Si Vis Pacem, Para Scientiam: Science For War, War For Science

Si Vis Pacem, Para Scientiam? If you want peace, prepare for science? The original Latin proverb is: Si Vis Pacem, Para Bellum. If you want peace, prepare war. Cute, but not enough. My proverb is more to the point.

At first the original Roman proverb, want peace, prepare war, sounds pretty deep, in the philosophy of military science, and so did I feel, for decades…

However, in the end the Romans were defeated. They didn’t get defeated once, or a few times, and then ultimately won the wars… As the Franks/French did so many times. No, the Romans, starting under Marcus Aurelius, started to lose… and lose, and lose, didn’t not recover very well, and finally, two centuries later, by 406 CE, four years before the fall of Rome to the Goths, the empire was riddled with armed German nations [1].  

So the proverb was nearly right, thus still wrong, a near-miss, the equivalent of the big splash the Bismarck succeeded to land next to one of the two British battleships assaulting it, drenching the command deck of its enemy… but failing to score. The British did score, though, and, within minutes, the Bismarck had lost the ability to aim its fire, becoming just a big fat target for the Brits.

By 406 CE, the Roman empire was also a big fat target for the Barbarians. To try to defeat the Goths later, the Romans had to muster an army mostly made of Huns at Toulouse. The Goths still won and killed the Roman general. That defeat of  Litorius was in 439 CE. In 451 CE, after being chased and harassed by a Frankish army, a coalition of Franks, Goths and Romans (under the plausibly double dealing generalissimo Aetius) defeated the Huns spectacularly.

Clearly the Romans were fighting a lot, prepared or not, and prepared to this mess, they were not. Something deeper had gone very wrong. Actually Aetius was assassinated later in palace intrigue.   

Because they only prepared for war, the Romans lost to the other guys, because the other guys had also prepared for war; the Parthians, then the Sassanids, and finally, worse of all, the Arabs. The Romans should have prepared for (more) science.

Greek fire was a sort of napalm spewed from metallic machines which could spew enormous fire at great range, from 15 meters to up to 450 meters when loaded on catapults. In the first battle which saved Constantinople, more than 2,000 Arab ships were destroyed, and only seven (7) survived! There was a repeat of that latter. Then the Arabs launched the plan of taking Constantinople from behind (as the Turks would o, seven centuries later!). So the Arabs conquered North Africa, Spain… Only to see three successive invasions of Francia crushed to smithereens, causing the fall of Umayyad Caliphate in Damascus… Greek fire was used to destroy the Arab fleet in the Gulf of Saint Tropez in the Tenth Century, while a Frankish army was pressing inland on the Muslim redoubt at la Garde Freinet. The Arabs never figured out how it worked… And we still don’t know, actually, so well guarded was the secret. In comparison, how to make nuclear bombs is no secret…

Greek Fire had saved the Oriental empire. It was then superseded by black powder. French engineers (more exactly the Bureau brothers) were able to make field guns, guns which could be wheeled into a moving battlefield, with which twenty years after roasting Joan of Arc, the “100” Year War was won…

To make sure one will win, one doesn’t just need overwhelming force [2]. One needs overwhelming smarts. Heraclius, the Roman emperor who defeated the Sassanids, was one of humanity’s greatest generals, achieving an incredible Blitzkrieg. However, Heraclius had fallen ill and was unable to personally lead his armies to resist the Arab conquests of Syria and Roman Paelestina in 634 (he was sick in Alexandria). An incredibly stupid tactical engagement of the vastly superior Roman army, in a place that put it at a heavy disadvantage, using impatient, foolhardy tactics, led to its defeat by the much smaller (40,000) Arab army. The Arabs then did something no one expected: they killed all males in age of bearing arms. (So here we are!)

But the really deep question is: why had it become a fair fight between Romans and Barbarians? How come Barbarians had achieved military technological equality? In short: because Rome had become a stupid dictatorship. Excuse the pleonasm: all dictatorships are stupid, my dear Marx! 

What keeps the peace nowadays? Some erroneously believe that’s because we are all so civilized. They look at the plutocrats who feed them to say such inanities, and they love themselves for being so smart.  A casual look at leading politicians show that this is not the case: civilization is not improving, just Machiavellianism (as happened in Late Rome). 

Peace is kept, because the three leading military powers of the West have no interest to wage war; they already have what they want, profit from the status quo… And the leading Western military powers have had, recently, huge military technological superiority (now quickly fading, though…) 

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“Fourth Spy Unearthed in U.S. Atomic Bomb Project
His Soviet code name was Godsend, and he came to Los Alamos from a family of secret agents.”

The New York Times just ran an article exposing still one more spy at the heart of the Manhattan project, the nuclear bomb. A spy no one knew existed before, a physicist who was spying with the apparent help of his brothers. When the spies fled to the USSR in the early fifties, the FBI kept it secret (to keep the existence of its own informants secret). 

In any case, the Manhattan project leaked a lot; there were a lot of “Communists” at the time among intellectuals (“Communist” meant, in practice, at the time, infeodated to the fascist Stalin…) Carried over, the ebullient PM Churchill wanted to imprison indefinitively the top French atomic scientists… because they knew so much [3] 

The Manhattan project’s ancestor was launched in France in January 1938, thanks to the discovery by Nobel Irene Curie of the nuclear chain reaction with U235. [6]

Differently from the French, German scientists didn’t know a bomb was possible. French scientists and their plans fled to Britain, part of the materials was sheltered underground with the Crown Jewels, then the entire project transferred to Canada and the US. 

Secrecy in military matters is crucial: had the Nazis known in 1938 what the French knew, they would have developed a nuclear bomb. A better way to slow down neutrons was found (boron); then Plutonium created in reactors, the implosion pit invented with neutron triggers, etc. Lots of crucial details.

Too much Western (military) tech flows to the regime of dictator Xi, through armies of dual use spies, and Chinese investment in universities related startups.

