BUSHWHACKED

HOW THE AMERICAN DREAM ENDOWED THE NAZI NIGHTMARE.


Some will say, it's old history, and we Americans have no history. So who cares? Others will try to gather brainspice... Read on, then, should you want to spice your life...

George Herbert Walker And Prescott Bush, and many other American plutocrats, funded and directed the military industrial complex propelling Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime. Clear enough: in 1923, Germany was completely broke, except for the mysterious Adolf Hitler, yesterday a corporal, now the very rich head of the suddenly immensely wealthy Nazi party. Behind him, in his luxurious Munich hotel, a gigantic portrait of Henry Ford. In the lobby, free copies of the "International Jew". A private army of SS, experienced soldiers armed to the teeth with the latest weapons, was at the ready.

The grandfather of President George Walker Bush (Skull & Bones, 1968) was Prescott Bush (Skull & Bones, 1917), and his great grand father was George Herbert Walker. Prescott Bush and George Herbert (Bert) Walker were directors of the London-affiliated New York banking house of Brown Brothers-Harriman and its various fronts, which funded and directed part of the military-industrial complex behind Hitler and the Nazi revolution.

In 1919, George Herbert Walker had organized W.A. Harriman & Co which merged with the British Brown Brothers in 1931. In 1924, Averell Harriman (Skull & Bones, 1913) and Fritz Thyssen, the German industrialist who began funding Hitler in 1923, set up the Union Banking Corp in New York to handle funds supplied to it through Thyssen's Dutch bank for American investment. Prescott Bush, who had been an officer of the W.A. Harriman bank since 1926, was a director of the Union Banking Corp from 1934 through 1943. According to government documents, "all of the shares of the Union Banking Corp., were held for the benefit of members of the Thyssen family".

And so on... Thyssen wrote a book in 1940:"I paid Hitler". The preceding is an extremely small part of the Americano-Nazi story. There were many other parts, all united by the same theme: some of the greediest American plutocrats, on Wall Street and even places such as Detroit, played more than enough of a role to tip Germany into Nazism.

All indications are that Henry Ford, an immensely wealthy car maker, and adulated racist author of "The International Jew", was an early financial backer of Hitler (the subject does not seem to have been as explored as it deserves by scholars). That gave Hitler a private army, great renown, and the capability for a (failed) coup in 1923.

The Hamburg-Amerika Line, seized by the US government as a war trophy in 1919, was given free to friendly US plutocrats (of the type who go in and out of government, "serving" inside, and serving themselves outside, a tradition to this day). It was the largest shipping line in the world, and said capitalists used it to smuggle American firearms to the Nazis while they conducted a civil war inside Germany, in spite of the blockade organized by the Weimar Republik. That American armed civil war killed more than 10,000 anti-Nazis in 1932 alone. It gave us the picturesque sentence uttered by a top Nazi: "When I hear the word "Kultur", I pull out my Browning". (At the time "Browning" was a famous American revolver.)

Prescott Bush managed several war companies directly for Hitler (Hitler was his boss), including the most important, the American-Silesian corporation (even after Hitler had nationalized it). Bush was compensated in 1953, founding the Bush family fortune.

Verily, understanding Hitler without understanding Wall Street and racist American industrialists such as Henry Ford, is a struggle in vain. Wall Street created the super monopoly called IG Farben (of Auschwitz fame). American-Silesian used Auschwitz slaves (even six months after Hitler had declared war on the USA, Bush kept managing the A-S corporation).

IBM had the monopoly of computing in the Reich (see "IBM and the Holocaust"). It was managed from New York in its daily operation, through Geneva, throughout the war. None of the 35 IBM factories in Hitler's Reich was damaged enough to stop operations, because US pilots were given strict instructions to avoid bombing them.

Standard Oil ("Exxon") gave the synthetic rubber and oil processes to Hitler (crucial to turn around the Franco-British sea blockade), Texaco gave Hitler the fuel to conquer Spain, the Ethyl Corporation of America flew in airplane fuel crucial anti knock compounds desperately needed as early as September 1939 while Hitler fought the entire Polish army and 45 French divisions, Nazi armor, magnesium bombs and automatic pilots for Stukas or Ford engines for superiority fighters were all, well, American, and so on.

Oh yes the USA did not send one cartridge to France in May-June 1940, during the Battle of France the Western front deadliest battle (more than 185,000 soldiers killed), but was the first and only country (besides the fascist ones) to recognize the illegal and unconstitutional Vichy regime (established under Nazi occupation). During Nazi occupation, thousands of Nazi-American companies called themselves Nazi, and conquered Europe. As Nazis went up in smoke, they called themselves American, and said they freed Europe. Maybe not a good deed, but sure a good deal.

One can call that set of observations anti-American, if one wishes, but, true, reality is pretty anti-American these days, I must admit. Maybe it should be racially excluded.

Fuller versions of some of this drift are found on my old site, Tyranosopher.
More recent material on other subjects (many pertinent to the present plunge of the US socioeconomy) can be found on:

Patriceayme.wordpress.com

Some will say, it's old history, and we Americans have no history. So who cares? Others will try to gather brainspice... So let them know that the story did not stop there. Satisfied from their Hitler trick, the Empire Builders tried to repeat similar ones. Empire Builders such as the Dulles brothers, lawyers of more than 100 Nazi companies, heads of the OSS and the CIA, and the State Department (and true US president under Eisenhower) employed Nazis such as Klaus Barbie (who tortured to death more than 4,000 French adults) to set up a profitable drug trading system in South America to finance the USA's black operations (by selling drugs to the US population). Barbie was much later arrested in Bolivia by French services, and condemned to life for the deliberate murder of 42 non French small Jewish children (crime against mankind, no prescription). The same Empire Builders created Muslim Fundamentalism, using it to gain control, for a while of many Middle East countries, including Egypt, Iran, Pakistan, Afghanistan (in chronological order). We know how this is a gift that keeps on giving.

PA

USING EUROPE TO REPLACE THE SHUTTLE

ARIANE 5 IS GOOD ENOUGH.

The Constellation program is a stop gap measure. So why to create it from scratch, at great cost, and technological uncertainty, and not use instead Ariane 5, which exists, is reliable, and has the launch capability?

The reasons for sending human beings in space at this point are borderline (whereas robotic space science is a must, and starved by present US and NASA policies). Space launch, before the space elevator, basically uses a chemical propulsion principle discovered in China about 900 years ago (according to legend the first Chinese rocket engineer, Wan-Hu, died in the first attempted launch; he 94 rockets attached to two kites, and it would have been the first attempt at motorized flying).

It is enlightening to compare European and American space science policies. At this point Europe does a lot of good science (a French space telescope, Corot, is searching for extrasolar planets, for example, well in advance of the similar NASA project).

Ares V seems too large for anything reasonable looking forward for the next 15 years (there is no urgency to rush to Mars, robots will do better for now, including maybe setting up a base there).

Europe has resisted the call of engaging in launching people in orbit, although it has invested a lot in the space station and has the capability with the Ariane 5 and ATV combination. The ATV, the Automated Transfer Vehicle was successfully launched to the ISS in March 2008, and docked to the station for 5 months, bringing supplies, and pushing the station to a higher orbit (to compensate for aerodynamic drag). The ATV was also used to brake and drop the station by a mile to avoid a large piece of Russian space debris. The ISS crew used the ATV for personal hygiene and sleeping (it's large and quiet, which the station is not).

It seems that it should be only natural that Orion be modified to sit on top of a variant of the ATV. Ariane 5 is already scheduled to launch the next US Space Telescope, and increasing Euro-American technological cooperation can only benefit both sides. Ariane Vs and ATVs could be shipped to the USA, as they are to French Guyana now, and, or, made under license in the USA. This is strategically not a problem (the extensive Franco-Americano-British nuclear weapon cooperation is incomparably more sensitive, defense-wise).

France had the good reflex when, after trying to develop the erroneous home grown graphite-gas nuclear technology (the design used for Chernobyl), she bought US technology from Westinghouse (since then transmogrified). There is no shame in getting a little help from one's good friends. That is what trade is all about. Europe has some better systems right now, let the USA use them. In turn Europe could use Orion, and splash in the ocean too (although, with Ariane 5 greater lift, Orion could be equipped with land landing capability, like Soyuz).

Patrice Ayme

THINK, OR YOU SHALL SINK.

FAITH OVERDOSE DOES A MIND KILL.

What needs to be rediscovered, reinvented, and re-disseminated in the USA is thinking. Good, deep, honest, deliberate, well informed thinking. Not feel-good thinking, not wishful thinking, not let's-all-sing-together-we-are-so-beautiful thinking, but causal, rational, hard core thinking. That means that faith should be out as a first choice for mental pre-positioning. Certainly returning to the separation of church and state would help. One could start by phasing out the obviously anti-Constitutional motto of 1956 "In God We Trust", an apparently obvious imitation of Adolf Hitler's motto: "Gott mit Uns" ("God With Us"). German soldiers and SS carried "Gott mit Uns" all over Europe as they invaded. Similarly, G. W. Bush's ultimate justification for invading Iraq was that his "Higher Father" told him to.

When thinking is applied, it will be revealed that plutocracy does not a democracy make. Nor does calling the world's richest men "philanthropists" make them good. Nor being the only country in the universe to use the old imperial system of units does an empire make. And so on.

