Oil peak dynamics did not begin with 9/11! Where did you get that idea? They began in the early-1950s with the coup in Iran; the late-1940s, if you want to include formation of Israel as a nation-state. Publicly stated rationales and subsequent documentary revelations never accurately reflect thought of the policy principals. And it is not the case that the policy principals always learn what the public learns just before the public learns it. In any phase transition there are dynamical regimes ordered by levels, spread equilibrium to far from equilibrium, stable to meta-stable to catastrophically disorganized as critical-state boiling is reached. These two events -- Israel, Iran coup d'état -- laid down the rules of the game that would be played. All major players comprehended this from the earliest days -- however little they may have liked it. New rules were added along the way, as circumstances evolved, e.g., the manner in which Eisenhower played the Suez crisis established the pecking order amongst rule imposers. This was little more than a reminder that the pecking order Eisenhower had imposed more than a decade earlier was not to be forgotten. If you want to understand why the Saudis have long funded those who claim to wish their overthrow, you've got to understand the rules of the game as it has been played. In MOON, there is given a conversation at MACV-HQ in early-1968, a conversation that in substance actually took place there at that time, and which took place in substance numerous times the previous year at JFK Special Warfare Center in the period just before outbreak of the Six Day War. Though there was mention in the press at the time, many people seem unaware the 82nd Airborne Brigade was issued desert gear and camped out on the flight line awaiting deployment. U. S. Special Forces units were poised on Malta for insertion. I personally was assigned to a “Go Team”, locked in a blockhouse on Smoke Bomb Hill, and placed on 2-hour alert for a flight to Tel Aviv. Here is an excerpt from the 1968 Dillon-Toussaint conversation, published in 1994 (MOON, Vol. 2, pp. 67-8):
“Oil is a limited resource slowly running out. The U.S. wants for itself and its allies as much as it can get as cheap as it can get it. Ideally, it would stop domestic production -- save its own for the future -- and buy cheap from the oil producing Third World. This dependency on foreigners, however, involves security risks, so a production compromise is made while every effort is undertaken to control to its own advantage the political scene of the Third World producers. In the Middle East, Israel is the surrogate in this effort to maintain a political environment favorable to U.S. economic interests. This is the real reason our support for Israel is so vigorous; other reasons are minor determinants. But the oil producing Arabs know oil is all they've got. Once it's gone the development game is over. Every kind of carrot and stick is used to force them to keep production high, prices low. One producer is played off against another, Israel being the main stick. But the success of this policy can be sustained only so long: so long as the volume of oil in the ground remains relatively high, so long as the Arabs can be kept at one another's throats, so long as the arms provided as a carrot do not seriously threaten to overcome the military capabilities of Israel, the stick. But the longer the policy succeeds, the more explosive the end consequences become. The societies on the receiving end are being so severely raped, the violence of the back-reaction cannot be doubted. The longer the policy succeeds, the more force required to keep it succeeding, the more apocalyptic the end will be. And the policy may not find its end in the Middle East. The effects of the policy bleed over the whole globe. Even a non-fossil-fuel energy breakthrough will not prevent an apocalyptic end to the policy. Given such a breakthrough, the producers would be completely denied realization of the 'revolution of rising expectations'; they could not go back to the world that once was, and they would have been denied entry to the new world. The only possible results of U.S. oil policy are: terrorism, coup d'état, revolution, assassination, war. It is instructive to remember that, in response to an imposed arms limitation treaty, an attempted American-Anglo-Dutch oil embargo was a primary factor precipitating World War II in the Pacific.”
“I find that comparison spacious, to say the least,” said Jacques.
“Israel survives only because of Arab oil… Y'know, after World War II the Iranian people received about ten percent of the royalties generated from their vast oil sales, the rest going predominantly to those Brits who, due to British colonialism, owned interest in the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company. So, it wasn't any surprise that when the Prime Minister of Iran, Muhammed Mossadegh, nationalized Iranian oil that the plebiscite on the issue was overwhelmingly supported by the Iranian people, nor that those same people -- to this very day -- harbor deep resentment, hatred even, against the U.S. for its embargo of this nationalized oil, for having the CIA organize a coup against Mossadegh, and then seeing to it that the U.S. received a massive increase in its access to Iranian oil in the coup's aftermath… Ten percent. Shit! They shoulda, AT LEAST, got twelve-and-a-half percent.” Derek laughed in one big burst like a wallet-pod of shepherd's-purse showering seeds. “The levels of violence required to keep this Middle East policy in place will jump by huge leaps over the decades until the time comes when no amount of violence will keep the horrendous consequences at bay. Before it's over, American air strikes will have destroyed half the major cities of the Middle East, so as to keep the price down at the pump and to avoid building adequate mass transit systems.”
“Hmmmm.” Talks like an astrologer, doesn't he.
“For the sake of oil, America, the other industrialized nations, and the compromised indigenous elites are raping those cultures. No matter what agreements the power brokers might make -- including those regarding the Palestinian issue -- to legitimize that rape, the long-term consequences will be extraordinary. America will become as embattled as Israel. If the policy continues unabated, fortress America will burn to the ground.”
“What would you suggest?”
“The chain of events leading to the inevitable began in the early 18th century; far be it from me to stand in the way of Newton, Locke, Smith, and Associates. Our great leaders are bent on national suicide, even species suicide. They are likely to achieve their goal. What they don't understand is this: massed force is powerless in face of intelligent use of decentralized and self-organized interdiction. But they're gunna learn.”
“That's hardly a productive response to the question.” Hmmmm. Major problems with reality orientation.
“New concepts are needed across the full spectrum of human activities. The first step would be to stop doing everything possible to block emergence of those concepts.”
Thirty-five years later, that first step has yet to be taken.
And new concepts are the last thing James Howard Kunstler wants in face of the rapidly evolving crisis. One way to interpret the meaning of Kunstler's how-to book The Long Emergency, Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) is to regard the Vice President's “non-negotiable” American way of life as under threat, not by climate shift dynamics, not by resource depletion, not by the first and second laws of thermodynamics, but by the existence of approximately six-billion non-American people on this planet who don’t need to be here. An extensive collection of well-reasoned, poorly reasoned, unreasoned assertions not articulated relative to explicitly stated multiple-scenarios future histories, this book illustrates the need for m-valued logics and the probable horrific consequences of continued employment of monotonic modes of thought. Poorly documented, apparently put together in a rush to press. If in some ways an excellent book, the manner it is done likely will contribute unintentionally to something not so excellent. The book subtly prepares the collective subliminal mind for the enormities sure to come. For instance (p. 21):
If it happens that the human race doesn't make it, then the fact that we were here once will not be altered, that once upon a time we peopled this astonishing blue planet, and wondered intelligently at everything about it and the other things who lived here with us on it, and that we celebrated the beauty of it in music and art, architecture, literature, and dance, and that there were times when we approached something godlike in our abilities and aspirations. We emerged out of the depthless mystery, and back into mystery we returned, and in the end the mystery is all there is.
Justification of and means for ridding ourselves of the unnecessary six billion (a mere six million last time around) has only just begun, but psychological preparations are nonetheless well in hand. Kunstler even suggests one possible means that could be employed (p. 11, with the same basic idea repeated for good measure on p. 176):
Regimes overwhelmed with population pressures -- at a time of crashing worldwide oil supplies and a melting global economic system -- might be tempted to deploy [or, by subliminal suggestion, might already have deployed] “designer” viruses against their own [or other] masses, inoculating beforehand an elite of select survivors.
And we are already formulating the prayers to be said (p. 60):
Let us give thanks for this extraordinary period [the period of oil exploitation when human population of the planet grew in proportion to oil consumption] of human history we have lived through. Let us realize we are moving into a new phase of history. Let's be brave and wise about it, and prepare to move on [with all the other moveon.org's].
Amen. Leaving behind, after our intelligent wondering and wise bravery, at the minimum, half a million extinct species and an omni-transforming climate shift. Sorry, Charlie! Like the wholesale nursery at end of season shoveling into a ditch the unsold potted plants left scattered across the parking lot. Pretty big ramp up from those left behind in Saigon, uh, in Kurdistan, uh, in Afghanistan, uh, in Shiite Iraq, uh, in… wouldn't you say? Why they should be left behind is clearly stated (p. 187):
Cheap oil had allowed populations to explode in precisely those parts of the world that had had, for millennia, a high infant mortality rate and modest life expectancy. Cheap oil was behind the “green revolution” that increased the food supply in the nonindustrial world. Oil was also behind many of the medicines and preventives that had neutralized tropical diseases. Now, suddenly, most of the children actually survived, grew up, and produced more children who survived and grew up, and over the course of the twentieth century, the global populations hurtled into extreme numerical overshoot.