Military superiority of (representative pseudo-) democracy, is a war the West can’t lose against blatant dictatorships. Rome, initially equipped with Gallic (!) weaponry, lost military superiority to Parthians, Sassanids, Goths. Yet, 

Constantinople was saved by Gregian fire (700 CE). Ever since Franks and their successors kept military technological superiority; that’s how the West (“democracy”) won!

Science for war, war for science. It has been going for millions of years. Progress doesn’t come cheap. It first have to fight those who want none. For a whole bunch of reasons. From the prosaic, to the most petty [4]. Those in power find progress hard, because, by definition, it means a move forward (forward (pro)-walk (gradi)), Any move is a threat to the establishment [5].

Science, and the scientific method, are as old as the genus Homo (and certainly older). How many today could go naked in the bush, and survive? Not many, because they don’t know much, starting with making and feeding fire… War rewards smarts, and reciprocally. Is it mean, is it hopeless? No, it just is. Science is about what is, and war about creating more of what is [7].

Progress is not innocuous: it’s a war, war against the unknown, war against the certainties of the past, and an understanding moving forward. In any case, it messes minds up, and many don’t like that… Especially when someone else starts the mess [8]. Well, they will still be pushed out of the way…

Ultimately, the giant walls of Constantinople fell to the giant guns of the Muslim invader. And a civilization fell. Did the famed (and imaginary) “Muslim science” (Islamophiles love to promote) succeed that feat? No. The engineers who made those guns were Hungarians. The assault troops who stormed Constantinople were “Janaissaries” Islamized slaves who had been captured as the Christian boys they were… and then brainwashed, imprinted, indoctrinated, and made offers they couldn’t refuse (everything they want, or impalement).

Dictatorships don’t play nice. Later printing was enough to earn the death penalty in Turkey, and that lasted centuries (in France too, but only if unauthorized, and it didn’t last; thanks Francois I for that). Right now the West’s technology is leaking to Xi, a dictator (he says it himself…) OK, maybe he is a “friend” of Trump, but that is still no excuse, let alone a guarantee, and the West should meditate the preceding…

Patrice Ayme

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[1] Ironically, in the Seventh Century, after a horrendous war, the Romans, launching themselves south from Armenia, destroyed the Sassanids. However, this is just after this that the crafty Muhammad attacked… an exhausted Roman army, and a devastated Sassanid army and schizoid, civil war government. So, weirdly, Roman triumph was quickly followed by the destruction and occupation of ⅔ of the empire… 

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[2] Overwhelming force failed during the Battle of France of 1940: all together, it looked as if France and Britain couldn’t be defeated. And actually the French Foreign Legion had put to flight, after two combined air-sea landings, elite Nazi divisions to flight in Norway. At the famous Midway battle. A small US fleet sank a more than twice bigger, in aircraft carriers alone Japanese fleet (and the Japs had a whole battleship fleet on top of that).

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[3] Irene Curie and company were indeed dedicated Communists… until at the world intellectual Communist Congress in 1953 the Soviet delegate called Sartre a “dactylographic hyena”… The French delegation, headed by Irene, stormed out…

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[4] A friend of mine a research Quantum Computing pure mathematician with chair and all the bells and whistles, medals and paid CO2 travelling, sent me a cartoon of Scott Aaronson, a revered figure of Quantum Computing software. The idea, apparently was to make fun of the ideas I proposed on Quantum and Brain. I am used to being made fun in that domain (50 years and counting)… And I sort of count Penrose among my students, so I am used to scoff.

However, why are paid intellectuals so motivated to be offensive to others, even at the price of being idiotic? It’s the old monkey coming out. They are looking for prestige, and want to pull rank. It’s not enough that they are paid to think. It’s even actually, a secret flaw: in spite of all the honors, isn’t it what prostitute do? Money for posing?

Oh, and the cartoon shows Aaronson either doesn’t know Quantum Physics at undergraduate level, or doesn’t hesitate to mislead the public about it… Just to claim he has the awe and mystery, with his Quantum computing algorithm, and others have not. Hopefully more on this later… Got me to think about the axioms of Quantum Physics…

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[5] This is why the establishment hates Trump so much; because he moves things, and ask why is it the son of Biden gets diamonds from a Chinese plutocrat? And the like. Amusingly, when Macron started to tax tech giants at 3% revenue (as yours truly had begged for for more than a decade…), Trump went all enraged… But apparently Macron was able to talk him out of reprisals against France… Trump, a pure product of the financial establishment and its entanglement with subsidized construction, has been so vilified over the years, that he turned into an enemy of the establishment, where it hurts. The opposite can happen, the most famous case being Perikles… who ended up passing anti-immigrant laws who hurt Athens and himself, and were completely contradictory to the start of his political career… Also, he destroyed Athens in the guise of saving it… Powerful men turn into rogue rockets at the drop of a pin. That’s why we should organize the world to do without them…

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[6] Maybe because I pointed out the origin of the Manhattan project in France, the New York Times censored my comment in the article linked above. But that was so true the nuclear business with Norway was probably a factor in Hitler’s invasion. In any case, when Norway fell to the Nazis, so full of spies Norway was, that the flight carrying, supposedly, heavy water to France was intercepted by the Luftwaffe. However, French agents had secretly transferred the heavy water into another plane on the airfield, and the heavy water escaped the Nazis…  Long live the new York Times and its Uber Alles view of history!

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[7] Civilization, as it is, was created by war (in particular, the USA, in its extravagant beauty). The PC establishment doesn’t want to be reminded of that, because it’s sponsored by the plutocratic establishment, which itself, would prefer to see everybody asleep, far from any rebellious passion…

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[8] I have seen individuals who make a show to project equanimity, gravitas get all enraged… when I proposed to change something to the US Constitution… It’s funny how something so small spiritually can engage minds: Homo takes thinking seriously, even fatally… That’s actually a strength of the species as it provides an environment in which mental progress can thrive…

 

 

 

 

Notre-Dame, Lead, Deep State, Deep Lies, As Usual

In a fancy article, Notre-Dame’s Toxic Fallout, By Elian Peltier, James Glanz, Weiyi Cai and Jeremy White, Sept. 14, 2019
complete with moving flames devouring the work of 850 years, the New York Times made “clear that the French authorities had indications that lead exposure could be a grave problem within 48 hours of the fire.