Happy Winter Solstice (aka the Birth of the Sun, the birthday of Mithra, made, more than a millennium later, into the famous "Sol Invictus" (the Invicible Sun), an official massive Roman celebration, later conveniently transmogrified into Mr. Christ's birthday, when the later Roman emperors decided that all the People needed was the cross...)!
***

P/S: The treaty of Tripoli, a document agreed to by the entire machinery of the US government under the first and second US presidents, Washington and Adams, states that "...the Government of the United States of America is not, in any sense, founded on the Christian religion...." (1796-97). Indeed the de facto motto of the USA dating from 1776 was "E Pluribus Unum" (but had never been officially proclaimed as such).

Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.wordpress.com

MONEY ALLOWS PAID INTELLECTUALS TO FORM INTO A CLASS, AND SERVE THE PLUTOCRACY.

USING PUBLIC MONEY TO FORM A SECRET SOCIETY. HOW INTELLECTUALS ARE ALLOWED TO TURN INTO A NEW CLASS OF STATE PRIESTS, OR IS THAT AS PROSTITUTES FOR THE ELITE?

Recently, only personel of rich universities have been allowed access to scientific and intellectual research product. This is done by requiring the public to pay hefty fees to just have a glance to an article.

It's outrageous that scientific research would be withdrawn from public scrutiny and access. Most scientific research is funded by the PUBLIC. Thus the public ought to be the ultimate owner of the information gathered by scientists. In Britain, for example, the universities are now all public (Oxford and Cambridge are not private anymore). So it is in continental Europe. US universities, even private ones, are hugely financed by taxpayer money in various ways. To grab other people's property for one's profit is thievery. To do it to the public defiles and attacks the REPUBLIC (res Publica).

Besides, science, and intellectual activities are public utilities, thus should provide with public access, just like the high seas, the moon, or the air one breathes.

Should this grabbing of collective resources by a small self-selected elite and rich universities be allowed to go on, it is to be feared that a new priesthood will rise. Meanwhile, most of the public will get ever more ignorant, antiscientific, anti-intellectual, and resentful (of that new priesthood). New Dark Ages would be here. (Apparently, even the present administration has expressed alarm, and took corrective action in some biological areas.)

In a way, allowing only members of rich universities to have access to intellectual product, is similar to what happened at the criminal root of the present financial crisis: a small elite grabs for itself, and its personal enrichment, vast global, public resources.

Indeed, more globally the question is that, if it takes several hundred dollars to look at a just one issue of one journal financed by the public, who has that kind of money? Who has that kind of access? The plutocracy, those at the root of the world financial and economic mess.

As Obama claims that he wants to provide better internet access to the population, one guesses that he means better access to information, and, in particular, to publicly financed information. So he should look at this injustice.
***

Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.wordpress.com
****

P/S: Here is how Dr. Olivia Judson describes the access to intellectual product problem in the New York Times (Dec. 16, 2008):

"One caveat. I say “access to information is easier and faster than ever before.” With respect to scientific information, this is true for people within universities, but not for those without them. One of the consequences of the scientific journals going digital is that it has become harder for members of the public to get access to original scientific information. It used to be the case, for example, that anyone could get permission to spend a day at the library at Imperial College; once there, they could read any of the journals on the library shelves. Now, subscriptions to the paper editions of many journals have been stopped — the journals are no longer physically there — and only members of the university are allowed access to the online versions. Some journals give free access, at least to back-issues; but many do not. Then, if you are not a member of a university and you want to read some articles, they may cost you as much as $30 each. I think this is a pity. Perhaps not many people want to read original scientific research; but somehow, it seems against the spirit of the enterprise."

GAY VERSUS SAD STATE OF AFFAIRS RESOLVED...

Maureen Dowd observes that: "Gays who supported Barack Obama had the bittersweet experience of seeing [less educated, being Black and Hispanics] voters who surged to the polls to vote Democratic also vote for Proposition 8, which turned gay “I dos” into “You can’ts".”

California already has a domestic partnership law. Once united by it, couples need to go through a real divorce if they want to part ways (as one of my friends found to her dismay!). So President Obama has just to pass, with his tremendous majorities in the Senate and House, the law recognizing domestic partnership from state to state. Problem solved.

In Europe, domestic partnerships have supplanted the old style marriage, thus vaporizing the problem of sad versus gay state of affairs. Please circulate, good people, there are more serious matters out there!

Patrice Ayme

PAST THE TECHNOLOGY OF NO RETURN.

FULLL TECH AHEAD!

One reader wonders about the following quote found in "STIMULATING THE RIGHT WAY" (on http://patriceayme.wordpress.com): “That is precisely why high technology green jobs have to be promoted.”

"This is paradoxical — industrialism has created widespread environmental devastation, and so we expect to work our way out of this with more “high technology” (i.e., industrialism)?"

“Paradox” means against common opinion. In the USA, opinion is running strongly against intellectualism, science and high technology, which are all tightly related. But it seems not to be the case in France, Britain, Germany, or some non negligible countries such as Brazil, India and China.

The main problem nowadays is that high technology and its attending industrialization keeps alive nearly seven billion people. It is indeed unlikely that much more than 50 million people could be kept alive with primitive technology.

Our civilization is in the situation of a jet barreling down the runway, well past the point of no return: either we take off, or we crash in flames and explode.

More advanced technology will not have to have a worse impact on the environment. A gory example is that when thermonuclear power reactors get on line, one could probably burn in them unusable radioactive waste (such as produced in medicine). A sunny example is that solar power will work, and give us all we need (the most recent studies show it would even provide with enough power on Mars to make fuel there).

The American anti-technology, anti-intellectualism bias is strongly related to the American reign of plutocracy (See Patriceayme.wordpress.com, Nov 16, 2008).

PA.

PLUTOCRACY ORIGINATED SLAVERY AND RACISM.

THE HEAD OF THE DEADLY SNAKE HAS NOT BEEN CUT OFF YET.

The racial Civil War started 147 years ago. Some will say it ended with Obama's election (thus nicely forgetting that Africans were enslaved in English America 390 years ago). But what about the plutocratic civil war? The one of the rich against the people? Is that finished too? As it turns out, the racial war is a particular case of that war of the rich against the poor. God, in the fourteenth century had told the Pope that Africans could be enslaved, and the Pope dutifully wrote a bull recommending that, and the invasion of Africa. That was most pleasing to the plutocrats in Portugal. Like in Iraq with the oil nowadays, there was money to be made in Africa with sugarcane. In the Americas, it's the rich who acquired millions of African slaves, to produce very profitable tobacco. Those slaves were extremely expensive to purchase: the rich in America committed the crime of slavery, it's not everybody who did it. Most people had nothing to do with it.

President Washington, who got started in the military and real estate, playing the Brits, the French, the Indians, and the average Joe in a masterful game, finished as a big slave master, and the richest man in the USA. He resisted his friend Lafayette's entreaties to outlaw slavery. Twelve US presidents owned slaves (yes, more than 25%).

It's not just the Bush team that came short in recent years, but the entire plutocracy has finally shown its ugly face for everybody to contemplate. Flushed by increasing bubbles, the plutocracy became ever more arrogant, so arrogant, it had decided to conquer the world physically, or at least where the oil was. As the American people initially applauded the decision, the plutocracy became ever more arrogant, and engaged in ever more dangerous and abusive financial practices. Thus it finally tripped in Iraq, and in banking corruption unbound. Apparently not satisfied with the enslavement of Africans, now most Americans had also to be treated as means to ever greater riches. It's no coincidence that the people has chosen one who would have been looked at as a slave a little while ago: the entire American people has good reason to feel enslaved now. Most Americans feel black, in more ways than one.

The Plutocracy forced God fundamentalism on the people ("In God We Trust" was imposed in 1956). Thus God could tell Bush to invade Iraq. So, sure the Bush team was going from blunder to blunder, but that was a method of government, born of total contempt. It was taken for granted that the plutocracy would keep on governing: by making people naive and uncritical. Even at this late hour, it has asked for a trillion dollars for itself, so it could pay its bonuses past and present (those total more than 110 billions, according to respected newspapers).

Thus there is a bigger picture than slavery and racism. Slavery and racism originated in Pluto's world. They were literally political and psychological derivatives that plutocracy used as an exoskeleton. The greater war of rich against poor is far from won: many mass psychological structures of the USA support the plutocracy, not the People. Just look at the coins; they do not trust the People ("E Pluribus Unum" was the original slogan of the USA). Instead the coins order us to trust "God", the one that brought us slavery and the invasion of Iraq.

Well, it may be time to remember that Rome did not have racism, but Rome had plutocracy, and ultimately, that plutocracy destroyed Rome.

Patrice Ayme.

WHY THE USA IS NO ROSY FUTURE.

A NEW MAN DOES NOT MAKE A REPUBLIC.

Mr. Obama lived overseas for a little while as a child, and then had a long, exceptional, highly instructive childhood in Hawaii (See "Our Friend Barry" by Constance Ramos). Hawaii has long been known as a rare case of multiethnic integration. All this makes Mr. Obama's mind uniquely qualified to practice mental flexibility.

But one man will not a new world make. Comparing Switzerland, with its highly democratic system, and the awkward United States presidential system, one may doubt that the future lays in the direction of the personalized US presidency. Sure, the US Presidential system was ideally suited to Presidents Jefferson, and Jackson, and their antidemocratic maneuvers. Sure, their conquests of immense Indian lands made the USA a great power. And sure that is what the Europeans wanted (France, in particular, wanted a mighty America, that came in handy later). Sure, by making dirty deals in 1945 (with Stalin and Ibn Saud), President Roosevelt insured US supremacy for a generation or two. The waters have gone below those antidemocratic bridges to the present, the USA as a world country. But it remains that the US Presidency is both too strong in its antidemocratic ways, and too weak against the plutocracy.

