slaves, too.

Jefferson even promised the slave child he was having sex with, that he would free her after they got back to the USA. She, and her brother, wanted to stay in France to be free. But Jefferson hypnotized them, or something, and they followed him back to the USA, where their master did not free them, far from it. Honor may be a French concept, but it certainly is not a Jeffersonian one.

Jefferson promised he would free his slaves at his death. He did not do that either. Too busy killing Indians, robbing vast swathes of native territory, and running tremendous debt, I guess. Beautiful Jefferson memorial in Washington, though. All resemblance with today’s events is not coincidental, either.

In any case the French point of view about slavery was finally implemented with the most murderous civil war known, the Secession War (more than 650,000 killed). So the French were proven right, once again, but the price was sky high. Another reason of sorts, to resent France.

One day in August 1914, crazed Prussian generals attacked four countries, including Russia, France, and  neutral Belgium. Everybody was taken by complete surprise (including probably the Kaiser, who had been put to pasture, so that he would not interfere).

The French government was in vacation, Britain, which had been consumed by the Irish question, ‘had no army’ (said Lord Kitchener, who was made War Minister). However, within a day, Earl Grey, the Foreign Secretary, observing that civilization was at stake, got parliament to approve a British declaration of War against the German Second Reich. Canada, Australia, the British empire followed suit.  

The USA did not come to the rescue of its mother. Nor was “the special relationship” with Britain of any import, either. Good things come to those who wait. By refusing to distinguish between democracy and fascism, and between its parents and alien predators, the USA prepared its world hegemony.

In the following years, the USA used the occasion of WWI, to invade Mexico, before finally flying to the rescue of victory in the last four months of the World War (the French army and its serb allies had cut off Germany from its food sources to the south, so Germany would not have passed the winter without starving; a point rarely mentioned).

The Versailles Treaty was to a great extend a failure, because the USA refused to allow France to take all the measures necessary to defang German fascism. Retrospectively, considering what happened next, American plutocracy conspiring and plotting with Adolf Hitler, it looks like a plan, at least subconsciously.

The half baked Treaty infuriated German fascists, though, and they were left like wounded bears, instead of being properly punished, as they should have, as the war criminals they were. Indeed the two top generals of the Prussian army, Hindenburg and Ludendorff,  were the most direct actors in the rise of Nazism. (Full disclosure: I am very distantly related to the plotter in chief of 1914, but enough so, for that ominous figure to have haunted my childhood as a moral question…)

Clemenceau famously claimed that the war with Germany would restart within 20 years. (And it did, and Germany was 2.5 times the population of France.) By 1933, France prepared for war, against Hitler, and the USA started a sort of cold war with France, culprit of planning to disrupt its private garden of the beasts, Nazi Germany, where American plutocrats could roam freely as the biggest predators around.

In September 1939, many nations followed the joint French and British declaration of war against Hitler. To Roosevelt’s hypocritically professed regret, the USA, instead, declared France and Britain to be “belligerent countries“, object to sanctions. American plutocrats and corporations rushed supplies, investments and technology to allow Hitler to keep on fighting mighty France and Britain. Finally, at the very end of 1941, Hitler followed Japan, and declared war to the USA.

In the ruins of extermination camps, where more than ten million died, in an Europe which suffered more than 50 million dead, everybody could see that France had been right all along to oppose Hitler fiercely. Even the Germans came to that conclusion (as Germany suffered about ten million killed, and  lost of all her territories to the east).

On July 3, 1979, the USA’s president Carter decided (secretly) to attack Afghanistan. A few million Afghans dead later, plus lots of American self pitying whining, that war is still going on, thirty-two years after it started (and Obama wants to make it another three years at least). All Americans repeat every day that the war started by surprise that day, on 9/11, 2001. They are just twenty-two years off. But who is counting? That’s too intellectual.

Now we hear from the government of the USA that keeping people in cages without a judicial process is OK (that is what “Guantanamo” means). We hear from the USA that torture is OK. Those who ordered it, keep on writing, in the most powerful media, that it was a good thing, and they are not prosecuted in any way.

