Lesson From Evil Germany? Global Plutocracy Causes Evil Insanity

In Germany’s Lessons for China and America, Roger Cohen philosophizes that:

Better to love your country with a broken heart than love it blind

Well, good try. Germany is a country created in the second part of the Nineteenth Century, in Versailles, France. It’s not an old entity such as France and its vassal England, which were both parts of the Greco-Roman empire… And France was basically the Second Foundation of the “Renovated Empire”… Which included unifying Germany. However, Germany became a nation-state 14 centuries after France, and eight centuries after Britain…

Thus it’s not that simple to compare France, the core of the Renovated Empire, and a country which was created… to fight France (its own mother, in a way).

Our fascist masters, the arrogant, deranged so-called “Democratic Representatives” told us we can’t go the beach, because they said so, a virus in their heads told them. And what they say is the law (they have not read the Constitution of the Republic). Instead, we the free, should put them in prison for abusing their powers, and applying them in an anti-scientific way.

German history is actually a festering cave of decomposing wiggling monsters, many of them poisonous. Vigorous criticism has not handled them all as deserved yet. And it gets worse: both the First World war, and the Second World War went the disastrous way they did, because the USA, child of the bickering union of France and Britain, did not just refuse to help them in a timely manner (it helped, in an untimely manner, most self-serving, after others had done most of the suffering and dying)… It was way worse than that:US plutocracy actually actively helped the crazed militaristic, racist, German plutocracy to achieve its self-defeating rampages. Result; the “American Century”.

But back to that crazed German culture, mostly an anti-culture defined as an opposition to the Greco-Romans and their Franks (the latter having built Germany, and even the language, it’s completely masochist for Germans to be anti-Franks…)

Breaking the spirit which made Germany criminal, is of the essence. Military victory is not enough. Barbarity has to be vanquished in the hearts, souls, and cognitive systems. A whole series of German master-thinkers were despicable and dumb. Starting with the traitor Arminius (“Hermann”) who betrayed the Roman army in 9 CE… Yet celebrated in the Nineteenth Century… A traitor, adulated.

The Gallic opponent of Rome, Vercingetorix, however stupid and rebellious to his own family, was not launched by perpetrating a stabbing in the back. So it does something to the soul when one erects as an example to follow someone who betrayed his comrades… fatally. And the captured Roman troops were not made prisoner or enslaved, they were tortured to death: Auschwitz, anticipated… Martin Luther, one protestants out of many in the period from the eleventh to the seventeenth century, was not nice either: whereas five millions assassinated Cathars advocated purity and veganism, Luther advocated to torture Jews (below his house). Luther was following “Saint” Louis… But not fully. Although Louis IX of France said nothing would please him more than planting a knife in the belly of an atheist or a Jew… He couldn’t do it, because it was against the law. Luther omitted the prominence of the (secular) law. For Luther, his fanaticism was the law. 

Lesser minds may object that they don’t see the connection between plutocracy and Luther. Well, they don’t know history. Luther succeeded because many Germany princes found him very convenient to assuage their thirst for power. Plutocracy, evil power, loved Luther fanaticism. Add Catholic fanaticism and, a century later you get the monstrous “Thirty Year War”, which ravaged much of Europe.

Catholicism itself was invented to give the fascist Roman emperors the metaphysics they needed to terrorize everybody during what one now calls the “Dominate” (which collapse the empire in less than a century…)

EMPEROR CONSTANTINE CHRISTIAN TERRORIST 325 CE (Fall Of Rome Part X)

So Lutheranism, just as the crazed anti-Judaism of the Christian founders, are actually plutocratic effects, to further mental fascization, hatred and sadism (Luther’s despicable sadism is completely obvious, to whoever read enough of him).

Then, to build on Luther’s madness, Hitler, unelected, Germany had a whole slew of grandiose tribal fanatics, still all too much admired, to this day: Herder (who loved herds), Hegel, Wagner… While most Germans got indoctrinated in the military attack dog role (but not Nietzsche and Einstein, both good Europeans).

An important figure of the deplorable German intellectual landscape is the despicable Kant, a much admired philosopher, whom the Nazis, including Eichmann at Jerusalem, used as a defense to justify killing millions because they were following orders, the highest order of morality according to that Prussian military robot. Kant was so pro-slavery , he wrote about to West Indies leaders to not outlaw the institution…

Warning: Nazis, the Kaiser, enemies of the Roman republic, and Xi, were promoted by global plutocracy (= evil-power). 

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Roger Cohen informs us with wisdom from up high: Stephen Heintz, the president of the Rockefeller Brothers Fund, has written of a crisis “that stems from the growing obsolescence of three core operating systems that have shaped civilization for the past 350 years: capitalism, fueled by carbon since the dawn of the Industrial Age and increasingly driven by global financialization; the nation-state system, formalized by the Treaty of Westphalia in 1648; and representative democracy, a system of self-rule based on Enlightenment ideals of freedom, fairness, justice and equality.”

Well, the representative of the plutocratic brothers forgets that “Enlightenment ideas” were the ideas from, and published by an oligarchy which had forgotten the meaning of the word “democracy”.  

Representative democracy is neither representative, nor democracy, or then what it represents is plutocracy, or, at best, oligarchy.

The problem is that “our practice of capitalism is both putting the planetary ecosystem at risk and generating vast economic inequality.” The nation-state is “inadequate for managing transnational challenges like global warming.” And “representative democracy is neither truly representative nor very democratic as citizens feel that self-rule has given way to rule by corporations, special interests and the wealthy.”

It’s not just an economic equality. It’s an inequality of power, and an inequality of public expression, and an inequality of legislative enactment, also a health care inequality, etc. 

The financialization is also completely out of control. Actually the global financial system seized up on March 16, 2020, in a way it had never done before. Suddenly all financial values were threatened to go down to… zero. That includes all retirement systems… Why it happened is the same old same old: self-interested idiots of finance, making huge amounts of money, the sort of people Obama and Biden and Clinton eat in the hands of, and Trump has learned to milk, had decreed that some situations would never, ever, occur. But of course, when all financiers believe something, they make the opposite unavoidable…

I am not making this up because I am a maniac. I am not a maniac, but we are managed and led by maniacs, and they are ignorant and stupid. Most of their expertise is to be like the moronic Bush or Obama, and read off a teleprompter, what their bosses wrote for them, posturing with consummate gravitas, and wisdom. To see the enormity of what we are overlorded by, please read:

https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-day-coronavirus-nearly-broke-the-financial-markets-11589982288

Cohen adds: The virus and accompanying economic collapse have only redoubled the urgency of these reflections. This is the Age of Undoing — of world order, of international law, of truth, of America’s word. It is a dangerous time, as Germany knows better than any nation. Autocracy feeds on fear, misery, resentment and lies. It did in the 1930s; it does now. Better to love your country with a broken heart than to love it blind.