The lesson of the Bush years has not been drawn. With W the lesson is that not much of a man, not much of a mind, can lead an entire democratic nation astray. But the Bush saga started two generations ago, when both of W's grandfathers collaborated with the Nazis at the highest level (Prescott and Mr. Walker). The lessons of the collaboration between some of the mightiest US citizens and Nazism was not seriously investigated, let alone drawn. But it is the heart of the problem. The present financial crisis is just another manifestation of the same elite going too far. Once again.

We have here in the USA a system where plutocracy is strong, and the democratic institutions are omnipresent, but weak. One man will not change this. It will take a nation. The conscience of a nation, not just of one liberal. Now, of course, that man, the president, could turn into a great teacher. The tenacity of hope.

Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.wordpress.com

P/S: Novus Homo was a well known concept in Rome. The most famous was Cicero, and his hands got nailed on the Senate door by Marc Anthony. No Novus Homo never changed the republic (or the empire). Augustus, or Constantine were pretty much their dad's sons.

MUNICH AND IRAN.

TALK IS STRONG, NOT TALKING TO FASCISTS IS TOLERATING THEM AND THEIR DEEDS.

It goes without saying that one should talk to Iran. Opponents often brandish the talks of France and Great Britain with Hitler and Mussolini in Munich in 1938 as the epitome of the pitfall of talking. Such a naive, but traditional “wisdom” denotes a superficial knowledge of history, infused with erroneous data. Wisdom without knowledge, that’s hubris.

It is true that in Czechoslovakia, the Munich accords came to be known as a “dictate”, or a “betrayal” (it thoroughly violated the military defense treaty between France and Czechoslovakia). Although France had partially mobilized, it forced Czechoslovakia to surrender to Hitler its Sudetenland territory that were had a majority of Germans. (Czechoslovakia sticks smack inside the core of Germany.)

In truth, though, Munich was an indispensable preliminary to World War. If nothing else, it gave time for Britain to mass produce enough of a state of the art airforce. But it did much more. It provided the two large democracies with the casus belli they needed.

When at war, democracies, to stay in one piece, have to have the People use its power, in agreement with itself. That means the war has to be perceived as just by the People. The Romans, under the republic, called that a “Casus Belli”, and paid careful attention to having one always, before going to war. The reason that France and Britain were able to declare war to Hitler while occupying the high moral ground, was precisely because they had talked to him first.

For years prior, Hitler had been good at dividing his opponents. In 1934, he made a pact with Poland, and one with Britain in 1935 (which violated the Versailles Treaty). By 1937 the business opportunities presented by Hitler had incited the USA to pass laws dealing with the democratic French republic as an enemy belligerent of some sort (because France was exhibiting no obvious signs of affection towards Hitler, contrarily to the USA).

As France and Britain talked to Hitler in Munich, they consolidated the British conversion to an alliance with France against Hitler. The talks also forced Hitler to formally engage himself to some agreements. At this point, Hitler was stuck, it was the end of his malevolent dance. Either he respected the accords, and he lost prestige, and that is grave in a regime that rests on terror. Or then he violated the accords, for the whole world to see, and Britain and France had their Casus Belli. Whereas most of the German establishment was satisfied by the Munich agreement, Hitler saw that he had been entrapped, and he was furious.

As it was, Poland, observing that Britain was following France, taking a firm stance, got encouraged to make a formal military assistance treaty with the French republic, and Britain was in the fine print in the appendix.

Next, of course, Hitler, observing that he was in the process of being surrounded by France and Poland, while Britain was scrambling to build a modern air force, had to strike. So he attacked Poland, after rushing a love pact with his pal Stalin. Britain and France declared war, 45 French divisions attacked the Siegfried Line (”Westwall”), and while Poland fought to death, American capitalists of the Wall Street type, rushed anti knock additives Hitler desperately needed for his air force. But I digress.

The point is this: Hitler was entrapped by talk. No talk, no entrapment. If one had kept ignoring Hitler, as the US government was doing, Hitler would have got his world war when he wanted, when he was going to be ready, in 1945, with huge quantities of new weapons that were on the drawing boards. In 1939, he was not ready, not at all. There is force in speech, power in thought. Before acting, think, and then talk.

If nobody had talked to Hitler, the survivors would be living under the Great Nazi World Reich. Only those who have no brains, and no morals, fear speech. Winking at destiny does not make for a better world. Only expression can bend destiny, and that starts with speech.

So indeed, seen from the purely military point of view, the USA should talk to Iran.

Patrice Ayme

Patriceayme.wordpress.com

(Published in International Herald Tribune, October 27, 2008.)

TAX MORE, WASTE NOT.

To reduce the United States of America's considerable waste of energy, the most efficient way is to augment the price of energy enough so that everybody notice, and modify their behavior accordingly. That can be achieved with much higher taxes on fuel and electricity. Those of modest means that are adversely affected should be compensated, by direct payment from the State, as they are in France. It would help with the United States' deficit too, instead of borrowing ever more Chinese money.

Taxes on energy are about eleven (11) times higher in France than in the USA (and at similar levels in all the advanced countries of Europe, including big oil exporters such as Norway and Britain). It is unfortunate that many Americans who profess to reduce U.S. energy usage do not dare to mention heavy taxation of energy, the only method that is sure to work, to reduce American energy waste. France per capita Carbon Dioxide (CO2) emissions are less than a third of that of the USA. (And the French rose their taxes on energy even higher a few weeks ago!)

Trying to change society without changing taxes is like trying to change the world, by chanting forlornly to the raging ocean. Beautiful, romantic, but useless, and pathetic.

Patrice Ayme,
Patriceayme.wordpress.com

P/S: Other measures could and should be taken to help develop a greener economy [Congress gave a low interest loan of 25 billions dollars to car makers for greener cars (the problem with these sorts of gifts to the corporate USA is that corruption tends to swallow all the billions); see T. Friedman for still more ideas: NYT, October 21, 2008]. But the point I made here is that taxing energy heavily should be the first thing to do, because it creates an arena for a greener free market. Free markets are free, but only within the arenas the law gives them. Heavy taxation means green liberation.

THAT SUCKING SOUND...

It used to be that the greatest jobs in the USA were to be an engineer, a scientist, a doctor, a teacher, a judge, even a --- blue collar worker. Those jobs were the pillars of the economy. They were well paid and respected. In 1941, the USA was a nation of engineers, and it's how W.W.II was won, so well, and so quickly.

In recent decades, though, the money manipulators sucked all the money, leaving not enough for even the most meritorious and necessary professions to attract the next generations. This is no exaggeration: Wall Street bonuses (just Wall Street), were more than 100 billion Dollars in 2007 (about 4% of the U.S. government budget). So the country has decayed. Worse: this U.S. plutocracy allied and entangled itself with the most terrible elements overseas (the Saud and bin Laden families are examples, just for Saudi Arabia). Plutocracy became a world network, and globalization without regulation its preferred weapon.

To reestablish a balance, the money manipulators (Roosevelt's "banksters") should be condemned to regurgitate their ill gotten gains, indeed. The last thing to do is to send more money to the money manipulators: that is not what the People want, and, besides, more of the same will not solve the crisis. The entire world plutocratic system should be dismantled, because it's antinomic to democracy. By definition, it's either moneypower (plutocracy) or peoplepower (democracy). One cannot have both. in 1941, the USA was a democracy. Maybe it can become one again, for real. The increasing refusal of people to pay exaggerated mortgages as their wages sink is actually a revolt of the People against banks. It looks like a financial crisis, but maybe it is actually a very healthy rebellion of the People against over-exploitation by money manipulators who violated the law for so long, they don't care if they do, because they are persuaded that they could get away with anything.

Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.wordpress.com

NEW TAXES FOR THE NEW WORLD.

(New York Times EDITORS' SELECTIONS. October 17, 2008 11:38 am.)

HOW TO REORIENT THE ECONOMY OF THE USA TOWARDS A BETTER BALANCE OF INFRASTRUCTURE AND CONSUMPTION. THE ADDED VALUE TAX.

All the economic policy of the USA has been to make bubbles, like a child in a bath. Maybe one should get out of the bath, and have an industrial policy instead.

One of the very reason for the U.S. slump is its increasing dearth of appropriate infrastructure. Obsolete infrastructure creates waste, diverting economic activity to entropy. A simple example are bad roads. Their potholes force people to drive trucks with huge wheels as if on a safari, and that in turn brings fuel waste, etc. Similarly people take planes to go anywhere in the USA, even on relatively short distance. In Europe, whenever the flight is less than 4 hours, (electric) trains win. They are much more efficient (the latest go at 360 kilometers per hour). Ibidem for housing, which is very thermally inefficient in the USA, resulting in energy spending that prevents home owners to have capital for better insulation.

Another reason for the U.S. slump is the relocalization of U.S. industry to China and similar places. That was encouraged because it allowed the reigning plutocracy to increase its profit margins. Because U.S. infrastructure will be presumably built in the USA and not in China, infrastructure should help to increase U.S. activity.

The population should be also encouraged to stop buying too much fluffy stuff built overseas, or plain wasteful stuff, without of course rising trade barriers. Another good thing would be to fight tax evasion. It would be of course great to fight deficits by rising revenue. There is one common solution to all this. The ADDED VALUE TAX. It makes tax invasion, and tax write-offs for the rich, impossible, per its very structure.

OK, The AVT was invented in France in 1954, but the USA is turning these days to the solutions that France used in her past crises. The AVT is imposed as part of European Union membership.

