by Patrice Ayme
Wed Jun 10th, 2009 at 02:40:01 PM EST
When the Titanic zooms and scraps among icebergs, those who steer the ship ought to be changed.
by Patrice Ayme
Sat Jun 6th, 2009 at 02:32:05 PM EST
Those who don't know what to learn from history are still living it, same as before, and the time before that.
by Patrice Ayme
Sun May 31st, 2009 at 11:43:00 PM EST
Sheep, even when they bleat, do not a civilization make.
by Patrice Ayme
Fri May 29th, 2009 at 02:01:40 PM EST
Time to call it quits on traditional economics, and modernize the concept of "product".
by Patrice Ayme
Sat May 23rd, 2009 at 04:10:09 PM EST
The financial and economic crisis of 2008 is not just a case of an economic cycle gone rogue. It's the old struggle of exponentiating wealth against the society that gives rise to it. What is new now is that wealth has been given one of the age old prerogatives of the state, money creation.
The FRACTIONAL RESERVE BANKING SYSTEM allows bankers to CREATE MONEY BY GIVING IT TO WHOEVER THEY PLEASE. This combines with the "SHADOW BANKING SYSTEM", a set of unregulated conspiracies among the richest people in the world (sometimes, the taxpayer is outright asked to pay for these conspiracies (AIG)).
A prerogative of the State, making the money, is privatized and DEMOCRATICALLY UNSUPERVISED. This has created a money class whose increasing influence has bent to its liking society's aspirations, cognition, and common sense. That is all what the so called "financial" crisis of 2008 is about: it is an attempted takeover of democratic civilization by plutocracy, straddling a money machine. Most of recent American anti state ideology is part of that coup. Time to get informed; cognizance brings resistance.
by Patrice Ayme
Tue May 19th, 2009 at 05:58:54 PM EST
"Cap and Trade" is the most sophisticated way of controlling carbon dioxide emissions, the final touch in a vast anti carbon arsenal, but it is neither the simplest nor the most efficient weapon. Even the French, who invented it, could not figure it out for the longest time. So why is Obama hell bent at starting with that? To fail? (As a pseudo non tax tax, it failed already, because even republicans figured that one out.)
Instead Obama should have kept things simple to start with, and kill two birds with one stone.
A straight WORLDWIDE carbon tax as France suggested a few years ago would do wonders, and not just for limiting carbon dioxide production. The idea would be to tax all and any CO2 used in production, including transportation. So it would be good for the planet, but also for EMPLOYMENT in advanced countries (such as the USA). No more cheating around by going to China to pollute the planet, and undermine the workers of the world! This is not just fair to the planet and advanced countries' workers, but it would allow to introduce Americans pleasantly to ecological correctness.
by Patrice Ayme
Sun May 17th, 2009 at 01:47:58 PM EST
This an introduction and synopsis of an essay on banking I am struggling with. It seems to me that it puts the debate in fundamental civilizational setting it should have. This crisis is not about an economic cycle, but civilization. It's a bit like the war situation in Afghanistan-Pakistan: the West set up the context, and it is the wrong context, and I will say, deliberately so.
by Patrice Ayme
Fri May 15th, 2009 at 02:45:26 PM EST
Paul Krugman, having visited China, concludes that "China cannot continue producing greenhouse emissions at an escalating rate because the planet can't handle the strain." OK, but China goes on, and so does the USA. The USA gets 71% of its electricity from fossil fuels. China, with supposedly one new coal plant a week, now emits more CO2 than the USA. What to do?
(Health warning: those who cannot tolerate stress should stop reading right here.)
Well, one has to realize we are facing the greatest extinction and cataclysm ever. And it could happen suddenly, thanks to thousands of billions of tons of buried methane. Then the earth would switch to its hot mode, with only the polar regions inhabitable. War for survival would erupt all around. Most of the seven billion humans would die. Drastic, counter intuitive methods have to be used swiftly to prevent or mitigate this. Bellicose pressure, first in economics, should not be eschewed, right away.
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by Patrice Ayme
Tue May 12th, 2009 at 02:00:34 AM EST
Is it a form of exploitation and hypocrisy, across the globe, for the most developed countries to ask the poorest to save their animal species, while not doing much effort themselves?