Corruption means; what comes with the rupture. This is the age of rupture, the age of corruption. Look at any center of power, nowadays, and you will see corruption. Not just a little bit. Instead, astronomical amounts. And now the corrupt ones tell you: don’t go to the beach, don’t swim in the sea. You know what? I did both, in full lockdown, and so did my ten year old daughter. Teaching the young means teaching not to respect the orders of corrupt, malevolent, power crazy idiots. 

Because that’s the fundamental problem with so-called “representatives”. Free people don’t need to be led by the nose by “representatives”. Since they have so much power, the positions tend to attract those who are the most greedy, the basest, most grotesque… and malevolent. Direct democracy is not just a political solution, it’s a moral solution… So we don’t have to be ruled by evil (Pluto) power (kratia).

Patrice Ayme

Nature Is The Ultimate Teacher

WILDERNESS IS NOT JUST NICE, IT’S REAL. A TEACHER. GET LOST TO FIND HOME.

Nothing beats being lost in the wilderness as a formative experience. John Muir did this a lot. He loved a good storm shaking the tree where he elected to reside at night, just to experience the power of nature. Who needs the god of books, when the goddess of reality shakes your tree? (Muir, and several of his friends and followers, including the hyper plutocrat rail magnate Harriman, father of the Democratic Party controlling Harriman brothers, proceeded to save enormous swathes of US wilderness, from Alaska to Florida…)

I have practiced that exquisite, most captivating activity myself, getting lost in the wilderness, on 5 continents, since early childhood. In my search for truth and wisdom, I was attracted by that teacher, reality in full. As found in nature, from nature, by nature. It’s not just a question of allure, or thrill, or adrenaline, or of the hyper concentration it requires to not sprain an ankle, not crash into a tree, not catch a root, not go fly head first, not falling into a hole…

It’s not a question just of keeping a sense of orientation. It’s not just a question of listening to the sounds of possible predators, or looking scary enough to keep them at bay, even if one doesn’t see them, and have only a vague idea of where they potentially lurk. It’s not just a question of continually analyzing the ominous silence indicative of predators, bears, lions, hungry canids, and the discrete high pitch sound signaling wasps or African bees… while keeping an eye for snakes, spiders, thorns and pointed branches.

I used to worry about panthers in Africa (one visited me at night when I was ten years old, sleeping in a national park in a tent, leaving a definitive impression)… Now I worry about mountain lions (once I saw tow at dusk in half an hour, and I was running…) Leopards may have evolved to attack not just primates, but specifically, humans.

Baboons have canines to help lions think. We have stones, to help all beasts think, and learn how to measure distance. As a human child, I fought stone battles with full grown baboons. So much about pacifist beasts. Because we are superior tree climbers (more than even baboons), the human shoulder can throw stones more powerfully and further than baboons.

Getting lost in the wilderness and surviving it is not just a question of exerting judgment to choose in a timely manner whether to turn left or right, go up or down, or which direction to bushwhack. It’s not just a question of finding strength when has not had water, food, or rest for hours, or ignoring pain in one’s feet, and general exhaustion, or of seeing in the dark, or surviving hail, or of continually moving enough to fight the otherwise paralysing, deadly cold, not just a question of judging the depth and nature of the snow, or of the swift water, or of navigating by the stars.

Bears know stones, and they fear and hate them (because they have been injured by them). So, when bears and other beasts meet a stone master, a human, they are instilled with respect, especially if they are reminded of reality with a little stone play. The stone master can make a demonstration, for this wild audience, and, if that’s not enough, can actually connect with the recalcitrant ursid… (Something I have done, because I had to do it; law enforcement killed that particular bear, three weeks later… After he injured gravely a grandmother…)

Getting lost in the wilderness is all this, and more, all of it in one day, especially when crossing mountain ranges. This is when we get lost in the universe, in which our astounding brains can be all they are, and love to become wiser for it by visiting what is inaccessible otherwise: nature itself, raw, greatest trip of all, astounding in power, awesome beyond anything human…

Nature, embracing the wilds, reveal how humanity shines the most, finding its real home, which is not just its comfort range, but the entire universe we need to make us whole.

We need to get lost, to find where home is.

Patrice Ayme

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P/S: The preceding essay was inspired by “Lost and Found in Hemingway’s Spain
Of fear and thankfulness. The white elephants of eternity are always out there.” by Roger Cohen, NYT, Nov 30, 2019 (he published my comment). Roger got lost in a national park in central Spain, and was helicoptered out… (I myself was the object of 3 mountain rescues I neither asked for, not needed… But I have been in dire straights, many times… As I generally engage best when the epic factor is significant and  potentially dramatic… Nietzsche used to do solo climbing on a glaciated mountain, with crampons, a mountain I have skied on, of course… Nietzsche had guessed much of what was above, and that’s easy to do, as, if one tries to get lost in the wilderness, the subsequent enlightenment and drugging aspect is so strong, one will be back… if one can…)

Here is from Cohen’s essay, as it’s pretty typical of the lost-by-accident syndrome:

“Earlier this year, I got lost while hiking in the Sierra de Guadarrama, which rises to almost 8,000 feet in central Spain. It had been a grueling day under the September sun. The trail, scattered with boulders, was longer and steeper than expected. What had been described as a gentle glide along a ridge after a tough initial ascent proved unrelenting.

About seven hours in, I fell behind my two friends. I was following stone mounds, or cairns, not the clearest indicators in this case. False guides, they pulled me deeper into the mountains.

This was not a sudden realization but a growing unease that culminated in an admission: lost. Lost as in every human being has vanished. Lost as in I have to slow my heartbeat. Lost as in there are perhaps two more hours of daylight, my lips are dry and I’m out of water. Lost and small in a sierra suddenly vast and threatening.

The stupidest decisions can seem natural enough. For the three of us to separate, for our remaining water to be with my friends, even to undertake this trail without adequate information, was lunacy. Yet it seemed like harmless lunacy — until the mountains rebuked me with their immensity.

I had no water but did have a faint bar of reception on my dying cellphone. All I managed to communicate to my friend was two words — “I’m lost” — before we lost each other again.”

Saved by technology unthinkable three decades ago…

“I looked around. I’d been descending, several hundred feet. I needed to climb again, get around the rocky outcrop above me, to be more visible. In the direction I’d been heading lay only wild terrain and jagged peaks.

Adrenalin is the most exhausting form of energy. Fear is a survival instinct as long as panic does not supplant it. I climbed without feeling the effort, leaping from boulder to boulder, but growing more parched. Far below me the switchbacks of a forest track appeared. No visible way to reach it.

Don’t fall or twist an ankle. Don’t trust that rock with your weight, misjudge the depth of the juniper thicket, or turn in circles. How and at what point does extreme thirst affect the mind? Don’t panic. Think.“

This is the paradox of Getting Lost In the Wilderness: contrarily to repute from stuffed academics and drugged out pseudo-philosophers, the wilderness is a place to learn to THINK and CONTROL emotions (because one doesn’t want to move in haphazard directions… That could mean death, and right away…)  One should even say that the wilderness is THE place to learn to think and emote correctly, because, not only it contains the universe in full, but it’s the ultimate disciplinarian… And Roger to have a bird experience. The bird experience is indicative of the ripe state of an epic. It happened to me even in California with two condors, at the night was coming (the only time I ever saw California condors).