Out of The Dark Continent. From The Rat Holes of Asia. According to this interpretation, all the epidemic and pandemic threats to the West -- past, present, and future -- originate in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia. Modern syphilis came from ancient Middle Eastern and North African yaws (p. 170); AIDS, of course, came from a “wild backwater of Africa” (p. 168) and could morph into a disease “spread by aerosol means” (p. 170); so-called Spanish flu “most likely originated in Asia” (p. 171); the H5N1 virus first appeared in Hong Kong (p. 172); the original Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease came from “the more isolated parts of Indonesia” (p. 174) and from tribal warfare, headhunters, human brain eaters (not Monkey Brain Sushi eaters; and certainly not the cow brain puddin'-and-hominy eaters of Mennonite and Amish south central Pennsylvania, many of whom were and are my relatives) and its horrifying modern variant causes “not just dementia but also extraordinary behavioral problems -- wild rages, violence, screaming” (p. 174). The U.S. is now threatened by dengue, West Nile virus, SARS, avian flu: each out of Africa or from Asia (p. 168). Moreover, even the Black Death of bubonic plague, which killed off “a third of Europe's population” (p. 178) in a mere four years “stole into Europe from somewhere in Asia in 1347” (p. 180), from, that is, some Asian rat hole, and almost certainly carried by a Rug Merchant (certainly no Blanket Merchant selling smallpox to the Redman). By subliminal suggestion in context of the subject matter being discussed, a contemporary global pandemic as lethal as was the Black Death, and utilizing the improved means of transportation currently available (the process of spreading geographically is largely separate from the process of jumping species), might conceivably take a third of Earth's human population in four short years, somewhat over two-billion people.
Kunstler's threat analysis, or scan over incoming fields of fire, much of which is conventional, is, according to my lights, a product of new concepts being the last thing wanted, the last thing sought, the last thing in mind. The thing that Kunstler is “most especially not wishing for [is] some mysterious deus ex machina” (p. 238). Not only is his single-scenario portrait of the future and how to survive it derivative of a rejection of new concepts, so is his analysis of past and present. He says (p. 139) that the “dense and abstruse physics surrounding ZPE [zero-point energy]… are beyond the competence of the author”, yet he still feels qualified to dismiss the involved notions as pie-in-the-sky and, of course, does not apply quantum perspectives to an assessment of the prevailing global circumstance his book attempts to describe. “Self-organization”, in Kunstler's understanding, has nothing to do with quantum physics. He uses the term frequently and regards its meaning as essentially the same as “positive feedback” -- tacitly construed only with 1T2 logic. Just as the buzz word “ecology”, in his treatment, is largely conflated with thermodynamics, by the tacit assumption that heat-driven molecular biology is all the biology there is, and by direct extension that quantum chemistry, and hence the principles of quantum physics, play no significant role in microbiology or the macro-biosphere. Indeed, “a flow of events and possibilities that are nonlinear, chaotic, emergent, and self-organizing” (p. 97) is worked up into a single-scenario future history, but these buzz words are not actually applied to the scenario, and no scenario logics employing their factors are explicitly stated. The heat-engine-only view of reality as a lose-lose proposition, which gave rise to the technological regime employed during the 19th and 20th centuries, that regime so severely criticized in Kunstler's book as being fossil-fuel driven and soon to be slain by fossil-fuel exhaustion, is used by him as the sole criterion of judgment to determine how to survive the post-fossil-fuel 21st century. So fixated is he on the entropic spending down of energy, he goes so far as to assert “the fact that the earth is a closed system” (p. 194; repeated on p. 220). If this were actually a fact, I bet it would be hard to find a plant on the planet who would agree.
This is not “spaceship Earth”, as one Great Engineer had it; this is “Earth, the microwave oven”, as another Great Engineer helped make it. The quantum wave properties of the genomes of ten-million species have been subjected to microwave and RF and VHF and UHF and VLF and ULF (AM and FM) modulation in the valley of minimum sky noise where, for good reason, genomes all have their frequency response windows, and where, by law, are located ground-based and satellite-borne common carrier frequencies, phased-array radars, the "woodpecker", and what have you. Each time you punch your cell phone you engage in a nascent act of genetic engineering! There will not simply be a snap-back to immuno-genetic normalcy when the cell phones are all turned off, as Gen. Dugway and Dr. Dietrich apparently assume. Satellite commo was how one Great Engineer made his living. That's how he retired to Cinnamon Gardens and daily Ping-Pong. Unfortunately, as Kunstler tirelessly points out, it is unlikely that many following in this Great Engineer's footsteps will be able to similarly retire -- without creation of new concepts, that is. In the decade before AIDS was identified as a syndrome, as the superconductant DNA model emerged into awareness, it was argued that the ratio of collective vector virulence to collective host immune competency (this “collective” being the m-logically-valued quantum “relative-state” actually responsible for “self-organization”, not merely ”positive feedback” or 1T2-logic chaotic attractors) could be modulated absent mutation of nucleotide pairs, by alteration of the natural frequency of response (involved in immunological identification), and that, indeed, immune competency could collapse without the presence of a discrete vector. This led to the further speculation that as “Earth, the microwave oven” continued operation, patterns of vector-host relations would undergo unexpected phase transitions, those host population groups with preexisting inherited genomic frequency anomalies being most vulnerable to foothold status for vectors modulated to super-virulence. These days, “out of Africa” and “from Asia” may be on an invitation only basis. In days past, this was also the case, but less concretely, more psychosomatically -- given that [1] the “dark continent” signified the feared collective unconscious, with its supposed all-against-all tribalism (dissimulation of the reality of quantum relative-state identity transparency) which social contract theory expurgated in establishing Leviathan as collective ego-sphere defensive encapsulation; and [2] “yellow peril” histrionics by processes of projective identification reached hysterical proportions just as effects of assimilation of The Great Books of the East “infected” the European mind. In an updated version of this, and even locally applied, Kunstler's racial stereotyping, regional stereotyping, cultural stereotyping and chauvinism are sufficiently elaborated as to be embarrassing to read.
Personally, given my nuclear family background, my extended family history in south central Pennsylvania (very “green”, coming from the Greencastle “tree gardener” clan), my training experience, my in-the-practice pragmatics, I can register only unmitigated contempt for those whose knee-jerk response to threat of collective extinction is “protect me and mine”. The political orientation of this or that special service operative is incidental beside his practiced instinct to service the collective need -- risk “me and mine” -- through cultivation of the consciousness state of identity transparency: even if the perceived collective need is not the larger collective need. At least the correct principle and state of consciousness is involved. Disdain for the dominant response! Not to mention difference in the sizes of the knives involved in the German stab-in-the-back myth and the American stab-in-the-back myth. At least Farhad Khosrokhavar was honest enough to forthrightly note that his book, Suicide Bombers, (Pluto, 2005) was “supported by the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs”. If Kunstler's book wasn't commissioned, then it should receive The Black Propaganda Award of the Year. I've worked my way through a second-hand copy someone has written “B.S.” in the margins of quite a few times -- and I had to add a few “B.S.'s” of my own, the “history” on offer being so Time-Life-CIA-Nat'lGeo. I guess Kunstler must be one of those American intellectuals who read The Atlantic Monthly -- or like someone I once knew, intelligently wondering and wisely brave, who said: “Others will have to address the environmental aspects of holistic health; I had my fill of politics during the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley.”
Superconductant DNA not only responds to ambient radiation -- intraorganismic and exosomatic -- but radiates coherent radiation in response. This coherent radiation is deeply involved in orchestrating protein folding. Anything responsible for alteration of the normative properties of these radiated coherent waves could be, among other things, etiological of prions, proteins folded in abnormal fashion -- the prions responsible for variant Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, for example. But protein folding is no simple matter of superimposing biomorphic fields upon heat-driven molecular stereo-chemistry: if it were, it would long since have been technically explicated. Time-itself and Cantorian fractalization of space are involved. Molecules are “time-lapse portraits” of atomic and elementary-particle processes; elementary-particle processes are “time-lapse cognitive pictures” of ZPE (zero-point energy) fluctuations. Superconductant DNA transposes the genetic information encoded as nucleotide pairs into pole shifts of quadripolar waves coherently radiated from the molecule in response to ambient radiation (that is, information received from the environment). The pole-shift “code” involved is that of the “spacetime double-helix” biomorphically informing and chronotopologically subtending the DNA double-helix. The double-helix morphology is the chronotopological invariant of first-order operator-time, i.e., first-order temporal curl. One could, to a certain way of thinking, regard this invariant as the origin of a certain class of chaotic attractors. Even the first-order case involves complex numbers (imaginary time) and pole movements onto and off of the complex plane in a cascade dynamic between omni-interactive (i.e., more correctly, quantum “relative-state”, as there actually are no actual simple-identity distinct entities between which to “act” in an “inter” fashion: this is why m-valued logics are required for comprehension), fractalized, nested, multi-scale, sub-“components”. The transposition operator (from nucleotide-pair to pole-shift, and vice versa) is operator-time (aka “Maxwell's demon”). But operator-time operates not only within Earth's biosphere; it also operates within Earth's atmosphere, and in solar-terrestrial dynamics. Variability of solar fusion dynamics (sun-spot cycles) is communicated by the solar wind to Earth's upper atmosphere as minute “jerks” to the planet's complex angular momentum budget. These “jerks” disturb the energy-momentum balance of macroscale wave motions, the effects of these disturbances cascading to smaller and smaller spacetime scales (under orchestration of first-order temporal curl, as described above relative to DNA) until “running out of spacetime” and becoming trapped -- morphology of such a “trap” being that of a severe storm like a tornado or a hurricane. Such a “trap” is “dissipated” in two ways: [1] “injection” of the solar-to-terrestrial complex angular momentum transfer packets (twistor-type quanta) into the Earth's crustal and core dynamics; or [2] radiation of coherent acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes (atmospheric infrasound punching holes in the tropopause boundary, the atmosphere's very own cellular Plasmahaut), just as DNA radiates its coherent waves. Dissipative viscous processes are involved in both [1] and [2]. Anything responsible for alteration of the normative properties of these radiated coherent waves could be, among other things, etiological of… well, not exactly prions, but maybe their atmospheric functional equivalents, non-normative chronotopologies of equivalent-potential-temperature surfaces, for instance. Atmospheric infrasound (Twist and shout!) is deeply involved in ozone metabolism, which such deformations could affect. Engage in electron temperature enhancements to create hot auroras and you might alter the upper atmosphere's reception of the complex angular momentum “jerks” arriving from the sun (which adjust Earth behavior in response to solar variations, just as solar variability is regulated by the Milky Way's blackhole computer). Not only do these “jerks” imparted from the complex plane enter crustal and core dynamics as so-called “butterfly effects”, they obviously have minute effects upon real-dimensional Earth rotation, which, in turn, could affect ocean current behaviors, like those of the Gulf Stream, for instance. Whole lot of twistin' goin' on.
