Archive for August, 2012

Record Arctic Melt Down

August 28, 2012


Sea Ice is now the lowest in maybe fifteen thousand years (and possibly 100,000 years). Just the beginning of the nuclearized Jurassic.

Ice August 26 2012 Versus Minimum 1980-2010

Notice that Greenland is sticking out like a sore, frozen thumb. Ready to melt, obviously. When the remaining huge white, reflecting expanses will be replaced by dark, light absorbing surfaces (that’s why they will be dark), the heating of the Arctic will accelerate, and become irreversible.

(I am using the adjective “heating” on purpose; it’s exactly how the average rise of maybe twenty degrees Celsius which is coming for the poles, should be qualified.)

With two to three more weeks left in the melt season, Arctic sea ice is certain to fall well below 4 million square kilometers. The previous minimum was the September 18, 2007 extent of 4.17 million square kilometers. The six lowest ice extents in the satellite record have occurred in the last six years (from 2007 to 2012).

And it’s not just the Arctic. In Antarctica, the temperature of the  giant peninsula down there has augmented by at least three degrees Celsius, and plants have started to grow around scientific stations (feeling culprit, the naïve scientists are trying to remove the grasses by hand). In Greenland, forests have been planted, and harvested, for the first time ever.  

Arctic Sea Ice in 2012 is less than half of the minimum extent of 1980. Everything indicates that, within a few years, ice will be at the lowest extent in three million years.

Another drastic fact: in mid July 2012 all of Greenland’s surface was melting, including at Summit Station (up at 3,216 meters altitude, 10,551 feet). Records from ice cores shows that this happens in the average ONCE every 150 years. Should it happen again next year, many of Greenland’s glaciers would become unhinged.  

Why? Because the water flows down “moulins“, all the way down the ice cap, 3,000 meters down, two miles down (to speak in units the Romans used to have before the planet went metric, except for a few savages in the woods). There the water flows below the ice, in channels (in Antarctica, there are hundreds of lakes, 4,000 meters down, some huge, up to 160 kilometers long, and below the icecap water flows from one lake to the next… rather ominously).

Should there be way too much water, it will have to break out of the channels, and force itself more below the icecap, and lubricate it from below.

Entire glaciers have suddenly slipped in Greenland, as if they were rumbling snakes come alive, generating up to Richter 6 quakes. Ice quakes.

Now what’s next? Well, as there is less sea ice than ever, solar radiation will penetrate the sea, even during Fall 2012, and warm it deep down inside. Even ultra violet light can penetrate sea for dozens of meters. So all this solar radiation, usually bouncing on the sea ice back to space, will dissipate itself deep down in the ocean, warming it up. In depth. The huge caloric capacity of the ocean will guarantee a milder winter, and even thinner ice, comes next Winter, and thus an even faster melt, starting next March.

All the more since solar activity is on the upswing (part of the sun’s eleven years solar cycle, which reached its nadir last year). So we can be sure that, come next July, all of Greenland’s surface will be melting again, including at Summit Station. And the glaciers will come unhinged.

What to do? Beyond getting properly informed about the unfolding disaster?



First one has to understand that the exponentially rising greenhouse gas curve is completely amoral. In the deepest sense of what “moral” means. See “Immoral CO2 Curve“. (See note.)  

To curtail the CO2 rise is very simple: just put up a hefty carbon tax. If fossil fuel energy is expensive inside the free market, the free market will adapt, and replace it by sustainable energy. Right now fossil fuels and their users are heavily subsidized. Strike those subsidies.

Sweden introduced a carbon tax in 1990. Not only it did not adversely affect economic growth, but now bio mass is massively used in Sweden, thanks to the tax. Most European countries have inchoating, or partial carbon taxes (even Britain). Even in the USA, the San Francisco Bay Area air quality management passed a (local) carbon tax in 2008. A question of intellect reaching a critical mass around UC Berkeley, UCSF, Stanford, the Silicon Valley.

The USA has done its best to block any worldwide carbon tax. The idea of such a carbon tax would be to tax any product according to how much CO2 was created to produce, transport and distribute it. Such a tax would lower the mercury in fish and the Arctic (which is condensed mercury vapor in colder regions from coal burning, mostly in China).

A worldwide carbon tax would not just lower the CO2 and give a chance to sustainable energies, but also a carbon tax would lower unemployment considerably in developed countries (good are transported using what is, by far, the dirtiest oil, bunk oil, being the cheapest and only giant ship engines can devour it).

So why is a carbon tax not implemented? Mostly through opposition of the USA. Because those who truly rule the USA make USA politicians understand they should not disrupt the entangled miracles that feed them so well.