The AVT can be regulated according to economic needs: although colossal on luxury products in France, it's only around 5% on infrastructure work. And of course 0% on basic necessities. The AVT is the largest fiscal source in France. By the way, in case you did not notice, well regulated France is the least affected of the large economies by the financial crisis, although she took the fastest and deepest countermeasures.

It goes without saying that, to incite Joe the Plumber to not buy a Porsche with his $250,000 income, and buy his fuel from Arabia, one should augment energy taxes (in France, compensatory payments are made for low income people on overall energy spending, than more than compensate for the tax).

After trying to turn the U.S. economy to China, in the last decade, it may be wiser for the USA to remember its European roots, and get enlightened a bit.

Patrice Ayme

Patriceayme.wordpress.com
— Patrice Ayme, Hautes Alpes

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AFGHANISTAN: THE AUDACITY OF DOPE.

NATO IN DENIAL AND WHY.

Afghans cannot just be told that, if they behave, they will not be killed by NATO. And that's called civilization, and it's much better than the Qur'an. Be the poorest people on earth, or so, Afghans, but be quiet, and we will search your houses, and bomb your villages, when our sensors tell us to. If some men and some guns are among the dead, we will call that a justified strike. That's the entire NATO program. It sounds straight out of the "Terminator" movie, with NATO troops playing terminators, with their flying robots overhead.

To persist in this course of action is to humiliate the Afghans, and to throw the gauntlet at them. Realized civilian help spending by NATO has been closer to 1% of the budget for NATO bombing and killing, rather than to all past promises. Besides, the Afghan army has been left tiny, because NATO does not trust it, and is afraid to train enemies, rather than true allies. Joining impudence to insult, NATO then complains the Afghans are not doing enough.

Many countries of NATO are becoming aware of the audacious hopelessness of NATO's message and practice. The Canadians will pull their soldiers out within two years (and they have fought courageously, with the greatest proportional deaths, more than 50% higher than the U.S. in relative numbers). If Canada leaves, it's very unlikely that Europe will stay, and the USA will be left to bomb, and kill, and die, alone. (The U.S. contingent is about half of NATO in Afgahnistan.)

The only hope for NATO is to act as tribal chief, and friend of all in Afghanistan. As a friend, it has only one material thing to offer, short term. The legalization of the "booming" poppy trade should be used as a carrot to turn around sympathetic tribal leaders (in the areas to the south, precisely where the insurrection is the worst). There are no ethical, political and economic objections to this.

An interesting question is why does NATO persist in a policy that has failed for seven years already, and that is bound to fail? Why is it the gift that keeps on giving? Hubris is part of the answer. It goes like this: we can win this, we are better men, we just did not try hard enough. Hubris is a drug. Or more exactly, it acts just like one, because it infuses the brain with very similar chemicals. So NATO strategists may look sober, but, in truth, they are just as high as if they had abused of the poppy fields themselves.

True, if non military means of helping were used massively, the war could be won. But they won't be deployed as they ought to. Why? Because there is no constituency to send massive civilian help to a country of 35 million people, when entire urban zones, in the USA , or in France, are in need of drastic help, and when so many young Brits of Muslim descent dream of Jihad. There is a constituency, though, for developping, testing, and deploying new weapons. Great progress was made because of flying lethal robots in Iraq, militarily speaking. That's encouraging in many ways: at last one thing the USA does really well.

Thus it may be viewed in some circles as rather helpful that bin Laden is so hard to catch. Better, one could extend the war to Pakistan's mountainous terrain. Nothing like a war that last forever. As Orwell pointed out in "1984", nothing like the war that keeps on giving, to support the class that keeps on leading.
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Patrice Ayme
Patriceayme.wordpress.com

IN THE USA "LIBERALS" COLLUDE WITH THE ESTABLISHMENT

MY WALL STREET, RIGHT OR WRONG, SAYS FAMOUS SELF DECLARED LIBERAL!


Paul Krugman, the self declared "Conscience of a Liberal" writes the following in a New York Times editorial (September 26, 2008):

"Maybe we can let Wall Street implode and Main Street would escape largely unscathed. But that’s not a chance we want to take."

Really? Why not? All indicates that it's the other way around. Keeping on sending money to Wall Street may keep on depriving Main Street of money. Sending money to Wall Street is exactly what has happened in the last few decades. Maybe it's time to try something different.

The total worth of the world is about 100 trillion dollars, and the total world GDP is not even half that. Nevertheless, the supposed "value" of all derivatives invented by "Wall Street" is in excess of 500 trillion dollars. Many of these derivatives are leveraged out of mortgage based securities.

In other words, "Main Street's" money (found in banks) was lent to hedge funds owned by extremely rich individuals, so they could leverage themselves to make themselves even more fabulously rich. Now that this leverage is working the other way, two things are occurring: the banks can't be reimbursed, and the hedge fund industry (worth two trillions dollars in the USA) is in danger of being wiped out (bringing many of the hyper rich to ruin). This is probably what is the real reason for the panic of the Bush administration.

The simple solution to all this, for the People at large, "Main Street", the real economy, is to nationalize all institutions that are necessary for the ongoing functioning of the economy (in the Great Depression, the Fed let thousands of banks necessary to the functioning of the economy close, a horrible mistake). In other words, let the government provide necessary banks with all the capital needed for operations necessary for the ongoing functioning of the economy . Simple. and don't send the money to the rich: that could cause a new Great Depression.

Hedge Funds and obscure, unregulated derivatives are unnecessary to "Main Street", and have actually hindered "Main Street" by siphoning money away from it. Let them die. It's time to do triage.

Nationalizing (hence saving) only functions and institutions useful to "Main Street" will save the economy. All "Wall Street" has been doing is destroying the real economy. Time for a change.

Patrice Ayme.
— Patrice Ayme, Hautes Alpes

http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/


(Recommended by 45 Readers).

FINANCIAL OBSCENITIES.

If France was in the same mess as the USA is in now, with many major financial institutions unable to carry their obligations, France would solve the mess herself. France has been in related messes, and has been solving them herself (remember Credit Lyonnais? The greatest bankruptcy ever, around 30 billion dollars…). After W.W.II, France was completely broke. It was solved the old fashion way. In cases like that, the solution is direct administration and ownership by the People. In other words, nationalization. The USA is no exception.

Just as the Central bank is the “Lender of Last report”, THE STATE IS THE OWNER OF LAST RESORT. Time has come. That psychological issue nobody can solve it for the USA. If the USA wants to keep on operating, it will have to nationalize maybe 1,000 financial outfits. Maybe more. Otherwise, an alternative would be to establish a feudal regime, with the great Lords of American finance always going unpunished, owning any and all, and the American People even more submissive than it already is.

After a spectacular bank failure last fall, even the slightly deluded great pope of the Free Market, P.M. Gordon Brown, deduced, all well considered, that the solution was to nationalize said bank. Anything else would be a fraud on the British People, said Gordon.

The plan proposed by Paulson is to have the American People come to the rescue of the Rich of America, lest the latter burn the house to the ground, leaving the People most deprived.

The plan proposed by U.S. dinosaurs, with the help of Barney (Frank) is even funnier. It is even more hilarious, indeed, to ask the poor People of the entire planet to come to rescue the American Rich.

But why not make such an outrageous plea? It is even more obscene than the present situation, and, as we visualize this, the poor of the world getting their coins together to help the nasty, arrogant, possessive U.S. gadzillionaires, we are seized, hopefully, with intense comic relief…

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

AMERICAN ECONOMIC IDEAS ARE EXPLODING.

If worst comes to worst (and we are getting there very quickly), the USA will turn into France. France is a capitalist country with stronger social and financial regulations. The USA has turned into a creditist country with a ravenous plutocracy. The USA has a class of hyper rich people that buy elections, but average people are so bereft of capital, they have to borrow for everything, They borrow at usurious rates, making the rich richer.

But there is hope. Indeed, looked at it another way, the present crisis denotes the unwillingness of average people to keep on overpaying for their ownership of homes (then, through huge leverage, this avalanched in a giant credit crisis).

The USA got into this in a bipartisan way: a lot of the present excess went out of control under Clinton (Bush only encouraged it further).

The Titanic sank because its rivets were of poor quality (there was a shortage of high quality material to make them, so the hyper rich builder cut corners to build Titanic and its sister ships). Under pressure of scrapping along the iceberg, the rivets lost their heads, so the ship opened like modern tin can do.

Many of the leading socioeconomic ideas of the USA are characterized by a carefully designed poor quality, so that the rich can rule and prosper more, and now that the pressure has come, they are losing their heads.

Fortunately, some ships are better sunk. And what's so bad about France anyway?

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

SOME INTELLIGENT CHOICES FOR THE USA

One liner thoughts ("[Obama] is worried that someone won’t read [the terrorists] their rights.”) do not an intelligent policy make. In Afghanistan, as in Iraq, as in the USA all over, what is needed is intelligence to blossom, not the ability to not read moose their rights. Ms. Palin seems eminently qualified for more of the same, shooting innocent creatures, and the American people should ponder seriously whether that is what they want again.

This being said, total withdrawal in Iraq within sixteen month is not a solution. And I don't think that Obama is advocating it anymore. It's not much more of a solution than total French withdrawal from, say, Ivory Coast. Civilization cannot just withdraw here, there and everywhere, until it surrenders from the last corner. What needs to be done is a careful maneuver of getting United Nations' approval and military replacement of most of the US force by UN forces, ASAP.