Possibly as early as five years from now there will be little talk of a LONG emergency, only of the coming flap-over -- and all the associated twitchy psychological snappin'. Gizwickan! Twicchen! Twiccian! Subject to absolutely no form of management. Resource wars may have begun at the periphery as brush fires, but, just like HIV, they will not long remain at the periphery. Temporal extension of far-from-equilibrium phase transition would require a well-managed shift, a well-managed boil -- down to details, over every class of planetary bulk phase. Sure we will. We'll manage. Well-management of massive thermodynamic barrier penetration -- be the barrier a Plasmahaut or a haute autonomie -- or the more likely failure of such penetration, would not only be unprecedented in history, but in nature. Kunstler's prescription for America is something few Americans will take -- and Kunstler surely must know that: as the fossil-fuel window closes, an oil flush-fast and brown-end high colonics. Give me that pill or give me death! I don't think so, and for good reason. How many fasting-colonics vegans are there, even amongst those who have stepped through The Golden Door frequented by Hollywood's best… you know whats? Death over that pill, certainly the choice of most Americans. Underlying a stack of “I believes” (p. 288; p. 290; p. 300), an unsupported “I believe” is the central argument of Kunstler's book (p. 19): “…I believe the human race will carry on…” After which, is offered a litany of reasons why it may not, the primary one being that there are six-and-a-half-billion people using up what remains of the thermodynamic resources. He says (p. 18): “Overall, I view the period ahead as one of generalized and chronic contraction… downscaling of America -- rescaling or rightsizing…” Contraction -- implying a managed process of retreat, not incendiary collapse. He says (p. 290): “I believe every one of these cities will shed large fractions [emphasis added] of their populations as the Long Emergency continues, year after year [emphasis added].” And (p. 239):
The salient fact about life in the decades ahead is that it will become increasingly and intensely local and smaller in scale. It will do so steadily and by degrees [emphasis added] as the amount of available cheap energy decreases and the global contest for it becomes more intense. The scale of all human enterprises will contract with the energy supply.
He believes that (p. 249) “the post-peak oil predicament is liable to render big government dysfunctional and impotent.” Another scenario (multiple scenarios get rid of both the “I” and the “believe”) would have the major nation-state contenders SUDDENLY all rushing, by military action, to declaration that oil and gas are no longer commodities, but scarce strategic military resources -- likely justified by the contention that this has become necessary in order that a rational system of allocation can be “implemented”, as opposed to “imposed”. But Kunstler gives three interrelated reasons for a LONG emergency, based on the notion that the Black Death was immunologically predisposed by climate-variation food stress and, in turn, precipitated the Renaissance by workforce pruning (p. 182):
The attrition is apt to continue for much longer than the Black Death raged in the Europe of the fourteenth century, because under the regime of cheap oil the carrying capacity of our earthly habitats was exceeded by orders of magnitude, and we have farther to go to return to the solar carrying capacity of our home places… Also because of the probable human contribution to global warming, this climate change might well be much more severe and longer lasting… As hunger and hardship increase, the world may see more than one wave of more than one disease.
Well, I certainly cannot gainsay the notion that this may be a portion of one plausible scenario, however unlikely it appears that humans could have developed the capacity to have caused a major climate shift while losing the capacity to use the weapons systems they created in the process. Kunstler apparently believes that oil and natural gas will run out slow enough for the cities to “shed large fractions… year after year” and for “life in the decades ahead… [to become] intensely local… steadily and by degrees”, but fast enough for nation-states to become sufficiently “dysfunctional and impotent” as to lose their capacity for nuclear war. Is this storyline an actual expression of underlying scenario logics, or is it an expression of not quite conscious oneirocritical wish fulfillment? Oneiromancy or not, that is the question.
The conclusion given at the beginning is (p. 17): “Life will become intensely and increasingly local.” This premise is repeated at the conclusion of the book (p. 300). The more likely development, however, is that death will become intensely and increasingly local. Why? Because there is no such thing as purely local life: the purely local is the dead, is the very definition of dead. Wendell Berry or no Wendell Berry. Ecological economics or no ecological economics. The prevailing, and long enduring, “consensus trance”: fixation of the social structure of attention cathexes via identification with Cartesian-Newtonian worldview and 19th century thermodynamics. Radicalism and fundamentalism: never the twain shall meet? Never, except through naive and murderous faith: an upheaval is necessary, therefore desired, however much that may be denied. For the radical, necessary for creation of an exurban, de-suburban, post-yuppie, hippie-yippie-dippy, neo-communitas, permaculture utopia situated in a hug-me! encounter-group, sensitivity-training culture. This “vision” is a spoiling operation preventing anything real from being done, a spoiling operation in place for almost 50 years. Uh, uh… sorry to demur, not so demurely. Life is not purely local! Quantum non-locality is an essential pre-condition of life (the central theme of Albert Szent-Györgyi's scientific life). Indeed, not only life, and not only ONLY negentropy: organization qua organization in nature. One scale -- all local -- is as bad as one scale -- all global. No living system is single-scaled; no system is single-scaled (a theme of Ilya Prigogine's scientific life). Kunstler assures the reader that (p. 193) “…the public cannot process the notion of a nongrowth economy… [that] We are not capable of conceiving another economic way. We are hostages to our own system.” Yet, nowhere in this book does he offer the slightest intimation as to how organization, ecological or otherwise, could transpire absent growth and repair processes. Why is this creative insight absent? Because of psychological identification with the heat engine! First of all, creativity is disallowed by the first law of thermodynamics: conversion only can transpire, not creation. And any conversion, according to the second law of thermodynamics, takes order into disorder; though, as Prigogine has thoroughly explored, a nested scale-level can borrow order from a nesting scale-level. Life is such borrowing betwixt scale levels. According to this heat-engine view, life in the small kills life in the large, until life in the large finally gets around to killing life in the small. Feedback, in all its wondrous complexities of positive and negative reinforcements. But this is old paradigm thinking calling itself, in the postmodern way, new paradigm thinking: the thing named by the name of its opposite, an old Marxist trick. Jabberwocky.
The notions of order and disorder can be applied to any linear-time-bound process, any static collection of objects, subjective or objective -- even any collection of subjects, objective or subjective. Heat engine as world construct is even carried by Kunstler into interpretation of the arts, as was prefigured by at least one noted art critic. Creativity in the arts clearly cannot survive thermodynamics. Kunstler speaks (p. 210) entropically of “the deliberate disorders of Modernism in the arts”. Whereas Worringer (Abstraction and Empathy) and Kandinsky (On the Spiritual in Art) would surely speak of deliberate negentropic spiritual inputs. One man's entropy is another man's negentropy. It's not so much that entropy is a subjective notion, as has so often been argued; entropy is order-of-logical-value dependent. What appears to be disorder under 1T2 logic may appear to be order under 22T56 logic, or some other order of logical-value. That's one reason why all the m-branches of Schrödinger's wave-function are required and real (if, numerically speaking, complex and hypercomplex): no probability amplitudes. The logical-operator involved here is operator-time, and the spin component of operator-time is hypertemperature (a several-order abstraction removed from temperature as random molecular motions, just as “equivalent potential temperature” is several abstractions removed from simple temperature). That the “temperature” of “electron temperature enhancements” cannot be the “temperature” of random molecular motions of 19th century heat-engine thermodynamics should be quite obvious: different scale levels are involved, those same different scale levels essential to the very definition of life. What of the temperature of quarks, and vacuum fluctuations, and coordinate-free “scalar waves”? Hypertemperature is the curl of active time, its imparted twist, its twistor. This is what first-order temporal curl, chronotopologically a spacetime double-helix, is all about. Strongly supported by both DNA and tornadoes -- not to mention spiral-banded hurricanes, mini and maxi blackholes engaged in particle creation, spiral-banded galaxies, and so on. Thermodynamics of the 19th century, that is the first and second laws, apply solely to linear-time-bound closed systems, systems which can only be fully defined under 1T2 logic. Change the order of logical-value employed, and to some degree, depending upon the order employed, initial conditions, spatial boundaries, temporal reference frames, homogeneity, isotropy, simple-identity, spatial separation, temporal separation, and so on are indefinable. Both Riemann and Maxwell, in their own ways, anticipated this. Riemann imagined a violation of the first law: charge creation as “lines of force trapped in the topology of space”. Maxwell's equations for the electromagnetic field describe conversion between the electric and magnetic fields as transpiring with perfect efficiency, a violation of the second law. Maxwell's “demon” was conjured into being to explain this. Here we have the latent print behind the quantum measurment problem. A problem that applies to all scale levels when universal constants are recognized to be m-logically-valued. This is an absolute violation of experience as processed by 1T2 logic and only 1T2 logic. What the long emergency -- if LONG it is to be -- is all about is cusp in cumulative effects of human refusal for 200 years to process experience, organize itself, and engage with nature on any other basis.
