TRANCHE 1

Beginning in 1993, I argued to people working for the Thai Prime Minister's Office that the Thais could protect themselves from the negative effects of globalization by use of local currencies. My thesis then was that the Thai national currency was in trouble because of the globalization of Reaganomics (which Americans were too smart to use at home): privatizing public sector production through very overmarket interest-rate financial schemes mediated by big global banks and rooted in hedge funds and other funds heavily invested in emerging markets. Many, many large public works projects all over Southeast Asia were being funded in this way on a short-term loan basis (say, 30 years, by comparison to the long-term low-interest-rate public financing of, for example, Rural Electrification and the Interstate Highway System in America) at overmarket interest rates as high as 14%. The Bangkok overhead tollway, for instance, was to be financed in this way -- and projected user fees were to be exorbitant relative to average local incomes in Bangkok and provincial Thailand. The principal on the involved loan clearly was to be rolled into a new loan in 30 years at just the time the highway would need to be rebuilt. The user fees clearly were to cover the interest. The user fees were to be the same to all users, with a few commercial exceptions, thus being basically equivalent to a regressive tax which, ultimately, would be paid in a foreign currency (hence, very overmarket) to cover interest on the privatized foreign-source loan. So, the reality of the economies of the hedge-fund and emerging-market fund high rate of return on individual investment (enjoyed by so many Americans) was in large measure that some of the poorest people in the world were paying very overmarket interest rates to some of the world's richest people so travel time between the Bangkok Airport and the downtown 4-star hotels could be cut in half on the fast lanes. With a huge number of such overmarket interest-rate projects in tow, the Thai economy had eaten a major driver of inflation (thus transferring actual user fees from Bangkok-only dwellers to rural and urban dwellers throughout provincial Thailand, as increased cost of food and other necessities), which inevitably would have a negative effect on stability of its currency. (Retorts at the time can be summarized as: “That all may be true, but the overhead highway system will never be built otherwise.” The tollway was, indeed, build and on terms very like that described above.) Stock funds based on such economies cannot long endure because the involved national currencies will surely get into trouble -- as happened to the Thai baht. Multiplier effects of this sort of thing were responsible for the East Asian currency crisis -- not “Asian corruption”, as opposed to Western corruption; not “Asian lack of transparency”, as opposed to the Western forms of lack of transparency; not “Asian old-boy networks”, as opposed to Western old-boy networks. IMF loans in wake of currencies collapsed by such financial schemes can be viewed as bailouts for the New York Stock Exchange -- another form of regressive tax paid by the poor to the rich (given that IMF funds have their ultimate origin in taxes). This, of course, is not the interpretation of “Asian” media in Southeast Asia owned by Dow Jones, Inc. Most everyone, it seems, somehow forgets that America used the “Asian Model” itself to achieve 15% annual GNP growth rates and to launch its multinational corporations: government orchestration, government funded R&D, forced industrial development, wage and price controls, restricted consumer access to “luxury” goods, 25% personal saving rates, and a 200-billion dollar expansion of the national debt during the four years of WWII which, due to the ballooned money supply, formed the platform and postwar lower sweep for the exponential inflation curve governing the latter half of the century. When Asians use the “Asian Model”, however, that is another matter!

Laissez-faire was the economics of the Great Depression; demand-side Keynesianism was the economics of global war. Who created the ideas of Keynesian economics? Keynes? No. The basic ideas were created on the far right of the political spectrum by Hitler's economic advisors. They were created in the far West of America in places like Utah: Marriner Eccles. Keynes collected ideas that were in the air and put them together with Newtonian-derived economic concepts such that some economists and politicians could put their sense of self-identity into the prevailing idea Zeitgeist. But all this was 30 years after Newtonian physics had died and 100 years after the mathematics underlying Newton's laws of motion (upon which the market mechanism was modeled) had died (with the appearance of Abelian functions in the 1820s). The economy is not a natural system; it is a human system constructed on a Newtonian model of nature. Consider how ridiculous the last 90 years of monetary policy debate has been! Is the dominant causal force interest rates? Does M-1 control nominal GNP? Can the Fed control M-1 growth independent of a coordinated fiscal policy? Is there a monotonic linear functional relationship between adjusted M-1B and GNP? All of these are silly questions when, quite obviously, it's an N-body problem. The economy is not a natural system; it is a human system constructed on a Newtonian model of nature -- a model that largely denies existence of N-body problems. The economic N-body problem cannot be solved in the present economy, because its structures, functions, and process were created with single-valued properties (according to the underlying Newtonian model) -- and not on the basis of multivalued Abelian functions. Of course, the Fed can finagle the variables. And do right well, too! It would, however, be rather surprising -- given that the U.S., by the various economic and non-economic means available to it, has unique access to global natural and human resources -- if the Fed couldn't finagle right well. The economic N-body problem is not a problem for the dominant economy in the global economy -- it's a problem for everybody else.

Say you have a relatively fixed money supply because your single-logically-valued currency is pegged to the dollar and the dollar is rising and you can't sell much of anything abroad to get more dollars to expand the currency in circulation. The only thing that could save you (with your pretty well fixed M-1 aggregate) from a recession is an increase in the manual dexterity skills of your population: the money you do have would have to move faster and faster (thereby acting like it was more money). One way to increase the monetary through-put velocity is with bill-counting machines, computers instead of typewriters, internet as opposed to teletype, and so on. Properties of the existing techno-base set some sort of limit on through-put velocity. Another way to increase the RELATIVE VELOCITY of money in movement is via simulacra, via virtual money, monetary slight of hand. You can't create any more national fiat money because it is not really fiat; it is pegged to the dollar and must be (via central banks) exchanged on demand for the dollar. But you can create local currencies that are not national money and which are not, therefore, pegged to the dollar (though they could be pegged as a basket to the national currency). This local money can't fly away -- even to other parts of the national economy, because it won't be accepted, can't be spent outside of town, so to speak. But say the national economy were suddenly to spring forth many, many such local currencies. The national currency aggregate has not expanded, but it is as if its through-put velocity had greatly increased -- thereby offsetting the threat of recession by acting as if there were an expanded national money supply. (Looking at history of the Great American Deflation of the 1880s and 1890s, with its various local attempts to create “Alliances” and fiat monies, one cannot help but entertain the notion Japan would presently greatly benefit from creation of a modern version of local currencies. See: Lawrence Goodwyn's in-depth study Democratic Promise: The Populist Movement in America, Oxford U. Press, 1976.) But this is simulacra only from the point of view of the national currency dynamic and the peg attaching it to the currency of the dominant economy (which is constructed on a Newtonian model of nature). From the point of view of the SET of local currencies, itself, no magic is involved. Rather, the first step to solving the economic N-body problem has been taken.

You cannot solve an N-body problem in a system created on the assumption there are no N-body problems. Relativistic steps to N-body quantum economies (killing time): limiting velocities, limiting accelerations, limiting time rates of change of acceleration: timeless “Platonia”, the econometric world in N-body relations of general economic entities (mapped on a Cantorian fractal reference). Not only, or primarily, the adjusted M-1B aggregate, but velocity, acceleration, and time rate of change of acceleration of monetary through-put (in part rate-limited by interest rates) relative (Relativity Theory) to limiting values of dynamical variables set by the prevailing quantum techno-base (the economy's “light”). Velocities map information exchange within the system under consideration; accelerations map information exchange between sub-systems of the given system; time rates of change of acceleration map progressive loss of orientability (i.e., globalization) between sub-system and system. (Please see Table III of the “General Process” paper, and the paper itself for a more thorough treatment of this formulation.) Monetary through-put velocity, accordingly, is mere shorthand for the full-blown case -- just as Fed finagling of the federal funds rate and/or the M-1 aggregate is greater shorthand, yet, for the full-blown case. You have to create a system where these dynamic variables and their limits are explicit and measurable, not largely defined as externalities or inconsequences.

The local currency Buenos Aires is issuing on a municipal deficit spending basis will not solve its problems because this currency is a panic measure, not part of a strategic response based on multiple local Argentinean currencies. Also, it is a single-logically-valued local currency, not an m-logically-valued local currency. Moreover, it does not have an “m-card fund” behind it. A better attempt was made relative to Cesky Krumlov, Czech Republic. As I understand it, a strategic planning project was undertaken, funded by a small foundation. A Western European government was to have funded the second stage: a study to identify and weight local alternative economic indicators and sustainable development indicators to which, eventually, the m-logically-valued parameters of the local currency would be tied. At the last minute, the Western European government declined, apparently saying that the amount of money sought to cover costs of the study was too small for them to bother with -- the usual problem of high grant-servicing costs precluding the funding of small projects. A third stage of the Cesky project would have involved initial phases of implementation of a local currency tied to a local joint stock development fund (a mini-hedge fund, if you will). When collapse of the Soviet Union took place, the Cesky Krumlov town government found itself the owner of over 300 pristine 10th century buildings. The strategic planning project, in part, involved cataloguing all these and their furniture, creating building covenants, placing about 100 of them up for sale (privatization), and creating the basis of a local development stock fund using proceeds of the sale of the 100 buildings as the liquid capitalization basis for the IPO (the other 200 buildings being assets of the Cesky Krumlov Joint-Stock Development Fund). The strategic planning scenario chosen during the planning process for Cesky involved it striving to become the foremost center for the fine and performing arts in Central Europe. The planning project also involved Sumava NATIONAL Forest Preserve surrounding Cesky, with LOCAL (almost watershed) ADMINISTRATION in conjunction with the Department of Landscape Ecology of the Czech National Academy of Sciences: this apparently was accomplished and, as far as I know, is unique, globally.

This effort was conceived as a paradigm demonstration project for m-logically-valued local currencies (with Russia's development problems held most in mind), while studies were being made of amenity migration sites and World Heritage sites around the world where unique adaptations of the paradigm could possibly be made. (Given the horrible mess made of the Russian opportunity by Harvard Wiz-kid gee-wizz crash capitalism
-- apparently absent any knowledge whatsoever of how pre-existent communist cellular frameworks can be adapted for accelerated development of autopoietic dynamics: see MOON -- the Russian opportunity is no more an opportunity; things have moved decisively onto another path.) Many mini-m-card funds tied in a fractal nest to bigger m-card funds! The economies of this arrangement are far more sustainable (though the short-term individual return on investment certainly would be smaller) than those tied to the sort of schemes used to finance the Bangkok overhead tollway, described above. What was to be demonstrated was a special case of asset-based currencies as opposed to commodity-based currencies. These asset-based currencies would float internally (via m-logically-valued parameters) and externally (in relative-state to other like currencies), while at the same time having a sound-money basis in assets. Since there would be many, many such currencies in fractal array operating through markets in the global economy, the health of any one of them would not be of critical concern to the health of most others. In the present system, by contrast, where a few currencies dominate everything, everywhere, an unhealthy currency can become a catastrophic event. By analogy, who cares about the presence of “yellow journalism” if there are many, many, many small news organizations? If there are only two or three global media giants, however, the degree to which the techniques of “white” and “black” propaganda have become standard journalistic practice is a matter of concern.

The classic gold standard largely ended with WWI. The post-WWII Bretton Woods gold exchange standard largely ended with the Viet Nam War. These standards had instituted commodity-based currencies. The British economist, Keynes, and the American economist, White, architects of Bretton Woods, though one focused on employment issues and the other on currency manipulation, were both intent on having a system of constraints upon behaviors believed to have contributed to origins of WWII, i.e., they created a system that limited the foreign policy repertoire of nation-states in the area of economic behavior. In many quarters, this was viewed as a socialist program -- the state being seen as a corporate (individualistic) person in the international arena (even if felt to be a socialist busybody in the domestic arena). It is, thus, much more than a little likely that the manner in which the Viet Nam War was financed (essentially by foreign borrowing, as opposed to taxation) had its motivation in far more than a mere attempt not to antagonize the anti-war movement. Reading in the Washington Post at the time about the painlessness with which the Nixon cabinet made the decision to separate the dollar from gold, thus ending Bretton Woods, I had little difficulty entertaining the notion that ending Bretton Woods had at some point become one of the main objectives of the Viet Nam War. Subsequent events in large measure confirmed it. Japan, Inc., which had gotten out of control in wake of the Containment-Policy-related economic mandate granted it relative to Southeast Asia, and the supply-and-matériel provisioning advantages taken relative to the Korean and Viet Nam wars which so enriched its auto industry, was brought to heel by the bubble-creating Plaza Accords and brow-beating over trade imbalance into deficit spending and brow-beating Structural Impediments Initiative into deficit spending and brow-beating over opening rice markets into deficit spending to appease the rural constituency of the LDP and… demonstrating for all to see the advantages of having rid the world of commodity-based currencies. But no one, including the Japanese and the Thais, need, on account of such realities, desire a return to a commodity-based sound money currency system -- which simply will not work in a world more and more ruled by the principles of quantum physics imposed with communications and computing technologies derived therefrom. Why? Fixed-value tags insure a level of market self-organizational competency too low to meet the challenge of quantum-based technologies and the breakdown of rigidities which inevitably follow in their wake.