But it took a month before city officials conducted the first lead tests at a school close to Notre-Dame. Even today, city and regional health officials have not tested every school in the proximity of the cathedral.

The tests showed levels of lead dust above the French regulatory standard for buildings hosting children in at least 18 day care centers, preschools and primary schools.”

One can learn a lot from isolated very public incidents and how our leading structures handle them. They define a mood, the ruling mood… Of the planet. Distinctions between France and the USA… or Britain for that matter, and also Germany are illusory… and that’s a good thing.

Let me mention thus in passing, once again, one of my master ideas: the relationship between France, Britain, Germany, the USA (and their ideological satellites, including Australia and Italy) is not as in between Greek city-states, or Greece and Rome. Indeed Greek city-states had just one language, but various origins. And Rome was still something else, tracing itself to Ilion (Troy). Whereas, in the “West”, all can be traced to Celts, Romans and Greece, through the gauntlet of the Franks (Imperium Francorum, by 800 CE the Renovated Roman Empire, RRE).

All this to say that France and the USA have very similar psychologies. So when one of those two acts insane, it throws a light, the same light, onto the other. Thus the Notre-Dame story is not just a warning about France, but one about the USA. In both cases it says something about the Deep State… The Deep State of France and the USA being roughly the same, highly dissatisfying to someone as yours truly… New York Times:

“PARIS. The April fire that engulfed Notre-Dame contaminated the cathedral site with clouds of toxic dust and exposed nearby schools, day care centers, public parks and other parts of Paris to alarming levels of lead.

The lead came from the cathedral’s incinerated roof and spire, and it created a public health threat that stirred increasing anxiety in Paris throughout the summer.

Five months after the fire, the French authorities have refused to fully disclose the results of their testing for lead contamination, sowing public confusion, while issuing reassuring statements intended to play down the risks.

Their delays and denials have opened the authorities to accusations that they put reconstruction of the cathedral — which President Emmanuel Macron has pledged to complete in five years — ahead of the health of thousands of people.

A comprehensive investigation by The New York Times has helped fill out an emerging picture of a failed official response. It found significant lapses by the French authorities in alerting the public to health risks, even as their understanding of the danger became clearer.”

Notre-Dame Burning, Or When the Modern Deep State proves itself less competent than the Middle Ages… Why are the same clowns in charge of thermonuclear weapons?

The Deep State, whether French, British, EU, or US, is always afraid to make people afraid… even in cases where people should be not just afraid, but made to be afraid. Not being afraid of what one should be afraid of, when being afraid would force people to fix a lethal problem, and when being afraid is the only way to make people fix the problem, is not just stupid and immoral, but it’s deeply undemocratic. 

Democracy, representative, or direct, without transparency is lunacy and invites larceny.

We are not living in normal times. We are definitively out of any sort of normalcy, if one defines as normal, anything seen since there were dinosaurs, and plesiosaurs and eagle like plane-sized flying pterosaurs… The planet’s biosphere is on the brink of collapse, from mass extinctions, the CO2 crisis, global warming, sea level rise, countless biocides, pesticides, fertilizers, gender-bending chemicals, aerosol air and heavy metal pollution, the nitrogen cycle crisis, plus nuclear proliferation and thus war, around the corner. 

Transparency is crucial, as it fosters full, and thus honest thinking. To try to figure it out and serialize the problems. One would hope that the headquarters of what is arguably the oldest center of modern civilization, Paris, would be aware of the need for transparency, thus debate and advancing intelligence.

But the leaders of France have become timid, full of self-doubt, ever since Washington told them in 1933 that run-away growth, devaluation, debt, and especially Adolf Hitler and his Nazi clowns, was nothing to worry about… And would France stop being so aggressive. Now France has a young and inexperienced leader, Macron, who affects to believe he will augment democracy in France by halving the number of Members of Parliament. even the Brexiting clowns on the other side of the Channel with their suspended Parliament, have not reached deep down such an abyss of stupid anti-democracy… Although suspended the British parliament has 650 MPs, roughly twice what Macron wants.

“We are facing a widespread issue around lead,” Ms. Souyris, the city’s Socialist deputy mayor in charge of health, said. “It goes beyond Notre-Dame, but since there is no norm for public spaces, we need a bigger plan against lead in Paris.’’

One theory about the decay of Roman civilization and its state, is that they got contaminated by lead. And thus became idiotic. Could that apply to Paris? Could that help to explain mental shortcomings of the government there? Lead induced idiocy in one of the most ridiculously expensive real estate in the world? 

My take on all of this?

Well, all those responsible of having partaken in lead contamination, knowing about it, and doing nothing timely enough, should be severely punished, and the higher, the more punished they should be. After all, I saw the enormous lead panache coming out of Notre-Dame, spreading west over Paris, I saw it on TV, live, from California, and Macron, who was on the scene, should have exerted the noodle material between his two ears too. And if that jelly doesn’t work good enough, why is it in charge of deciding whether he can, or not, kill 50 million people in twenty minutes?

The idea is to punish hard, after they deliberately persist in their errors, those who have the effrontery to believe that they can lead the world, all by themselves, with the help of tons of secrecy. Hard punishment should make the present unsustainable political system insufferable, even to the parasites who presently suck on it with wild abandon.

The preceding should not be construed as a wild attack on France, while I neglect the Brexit monstrosity next door. The lead scandal shows that too few have too much power in how they move the state (in France as anywhere else). Brexit shows even more of the same: that the control of British media by a very small oligarchy which doesn’t pay taxes, and is determined not to pay taxes in the future, risks creating the sort of anger wars are made of [1].