The issue of cancerous unending growth as the prerequisite to economic organization cannot be transcended within a linear-time-bound framework. That is why von Hayek's notion of the “time-shapes of total capital stock” is so very important. This notion is functionally equivalent to the relative-state interpretation of quantum mechanics being placed under m-valued logics and operator-time. What pops out of that is m-logically-valued monetary units (brought up across scale levels, locally to globally) weighted relative to indicators (economic, sustainable development, quality of life, whatever). Kunstler offers a critique of “abstract finance” and notes (p. 206) that “…the idea of credit (of 'money' created out of nothing more than expectation)…” has been subject to periodic loss of faith. He argues this will happen again during the long emergency. The “expectation” behind the idea of credit has been an expectation for growth of capital. With m-logically-valued monetary units, however, this expectation could become no longer univalent, but multivalent. The expectations tied to credit expansion could be tagged to many, many things beside merely growth. Autopoiesis and self-organization in nature are not only cancerous; this is fundamentally because the electrons Albert Szent-Györgyi studied carry m-logically-valued information. Monetary units similarly logically multivalent would have far greater self-organizational competency than those required to mediate mere cancerous nature rape. If you wish to return stock markets to investments in enterprises and payment of dividends, the way to accomplish that is not by differential tax rates between dividends and capital gains by stock sales, but by weighting different values of an m-logically-valued currency relative to dividends and sales. The possibilities along these lines haven't even begun to be investigated.
Singularly naive; unbelievably optimistic; thoroughly wrong-headed; and a recipe for certain extinction: one could easily reach such a judgment on The Long Emergency. I, too, do not like suburbia, car culture, mass marketing, outsourcing, and so very much more. The critique presented is in many respects excellent. However, pursuing return to solar carrying capacity on the basis of a heat-engine paradigm, Kunstler advocates (p. 240, for instance) dealing with the fossil-fuel crisis by, essentially, returning to the American farm and small town as they existed in early-1800s New England. This is the period just before Abel did his work in higher mathematics, ramifications of which brought the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm to its knees. The 200 years of longing for the past, which wed the species to the technological regime it chose to embrace, was an attempt to put Abel back into the bottle from whence he came. Abel's impossibility theorem solved the quintic and revealed all sorts of possibilities found to be anathema, and the back-reaction started immediately -- as did the interminable longing for the past. Kunstler's longing is continua and variations on a theme, the theme so brilliantly essayed by Henry Nash Smith in Virgin Land (Harvard, 1950). If “The Garden of the World” was a myth during the 19th century, why should that not also be the case during the 21st century? Forced-draft de-urbanization of mega-urban regions globally, whether forced by circumstance or some equivalent of the Khmer Rouge, can only produce an outcome far worse than a mere localized Cambodian holocaust. As Derek says a number of times in MOON: “A Cambodian holocaust of the Whole Earth!” Any attempt to shift back to one scale, the purely local, is a recipe for demise and only demise -- not only a compounding of prior catastrophe; any attempt to shift to one scale, the purely global, is a recipe for long-term disappearance -- not only induction of short-term cataclysm.
One of the more interesting, and presently highly relevant, aspects of the last major Velikovsky conference (Hamilton, Ontario, 1974) was the density of participants arguing that Neolithic culture was a global culture and that Stone Age economics was a global economics: a culture and an economics in response to planetary catastrophe. How to organize activities on appropriate scales, local to global: that is the question, and that is what is to be done. This is why explorations of the intellectual history of the cul-de-sac -- not only the consensus trance and geopolitics of the techno-conundrum -- are necessary if entrapment in a blind diverticulum is to be avoided. Not only are the m-valued logics of Stone Age animistic identity transparency required to fulfill the prerequisites to appropriate-scale quantal self-organization across the full spectrum of scale levels, but they are required to actually overcome the 1T2 Cartesian-Newtonian mode of thought and the 19th century thermodynamics responsible for vision quest upon overkill, megadeath, and Bye Bye Birdie's final leap. The second law of thermodynamics is the death dealer. You want a way around collective self-immolation, you seek a way around the second law. What we get instead is Santa Fe Institute identity incorporation of Native American celebrity: alternative media-forced assimilation of the soaring eagle to the butterfly's chaotic wing-flaps. Heea! Heea! Heea! And bird flu, of course, uh, swine flu, uh, dog flu, uh… whose flu is this, anyway?
It is easy to view the whole area of internet-related systems thought -- involving “cooperative individualism”, participatory process, partnership-based models, and, indeed, P2P, itself -- as continuation of the postmodernist attempt to save whatever can be saved of “simple identity” in face of quantum weirdness and m-valued logics. For instance, “distributed networks” as defined by Alexander Galloway -- indeed, distributed control in general, distributed functions of an “executive brain”, and so on -- rule out actual quantum processes of self-production (zero-point energy) and self-organization, for in such processes, for instance a holographic process, the information is not distributed; it has no locality spatially or temporally, and the identity of a “bit” does not exhibit selfsameness (as do cooperating individuals, participants, partners, peers). This is by no means to suggest that consensus quantum physicists are not postmodernists; they very definitely are, and probability interpretations and definition of q-bits in terms of binary logic instead of m-valued logics are clear indications of that.
Practically speaking, why is this distinction important to attend to? Because the fossil-fuel era is coming to an end, and the “abundance-oriented” and “already existing social practice of P2P” and cognitive capitalism in general can be regarded as symbiotic to, or parasitic upon, cheap-energy-dependent, market-organized, industrial and postindustrial capitalism. The only way P2P could escape this status and begin a substantive transformation of the institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm would be for it to solve cheap-energy dependence and overcome the limitations of externality-blind market as less-than-pan processor.
Using the holographic example, information is distributed over a holographic plate because the experimental set up (quantum measurement problem) that created the plate was formulated on the basis of binary logic, which, by conventions of Aristotle's syllogistic, rules out quantum non-locality (except as dissimulated as “probability amplitude”). Existing holograms are, thereby, something substantially less than actually holographic; they are made to conform to the principles of heat engines. Production of “actually holographic” holograms (Musculpt) would require an experimental set up based on phase-digit q-bits understood in relation to µTm logics, not merely 1T2 logic. Cheap-energy dependence cannot be overcome within the purview of the thermodynamics of heat engines (linear-time-bound closed systems). I would argue only within time-independent, multiply-self-reentrant, non-orientable systems like that described by Schrödinger's original time-independent wave equation (not merely orientable open systems, linear-time-bound or not, wherein life is regarded inherently, even by definition, multi-scaled, as order is borrowed by the nested system from the nesting system). By choosing the distributed, non-quantum, account over the non-local quantum account of self-production and self-organization, the possibility of overcoming cheap-energy dependence, necessary to the socio-politico-economic transformation sought, is nullified. The requisite cognitive capability is quenched.
Absolutely. All of this is interrelated on the slightly unconscious subliminal level. Assimilation of the pre-traditional to the traditional is not simply a simplification: it helps conceal the correspondence between pre-role-stratification tribal life-world and an undissimulated quantum account of self-organization. The degree to which organizational conception is held hostage to psychosexual dread and political agenda is strongly indicated, for instance, by Elkhonon Goldberg's notion of “gradiential” -- as opposed to modular -- distribution of cognitive and neurological functions (The Executive Brain, Oxford U. Press, 2001). Brain functions, and dysfunctions, are elaborated upon by a Soviet émigré in relation to capitalist corporate management model and democratic dispensation of authority, both of which are treated as the apotheosis of neuropsychological evolution. Quantum processes of brain function are neatly sidestepped and thereby suppressed. Not surprising, even with gradiential distribution, Goldberg should endorse Julian Jaynes' (The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind) functional localization of the voices of the gods to the right hemisphere. Holoptism, the ability of any part to see the whole -- which is very much less than the holographic ability of any part to be the whole -- is not a mere matter of distribution of functions, gradiential, modular, or any fallacy-of-undistributed-middle conflation of 1T2-logic continuous-discrete dichotomy. Don't believe it? Close approach to this is the root fascination of suicide-squad “high combat” -- and even martyrdom operations. Indeed, it is easy enough to construe that rabbinical obsession with 1T2-rule regulation is the unconscious efficient cause of martyrdom operations. As Toussaint says in MOON: “You can see what you can't possibly see, but which someone else is in a position to see.” What does real full-blown holoptism take? Up the arousal tree! It takes overcoming -- and I do mean coming -- not only the principles of “double dissociation” and “strong dissociation” prerequisite to establishment of ego-sphere initial and boundary conditions, but full-blown gran mal trance-seizure. One is moving back from encapsulation in conscious finite sets to unconscious transfinite sets again entering conscious attention cathexes as collective occasion of experience. Symptomology of anosognosia (Cabbalistic no-mind Satori), idiopathic epilepsy, obitofrontal syndrome, schizophrenogenic field-dependent digressions (i.e., paraphasia), and so on and so on: any diminution of ego-autonomy is inherently pathological -- and if it isn't, it can easily so be made. In and of the tribal life-form prior to onset of role stratification -- long before the gods were localized to the right hemisphere -- any part could be the whole for a day, by taking trance-seizure reading on the needs of the whole. But this was actually the beginning of the rise of role stratification, and the fetishism required to sustain it. Collective gran mal trance-seizure group sex was how the {part(whole-part)} “see and be” the needs of the {whole(part-whole)}. Residuals of this non-simple identity-“state” (this collective occasion of experience: e.g., African group-rhythm agriculture) persisted into near-modern times on the Dark Continent and amongst the Yellow Peril in spring-planting fertility rites behind village gates where the Chief's, the King's, the Emperor's mandate and prerogatives (and in distribution as nation-state) once stopped. Cultural lags of non-simple identity are seen in mudra (stylizations of oceanic trance-seizure trans-orgasmic “gestures”), Japanese log-woman catatonia, and so on. Prescriptively enculturated, glutamaturgic suppression of this “state”, generation to generation, was responsible for neuropsychological “evolution” from µTm-logic processing to 1T2-logic processing -- not to mention “the converging catastrophes of the twenty-first century”. Collapse of the quantum wave-function recapitulates phylogeny and ontogeny!