For all those who believe “less is more” in regards to government -- if not graphic art and flower arrangement -- there are asset-based m-logically-valued currencies. The m-parameters of the currency, that internally float relative to varying measures of economic and sustainable development indicators -- hence adding subtly to market action directives otherwise largely on-or-off in character -- reduce the decision need legislative assemblies were created to address. And since the asset basis of the currency is floated by a popularly constituted political body, say, a municipal government, this asset basis of the currency is an indirect privatization of specific functions of that municipal body. Here is what is most likely to happen if m-logically-valued local exchange units are not put in place in the fashion described: Hernando de Soto's scheme to entitle squatter settlements (The Mystery of Capital) and Buenos-Aires-type local currencies will join hands. The roughly 2 billion rural-to-urban refugees projected over the next several decades will be used as a recruitment base for implementing macroeconomically dysfunctional single-logically-valued local currencies as panic “solution”.

There is something about money we must remember. In moving from country to city, from empathy to abstraction, from nature identification to technocratic systematization, from animistic participation mystique to alienated detachment, from womanly self-decomposition to patriarchal recursive generation, from signifying identity-transparency in ritual gifting (in lieu of war) to accounting distinctions in interest-bearing loan and exchange dynamics, from carrying cosmological metareference to carrying no reference beyond itself money stopped being a multivalued facilitator of the spiritual life of peoples and became a single-valued promoter of physical death in mass wars of nation-states. In compensation, a wealth of physical objects stripped of cosmological metareference became widely available, which collapsed quality of awareness to such an extent the magnitude of the loss went largely unnoticed. Indeed, awareness was so deadened in this collective transition, it became widely believed that collective states of consciousness do not exist -- even though, when reduced to the single-valued variety, such states of consciousness were the clear proximate cause of mass warfare.

RECOMMENDED READING

1. Gilder, George. Microcosm: The Quantum Revolution in Economics and Technology. N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1989.

2. Ohmae, Kenichi. The Borderless World. N.Y.: Harper Business, 1990.

3. Funabashi, Yoichi. Managing the Dollar: From the Plaza to the Louvre. Washington: Institute for International Economics, 1989.

4. Shelton, Judy. Money Meltdown: Restoring Order to the Global Currency System. N.Y.: Free Press, 1994.

5. Greider, William. Secrets of the Temple: How the Federal Reserve Runs the Country. N.Y.: Simon and Schuster, 1987.

6. Friedman, Milton and Robert Roosa. The Balance of Payments: Free Versus Fixed Exchange Rates. Washington: American Enterprise Institute, 1967.

7. Rahn, Richard W. “Private Money: An Idea Whose Time Has Come,” Cato Journal, 9:2, 1989.

8. Hayek, Friedrich A. von. “Toward a Free-Market Monetary System,” The Journal of Libertarian Studies, 3:1, 1979.

9. Vaubel, Roland. “Currency Competition Versus Governmental Money Monopolies,” Cato Journal, 5:3, 1986.

10. Mauss, Marcel. The Gift. Glencoe: Free Press, 1954.

11. Sahlins, Marshall. Stone Age Economics. Chicago: Aldine-Atherton, 1972. (See excerpt at http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Parthenon/9270/sahlins.html)

Given press reports of the recent mass eviction event at Bredell, near Johannesburg, issues involved in de Soto's program to entitle squatter holdings takes on day-to-day currency even outside the developing world. Based on projections from UN-documented present-day growth, Third World urban population will double in the next 30 years, meaning that during this period there will be somewhat under two billion rural-to-urban immigrants leaving economic free-fire zones (to make way for large-scale process of agroindustrial combines) and relocating to Brendell-type squatter settlements under global capitalism's policy of forced-draft deruralization and associated cheap labor mobility program. Given that a significant percentage of these little-left-to-lose economic refugees will be HIV-positive, they will have far less than little left to lose. Never before in known history of the species has there been such an enormous potential political action recruitment base. What are the strategic implications of this evolving circumstance for those inclined to act in opposition to globalization?

Is Hernando de Soto's idea (see The Mystery of Capital: why capitalism triumphs in the West and fails everywhere else, N.Y.: Basic Books, 2000) to entitle squatters a brilliant stroke of genius? (((Please remind me to someday write an aside on Peru and why theory of autopoiesis should have issued from there in wake of Andean priestly practices, an active Gurdjieff “school”, John C. Lilly's influence, and other such interconnected personal histories.))) The “sites-and-services approach to upgrading slum infrastructure” was the first attempted application of the theory of self-organization within the field of urban and regional planning. Right around 1970, as I understand it, some Berkeley planners familiar with the early work on self-organization produced by Heinz von Foerster, M. C. Yovitz, S. Cameron, and G. W. Zopf, and who had heard Paul Feyerabend's Berkeley lectures “Against Method” -- and by virtue of this introduction began cultivating an interest in informal systems of practice, and their communities -- created the notion of sites-and-services. (Thirty years later, one of these Berkeley consultants initiated the strategic planning project at Cesky Krumlov.) The idea was to grant slum dwellers the sites they had squatted upon and provide those sites with public services (otherwise always denied squatter settlements), so that there would be self-organized individual and community action to upgrade the infrastructure, once access to services was provided and vested personal financial interests were thus invoked (along with sense of pride, et cetera, et cetera, and et cetera). Sites-and-services was partially applied in Bangkok, Jakarta, and elsewhere in the early '70s, with considerable success for short periods -- until the involved governments failed to follow through.

But, very significantly, as I have recently learned and perhaps de Soto doesn't fully understand, death of sites-and-services wasn't just a matter of failures in government action. While the host politicians were certainly a factor, more important were the built-environment professionals, i.e., particularly engineers and architects, who progressively increased the building and site standards, to what their professions had brainwashed them to believe were appropriate, until the serviced-site costs crept past the utility value of the concept. Also determining demise of sites-and-services was the personal career advancement needs of both these two classes of institutionalized professionals (most particularly those in the World Bank) and the need of their institutions to make large dollar loans, in no small part in order to help hide their high loan/grant servicing costs. Grant requests are frequently rejected by multilateral institutions and governments for being too small. What de Soto has done is simply put the “sites-and-services approach” out there, argued from the point of view of a market-oriented economist, rather than that of a strategic planner. Since his perspective and publicist acumen resonates with the current American global agenda, he is able to get people like Margaret Thatcher to write prefaces to his book.

He also does not seem to understand well the actual origins of “lack of boundaries” in many traditional cultures, and how the involved “identity transparency” had to do with informal processes of self-organization of what economists technically designate “externalities”, i.e., what some would regard as repositories of non-economic value and non-economic behaviors of enormous cultural, social, and psychological value -- origins of the unbound being notions like that of kinghood and its cosmological metareferences (see, e.g., I. W. Maggett, “Kingship at Angkor”, Journal of the Siam Society, 66:2, 1978). These repositories of enormous cultural, social, and psychological value are, of course, wholesale disappearing from the modern world under dictates of the West. Much less does de Soto appear to understand how these traditional metareferencial notions relate, in principle, to what is currently identified as quantum properties of self-organization and resultant possibilities like defining m-logically-valued monetary currencies on Koch-curve-type boundaries -- with the fractal entrapment possibilities inherent therein, and so important to issues like currency repatriation, where prevailing state-of-the-art innovation involves a very Newtonian and utterly un-self-organizational statutory mandate that repatriation cannot be accomplished short of, say, one year (somewhat of an improvement upon heavy-handed nationalization, or the threat thereof, one must countenance).

A one-time Director of the Southeast Asia Program at UC-Berkeley tells a wonderful story of Hmong housing in the Tenderloin District of San Francisco. When a large group of Hmong displaced from Laos were placed in a Tenderloin tenement building, the first thing they did to settle in, to make it habitable, was remove every interior door in the building, thus transforming it into a very large long-house. When I heard this story, it suddenly hit me that a Special Forces Medic teaching story I retold in THE MOON OF HOA BINH about the anthropologist Gerald Hickey in Viet Nam was flawed in my re-telling. The story was about how Hickey ended a Montagnard typhoid epidemic by having the unused Special Forces provided privies moved a mile outside the village: I forgot to include the part that he also instructed that the privy doors be removed. No one would use the privies unless they could have a long walk in a group to get to them, and there were no doors to prevent communal squatting.

Sometime walk up to a POV (privately owned vehicle) stopped in LA traffic and simply open a door, then watch the reaction of the person sitting in the car.

De Soto's notion of “dead capital” is a repository of economic value (property) that is not wholly ownable, i.e., is not “bound”, is not absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct, is not completely identifiable as utterly separate and, therefore, completely private. That which is not so bound cannot, according to his consensus Newtonian market economics, be documented. It cannot be so documented because the prevailing legal system is based on 2-valued (either/or) logic which does not conceive a middle term between Property, no-Property (19th century anarchists followed the same logic in formulating the slogan “Property is Theft!”). And we now have the “Law and Economics Movement” in theory of jurisprudence, where principles of market mechanisms and their equations are used as the sole criteria of judgment relative to legitimacy of legal statute: soon to become globalization's own common law (see, e.g., Richard A. Posner and Francesco Parisi [eds.], Law and Economics, Lyme: Cheltenham, 1997 and Richard A. Posner, Frontiers of Legal Theory, Cambridge: Harvard U. Press, 2000). The retort of the Newtonian capitalist fundamentalist to the Islamic fundamentalist!

Global capitalist program of “forced-draft deruralization” has the same intent as “free-fire zones” in Viet Nam had: get rid of animistic identity-transparent participation mystique and the “dead capital” associated with it. Margaret Thatcher embraces de Soto's program because something like it is required if economic free-fire zones are to work on a global scale. Four billion people (minus the upper one-tenth of one percent), poor of health and finances, trapped in Third World conurbation 30 years from now is an enormous recruitment base, unless somehow mollified (until the final solution is reached in the cloned laborer/consumer).

To illustrate what I am thinking, rather than get too long winded: French condensed materials physicist, Catherine Even, not too long ago did an experimental study of a “fractal drum” (see Catherine Even, Stefanie Russ, Vincent Repain, Pawel Pieranski, and Bernard Sapoval, “Localizations in Fractal Drums”, Physical Review Letters, 83:4, July, 26, 1999). One of the purposes of the study was to understand the essential properties of “strong irregularity” (a property of informal systems and their communities of practice, I might note). Vibrations are set in motion on a surface fractal resonator: a liquid crystal that is bound by a fractal frontier (something like a soap bubble film on a jagged edge). She developed instrumentation to read vibrations at different portions of the resonator, including in the “peninsulas” of fractal border areas. And she was able to establish that the vibrations have local pockets of intensity near the fractal boundary, rather than being spread evenly over the entire film (like a hologram): this is called “fractal entrapment”. The “fractal” frontier is made of nickel sheet 80 millimicrons thick, bent into a fractal border shape. Now, here is where the de Soto intent comes in in this post-structuralist, deconstructionist experiment: a real fractal border is an infinite nest of jagged edges inside jagged edges inside jagged edges, inside… et cetera. Even's (an interesting name for someone studying “strong irregularity”) border, however, has only one scale level of jagged edges, and therefore cannot be a true fractal boundary. A true fractal boundary is more like what the Hmong tried to do to their tenement building. A true fractal boundary is “Cantor dust”: Halve a length of line, then halve the halves, then halve the halved halves, then halve the halved halved halves, and so on to infinity. Each act of halving creates a space-between (like removing a door in a tenement building). So, a true fractal boundary in full elaboration is densest-packing of empty spaces: that housing fractals is not only There, not-There, but, in the limit, there-not-there: minimally, subject to a 3-valued logic. Liquid crystal, an in-between state of matter, displays all the nonlocal (anathema to Newtonian scientists and economists) “identity transparent” coherency weirdnesses of quantum theory. Even's experiment “demonstrates” that these nonlocal weirdnesses can become localizations if the liquid crystal is “bound by a fractal frontier” -- except that her fractal is not a real fractal (a likely authentic case of real fractal entrapment being a tornado). De Soto's program is designed to do to informal systems of self-organization what Even's experiment does to quantum nonlocality.