It's true that the Sunnis, or the Kurds, will need help against the Shiah majority for years to come, and that one needs to insure that Sunni Muslim Fundamentalism (aka Al Qaeda) does not come back to provide it again. The Shiah are backed up by a powerful Iran. Iran (population not far from 70 millions, mostly young and many indoctrinated and ready to fight) at some point grabbed the Caliphate, and established it in Baghdad (750 CE). Memories are long in the region, one can expect Iran to keep on pushing. So UN troops should be there to provide the Sunni tribes with help instead of al Qaeda (recruiting UN soldiers in poor Muslim countries should be easy). The US could withdraw to remote high tech bases to provide the UN with ultimate backbone (France is opening a military basis in the United Arab Emirates, with advanced supersonic interceptors; the US could do more of the same in the area).

Now as far as Afghanistan is concerned, the way is indeed to help massively the locals who think basically in a way compatible with civilization. Reward those financially, encourage education, and boost the Afghan army.

The French did this in Senegal during the initial conquest, using 5,000 local soldiers led by a handful of French officers. In the early twentieth century, though, the French stumbled for a while. After fighting a local Muslim prophet, and caging him in Madagascar, they were going nowhere nice. Finally, though, they thought better of it, brought the prophet back, helped him, and he helped them, and France ended up decorating him in the most prestigious way. This is important: the resulting Senegalese Islam is FULLY Western compatible, and is now actually an alternative to Saudi Wahhabism, and its popularity is growing in Western Africa (thus barring Al Qaeda).

By contrast the French mishandled Islam in Algeria (they could have tweaked it and used it in the service of democracy, instead they mostly ignored it).

In the last two decades, fanatical and illegal Wahhabist preachers sent from Saudi Arabia with Saudi money wrought havoc in France (and, much worse, caused a huge war in Algeria, with more than 100,000 killed). French authorities, and in particular Sarkozy, have finally opted for a strategy of promotion of an "Islam de France", fully compatible with the republic. After all, making an Abrahamic religion compatible with the republic was done before, with Judeo-Christianism. If one allowed these two Middle-East superstitions, why not a third? Support means control, of course. After all, the civilization of Al Andalous at its best was resplendent precisely because it was tolerant of all variants of Judeo-Christo-Islamism.

By the way, the official production of opiates for pharmaceutical usage, although saturated in its present very restricted markets, could be extended worldwide to provide the gravely, or terminally ill with comfort. Integrating this in the Afghan economy would solve short term Afghanistan economic problems, and would do wonders with the popularity of the West. In first order, the problem in Afghanistan is not military, so the first order solution should not be military. Unfortunately, as it is, the effort of the West is primarily military, thus destined to fail.
***

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

DIRAC AT A GLANCE.

DIRAC EQUATION JUSTIFIED IN ONE SENTENCE

The Dirac equation is the statement that the electron satisfies the simplest WAVE equation possible in space-time. The simplest wave equation is first order, and is of the type dw = w. If the differential operator d treats all dimensions equally (and it better does that, to satisfy the Einsteinian-Minkowski wish of treating all dimensions equally, and time "as" space), one gets the Dirac operator.

WHAT CHANGE REALLY MEANS.

Democrats may feel the pain about all those with bad health care, forced into destitution by emergency room treatments, but, without power to fight back the causes of the pain, there will be pain always.

In economics, power is money. So where are the democrats going to find the money? Nowhere much, if they do not change their minds, because the taxes on income are not far from maximal already. European countries confronted that problem long ago, and decided to find the money with new taxes. The taxes, in turn, diverted economic activity from consumption and waste to savings and caring. To do this, a French "inspector of finances" invented the Value Added Tax in 1954. That tax was soon made mandatory in all countries members of the European Union (it taxes all increased values of stages of production around 19%). Huge taxes on energy were also introduced (they correspond roughly to $300 per barrel oil). France is now introducing a system of bonus-malus on all products according to their CO2 impact during use and manufacture (tax the inefficient ones, reward the efficient ones; it's already deployed with cars, and that explains why Peugeot SA has the best fleet mileage, worldwide: 141 grams CO2/kilometer).

The USA has to go in that general direction. Away from rabid consumption and mindless waste. Into saving, caring and investing. And taxes are the only way. Short of this, the pain is just made into a song. Short of this, it's just change one cannot believe in.

Patrice Ayme.
— Patrice Ayme, Hautes Alpes

MOSCOW RULES.

GEORGIA TOLLS FOR THEE.

The New York Times editorial on the invasion of Georgia concludes this way: "Ties between Russia and the West are now the worst in a generation. It will take toughness and subtlety to ensure they do not lock into a permanent confrontation — not more bluster from anyone."(August 27, 2008)

Right. But lots more toughness. Moscow, per its intrinsic genesis and nature, is anti-Western. That was long hidden by the fact Moscow claimed to be Marxist, and socialist, and many in the West were, and are, genuine socialists. Basically, all of Western Europe, Britain included, is socialist (and the USA is not too far behind!). So there is a lot of sympathy for socialism in the West, and Moscow ended using that sympathy as a trick to advance itself. That Moscow is deeply anti-Western was also hidden by the fact that Stalinian fascism, after being allied to Hitlerian fascism, was attacked by it, and conducted a desperate fight against it (suffering 20 million dead).

But now the smokescreens are dissipating. The time of the final confrontation is at hand between the mentality of the West and the anti-Western mentality of Moscow. That anti-Western mentality is more than 1,000 years old (indeed much older than Moscow itself). This confrontation is much bigger than any problem connected with the US mistake of having invaded Iraq, because invading Iraq was deeply anti-American. Thus, invading Iraq was contrary to American nature. Whereas invading Georgia is exactly what Moscow has always been about, ever since it was born as the double agent stooge of the Mongols (before 1480).

Cheney, that error onto himself, should better be threading lightly, indeed, as he goes to Europe to talk about Russia. The Europeans dislike and despise him, and the Europeans have to carry the main economic weight of confronting Moscow at this point. The Europeans have to have the courage to go all the way, and forget about begging for energy from Moscow, down on their knees. They can do it, but it will be tough. Otherwise Moscow will reinvade as much as it can (until the unavoidable military struggle).

Gorbachev, the Russian tzar before Putin, impudently condemns the fact that Kosovo voted for its independence repeatedly. Voting is a big no-no for Moscow. Invading is what Moscow does.

Kosovo has been its own country forever. The Serbs were invited to settle in the area by emperor Heraclius (7th century). The Serbs are the guests, the Kosovars are the original stock. And, although the Serbs fought a battle against the Turks in Kosovo, they mainly stayed out of it for a very long time. Moreover the Serbs have voted recently twice to say implicitly that Kosovo could go its own way, and that Serbia would join the European Union instead (reunifying Serbia with Kosovo, in the fullness of time!). Kosovo, besides, is 35 times the population of South Ossetia, South Ossetia has been a province of Georgia for 3,000 years. But now Moscow has decided that South Ossetia is part of Moscow. Is Kosovo also part of Moscow? What about Berlin? After all, Berlin is much closer to Moscow than Kosovo.

So why is Moscow so obsessed about Kosovo? Kosovo is smack dab in the Middle of the Mediterranean region (100 kilometers from the sea). Kosovo never had anything to do with Moscow, except as an object of desire. The Muscovite desire for the Mediterranean sea. Moscow wants all the seas. It has many of them, but not that one. It is painful. Moscow wants it all, like Staphylococcus Aureus. It is high time to draw the line. The line is that if Moscow wants to keep on with its anti-Western, antidemocratic, invasive mentality, it can stay in its own sand box. After all, it is the largest in the world.

Patrice Ayme.
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

P/S: The NYT published the text above, minus the final section (commentary # 31). It was an interesting wink: OK, we know who you are, and you may be right, but we, at the NYT, have our own foreign policy, we are sure you understand. At least, this time we did not outright ignore you. A week earlier, a post of mine giving a list of facts demonstrating that Russia had planned its invasion of Georgia was outright omitted (true, the Georgian may have opened fire first, but only after 3,000 tanks and dozens of thousands of troops were found to be advancing in Georgian territory).

COGNIZANT PSYCHOLOGY SYNCHRONIZES WORLD ECONOMICS.

COGNIZANT PSYCHOLOGY IS CORE TO ECONOMICS.

Paul Krugman claims that the synchronization of the world business cycle is something of a mystery (NYT blog, August 22, 2008).

It seems to me we had a similar quandary earlier, when some of us were mystified by the influence of the price of the futures in oil on the oil cash price itself. (Traditionalists, such as Krugman, said it is not so, because, according to them, it could not be so; that is the traditional authoritarian explanation pitfall: refusing the observation, because it does not fit the preexisting theory; some commodities hedge fund managers disagreed deeply, because, in their experience, futures influence cash prices.)

In both cases, a mystery influence apparently propagates, and it cannot be detected with numbers attached to matter or currency exchanges. Conventional economics seems baffled.

But the nature of the propagation may simply be that this thing being transmitted has to do with basic cognitive psychology.

A hunter walking in the forest can detect something is amiss, just by the absence of bird singing. In an equivalent case, a conventional economist would detect nothing because the presence of the absence of something not easily quantified would not strike him as relevant to a jury of his peer reviewers (hence to the advancement of his career).

On the other hand, the average businessperson, however small and remotely located, or the governmental, or administrative decider, or the average cab driver, even in Karachi, hears, or reads the news. Thus, they become cognizant that an economic tsunami has struck a remote, but important part of the world. Naturally that decider will expect the tsunami to come around, and rather soon than later. it is not a matter of their career, but most of the time, of their livelihood.