“Then I saw the birds, two of them. They were looking at me. Hulking and black, they were perched side by side on a rock like bloated chess pieces. No, they were not looking at me, they were eyeing me.”

Europe has Black Vultures. The Black Vulture, not just a vulture, is the largest bird of prey. It will attack wounded hiker. A French woman with an injured leg in the Pyrenees was left by her companion who went for rescue (there are no phone coverage in most mountain range yet, this side of Elon Musk…). When the rescuers came back, Black Vultures, who had killed her, were disposing of her remains. They will attack cows. Europe has also the magnificent Gypaete, the only bird known to have killed a (Greek) philosopher. Last year I was doing a high altitude rock climb, off season, the snow was everywhere, the sun was getting low, and these four Gypaeti came to study us very carefully, to see if we were going to make it. They used the updraft of the formidable, slightly overhanging limestone peak to make alluring acrobatics, eyeing us with yellow eyes… When they decided we were too vigorous, they left…

But dogs can be the worst: like leopards, they can be hard to impress: A pregnant woman was killed by dogs in a forest in France as a hunt took place nearby, investigators have said.

“The body of the 29-year-old woman, who was walking her own dogs at the time of the attack, was found in the forest of Retz outside the northeastern village of Saint-Pierre Aigle on Saturday.

An autopsy revealed that the woman had died of “bleeding from several dog bites to the upper and lower limbs as well as to the head,” prosecutor Frederic Trinh said in a statement Wednesday.”

https://www.cnn.com/2019/11/20/europe/woman-killed-dogs-hunt-france-intl-scli/index.html

Once French geologists in Iran (a place where I confronted an angry bear), were attacked by five wild dogs, intent to eat them. So persistent were the ferocious animals, they had to kill every single dog with their geological hammers (the story, which is old, will not be on the Internet, I knew them…)

Nature is not nice. It’s real. A teacher.

 

 

 

 

Pluto Propaganda Censors Critics Of Obama The Great

Anti-Trump Pundits, Lying About What Their True Aim, Use Methods Which Should Be Illegal: Censoring Comments….

Machiavellianism is doing something for all to see, to get what one is truly looking for, the opposite effect.

Everybody asks me: who do you think will win the presidential election? The answer should be: which ideas do you think should win the next presidential election? Trump’s answer is: America First and MAGA. That will win the election… Except if better ideas can be imposed… Say America First and MEGA (Make Earth Great Again).  

The reason Brexit is such a mess, is that British media lied for so long, that the British public can’t even feel, let alone think, right anymore.

Brits are now a bit like those Germans who believed all their problems came from the Jews and the French. 2019: Boris Johnson, the future PM, said ‘I’m wrenching Britain out of Europe, I think the French are turd…” 

The point of view that all what ailed Germany were the French and the Jews (and the Poles, etc.) was so prevalent before 1888, that Friedrich Nietzsche wrote dozens of pages about it… to harshly criticize it and declared prophetically it would bring the greatest wars… As it did: 1914, 1939, and the Holocaust. Nietzsche didn’t write that much, so this is all the more striking… He dined himself as a “good European” rather than a “good German” (there couldn’t be such a thing according to him, pointing out his family came from Poland…). 

I will consider a small and telling example of the attention plutocratic propaganda pays to detail: an article of the New York Times from Roger Cohen raged against Trump, after identifying The Donald to Boris Johnson. Silly:  Just 0.3% of registered voters will pick the next UK’s Prime Minister. They are mostly white, aging and male – the Conservative Party’s grass roots members. Boris Johnson is all about Brexit, something grotesque… [3]

Whereas many issues tackled by Trump have value as serious problems. Obama wrestled with many issues presently handled by Trump: North Korea, Iran, Immigration, space colonization. A specific Trump issue is crucial: globalization, and the Chinese invasion of intellectual property (an issue I have seen close at hand)…

Trump was voted in by nearly half of voters, not .3%. The core of Cohen’s editorial closely embraced critiques I made more than ten years ago. Thus my comment pointed out that the mistakes were made ten years ago, not by Trump the Dismal, but by Obama the Great. 

My comment was censored. The intolerable mood I tried to convey? That many things plutocratic didn’t originate with Trump, but with Obama the great, of before. This is of import as the Democrats try to fight what ails the US and the World. The disease, and why it was left untreated, better be defined correctly first.

Media pundits, are very well paid, very influential individuals working to please the plutocrats who own the media they work for. Just from their very definition, they are not working for We The People… But for the world’s wealthiest, or most powerful, people (from Gates to Putin). 

Censoring my comment violated the new comment policy of the  NYT (which supposedly checks only for “civility” of comments, not whether the ideas therein are pleasing to editorialists).

Censoring, or massively delaying critical comments matters, because, by putting our collective heads in the sand, loudly anti-Trump pundits are actually preparing for Trump’s victory. How does that make sense? As I said in the beginning of this essay, Machiavellianism is doing something for all to see, while arranging for the opposite effect to triumph.

Harris demolishing Biden by throwing buses at him, while Sanders, looking aghast, caught in the crossfire, wished he would die peacefully, in a galaxy far far away…

Willie Brown was the Democratic Mayor of San Francisco, for years… When he was 60 years old, his girlfriend was… Kamala Harris. [1] I agree with his opinion below.

Willie Brown June 29, 2019:
Bad news for Democrats — none of these candidates can beat Trump.
The first Democratic debates proved one thing: We still don’t have a candidate who can beat Donald Trump.

California Sen. Kamala Harris got all the attention for playing prosecutor in chief, but her case against former Vice President Joe Biden boiled down in some ways to a ringing call for forced school busing. It won’t be too hard for Trump to knock that one out of the park in 2020.

Biden did himself zero favors by telling Harris that he opposed only busing that was ordered by the federal government. It was a weird endorsement of states’ rights and local jurisdictions’ right to segregate schools. That’s the best argument he could marshal against busing little kids miles across town?

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders came across as Rip Van Bernie, looking and sounding as if it were still 2016.”

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In response to “Trump, Johnson and the Hole in the Doughnut. Will two charlatans and narcissists with hollow centers lead the free world?”

I sent the following comment censored by New York Times, July 6, 2019. To fully appreciate the comment, one has to read the gist of Roger Cohen editorial… with which I agree. [2]

“Confusing Trump and Johnson has merits, but only so far. Boris Johnson helped cause Brexit: short of the dismal Cameron, and the perfidious British Parliament (which retrospectively made the Brexit poll legislating), Johnson was the most important actor in Brexit. Trump didn’t cause most of the surrounding disasters

Trump didn’t cause the rising inequality in the US and the West. Nor did Trump cause the decrease of life expectancy in the USA, which started under Obama the Great thanks to the excellent Obamacare he instituted (which prevented our family doctor we have had for 30 years: it would cost us $700 to do, for each visit). Nor did Trump cause the impunity of the bankers: here again you have to thank Obama the Great. And the destruction of the financial safeguards instituted by Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933 happened under Clinton, another “Democrat” well to the right of Reagan.