One has next to understand that it is mostly the Anglo-Saxon colonies, which have created a mood of CO2 criminality. Here is the CO2 pollution of the USA: 18 tons per person per year. Here is Australia: 20 tons. And Canada: 16 tons. Canada celebrated its choice of the Dark Side by quitting the Kyoto protocol, the only country to have done such a thing. Why? Because not only Canada is not reducing its CO2 emissions, it’s planning to augment them as much as it can. Federal Canada is hell bent to exploit its tar sands. That means burning twice its tar sands, to extract all the money it can from hell itself (tar is so viscous one needs to heat those sands really hard; oil companies are hush about how exactly they heat up and extract the oil from the sands).

Provinces such as Quebec and British Columbia, with splendid unspoiled nature, and no fossil fuels, have implemented local carbon taxes.

By contrast to the federal behavior of the USA, Canada and Australia: Britain pollutes with 9 tons of CO2 per year, per person. Hint: there are hefty fuel taxes in Europe, including in Britain. The Europeans have been trying much harder, for much longer. Big industrial Germany is at 9.3 tons, Italy at 7 tons, France at 6.3. Switzerland, about twice richer than the USA per head, is at 6 tons of CO2. Japan, another industrial heavy weight is at 8.6 tons of CO2 per year.

So why does the USA block a carbon tax? One has to understand the USA is an imperial plutocracy made of entangled components: the banks, their banksters, and shady financial plotters, the Military Industrial Complex (MIC), the fossil fuel lobby, the plutocratic universities. The various components have a vested interest in the CO2 exponential, and even the CO2 catastrophe, and they reign in Washington.

For example some have evaluated the price of gasoline at 14 dollars a gallon, when hidden subsidies are incorporated, such as the cost of the various military programs that allow to control the Middle East (and, indirectly Venezuela, etc.) Of course the MIC has interest that this spending keeps on going. And even countries such as Israel, a sort of land locked USA carrier, receiving, with its Egyptian buddy, billions from the USA, are all entangled in the USA MIC and fuel lobby.

The plutocrats have lined up all the colonist Anglo-Saxon sheep, and taught them to bleat non sense. One can read deep consideration on why it is human nature that the Anglo-Saxons ought to use so much more oil than anybody else. Soon the bleating ones will be singing that the ice is not melting, it’s just going to heavens. Fossil fuel lobbyists even sing in unison that the more CO2, the better, CO2 is life sustaining. They congratulate each other for such strokes of genius, bleating even louder.



A fascinating experience in the USA is to visit a truck parking area where dozens of giant gas guzzling trucks can be parked, all running their engines. For hours, with no one inside (the truckers are partying somewhere else). A curious religion of waste erected as a basic expression of pride and freedom. What I deduce from that sort of scene, when I have recovered from the breathing difficulties that cause my brain to nearly shut down, is that the price of oil is ridiculously too low in the USA.   

In a country such as Switzerland, running a vehicle on idle is against the law. In countries with highly taxed fuel, it’s not an economic proposition. European car makers have even invented “stop-start” engines, which cut off, as soon as the car does not require traction. That saves up to 10% fuel (engines have to be redesigned so that secondary systems such as cooling can run on electric engines, as they traditionally run directly on the combustion engine). One may wonder why it is that the USA poisons the atmosphere twice more, per person, than Britain. Why is Britain so much more reasonable?

The fate of the gasoline tax is indicative of how regressive the USA has become. In constant dollars, that tax used to be much higher in the past, although then, people were driving gas-guzzlers. What seems to have changed is that people used to believe much more in sacrificing much more for the common good. Too long frequenting R. Reagan and G.W. Bush?

And the gasoline tax used to be high, just to pay for roads. Now we have a good reason to bring up the tax: Arctic sea ice is now at its lowest ever. And yet CO2 production in the USA peaked in 2005 (just before the Greater Depression took hold).



Britain has learned to fear hubris.

It has to do with Britain suffering terribly in WWI and WWII. The British elite knows that hubris is the source of most flaws that affect civilization, because that is what the Greeks believed. Hitler’s hubris that he could free himself from his American masters’ oil, and invade all places with fossil fuels such as Poland, Romania, the USSR, Iraq, was what set him on a collision course with France, igniting World War Two…

Britain knows hubris well, and knows it can work for quite a while. Britain’s murderous expansion in Ireland and then in North America was driven by the “West Country Men” the plutocrats who ruled England in the Elizabethan age. That spirit of relentless exploitation was leveraged further when tobacco growing in America made them rich and the Dutch took control of England, leveraging the bank of England and the Royal Navy to the hilt, in the hope of subduing their creator (at the time autocratic) France… And that in turn also worked.