I argue that real fractal borders at culture “boundaries” were floated as standing (sound) waves (songlines) in old Asia by bronze drums sited under energy-momentum cascades (like that responsible for tornadoes) called waterfalls. What would happen to market mechanisms if informal repositories of economic value (“dead capital”) were bound by true fractal frontiers -- not wrapped in 2-valued-logic legal paper? How could this be accomplished? I maintain that this could be accomplished by m-logically-valued exchange units. And I believe that the identity-exchange behind “Stone Age Economics” ritual gifting (e.g., sacred cloths) involved such repositories of value.

Market-mediated fractal entrapment with m-logically-valued exchange units is an alternative to tariff barriers.

Fractal borders (such as those proposed for m-logically-valued currencies defined on Koch curves) associated with animistic identity transparency, however, are not the borderless borders of suit-and-tie cultural monism advocated by globalization ideologues in their (not quite conscious) obsession with purified identity. To quote management consultant, Kenichi Ohmae, writing in The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy (N.Y.: Harper, 1990):

Maintaining a corporate identity in a global environment is different [from identity in the old colonial empires]. Formal systems and organizational structures can help, but only to the point that they nurture and support intangible ties… The most important… is a system of values that all employees in all countries and regions unquestioningly accept… [emphasis added]. (p.89.)

…it's not just the official language of business [English] that must be shared in common around the world; so must the corporate “language” -- the unofficial culture of the organization. (p.95.) [He is speaking in the business particular here about something which in practice becomes the cultural general: a way of sweeping things under a rug.]

Commonalities in a business culture are so important to economic success that they easily outweigh traditional differences in language or secular culture. (p.112.) [Corporate monoculture having become sacred culture!]

Compare these statements of Ohmae (Ph.D. in nuclear engineering from MIT before becoming a management consultant) with the following, issuing from out of late-Wilhelmine Germany:

America… represents in advance what the world must be like at some future time when, with the annihilation of time and distance through the genius of Zeppelins, Wrights, and Marconis, the world will be fused into one great whole, speaking one language, and pursuing but one ideal… (Quoted in William Manchester, The Arms of Krupp, N.Y.: Little, Brown, 1964.)

This is Krupp heiress, Baroness Barbara von Wilmowski, speaking to the Chicago World Fair in 1910, just before the outbreak of WWI. She is summarizing for an American audience the ideology of cultural monism which, slightly modified, a decade later was to inform the rise of Nazism -- and which belief system is the dominant emotional commitment of Americans today, governing their personal aspirations, public and corporate planning, financial innovation, technological forecasting, and projection of U.S. power globally.

And Singapore's Lee Kuan Yew adds his voice to this increasingly universal refrain: “There will be no unique and distinctive life forms in the future; it will be one interrelated and integrated world.” As quoted in Anthony Sampson, The Money Lenders, N.Y.: Penguin, 1981, p. 231.

With rich double irony and a good dose of parody, artist, Ed Ruche, has offered us the maxim: “Japan is America”. Multi-dimensional (including art, music, literature, language, religion, cosmology, handicraft, et cetera) cultures are to be replaced by one one-dimensional, materialistic, business-fixated, up-the-organization global corporate monoculture. Have you ever been to a stand-up cocktail party of business executives? Imagine living in a world where that is the only party there is! This cultural monism ideology of globalizing corporations is a result of cognitive monocropping, of emotional and perceptual cloning. Patenting genomes, stem cells, and clones means there will be no reforming this civilization. More and more people, consciously and/or unconsciously, will conclude that the only possible solution is to create a pile of broken bricks.

There is an alternative, but it requires a major leap in cognition: instead of monoculture as the basis for organizing technologically-forced global unification, there is metaculture.

Yes, I know people don't quite get the idea of what an m-valued exchange unit would be. That's why I started saying “m-logically-valued exchange unit”. Several famous economists and even one Nobel winner have said they do not understand what I am talking about. I am not taking about M-1, M-2, M-3 as money categories, which the Federal Reserve tries to regulate the quantities of in various ways. I am talking about something quite different, though the m-values weighted on the exchange unit base could eventually become involved in regulating multiple bank credit expansion and other such monetary processes and variables. George Soros early in his career came closest to getting the gist of it. To quote from his recent book, The Open Society (N.Y.: Public Affairs, 2000):

Logical positivism outlawed self-referent statements as meaningless. I claimed that statements whose truth value is indeterminante are, far from being meaningless, even more significant than statements whose truth value is known. The latter constitute knowledge: they help us understand the world as it is. But the former -- expressions of our inherently imperfect understanding -- help to shape the world in which we live. At the time I reached this conclusion, I considered it a great insight.
(p. 17.)

This insight, arrived at when Soros was a student of the philosopher of science, Karl Popper, apparently formed the basis from which his whole method of creating investment strategies was formulated.

Now, to quote myself writing on Emil L. Post's 1921 paper (“Introduction to a General Theory of Propositions”, American Journal of Mathematics, 43) on m-valued logics (logics with propositions in m-degrees of self-reference) which he notated using the symbol _mT_m:

What is _mT_m? The m is the number of possible logical-values (traditionally, truth-values); the m is the number of such values permitted to any given proposition. In traditional Aristotelean-Baconian logic, a proposition is defined as any statement that can be determined to be true or false. There are two possible logical values (the m factor, that is). But the statement must be either one or the other; it cannot be both true and false at the same time. So only one value is permitted per proposition. This traditional logic, then, is single-valued (the m factor, that is). Two-valued binary logic is single-valued. Confusing? Post's system is better. Traditional logic is a ₁T₂ logic. Why Post chose “ T ” I don't know. Maybe for logic tree. In Post's logics, the factors m and m can take on any number. “This statement is false” (the so-called “liar paradox”) is a proposition in a ₂T₂ logic, but such interpretation does not lead far, so long as the values are regarded as “truth-values” -- as Post appears to have regarded them. This is why he maintained that ₁T₂ logic is the fundamental order of value, and why he called _mT_m logics m-valued “truth systems”. But what does it mean for a given proposition to be both true and false simultaneously, as in the ₂T₂ case? Even in ancient Chinese logic, Yin becomes Yang as Yang becomes Yin as the tai chi wheel spins out time cycles (the wheel being operator-time). Much more complexly, what does it mean for a proposition to have m simultaneous valid contradictory answers? What could, say, a ₃T₄ logic possibly refer to? Once the values of m and m are understood as relating to part-whole identity transparency, such as that seen in a hologram and its information properties -- not to truth-value -- it's a different matter altogether.

Issues of consistency are not paramount relative to the logic of quantum mechanics. Consistency issues are issues of truth-value, issues plotable in truth-tables. Paramount issues relative to self-organizing quantum systems are those of identity. In classical logic, “no A is not-A” and “the case is either A or not-A” are definitions treated as truth-value related, violations of which are regarded as fallacies: the “fallacy of contradiction” and the “fallacy of undistributed middle”, respectively. But these definitions are not only related to truth-value and consistency, they are also definitions concerning permissible-identity. “No A is not-A” mandates that the only entity given logical consideration is that deemed selfsame, the same as itself, an entity, that is, which is itself and only itself -- not simultaneously something not-itself. “The case is either A or not-A”, similarly, prescriptively specifies only entities defined as possessing “simple-identity” (to use the quantum physics term). But the “Schrödinger's cat paradox” was a simile before it was a logical paradox. The essential features of the simile have to do with identity, whereas the consistency, qua truth-value predicates of the simile, deemed paradoxical, are derivative -- even irrelevant. As with all similes, this simile has its limitations: the state function in Schrödinger's wave equation is not limited to merely three simultaneous states. N-states are permitted. The simile aspect of Schrödinger's “cat”, which logically precedes the so-called truth-value predicate, is an identity conundrum of far greater complexity than can be resolved by simply slipping a third term between “A” and “not-A”, as Paulette Fevrier did in the late-30s and Reichenbach after her. The simile, in actuality, has no truth-value predicate. Truth-value is a mere subjective attribution, indeed, even a culture-bound subjective attribution.

Russell's treatment of self-referential statements was developed in the way it was specifically to discredit Cantor's (1870s) definition of a denumerable transfinite set (which is self-referential and exhibits holographic part-whole identity-transparency: “any set that can be put into one-to-one correspondence with one of its proper subsets”, a variant of “the set of all sets including itself ”) -- so as to carry the day in the prevailing debates over the “axiom of choice”. I have written at considerable length on how these events in higher mathematics, and later in physics, created the preconditions for two world wars -- and have insured a third. A full treatment of m-logically-valued monetary units will surely involve lattice mappings of Gödel numbers in a holographic display system I refer to as Musculpt (music-sculpture).

Normative well-equilibration in self-referential systems has certain prerequisites; well-ordered far-from-equilibrium marches have certain prerequisites; tracking on the dissipative structures required to mediate non-equilibrium phase transitions to higher levels of integration has certain prerequisites. For instance, preserving normative stability, well-ordered non-equilibrium marches, and dissipative tracking on integrative transitions in self-reflexive markets (markets with participants aware of market reflexivity) is best achieved, not by legislative/governmental fiat (interposed/imposed non-self-referential statements/controls, e.g., the monetarist's 3% growth in M-1), but by autopoietic (self-generating) operators making self-referential statements (market action directives) based on part-whole identity transparency (i.e., m-logically-valued monetary units, with logical values referenced to “externalities” like sustainable development indicators). One does not want to be rid of a Fed, one wants a hundred Fed's in America and several thousand globally -- whereas the current global-monoculture political-agenda objective is to have one global currency with one global Fed (run by US). The IMF is not yet a global Fed, but some day is must be! or God help us -- so say the cultural monists.

Does the self-organizing human organism run on only one type of information (one currency)? Is it organized only on one global scale level? Is it regulated by manipulating a few valves in a centrally located water closet? Hardly. To paraphrase Edmund Jacobson, M.D., writing in the 1960s, control of organic behavior has never been recorded in any portion of the organism because it resides in the integrated totality. But there are myriad regulators in this integrated totality: every cell has its nucleus; there are numerous biological clocks of many different types responding to many influences determining rates of flow; there are various complex languages of positively and negatively reflexive and redundant regulatory processes arrayed on multiple spatial scale levels spanning that from the electron to that of the whole organism. Yet, with all these regulators turning valves in many, many water closets, there is an integrated totality from which control of the system emanates. Most economists agree that the economic correlate of this organic systemic-integration slight-of-hand is the “magic hand” of the market. But this is no justification for believing that an economy which is a single-celled organism, or that of a few cells, is optimally self-organizing. Quite the contrary. One homogenized global economy or a global economy dominated by a few national economies simply cannot be anywhere near optimally self-organizing. Multiple (local) currencies and classes of (local) currencies (analogous to tissues) will lead to higher levels of market self-organizational competency. And currencies that carry economic information with properties like the information carried by electrons (i.e., superposed, q-bitic, m-logically-valued information) will make possible processes of economic integration not even presently imaginable. Reserve requirements; discount rates; federal funds rates; quantities of M-1, M-2, M-3, and L; and the like will become progressively more self-regulative, without stripping them of their complexity or responsiveness to multiple stimuli.