Reagan and Bush Senior nationalized more than 2,000 (two thousand) banks. Confronted to a more terrible financial crisis, how many banks did Obama the Great nationalize? Zero.

But Obama the Great saw that many plutocrats had lost all their money to smarter colleagues. How could the economy, and society still function? As Joe Biden said, billionaires are nice people.  Promptly TARP (Transferring Assets to Rich People) send them trillions.  

A lot of the destruction of the Roman republic, and the present West, was caused by globalization, which enables the wealthiest to evade the laws of Republics, and makes them accomplices of overseas dictators. This happened with Hitler.

Plutocratic globalization nowadays, just as 2,000 years ago, had the exact same effect. To wish to return to the state of globalization, as in the last year of Obama the Great, is not a progressive option.”

After he was done serving plutocrats as president, Obama the Great flew out of Palm Springs on the private jumbo jet of his friend plutocrat Richard Branson of “Virgin”, directly to the latter’s private island, a tax haven.

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One thing we know about plutocrats is that, as per their definition, they love to make, and, or, see common people suffer.So do their servants, and they work to make us suffer… Be it only by confusing us. It’s intriguing that the New York Times, although much of its commentariat is just made of pseudo-leftists on automatic, is so insure that its readership will realize how biased their propaganda is, that they still use dirty tricks against my comment (delaying them two days is another favorite… While checking with all secret plutocratic conspiracies?)

Patrice Ayme  

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[1] Dirt California Politics; The Brown Connection:

Kamala Harris’ first significant political role was an appointment by her powerful then-boyfriend Willie Brown, three decades her senior, to a California medical board that has been criticized as a landing spot for patronage jobs and kickbacks.

Then 30, Harris was dating 60-year-old Willie Brown, at the time the Democratic speaker of the California State Assembly, when he placed her on the California Medical Assistance Commission in 1994. The position paid over $70,000 per year, $120,700 in current money, and Harris served on the board until 1998.

Harris (right) advancing her career, one cuddle at a time… With Brown as cuddly bear…

The medical commission met twice a month. Harris, now a United States senator for California since 2017 and Democratic presidential candidate, missed 20% of the meetings each year, according to commission records obtained by the Washington Examiner. The seven-member board was mostly composed of late-career semi-retired former state officials. At 30 years old, Harris was the youngest appointee by three decades.

Brown, in a letter to Harris, wrote that he was “pleased to appoint” her to the board, which oversaw the payment of insurance providers for state-subsidized MediCal recipients. “I am confident that your knowledge and experience will contribute significantly to the important work of the Commission,” he wrote.

Harris had no medical background, according to the resume she submitted to Brown at the time. Her experience consisted of four years as a deputy prosecutor.

Granlund, a former California Republican state assemblyman who worked with the commission while Harris was on the board said: “The boards are considered plumb appointments as they require no work, no policy credentials, and are paid the equivalent of a full-time [state] senator for arriving at a one- to two-hour meeting each month… crewing the speaker has its rewards.” 

Brown recently acknowledged in the San Francisco Chronicle that “Sure, I dated Kamala Harris. So what?… I may have influenced” Harris’s career. “Yes, we dated. It was more than 20 years ago. Yes, I may have influenced her career by appointing her to two state commissions when I was Assembly speaker.” Money for nothing… Brown noted that he had helped other politicians throughout his career: And I certainly helped with her first race for district attorney in San Francisco. I have also helped the careers of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, Gov. Gavin Newsom, Sen. Dianne Feinstein and a host of other politicians. Harris was the “only one, who after I helped her, sent word that I would be indicted if I so much as jaywalked’ while she was D.A.” He added: “That’s politics for ya.”

It gets better than that. Harris and Brown broke up after Brown met 32-year-old San Francisco socialite Carolyn Carpeneti, a woman with whom he would later have a daughter. 

While those two were dating, Carpeneti was paid (at least, and probably much more than) $2.33 million for campaign work from a network of nonprofit groups and committees run by Brown and his associates, according to the San Francisco Chronicle.

“If this doesn’t cross the line, it comes awfully close,” Jim Knox, executive director of California Common Cause, told the San Francisco Chronicle at the time. “At the very least it seems questionable for [Carpeneti] to have free use of a public resource in her role as private campaign consultant.”

That wasn’t the first or last time Brown would steer benefits to women he was dating. In the 1980s, he reportedly hired his girlfriend Wendy Linka as a fundraiser, and she was later hired as a marketing director for city commissions after Brown became mayor.

Machiavellianism again: Brown also continued to aid Harris’s political career after their split, supporting her successful 2003 campaign for district attorney (powerful San Francisco mayor, Brown knew all the powers that be in California, from present and ex governors to assembly speakers).

An spectacularly ingrate Harris called Brown an “albatross hanging around my neck” in a 2003 San Francisco Weekly profile, in which she said that the “mere mention of their former liaison makes her shoulders tense, her hands clench, and her eyes narrow… His career is over; I will be alive and kicking for the next 40 years. I do not owe him a thing … Willie Brown is not going to be around. He’s gone — hello people, move on.”

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NYT Cohen on Trump-Johnson to which I responded in my censored comment: 

“How did this happen? How did two nations of laws dedicated to individual liberty come around to the semiotics of Trump: It’s O.K. to stiff people; it’s O.K. to lie; it’s O.K. to wink at racism?

The answer lies in the Six I’s: Inequality, impunity, invisibility, immigration, inversion and the internet.

Inequality that has risen as workers in the bottom 60 percent of American society have seen no real wage increase since 1980 while the richest 1 percent now own more wealth than the bottom 90 percent.

Impunity that allowed the designers of the financial weapons of mass destruction that bankrupted many millions of people in 2008 to walk away. To conclude that the system was rigged was then only logical.

Invisibility that gave many citizens living far from the wired metropolises at the nexus of globalization the impression that they counted for nothing, as their hospitals died, public transport disappeared, their schools closed and their jobs went elsewhere.

Immigration that, in both Europe and the United States, brought millions of undocumented migrants to the borders without these societies showing the capacity to agree on a policy that was humane, firm and clear — and, in the American case, that reconciled the demands of a nation of immigrants and a nation of laws.

Inversion of the values of what had been white-male-dominated societies, giving rise to culture wars ranging across the charged questions of race, gender and identity, with cities and the hinterland often at violent odds.

The internet that, through social media, destroyed traditional mediators of society, like established political parties, and empowered politics of the mob. What counts today is not persuasion but mobilization.