All fair and good… Until the “West Country Men” exploitative logic backfired, when Twentieth Century USA plutocrats learned to use it against Europe. England, that, ever since Guillaume Le Conquerant had created it, had been obsessed to prevent the rise of a super power in Europe, found itself the pawn of the one, on the other side of the pond. The one that Britain and France had given birth to.

The British started to feel progressively, same as a lot in Europe, as the new Indians. A change of paradigm was in order, and the French ultraconservative approach, to husband one’s resources, won over. Same in Germany (this also explains why the German birth rate has collapsed). And all over Europe.

Where does the ultraconservative French approach comes from? From the fact that, from government policy through the Middle Ages, by 1600 CE, French peasants were small owners of what they cultivated (the opposite of the situation in England, ruled by enormous land owners). The French peasant-owners were no non sense, they were very close to their sous ( a word denoting money that evolved from the Roman “solidus”). The first thing they did was to curb their birthrate, to protect their resources (as they owned them). When Louis XVI, in an astounding access of hubris, idealism and naivety, spent money, trillions, that he did not have, to make a revolution in America, he lost the support of French peasants..

So doing nothing about CO2 is, first of all, an Anglo-Saxon “West Country Men” led phenomenon. It’s a mental world of ravenous exploitation united by hunting Mr. Assange, Mr. Manning and denying that the ice is melting, while having an open season on Iraqis, Afghans, and singing the praises of global, delirious finance.

Unfortunately the USA-Canada-Australia block has 370 million gas guzzling souls, and their collaborator is called China. All together this axis of fossils produces about two-thirds of the world CO2.



For the Greeks, Gaia, Earth, was the mother of all gods (including Zeus-Deus). Great powers have always conspired to further their rule. As the power of human technology has exploded, those conspiracies have reached new heights (the arch example being Auschwitz). Now they involve conspiring against the entire biosphere.

Some will say I am going too far by supposing that letting the CO2 catastrophe run its course is part of a conspiracy. But the facts support this. For years great billionaires of the USA, such as the (fossil fuel) Koch brothers have paid professors in what are supposedly the world’s best universities to come up with obviously false science (like CO2 does not cause warming, and there is no warming, etc.)

Here is an anecdote showing that the plutocrats who leads the USA really view hell as a friend. For years USA taxpayers have given, through their government, hundreds of millions of dollars to the Pakistani theocrats to make nuclear bombs. Very strange but true (and reminiscent of the USA support for Hitler!). An excellent proof, though, that the Washington leaders (whoever they truly are) see great opportunities in future crises, such as a nuclear war in Asia. Let alone some terrorists getting their hands on a nuke (of which Pakistan has more than 100). So that they see great opportunity in the mess the CO2 catastrophe will entail, is a small logical step to make.

In this general mood, a melting Arctic crisis spells an even greater opportunity. And it’s coming, much faster than people expect. When there is no more Arctic sea ice in summer, it’s just a matter of a very short time before there will be no more in winter. Because the ocean will warm up irreversibly (while cold sweet light water on top will shut down the Gulf Stream beyond Iceland).

In the Jurassic not only were there polar dinosaurs in Alaska, but crocodiles in Greenland.  Some will scoff, and say it’s an opportunity: Washington will be among the places to drown. Actually fossil fuel and mining companies are scrambling to exploit the parts of the Arctic freed of ice. However the whole planet’s climate will lurch into the Jurassic. In a few decades.

Most of the Earth’s greenhouse is from water vapor (about two third). As the oceans get warmer, steam content is going up. Some scientists say it’s already 5% up. Steam increasing fast is one of the NON linear effects that is going to make planetary heating exponentiate.

The planet, as it is, function as a giant Carnot engine. The moving parts of the engine are the sea currents and the wind. The expansion and contraction come from heating and cooling sea and air. All this will come to a halt as the cold sinks the poles, disappear. Thus a lot of sustainable energy will disappear.

Excepting man, any exponential phenomenon is an immoral phenomenon.


Patrice Ayme


Note: Why is the rising greenhouse gas curve exponentiating? Because the CO2 equivalent gases brings up the temperature, which then brings up the water vapor, at a rate proportional to the temp rise! (Thanks to Paul Handover for chastising me for a careless version of this statement)


Currency Crisis In A Nutshell

August 24, 2012






































They much prefer the jungle, and its law. 


Patrice Ayme


August 21, 2012


And Mind Melding Is What Makes Us Possible.

The question has long been asked: what is love, where does it come from? But the real question is: what is man, where does it come from? And the answer is love.

I do not allude here to the silly confusion between love and sex called, rather pathetically, “making love”. At best, it has to do with the amplification oxytocin provides with, and it’s a sideshow; fishes do it.

Love in full is parental love, mammalian style.  