We hear from the USA that attacking countries under false pretense (as was done with Iraq) is OK.  It is OK, since the perpetrators have not been pointed as such, let alone indicted (as Bush was told he would be, if he showed up in some European countries, as he is suspected of ordering war crimes).

Amusingly, Hitler and his goons would have claimed to be outraged by any of these concepts: detention without justice, torture, war of aggression. Outraged, officially speaking, that is. By advertizing plublicly this return to savagery, the USA, though, has gone where even the Nazis did not dare to go. This can only cause great ongoing damage to the subconcious, let alone the strict letter of civilization.

The Nazis, officially applied the judicial process (they got French judges to cooperate with them to execute hostages in France, for example; judges love to serve the established order!)

Officially, the Nazis did not torture (they tried to protect Jews, and those who drove the Germans furious, they said, loud and clear). Even as Hitler attacked Poland, the Nazis fabricated an elaborate set-up to pretend that it was Poland which had attacked (it fooled only the despicable, Nazi collaborating governments, such as the Irish, or the American).

We have been hearing even more: the Dominique Strauss-Kahn affair was the occasion for American DAs and judges to proclaim that the French are the new Jews, and, apparently, the American justice system is the new Gestapo. All French are to be punished and discriminated against thereafter, because, once, an Auschwitz survivor born in Poland, acted badly with a child. And it’s somehow France’s fault, although the American judicial authorities have been unable to present any justification for any country, or Interpol, to bring up an arrest warrant against the gentleman. That is why Switzerland let him go, and there are no international warrant of arrest against him.

OK, France can defend herself against the American oligarchy. Since Wall Street caged Strauss-Kahn, France imposed Lagarde in an instant. But can the USA defend itself against its own oligarchies? Germany proved unable to do so.

Once detention without justice, torture, wars of aggression, discrimination on an ethnic basis, and prosecutors, or judges, financed by the rich, collaborating with organized crime, have been admitted as guiding principles of the republic, by the entire populace, fascization can proceed further. This is how the Nazis did it (they even used referendums!)

The (American) credit evaluating agencies played a nefarious role in the financial crisis. In exchange for money, they deliberately undervalued the risks, presenting as AAA investments and loans, investments and loans they knew were worthless (and some of their associates were betting they would collapse, as part of that vast conspiracy and plot). Now one of them has evaluated Portugal as great credit risk, in a self fulfilling, but blatantly absurd prophecy. Probably, as they were before, their rich friends were forwarned. Portugal has less debt per GDP than the USA, and a plan to get out of it 9which the USA does not have). So what was the pretext? With characteristic impudence, the credit rating company claimed that the european Union had not offered enough money to private banks!

Those private agencies ought to be framed much more carefully by the law, as Strauss-Kahn proposed. Dangerous creature that Strauss-Kahn. Good that Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal called him a “sleaze ball” (July 5, 2011, editorial), while wishing to dear god that he won’t become president of France.

Who was behind the Nazis? The American and German plutocracies. Who is behind the fascization of the USA? The American plutocracy. Thus the problem with France.

France, of course, made a real revolution against its own outrageous plutocracy in 1789, and, ever since, French plutocracy has known that there are boundaries not to be trespassed before the People goes into the street, and all hell breaks loose. That is a lesson American plutocracy has not learned yet. But, some day, it will be learned. It may be learned, the old fashion way, the hard way.

***

Patrice Ayme

***

P/S: Why did France foster the rebellion of English speaking colonists against Great Britain? Because Great Britain had become too powerful. One should not forget the British monarch had just finally incorporated Scotland, a French Celtic ally, into its empire (an old dream of the Romans, who always failed to do so). The British monarchy kept on insisting that it ought to rule France (the essence of the “100 Years War”, which started in 1337 CE, when Edward III, grandson of Philippe Le Bel, tried to recover his rightful inheritance), a claim it would give up only in 1815.

France had lost a world war, the “Seven Year War” of 1756, against Great Britain and its opportunistic lackey, Prussia. In no small part because the philosopher and friend of Louis XV, Voltaire, claimed that it was not worth it, dying for a few “arpents de neige au Canada”. Sometimes idealistic philosophy is too idealistic by half.