My point here, in referring to the origins of George Soros' thought on market reflexivity, is that the existence of orders of value of logic has long since entered the arena of money -- even if not explicitly so recognized -- and that this entry has not only been through accelerated use of quantum-based technologies. Bohr and Heisenberg took the position of logical positivism: a third term between true and false is meaningless. Birkhoff and von Neumann implicitly agreed by looking to other ways of constructing a logic of quantum systems: challenging distributive properties of 2-valued logic, and so on. Soros leaped beyond all this dilly-dallying by attributing reflexivity-type meaning to that which cannot be explicitly defined with a 2-valued logic. When the Bretton Woods monetary system was brought to an end largely by the Vietnam War, allowing a literal explosion of reflexivities in international currency markets, Soros was able brilliantly to exploit his superior insight into the involved dynamics. But there is more insight to be had relative to the meaning of higher valued logics than that contained in George Soros' published thoughts on the matter. Those further insights are ripe for application, not so much to the speculative arts, but in order to increase competency of monetary system auto-regulation through expanded understanding of orders of self-reference, and the implications of these orders concerning properties of “externalities”: i.e., how such properties can be integrated into self-reflexive auto-regulative mechanisms. The order of logical-value defines permissible identity (the prevailing tacit notion of what identity is). A given class of externality is an externality class only under a given order of logical-value. Altering the order of logical-value of a class of monetary exchange units changes what is and what is not an externality class vis-à-vis the quantum economy the exchange unit class in question is operative in. There can be no actual “calculus of self-reference” for a calculus tacitly constructed via a logic that denies meaning to self-reference. This is why the cardinal principle of prevailing theories of autopoiesis (self-production and/or self-organization) is that parts and wholes are incommensurate: the calculus of self-reference employed is no actual calculus of self-reference, as it was constructed with 2-valued logic which denies meaning to self-reference. Self-referential systems are “centered systems” in the Hegelian sense, they subscribe to the holographic nature of Cantor's definition/diagonal-proof of a denumerable transfinite set: the part and the whole contain the same information, they are not incommensurate. Centered self-referential reflexivity violates "other-same" structure décentrée! Marxist deconstructionist “de-centering” is the raison d'être of a calculus of self-reference that is not a calculus of self-reference. What one gets with such a non-calculus calculus is massively parallel models of positive and negative feedback hypercycles transpiring over time, when the reality of self-referential reflexivity is omni-interactive and instantaneous -- even faster than instantaneous, as anticipation plays a major role: conditions “before” the initial conditions flap the butterfly's wings, determine the attractor, make causality and teleology non-orientable. Employment of m-valued logics is the only way this can be fully comprehended; and implementation of m-logically-valued exchange units is the only way auto-regulative competency can be significantly enhanced. As the globalization process proceeds, accelerated infusions of quantum-based technologies will exact a higher and higher price for longer and longer delays in meeting the explicit demand for increased auto-regulative competency. The price that will be paid is already very high.

Consider this: repeatedly, over the past 60 years, in discourse on meaning of quantum physics, it has been suggested by the leading authorities, almost without exception, that the logic of quantum mechanics (i.e., supposedly the logic of Nature) violates traditional Aristotlean 2-valued, true or false, logic. A recurrent suggestion made since the 1930s has been that quantum logic is a 3-valued logic. Now, get your mind around this: the Bolivian linguist, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, has lavishly demonstrated that Aymara, the ancient animistic pre-Inca tribal language of the Andes, is based on a 3-valued logic. (See: http://www.aymara.org/ and in particular the chapter entitled: “The Trivalent Logic of Aymara” which you get to by clicking on “bibliography” and then on “Logical and Linguistic Problems…”) This means that the logic gates in the brains of people who think in Aymara must be physically different from the logic gates of those who think in 2-valued-logic-type languages: the involved cortical neurons must have some third state not either on or off. The animisitic tribal social, political, and economic “institutions” once created by peoples in 3-valued-logic language cultures, by definition even, MUST, therefore, be a more direct expression of the full-blown quantum-relativity comprehension of the universe than any social, political, or economic institution created by the West at any time since the ancient Greeks.

How do you get people who are brain damaged, people, that is, who suffer from Kundabuffer-on-the-brain, people whose cortical neurons have only 2-states instead of three or m-more, to go against institutional modalities they are psychologically identified with because of their enbrained lacunae? This is a PHYSIOLOGICAL problem only meditative practices endemic to the Himalayas and the Andes could possibly address. As a strategist, one simply has to assume this is improbable: to repeat the earlier stated premise, such brain-damaged people will not move against institutionalization of modes of comprehension they are psychologically identified with, thus precluding significant support for phase transition to quantum-type systems of self-organization.

In a whole lifetime, a person never gets more then two or three chances to truly come to terms with the man-woman level of the transference. It is an extremely painful process. No one does it voluntarily. Only when backed into a corner will one seriously consider looking the thing straight in the face. And only if one integrates projective identification on the man-woman level is one later given the opportunity to get backed into a corner relative to the subject-(physical)object level of the transference. It is the same with the economic effects of post-WWII globalization through quantum-based technologies. The global economy only has a few chances to find a viable integrative regime. One failed chance was the Thai monetary crisis leading to devaluation of the baht. Another chance for the global economy, which seems sure to fail, is the current crisis in Argentina (circa 12/24/01).

The Argentinean economy knows what it needs. In great danger, it is spontaneously generating elements of the paradigm solution to the planetary economic crisis globalization is -- just as one would expect from a self-organizing process. The Argentinean economy is responding to what has been done to it by a global economy being made over by quantum-based technologies. People should listen to what the Argentinean economy knows it needs. They should not listen to what Newtonian economists tell the Argentinean economy it should need. Newtonian solutions will not solve the problems of national economies thrown into great danger by a global economy being made over by quantum-based technologies. Only quantum solutions will solve such problems. The Argentinean economy knows what it needs.

In response to a globally-imposed crisis, the Argentinean economy is generating multiple currencies. The generation of multiple currencies in reaction to the impositions of quantum-based technologies is a systemic quantum response in an economy attempting to undergo non-equilibrium phase transition to a higher level of self-organizational competency. This is not “a proliferation of 'pseudo currencies'” (“Argentina defaults on $155bn debt repayments”, Financial Times, 12/24/01), as the Newtonian economists would have it. To the contrary, single-logically-valued Newtonian national and supranational currencies (e.g., euro) are “pseudo currencies” in a global economy subject to impositions of quantum-based technologies. Globalization is an economic crisis because of the continued existence of single-logically-valued national and supranational pseudo currencies, which prevent any and every economic corpus from transiting to the higher levels of self-organizational competency demanded by the impositions of quantum-based technologies.

Self-organizing quantum systems simultaneously demand “spontaneous localization” and “spontaneous fusion”. This 2-valued-logic contradictory demand is built into their essential nature as described by the Schrödinger equation. The local currencies that have spontaneously arisen in Argentina in response to crisis are part of the required permanent properties of quantum economies. These local currencies (municipal and provincial) must not be “absorbed” by the new floating currency, possibly to be named the “argentino”. They must become nested-logical-values of the argentino. To absorb these currencies (by assimilating the local negotiable bonds to national negotiable bonds: “Argentina Plans To Pay Its Bills With New Currency”, Bloomberg News, 12/24/01) is to lose them, which is to eradicate the quantum response characteristics of the Argentinean economy spontaneously generated in reaction to the crisis.

There are two “directions” to build m-logically-valued reference onto a currency base: vertically and horizontally. Nesting the local currencies as indices of the floating argentino is to vertically stack m-logically-valued reference onto the argentino currency base. This is the “spontaneous fusion” aspect of a quantum economy. Tagging a local currency base to local economic and sustainable development indicators is the “spontaneous localization” aspect of a quantum economy achieved by horizontal m-logically-valued reference. Both the vertical and horizontal are needed if the Argentinean economy is to develop the quantum response characteristics necessary to cope with the demand for increased self-organizational competency imposed by the quantum-based technologies driving globalization.

Argentina is making a grave mistake for itself and for the global economy in abandoning its efforts to create multiple local currencies. Regardless of what is immediately (circa 01/13/02) done with the national fiat currency, Argentina's long-term economic and political salvation lies in creation of viable local asset-backed or commodity-basket-standard currencies -- be those currencies issued by municipal and provincial governments or by private financial entities. Local and provincial economies within Argentina do not need to be held hostage to the globalization process; globalization is a process the national economy of Argentina must protect local and provincial economies against. The national currency must be viewed as a buffer currency until it can be so interfaced with local and provincial currencies as to form a nested boundary framework capable of two-way (in and out) fractal entrapment.

Economic disequilibrium results from several factors: inflationary consequences of government monopoly upon issuing monies; the fact that currencies are defined in such a manner as to prevent externalities from being brought within the purview of market autoregulation; the fact that single-logically-valued prices (conception of price being a consequence of prevailing definition of currency) do not convey sufficient information to market actors to prevent behaviors such as gross misjudgment in inventory planning; the fact that intersystemic economic variations and resultant implied differential market action directives are masked by absence of a sufficient number of currencies to signify and convey the hidden locally-specific information.

Spontaneous response of Argentina to its present crisis was initially correct and focused upon the process of developing the only possible comprehensive amelioration of the array of factors causing economic disequilibrium: m-logically-valued LETS.

Well, I can recommend three publications of F. A. von Hayek. Unfortunately, it appears these publications are “lost in circulation” in many libraries, which seems increasingly the fate of critical texts. Theory of Complex Phenomena. Tübingen: J. C. B. Mohr, 1972. Choice in Currency: A Way to Stop Inflation. London: Institute of Economic Affairs, Occasional Paper No. 48, 1976. Denationalization of Money: An Analysis of the Theory and Practice of Concurrent Currencies. London: Institute of Economic Affairs, 1976.

After 35 years of engagement with econophysics, I think I can identify several categories of people resistant to these ideas:

1. Those who, for various psychological reasons, refuse to try to understand;
2. Those who think only governmental and multilateral regulation can solve economic problems;
3. Those who ideologically support an unfettered “magic hand” without willingness to inquire into past, present, and possible properties of that “magic hand”;
4. Those who, out of vested interests, wish to maintain a framework that advances inequity.

The idea of a local economy, Wendel Berry states (“The Idea of a Local Economy”, Harpers, April 2002) “rests upon only two principles: neighborhood and subsistence.” He goes on to say:

A viable community, like a viable farm, protects its own production capacities. It does not import products that it can produce for itself. And it does not export local products until local needs have been met. The economic products of a viable community are understood either as belonging to the community’s subsistence or as surplus, and only the surplus is considered to be marketable abroad. A community, if it is to be viable, cannot think of producing solely for export, and it cannot permit importers to use cheaper labor and goods from other places to destroy the local capacity to produce goods that are needed locally.

Neglecting for the moment all the planet’s population forced into mega-urban regions by 3000 years or so of ever accelerating technological, economic, and political coercion, as well as forced-draft urbanization warfare policies of nation-states -- because this population corpus simply cannot survive an injunction for food subsistence of its local economies -- how is it, Mr. Berry, that you imagine a local economy could organize fulfillment of these two principles: neighborhood and subsistence. Studies in Stone Age economics suggest there has probably never been a local economy rigidly adherent to these two principles -- absolutely so after introduction of the iron-tipped plowshare. Certainly, as you clearly indicate, such adherence could not be accomplished by an unfettered free market -- free market as we have come to regard the notion of free markets. Is it to be accomplished, then, by a local command economy? How is the owner of a particular apple orchard to know when one of his bushels is a local subsistence bushel and when it is a local surplus bushel? Who will tell him, if not the local central planning board on the basis of the local comprehensive plan, with its production tables and projections, its counters, its computers, its controllers? But we have a wealth of Chinese and Cuban experience that tells us this simply won’t work satisfactorily for a significant number of non-intended community economies. Indeed, it hasn’t worked well even for the few intended communities scattered randomly about in affluent market economies, mixed or free. And if we engage in forced-draft de-urbanization to return those forcibly mega-urbanized to localizeable economies, so as to re-establish neighborhood and subsistence, we risk demonstrating how little we have learned from recent Cambodian experience.

The orchard owner will just simply know when his remaining bushels are surplus bushels because no one is buying them? Which would mean that he has repeatedly advertised well, and every member of the local economy who might want a bushel knows of his bushels and the state of his inventory, or that the corpus of economic actors comprising the local economy is sufficiently small that no such advertising is required. Moreover, the contents of the bushel would have to be slow to over-ripen, limiting the choice of apple varieties grown; otherwise, by the time certainty is reached that, indeed, this particular bushel is a surplus bushel, its contents would not be able to reach the export market prior to spoilage (or they would have to have been stored in one or another inert gas -- thus reducing their quality). These sorts of considerations would seem to dictate that all local economies would have to be quite small, approximating to the same unit size -- which localization uniformization, in itself, likely would have consequences as unpalatable as those associated with the uniformization imposed by globalization.