Here was the grist for Trump’s populism — and that of his acolytes across the West. Here were the sources of anger and fear that could be exploited. Here’s “the American carnage” he could leverage. Here’s why, in the name of America First nationalism, he went about trashing the multilateral postwar order America had forged. Here’s why he tweets not only of a second term but of staying in power beyond that if the masses demand it. Trump’s inner despot is like Dr. Strangelove’s arm: He can’t keep it down.

Like Johnson, Trump is not an “aberration,” as Joe Biden has suggested. He’s a symptom. He won’t go away absent treatment of the symptoms. That won’t be easy, but it’s doable because Trump’s doughnut not only has a big hole in it; it’s rotten to the core.

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The preceding is indicating that Cohen is not all together well: if the situation is as bad as he describes, if Trump is a symptom, well, why not to focus on the disease, rather than the scratch, Trump which irks him so much?

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[3] The EU had already been on its knees, for decades, begging Great Britain to do as it pleased, and to get ever wealthier at the detriment of the rest of Europe. Great Britain  had the best imaginable deal. (So did Switzerland, also now the object of an EU crackdown…)

The UK got a big rebate from the EU. The UK was not in the Schengen area… while profiting of an immigration which it didn’t stop, by refusing appropriate police controls (slaves for free).  The UK was an exception to the Euro currency… while being allowed to become the main clearinghouse for EURO trades. The UK was an exception to the principle of ever closer Union and would continue to be so in the future, indefinitely.

Then the EU announced the coming of new, stricter tax avoidance regulations in 2016, and a crackdown on tax havens. Suddenly the glorious British leaders, and their global plutocrat friends, with their offshore, or ill-gained wealth, decide they would rather get the UK out of the European Union, rather than having them and their friends pay their fair share of tax. For a better idea, consider many Obama friends such as Richard Branson.  

That’s all there is to know about Brexit.

 

 

 

 

 

Trump Was A Warning To Plutocracy. Warren Is What Is Really Needed!

EINOs: Elite In Name Only. This is the entire problem. No more than 10,000 people decide of the fate of the USA, the West, Civilization, eight billion people, and even the fate of the biosphere. 10,000 have captured the planet. Who are these experts in heist? Who are these gods? Mostly a self-nominated elite. OK, not all from the same place: after all, Putin was nominated by the KGB, and Xi Jinping is the son of Xi Zhongxun, nominated by the Politburo.

Yet certainly China’s elite became part of global plutocracy. Here is an example: corrupt armies ransacked Congo for rare earths enabling China to make phones for Apple, which “optimized” its own taxes into quasi-nothingness, by a combination of Caribbean tax havens and an EU-illegal deal with Ireland.   

It is this global plutocracy which rules the world. It talks one way… precisely to be able to act the opposite. Biden is the centerfold of this, even more than the transparent Obama, and the blatant Clinton. In the 1990s, time and time again, Biden fostered the plutocratic coup against civilization, the crux being the destruction of the Banking Act of 1933, thus giving free reins to the world financial plutocracy.

All is tied up: Obama fostered a fracking rampage thus the US produces twice more fossil fuels than Russia or Saudis, poisoning Earth… But 1% of US CO2 is from US subsidized private jets.

Only one way out: as the Roman Republic did. Put an ABSOLUTE limit on wealth. As Warren suggests to do (de facto). Warren’s revolution can defeat Trump’s revolt.

***

The preceding commented on the New York Times “Joe Biden and the Party of Davos

As a pillar of the ancien régime, Biden is ill-placed to overturn Trump’s revolution,” opined Roger Cohen in the New York Times.

My, my, my… How the Times they are changing. Just a little while ago, Trump was reviled, and not hating him, a grave moral failure, let alone a revolution. Calling Biden and the revered Obama ancien régime was a sin. Biden was arguably the most prominent engineer of plutocratic legislative installment in the 1990s: he reversed women rights, instituted mass imprisonment, demolished the Banking Act of 1933. [1]

 

Obama: “Can you believe those idiots? They really think we are not on the same side! I just smile, and they believe me!” Trump:”yeah, well, we better give those losers a bit of slack!”

Truth is Trump is not that bad, especially considering what the ancien régime has done, and not done. The US unemployment rate just reached (May 2019) a 50 years’ low. Trump brought tariff on 200 billion dollars worth of Chinese goods to 25%. Seeing those facts, global plutocracy screams high treason. I say: why doesn’t the European Union not do the same? Because it’s neither European, nor an Union?

Cohen goes on:

“Is Donald Trump an aberration? If he is, Joe Biden is the perfect Democratic candidate to defeat him next year, the steady hand that can restore decency, steer a middle course between Wall Street and Main Street, and reinvigorate the shaken liberal democratic order.

I don’t think Trump is an aberration. On the contrary, he’s the face, however duplicitous, of a revolution against the Party of Davos, the network of elites whose economic and cultural prescriptions came to be seen by myriad voters across the United States and Europe as camouflage for a self-serving heist. Biden has been a regular attendee at Davos.”

The present economic expansion is the longest ever. Trump has argued with the Fed about letting the economy run; the Fed has argued it “wants to take the punchbowl away”. The Fed is clearly wrong in a globalized economy… Now, of course, Trump has been de-globalizing more than a bit… As needed…Now here is Cohen going on with more of what I have been saying for a few years. Actually I said it, years before Obama enraged Trump enough, and made him realize anybody could become president, as long as they lied big enough, deep enough, and frequently enough, that Trump decided to run for president. As I pointed out in August 2016:

“USA As A Police State

Many rage against Donald Trump, while singing the praises of Obama. They overlook that the Donald duck is what the Obama cat dragged home.”

Therein the graph of the incarceration rate in the USA, much of it having to do with Biden’s work, as the head of the relevant Senatorial committee in the 1990s:

Thanks to Biden’s reforms, incarceration doubled. Under Reagan, it’s the Democrats who passed the laws to incarcerate, as all the end all, be all laws needed…

Here is Roger Cohen again: [Trump] “could say the unsayable. He could disrupt. He could restore violence to a wan political stage of PowerPoint slides. He could take on the China that had put millions of people to work on the cheap in its factories and so, from the Midwest to the British Midlands, de-industrialized much of the West.

If people felt like nobodies, felt abandoned, felt there was not only growing inequality in wealth but inequality of recognition, felt their very language had been anesthetized by all-knowing elites more at home in global capitals than in the provinces of their own countries, then somebody could speak for liberalism’s disappeared — and maybe even win. Steve Bannon saw this. Trump grasped this and did win, not as the creator of a movement but as the media-savvy messenger of a groundswell.”

This revolution is not an American phenomenon. It is much wider…”

Roger Cohen observes the obvious:

There’s been a movement in people’s minds, a radical change in the way people live, perceive and conduct their politics. The old paradigm won’t work… whatever Biden’s early lead in polls. He’s ill-placed, as a pillar of the ancien régime, to overturn the revolution. This is not personal. It’s societal.