Earlier, the first European colonies in North America were founded by French protestants, in the Sixteenth Century. They were exterminated by the Spanish dictator, Philippe II (himself son of a Catholic Bourguignon, Charles V). That is why the first English colony, much later, was hidden hinterlands.

***

Aphorisms, April 2011.

 

No Greenhouse, The Tornadoes Blew It Up…

The USA is the country which contributes the most to the emission of CO2, either directly, or indirectly, through its factories in China, fed by the power of radioactive, mercury laced coal.

The most deleterious consequence of CO2 emissions is the acidification of the oceans, which are turned into carbonic acid, according to the exact same reaction which makes all carbonated drinks interesting.

Another consequence of the CO2 poisoning of the biosphere is the rise of atrociously bad weather, as the energy pumped into the atmosphere goes up. That makes the atmosphere, well, much more energetic.

North America and Eurasia are the only continents which spread appreciably from the polar regions to the tropics. The continents do not have the thermal inertia and conductivity of the oceans, so air masses passing over continents are not rendered mild, as they are above the oceans. However, Eurasia has gigantic mountain ranges enforcing a continuous separation between the glacial north and the hot south. Those ranges spread from the Pyrenées in the West to unknown ranges in Eastern Siberia. The polar and tropical air masses are thus segregated in Eurasia.

In the USA, mountain ranges are absent in the Middle West, so polar air can battle hot humid air from the gulf of Mexico. As the greenhouse gets worse, the death toll in the heartland of the USA keeps on climbing. More than 300 dead on the outbreak of April 27-28, 2011.

An aggravating  factor is that so many American citizens live in so called “mobile homes”, shacks which were once on wheels, and have no basement (to take shelter in). Only Gypsies live in such conditions in Europe. And even then, not really, that would be unlawful. so the Gypsies mobile homes are still mounted on wheels, ready to take off before the local authorities get really irked.

Thus, the socio-economic organization of the USA is directly  at fault in the tornado massacres: too much of a consumer, debt driven economy (bringing the CO2 up, and the infrastructure down), too much dire poverty (hey, we want the rich to boast of their “philanthropy”, with their 17% tax rates, and no taxes on inheritance).

What is the plutocracy going to do about it? Don’t hold your breath. Probably pay some Stanford or Harvard professors to go around the Main Stream Media, to claim that the rise of energy in the atmosphere has nothing to do with tornadoes.

***

At War With China & Pakistan?

The Main Stream Media report that Pakistan has been urging Afghanistan to switch alliances from the USA led NATO to the holy alliance of the Taliban, Pakistan and China.

I have said all along that such was the real threat. But now it’s a problem, and it’s in the open.

What do these three have in common? Dictatorship. In other words forms of plutocracy which Lenin was not aware of when he was still healthy, and became suspicious of only when he was on his death bed, and (ex bank robber and terrorist) Stalin had taken control of the Soviets.

***

Syria, Or Why Tyrants Love Tyrants:

Some have protested that the leading democracies attack the bloody Libyan dictatorship just for its oil, instead of the blood it spilled over the last 42 years.  

But not so. First Libya does not have that much oil. It should be enough to give all 8 million Libyans a good life, for a little while longer, but Libya is not Saudi Arabia. Libyan peak oil is soon, Saudi peak oil not before another 15 years or so, and at considerably higher rate of extraction.

Politically; the French succeeded to persuade China, Russia and Brazil to not stand in the way at the United nations. The French have important high technology transfer programs with them all (nuclear submarine with Brazil, nuclear power plants with China, aircraft carrier/command ship and high speed trains with Russia). Economic ties (gas, cars, steel) are also playing an important role (even with India). But now Britain, France, and the USA “shall not rest” until Gaddafi is out.

So the muscular regimes or dictatorships, or plutocracies who have no love for their own minorities, and want to keep on cracking down in all serenity, have now understood the danger of democracy spreading. They object strongly to threats against Assad and his dictatorial system, because they know they are next. So this time, whatever the French want, they will try to veto them at the UN on intervening in Syria.