And how are we to distinguish one local economy from another local economy? By means of the geographical partitions gerrymandered by decision algorithms of nation-states, constitutionally democratic, McLuhan-Leary participatory, or otherwise? Certainly, all this could be greatly improved with GIS satellite mapping using digitalized TIGER/line files worked over with Microsoft Windows. Shall we use closed curves capable of absolutely distinguishing inside from outside? Such maps do not require the skills of a topologist to read. This orchard is in Local Economy A and that orchard next door is in Local Economy B because they sit inside and outside the closed curve? Without being able to draw such distinctions, we cannot identify a local subsistence bushel from a local surplus bushel, and without that capacity the local central planning board will not be able to organize exports and imports of the local economy. People will not know what to do, what they are permitted to buy, what they are permitted to sell. Perhaps watersheds or other such natural features should be used to determine boundaries of local economies. But are we then to just ignore the role of the built environment, including transportation facilities, in determining patterns of economic activity? The local truck farm, for instance, does have to get its produce to the local farmer’s market, if only in a cart.

And how would the injunction not to sell a subsistence bushel as a surplus bushel, and vice versa, be enforced? Should this be criminalized? Should violations be regarded felonies or mere corruption? And must we raise local property taxes to pay salaries of the economic police required?

Every problem -- in its principle, not necessarily its concrete form -- a national or global economy has, a local economy also has, especially so if local and transnational currencies are employed along with national currencies. Economies have a tendency to exhibit chaotic behaviors because there is self-similarity over multiple scale levels. The problems on one scale may have a different form (i.e., they may not be self-same) from those on another scale, but they will demonstrate the same principles (i.e., there will be self-similarity). This means that solution to a fundamental problem cannot be achieved by mandating that only one scale level is to be permitted -- be that scale global, regional, national, or local. There is no such thing as an economy without multiple scale levels. Even a local economy is multiscaled: the individual economic actor, the household, the cottage producer, the family farm, and so on. Scale partitions are in significant measure a matter of arbitrary definitions, of choice of rules determining how data and noise are to be distinguished, of value judgments, of perceptual filters. Solution to a fundamental problem requires discovery of a new principle, a principle that supercedes the principle giving rise to the fundamental problem needing a solution. Those who want to localize the global economy want to commit the same (in principle) error as those who are globalizing the global economy.

These comments do not mean I disagree with Wendell Berry. I agree with what he has to say about neighborhood and subsistence in local economies. The question is: how can this be achieved? I do not believe any local economy can achieve neighborhood and subsistence absent other scales of economic activity. Moreover, I believe that those multiple scales of economic activity must achieve a very high level of self-organizational competency -- a level far higher than that possible with unfettered free markets functioning according to our present notion of free market operations -- before any nested local economy can achieve neighborhood and subsistence. The new principle superceding the old principle giving rise to the problem preventing neighborhood and subsistence is m-logically-valued exchange units defined on fractal boundaries to replace single-valued exchange units defined in relation to the geographical space delimited by a closed curve -- implementation of these m-valued exchange units beginning at the scale level of the local economy.

The concept of an m-logically-valued (fuzzy logic) monetary exchange unit necessarily involves e-money. Transactions involving multiple logical-values stacked on a currency base can only be processed electronically. Both purchase price and wage rate would involve multiple values tagged to indicators of various types -- thus subtly modulating incentives and sanctions on market micro-behaviors. This would be quite complex, but there would be many stages in evolution of such a system -- starting with single-valued Local Exchange Trading Systems and ultimately leading to full-blown m-logically-valued monetary exchange units nested in multiple economic scales -- each such stage contributing something to the involved economy. Whether or not this is so can be studied via computer simulation. With the appropriate technology, the complexity of transactions would be shielded from the user. How this might be accomplished could also be studied via computer simulation.

It is proposed that a computer simulation model be created to demonstrate how performance of the Argentine economy can be improved by protecting the peso from negative aspects of globalization with local and provincial monies linked to the peso as a currency basket. This is not to propose at this time actual creation of such monies other than those which already exist. Using historical data sets, the computer model would show that the basket of currencies internally nested to the peso would function like a fractal drum with the capacity for highly sensitive fractal entrapment -- thus enhancing the level of self-organizational competency of the involved market mechanisms.

Creating such a model would require 8 steps:

1. Re-creating the classical development model of Ronald Brunner and Garry Brewer (Organized Complexity, N.Y.: Free Press, 1971) which ran computer simulations and compared them to historical data sets drawn from the Philippines and Turkey. This model's state vector involves variables and parameters related to approximately a dozen equations arrayed in demographic, economic, and political subsystems. Once these equations are re-programmed (originally done in Fortran IV), the model would be tuned using historical data sets from Argentina.

2. Rewrite the Brunner-Brewer model into a neural network program. This would involve programming parallel vector networks. After this was accomplished, chaos modeling techniques would provide a means to reformulate the neural network model in such a way as to transform the parallel vector streams into full-blown m-valued operators, which is how the m-valued exchange units would be programmed into the model.

3. In the context of a neural network model, reconfigure the canonical equations of the Brunner-Brewer model relative to Stuart Kauffman's “Fitness Landscape” approach, which is the Santa Fe Institute's foremost model of complex systems. The fitness landscape is a display format for model output which is much improved over that employed by Brunner-Brewer.

4. Kauffman's approach does not model systems undergoing graded transitions; its variables must either be on or off. This problem can be solved by expanding Kauffman's canonical equations through use of m-valued variables, as opposed to single-valued variables. In the computer simulation model, this would mean that the local and provincial currencies nested to the peso as a basket would be functionally m-valued.

5. The economic subsystem of the Brunner-Brewer model was in part based on Paul Samuelson's account of multiplier accelerator analysis. This aspect of the model would be expanded using the Young-Paine-Pensinger account of how accelerations control information flow into and out of a complex system (Young originated the notion in creating the rotor for the Bell helicopter; Paine independently arrived at the same concept in describing cascade effects [i.e., equivalent of the “multiplier”] in tornado genesis.

6. The full model -- unfiltered for accelerations -- would then be used to simulate the effects of tagging local and provincial sustainable development indicators to the m-values of the local and provincial currencies nested to the peso as a basket.

7. Once local and provincial sustainable development indicators were incorporated into the model, its simulation output would be compared to behavior of fractal drums receiving information from the environment. This comparison would be made in order to tune the model for optimal levels of fractal entrapment.

8. The output of these simulations would then be compared to Argentine historical data sets in the period prior to collapse of the peso in order to evaluate effectiveness of m-valued local and provincial exchange units in protecting the peso and enhancing performance of the Argentine economy.

Dear Sir:
For the past several years, I have been thinking my way into the concept of m-valued monetary units. In 1994, I learned from a Swiss economist that something similar had been attempted by several principalities in Weimar Germany, but that it had not been successful due to the lack of computing capability. In the same conversation, a planner said that during the early 1930s something similar had been tried in Western Canada and had failed for similar reasons. These pieces of history encouraged me to push my thought regarding the basic concept.

The occasion leading to the present proposal was my recent discovery in the library of Brunner and Brewer's 1971 book, Organized Complexity. I immediately noted that their computer simulation model had many similarities to a multiscale numerical simulation model I had played a role in developing in the mid-70s. The model, however, was not related to economic and political forecasting, but to the simulation of severe local storms -- thunderstorms and tornadoes. At that time, I was an assistant to an atmospheric scientist at Cornell. The Cornell model involved a cascade theory of tornado genesis. Energy and momentum cascades from larger scales of motion to smaller in formation of thunderstorm supercells and tornadoes. This was a deterministic model which incorporated elements of relativity physics, to which quantum approaches were being incorporated. At the time, however, chaos theory was rapidly entering atmospheric science and the deterministic cascade model was increasingly left to lay fallow.

I cannot be sure, as I have not had the opportunity to conduct the required research, but it seems likely that a similar fate may have befallen the Brunner-Brewer model. Toward the end of their account, they illustrate a procedure employed in their sensitivity analysis by defining a parameter space upon which contour maps of variations in juxtaposed parameters are displayed. This is so similar to the Santa Fe Institute “Fitness Landscape” that one cannot help but view it as one origin of the Santa Fe Institute approach -- suggesting that the Brunner-Brewer model was supplanted by chaos theory approaches.

In the Cornell cascade model, quantum approaches were beginning to be incorporated because simulations inevitably led the researchers to the conclusion that the involved variables were fully multivalued in nature. In fact, it became apparent that the energy-momentum cascade was a decomposition process wherein the macroscale motion field held all the microscale information in a multivalued format. So, the emphasis began to shift toward a focus on modeling the multivalued properties of macroscopic wave motions.

Indeed, Brunner-Brewer in their last chapter, while discussing degree of connectedness of components and the issue of decomposeability, note that one must suppose that the variables are actually multivalued, whereas the model treats them as single-valued for heuristic purposes. The Brunner-Brewer model, then, would be improved by the employment of quantum approaches -- which, in their undissimulated form, are m-valued (not probabilistic).

To my delight, I was again yesterday surveying the library and ran across a 1973 paper by the Nobel-winning economist Paul A. Samuelson entitled: “A Quantum-Theory Model of Economics: Is the Co-ordinating Entrepreneur Just Worth his Profit?” I had never seen this paper before. It is hidden in a collection of papers published by MIT Press under the title: Development and Planning (Jagdish Bhagwati and Richard S. Eckaus, editors, 1973). As one aspect of the Brunner-Brewer model is based on Samuelson's analysis of multiplier-accelerator effects (the cascade process in its economic guise), this 1973 paper by Samuelson suggests that intuitively he was reaching for a similar orientation at just the time single-valued chaos theory was more and more supplanting m-valued quantum approaches (in parallel with the Reaganomics shift back to unbridled Cartesian-Newtonian naïveté in political economy, by way of back-reaction to effects of greater and greater infusion of quantum-based technologies into the global economy, its stock, commodity, derivative, and monetary markets).

In the model suggested by the present proposal, a national currency, e.g., the peso, would be treated as a macroscale information field, which, through multiplier-accelerator effects, decomposes into provincial and local currencies. Once this was adequately modeled, the scale-level partitioning of the model could be shifted to larger or smaller grid lengths, longer or shorter time steps, so as to encompass regional or global economies, interlocal or intralocal economies -- every one of which being subject to changing time steps due to technologically- and administratively-forced alteration in transaction times (the times taken to execute given categories of economic exchange). Altered time steps modify velocity of monetary through-put and multiplier-accelerator effects. These altered temporal parameters change the operations of money-in-movement upon an economy, wherein the economy acts, for instance, as if the money supply had expanded or contracted, when in actual point of fact this has not occurred. The presently proposed computer model would be able to simulate such effects in considerable detail and study chaotic transitions undergone by economies which suffer mismatches between the grid lengths upon which monetary exchange units are defined and the time steps governing movement of those exchange units between grids (i.e., regional, national, and local geographies of legal tender).

I am most of the way through your dissertation at this point, which seems to me a brilliant piece of work, particularly given the time at which it was written -- twenty years before the flurry of interest in indicators. There will be much discussion between us of indicators and indexes and all that in the future, I suspect, regarding m-valued exchange units, so let me address something more fundamental here.

In noting your opposition to centralized administration and in developing indicators of administrative performance (to ride on the back of urbanization indicators and development indicators), you quote Robert Heine-Goldern writing in 1956, “Conceptions of State and Kingship in Southeast Asia”, to the effect that the traditional Siamese conception of the capital is as the center of the universe. Mabbett, in his article published in 1978 in the Journal of the Siam Society, “Kingship at Angkor”, arrives at a similar notion by regarding the traditional “lack of boundedness” as a stage in the development of geographical boundaries. I regard both of these perspectives as Westernized interpretations filtered through the distorting lens of Cartesian-Newtonian assumptions (particularly those assumptions about the nature of identity as a metaphysical category). Anthropologist Clifford Geertz’s (The Interpretation of Cultures, N.Y.: Basic Books, 1973) treatment of the King/Emperor as an “exemplary center” is closer to the truth, but still misses the mark.