That does involve oxytocin (and vasopressin), sure. But love, in advanced species, goes well beyond chemistry, or biology. It involves intelligence, logic itself. The chemical intervenes just to amplify, and stabilize, the logical. And it is pretty obvious why.

Homo Sapiens Sapiens is the official name of the species. Sapiens Sapiens: Wise Wise. Where does all that wisdom comes from? Love. Facts are mostly learned. Logic is learned, like anything else. Wisdom is learned, even more than anything else.

And how was most of this learning achieved? From others, and for others. What motivated the teachers, the parents? Love. What mostly motivated those who learned? Love.

What one learns depends upon one’s environment. Famous experiences from  the 1970s have shown that kittens brought up in an unnatural visual environment do not see properly. Their visual neurons are abnormal. Kittens reared in a world of vertical lines do not have any neuron responding to anything within 30 degrees of the horizontal. (They need 5 months in a normal environment to start to see what is horizontal!)

In other words, neurobiology is made from what’s out there (the idea is at least as old as Ramon y Cajal, the Spanish discoverer of neurons, a century ago).

This generalizes to many mental behaviors, and much mental infrastructure. True, one can learn logic, octopus style, by making little experiments at the bottom of the sea. But that carries only that far.

Interacting with the material world does not teach high level Machiavellianism, the gist of social intelligence. And indeed, although cephalopods are intelligent, they have not developed high social intelligence as, say, whales or primates. (Although cephalopods are very social, their lives are very short, they just don’t have the time to be taught by fellow cephalopods; an aspect of the connection between longevity and wisdom; so their brain/body mass ratio is between cold and warm blooded animals; it’s also probably why their brains did not grow much in the last 400 million years, whereas warm blooded social animals are launched in a brain size race).

To see with one’s heart, to have a heart that can see, one needs to be exposed to all the emotional lines imaginable. Otherwise, just as neurons reading horizontal lines do not appear in a world of vertical lines, so will it be with emotions, or other stimuli. Presenting a growing mind with a mutilated world fabricates a mutilated neurobiology.

The mutilated world can be physically mutilated, as with the cats with an amputated visual environment. But if the mental environment is emotionally, logically or experientally mutilated, it’s the same, and it’s worse in humans. For example the chidren of abused people tend to become themselves abusers.

One thing man did when selecting dogs was to evolve animals who are eager to find out the cues that human eyes indicate. In other words, animals eager to meld minds. This is reinforced by an expectation of love, which is necessary as most wild animals interpret direct eye contact as proximal to attack.

High social intelligence is taught by love, for love, through love. High social intelligence makes very complex, caring societies possible. But not just that. It makes technology and science possible.

How? High social intelligence involves Machiavellian Intelligence. Machiavellian Intelligence is, basically, and in its most general sense, the ability to compute with love (real, fake, suspected, or suspicious).

Machiavellian intelligence rests upon, and demonstrates, all day long, that infinitesimal causes, properly piled up, can have enormous effects. This is the hint, the motivation, the inspiration, that entices to create logic, science and technology, thus the human universe, possible. Man without logic, science and technology is nothing. Man simply cannot even survive in nature without technology, ever since stone weapons have been wielded.

I claim that Homo’s social subtlety was the paradigm for science.

Indeed, that infinitesimal causes, properly piled up, can have enormous effects, is the gist of infinitesimal and integral calculus, and the principle on which experimental and theoretical sciences rest: from the apparently neglectable, experimentally or logically, the essence springs forth. (An example is that if one contradiction arises in a logical system, the whole thing is invalidated.)

What we call love is the sensation we experience when our mind is working properly, that is, socially enough to learn most of what it knows from society (as it is congenitally programmed to do).

Love is about mind melding. Love is what makes mind melding possible. Culture is one aspect of mind melding. So is one’s entire emotional system.

To say that love brings the oxytocin up, explains how attachment is amplified, but it does not explain why attachment happens.

Attachment happens, and it is so strong, because minds are mostly programmed by the environment provided to them. OK, in the case of cephalopods the sea itself can provide much. In the case of social insects, a few simple behaviors are easily produced.

But advanced brainy animals have much more sophisticated behaviors. And only that very sophisticated environment called love can provide it.

Our brains have reward centers all over. My guess is that they are set-up so that enriching input from another mind is most appreciated, once basic physiological needs are satisfied.

Without love we would be nothing much. We would not even know how to see or think in a human way. And certainly we would not know how to feel correctly. Most of these behaviors are learned… from the loving environment provided by caregivers. And they are socially learned, and they can only be socially learned because our care givers were motivated to do their job well, by that particular organization of neurobiology found in advanced brains that we call love.