Look. I do not care to write this stuff up in the way required to be successful. All sorts of successfulness has been engaged in over the past 50 years -- and human situation, planet Earth, just gets worse and worse. Wherein lies the value of success? When cop-mystery fiction is the best social criticism planetary exemplar, America, has to offer itself, what is left? Nowadays, in the short-term we are all likely dead. Likely, likely, likely! Likely, the circumstance is wholly in the hands of those under the age of twenty. Those post-teens with significant resources support the system, oppose the system, or feather their own nests: all three behaviors are dissipative in face of oncoming events. Mob logic of teens and pre-teens is soon to control human destiny -- and that is why, by unconscious processes of projective identification, skateboard parks require armed guards.
What you don't understand is that there is no possibility of a successful politician who is not in principle a Hitler. Once the person acquiesces to the socially-conferred role attribution, his/her-he/she -- in so far as these ever have any reality-value -- has no possibility to psychologically sustain differentiation from collective transference. Acquiescence, in fact, demonstrates lack of prior possibility. The source of their “power” is their capacity to burrow into the state of identification with the slot which is the role conferred, the act of letting-go-to-the-slot being the “engine” of archetypal constellation and resultant personal power over those who have sufficient courage to enter only vicariously what the slot signifies. The person alive today who understands this more than any other is Charlie Manson. He ran many experiments on the variables involved, pushed past the limits of imposed structure and counter-valence, thus inflicting the inevitable atrocities, and is paying something approximating due diligence at defraying collective liabilities of the involved transpersonal psychological processes. Personal karma is yet to come -- whatever that trans-dimensional equation might involve.
What I am saying is really rather simple: creation of the prevailing institutions of political, economic, and social governance, as well as the existing fossil-fuel-dependent techno-base -- and collective behaviors in response to crisis in these -- has been overwhelmingly mediated by projective identification, not conscious integration. Further elaborations via projective identification cannot provide real solutions to existing problems; these can be obtained only by reversion to conscious integration. Whatever is done, therefore, has to be explicitly formulated in such a fashion as to facilitate processes of COLLECTIVE conscious integration (no mere additive process whereby a quorum of “realized” individuals is to be met). If this is not done… If this is done… This is the main “if” that needs to be attached to any forecast, any scenario, any prospective future history.
Examples? Examples are in details, the “exactly how”. The Wired, hyperpeople, SmartMob, Cyberia, VR-gaming, voice-audio-video over IP, Wi-Fi cellular meshwork, streaming multimedia, P2P, 1T2-BitTorrent peercasting, mobcasting, podcasting, non-place community telepresence is a REGRESSIVE collective psychological projection, embodied in technology, of what is not consciously integrated, and hence is obsessively identified with: animistic, m-logically-valued, non-simple, holographic, non-local, quantal, non-algebraic, transfinite-set, relative-state part-whole identity transparency. This TRANSFERENCE is directly analogous to the entelechy compulsively pursued in Weimar youth groups: Wandervogelmystik of the “internal necessity” of the part TRANSFERRED to entelechy of the whole as Schicksal. While non-simple animistic identity transparency is regressively simulated, simple-identity is retained via the transference: ego autonomy amplified in the swarm as queued-bit, not m-logically-valued q-bit. This is a high-tech form of “mutilation” and introjection of the vanquished “other”: collecting “ears”, signifiers of the vanquished “other”. Nature is an afterthought here, here in the projective identification: Oh, yes, and permaculture, of course, they say (just as “Bronze Age” sun worship was an afterthought for Weimar youth). Even opted by the martyr's “community in death” and “individual in death” -- as understood in postmodernist mode by Farhad Khosrokhavar (Suicide Squads, Pluto, 2005). Nature in regression only: torrents and permalinks, viral communicators. If cellular networking and the internet facilitated Al Qaeda martyrdom operations, what is to keep SmartMobs from using lynch-mob logic more effectively than DumbMobs? Who pioneered applications of SmartMob technology? U.S. Army Special Forces, the Russian mob, narco-capitalists, out-call services, and so on. There are all sorts of affinity groups and communities of practice (aka “front” organizations). When Al Qaeda puts up its first satellite… The fact that ketamine use was epidemic in the techno-developer community is not incidental: this is a measure of the degree to which conscious integration is absent. Simulacra. The way in which the technology is being used further distances the user from the not-available-to-consciousness psychological functions the technology simulates, thus making conscious integration impossible. The emerging techno-regime as it is currently envisioned and used is a substitute, just like ketamine was a substitute. Overvaluation in both cases was and is rampant. Exteriorized Musculpt, however, which would use some of the same technologies, is not a psychologically-projective substitute; it would facilitate emergence into conscious awareness of interior Musculpt. The same can be said about m-logically-valued monetary units and computer-gamed multiple-scenarios town planning.
Weimar Rhein Gold is not inexhaustible; it's intractable. And I find it very interesting that, given the known political baggage, Polanyi's Primitive, Archaic, and Modern Economics (Doubleday) was published the same year as Garrett Hardin's paper “The Tragedy of the Commons” (Science, 162): 1968. A very good year for residuals of the Weimar youth groups. Members of those Weimar groups had no idea they were laying the foundations for Nazification of the arts, let alone of Germany. The notion of panzer swarming had yet to enter subliminal collective awareness. Just as George Soros does not appear to be aware of what he is underwriting today. The man for whom I directly worked in 1968 at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV Headquarters, while studying the Viet Cong Political Infrastructure, came into the Army immediately from the Masters program in PPE at the London School of Economics. And you can be sure that discussions of F. A. von Hayek's Studies in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics (U. of Chicago Press, 1966) were periodically engaged in at the VNAF Officer's Club down the street from Westmoreland's bailiwick. There was a lot of press and urge imparted to those conversations by the fact that the O Club restaurant terrace overlooked the flight line from which many classes of fighter aircraft took off laden with many classes of ordnance. My real introduction to the free-rider problem, however, was Michael Taylor's Community, Anarchy, and Liberty (Cambridge, 1982) and I did not miss the fact that the free-rider obsession of Anglo-American political economy was a not-so-subtle attack on cooperatives, communal lands, utopian socialism, the very idea that there should or could even be a “the commons”. Rule, Britannia! The Pacific is an American lake! The Stars-and-Stripes was planted on the Moon, just as it was on Iwo Jima. The U.S. has already laid its claim to nearby outer space -- and a space shield electromagnetic mirror will seal the deal. In all probability, Anglo-America is not going to fight a war with China: under present circumstances, the neocon hawks are very unlikely to prevail in that regard. Superpositioning of the probability amplitudes suggests that when the situation evolves to cusp, the war will be with a Greater China aligned to a Germano-Russian bloc. Elinor Ostrom (Governing the Commons: The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action, Cambridge, 1990) emphasizes the need for well-definition of boundaries, group and otherwise, as orientable closed loops, where inside can be absolutely distinguished from outside, as a primary prerequisite to explicitly formulating the social-contract rule regulation and sanction system required to prevent free-rider degradation of the commons. Either this or a borderless world. Won't they ever make up their minds? Their idea of distributed control, of a distributed system, is one that does not engage in the fallacy of undistributed middle! Hardly a Buddhological notion of space involved here! Let alone DreamTime and SongLines. A little bit of judicious data selection, eh, Elinor? Separating data from noise. This is the only way to stop treating prisoners of the nation-state as if they were not prisoners of the nation-state -- according to this Anglo-American orientation, this longing-for-the-past prescription upon what is taken to be the inalienable future of life, liberty, and happiness in pursuit of… whatever. And it is not as if “A Beautiful Mind” did not have a problem with this nation-state stuff. The same problem Weimar youth had with it! Demerging to conscious awareness during the period 1907-12, rigorously formulated and published in 1921: m-valued Polish logics. And when the panzers began to swarm, Poland was the first to fall. “The free-rider problem” and “the prisoner's dilemma” are both epiphenomenal to the restriction of logic to the digital 1T2 order of logical-value (which is not necessarily truth-value). With his pre-Goggle search, Jan Lukasiewicz, the discoverer of m-valued logics, explicitly sought to undermine control over people (prisoners) by the nation-state, control which he believed devolved to the relationship between logical determinism and bivalence in Aristotle's syllogistic (the fact that once you accept the definition of a logical proposition as being “any statement that can be determined to be true or false”, then rule-regulated logical march of the syllogism is imposed by the fact of that acceptance). The prisoner is a captive of the logic of his own acceptance of his voluntary self-commitment to the cackle factory: this is the social contract underlying Leviathan's purge of the all-against-all tribalism threatening to come out of the Dark Continent of the unconscious by refusal to voluntarily self-commit. More than one beautiful mind has foundered on the shoals of this dilemma, and only a few make it out of “The Cube” to free-rider status. Daffy Duck: “Whose flu is this, anyway?” Whether you think the nail that sticks up has its head cut off or gets hammered back down, those who do not voluntarily self-commit are in one fashion or another involuntarily committed to the commonweal (a symptom of small pox, it may be noted) by the thin blue line or the broad march of olive drab. What, me worry?