For all his Scranton blue-collar beginnings, Biden will be pilloried as a faithful servant of the Party of Davos that secured impunity for the financiers behind the 2008 meltdown, a heady growth in inequality, China appeasement and the arrogance of money-wooed Democrats estranged from their working-class constituency. Unfiltered politics, technology’s dubious gift, will hurt him. These politics prize agility more than honor. The world has moved on. Whither I’m not sure, but it has. Things shift. That’s the way of the world — inexorable as biology.

One of the most significant exchanges so far of the fight for the 2020 Democratic nomination came in the last few days when Biden said of China: “I mean, you know, they’re not bad folks, folks. But guess what? They’re not competition for us.” To which Bernie Sanders shot back that the United States had lost three million manufacturing jobs to the 2000 China trade deal. “It’s wrong,” he tweeted, “to pretend that China isn’t one of our major economic competitors.”

Not only economic, I would add. China is set on an implacable course to run the world in the second half of this century. If that is not precisely what you want for your children, thinking that “they’re not competition for us” is precisely the wrong place to start. It’s lazy thinking

Cohen then evokes Macron, who went one carbon tax too far. Macron was preoccupied by the end of the world. The Gilets Jaunes replied they were preoccupied by the end of the month. Cohen, optimistically said that Macron learned. Our banker learned? Of course not really. All Macron learned was to fly, one burning cathedral at a time, just dumping enough Pluto baggage, to get over the next hill.

And finally Cohen draw the conclusion I have drawn in the past:

“…among Democratic contenders, Elizabeth Warren is listening most closely. Her proposed tax on the super wealthy reflects that — while billionaires, like China, get a pass from Biden. Trump is not an aberration. Only the innovative will beat him.”

***

From Repression To Barbarization:

Other opinion makers at the New York Times are also condemning Biden, even if they don’t say it aloud, but use euphemisms. In “Imprisoned for Trying to Save His Son. Mass incarceration was America’s biggest mistake over the last half-century.” Nicholas Kristof, Opinion Columnist, on May 4, 2019,

“America’s biggest mistake over the last half-century arguably had nothing to do with the war in Vietnam or Iraq, or with Watergate or Donald Trump. Rather, I’d say that it was mass incarceration, fueled by the war on drugs.

The United States used to have incarceration rates similar to those of Europe — and then, beginning in about 1970, we increased the number of people behind bars sevenfold. About as many Americans now have a criminal record as have a college degree. Mass incarceration shattered America’s family structure, magnified race gaps, left millions of people marginalized — and has been brutally unfair.

Years ago I wrote about a case that still haunts me. Dicky Joe Jackson was a Texas trucker whose 2-year-old son, Cole, needed a bone-marrow transplant to save his life. The family raised $50,000 through community fund-raisers, but this wasn’t enough — so Jackson tried to earn the remainder by transporting meth in his truck for a distributor. He was caught and sentenced to life in prison.

The prosecutor himself thought the sentence unjust, saying of Jackson: “He didn’t know of any other way to take care of his kid.”“

***

Mass incarceration was itself a manifestation of a much deeper disease: the control of the USA by its wealthiest class, even when civilization was. and is, at stake. Those who know too little history will say the USA declared war TO Hitler. No. Hitler declared war TO the US (Dec 11, 1941). The USA had the plan to NOT go to war in 1942. Fortunately, the stupid fascists couldn’t resist.

USA’s worst lie, and worst mistake, for those who care about lives, humanity,  and its standards: not to recognize the value system which led it to fight too late against Nazism, or even more basic, that the deepest flaws of US society, still in power today, led it to not declare war to Hitler. Obscuring this vile story hides US Pluto power (US plutocracy!

It’s all tied up together into an all too evil mood…

No more than 10,000 people decide of the fate of the USA, the West, Civilization, eight billion people, and even the fate of the biosphere. 10,000 have captured the planet. Some could argue that they are busy destroying the planet, precisely to hide their heist, by fostering great destruction, making it impossible to understand who, what, started the holocaust, the burning of everything…

Anyway, good to see the Times they are changing…

Patrice Ayme

***

***

[1] Relative to Biden, Obama was just a poser: his Obamacare, however helpful it has been to the healthcare plutocracy, pales in insignificance relative to Biden’s hellish reforms of the 1990s… 

Obamascare

Of course TARP was very much in the spirit of Biden’s finance reforms of the 1990s:

TARP: TRANSFERRING ASSETS TO RICH PEOPLE.

Is London A Cancer?

London is getting ever richer. Why this is, is, at first sight, a mystery. San Francisco is also getting richer. But that’s not mysterious: thousands of beaver geeks are busy building “apps” there, San Francisco actually produces products, common products which common people love to use. And code writers prefer to live there, in a big city, next to Silicon Valley’s centers of power and innovation. Apps made in San Francisco are then sold worldwide.

Excuse Us Not, We Are Building All over

But London? What does London make? The answer is not what London makes, but what it harbors… which we abhor. An increasingly serious world problem. The New York Times’ Roger Cohen ponders the situation:

“The streets look the same — if spruced for the new gentry from drab and dreary to spick and span — but London’s animating spirit is another. Money, and I mean the world’s money not Britain’s, now determines how London looks, sets it apart from the rest of the country, and defines what it is… it resembles a mausoleum reserved for the occasional use of the globe’s peripatetic rich and their ample staffs.

Real estate as investment and tax dodge, rather than as dwelling, is a life-sucking force. Georgian mansions of cream-colored splendor sit there, empty much of the time, with a banner to the great unwashed on their shuttered windows proclaiming: Stay out!…

The faraway “Continent” of my youth — full of such unfamiliar and vaguely suspicious items as garlic and French intellectuals and edible food — has defied the Channel and arrived. London and gastronomy are no longer strangers.

French and Polish and Romanian youths pour into London in search of a living wage and passable English, followed by young Spaniards and Italians. That they are undeterred by how crazy-expensive London life is testifies to the economic slump and high unemployment across much of Europe.”

It is most reassuring for me when mainstream commentators adopt pretty much word for word what i have been saying for years. All the following ideas I brandished in the past, iconoclastically:

“London is skewed in dangerous ways, indicative of European and global problems. House prices keep jumping. Cranes are everywhere, hoisting new luxury developments into being. Some are certainly for wealthy Greeks fleeing their country’s problems. There’s a bubble. The capital has become a glittering enclave in a country often resentful of its dominance. It presides with an air of superiority, like squeaky-clean Singapore looking down on Southeast Asia.

An alternative way of looking at the push for independence by Scotland, now a one-party Scottish nationalist state, is to think of London as having seceded from the rest of Britain, a city-state unto itself. There is widespread resentment of the city’s self-absorption. An alternative way of looking at the way London sucks in money and the affluent from the rest of Europe is as a reflection of the stagnation and unresolved structural problems of the eurozone. In some ways, London reflects both a country and a continent in which the fracturing forces are, for the first time since World War II, stronger than the unifying forces. London is a capital of culture, but also of inequality and tax evasion.”