Thus there is symmetry breaking between the Good Lord and the Dark Side. The Good Lord, Love, makes us possible. Love is our ground state (to use the Quantum analogy). The Dark Side is just something that is sometimes necessary.

Hence a polity should not rest too much on the Dark Side: it’s not our creator. This is the fundamental reason that makes plutocratic or cannibalistic societies so little creative that they always meet an ominous fate, in short order. And also why they contributed so little to civilization.

This philosophical observation has a strong bearing on politics. It means that society has to be built on love first, not profit, or an ill defined “market”. It means that the economic set-ups based on exploitation strategies (that brought us Anglo-Saxon empires and Russia) are suspect.

This is something the Roman Republic, tough as nail, had understood perfectly well. It was built mostly defensively, around the idea that the simplest version of love inside the Republic was the ground state. They called it the law. And thus endures the Roman Republic to this day, at least in the spirit of our laws.

It also means that any other sentient species, long ago, in a galaxy far away, would also have been built first, out of love… At least for itself. Culture is impossible without a cultivator. And why to cultivate minds, if not out of love?

We love, we have been loved, therefore we think.


Patrice Ayme

Drugged-Out Mutant Olympics?

August 14, 2012



































What to do?





How did the Tour authorities do it?  















Patrice Ayme

French Rafale Versus USA Corruption

August 12, 2012






[All the targeting data was removed.]













Now for a somewhat peaceful sight:



















Ah, and what of the Rafale already?








Patrice Ayme

Alsatian Lessons

August 9, 2012




Koenigsbourg: Military-Industrial beauty for all to see.


And Charlemagne was more than that.

























































Patrice Ayme

Curiosity, Lightning, Rafale

August 6, 2012


Military-Industrial Corruption A treacherous Friend Of Plutocracy?



















Here is a “truck“:

A Rafale can carry more than its weight

A Rafale going to war with plenty of goodies

















A few facts:


























Patrice Ayme

Happy Banking Barack!

August 4, 2012



Abstract: Obama’s birthday today. What a precocious child, from nothing to president. OK, Senator a few years. “Senator”: the word is from “senior”. The Roman Senate was made of seniors, advising.

Obama: so young, inexperienced, and yet father of the nation, with his young fellow multimillionaires friends from Chicago to talk to! Jamie Dimon, a young plutocrat, third generation, lived there in a 17 rooms mansion. Is not the world wonderful? Obama: even Nobel before noble! What magic! President of the mightiest nation without genuinely friendly family elders for common sense advice?

At least Vladimir Putin got the elders at the KGB for advice, who he knew and trusted since he was a student! With Obama, the elders were there for advice, sure: they were the very greedy plutocrats who caused the crisis.

What did Obama accomplish? Why so admiring of banks and financiers? Is it why he did so little in reforming finance? Because it was the greatest heist that ever was, and is still on-going, in full view, and still nobody sees it? The emperor has no clothes, but dances the twist? Truly a wonder! Fooling all the people, all of the time?

In Great Britain even the right wing conservative government of David Cameron has had enough with the banks. The Tory-Liberal government and The Economist are now saying about banks what I have long repeated. The bank outrage is central to the crisis not just in Great Britain and the USA, but in the entire West.

Just two days ago a crazed financial program went on line and caused at least half a billion dollar loss to its firm, while battering the credibility of the USA’s financial markets. Operators could not even stop it for half an hour. That sort of scandal could easily be avoided with a Financial Transaction Tax. A Financial transaction Tax would automatically impose a speed limit on financial trading to re-establish causality, as I have long advocated. (Also it’s only justice; all other transactions are subject to taxation!)

Why did only France pass a Financial Transaction Tax?



This is Barack Obama’s birthday. For those outside of the USA, it is hard to fathom the cult the Obama campaign is trying to build around it. Truly pathetic. Those guys are desperate, begging for money. And people ask: what did you give us for our money, Barack? Odes to banks and the world’s richest men? The citizens of the USA are treated as if they were three years old.

As I am slightly more mature than that, I decided to go to the bottom of that childish behavior. I met recently with people who knew Obama pretty well when he was a child, when they, themselves, were already responsible adults with children of their own. I asked them whether they found normal that the kid they knew and befriended is not only now president, but never bothered to ask for their parental advice. It’s not like Obama had living parents. He has not been so endowed, for years.

Those elders thought it had been a mistake for Obama never to talk with them. They were actually shocked by it. Who else could Obama have turned to for friendly trust, guidance and experience?

People such as the plutocrat Eskrine Bowles, advised (or ordered?) Obama to “leave your friends behind, they only cause problems“? Welcome to plutocracy, Obambi!