Primitive people are not always primitive when their life is at stake. When the giant earthquake (9.3 Richter) struck Indonesia, the people in the closest islands to the epicenter immediately went to the high ground, and suffered nearly no casualties when the 120 feet waves crashed on the shore. More sophisticated people did not know what to do, until waves crashed into cities. Thus the total, illiterate savages demonstrated a better appreciation for risk than the most sophisticated specialists. Why? Because they were more concerned.

As people, worldwide, expect a slowdown, they batten their hatches, reduce, or even stop investing, and the crisis is instantaneously transmitted, faster than anything economists usually measure. Nowadays, information moves at the speed of light, and information always was at the core of economics.

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

POTENTIALLY SERIOUSLY WRONG ON CLIMATE

How come governments have been unable to predict the greenhouse heating presently assailing the planet?

Specialists want to be taken seriously. This means they tend to make predictions serious people take seriously. "Serious" means at the pinnacle of society, hence of conventional thinking. In other words, those serious people predict what conventional thinking can accept. That means what conventional social structures are ready to accept. It does have to do anything with reality.

Instead, in the case of the climate, just as in the case of flying a plane, what would be really serious would be to get ready for the worst possible cases. Conventional, let alone wishful thinking is useless and dangerous. But, unfortunately that is what has served as the ground for governmental thinking, especially in the USA. The history of the climate in the last billion years, plus the cases of Mars and Venus, plus some elementary logic, show that the worst possible cases are highly non linear, fast and most terrible. Highly non linear means that the heating effect would feed on itself. The worst possible climate catastrophes would make the holocausts humankind visited on itself in the past small details. And those catastrophes are entirely imaginable. So we should get ready for them, just as those who built and operate planes are getting ready for the worst, and, by anticipating it, mostly, avoid it.

Earth is our spaceship, the most complex one ever imaginable. By working on it so hard and so long, we made it into our contraption, and we are operating it. Just as for any spaceship, the worst imaginable should be studied, and avoided.

Details can be found on http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/2008/05/21/france-versus-greenhouse-or-how-to-mitigate/

Patrice Ayme
http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

OBAMA'S VP CHOICE DEMONSTRATES SORELY NEEDED WISDOM.

Bill Clinton long refused to divest himself from some embarrassing financial speculation, although, while his wife was running, he promised several times to do so. Bill had to chose between servicing some more, or serving himself much more. Although Hillary Clinton was the obvious choice for VP, considering her extremely strong run, the various attachments of Bill with various dubious characters and tin pot dictators worldwide made her too vulnerable a choice (a small example: did she use Dubai Investment Group money through Bill's Yucaipa fund in her campaign? It seems so...). The Republican attack machine would have had it easy (talking about Bill and Moldava, and Kuchma, and Kazakstan, etc...). Bill Clinton's behavior was unusual for a US president: neither Nixon, nor Ford, nor Carter, nor Reagan did such a thing (Bush Senior did, but much more discreetly). It forced Obama into not making the usual choice of selecting the runner-up.
Biden's experience in foreign affairs is real: the Bush administration used him front and center in the negotiations that led to Libya's peaceful nuclear disarmament, quite a remarkable task, considering how difficult the great, incomparably unpredictable leader Khadafi and his super wealthy super arrogant family can be (as Switzerland and France found out recently once again).
So, as the Clintons forced themselves out, Biden was left to stand out.Thus here we are. Differently from other choices (fighting drilling, refurbishing old tax schemes that have proven wrong headed in the past, etc.), this was the most obvious, most sensible choice.

Interestingly, this was a decision Obama took alone, differently from the other, rather non sensical ones, taken in committee. Thus, there is hope!

Hope for McCain, that is, because, in the end, the fact remains that the obvious person was not selected. It is only fair, and traditional, to select a strong runner-up. Clinton was more than that: she beat Obama in all big states primaries, except two. She now incarnates the obvious woman who was not selected, where, it will seem, a man would have been. Will women see a pattern there? Will they ever forgive Obama?

Patrice Ayme. http://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

THE WILL TO AUGMENT (final version June 08)

(Final version June 08)
FREE REINS TO THE AUGMENTATION INSTINCT AS THE MOTHER OF MENTAL, SOCIAL AND CIVILIZATIONAL INSTABILITY.
THE WILL TO POWER AS A COROLLARY TO THE WILL TO AUGMENT.

May 28, 2008 by Patrice Ayme

WHY DISREGARDING MORE BASIC INSTINCTUAL FORMS OF AUGMENTATION IS FRIENDLY TO WISDOM.


Can one kill a relationship with hope and certainty? Yes, one can! Better can be worse! How come? People always want more, and that includes relationships. Once they feel socially secure enough, many move on. To know more, to possess more. It's part of a general instinct, the "Will to Augment".

Why do people always want more? Well, it’s a survival skill that turned into an evolutionary advantage: expand, augment when the going is good, and the probability of surviving will be greater for the group. The larger the territory, the more to exploit, the more buffer. After all, Homo evolved as a hunter, and social hunters on land have to be highly territorial, they spend a lot of time acquiring a place that they will defend to death. Lions and wolves spend a major part of their energy acquiring, and then patrolling their territory and advertising loudly their presence. Those who did none of this did not contribute to the species beyond themselves (they had no descendants among their kin). The same holds for humans for the same reasons; it even holds strongly for chimps, although the reasons who make humans so prone to augmentation are diluted in chimps, they kill and go to war to augment themselves.

Everything else being equal, having more, of whatever one controls, means such a higher survival capability, that the “Will to Augment” has been a strong advantage, so it evolved to become strongly dominant. Even many birds and squirrels enjoy it, gathering and storing more nuts than they can use. Since human beings can do much more things than any other species, over the last few million years many activities were found in which frantically augmenting could be very advantageous. The instinct to augment evolved for millions of years on a huge planet, with a few good human troops, fighting each other to death. There were none of the limits to growth civilization would meet later, bringing that instinct under scrutiny.

When people have it all, all what they wanted previously, they move on to want even more, and not just landscape, or material goods, it extends to all imaginable dimensions. Augment as much as can be imagined, and when the going is good, get going some more. The instinct to augment is so ravenous, it’s why so many tyrants never stopped, even when it was clearly wiser to do so. Many a human folly, by otherwise wise people, is just about the "Will to Augment" gone on a rampage inside their minds.

The traditional example of Will to Augment gone amok is Easter Island, where, having cut the last tree, the islanders could not transport the last statue, nor build the last boat, nor fish the last fish, nor escape. A subset of the “Will to Augment” acquired in turn a philosophical life of its own under the label of “Will to Power”. Nietzsche made it famous. But Nietzsche disliked Darwin (whose insistence on biological evolution contradicted the Buddhist idea (parroted by Nietzsche) that the wheek of fate would roll back, just the same). So, ultimately could not ground his Will onto anything. Whereas the "Will to Augment" justifies it (all the way to Quantum Theory, if need be!).

In particular, once people have a relationship full of hope and certainty, they tend to want to move on. It’s psychobiological, all about getting maximum territory under control, in this case, social territory. Indeed, perhaps the greatest asset for survival has been the quest for power by extension of alliances, good both for groups and individuals in them. Ultimately, most of what people do is to extend these alliances (in particular in the framework of what is called a “career”, from the Old French meaning “horse race”). So if one can depend upon an individual, having thus one alliance one can depend on, one tends to move to the next one to extend an alliance with: the bigger the total set of alliances, the stronger. There is always a greener meadow on the other side of the fence, a new spring somewhere, and more interesting (in particular, the “Will to Augment” may even be the root of the anti-incest “instinct”: no point augmenting what you already got; this is proven by the fact that non genetically related sibblings, or simply people who lived long together, tend to exhibit the same incest repulsion).

The quest the "Will to Augment" spurs one into is unending. Or is it? It’s not just that when astronauts went in orbit, they found nowhere else to go. The Dark ages themselves show that controlling the augmentation instinct is key to surviving the ongoing civilizational expansion. Augmentation here may mean diminution out there, somewhere more important.

For the longest time, indiscriminate augmentation was NOT what the Roman republic was about. Just the opposite: the law was Rome meta structure, in overall mental and social control. It prevented augmentation for augmentation’s sake (that naturally occurs most readily along the most basic instinctual lines). Roman secular law as the overlord of Roman psychology kept for many centuries the Roman republic as the most civilized place on Earth. The People, Populus Romanus, augmented its power as the plutocracy reluctantly relinquished its power.

But then, after Hannibal and his army hanged around Italy defeating and massacring Romans for 15 long, devastating years, indiscriminate augmentation of Roman material power and territorial extension was felt safest and wisest (all the more since brute augmentation of the military allowed the plutocracy (the Senate) to beat back the People into submission). That change to uncontrolled augmentation was perhaps the largest mistake civilization ever made. The brute force augmentation and militarization of Rome was deadly to civilizational progress. Within a century, it led to uncontrollable civil strife. Augustus was at the tail end of the next century, during which the republic died.

“Augustus” means “Augmenter”. It was the title Rome’s first official “Princeps” kindly found for himself. The fascist “augmentation” that great nephew and adoptive son of Caesar provided with, put most of civilization in reverse, and ended with the Christian apocalypse of the Dark Ages. Augustus' augmentation blocked higher mental creativity, that was Rome's undoing.
So, for more than two thousand years, the lesson has been that the quality and nature of what one wants to augment is more important than augmentation for augmentation’s sake. Augustus reached that conclusion himself in his testament, tentatively, but without drawing any deep consequence thereof (having got augmentation shy in his later years, he told his successors to stay out of Germania, a mistake that the Franks corrected five centuries later). Precisely for having the wrong concept of augmentation, the Augmenter, “Augustus”, single-handedly insured the dead end of Greco-Roman civilization.