But of course, by the time France decided to intervene  in Libya, Gaddafi had killed thousands already, and Assad is not yet there. Once he gets there, and he will, the West, and democrats in general, will be better able to distinguish friend from foe, and the cleverly righteous from the stupid cowards…

***

 

Creeping Irrationality.

As the Roman empire matured, degenerating ever more, irrationality gained. Ever more. The same process can be observed nowadays. Why so?

Our leaders, the plutocrats, and their sycophants, are uncommon. By definition. Anything having to do with the commons is antagonist to them. Common sense is not just their enemy, but thoroughly alien.

There they go, per the grace of their god. What should they fear? Revolution? There will be no revolution as long as the debate is not about the true problems. So, instead of talking about the corruption of the political system by high finance, and the feeding of high finance with common tax money, or the collusion of international plutocracy with the dictatorships, the propaganda makes it so that the Main Stream Media talks of other things: overstretched Medicare in the USA, overstretched peripheral economies in Europe.

***

Is America Tribal? Or Just Rendered Stupid?

So Obama went on his knees, and produced the “long form” of his birth certificate. Trump, the plutocrat, proclaimed victory.

It is interesting how, 150 years after the Secession War, Americans are still basking in the glory of having a two track citizenship. There are real Americans, those, born in the USA, who can become president. And then there are second rate citizens, who can be deported, and are not good enough for the US presidency.

Let me be clear here: the worst problem is not with republicans. Most of these, in polls, did not believe that Obama was born in the USA. This showed, as usual, that most republicans have a diminished sense of reality. The worst problem was with the left wing media, which did not realize that, by being indignant about where Obama was born, they made the point of the racists, and the partisans of the “us versus them” mentality. Why? Because it OUGHT not to matter where Obama was born. And, moreover, on the letter of the law, it did not matter. So the left argued as an extreme right, while thinking of itself as, well, on the left!

So much for human rights, and equality! It is alarming to see that, 150 years after the Secession War, people still do not seem to understand that violating the neighbor’s rights violate their own, and that the tribalism of geographical origins is nothing to defend.

Let’s notice in passing that Sarkozy, the French president, himself the son of an immigrant from Hungary, suggested that naturalized citizens ought to have fewer judicial rights. But the outraged reaction of French public opinion, and of French democratic institutions, such as the Constitutional Court, made Sarkozy gave up completely on the idea. Having entertained it brought down Sarkozy in the polls, as low as a French president ever got. 

What is particularly grotesque is that millions of American parents have lived overseas, giving birth to American Untermenschen… Even if the families of each parent had been American for generations. And still most Americans and the Main Stream Media consider them to be a lower caste.

Oh, and what does the Constitution of the USA say?

The Constitution reads as follows: “No Person except a natural born Citizen, or a Citizen of the United States, at the time of the Adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the Office of President; neither shall any Person be eligible to that Office who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty five Years, and been fourteen Years a Resident within the United States

The US Constitution does not say you have to be born INSIDE the USA to be a natural born Citizen.  Actually John Mc Cain was born in Panama. True, the US Supreme Court messed up the “natural born” common law idea by deciding at some point that Native Americans were not Americans. (That was rescinded in 1924.)

Barack Obama’s mother was a citizen, a child of two natural born citizens who always lived in the USA. She lived in the USA for more than seventeen years before his birth. That made Barack Obama a natural born Citizen no matter where he was born. One would think.

Hence, Obama is a natural born citizen from two independent criteria. So why to talk about this non subject with so much enthusiasm for so long? Either the Main Stream Media is stupid, or wants people to be stupid, or both.

***

How democracy Turns Plutocratic:

A democracy is as wealthy as the many who compose it. It is complicated to keep people individually well provided for. That is a seduction of plutocracy: only the wealth of the few matter matters, and they call that an economy. And how does plutocracy happen? By transferring wealth from the many, to the few. The few (oligoi) manage (nomos) the house (eco), and the many are left to live in the outhouse. There we go.