We, the elders and me, concluded that the inappropriate public dreaming of Obama for figures such as Warren Buffet was an ersatz search for fatherly advice. Instead of finding the latter, with those he could trust, since childhood, Obama went to search for advice in all the wrong places. It will, no doubt turn out well for him financially. If you obey Morgan Stanley as USA president, Morgan Stanley should not forget you, as USA citizen. But the question remains: is that all the wisdom the world can pretend to?



Tyranosopher: So this is your birthday, Mr. President, and what have you done? [Words on the song of John Lennon, So This Is Christmas]. Answer: When I could, not much. When I could not, well, I begged for much money, for me, The One. Although I did support the war of France against Qaddafi, like you guys wanted.

Tyranosopher: This you did, and that was good. And you also saved the auto industry, and that was excellent. But you saved the auto industry, because it begged for mercy, first, and when only public money could provide it. The banks have not begged for mercy. Ever. Quite the opposite, they, and their agents (Honorable Krugman among them), have been dictating the agenda, up to, and since, 2008. The banks were not allowed to fail, first. So they could not be nationalize for nothing.

The only bank that was not helped, Lehman Brothers, was not helped because the secretary of the treasury, Paulson, ex-football player, not really an intellectual, ex-head of Goldman Sachs, and owner of a large island, hated it with a passion.

Obama: I accomplished my signature achievement, ACA, the Affordable Care Act.

Tyranosopher: You could have expanded Medicare in one minute, and get Congress to pass the whole thing the next day, when you had a super majority in the Senate (60 votes, as Ted Kennedy was still well enough to vote, then). It would have long been effective. That’s change. Change that may happen someday, if you are still around on top, that’s not change.

Instead you bent over backwards to please the plutocrats, so it is taking years to produce that silly, hyper complicated thing, and we ended down in the muck with an ACA, aka Obamacare, aka Romneycare, which pleases nobody. If you lose the election, we can only admire how hard you worked for it. Or how hubristic you were to think you could fool everybody, and get away with it.

Obama: “What’s done is done. We gave a serious thought at what you call Medicare For All, too late. Now ACA is the law.”

Tyranosopher: ACA is the law, as long as you are not beaten in three months. And that hinges on enough of an economic recovery, which is hobbled by the financial plutocracy, which believes it owns all the money in the world, and ought to keep it to itself.

That economic non-disintegration, in turn, depends a lot upon Europe not collapsing in another bout of deep recession in its on-going Greater Depression. Please don’t forget that the present head of the European Central banks was a partner at Goldman Sachs for six years, and even a vice-chairman there. Why would he want to help you? When he can help the real thing, Romney?



Ever since the 2008 banking Crisis, the Anglo-Saxon governments, the U.S. Federal Reserve, and their obsequious followers (the ECB Draghi) have known mostly one policy: throwing money, ever more money, at the banks (It’s called under various names, to confuse the herd of bleating sheep).

The self celebrating conscientious liberal Paul Krugman would put it, trying to hide his apparent plutophilia behind semantics, throwing ever more, “monetary base” at the banks.

Obama of course, has been a central part of this celebration of the banks. Obama does even more: he celebrates hyper rich financiers and over-crooks, and sing their praises all over the main stream media. He wrote an ode in Newsweek to the famous Warren Buffet, a rare plutocrat owning the main rating agencies, Goldman Sachs, and going long or short, accordingly, when he is not plotting with the Chinese the demise of Western work, industry, and the global atmosphere.

Indeed China, were Buffet invests so much, is “severely under-reporting its carbon emissions“…China may be under-reporting its annual carbon emissions by as much as 1.4 billion tonnes a year—roughly the amount that Japan, the world’s fourth-largest emitter of carbon dioxide (CO2), pumps out each year” (The Economist quoting Nature Climate Change.)

Obama went on TV to sing the praises of Jamie Dimon. Hey, suppose Obama has no job next year, would not it be nice to be invited at Citigroup, or Goldman Sachs, and be n $200,000 for a few minutes’ speech as Larry Summers had been? A man needs to feed his fancy, and cannot live normal, after living so big, that would be cruel and unusual punishment…

OK, back to the banks. I will quote extensively from the most current issue of The Economist (I am a subscriber), and if the Economist disagrees, it can always have its directors in Luxembourg, behind that cheap door, explain to me that I cheated taxpayers. I will address their grievance.

The reason for quoting extensively from The Economist is that this way I cannot be accused to be far out to the left of Marx, all alone. I have company among the fact based community.



The Economist says, in “Money For Nothing“,  that: “Although it should still, in theory, be profitable for banks to lend to small and medium-sized companies, they seem unwilling to do so. The latest figures from the European Central Bank show that bank loans to the private sector were down… Nor is it economic, given the issuing costs, for small companies to borrow money in the bond market.”