An alternative way to look at the most recent phase of the Greek crisis is that it consisted in several Machiavellian shows, entangled with each other. Tsipras wanted to claim he had no choice, but to take some strong measures which he knew and wanted, to take. Merkel and Hollande did not feel like negotiating with Cameron, something they sure could not do, as long as Greece is on the front burner. Cameron himself may have felt that the Greece crisis gave him an excuse for having had no time for significant negotiations with the EU, thus dissimulating his impotence. After all, Cameron is only PM of Great Britain, not the power behind London’s growth. That is what really pulls the strings: world plutocracy, un-taxed, uncowed, unabashed, indomitable.

Politics is nothing, if not Machiavellian. London itself is so outrageous, that it presents, by its very absurdity, both crisis and opportunity.

London’s average metrics are getting ever richer, on the back of We The People, worldwide. And Roger to conclude, in a style reminiscent of yours truly:

“[London] is also a magnet for people looking for a safe place for their money. Having made it in countries like Russia and China with a cowed press, rampant corruption and no rule of law, oligarchs and crony capitalists reach the conclusion that they like nothing as much as democratic systems with real legal systems and a vigorous press. Having trashed the West they trust the West with their money.

Autocratic hypercapitalism without Western checks and balances produces new elites whose dream is an American or British lifestyle and education for their children, and whose other goal is to buy into the rule of law by acquiring real estate, driving up prices in prime markets to the point where the middle classes of those countries, with incomes stagnant or falling (and taxed), are pushed aside.

London is the capital of these trends. That is the different reek, of something amiss and skewed and wrong, in its purring streets.”

Roger does not go into the nitty-gritty of the tax code. However, this is the core of London’s ascendancy. The tax code allows “non-doms” and plutocrats from all over the world to come and situate themselves, tax free, in London, for at least seven years. No questions asked.

London has turned into Monaco, writ large. With much less stringent admission criterions. Plus the added twist of world financial conspiracies, so unethical that the law of the USA does not allow them to be conducted, even in New York.

England (that is, London) and the USA (in particular Delaware, Wyoming, etc.) are the world’s largest tax havens, for world plutocracy. The serious money is hidden in “dark pools” where the real owners cannot be traced, in the present system: the situation is similar to tax evasion in Greece, but much worse.

The leaders of the USA, Wall Street, and London thus try to control the world, by inviting the controlling plutocrats to reside there. It’s a sort of Faustian bargain, writ large. The New York Times has made a whole study of wanted international criminals, and completely opaque arrangements controlling the mighty towers in New York.

Apparently the idea is to sell our democracy, in exchange for the influence, you plutocrats, you, our beloved plutocrats in residence, exert upon the world.

The price which is paid is not just measured in how much soul goes down the drain, but in the influence of plutocracy on politics. Academic studies have shown most decisions in the USA, have to do with what the .1% want, not what We The People of the USA want. The same phenomenon blossoms in England. Hence the Scottish rejection of the London wealth phenomenon.

It is high time that the Scottish rejection for plutocracy supreme spread around the world. If we do not reject plutocracy in a timely manner, it will come to control us completely, until a new serfdom becomes a fact.

Patrice Ayme’

Serres Decapitates France

I just landed in France with the elegance of the death star among minnows. A contributor to this site, Kevin Berger, attracted my attention to an editorial of Roger Cohen, “France Decapitated”, amplifying moaning from Michel Serres, a philosopher.

Probably to set the tune of fundamental idiocy that was going to overshadow his entire editorial, Cohen complained, to start with, that the Tour De France started in Yorkshire. In his crass ignorance, the connection between France and England eludes him totally (although Cohen is now a USA citizen, he originated as a South African Jew).

French Light Speed Communications, 18th Century

Cohen whined that having the Tour in England showed that “nothing was sacred anymore, and pigs will fly”. Well, since pigs already write for the New York Times, they may as well fly. As this essay will show, given enough ignorance, anything flies handsomely.

Mark Cavendish, the (ex) number one sprinter in the world, tried to force his way in the first sprint of the Tour, in Yorkshire (he himself recognized). He fell, dragging others in his fall, injured himself and then had to abandon the Tour, on day one. On day four and five, Christopher Froome, who won the Tour last year, fell three times on Northern France’s cobblestones, and also had to abandon. Cavendish, Froome, are British. At one point they owned the Tour. It’s only natural the Tour comes by where they are from. The roads were packed along the Tour in Britain, driving many a rider furious from too many cameras in their faces.

Ah, lest Cohen did not get the news, the Franks conquered England in 1066 CE, and stayed permanently after making an alliance with the people and freeing the 20%-25% or so, of the population who were slaves. English democracy was definitively launched by a number of Frankish rebels.

The Franks ruled what they called “Renovated Rome”. Indeed they spoke Latin, used Roman Law, and originated as the Roman army.

The original Roman army had evacuated Britain in 406 CE, for budgetary reasons caused by plutocratic will. (On the continent, the Franks had officially replaced the legions in 400 CE.)

Knowing there was no more highly trained, superiorly armed legions facing them, but only local soldiers, the unconquered savages of Northern Germany and Scandinavia attacked in the following six centuries and overran Britannia, including the Roman successor states (Northumberland, etc.), in a succession of complex invasions.

For centuries Britannia and Gallia had been part of the same Roman state. Earlier both were part of the same Celtic civilization, for more than a millennium. After 1066 CE, they were again part of the same polity, itself officially the “Renovated Roman Empire” explicitly proclaimed under Charlemagne… But effective for more than three centuries.

However, the rulers of Western Francia, gained by Gallic arrogance, proclaimed that the Paris/French king was “emperor in his own kingdom”, sometimes around 1000 CE. This brought a mess of little leaders, all over Europe, with no central authority until the European Union.

The mess of too many little great leaders after 1066 CE, all over Western Europe, led to no less than 50 major wars.

This is the fundamental reason to make a united Europe that Europhobes do not know about, in their crass ignorance, and immanent treacherousness.

Cohen, by refusing the Tour in Britain, on the ground that makes pigs fly, rejects history, plays dumb, and embraces hatred for European unity. In the garbage, please.

Cohen: “That the French are unhappy has become a commonplace. A nation that loves ideas is living in an ideological void. If that void is filled by anyone it is the rightist leader Marine Le Pen with her cleverly dosed venom about Europe, immigrants, crime, globalization and the other supposed culprits behind French national decline.”

That is roughly correct. Except that rumors of a French decline have been much exaggerated. And the solution is thriving next door in an independently managed part of Francia: Switzerland. (Let alone Germania, also independently managed Francia.)

Cohen: “France is a modern country as well as a beautiful one. Its attributes, from its health system to its rail system (when not on strike), are well known.”

I had a very personal demonstration of the superiority of French health care this week: my four year old daughter was cured within hours, from French antibiotics, after a harrowing flight. Californian doctors were apparently firmly set to leave her fate to the will of God. In the USA, antibiotics are for plutocrats and their animals, much dying keeps We The People in check.

French rail has held the world speed record for rail for seventy years or so (but for a few months of German domination). In the late 1950s, the Japanese bought and deconstructed French electric engines for building their own high speed trains.