Patrice Ayme

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[1]:  113,000 potential taxpayers are living in Britain while also being a ‘non-domiciled’ in the U.K…. as far as taxes are concerned. Those extremely wealthy individuals control the UK media. EU member states have until 31 December 2019 to make this sort of blatant tax avoidance scheme by plutocrats illegal in their own national law.

Why isn’t this advertised more? Consider France: the media there is owned by plutocrats too, just as in the UK, and they have huge tax avoidance schemes in place as laws in the tax system. If the Pluts were stupid enough to call attention to the non-dom reason for Brexit, they would bring along a mood questioning tax avoidance schemes in general…. and in particular, the schemes contrived in the legal system they profit from…

US Indicts Journalist Who Revealed Major US War Crime In Iraq

A new age of terror is upon us: expose US war crimes, from anywhere in the world, go to prison. US Big Brother has spoken. This is big: as I will show below, even the Nazis were not in enough control of infamy, to go that far: Nazis didn’t indict those who revealed Nazi war crimes (because Nazis didn’t want their crimes to go in front of a judge, lest they be revealed to all Germans!)

US Army Helicopter getting ready to kill those civilians. Courtesy Assange…

Says the New York Times: “Assange Indicted Under Espionage Act, Raising First Amendment Issues. Though Julian Assange is not a conventional journalist, much of what he does at WikiLeaks is difficult to distinguish in a legally meaningful way from what traditional news organizations do.”

In a NYT article by Charlie Savage and Adam Goldman, May 23, 2019:
“WASHINGTON — Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks leader, has been indicted on 17 new counts of violating the Espionage Act for his role in publishing classified military and diplomatic documents in 2010, the Justice Department announced on Thursday — a novel case that raises profound First Amendment issues.

The new charges were part of a superseding indictment obtained by the Trump administration that significantly expanded the legal case against Mr. Assange, who is already fighting extradition proceedings in London based on an earlier hacking-related count brought by federal prosecutors in Northern Virginia.

The secret documents that Mr. Assange published were provided by the former Army intelligence analyst Chelsea Manning, who was convicted at a court-martial trial in 2013 of leaking the records.

“Assange, WikiLeaks affiliates and Manning shared the common objective to subvert lawful restrictions on classified information and to publicly disseminate it,” the indictment said.”

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This image captured from a classified U.S. military video footage shows Iraqis being shot from an U.S. Apache helicopters that killed a dozen people in Baghdad, including two Reuters news staff on July 12, 2007, and released to Reuters on April 5, 2010 by WikiLeaks, a group that promotes leaking to fight government and corporate corruption. Reuters photographer Namir Noor-Eldeen, 22, and his assistant and driver Saeed Chmagh, 40, were killed in the incident. The helicopter initially opens fire on the small group. Minutes later a van comes by, and starts assisting the wounded, and the helicopter opens fire on the van. REUTERS/WikiLeaks/Handout (IRAQ – Tags: CRIME LAW DISASTER MILITARY CIVIL UNREST

Among other things, Wikileaks revealed a US Army video of what looked like a very serious war crime: the arguably deliberate, premeditated, insistent killing, in occupied Iraq, by the US Army, of civilians who happened to be journalists and rescue personnel, over a period of several minutes.

A republic in good standing with respect to human rights, would have thanked Wikileaks, for exposing such a serious crime, and made a serious inquiry to see if crimes against humanity and crimes against the US military code of conduct had been committed.

Such an inquiry would have been an indispensable preliminary to preventing another occurrence of such crimes.

In other words, Wikileaks acted as a whistleblower.

Not satisfied with killing journalists, US Army helicopter in radio relation with headquarters, will now kill the rescuers… Photo courtesy of Assange. Now US says Assange is a spy.

Any unlawful acts on the way to commit whistleblowing should be viewed as minor, considering the gravity of the war crime they revealed: killing deliberately civilians, especially when they belong to categories which should be protected (journalists, rescuers).

The decision taken today by the US is tantamount to saying that keeping war crime secrets is of the utmost importance.

It may be good to remember that the massacre of more than 15 millions in Nazi death camps, including 6 million innocent Jewish civilians, was rendered possible by enough secrecy to enable the average Germans to claim they didn’t really know what was going on.

Without secrecy, the crimes against humanity of the Nazi regime would have been exposed, for all to see. Even Germans couldn’t have denied and the German population and military would have had to put an end to Nazism.

The same holds in roughly all regimes committing crimes against humanity: secrecy is a necessary condition to commit crimes against humanity.

So the US is now saying: we want to be able to commit war crimes and crimes against humanity, unnoticed… And we will be capable of doing so, because our judicial system says that exposing such crimes is more of a crime than the crime itself.

This is coherent with the United States not being a State Party to the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court, a permanent international criminal court to “bring to justice the perpetrators of the worst crimes known to humankind – war crimes, crimes against humanity, and genocide”  

The Nazis faced roughly 150 defined cases where German military personnel disobeyed direct orders, on the ground they were war crimes. Every single time, Nazi authorities counter-ordered to not prosecute the official disobedience…  Because Nazis didn’t want a case in front of a judge, even a military judge.: if they lost, there was jurisprudence. Worse: people would talk about it.

Even the Obama administration saw the validity of this approach, and didn’t prosecute Assange all the way (keeping the workings of their prosecution secret).

At least now, the US is revealed in its full war criminal glory. But, after all, isn’t it how the West was won?

Patrice Ayme

Transatlantic Sadism

Transatlantic Secret Plot:

A transatlantic accord is negotiated in the greatest secrecy. The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership, or TTIP, or Transatlantic Tragedy and Irreversible Plutocracy. In the USA, TIPS are highly valued. TIPS represent the moment when the power of money, the mastery of the rich over the poor, and even of deciding if the poor served well enough to deserve to eat, comes into play. It is a sacred moment: the worth of American man is determined by tipping, both as a receiver, and a donor. Thus no doubt smart propagandists in the USA thought that “TTIP” the stumbling sound of the beggar who has served, was, no doubt, alluring.