The emeritus Kyoto University anthropologist Kawai Hayao, I believe, offers insight leading to a more faithful understanding of the traditional conception. In a little-known article published in the C. G. Jung Institute’s Eranos Yearbook 1985, “The Hidden Gods in Japanese Mythology”, he provides a discussion of the Japanese myth of creation in relation to decision making. In this mythology, the Emperor is called an “empty center”, an empty center in what is essentially a decision-free system. Is this the same thing as Heine-Goldern’s “the center of the universe”? I do not think so.

Heine-Goldern’s conception is rooted in the idea of power; power is supposed to emanate from the center. The notion of an “empty center”, however is related to the Buddhist concept of “dependent origination” -- wherein the center represents or symbolizes the superintegration of the whole: the interfusion, the “relative-state”, or the identity transparency of whole and part.

An “empty center” is also related to the Hindu creation myth depicted in bas-relief on the gates of Angkor Thom and Preah Kham as “The Churning of the Sea of Milk”. The paddle plunges into the sea at an empty center, a spacetime singularity. The handle of the paddle is referred to in the Vedas as a “transevering axis”. The other reference to this is the “Pillar of Heaven” riding on the back of a tortoise swimming in the Sea of Milk, upon which there is an octagonal (equilateral triangular) geometric matrix, at the central point of which, the pillar rests.

Deep in the Sea of Milk -- the primordial vacuum -- rides a sacred tortoise, Vishnu, shell inscribed with the “wormhole” mesh of spacetime foam (the Einstein-Rosen bridge, a geometric diagram of a blackhole and a whitehole, i.e., a wormhole, is a matrix of equilateral triangles). Upon the back of the tortoise rides the generative monolith, Mt. Mandara. Rotate this “mountain” -- an axis of spin -- with “operator time”, signified by a coiled serpent, and the milk is churned into the quantum foam of spacetime. Time operates on space to generate form, the “butter” of the incarnate world.

This is the creation myth of the Ramayana. The center of the universe in this Hindu-quantum-relativistic conception is not a power center, but a spacetime singularity, an empty center about which event-gradients spontaneously self-organize due to the principle of “dependent origination” (the equivalent quantum-gravity term being “relative-state”). The spacetime singularity of dependent origination is a “strange attractor”, in the exact sense of contemporary chaos theory. As long as the center remains “empty” and thus functioning as a “ strange attractor” -- does not try to determine the flow of events through self-initiated hierarchical imposition -- “allowing” (non-doing) by its symbolic role unimpeded operations of dependent origination, order spontaneously emerges. If the symbolic role of the “empty center” is in any way molested or maligned (lese majeste), disorder results through disruption of the operations of dependent origination as a “strange attractor”.

The operations of dependent origination were intensively metareferenced (referred to, symbolized) in traditional social and cultural multi-utilities (daily-life artifacts and ritual behaviors having both practical functions and meta-functions). In this way the social structure of attention became a facilitator of the “strange attractor” without the necessity of coercion. The metareferencing of the identity transparency associated with dependent origination was, on a tacit level, of necessity logically m-valued.

Any present going beyond the semi-colonial, quasi-colonial, and French-modeled hyper-bureaucratic condominium administrative models, as developed in response to Western incursion, would involve finding contemporary forms of metareferencing of the operations of dependent origination, such as, for instance, m-valued monetary exchange units tagged to sustainable development indicators.

The few economists who have condescended to talk with me or correspond with me, with several notable exceptions, maintain that I make use of much technical terminology, but that I do not properly understand the terms I employ. This criticism is most assuredly well taken, as I am intentionally conflating half-a-dozen disciplines in presenting the ideas I receive. Validity of their criticism is strongly reinforced by the fact that, though I have formal academic training, this training is not officially verifiable and was not officially sanctioned. It took the form of collaborative tutorials within the official confines of academia, but without its framework of incentives and injunctions -- as I never sought a degree, only to follow implications of ideas received. One might say I am a tutored autodidact, a nearly extinct form of avionic dinosaur. Heeea! Heeea! There are great holes in my knowledge of every area, as I learned only what I needed to know in order to continue following implications of the ideas I received. I did not acknowledge disciplinary boundaries; I did not take tests; I did not aspire to the next level; I did not accept peer criticism because I had no peers (no one else, as far as I knew, spent decades “in” academia without seeking a degree, a career, monetary reward, and so on). Heeea! Heeea! Heeea! I made my living with a pick and shovel digging trees in the fields of various nurseries, at times on a piecework basis, making every effort to transmute this physical activity into a form of daily self-observational meditation -- applying to this subjective effort many of the techniques of stress-oriented training I had been exposed to while being molded into a Special Forces medic.

Look, I really don’t care about your concern that the Cartesian-Newtonian-Lockean electoral process should transpire unmolested. There has never been an unmolested election. It is true that what I have said about fractal boundaries could be applied to, as you say, “redistricting electoral maps” -- more accurately, reconceptualizing the notion of boundaries of electoral districts subject to periodic redistricting on the basis of population changes. But I have zero interest in mechanics of the franchise, as I have no interest in being represented. I do not believe in the necessity of politics being a decision science. Since, therefore, according to my belief, no decisions need be made, I do not wish to delegate this unnecessity. Fractal boundaries interest me relative to functions of adaptation to a changing socio-politico-economic and natural environment, not relative to being represented by some unnecessity.

The American army was militarily defeated in Viet Nam by employment of fractal boundaries (and by direct implication, psychosocial surfaces-as-measures) relative to functions of adaptation to a changing combat environment by a socioeconomic-politico-military underground apparat (a “terrorist network”). Nested jurisdictional boundaries were not gerrymandered on a 10-year cycle; they were gerrymandered on a continuous ongoing basis so as to maximize efficiency in implementation of the apparat’s various functions. For example, boundaries were changed to create infiltration corridors as a prelude to upcoming offensive activity (boundary change as military indicator). They were changed to some other configuration immediately after the offensive, because the environment of the combat had changed such that the infiltration corridors were no longer needed; something else was now needed, requiring different borders if it was to transpire with maximized efficiency. Such borders were drawn as topologically closed circles on maps by American intelligence personnel and those trained by such personnel, but these circles were not functionally closed circles; the lines forming the closed circles were actually surfaces-as-measures, measures of psychosocial event gradients (contour maps, i.e., surfaces) set up by the boundary changes within the whole territory enclosed by the closed circle: a boundary change was automatically accompanied by personnel re-allocations, new role positions, new mission statements for old role positions, new AOs and TAORs, new echelons, new functional elements, new mission statements for old functional elements, new recruitment policies, and on and on (each of these dynamic changes being a measure and an indicator -- of what? level of self-organizational competency and the types of activities characteristic of that spectrum of capability vis-à-vis the domain of conflict). Certain functions were trapped by these fractal-borders-become-surfaces-as-measures; others, not. The boundaries were band-pass behavioral sieves (i.e., served the function of fractal boundaries) on a multiply-connected double-stacked bureaucratic entity; they were not mechanics of franchise, means by which the unnecessity of representation transpired. There are no representatives in an organic process transpiring on basis of quantum principles of self-organization and holographic identity states.

I am interested in fractal boundaries as band-pass behavioral sieves on the m-values stacked upon a currency base (local, provincial, national, regional) relative to economic, sustainable development, administrative performance, and quality of life indicators holographically mapped, depicted, and communicated with surface-as-measure theory, fiber bundle arithmetics, and m-valued logics. This is how I imagine the unnecessity of representatives will be undone and politics will cease being mistaken for a decision science. Libertarianism is dead because it was not sufficiently liberated. Anarcho-capitalism is dead because it had too little insight into the self-oganizational properties of anarchistic identity states. As for the franchise, I believe it will be replaced not by an electronic commons, but by computer gaming the strategic planning aspects of tagging indicators to m-weights on any given currency base. Just as houses in medieval Japan were designed by every member of the family, including children -- as a game of moving rectangles around on the ken-unit-length grid -- so every member of the population corpus constituting the local political economy will contribute to the choosing of weights for tagging indicator-measures to m-values on the currency base by playing computer games. No unnecessaries, i.e., representatives, will be needed or desired as intermediaries. Take the Glass-Bead Game out of the academy into the arcade as human chess in quantum computing!

I repeat: market-mediated fractal entrapment with m-logically-valued exchange units is an alternative to tariff barriers.

Thank you very much for allowing me to post a copy of the 1996 Cesky indicators project proposal. Completion of such a project is an absolute prerequisite to implementation of m-valued exchange units.

LOCAL SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS (LSDI) PROJECT, CESKY KRUMLOV, CZECH REPUBLIC

1996
Courtesy of the Office of the Cesky Krumlov Planning Project

CESKY KRUMLOV STRATEGIC PLANNING MISSION

Preamble

Located in the valley of the Vltava River adjacent to the Blansky Les Protected Landscape Area and in the foothills of the Sumava Biospheric Reserve and National Park, Cesky Krumlov's location within a very beautiful and varied natural environment, and its splendid historical townscape, is a positive basis for the qualitative development of the town. Due to these superior attributes, Cesky Krumlov and its critical region are experiencing a growing influx of tourists and are likely to become the focus of longer term migrants seeking greater amenity. The involved critical region is the general area extending from Cesky Budejovice in the north to the Austrian border in the south, and between Lake Lipno in the west and Kaplice to the east. Of great importance to the town's sustainable attributes mission is the condition of the Vltava River from its source to Cesky Budejovice and the southern portion of the Sumava Biospheric Reserve. Community leaders in Cesky Krumlov are aware of the possible negative impacts of mass tourism on the culture, environment, and economy of the town and its hinterland.

Concern about tourism becoming the dominant economic activity results in the intent to bring about a harmonious sustainable development of the natural and cultural wealth of the town and its region. This includes some commitment to developing a well-rounded, high quality of life for inhabitants based on a diversified economy -- a condition in which the community fully participates in related decision making. In this context, the tourism sector needs to be both locally controlled and beneficial. Thus, maintaining superior cultural and environmental conditions to support a sustainable economy is considered an overarching strategic issue.

Associated with this issue is the need to develop effective planning and management systems, informed citizen participation, and related public-private partnerships. A key factor for success will be the town's understanding of its global strategic environment, which necessitates being well informed on alternatives, and the ability to act with skill and flexibility. Of significance is the problem of obtaining these attributes in the administration of a small town with limited human and financial resources. This situation suggests the need for innovative harnessing of relevant knowledge and skills found outside the town’s administration in proximate private and public entities.

Mission Statement

Formulate a long-range development strategy to facilitate the economic well being of Cesky Krumlov's citizens, while sustaining the environmental resources and cultural values of the town in its symbiotic relationship to the hinterland. Particular attention is given to:

1. Developing the town as a single, harmoniously integrated unit;
2. Increasing the town’s independence, balanced by it’s own moral and financial responsibility for this change;
3. Sustaining the symbiotic relationship of the town with the natural, social, and cultural attributes of its critical region;
4. Increasing the capability of the town’s administration, including its ability to undertake strategic planning and management.

LOCAL SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT INDICATORS STAGE
OF THE STRATEGIC PLANNING PROJECT

Shifting sustainable development from concept to fact requires the formulation of indicators to monitor and assess development. This need was emphasized at the 1992 Rio Conference. To date, progress has been made at the international and national levels through the efforts of SCOPE and other governmental and non-governmental bodies. Local indicators for use at the municipal and bioregional levels are also essential, but less work has been done to address this requirement.

The Czech Republic situation reflects the above stated global condition. Under the auspices of SCOPE and the Czech Ministry of the Environment, significant progress is being made at the national level. It is now appropriate to begin to address the need for local indicators. In this context, the town of Cesky Krumlov offers an excellent opportunity to undertake a pilot project to design and institutionalize local indicators for sustainable development.