The French health care system is not just good, it’s innovative, and the world profits from it. In the 1950s an observant French surgeon discovered the modern psychiatric drugs. Meanwhile a French woman discovered that Down syndrome was caused by an added chromosome. More recently deep brain stimulation was discovered in the Grenoble CHU as a method to cure Parkinson’s and other diseases.

A serious French effort has been underway for years to make a permanent artificial heart (a patient died mysteriously, so it’s not easy).

Cohen: ”But the French dislike modernity. They mistrust modernity. That is the nub of the problem. They dislike and mistrust it for two reasons. Modernity has redefined space and relegated the state. This is intolerable.”

A “modern” country that dislikes “modernity”, while inventing all sorts of “modern art”, and “art deco”, and “nouveaux philosophes”? And the number one inventor of “Relativity” was Henri Poincaré, who even named it, not Einstein. France, as the country that brought E= mcc (Poincare’ 1900, Einstein, 1905)? Intolerable. Quick let’s attribute that to a German Jew.

Lest you ask, Poincaré also invented topology. Among other things. Unfortunately he died while middle aged. If Einstein was turkey size, Poincaré was T Rex.

Modern, modernity and modernism are French attributes, thus are absolutely not the nub of the problem. Cohen, parroting three pence philosopher Michel Serres, is wrong as wrong can be.

Cohen is off the deep end here.

France is not just modern. France’s fundamental tradition is modernity. France’s Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, rests on modernism.

And so it shows. France invented the first cars (Eighteenth Century), hot air balloons and planes. All the preceding were private efforts under government (military) contracts. But the first submarines or helicopters were also made in France. And also cameras (both black and white, and color). Also the first (and, so far, only, ever) ram jet plane. The Concorde, by the way, still holds many speed records (the ones without air refueling).

The nuclear chain reaction and how to extract energy from nuclei, was so discovered in France, that the French government yanked all the patents out in January 1938, lest the Nazis read and understand them (fortunately, that understanding dawned on the dumb Nazi physicists led by Heisenberg only August 7, 1945).

More recently, the Minitel was a highly successful precursor of the internet. Astoundingly, and little known, the transistor, the integrated circuits and the PC were all invented in France (and quickly stolen by Silicon Valley and other USA propagandists). Optical pumping, a necessary precursor to the maser and laser, was also discovered in France.

On Mars the Curiosity Rover is mostly Americano-French. Besides scientific instrumentation, a French company made its supersonic parachute, another, Thales, made its laser.

Thales makes the world’s most powerful lasers, when it’s not building the Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carriers. The most advanced American material science labs purchase Thales lasers. French laser physicists are scared that, if they do not stay financed enough, they will lose their edge on the rest of the World. In ten years. (The NSA is supposed to fix that.)

The major advance of the Franks beyond Antique Rome, freeing Europe of slavery, was made possible by more advanced technology where it really made a difference (mechanical advantage, hydraulic hammers, super-horses, more advanced agriculture, including the new genetically engineered beans of the Tenth Century).

That was also necessary. The moral advance of “Equality, Fraternity” occurred only because more advanced technology allowed to get rid of slavery, in the 7^th century. Just as, someday, it will allow to get rid of work.

Let’s not forget that the Franks replaced the Romans, first of all, because they had better, and that means more modern, weapons. Similarly, four centuries later, the steel of the Franks proved superior even to the superb Damascus steel of the Islamists.

So modernism is the essence of France: no modernism, no Francia. One does not change essence overnight. Cohen does not know what he is talking about in the matter of French culture: it is centered, in the fullness of time, around modernity. To put it mildly.

Cohen: “The redefinition of space has involved the technology-driven elimination of distance. As Michel Serres, a prominent French philosopher, put it in a lecture last year at the Sorbonne on the digital world, “Boeing shortens distances; new technologies annul them.”

Philosophers are like blades of grass in the French prairie. Yet, I like Michel Serres. Once a mariner, his feet are firmly planted in the waves, essence of the universe. However, why did Serres use the sentence: “Boeing shortens distances…”. This is a deliberate lie, a sophisticated lie, but still, a lie: it is construed to give a misleading impression. Serres could have said: ”Jets shorten distances…” Jet engines were not invented by Boeing, but by Messerschmitt, a European company. The Brits were the second to realize jets. Even several years later, captured Me 262 operated by American test pilots were much better than the best jets made in the USA.

Boeing, indeed, is an American company. Airbus is European, French dominated, and makes as many planes. So Serres wants to depict France as under aggression from the USA, rather than from Toulouse (where Airbus churns out more than 50 jets a month; arguably the world historical capital of aviation).

To deliberately inflict on the naïve a misleading impression, that’s behavior unbecoming a philosopher.

All the more as the French were big time pioneer of aviation to the point many parts of planes wear French names. French military aviation was huge as early as 1914. The Aeropostale in the 1920s and 1930s, inaugurated long range airmail, all the way to Chili (as readers of the Petit Prince may know).

Besides the French invented the proto-Internet with Minitel, and it was a massive success. A French government program, as early as 1945, enlisted top German scientists, to make fast signalization for very high speed trains.

Hard for me to take seriously philosophers who make such stupid mistakes.

Cohen: “Humanity has also changed its relationship to the state. The French place deep faith in the state. It is the righter of wrongs, the mediator of human affairs, the source of social justice, the object of duty, and the repository of power. The very word deregulation is odious to the French.”

Humanity is changing its relationship to the state in Switzerland. Elsewhere, not as much, if at all. Actually the argument is common in Europe that the state, in the guise of the European Union, is taking too much importance, and that the EU is regulating too much.

Cohen, aping Serres: “A revolution in communication is underway, not seen since the invention of the printing press, but it is not a French revolution. It is in fact an anti-French revolution. It challenges fundamental French values, the French sense of self, and the French attachment to the state.”

Whatever. The French state, centuries ago, had set-up a semaphore signalization system. France was covered with 556 stations. In tall towers placed upon hilltops, 10 to 35 kilometers away, a two armed device depicted symbols read through a telescope. That was retransmitted, just the same. This signalling system could transmit a signal 250 kilometers (150 miles) in two minutes.

According to Serres and his parrot Cohen, that’s supposed to be anti-French? On January 7 1785, a Frenchman, Blanchard, having thrown his pants out to lighten the ship, succeeded to cross the Channel in a Montgolfiere. A few weeks earlier Pilatre de Rozier, who had flown over Paris 15 months earlier, died, when his hot air balloon caught fire during the crossing. Were all these attempts at modernism, anti-French?

Articulating one’s logic around idiocies, amplifies idiocy. Let’s heap spite on such critters, in Quranic style.

The question still arises: what ails France? As France, clearly, is ailing. If not Serres’ dumb hypothesis that France hates modernity, then what? I will answer this in another essay. Interestingly, while presently the greatest fuel for the right wing Front National, it is easy to fix.

Patrice Aymé