What does TTIP’s secrecy mean? Well, remember my essay on corruption: “Plutocracy Causes Cancer“? I proposed to consider that the USA was 15 times more corrupt than the Congo, because the cancer rate in the USA was 15 times that of Congo. Certainly, a corrupt body is worse than a corrupt mind, at least in the matter of survival, if not that of the matter of the honor of the human spirit. One of the main reason for the high cancer rate is food and the environment are corrupted deliberately, by adding 80,000 untested additives which cause cancer (and probably autism).

Trade Yes, Slavery No. And The Hell With Secrecy. Gangrene Should Not Be Hidden

Thus, Plutocracy Kills. The more global trade without global laws (passed by We The People!), the more plutocratization eschewing local legislation.

Adding disease causing additives in food augments the profits of those whose burning desire and highest value, is to own the world.

Such metaphysically driven by greed individuals guide the USA, including President and Congress. How do they guide? They guide through reasoning. Satanic reasoning, that is. It is the satanic nature of this reasons that has to remain hidden. This is why Pluto can make itself invisible, according to Greek mythology. If Pluto’s vicious ways were in plain sight, people would not vote for them.

(One of the engines of violent Jihadism is the confused feeling, among much of youth, that Satan (Shaitan in Arabic, is in power)

Viciousness can be useful, and even recommended, say, to defeat… evil.  But here what we have is viciousness in the service of the few, to make the few… even more vicious. Thus, instead of viciousness fighting a greater viciousness, we have viciousness to augment viciousness.

French laws on foods have served as a model for European Union laws on food. They forbid, among other things, the systematic use of antibiotics in food (even so-called organic vegetarian food in the USA can be treated by antibiotics; in the EU, that’s forbidden even on regular foods). Overall, they favor traditional ways of preparing food.

As Bloomberg puts it in “German Scorn Could Kill the Transatlantic Trade Deal”:

“Two years ago, when negotiations for a new transatlantic trade deal were announced (it was Germany that pushed for an agreement then, by the way), more than half of Germans favored the deal. A survey released last week showed only one in five Germans want it now. To Germans, TTIP reflects a capitalism that is too finance-driven, dominated by large multinationals, cavalier about privacy and not as serious about product standards.”

In this, as in most matters political, the Germans have been contaminated by the French (I watch TV of either countries, so I observe an increasing convergence).

TTIP focuses (it seems) on “non-conventional trade barriers” like cutting the regulations around fracking. Fracking is not regulated in the US states where it is massively practiced: nobody worries about destroying those states’ ecology, same as ever was. TTIP wants to open the floodgates of Genetic Modification and Unbounded Finance whilst tightening laws that harm innovation and culture like copyright (as has just happened under Obama in the USA). The agreement could also foster the ‘Investor State Dispute Settlement‘ (ISDS) making it harder for governments to protect the interests of citizens and legislate to protect environment, workers, and all what makes life worth living for those not obsessed by private jets. Alongside the harm of TTIP, the benefits seem much lower than suggested by the MSM.

Plutocracy flies from success to success. In the 2008 crisis, half the plutocrats stole the other half, and then they were all replenished by We The People of clueless turkeys led by their great turkey leaders, gloating the all way. How is this achieved? With brazen propaganda, which goes even further, in some important respects, than the Nazis ever dare to go: Nazis were for the “Fuerer Principle” (Obey the Leader , Qur’an Sura 4, verse 59); but they also conducted plebiscites. American university professors think that, having more than a few taking the decisions is obsolete. After all they teach in places made for the wealthiest:

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“Philosophy” American Style, Another Word For Plutocracy & The Destruction Of Democracy:

The New York Times “philosophy” series, called “The Stone”, probably because it’s bone-headed, has an answer to the question: “Should Everybody Vote?” The same answer as usual: off with We The People, long live the oligarchy: …”we rarely question… or objectively consider whether everyone who can vote ought to vote,“ entunes professor Gory Gutting (OK, I modified just one letter). This is American philosophy at its most original same question which ever was: ‘we rarely, objectively consider whether everyone who can wear a scalp ough to wear one.’ The City Of Boston objectively considered scalps, found them worthy, and paid for them. (As this was too enlightening about the American condition, scalps have been removed from public view, including in the mother ship of correct American plutocratic thinking, Harvard).

It is astounding how gross, and blatant that “philosophical” series can be. It is, of course, much admired by the individuals who, as “philosophy” professors, are endowed with chairs at the most “prestigious” American universities. Most of what they know is to determine what those who pay them, want to hear.

The author proposes to replace the present universal vote by denying the right of vote to most, 99.999% of people. This would be going all the way down the absurdity of the present system, where very few decide of everything. It goes exactly against historical and logical examples in two ways: first the Direct Democracy system, as practiced in ancient Athens and contemporary Switzerland goes exactly the other way in spirit: it makes everybody vote on the laws.

In Direct Democracy all citizens are concerned, and mobilize their minds to learn what they need to take an informed decision.

Professor Gutting guts democracy by arguing that the American jury system should be imitated. However, the American judicial system is arguably the world’s worst judiciary. US “justice” has eight million people under supervision, making the US the state with the most police repression in the world (with the Seychelles, another plutocrat friendly redoubt). In a country such as France, a jury summons is extremely rare in a citizen’s lifetime , in the US, it’s common.

In ancient Athens, a direct democracy, juries could have 2,000 members, that is 2.5% of the citizenry. A quora of 6,000 (7.5% of citizens) had to be maintained for passing important laws.

With the Internet, it should be easy to make the citizens vote on all laws. Many countries have started to use the Internet for voting (including France, a country where 50 million people vote; France at this point uses the Internet for hard to reach voters… but it is obviously a trial run).