A September 23, 2002 entry posted to the Smart Mobs Technology of Cooperation Weblog, entitled “Learning from OBL”, begins by stating the opinion that “Bin Laden understands networked management: he learned it from us…” Not only is this a ludicrous self-attribution, it is sad, sad commentary on historical memory and gathered insight within human networks. UBL learned nothing from us -- in principle. He bought a few cell phones and PCs, had his boys use internet cafes when they came on the scene. Technologies are derivative of principles; principles are not derivative of technologies. This blog was by way of brief review of an article written by Brian Friel, “Hierarchies and Networks”, and published in the April Fools Day 2002 issue of Government Executive magazine. In this article, Friel briefly summarizes some of what is taught at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey and quotes, as given below, two Rand Corporation analysts:
Advances in communications and technology have given rise to network organizations, according to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, analysts at the RAND think tank. In their recent book for the Defense Department, Networks and Netwars (RAND, 2001), the authors argue that conflicts will increasingly be “netwars,” or clashes involving networks rather than traditional, hierarchical adversaries. The definition of network organizations is not well-developed -- some analysts even question whether networks can be described as a type of organization. Arquilla and Ronfeldt argue that they are.
Structurally, a pure network organization -- what Arquilla and Ronfeldt call an “all-channel network” -- moves all the boxes on a hierarchical organizational chart to one level and then connects each box to every other box. “Pictorially, an all-channel network actor resembles a geodesic 'Bucky ball' [named for scientist and philosopher Buckminster Fuller]; it does not look like a pyramid,” the authors write. “The network as a whole has little to no hierarchy; there may be multiple leaders. Decision-making and operations are decentralized, allowing for local initiative and autonomy. Thus the design may sometimes appear acephalous (headless) and at other times polycephalous (Hydra-headed).”
Later, after discussing “amorphous swarming” as a netwar strategy and tactic, Friel presents the notion of “hybrid organizations” as taught at the Naval Postgraduate School. It is not necessary to choose between hierarchies and networks, it is argued; depending upon circumstances and the tasks involved, one or the other can be used, as appropriate.
First of all, none of this came out of advances in communications and computing technology, for it existed long before the advent of computers, cybernetic theories of self-organization by modulation of positive and negative feedback, personal computers, the internet, and counter-culture models of stress management, flat management, and cellular boy-girl dating management via global positioning satellites. MoSoSo: serious matters like that -- incorporating a crush factor not even so, so sophisticated that slot-of-the-role is regarded strange attractor, like in Japanese striptease joints. If television has not yet left the breast, according to the argument of Nam Jun Piak and a particularly well-endowed cello player, neither will the internet, as the vast bulk of bandwidth is used at the near-moron end of peercasting, peerhooking, peereeling, peernetting, peerlanding, peerbagging, peergutting, and peerscaling. Lacuna-on-the-brain did not have to wait around for a pandemic of vCJD. Moreover, the pre-computer forms had very elaborate social applications, so elaborate, in fact, that the Cultural Revolution in China was almost exclusively about conflict over the issues involved. C - T + 1T2/lmL = UD. Confucianism minus Taoism plus 1T2 over lynchmobLogic equals Unprecedented Dystopia. In Viet Nam, within the Viet Cong, it even had such elaborate sexual applications that there was no class of disciplinary citations issued by the Northern bo doi to Southern cadres that even came close to rivaling the number given for “licentious behavior”. No kidding! Ask any Combined Document Exploitation Center (CDEC) translator. The special service operatives who supplied arms and “expertise” on a peer-to-peer basis to the mujahedeen in the years before and after the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan did not provide these fighters with innovative organizational knowledge, because those operatives did not possess such knowledge. What, at that time, the operatives called a “guerrilla infrastructure” had nothing whatsoever to do with political, social, and economic organization of affinity groups (front organizations, voluntary associations) and pre-governments transiting to de facto governments tracking on de jure status -- and that is why the situation in Afghanistan went to the very determined deterministic chaos it did. That the lack of such knowledge continues to be the case is on elaborate display in Iraq at this very moment. Bin Laden learned the bulk of what he knows about flat management in the same way the Chinese communists learned it during the 1920s and '30s, and the same way it was learned by the Viet Minh and the Viet Cong: from animistic tribal and peasant traditions. That some communists had flat management schemes well in hand will be contested vigorously by Rand analysts, people like Chalmers Johnson, and a whole flock of others who wrote one or another autopsy on people's war. Randy types will go to their files and pull out study after study from 40 years ago to support their argument. Johnson will point to his Ph.D. dissertation relative to the Chinese communists, and maybe even Doug Pike's book on the Viet Cong. Relative to the Chinese, however, the fact of the matter is that in the period after the Japanese occupation of Manchuria, concerned Asian scholars have not had access to the sorts of documentation that would be required to shed light on the involved issues as they played out during the Chinese revolution in the period through 1949. And the Japanese Imperial Army did not place sufficient value on such types of documents as to archive them. I know this to be the case in several ways: [1] from the old China hands working at Special Operations Research Office during the years 1963-5, one of whom even accompanied Mao on the Long March; [2] from a Nisei who functioned as an underground intelligence operative between 1943 and just before early-1967 when I worked with him at JFK Special Warfare Center; and [3] from long conversations during December of 1967 with a one-time Japanese intelligence officer stationed in Manchuria during WWII, who was in 1967 deeply involved in Viet Nam anti-war activities in Tokyo where his restaurant served as a meeting place. Just like the Americans in Viet Nam twenty years later, the Japanese primarily relied on agent reports, interrogations, and captured policy documents, not intensive qualitative analysis of huge quantities of bureaucratic minutia: such documents were cursorily mined for tactical intelligence and later discarded. Documentation captured during the Korean war concerned the military party committee organs, not the party webwork superimposed upon the self-organizing mesh networks of the front affinity-group voluntary associations composing the unarmed, and never to be armed, underground political infrastructure.
Because during the Viet Nam war there was eventually unprecedented availability of data related to Viet Cong Political Infrastructure (VCI) bureaucratic minutia -- whether or not it was intelligently analyzed, and whether or not the analyses produced played a role in decision making of policy principals -- the plot thickens and the complexity convolutes considerably, with the cusp point coming in 1968 just as Polanyi and Hardin are making their contributions. Therefore, let's fast-forward to the present and then enter time reversal. I shall quote from the unpublished, but soon to be fully posted, manuscript entitled Peer to Peer and Human Evolution produced by a communications industry strategic planner named Michel Bauwens, wherein he synthesizes a list of dimensions and recommendations concerning a “global platform for autonomous cooperation” from the works of Howard Rheingold, Elinor Ostrom, and many others specialized in fields involved with internet P2P technologies, hard and soft. Though the author likely would not sympathize with the title I shall attach to the quoted excerpt, and the analytic extensions I will make, still, the exercise may be of some value. Quoting pages 22-3 under my title: “Al Qaeda's Fourteen Points Regarding a Global Platform for Fractionating Insurgent Infrastructure”. First, dimensions:
- The structures are dynamic and evolving, not static.
- The rules are not imposed by any outside authority, but emerge from the group itself.
- The resources are made available to the public, not kept private or available through sales.
- Thresholds are kept as low as possible, so that anyone can participate.
- Feedback becomes systemic, through the use of social accounting software and other forms of “participation capture”.
- Memory is becoming persistent, and no longer ephemeral as it was in the first phase of ever-changing URL's.
- Identity is derived from the group and participation in the group.
Next, the recommendations:
- Shift from designing systems to providing platforms; the system must allow emergent structures decided upon by the participants.
- Engage the community in designing the rules: the protocol must be democratically arrived at.
- Learn how to tap invisible resources.
- Track thresholds and phase changes: this is important as online communities evolve through various phases that have different rules and success factors.
- Foster diverse feedback loops.
- Convert present knowledge into deep memory: through archiving, persistent addressing, version control and archiving, contributions are never discarded but remain available.
- Support participatory identities through keeping track of contributions so that this process acts as a recognition for the participants.
Now, my argument will be that each and every one of these fourteen points, and so very much more, was accomplished by the underground Viet Cong Political Infrastructure (VCI) without so much as an adequate collection of typewriters -- and that's part, but not all, of why they were able to win the war, in spite of there being unprecedented asymmetry in available disposable force.