Well, there is a remedy, and a moral lesson therein: time to learn to share the planet with the rest of life, lest we want to keep on behaving as a malignancy.
by Patrice Ayme
Thu May 7th, 2009 at 07:44:25 PM EST
In the hope of deepening the debate on torture, I span three millennia of civilization, to find little known, but drastic, anecdotical and general logics, to support the case for the exemplary prosecution of American torturers.
by Patrice Ayme
Wed May 6th, 2009 at 12:44:33 AM EST
BANKING CLARITY A MUST TO REPAIR THE ECONOMY.
Stiglitz and Krugman had dinner with Obama. Krugman said he could not talk about it, because it was "off the record".
by Patrice Ayme
Sat May 2nd, 2009 at 08:04:53 PM EST
Anti thinkers are paid by the plutocracy to seed havoc and confusion. We skewer a few.
by Patrice Ayme
Wed Apr 29th, 2009 at 05:32:28 AM EST
The propaganda to legalize torture in the USA keeps on rolling. The famous New York Times editorialist and multiple Pulitzer prize winner Friedman came up with his own celebration of the American way, now to involve torturing whoever the leaders decide to torture.
by Patrice Ayme
Mon Apr 27th, 2009 at 09:11:00 AM EST
Pirates at sea do not cause nearly as much damage as financial pirates. The American public got habituated to abuse, and may find a perverse pleasure forgetting the emptiness of its condition through said abuse by their lords of finance.
Considering the state of the planet this codependency of evil has no future. Time for a philosophical straight jacket.
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by Patrice Ayme
Thu Apr 23rd, 2009 at 08:36:44 AM EST
Abstract: I extracted all the significant sentences in the Qur'an having to do with women, and put them below. (I use occasionally the older "Koran" instead of the more correct "Qur'an"; Only a few technical administrative like details about how to manage women have been omitted.) Those who apply the Qur'an to the letter are in violation with Human Rights as defined by the Charter of the United Nations.
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by Patrice Ayme
Mon Apr 20th, 2009 at 06:03:28 AM EST
Abstract: Why the new boss is in danger of getting worse than the old boss.
by Patrice Ayme
Tue Apr 14th, 2009 at 02:25:14 PM EST
Abstract: This is mostly a chronicle of some of the some of the latest errors of the Obama administration, from the silly (Obama forgetting he is not president of Europe), to the sublime (bombing allies to make sure they turn into enemies). We will do more positive stuff (Cuba, Mark To Market, etc.), some other time. First, we will buy a microscope.
by Patrice Ayme
Sun Apr 12th, 2009 at 09:05:56 PM EST
Abstract: The financial crisis is not what it is usually assumed to be. It's essentially a crisis of the plutocrats, and the economy has been stopped to come to their rescue. Sadly, it will be in vain.
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by Patrice Ayme
Fri Apr 10th, 2009 at 04:38:26 PM EST
Abstract: The Greenhouse warming is "worse than the worst that was expected three years ago" said the IPCC scientific intermediate conference co-chair a few days ago. The USA is the number one perpetrator.
Obama has proposed green energy, without paying enough efficient attention to the fact that the market has been manipulated towards burning carbon. Instead the market should be manipulated to make burning carbon what it really is, namely expensive.
So far, oozing ever so slowly to remedy this, Obama has proposed a Carbon Cap and Trade circus, as the European Union has tried to make work, for years. But Carbon Cap and Trade should be considered only a second order measure, as it is in Europe. Carbon Cap and Trade has been attempted in Europe, decades after the instauration of continent wide huge taxes on energy.
Carbon Cap and Trade has revealed itself to be slow, difficult to implement, with extremely complicated regulations, and tricky price fixing, that have baffled even the Parisian bureaucrats. Although the French wanted to avoid this, Carbon Cap and Trade turned for years into a subsidy for polluters.
The first order measure to make the market price carbon accurately ought to be, as it is in Europe, a tax on bad energy. That could be implemented by the presidential pen tomorrow. Let Congress howl to the wind: what could it do against icy presidential logic? So here is some logic.
by Patrice Ayme
Fri Apr 3rd, 2009 at 05:13:16 PM EST
Here and there goes the hummingbird in the field of wild ideas...