The quest “Will to Power” spurs one to is unending, it’s a blind psychobiological instinct. It is very hard to stop, and it's more astute to redirect it towards internal, mental growth. And what is this growing inside about? Civilization. It starts inside. Otherwise one ends up with many ephemeral friends, and no meaning.

If one wants more civilization, one wants to transform relationships between people in ways that augment mental creativity. That’s what the Franks succeeded to do, by freeing women and slaves. When the slave is slave no more, and talk back she will, dumb exploiters of the people are forced to get smarter (or devise smarter schemes to exploit people). Thus an increase of intelligence feedbacks on itself. The entire society is forced to get smarter. That’s how the Franks resurrected Western civilization: by using higher ethics to force down more basic instinctual forms of the “Will to Power”, which had been thoroughly rotting the Greco-Roman edifice.

So material and social comfort is not something one wants to augment if one wants to create a context more friendly to the very highest civilizational principles. An advantage of discomfort, and resisting the call to more simplistic instincts are necessary to get smarter.

The unbridled "Will to Augment" along the most basic instinctual lines has been characteristic of the domineering class of all empires that got out of control. There is actually a causal relationship. The USA has been no exception, and lack of psychoanalysis, at the individual or national level, has been overwhelming. Psychoanalysis is as far removed from the basic instincts as one can get, since its aim is to dissect them.

A very prosaic application of all this has been the huge taxes on energy long found in the European Union. The discomfort they induced have forced the Europeans to get smarter. Augmentation along the basic instinctual line of maximum waste became more uncomfortable than the alternative of augmenting in more spiritual ways.

A more subtle application of the psychological mechanisms exhibited here is that easy and cool mental attitudes are not the smartest. Unsurprisingly, both subjects are entangled: US society has learned to love it cool and easy, and general intelligence should have suffered as a result, and it did! This encroaching stupidity is demonstratable by looking at the US spurning of energy taxes, that led to an obsolete economy, the US incarceration rate, the US skewed distribution of riches, or health care, or the sub prime heist, or the hare brained invasion of the Middle East. All this is maddening in a country that wants to define itself as being about freedom, and the question is how did it happen? How did the US become the pathetic victim of unbriddled propaganda of the few, the rich, the plutocrats, etc. All these were not fought, as they augmented themselves, because not doing anything augmented comfort: fighting back clearly diminishes one's perception of augmentation. It's time to understand that the augmentation of comfort beyond some reasonable markers is the root cause of a lot of deviance.

If we do not want civilization to devolve, as it did with Rome and various fascisms, one will have to be careful what one wants to augment it with. The same goes for anyone, anytime, for the civilization in one's head. Augmented yes, but not if it means demented. It's a fine line individuals and countries have crossed readily.

Patrice Ayme,
Tyranosopher.


P/S: The analysis of Confucius, Machiavelli and Foucault on power are much more focused to the structures society uses for stability; Nietzsche was more ambitious, since he covered much of psychology, not just the part pertaining to sociology; we provided here with an evolutionary support for Nietzsche's work, generalizing and explaining the foundations of the "Will to Power".

Tentative HAPPINESS OBSERVATIONS.

Many people say what they want from life is happiness, it's their guiding light. Diamonds can be defined, but how can happiness be defined? Often what people mean actually by happiness is that they do not want stress. Indeed, stress can be defined objectively, by the presence of some hormones (cortisol, norephinephrine, etc.). So happiness could be objectively defined as the absence of stress. (OK, there are endorphin centers all over the brain, but that is more of a punctuated reward system, not the Holly Graal of genuine happiness.)

Such a tentative definition of happiness would lead one to suspect that any activity which would reduce stress levels generate happiness. But controlled, ephemeral situations of distress, by augmenting stress considerably, but transiently and willfully, make average life seem much less stressful, in comparison: one gets vaccinated against stress (all people in highly stressful occupations know this, and military training fully exploits it). Hence high stress, controlled and momentary, makes average life much more peaceful (rats shocked in the same way as a control group, but knowing exactly when the shock is coming, get much less stressed) . Hence stressful physical exercise should augment happiness, which is exactly what is observed.

The conventional explanation for the later effect is that stressful exercise generate endorphins which make people happy. This is indubitably true. But the endorphin effect is only during exercise, and it could be argued, just to compensate for pain and effort, ephemerally. The mechanism described above, admittedly a bit cynical, may be more relevant to how exercise removes stress long term.

Patrice Ayme'.

STRANDED IN WASTELAND.

It's no accident that both the USA and Australia, with Canada, emit up to more than three times the carbon dioxide per person, that France does. It's not just because these countries are huge (most of the populations are actually concentrated, and France is also pretty big, the size of Texas, and very spread out). It's not just because gasoline was kept all too long very cheap in these countries (whereas it was made voluntarily expensive in Europe, by huge taxes). It's because of a willful cultural tweak.

As they devoured entire continents (Australia, North America) the European colonists had interest to push and enjoy a culture of waste (because a wasteful culture helped in wasting the human element which was there before). Thus waste anywhere, anyhow, was favored. Thus no wonder the first rule of European urbanism was forgotten: don't sprawl!

An example. In the San Francisco Bay Area local authorities have resisted allowing the construction of high density housing, around transportation nodes (such as train stations) for no good reason whatsoever, except keeping on doing what they do best: augmenting GDP with giant traffic jams. The same authorities keep the price of operating a car with a single person on board cheaper (by at least 50%) than taking public transportation, even across the bridges they control the fares of. No matter that they have been unable, for nearly 20 years to build a replacement for the quake damaged Bay Bridge, and that cities are going bankrupt.

An economic metamorphosis is needed in the high carbon coutries, but it will not come without a philosophical one, first. Change? Yes, we should. But start with the head, not the pocketbook (that was tried before, and found wanting).

Patrice Ayme.

(The preceding observations were published on the Krugman NYT blog post of May 13, 2008, 9:17 am "Stranded in suburbia; "Stranded in suburbia" reproduced from The Oil Drum a nice picture from the Sydney Morning Herald about the percentage of income Sydney area residents will spend on fuel if the price rises substantially. The outer suburbs are, not surprisingly, hard hit. To which Krugman added, following one of our (obvious) themes (he got many comments about prior): "This is really our big problem: we’ve made long-lasting investments — in infrastructure, in housing, and to some extent in our auto fleet — based on low oil prices. Those past decisions are what make (sic) today’s high prices such a big problem.")

GAS TAX HOLIDAY FROM REASON FOUND INEFFECTUAL.

It was not just a crime that Hillary Clinton wanted to cancel the gas tax, it was a mistake: voters were not impressed, she lost impressively.

Clinton had demonstrated she was a panderer. Obama showed he was a leader. In November, he will have the pleasure of reminding Mr. McCain of this. A leader has to show the way, and especially when the way is not obvious, not just where everybody sees it too. Leaders encourage people to do well by teaching them what's right.

In Norway, which produces 3 million barrels of oil a day (and exports more than 93%), two-third of the price of gasoline is tax. Overall, European gasoline costs around eight to nine US$ a gallon, most of it, tax. The idea is to force efficiencies. The Peugeot 308, a regular family car on sale now in Europe, gets more than 63 mpg (one did 14,500 kilometers at 75 mpg!). Those efficiencies are all over, explaining why a 65 million strong country such as France make do with less than one-third of the CO2 emission of the USA per person.

PHILOSOPHICAL NUKING.