Cesky Krumlov's administration is in the process of formulating and implementing a long-range strategy for sustainable development of the town and its bioregion. As part of this process, local sustainable development indicators need to be designed for the town to monitor so as to evaluate the implementation of its development strategy and action plans. The indicators can thus function as performance criteria. We are proposing a two-year project to formulate and institutionalize sustainable development indicators for Cesky Krumlov. During the first year, we will focus on the formulation and testing of the indicators, as well as initiate the important element of identifying the best fit in the community for indicator responsibility. During the second year, while continuing to test and adjust the indicators, we will focus on operationalizing the indicators within appropriate local governmental and non-governmental organizations. In this task, considerable attention will be given to the role of citizen participation in both relevant decision making and operation of the indicator system. The project is designed to permit progress evaluation at the end of one year, before proceeding on to the second year.

Year One

A. DESIGN INDICATOR SET

Objective: To design a set of indicators which reflect the local economic, socio-cultural, and environmental priorities and conditions of Cesky Krumlov (CK). Inter alia, the indicators will be designed for monitoring and evaluating implementation of the town’s strategy for sustainable development.

Structure: An inter-disciplinary task force (TF) will be formed to undertake the project. Some members of this group should also be members of the town’s Strategic Planning Team (SPT), which was established in January of 1996.

Tasks: The TF will review sample indicators (e.g., UN CSD ‘menu’, CR national level indicator list, and other local indicator lists) to select trial CK indicators, but will be free to add or create others. The TF statisticians in particular will be responsible for ascertaining relative to each proposed indicator that: [a] sufficient and reliable data is available; or [b] there presently is not sufficient data, but there likely will be in the future; or [c] data is unavailable. For each proposed indicator, the scale-level resolution of available data (e.g., town, region, nation) will be checked. Deliberation will also cover: [a] the optimum number of indicators; [b] methods of aggregation, so as to avoid a long indicator list (although at this early stage aggregation may not be feasible or necessary); and [c] how often indicators should be revised or changed (this will depend to some degree on the quality of real-time strategic planning and implementation achieved, especially regarding the monitoring and implementation process).

B. DATA APPLICATION

Objective: To develop each indicator in the set.

Structure: A core technical team (TT) will obtain the data and develop the indicators in close consultation with the TF.

Tasks: Obtain all relevant data for each indicator. Data may include non-numerical and non-monetary measures where appropriate. Data quantity and reliability must be carefully rated. Subsequently, the data will be applied to each indicator. The individual indicators will need adjustments to allow for variations in data quality and to insure the indicators conform to local conditions. Methodological work will be required as data is tested to insure that the indicators actually communicate what is intended. The appropriate scale must be used for each indicator. The presentation of the indicators will be graphic in nature, with textural explanations, so the indicator set is user friendly and so as to guard against misinterpretation and misuse. Policy areas relevant to each indicator will be indicated. Once developed, the proposed indicator set will be reviewed by outside parties familiar with CK. In order to make evaluation, the indicators will be distributed on a pilot basis with requests for comments as to how they may be adjusted or otherwise presented to better serve the decision-making process in the town and its hinterland. Adjustments will then be made.

C. INPUTS TO USERS

Objective: To initiate the integration of the use of the indicators in the town’s strategic planning process, and more generally, in the town’s decision making, including fostering a wide community awareness of their existence, potentials for use, and citizen participation.

Structure: The TF will be responsible for assisting the town’s administration in understanding the indicators and their value. It will proceed to analyze the administration on a test basis to determine the best vehicles through which to use the indicators.

Task: During the first year the TF will explore and test ways to integrate use of the indicators on an experimental basis. This task will be integrated with activities A and B above, as the best fit is sought to insure actual use of the indicators. Information regarding employment of the indicators will be distributed to decision makers, planners, and others, for guided pilot testing and subsequent adjustment.

Year Two

The objective of the second year will be to institutionalize the use of the indicators in the town’s administration. This will include the exploration and possible establishment of mechanisms for on-going citizen participation in the process of indicator use.

Cesky Krumlov LSDI Task Force

Town Administration: The involvement of the following offices will be essential to successful formulation and use of the indicators:

1. Office of the Mayor;
2. Town Planning Department;
3. Environmental Officer;
4. Ecology Foundation;
5. Two non-administration members of the Strategic Planning Team and the Regional Planning Officer of the Cesky Krumlov District Office;
6. Statistical Office.

External expertise will be needed during both years of project implementation. The following parties are recommended:

1. Institute of Landscape Ecology, Anthroecology Department, Cesky Budejovice; role: key technical tasks (TT) and some advisory activity (TF);
2. Charles University Environmental Centre, Prague; role: advise on indicators formulation (TT and TF);
3. Strategic Planning Advisor to CK; role: advise on indicators formulation and integration into the town’s strategic planning process and strategy implementation (TT and TF);
4. Czech Government Statistical Office, Prague; role: advise on data and access to unpublished data (TT).

An m-valued currency does not mean that a given item sells for multiple prices, say one dollar, two dollars, and three dollars, the purchaser deciding which one of these to pay; nor is the purchaser required to pay all of these -- i.e., six dollars -- simultaneously or sequentially by credit deferral. The meaning of m-valued is completely different from multiple prices. One useful way to think of the difference between an m-valued currency and a normal currency is to regard the former as analogous to a tonal language (like Chinese, Vietnamese, Thai) and the latter as analogous to a non-tonal language (like English, Latin, French). The currency base is like the base-word upon which tones are placed (articulated). Vietnamese, for instance, has five tones: the base-word can have five meanings depending upon the tone attached to it: same word, different meaning; meanings varying with the tone employed. Words in non-tonal languages can also have multiple meanings; one way in which this occurs is by varying context. Change of meaning with context is also a useful way to think about what m-valued means relative to money. The m-values stacked on a currency base relate to “externalities” of a market “context” (the “externalities” being those factors the market is unable to process without there being an m-valued price to bring the externalities within the purview of the market). Change of context within an m-valued currency system changes the “meaning of a price”. The “meaning of a price” in an m-valued currency system is not only less or more (as is the case in a normal currency system); depending upon how many “tones” simultaneously attached, an m-valued price would inform the potential purchaser of an item as to how that item relates to its context: environmental, social, political, and so on. Contemporary tonal languages (like Thai) attach only a single tone at a time to a given base-word, whereas an m-valued currency system could potentially stack multiple “tones” on the given currency base. There are reasons to believe that, in the remote past, multiple tones may simultaneously have been stacked upon a given base-word in tonal languages. And that this multiple-stacking may have been integrated with the multiple meanings associated with the sacred object in ritual gift exchange, say a soul-cloth. Gift exchange as evocation/propitiation of the sacred was accompanied by ritual sound: chanting, recitation of a mantra. Successfully “carrying a mantra” involves becoming consciously aware of orders of sound “below” and “above” ordinary sound: in some sense related to infrasound and hyper-sound, though this is inadequate, for realization of the overtone series of the involved tone requires “Fourier transforms” which mathematically necessitate “imaginary dimensions” (dimensions numbered with complex numbers like the square-root of minus-one; dimensions we cannot now visualize, nor can we now “hear” the strain tensors mapped there within; dimensions related to what Stephen Hawking has called “imaginary time”). Any given mantra thus “carried” had its corresponding graphical pattern called a yantra. Such a yantra, or an element thereof, appeared as a motif woven into the soul-cloth over which the given mantra was chanted or “carried” during ritual gift exchange. The simultaneous stacking of more than one tone (the tone plus its infra- and hyper-sounds) on a base-word in tonal languages may have fallen by the wayside as, through intergenerational effects of prescriptive enculturation and associated electrochemical changes, direct conscious awareness of the brain's capacity for m-logically-valued processing was lost and authentic sacred, ritual, gift exchange went into abeyance. As this transpired, the order of identity of the “gift”, as embodied in its “price” (especially, perhaps, in the case of “bride price”) underwent a transformation from m-valued to single-valued (visitation of “the goddess” devalued to wholly-ownable property). In authentic m-valued gift exchange, the sacred object exchanged was not the “subject” of the exchange; the object signified the “identity transparency” of giver-receiver, which was the actual subject of exchange. Quoting Sir John Woodroffe (The Garland of Letters: Studies in the Mantra-Sastra, Madras, Ganesh, 1969, p. 19): “Mind [the man of mantra] is called 'transparent' (Svaccha) because it can take the shape of the object presented to it.” Vak (the vac of Svaccha) is “sound” in its most general defining property: “coherent phase relationship”. Acoustically-modified modes are incoherent modes (out of step) made coherent modes (in step, resonant). As more “values” are added to the “price” of the “gift” its capacity to mediate resonant transparency between contexts or modes (i.e., incorporate “externalities”) is increased. The full economic value of incorporation is to intercalate signifiers of identity: a less than fully functional modern attempt at accomplishing this is the informal Japanese keiretsu form of business organization. Employment of m-valued currencies requires only m-valued functions like those involved in the natural logarithms. Were, however, an m-valued currency to be processed using m-valued logics, the capacity of the currency system as a whole to fully internalize externalities would be greatly enhanced. Explicate as implicate; implicate as explicate. Monas erat explicite: implicite Myrias. The currency base would be the processing domain for the m-valued prices specified within the currency system. The base-state of the currency would be a reference space (a frequency domain recording the changing “tones” stacked on the currency as changing m-valued prices). John Woodroffe's pre-WWI-era discussions of sTongpa-nyid (in Tibetan, rDzog-pa chen-po) in the Demchog-Tantra are extremely suggestive regarding “mechanics” of such an m-logically-valued reference space.

Well, there are many issues here. I regard Buddhism in general, and particularly its social projection as institutionalized Buddhism, a step back away from “all this”. Tantra can be viewed a failed counter-reformation, an attempt to take Buddhism back to before Buddhism, back to spontaneous tribal fusion. Theory and practice of detachment was not to transcend the obsessions of modern life, as is often currently taught; it was to overcome the “attachment” to the “object” of perception and proprioception characteristic of animistic “identity transparency” (the Svaccha Woodroffe speaks of): embodied quite literally in the public group sex that took place about the ritual maypole, the sacred mount, the transevering axis riding upon the turtle's back as it paddled across the paddy, the axial pillar at the center of the stupa. That Buddhism attacked “all this” is clearly seen in how the Buddhist scribes rewrote the folk epics earlier transmitted only orally, e.g., the way in which treatment of the Rocket Festival is truncated, distorted, and maligned in the Isan (Thailand) folk epic “Phadaeng Nang Ai” in the 14th century written version (the text breaks off at multiple locations where it is clear discourses on aspects of sexual yoga have begun). Sexual experience having something to do with perception and proprioception of exterior and interior “objects”, one must countenance. As a child, I was a witness to this public group sex on planting day three years running, so… Successful suppression of quality in psychological aspects (perceptual and proprioceptive direct apprehension of “identity transparency”: literal inability to distinguish in immediacy“my” foot from “your” foot, not a mere loss of consciousness at the omega point) of sexual experience is inevitably associated with the impulse to collective suicide, an impulse the species as a whole has become increasingly committed to as animistic peoples have been evermore eradicated, or failing that final solution, subjected to forced assimilation. The modern notion “materialism” was not the impetus to Buddhist commitment to detachment. Animism lives with natural nature, not Buddhism. Detachment is a drawing back from the power of the object to shape the mind through what social anthropologists have disparagingly designated “participation mystique” or “participation inconsciente”. The gardening traditions Buddhism has spawned (one of which I devoted 15 years to the study and practice of) clearly indicate its withdrawal from natural nature, its abstracting out, its making of nature another room of the house of society. Prisoner in the house of Agape. Standing with your pruning shears above the Ming tree or bonsai specimen. Compassion is a rather “superior” paternalistic placement of conscious awareness upon the high altar stationed above life as natural nature (just walk into a Buddhist temple someday); the compassion of the abstracted-out is not generative empathy, which is the utter “identity transparency” of the burrowed-in. To hope ethical imperatives promulgated through “engaged” Buddhist association will lead to redress of ecological dyscrasia is to misassess the impulse which is fundamental Buddhism. High culture and high religion everywhere and at all times have rejected natural nature and the animistic modes of consciousness embedding humanity within natural nature -- regardless of the incessant, cloying black propaganda to the contrary. Brahmanism, Confucianism, the Sangha, church hierarchies, all social stratifications are set against the defining property of animistic modes of comprehension: the “identity transparency” inherent to natural nature. It was not by accident that Buddhism institutionalized itself in the fashion it did; institutional form is an analogical reflection of worldview construct. Actual reformation of the Sangha, no mere ethical window-dressing, would involve renunciation of Buddhism. Just as the “relative-state” hypothesis in quantum theory has been rejected by the mainstream, so the notion of “dependent origination” (which corresponds to “relative-state”) was thoroughly ignored throughout historical evolution of Buddhism, Buddhist institutions, and Buddhist influence on larger social patterns. Where the notion of “dependent origination” has come to the fore in Buddhism, the involved sect has been a cult-like attempt to resurrect one or another form of pre-Buddhist animism. Were this not the case, how could institutional Buddhism have proceeded through the gatha of patriarchs, a lineage in the form of a hierarchical tree which, in and of itself, completely denies validity of the notion of “dependent origination”? Indeed, “dependent origination”, though widely attributed as an insight original to Buddhism, actually preceded Buddhism, was assimilated to Buddhism, was a syncretistic adhesion to the body of Buddhist thought, something “attached” from animism: Hindu tribalism, Taoism, Shinto, et cetera. The original distributed (identity transparent) notion of kinghood (tribal Kings of Fire and Water: both continuous, not discrete) preceded Brahmanism preceded Buddhism, with the appearance of which hierarchical interpretation relative to discrete entities rapidly ensued. In pedestrian discourse, one accepts the unstated assumptions for the sake of discourse; if more fundamental questions are raised, however, then one is permitted to speak beyond the hidden givens. Access is limited by that which is tacitly carried to the engagement.