During the spring and early summer of 1968, while at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, the intelligence branch of Westmoreland's and later Abram's headquarters in Saigon, I was the principle author of a long paper which described the year-long synoptic organizational transformation the Viet Cong Political Infrastructure (VCI) underwent countywide in preparation for the Tet-'68 offensive. Content of the paper was based upon agent reports, in-depth interrogations of high-level Viet Cong cadres, including extensive debriefing of the highest ranking chieu hoi rallier of the war, Tran Van Dac, and the analyses by numerous analysts of an unprecedented number of captured documents related to bureaucratic minutia. The material presented in the paper (later reconstructed and published in MOON) was broken down according to the “Fourteen Points” regarding prerequisites to successful organizational phase transitions as explicated by Truong Chinh in his books The August Revolution and The Resistance Will Win. Chinh's general points were unpacked in enormous detail by the VCI in the preparations for Tet-'68. It would take a book in its own right to detail exactly how the VCI met each of Bauwens' “Fourteen Points” in unpacking Chinh's recommendations, but I guarantee that it could be done in depth: reading the paper printed in MOON (Vol. 2, pp. 2-34), “Third Stage of Insurgency Warfare: A Dynamical Analysis of VC Strategy, Tactics, and Intentions” should be enough to convince the reader of this. My objective here, however, is somewhat different: discussion of things done by the VCI not mentioned in the points listed by Bauwens.
The easiest way to enter this topic is to go back to the “Bucky ball” illustration given by Arquilla and Ronfeldt, quoted above. They collapsed the organizational or administrative hierarchy, the line-and-block chart, down to a single echelon or scale-level, then connected all the boxes to all the other boxes (all-to-all instead of the supposed all-against-all which the social contract was supposed to solve with formation of Leviathan). During my two-week-long debriefings of chieu hoi Tran Van Dac, which were focused on bureaucratic minutia, I began drawing line-and-block charts to illustrate what was being discussed by question and answer. Whenever I did these Weberian scribbles, Dac got irritated. Finally he exploded: “If you don't get rid of those drawings, you will never understand what I am trying to teach you!” We went round and round on this, and I never really fully understood what he was talking about. Indeed, well before Dac had rallied, his headquarters (temporarily used by Gen. Tran Van Tra to mount the attacks on Saigon, while Tran Bach Dang, the Saigon Party Committee Chairman, maintained a secondary headquarters for orchestrating political aspects of the assault) had been overrun and a huge document cache with deep historical memory was taken intact. These documents, many of which were Dac's personal official correspondence about bureaucratic-administrative minutia, all came to me, and I had studied them intensively for almost three months before Dac came over to our side. During this study, I had drawn what became known as the “many-hued Super Chart” (provided with each copy of MOON), the comprehensive, all echelon, heuristic bureaucratic model of the VCI. Household, hamlet, village, inter-village, district, inter-district, province, inter-province, sub-region, military region, COSVN, Hanoi hierarchical echelon set: the double-stacked (superimposed party-chapter webwork), tripartite (military, party-government, front) comprehensive, multiple, overlapping, chains-of-command and information-flow channels, forward and reverse representation overview. A major accomplishment, every myriad detail documented in depth, by many decoded and translated documents, of which I was quite proud. Now Dac was telling me I didn't know what I was talking about! And this insult, when off the top of my head I could quote to him word for word from his own correspondence going back years. Humph!
We beat around every bush, circling and circling issue after issue -- I clung to the two I had in hand, while he kept pointing at the three in the bush -- as I tried to ascertain exactly what he meant, tried to grasp it whole, tried to find an image, a way to visualize it. In specific-cases concrete terms, each of Bauwen's “Fourteen Points” was touched upon in one way or another during this debate, subtly become an argument. And I had known some of it from my first engagement with study of the VCI, where I had made the initial systematic dynamical analysis of boundary changes and their correlations with the full complement of bureaucratic variables operative in the network of front organizations, party cells and chapters, pre-governmental functional elements, military units. No bureaucracy, no organization, no government, no military force-structure I had ever heard of worked like this. Mr. Gerry never saw "mandering" like this: change and nothing but seeming change echoing through the system of interconnections changing absolutely everything, echoing from multiple nodes of change, changing the changes echoing from all the other nodes of change: wave upon wave interacting with wave upon wave. The whole thing just wavering! Identifying these boundary changes as INDICATORS, indicators of upcoming offensive military activities. Working with the CDEC translators over every bumbled code-designation decryption. Such a humongous headache! What Dac was trying to explain somehow involved the “interface between the simple and the complex”, between the near-constantly changing geographies and the near-constantly changing CORRELATED role attributions, job descriptions, mission statements, personnel allocations, and so on and so on into a seemingly endless tagged list (tagged to the boundaries which were changing): all in a virtual flux no static line-and-block chart could possibly capture, even in principle. Tags, types, triggers, roles, metrics, phases, stages… Ahhhhhhhhhhh! The level of complexity was so enormous, the depth of detail so staggering, how could I possibly get a handle on it? How many topological handles could it possess? And it was all in code! LBNs, for one. Letter Box Number addressing code. Radio-dispatched taxi cab system where locations are in code and the drivers bid against one another for each ride? Nah! Far more complex than that. The whole theater of war -- all the way to the Shan States of Burma, the total space of conflict -- was encoded! With a hugely manpower intensive -- and secretive -- commo-liaison system servicing the changing codes stacked on every party-cellular and front-organization affinity-group meshwork node. Commo-liaison line intersecting commo-liaison line into a lattice network that LAMPed-up only when thirteen-year-old girls threw on their straw baskets and crawled out across a vesicant moonscape of bomb craters, tracer-round criss-crosses, flare lampings, fear, and gory decapitation startles, leading their nightly groups of travelers on, onto the next stops, onto the next nodes, and placing the messages and money orders in the dead drops they serviced. Or LAMP-up via the systemic feedback of omnipresent party cell-and-chapter criticism/self-criticism sessions and employment of the other CI (counter-intelligence) social accounting tools and “presencing software” necessary to “netcasting” and “mobile proximity alerts” to enemy-agent mobilization of “group forming” counter-networks. The rumor mill: in Viet Nam, catty “Radio Catinat”; in Thailand, vicious “Dog Mouth Soi”. Or LAMP-up via actions of the universal platform, the mobile armed propaganda teams insuring “peercasting” and “participation capture” and “equipotential selection”. There were “group boundaries” and the whole activity matrix was FUNCTIONAL-element mapped upon those boundaries, but were their fluctuating boundaries -- fluctuating according to the changing combat environment -- boundaries like we just knew boundaries must be, must be according to the conventions of our logic? The way we generally first identified a boundary change was by picking up alteration of LBN code: changes in all the other classes of grid-computing code (identity codes for functional elements, personnel peers (comrades), commo-liaison lines, et cetera) followed changes in machine-language LBN addressing code -- usually, but not always. Identifying a renumbering of the LBN numbering of the space of contention was a way into the system, a way to break into their net, their matrix of strategic and tactical intentions (which, from our perspective, were indicators, even economic indicators, as they had an elaborate system of taxes, and so on, all also correlated to these changing boundaries). But I knew it was far more profound than merely all that. And I knew this because I had lived as a preadolescent child in an animistic rural rice-culture hamlet in immediate post-Korean-war Japan. I knew their whole notion of space, and even time, was fundamentally different from ours. Not to mention the very idea of what identity is or can be. Not to mention participation. So-called “participation mystique” was no kind of participation of the kind of identities we take ourselves to be. So, if their notion of identity was not our notion of identity, how did their numbering system actually work? Real insight into this did not come during the Dac debriefing period; it emerged over time after I departed from Viet Nam.
If you are asking yourself why you don't know anything about this, I invite you to closely study the testimony given during the Westmoreland vs. CBS trial.
Let us pause a second here and contemplate the fact that feeble American attempts to counteract this fractionated infrastructure gave rise to the Google search, indeed the systematics of the digital library later adopted by universities all across America. The MACV mainframes were installed primarily to create a searchable IDHS, Intelligence Data Handling System. CDC, CSC and so many other corporate Cs worked it all out, and it didn't work out so well. This was not only because it was too slow. A factor of failure, yes, but only a factor. Archived was any darned irrelevant datum that could be found. In spite of there being a very long list of chosen EEI, Essential Elements of Information, the IDHS became a data jungle worse than any real jungle. The intelligence EEI were inherited from WWII, not created de novo for Viet Nam; and thus invoked, refused all attempts to be reformatted: somehow or another that electromagnetic imprint could not be purged from the system. This MacIntel housed in a MacLab located in a MacHouse was pulled together by General McChristian, MacAppropriately. MacGosh! Moreover, it was archivists, library scientists, computer whizzes, electrical engineers, and the like who worked out all the bugs, not intelligence analysts. When the intelligence analysis failed, they sent elementary particle physicists over to design a hamlet defense system. No kidding! And some idiot arbitrarily decided, without asking anyone in the know, to use key words as the searchable items! And to this very day, that arbitrary decision has not been rescinded. As if what you needed to know, what you need to know, existed, exists on the level of vocabulary, not grammar, syntax, and semantics -- not to mention, not topological shapes of constant entropy surfaces. An IDHS running on mainframes with ancestors going back less than a quarter of a century and located at a discrete nonscalar coordinate point in ponderable space attempted to interdict and destroy a form of grid computing combining untapped resources largely non-local and without bombable coordinates -- can't find 'em, fix 'em, and finish 'em. And the ancestors of this form of grid computing went back thousands of years. For millennia, the indigenous peoples had played “human chess” on village and hamlet commons all across the land. Poetic duals were involved: capping couplets in retrograde inversion. The Confucian exams, themselves, were a form of such gaming. And Go. Children's games. Cockfights. And on and on. Folksongs were sung. Folk poetry quoted. Verse forms debated. People's theater, traditional opera, acrobatics and monkey music essaying hexagrams, trigrams, and every imaginable other grid dimension of semantic import. All referring to the eternal verities, to the classics, to strategy and tactics of the great battles of old, to the I-Ching, to the entrails of a chicken, to the astrologically pregnant moment. The prevailing situation, the current conjuncture, the needs of the whole were gamed, abstracted, numbered, patterned, colored, painted on umbrellas and fans, designated upper and lower heaven, explored in architectural grids of the great citadels, run into tactical and strategic scenarios, followed into the past and followed out to see where they would lead. Universal hazard was panarchically, holarchically pondered by all, by children, thirteen-year-old girls, the collective corpus. And it was all mapped out on the land by dragon currents, at sensitive geomantic acupuncture points serviced by daily rituals, by chronomantics casting sticks and fish bones, by oneiromantics, by temple dogs, naga LAMPing of the night rivereen forces, foggy ghost impresarios with fingernails long, long and curling like incense smoke. Active virtual gaming -- not passively received TV: just think of the unused memory store and processor capability -- to reduce the index of decision need, the need for electing deciding-representatives. A decision science? Referenda? Not likely! Virtual gaming and a great density of metareferencing tropes to build consensus as to what exactly is the prevailing need of the whole demanding immediate response from the part -- indeed, all subsets in “participation mystique”. Virtual gaming to identify the timing factors, the time shifts required. What are the rules of the cockfight, the breeding strategies, and how do they abide or violate the archetypal forms described in The Three Kingdoms, The Secret of the Golden Flower, the I-Ching, and so on? For everybody knew, just knew it in their bones, knew it from their ancestors that technical code was, is, and always will be the locus of social struggle. The VCI was a scaled version of the grid computing and virtual gaming regularly deployed on the village green as human chess granted from the ancients of days, the Glass Bead Game of the Old Ones. Which is not to say that those who still demurred were not dealt with harshly.