So why don’t the democratic governments create PUBLIC banks to finance small and medium companies? (The French Socialist government has said it would create such a bank, but it has been busy changing the fiscal system, with the Financial Transaction Tax, effective since august 1, 2012. Now, of course it went to the sacred August vacation, last savagely interrupted in August, 1914!)

Amusingly, some in the right wing British government are starting to feel so inclined…



The Financial Times, on August 2nd 2012, announced that “cabinet ministers” have been discussing the nationalization of the Royal Bank of Scotland (The British People already owns 82% of the Royal Bank of Scotland after bailing it out in 2008!) OK, the Financial Times has also its directors behind that same door in Luxembourg: the theme today is collaboration with the enemy, to fight greater evil.

As The Economist put it (before  removing the post later!):

“Fed up with the lack of lending, “senior government figures” are discussing whether to spend £5 billion buying up the 18% of RBS the state doesn’t own.

… the long-toothed Liberal business secretary Vince Cable… is looking for a more radical solution. In a leaked letter to the Prime Minister David Cameron in March, Mr Cable suggests breaking up RBS to create a “British Business Bank with a clean balance sheet and a mandate to expand lending rapidly to sound business“.

The rationale behind it is to lend to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs). Current government policy on this lies in tatters. In February 2011, those at the top came up with a whizzy idea called Project Merlin. The idea was that British banks would sign a contract agreeing to lend more to businesses and—like magic—there would be growth. The Excalibur of bonus cuts was hinted at.

This didn’t work. Growth flatlined. Lending dried up. Excalibur stayed in its stone…

To Mr Cable, “the banking crisis casts a long shadow”. Some economists place Britain’s flagging productivity and lost output down to the seizing up of credit. To desperate ministers who think the market has failed, letting the state step in seems increasingly a good idea.

…the coalition’s current plan—is to nurse RBS back to health and sell it off for a profit. But the bank is expected to announce losses of about £1.5 billion for the first half of the year…. This gives ministers a political reason to nationalise it.

There would also be trouble from the EU. Letting the state direct credit for a bank with a £1 trillion balance sheet might breach EU state-aid rules. This is not to mention the political difficulty of spending £5 billion (where will the money come from?) on something less likely to make a profit. But in an economy now smaller than when the coalition came into power, these things seem to matter less and less.”



The same applies everywhere.

Of course, in the USA, the lovers of financiers come around, and like Obama, proclaimed that the USA put its banking house in order, while Europe did not. But Europe did lent trillions, at zero interest (basically) to banks. And what did the banks do? Keep the money to themselves, not recycle it in the economy. That is what is giving many European leaders pause.

In the USA, it has been just the same: the banks kept the money for their own operations and that of their friends. The difference with Europe is that much more money was given (sorry, “lent” at zero interest or so) to them. So indeed, American bankers are more arrogant, as those who are given more often are. 

They know they are the ones who, using leverage, create the money. They abused that privilege, for themselves, so regulators are cracking down, thus cracking down on money creation. The only way out is to create public banks.

Big corporations have no problem getting money, as… they are trusted more than most government: investors know they rule the world (and often do not pay tax, because, thanks to decolonization, they have 100 banana republic to call home, like pirates of old, in the seventeenth century).

Is the state of world finance something to celebrate? Probably not. And now the USA is facing the real possibility that a plutocrat red in fang and claw becomes president. After 4 years of Obama bending over backwards to please plutocrats, voters of the USA may be thinking: if the president thinks plutocrats are so good for us, why not being led by the real thing?

So happy birthday, Mr. President. After all, even Adolf Hitler celebrated his birthday in April 20, 1945, as Soviet shells were exploding all over Berlin. Some people are so much into themselves, they never get out.


Patrice Ayme

Create A New Branch Of Government: TRUTH.

August 1, 2012

Government traditionally consists of three branches: the executive, the legislative and justice. I propose to create a new branch, purely advisory, truth.

At the highest level, the three branches of government, with their corresponding functions had been conflated early in the Roman Republic (in the times of “Tribunes with Consular Powers“).

Yet, as the State became enormous and subtle, those functions became increasingly distinct. The notion of “State of Law” evolved into ever more prominence. Galla Placidia, reigning Roman empress and “Augusta”  proclaimed the “State of Law” very clearly in the Fifth Century.

She explained that the supremacy of the law required that it be applied to all, including, herself, the head of state. Equally.

During the European Middle Ages, Roman secular law, refurbished by Augustus Justinian around 540 CE, was a buttress against falling into what the areas conquered by Islam fell into (the arbitrariness of The One, anointed by “god” as a “messenger“).

For example, seven centuries after Justinian’s 40 year reign, the king of France “Saint” Louis admitted that he wanted to stab those who did not believe Christ in the belly, so that they would suffer more, but he could not do it, because it was against the (Roman secular) law!