Continuous versus the discrete; the atemporal vs. time; collective vs. individual; impersonal vs. personal; static vs. dynamic; empathy vs. abstraction; trophotropic vs. ergotropic: the human species is foundering on these logocentric binaries and has barely the ghost of a chance for actual survival. Can't dance! The fact that most people would argue that “empathy” and “abstraction” are herein placed in the wrong order is just an indicator of that prognosis. If there is a survival, it appears likely to be as a genomically-modified cybernetic prosthesis. Humanity has massively committed itself to its own demise. For how many tens of thousands of years did humans exchange fluids in the jungle in close proximity to monkeys? Then, during the very decade of onset of genetic engineering, AIDS for the first time appears. A mere coincidental occurrence supported by the odds over such a long period? It just had to happen sooner or later as the density matrix of interspecies contacts hit the critical threshold (due to road building)? Proximal cause, temporally and spatially? Non-parametric statistical inference? Right! Genetic engineering is a human attack on the very notion of “dependent origination”; biotechnology, a phenotypic expression of psychophysiologic autoimmunity. Animism, all these thousands of years later, is still the culprit that MUST be annihilated. And since animism is “in here” (if projected “out there”), washing the hands, no matter how many repetitions, how many recursive iterations… Obsessive-compulsive disorder in pandemic incidence, humanity is marking host tissue -- the biosphere -- for self-reactivity. No more edifying than a dog peeing his way down a littered inner-city street. What matters the agent or how well the stream is controlled and directed? If hacking genomes -- arbitrarily dissociated (from the one-and-only planetary genome) -- is not a form of autoimmunity, what is? This sort of identity dyscrasia is electrochemical vomiting-defecation in one's own neural nest. Autogenic brain discharges with electromagnetic and stereochemical properties altered from their “natural frequencies”. Collective rage makes its own designer genes in “28 Days” or less. Hello. This is more The Book of the It and Snapping, than Gustave Le Bon, William McDougall, the UC-Berkeley era in studies of collective human behaviors, social structure of attention, social identity theory, smart crowds. Such befouled networks irradiate their environments, sooner or later affecting even RNA viruses. AIDS being only one of many autoimmune/immune-competency diseases going to epidemic proportions: gingivitis, even. The one that gets you won't be the one you're monitoring. Be sure of that! You think this isn't possible? Then you don't know enough about the quantum-wave dynamics of intraneuronal DNA and the critical-state properties of collective and cooperative quantum behaviors. All your categories are off in LaLaLand! One binary revolving around another, turning to cognitive butter. This has been a long-term problem with human brain oft discussed by the Old Ones, but it is now rising to terminal fulmination. John Woodroffe tried to penetrate the involved issues back during the incubation period for WWI, an early mid-stage in onset of the prevailing collective autoimmunity (p. 23, The Garland of Letters):

Indian doctrine revolves round the two concepts of Changelessness and Change. As these propositions cannot be logically predicated of the same substance [emphasis added], recourse is had to the doctrine of aspects. According to this, Brahman as It is in Itself (Brahmasvarupa) or Siva does not change, but Brahman as the Power (Sakti) from which the world evolves does, as Maya, change. It is perhaps more simple to say that Brahman produces and exists as the world without derogation to Its own unchanging unity. How this can be is, like other ultimates, inconceivable [emphasis added]. But its truth is said to rest on two established facts, namely the daily experience of the world of the many on the one hand, and the ecstatic (Samadhi) experience of the One on the other. Both are facts of experience though how [emphasis in original] they can be so is a mystery.

As these propositions cannot be logically predicated of the same substance within binary logic, the 2-valued order of m-valued logics, we can see that How this can be is, like other ultimates, inconceivable independent of decomposition of the m-logically-valued reference space (MVRS): on the most-dense m-valued reference sheet, all “lights” fully lit as Platonic-ontological anamnesis (Aurobindo's Plato and Vedic Idealism is useful here); on the decomposed single-valued sheets, and their less-than-order-m Regge cross-sheet lattices, the graded “Christmas-tree effect” as ontic forgetfulness, i.e., consensuation of a life-world of discrete objects though collective amnesia. Mankind in Amnesia. Understanding of how this can be so, via knowledge through identity, is animism; mystification of this as essentially inconceivable is high culture, be the given high culture based in Brahmanism, Buddhism, undecidability, deterministic chaos, entanglement by uncertainty, probability-in-itself on a p-brane-as-such, and so on. This is not to suggest that what is animistically known through identity cannot also be logically explicated; it just cannot be logically detailed in 2-logically-valued terms, and the principia requires Musculpt as mathematical notation. One is again referred to the discussion of lattice mappings of Gödel numbers. Why this has been inconceivable, and largely remains so, is because of the several sessions of glutamaturgic neuronal etching sustained by human brain in course of the forced indoctrination designated enculturation which severs awareness from m-logically-valued quantum processing, beginning in utero and largely running its course by soon after adolescence (although nowadays this is generally felt to be inadequate and additional constraints, some of them soon sure to involve satellites, are placed upon those persons who have not yet reached the age for subjection to higher enculturation). Given that endogenous ketamine is an antidote to glutamate flood, it is not surprising that considerable insight into this might be found in the “Tank Logs” of John C. Lilly, M.D., recording descriptive phenomenology of numerous rigorously controlled experiments conducted over many years whereupon the glutamate flood was suddenly, if briefly, quenched, and wherein non-attributable unsullied awareness as the sTongpa-nyid of the Demchog-Tantra is presented the task once again of finding the Way from the MVRS back via decomposition to the object-world of Maya. Of course, there are other ways to conduct the same class of experiments. When all the logical-values stacked on a Gödel-numbered point, and when all such values on all such points on the MVRS are fully lit, “nothing ever changes”; formation of propositions-order-less-than-m by which “everything is nothing but changes” occurs only if lights go out (forgetting what is always already there: collective amnesia). The greater the nescience, the more the object-world is: what entropy is really all about. Operator-time -- the active aspect of pure consciousness -- turns the logic-light rheostat upon the MVRS -- the passive aspect of pure consciousness -- to off and back to full-on by effecting spontaneous localization and fusion, and thus is Maya born and unborn, thus is She unborn yet born (for this does not occur in linear-time, which exists only to the degree that lights are out). Economics, as ritual gift exchange, used to be about such matters as this.

The act more than any other which made possible over several thousand years MANkind's repeated gang rape of Mother Nature was removal of the coins attached to Her veil, to Her skirt. Stripped from skirting frameworks, and more fundamentally the veil, coin became king of the mount and organized the violations. Dance of the Seven Veils is the welling-up of Turangalila jitterbug, pure Ceylonese hipster, the Zitterbewegung of cosmogenesis, epigenesis, phylogenesis, embryogenesis. The Sun Goddess refuses to leave Her cave, Pralaya, until the veil is removed, the skirt dropped, the dance performed, and coin of the realms is held before Her gaze as the most perfect mirror of all and everything lying hidden in Her ground state. So, what is being veiled? What the veil? What the skirt? What the coin? What the mirror? How is the veil removed, the skirt pulled down? The veil of Kashmiri chiffon, like the smart-skirt, is woven upon a meta-loom, and it is no surprise that the I-Ching coins have Laya holes for centers. At base, upon the veiled ground, latent coin of exchange is Advaita (non-dual by virtue of being m-logically-valued); stripped from the skirt, cast to the four winds, globalized coin in free trade is patent as Dvaita (dual by virtue of its Boolean algebra). Coin of the skirt's realms, Samanya-spanda -- in current parlance, zero-point motion of Heisenberg uncertainty (a mere intimation of the skew-perpendicularity between lines of force and equipotential surfaces upon which yarrow stalks fall) -- pulls activity after itself, pulls from generic to particular (logical precedence as the basis of ontogenesis; base-state, a pregeometric domain of logical-operators-order-m). Operators, m-logically-valued, hidden behind the veil, pulled by transforms all the way from complex harmonic motion to the simple harmonic oscillator, coin attached to Her skirt: Sabda-paramanu. Attached to the skirt of Maya (Ma = not; Ya = That: that That which is without attributes, is Aditi, that which cannot be divided or cut, the “perfect fluid” for rotational motions) upon which the formless is given geometrodynamic form: domain structure, spacetime laminate, limited spacetime domain. Tossing coins hither and yon across the money changer's tables is to cut identity exchange (entanglement) from its natural moorings: forms uninformed become emergent. How is the eternal coin unveiled, the skirt pulled down? As Woodroffe says, writing prior to WWI (p. 56):

The term “eternal” [as applied to a “whatnot”, not to time itself] may mean “always is” (a) without change or (b) with change. The former is existence uncontradicted in the three times [emphasis added, and I would append: i.e., 3-fold complex-imaginary operator-time as active topological operator on the MVRS, and which should replace the Hamiltonian operator in the original unbound unmolested Schrödinger wave equation, the only such Schrödinger personally ever wrote, rather than the mere addition of initial and boundary conditions arbitrarily imposed by Dirac so as to obtain solutions that could be consensuated]. Change again may be either immanent (Svagata) [that is, “downward” cascade from Advaita to Dvaita, spontaneous localization of the wave-function] or its reverse (Taditara) [“upward” cascade from Dvaita to Advaita, spontaneous fusion of the wave-function]. Thus if there be only one circle (A) any change going on within it is Svagata change or distinction (Bedha). But if there be two circles (A) and (B) of which the latter added a part of itself to the former with the result that (A) is changed, this is not Svagata. Thus Svagata change is Advaita whilst Non-Svagata change presupposes Dvaita.

Topological operations of the three times are here treated as set theoretical: point-set topology. The changeless background is the generic, the general of generals, the class of classes. Akasa, Vayu, Tejas, Ap, Prthivi (Ether, Air, Fire, Water, Earth): Russellian “types”, classes of classes, the stem cells of cosmic involution. The arithmetic of transfinite sets: “Purna remains Purna though Purna be taken from it,” to again quote Woodroffe (p. 57) again paraphrasing the Tantra of which Schrödinger was a life-long student. No classes of classes, except those transfinite, are undiminished under subtraction. What classes of classes? The classes of minima and their differing Adrstas, i.e., point-positions on the cross-sheet Regge lattices depicted on the yantra-weave of the skirt of Maya where coins of the realms are tied (stacked on points and numbered with numbered Gödel numbers). Who can see-hear these coins without a photo-acoustic spectrometer to read the coherent waves radiated by the superconducting mirror (moon, the pessary-tympanum of a fractal drum) the Sun Goddess carries around in Her purse? Universal Observer Q: Hiranyagarbha! And all those who see-hear with his/her eye-ear upon entry into Savicara Samprajnata-Samadhi (glutamate flood having been judiciously dealt with for duration of the state).

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