The myth is that our great leaders know everything, and they are best at taking decisions. The reality is the exact opposite: they know very little, and because they spend most of the day like savant dogs at a circus, showing off their tricks for all to admire, they actually don’t have much brain power, let alone time to cultivate it.

It is high time to replace this circus act with real thinking before passing laws.

The present secret decision making is shrouded by is a, thus far successful, strategy to hide the stupidity of those who decide and the cupidity of those who pull their strings. In the reign of Obama, Dark, Untraceable Money, which used to be neglectable, even under Bush II, has become the norm. Don’t expect Obama to explain you that: it’s probably a secret, dearly guarded… And something that TTIP wants to augment, just as the “Treaty to Promote Trade” with Panama fostered tax evasion towards US-UK controlled tax havens.

Remember the Transatlantic Slave Trade? It was justified by the best, and if you say this to American (pseudo) “philosophers, you will be banned, you, your transparency and your honesty, let alone intelligence, all together.

Patrice Ayme’

On The Insolence, & Power, of Plutocrats

The American NSA and French intelligence have agreed that the Paris attacks were made possible by unbreakable phone encryption. Their preparations would have been detected otherwise, as they involved communications between a number of countries and were prepared proximally from Belgium.

Apple Inc, whose boss is a dark clad plutocrat named Cook has refused, in spite of a judge’s order to allow the FBI to know the secrets inside Islamist State (inspired) terrorists in San Bernardino, California, who killed many.

The insolence, and impudence, of plutocrats knows no bounds.

Disunion Jack? Nice Flag, Too Bad The Craziness

Let me remind plutocrats that we have not yet formally switched to… plutocracy. They don’t command.

Apparently Apple believes it is Big Brother. But who elected them? Money? The State is supposed to represent We The People. Maybe the present state does not do this well, but then it can be modified. Putting plutocrats and tax avoiding ultra wealthy corporations in charge, is no solution.

By protecting the communications of mass murderers, Apple Inc. has clearly gone off the deep end.

In other news, a European conference among the principals is doing “all it can” (“Alles tun” said Frau Kanzler Merkel) to keep Great Britain in the EU. Well, Europe may be better without British obstruction and day-dreaming. Many of the English who fear Europe are typically losers who drank the imperial kool aid of an empire which is no more. The empire, now, however weak, is Europe, not the British empire.

Fear what you ask for. The problem of the millions of Brits who live outside of the United Kingdom and who would be left stranded by “Brexit” is easy to solve: they should be given expeditious ways to acquire the citizenship of their country of residence.

Thus a British citizen whose family lives in France, and who works in London should be offered French citizenship, and Great Britain forced to accept the same sort of treaties that France has with Switzerland.

The latest polls give 54% for Brexit, the British Exit. PM Cameron thunders that his intent is clear: to stay inside the European Union. Then why the vote in 127 days? It’s not like the Brits did not already vote. They did, at 67%. Everybody is angry against the European Commission in Brussels. Well, then, fix it.

But behaving as if Britain, or, more exactly, England, could set sail to somewhere southeast of New Zealand is beyond grotesque.

And how did we get there? The plutocrats who increasingly rule Britain, just as those who rule the USA, or the world (they are all the same), continually accuse the European Commission in Brussels of malfeasance… to hide their own. The EC is just the executive arm of the EU, and it is increasingly directed by the European Parliament, let alone the continual meetings of the European elected leaders with each other (as they are doing today with the British case). The EC has tended to bother cheese makers, rather than the plutocrats who pull the strings. This can all, and should be, fixed.

Countless plutocratic corporations, including Apple, have avoided taxation, and the EC has let it happen all too long. It just woke up to the fact IKEA forgot to pay a billion Euros in taxes. Well…

All what the plutocratic corporations tend to do is to bog down society in useless years of litigation against democracy. Apple Inc. wants to protect dead terrorists, and the psycho plots of plutocrats would only bring years of litigation between the EU and the UK, and between Brits and their own government, all this to end with an independent Scotland joining the EU, while England finds it does not enjoy the affection Switzerland got through 600 treaties with the EU… However, lunacy is the best way for the mighty to lead We The People by the nose.

A great part of English wealth, at this point, comes precisely from immigration of other Europeans to Britain, and, even more, from Franco-Germania closing its collective eyes to the general tax evasion and financial manipulations centered on London, while it profits of a nebulous galaxy of semi-dominions such as the isles of Man, and Jersey, or the British Virgin islands, or making financial conspiracies so dark and outrageous, that they are unlawful in New York. If Brexit happens, don’t expect that Franco-Germania will tolerate it anymore.

And this is why, precisely, and unfortunately, Brexit will not happen. I guess. But the law of unfortunate consequences all too often rules. Norway, or Switzerland, are not members of the European Union (although they are members of Schengen, the passport free area, which the UK does not belong to). However, they both contribute to the European Union budget. The fools who will vote for Britain to get out of the EU do not seem to realize this: Norway and Switzerland are still in Europe, and have to make do with the European superpower (Franco-Germania). Brexit will make Franco-Germania stronger, and thus Britain weaker (projections are that the UK will lose 3% of GDP, Germany, just .3%).

Well, whatever. The Europe empire, the ability of Europeans to command to the crooks of giant corporations, has to rise. English plutocracy is in the way: sweep it out there, and make compost with it.

NSA ought to be under WE THE PEOPLE’s Command (Imperium in Latin). That is not, is extremely deplorable. But it has to be fixed. Snowden should not perhaps get the Order of Merit, fleeing to Putin and what not, but some of what it did is extremely important, and commendable.