What we have now is more a politically driven phenomenon than an economic one. The fact that the presidents of the USA, for decades, have been immensely wealthy men, and similarly for most of the American Senate and Congress, has a lot to do with it. The extent of that corruption is different from that occurring in normally functioning democracies.

***

Geological Realism Against Unreal Plutocracy:

The entire Pacific plate seems to be on the move. From archeogeological studies, we know that the 9 Richter Cascadia quake entails a San Andrea quake south.

And look at the geography of California: it sure appears as if the land West Of the San Andrea fault, a part of the Pacific Plate compacted by the American plate, periodically falls into the ocean. How nice a tsunami does that make?

Although the San Andrea is classified as a “transform” fault (sideways motion), clearly the entire West Coast is, overall, a massive subduction zone, a giant pile up (a plate is sinking below another, never to be seen again).

Indeed the American plate heads westward ever more, crushing and… subducting the Pacific plate. As proven by the volcanic range which extends from British Columbia to Mexico, including on the way the massive Long Valley Caldera.

So the fact that the Pacific plate one moves north westward does not make the overall subduction go away. Whatever geologists say. But of course, if the geologists assert that no subduction quakes can happen in California, they ingratiate themselves to the powers that be, and their departments will be well funded. Reciprocally, should their insinuations irritate the powers that be, they will be, at best, ignored. At worst, their departments will get de-funded.

Farfetched? Exaggerated? How many tsunamis do you need to be warned? Japan was hit by three massive tsunamis in 30 years prior to 2011. It was known that the Senai plain had been hit in 860 CE by a tsunami, which went four miles inland. How many miles do you need?

Geologist Shishikura and his colleagues told the government. The powerful Trade Ministry dismissed the evidence. Trading first, tsunamis cannot be traded. Nuclear power plants were left by the sea, defended only by sea walls corresponding to recent wave activity. Fukushima had a 5 meter wave, so they put a 5.5 meter wall. When the tsunami came, it was 15 meters.  

Thus, ultimately, expect a Richter 10 quake along the West North American coast someday (after all, there was a 9.6 Richter quake in Chili, in 1960, same plate, similar situation).

But 10 Richter quakes are not something plutocracy has to worry about (its recent, expensive homes being the most capable of resisting quakes). it has only to worry about geologists, engineers and construction types working hard. If they work so hard, who would pay for them? The plutocracy. And that is insufferable. The plutocracy does not need arrogant geologists and engineers with their science, and , contractors with their big muscles.

The plutocracy needs valet parking, servants, servers, valets, private security, goons, sycophants and paid escorts.

Thus West Coast media and politicians ignore the quake danger, they are paid to ignore the danger, however indirectly, another aspects of neglect and complacency which has its root in the class structures of the USA.

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Riling Against High Speed Rail Because Is Where The Money Is:

University professors play an important role in fabricating an ideology compatible with the plutocracy in power. Under the USSR, professors were generally in the pocket of power. When Sakharov, or Solzhenitsyn turned against their masters, they  were rare exceptions who proved the rule.

A week or so ago, a Stanford professor blasted High Speed trains in the USA, claiming that, worldwide, only two Very High Speed lines are profitable. One in France, the Paris-Lyon line, one in Japan, the Osaka-Tokyo line. I don’t know about Japan, but the statement is blatantly false about France.

This is subtle ideology transfer. The gross message: “High Speed Rail is bad”, is accompanied by disinformation, if not lies. Indeed  the definition of High Speed Rail is 300 km/h in France, but only 200 km/h in the USA. Most of the French main lines go at 200 km/h. Most are profitable (SNCF, a private company, being overall profitable, although most of its mileage is internally subsidized  small lines in the boondocks).

In truth, France’s very high speed lines are profitable. So much so, most use double deck trains. The Paris-Lyon-Marseilles, Paris-London, Paris-Brussels  lines are very profitable. New lines are established with a mixture of private and local state financing, and would not be engaged in, if not guaranteed profitable (the local city will not sink municipal funds into nothingness).

Electric trains fed by nuclear power have at most 3% of the CO2 production of other means of transportation. Something to keep in mind next time very warm air mixes with cold air in the neighborhood.

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Patrice Ayme