Said Roman secular law became the foundation of all modern law, and United Nation law. Early on the Franks were equipped with their own tribal law, the Salic law (itself written originally in Latin), but they used it as an epiphenomenon on the main body of Roman law.

As the Franks were Roman authority in Gallia, Francia, and Germania, they adopted readily Justinian’s modifications. Their (re)conquest of most of Western Europe (507 CE-1066 CE), and their Renovatio Imperium Romanum (800 CE), insured that Roman law was European law for more than 2,000 years (most of the time, but for the occasional crusade, religious war, Spanish Inquisition, or bout of fascism a la Louis XIV, Napoleon, or Hitler).

Parliaments in the Middle Ages played the role of the Roman Senate. And they worked from the Roman legal system. France had 16 regions and 16 parliaments. They had to sign on any legislative, or constitutional change.

The parliament in London was endowed with extraordinary powers (much of them attributed when Montford tried to use it to become king). After the Republic nearly came back from action of the Paris parliament, little desirous to see in France what the London parliament had done (vote for cutting off the king’s head), the fascist youth, Louis XIV, shut them down (they were re-established by the revolutionary Louis XVI, and then they, in turn, shut down his attempts at making the plutocrats pay enough taxes).

I propose four branches of government: executive, legislative, justice… and TRUTH.

We need Truth Courts. One in the USA, one in Europe (although major European countries could have their own). Even the UN could have its own. A Truth Court could provide with unbiased opinions about various subjects such as Arctic Drilling, GMOs, Nuclear Technologies, circumcision and excision, stoning lesbians, drug legalization, and meta subjects, such as Much of FOX Is POX, etc.

We need Truth Courts to handle delicate subjects, and not just what were the forces behind Hitler, but also what are the forces behind the military-industrial complex, and the gifts it brings.

One of these gifts is the F35 “low observable” fighter-bomber that USA based military plutocrats persuaded many representatives of taxpayers in many countries to subsidy.

So far the program has cost 400 billion dollars, and not one single plane has entered service fully (although the plane has been “produced” since 2006). The cost is staggering: the Norwegian defense ministry admitted it could be as much as 762 million dollars per plane (the Pentagon had admitted only half that… so far, but recognized maintenance would be very expensive, easily doubling the price).

In truth, this is corruption at the highest order. As I will show in an accompanying essay, if the aim is really defense, an alternative offers itself, cheaper, safe and effective.

The Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa, Nelson Mandela’s great idea, has allowed South Africa to not go the way, of, say Algeria, or India. Both of these countries were torn apart, and have known war, civil or not, religious or not, more or less, ever since.

If Gandhi had been as smart as Mandela, not only would India, the Raj, not have split into three pieces, with millions dead, dozens of millions exiled, and a criminal and expensive arms race since, plus now the Damocles sword of nuclear war, but, moreover, other countries would have heeded the example (and Algeria would not have known 60 years of more or less hot uncivil war, plus millions exiled, and less economic opportunities for much of Europe, and all of North Africa!)



This house holds that: To insure civilizational veracity, let alone survival, we need a Truth Court.

“TRUTH” would be a new independent, secular institution. It would only provide with Truth Opinion. (Quite a bit like the Roman Senate provided only with Senatus Consulte, counsel, or advice, from the seniors… At least for a while, in the beginning, before the Public Assembly passed the bad law of letting the Senate decided in its stead.)

Alexi Helligar: Kind of like an official www.factcheck.org

PA: Yes. However, the mandate of factcheck.org, is, so far very limited as it checks mostly on USA politicians and their PACs. It is also privately financed. I am thinking of something huge, financed publicly, and to act as the fourth pillar not just of government, but of civilization. To find out all the facts, and likely consequences, related to human impact on the atmosphere, oceanosphere, geology and the biosphere, would be a primary target.

Andy Outis Would the jurisdiction of this court only apply to the fact-based community, or would Fox News audiences have immunity?

PA: Such a court would inform the commons that Much of FOX Is POX.

Andy Outis That happens on a daily basis. Their viewership doesn’t seem to care.

PA: They are living the lie. A Truth Court would help those who are addicted to lying sober up. It would be like being told that alcohol, or cigarettes are not good for health. Much of what passes for News at Fox News would be denounced as bad for mental health… by an independent governmental branch. Thus my proposition for four branches of government: executive, legislative, justice, TRUTH.

Andy Outis But that would take away their constitutional rites to be as ignorant as they wanna be!! Downright un American!!

PA: It’s indeed a rite, not a right. A tribal rite.


Patrice Ayme (with thanks to A. Helligar and A. Outis).