Apple has amply demonstrated, that, in spirit, it’s not just plutocratic (Crook is filthy rich), but an outlaw (literally). Apple outlawed profit processing, & that of other pluto corporations, depends upon total secrecy in how it makes money circulate thru filth. We The People can only rule if we can see what the criminals are plotting. Apple, and its ilk, have for business model, though, secrecy. To escape taxes, pay politicians serving them, violating the spirit of the law, and trampling human rights by feeding inequality to the point of inequity… Plus selling personal information, and manipulating public opinion to the point of madness (see the Iraq invasion, the inability of people to comprehend that the Clintons sold them to financiers, the sleight of hand of the 2008 crash, when Transfer of Assets to Rich People was effected, Brexit, etc.).

We The People should have every right in the world to extend the tendrils of surveillance all over. OUR surveillance, under OUR watch. It’s now technically possible, having access to Uranium ore, to make a nuclear bomb in a basement (with laser separation). Let alone make ricin in a tiny lab, etc… Actually since 9/11, the water networks, in countries such as France are watched exquisitely.

Immense powers require now immense surveillance, and we should start with spying all the phones of all the plutocratic corporations, to find out where they hid all the money, they stole from us, and who they pay, among our so-called leaders who are busy bossing us around, and spying on us illegally.

Plutocracy without secrecy is an apple without cyanide: not lethal, delicious to eat. The secret of Brexit: a plutocratic plot so twisted it is turning into its own demise.

We live in a wonderful world: everyday our power on the physical world augments. But that means the power of corporations, and of the richest, augments ever more. We have to watch them carefully to check they are not violating the spirit of the laws. And the same goes for individuals. Freedom and surveillance are two aspects of the same coin.

Surveillance is a direct consequence of the advancement of technology, and, thus, of liberty. Liberty means power, power means surveillance.

Patrice  Ayme’

NO PUBLIC, NO BRAINS, Crash

CRASHES (Examples: the Late ROMAN State, AFGHANISTAN) CAUSED BY LACK OF PUBLIC INPUT:

Abstract: Having a republic (Res Publica, “public thing”) is not just nicer to the public, in everyday life, it’s, more vitally, a military advantage, when war comes.  It’s not a coincidence that Rome accomplished most of its military successes when it was a Republic, or still, although a “Principate”, not far removed from one: under Augustus, worldwide, Rome was the closest society to a full blown Republic. That gave it tremendous military advantage: decisions were taken rather collectively. Thus after debates, hence more intelligently, in the average.

The important concept here is the notion of “public”. Rome crashed militarily from too much fascism, for too long and for no good reason, bringing the dreadful consequence of lack of public support, let alone a lack of creative input… which can only come from the minds of the many, the public.

A modern example? The USA stealth war in Afghanistan (1979-2013) and the rise of the USA as a surveillance state were engaged secretly and pursued without public debate. For example, why did US President Carter order a secret attack on Afghanistan on July 3, 1979? First, why was that order secret? Because, of course, it was ordered for no good reason! Thus the war in Afghanistan had no real public support (the public didn’t even know about it), and was not engaged for intelligent reasons one could justify. Time to cut the secrecy, and bring back the public. If one does not want to kiss the republic goodbye, that is.

***

When the fall of Rome is evoked, old fashion historians focus on military events at the end of the Fourth and beginning of the Fifth Century. Or they brandish hundreds of entangled causes of decay.

Superficially, indeed, the Roman empire cracked because it lost a crucial battle:

Battle of Adrianople: Fascism Is From One Mind, & If That Mind Is An Idiot, It Is Toast

The military crash of Rome blossomed at the Battle of Hadrianopolis, August 9, 378 CE, when the Gothic cavalry decisively annihilated  the extremely experienced Oriental Roman field army (including the emperor Valens, single-minded author of the disaster).

(Although the mysterious defeat and death of Augustus Julian in Mesopotamia (earlier, in 363 CE) was more fateful.)

The disaster at Hadrianopolis/Adrianople was a near fatal blow to the prestige, military, economy and tax base of the core of the empire. The empire was unable to recover for a number of reasons. In particular because plutocrats were too mighty to be taxed.

In 400 CE, the legions were ordered out of Britain and the Rhine Frontier. The Franks, shock troops and nation “infeodated” (under treaty and oath) to the empire were left in charge. Instead of having the defense of the empire staying a public thing, it was subcontracted!

However, during the winter solstice of 406 CE, the Rhine froze over, and an enormous coalition of savage Germanic nations charged through Gallia and Hispania, all the way to Africa (in the case of the Vandals).

That was the fatal blow to the Western empire, the “Occidental Part”. Population and economy collapsed. The Vandals, from their African redoubt, established an empire that reigned on the Western Mediterranean, cutting the grain trade, starving Italy, shutting down international trade, etc.

The Goths seized Rome four years later (410 CE). A century later, the Franks, in a full consultation with the Consul Anastasius (who reigned in Constantinople as Augustus for 27 years until his death at age 88), would finally destroy the Goths at the Battle of Vouillé, in 507 CE. Rome, that is, Constantinople, then made Clovis Consul.

Real Man: Clovis Killed King Alaric Himself

Thus 101 years exactly after the savages broke through, the Romans (aka the Franks) turned things around militarily at last. True, they had been busy meanwhile, destroying the cause of all that turmoil, the Huns (who had pushed the Goths and other Germans west, to start with).

Vouillé had avenged Hadrianopolis. 129 years later. History can unfold slowly, although it goes faster these days.

But the most interesting question is what happened at Hadrianopolis.

And, even more fascinating, why did it happen?  Roughly, the defeat happened because the Roman system was fascist, with one single jealous man at the top. The intelligence of the collective was reduced to the intelligence of one.

Actually it was a bit more subtle: the top emperor, Valens, was jealous of the success of one of the top generals, Sebastian, who had defeated some Goths, and of his nephew, the young Gratian, emperor in Occident, who had also defeated fierce enemies, the Alamani (the Franks would finally destroy those “All Men” two centuries later).

Valens wanted his own victory. Although everybody in the Roman military structure, including the officers in his own field army, and the Frank Richomeres, head of Gratian’s guard, told him to wait for Gratian’s army, which was only 400 kilometers away. So Valens marched his army ferociously for 7 hours over difficult terrain in full sun, and when thoroughly exhausted and dehydrated, engaged battle, without even knowing where the redoubtable Gothic cavalry was.