Abstract: There was a general attack against so called "French Theory" by Stanley Fish (http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/). The idea is to lump most late Twentieth Century French philosophers with the evil Nazi cow Heidegger, and declare the whole thing irrelevant, and a "farce". Verily, there is a lot that is correct about deconstruction. We use the occasion for a philosophical nuclear bombing on language, truth, thinking, etc... After all, Nietzsche was making philosophy with a "hammer", but science has progressed...
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NO DECONSTRUCTION, NO THINKING:
The practice of explicit deconstruction is a very old story. Socrates was deconstructing the argument of his interlocutors. Not only is deconstruction very old, but finding it insufferable, or abusing it is just as old. Abuse of deconstruction was central to policies of the Athenian assembly (before Plato was born). Consecutive to this deconstruction, all ethics was made relative to Athens. The argument that might is right, and that there is no truth, and no morality, won the day, but lost the war. This theory that absurdity ruled, that all was relative led directly to fascism in Athens, and its near annihilation.
Actually deconstruction is central to creative thinking, it's a precondition. It's not limited to language. After all human babies spend a lot of time pruning their neurology.
Any serious psychoanalysis involves a deconstruction (analysis from ana- "throughout" + lysis "a loosening" ). Neither can be a method (Derrida pointed this about deconstruction). But they flow from a determined hostility against established thinking. That is intrinsically extremely politically corrosive. For example, a deconstruction of American motivations to go invade where the oil is connects the obsession with superstition (aka "My higher father made me do it"), general "bad intelligence" (the official line for getting into Iraq).
All knowledge is social in origin, even the hardest core logics, mathematics or physics. No need for deconstruction a la Derrida to show this: it is obvious. For example, it took 22 centuries for the paradox of the liar to be used in the Godel incompleteness theorems. Perhaps ninety percent of Godel's reasoning came from the efforts of others, some long dead. No man could have invented all the tools Godel used. It took a civilization to build the argument.
Thinking itself is social in origin; humans brought up by wolves showed irreversible neurological deficits.
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SPEAKING IS SPECIFICALLY HUMAN, BUT IT'S NOT THINKING:
Another thing that is completely obvious is that LANGUAGE ALLOWS THE SOCIAL TRANSMISSION OF KNOWLEDGE AT THE HUMAN EFFICIENCY LEVEL. Language is the big difference we have with animals. Although most knowledge is non verbal, and internally established, by one's own neurology, corrections to it get transmitted in a finite way by this thing we know as language. LANGUAGE IS TO A GREAT EXTENT AN ERROR CORRECTING MECHANISM. Language does not incarnate truth, it corrects mistakes. It kicks mistakes around, and it shoves in the direction of the truth. Language can also symbolizes truth (E = mcc is a symbol of an enormous theory, where E, m, and c are all independently defined and made true before being finally related). But it's not the truth.
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The PHILOSOPHICAL METHOD:
It consists into grabbing rare special facts one has observed, and IMAGINING a lot from them, by using more logic and metaphors than are supported by the raw experimental facts (because there are not enough facts to start with).
In other words philosophy does not fundamentally differ from science, except that it has to walk onto thin air (somebody has to do it!). Science uses FACTS DETERMINED TO BE TRUE (through experimentation and/or observation). So science is naturally more certain, and philosophers are known to trust the truth of the scientific machines they fly around with.
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SCIENCE IS A SOCIOLOGY:
Now, of course, the arsenal of facts science uses did not grow out of thin air, but itself came from building entire preliminary theories of thin air, thanks to philosophy. So, it is true that SCIENTIFIC FACTS ARE SOCIALLY REVEALED, and one can deconstruct such revelation, and one should, because sometimes one comes up short (see inertia below). An example of this is the indispensable precedence of alchemy to chemistry (alchemy's fundamental motivation, real transmutation, was out of reach, but it was still a good hunch, and many instruments were devised during the search). An other example was the (so called) Darwin theory of evolution. It was guessed millennia before (by Greek philosophers).
Still the philosophical method, being much more guess work, by definition, can sometimes err big time: Aristotle physics was obviously wrong on inertia. Buridan and Oresme showed it was wrong during the Middle Ages, seventeen centuries later, by a more careful experimental and logical analysis (14C; this is erroneously labeled as "Newton's" first law, because many in the Anglo-Saxon crowd are still fighting the 100 years war, and want to believe only the English speaking invented every thing -a case where some serious deconstruction is obviously needed to show that some French theory can be indisputably true! Buridan and Oresme were pillars of civilization; head of the university of Paris, top adviser to the king, the other a bishop; but all some American university types with intellectual pretension can do, is to try to read the obscure Derrida to try to deride themselves!)
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THE AUDACITY OF NUGGETS:
Modern apostles of deconstruction were philosophers, and the worthy philosophical question should be: did they find/guess something worthy, somewhere, that had not been found before? Is there something to save from Derrida's elucubrations, some ray of light? One thing could be that deconstruction has to be applied with maximum severity (not a hard fact, but a hard emotion; still, a form of knowledge).

One does not want to just insult deconstruction with outrageous simplicity as the NYT obituary did: “Mr. Derrida was known as the father of deconstruction, the method of inquiry that asserted that all writing was full of confusion and contradiction, and that the author’s intent could not overcome the inherent contradictions of language itself, robbing texts - whether literature, history or philosophy - of truthfulness, absolute meaning and permanence.”

Once one has gone beyond the mentality of being persuaded that one could get the "truth" from Moses or the Bible, a finite string of signs, one discovers that any text is made of a few symbols. It could as well have been haphazardly typed by a monkey, it cannot reflect all, so, in a way, it's false, true. Truth is obtained by rejecting what is false, and that is all what the text can do, that and following procedures made of a few actions. When the tire of a plane looks tired, one replaces it: therein the truth, not a discourse of a few symbols, but a visual inspection of a two manifold.
There is physical truth (gravity, and how it's space time measured) and metaphysical truth (happiness is worth living for). Truth is about finding what was wrong before and otherwise (in the context at hand). Thus one has to deconstruct what one believed in before. How does one do that?
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LANGUAGE AS A META SUBSET OF TOUGHT:
Language is a massive simplification of what is going on in the brain (this is obvious in two ways: language areas form a limited part of the brain; and see the GTM below). To limit a theory of truth to language is therefore itself a mutilation (it is probably even more: a dedimensionalization -and you thought deconstruction was as bad it got!) Truth is the appropriate enough adequation of neurology to reality. There is truth is the flight of a moth. Deconstructing such a flight entails exposing the detailed machinery of the neural networks allowing such a flight. It has nothing to do with social constructs.
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ALL TRUTH IS LOCAL, NOT RELATIVE:
Gravity also is local, but it does not mean it does not exist absolutely: it does. In manifold theory, many concepts are local, but that does not mean they are not absolutely true in neighborhoods. Not having that picture in one's mind has led many "philosophers" to confusion.
Suppose A implies B, and B implies C and A is true; then A is true (says Aristotle). Old fashion logic implied that this would go on indefinitely, but Godel found that, in any first order logical theory rich enough to contain basic arithmetic, such a logical chain could NOT be extended to infinity. In second order logic (as used in mathematical analysis, because it allows to claim the existence of least upper bounds and the like) the failure of Aristotelian logic is even more drastic.
This means that Hilbert program of finding a few axioms out of which all mathematics would spring out was so naive as to be wrong.
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FUNDAMENTAL OBSERVATION OF THE THEORY OF MIND:
The deepest philosophical reason for the collapse of Mathematics-as-a-simple-thing comes from what one should call the (modern) General Theory of the Mind (GTM). The fundamental observation of GTM is that ATOMS OF THINKING ARE CARRIED BY NEURAL NETWORKS. This simple biological observation has huge consequences all over, including in philosophy and logics. The axioms themselves are neural networks (OK, they will slightly differ from person to person). One cannot deduct ALL neural networks from a few neural networks (anymore that one can deduct all animals from a few birds).
Old fashion logic said that the flow of logic (axon to axon), a countable process, exhausted all. But the environment of the brain is extremely high dimensional, and ultimately Quantum, and that makes it a non differentiable, continuously infinite process (thus, going down axon chains is not a deterministic, let alone countable process). If mathematics is roughly identified with (the set of) partial explicitations of brain logic, no counting on one's hands (which is what Hilbert's idea was) will do justice to it.
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THE NEUROLOGICAL NECESSITY OF DECONSTRUCTION:
As far as deconstruction is concerned, since all thoughts are carried by neural networks, any new thought will mean a new network. But there are only a finite number of networks. Hence networks will have to be somewhat deconstructed, when not outright demolished and nuked, to build new ones, more fitting to the world. It's also an emotional operation, because not only neural networks can themselves generate emotions, but they are entangled with astrocytal networks (which are purely chemical, hence emotional).
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DECONSTRUCTING WITH NUKES:
Hence the necessity for mental nukes, sometimes, to demolish not just the logics, but also eradicate the emotional system of the opposition (a "hammer" as Nietzsche had it, proved too delicate, as the rise of mentally challenged Nazis such as Heidegger proved it!) This is important, to devastate the emotional system of (say) Nazis, because psychological evidence is that the emotions tend to come first (we have now physiological indication regarding this: more active astrocytes tend to grow dendrites in their direction).
All this happens after a correct impulse from the outside world of "phenomenology", or language, and has to be done internally (in a generalization of discourse, since discourse is a particular case of neurology).

Sorry about all the deconstruction! But the aim of the preceding was to show that the work of the intellectual, fundamentally, and unavoidably, is to deconstruct previously conceived notions, somewhere, somehow. Just because a few writers (Heidegger, Derrida) may have erroneously used the notion (clear with the mental retard Heidegger, not so with Derrida), does not mean the concept of deconstruction should be guilty by association (as those who condemn all and any "French Theory" do). To do so would be to give up thinking (or embrace thinking a la Hitler, murky and Destruktion obsessed, so dear to Heidegger).
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Patrice Ayme
http://www.patriceayme.com/index.htmlhttp://patriceayme.wordpress.com/

TIBET VERSUS IRAQ.

LACK OF CIVILIZATION VERSUS LACK OF INTELLIGENCE, TIBET VERSUS IRAQ.
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“Does the U.S. matter anymore?'’ said Mike Wittner, head of oil research at Societe Generale SA in London. “Has the U.S. mattered for the last few years? It is debatable. As far as the oil market is concerned, demand growth is going to be continued to be driven by China and the Middle East.'’ (http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/04/21/irrelevant-america/)

The USA is not just getting irrelevant for oil, it is getting economically irrelevant, it is even getting mentally irrelevant, and this will, in turn, feedback further on the US economy.

If China had been fighting a huge civil war in Tibet for the last five years, with no end in sight, the world uproar would be colossal, and China would be universally despised, with heavy diplomatic, financial, currency and economic consequences. Moreover new investment in building useful things for China would have collapsed, just as investing in useful things for Germany collapsed when Hitler invaded other countries.

By its own admission, the best excuse the USA has found to justify its Iraq invasion, is LACK OF INTELLIGENCE. No, really! This is a revealing Freudian slip. I am world leader, with a superpowerful lack of intelligence! Indeed, looking forward, it is impossible to imagine a scenario where the USA comes out ahead from the Iraq adventure. At best the EU and the UN will come, and help the US with not too disgraceful an exit. The US will be left to take care of its mutilated veterans, and the economic consequences of world condemnation, and lack of intelligence.

At this point the USA is mentally irrelevant to the rest of the planet (as the Papua New Guinea delegate pointed out at the last world climate conference). The US has abdicated all and any mental leadership. Its irrelevance is global and will show economically looking forward.

Patrice Ayme