One man had taken all the decisions, all the wrong decisions. The one-man-alone-in-command factor was the fundamental cause of the defeat.

One can compare with two other spectacular defeats, this time the defeat of famous Republics. At Cannae an enormous Roman army was annihilated by Hannibal. What happened? The Romans fell into a trap: Hannibal retreated to give the Roman center an illusion of victory, drawing it in, and then enveloping the entire Roman body with cavalry, squeezing it, similarly to what would happen, six centuries later, at Hadrianopolis.

At Cannae, the Roman army was unwise, imprudent, outsmarted. However the army was not engaged in a march of obvious idiocy because of one man’s folly, as it would be at Adrianople. If it had been, that would have been stopped right away (as happened say when the French army tried to defeat the Brits in Toulon; as France was a republic, Napoleon, then just a captain, was able to contest the strategy of his superiors, was supported by politicians, and won a great victory).

The same hold for the defeat of France in May 1940. Just like Hannibal at Cannae, but on a much grander scale, Hitler and his generals, thoroughly desperate to start with, decided to be lucky, as that was the only thing that could save them. It did. They conceived the phantasmagoric plan to draw in the army of the Republic, by smartly attacking the Netherlands first.

Just as the Romans at Cannae and Hadrianopolis, sure of victory, the French rushed in their elite armor and armies forward. Then the Nazis, undetected thanks to Lady Luck, and how crazy their strategy was, cut them from behind.

So the difference is subtle. It’s a question of degree. The mind of one, versus the mind of the many. At Hadrianopolis, the orders given to the army were outright insane. All top military officers begged emperor Valens to reconsider. He refused, because he could, being the head fascist. But his head was no good. It was permeated by Christianity, that is, superstition.

At Cannae and the Battle of France, the armies of the Republics, blinded by hubris, confronted adversaries who were desperate, in all logic, and thus could only try to be lucky. And they were.

Then, of course, luck carries only that far against the intelligence and character that a superior public brings. Rome took seventeen years to defeat Carthage (218 BCE-201 BCE), the French republic, thanks to its reluctant, or even initially hostile, but finally enthusiastic allies, six years to annihilate the Nazis.

Conclusion? War is always the most serious business. One has always to be ready for the worst. Hubris ought not to be invited. And the public is both the brains and hearts of war.

The USA started the war in Afghanistan by 1979, under Carter, to block the Afghans, Russians and… despised French to exploit the resources in Central Asia without profits for Washington/Wall Street, and to show all who was the boss (Brzezinski claimed it was just to destroy the USSR, but he is dissembling).

At the same time, to make war by proxy, the USA decided that Pakistan’s dirty work in Afghanistan was best complemented by others. So Washington recruited Bin Laden and other fanatics, in cooperation and collaboration with Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, and its collaborator and enemy, the Saudi Inter Service directorate (notice all these people are alive and well).

That attack on Afghanistan was hubristic, greedy, full of imperial overstrech. Those adjectives count as three moral negatives. In Afghanistan, the USA had, at best, only one (fake) moral positive: namely the specious, devious argument that their rogue mercenary Bin Laden had attacked from there. (Yeah, and who made Bin Laden into a soldier of god, and armed him, to start with?)

Perhaps the most important asset in a long war, is moral superiority. Morality is the extension of war to the realm of the possible.

Moral superiority is why, ultimately, the Republics won against the fascists Hannibal and Hitler. Or why, ultimately, the Franks defeated the Goths (the Franks were tolerant, inclusive, more civilized, and supportive of the 97%; not so with the Arian, exclusive Goths).

Reciprocally, lack of Roman moral superiority is why the Romans were defeated by the Goths (both sides were Christian; but the Goths had made a peace proposition that was advantageous to Rome, and that Valens rejected hubristically).

A fourth moral negative in Afghanistan is that the USA made a cynical usage of a primitive superstition, precisely because it was primitive, hateful, and illogical. Right from the start, in 1979, the USA fought to establish, or re-establish, fundamental Islam in Afghanistan (as the USA had done in Iran, or Pakistan, let alone Saudi Arabia or Egypt).

Once again the prominent tactic was that superstitious people can be easily manipulated, as the CIA had done in Iran, by instrumentalizing the Shiites against PM Mosaddegh (culprit of oil nationalization, and general insolence). However, Afghanistan, as a republic, and the benign monarchy before that,  had been pretty much free of superstition and at peace, so the USA strived to re-impose, twice, on Afghanistan a fascist, sexist interpretation of Islam.

This is no way to win a war. Morality cannot foster, or tolerate, big contradictions. As it is, the West has nothing much to defend in the Islamist republic of Afghanistan. Best to negotiate directly with the Taliban. Or, barring that, to just withdraw.

One lesson of the Roman military collapse, was too much energy was spent fighting war in the Middle East without enough overall civilizational superiority to win once and for all. All this energy playing military Sisyphus was as much energy that was not spent on the crucial frontiers: the Balkans, and, especially, the Rhine-Danube gap. Or reacquiring civilizational superiority.

Instead, what we presently observe is that the USA is turning stealthily into a military regime, complete with secret supreme court of surveillance and secret laws. How can one have secret laws in a res PUBLICA? Are not laws the architecture? Are they not public, by definition, in a republic?

It’s time to stop that drift. Obama should yank the USA out of Afghanistan, after making to the Taliban an offer it can’t refuse. He should also remember that Rome rotted from inside first. The more secret the rot, the worst the gangrene. Industrial strength secrecy has no place in a Re-PUBLIC. Moral force is domineering for wars, and the survival of civilization, in the fullness of time.

History is not just complex. It has meta-layers of complexity, as psychology does, and because psychology does, on the grandest scale. Those who do not want to learn from history, do not want to learn from psychology.

***

 

Patrice Ayme