There was not much truly unique about the Super Chart, except that it displayed every echelon on one very “long scroll”. And there were so many types of functional elements at each echelon type that no attempt was made to include all such elements in a single image. So the issue of what would constitute an appropriate single “image” had already come up well before the Tran Van Dac debriefing. Truthfully, I never thought of the “Bucky ball”. The reason for this was that it did not occur to me to try altogether to get rid of scale-levels. As far as I knew, there was no process in nature that was single-scaled -- either global or local -- and, so, well, it just never occurred to me. Moreover, they were animists. Would animists do something unnatural? That thought never crossed awareness. What did pop into my mind, however, was the principle of superpositioning. At one point, I took the line-and-block chart for each echelon, as depicted on clear acetate sheets, and laid the collection one upon another. What I got looking down through all the sheets was a single image, but an image I was unable to read. That didn't mean nobody else could read it: they might be able to read it, even if we couldn't. Or maybe they didn't have to consciously read it. Maybe it was somehow so ingrained -- generation to generation to generation -- that such a reading was taken for granted and didn't have to be explicit, in the way it would have to be for us to make sense out of it. Where I drew a block and a line, maybe Dac didn't see a block and a line. Maybe he saw something else. What, then? What did he see I couldn't? The whole thing was numbered. I knew that. Maybe their notion of number wasn't our notion of number. Maybe numbers, themselves, were animated. Why not? Could be. But it wasn't just a matter of mere categories. Sure, their categories were very different from mine. If I said “To the left of the door”, they would go to the right. Hey, there, didn't you learn nothing in kindergarten? After studying how to draw a straight line with a ruler, you learn left from right. Right? Wrong. In America, everything is referenced from point of view of the ego, regarded the sole subject. While over in Viet Nam, the object is animated, is itself a subject: in giving and receiving directions, left is distinguished from right relative to the object, not the subject. Our “To the left of the door” is the door's very own “right”. Animism changes a lot of things. Even logic, maybe. Maybe even what logic can and cannot be. The Tai Chi symbol goes round and round spinning out yin and yang: a rotational logic. Looking down through the whole stack of acetate scale-level echelon sheets, maybe it's not just a matter of, speaking locally, drawing a straight line between each block and every other block -- or even, speaking globally, between every block and every block, however hard that might be to visualize. It was my first developed insight that seemed the real clue: how bureaucratic variables, the functions of functional elements, were mapped on changing boundaries. The involved system of correspondences was not only a metaphorical analogue for the first principle of Chinese medicine, it was authentically the Eulerian conception of mathematical function. Each of the cadre I debriefed or interrogated had worn many hats, so the functions of the roles they played in the functions of functional elements mapped on changing boundaries at whatever echelon had to be multivariant, not single-valued. Ha! The multi-sheeted Riemann surface I had run across in that self-study tutorial in high school. Anyway, this was about as far as I got in Viet Nam. But the question wouldn't leave me alone, so I found myself studying multi-scale systems wherever I went.
If I am not mistaken, on the single echelon-scale sheet of a “Bucky ball” each triangular unit cell is not directly connected to every other unit cell; a given unit cell is connected to other unit cells that are connected to other unit cells that are connected to other unit cells in serial formation such that all unit cells are connected together into a flat meshwork of unit cells which, as a whole, can be folded through 3-space into a “ball”, an approximation to a 2-sphere, an approximation that can be as close as we like by choosing the size of the unit cell as small as we like. So, the claim, according to John Arquilla and David Ronfeldt, as reported by Brian Friel, that a terrorist network like that created by Bin Laden “moves all the boxes on a hierarchical organizational chart to one level and then connects each box to every other box” is not quite correct. Even on a standard line-and-block chart each box (square or triangular) is connected to every other box through some combination of intermediaries, to include across echelon-scale levels. So, the innovation offered here by Arquilla-Ronfeldt-Friel is likely not Bin Laden's innovation; it is simply to remove scale-levels from view. One just ignores them, ignores that they are actually there (and can reassert their “authority” whenever they so please). This “ignoring” is called filtering, separating data from noise, scaling, renormalizing, and so on: sacred (psychologically compensatory projective-identification) methodology of institutional science whereby you can have your cake and eat it too. No matter how you view an intranet or the internet or some supernet, however hypercubed, as long as the net is, topologically speaking, simply-connected, it is not a supraordinate network: the thing is serially connected or it's connected in parallel and in both cases in the real world of actual connections in real-number 3-space there are switching units involved, nodes, be those nodes telephone switch boards or uploading and downloading satellite microwave links. It's a problem in tiling pattern and closest-packing network architectures, an area Roger Penrose has preeminent expertise. But what if the space involved is not real 3-space? What if it is “sacred space” or “Buddhological space” or the spaces of the tribal Kings of Fire and Water? And what if the boundaries in this space are not closed-circle-type borders whereby inside can be absolutely distinguished from outside? Would it be possible, then, for each box to be connected directly to every other box? No it would not. In order for that kind of connectivity to take place, even in sacred space, the given box could not be the given box, it could not be selfsame, the same as itself; it could not have simple-identity. It would have to be not-itself n-times over; it would have to have animistic identity transparency to the nth-degree. And explication of this Nirvanic nth-degree of non-selfsame no-self identity would require m-valued logics, not bivalent logic propositionally calculated by Aristotle's syllogistic. The unit cell directly connected to every other unit cell would have to be itself and every other class of not-itself unit cells simultaneously -- in transfinite sets where, at the very least, the given set can be put in one-to-one correspondence with any of its proper subsets -- which means that not only is sacred space involved but also higher-order time, “imaginary time”, DreamTime, otherwise no constructability could be demonstrated in finite time. Simultaneous incarnations -- not reincarnation, not exact recurrence, and not resurrection: no “re's” allowed. And the LAMP-up lattice-connector lines are not merely optical; acoustico-optical SongLines-type border-boundaries are required, for the involved sacred space must have auditory properties if it is to fractalize into band-pass-type fractal boundaries (where all properties of the “bureaucratic” space “contained” by its boundaries are mapped on those boundaries: Koch-curve-type boundary without boundary); it must carry acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes, i.e., standing infrasound signatures used for homing. The given part is directly connected to every other part only by each being the whole, not simply by seeing the whole -- and this requires an animistic-tribal m-logically-valued al-jabr of Cantor dust, of transfinite sets (not limit sequences) and their sacred spacestimes. In this case, the collection of LBNs, the node-addressing number system, would be an application of the primes: each LBN would be a numbered Gödel number (a number composed of prime factors defined on logical operations) representing an m-logically-valued proposition (the set of all sets of which, including itself and/or not including itself, being -- not subject to the rules of 1T2 logic alone -- equivalent to the corpus of Cantor dust particles).
Here's how Derek, et al., imagined the “Bucky ball” in MOON, as depicted on a “found object”, the “large glass” of an ancient bronze-drum tympanum (Vol. 2, pp. 548-54):
“That night,” continued Yoshio, “father apparently decided to name the drum he had seen: The Moon of Hoa Binh.”
“A nice thought,” observed Thuy Tien.
Lines from Saigyo drifted into Tadao's awareness:
Tsukiga subeteo utsushi
(Moon mirrors all things everywhere)Kokoroga tsukio utsusutoki… satorino kyoochi
(Mind mirrors moon… in Satori now).“Here is a note about the drum, along with a sketch of the tympanum,” said Yoshio, running his finger down the text of the journal. He directed his attention to Derek. “The tympanum has a very Yoman feeling. This sort of bronze culture was centered in the Kansai area. The bronze sword culture from Korea was predominate in kita-Kyushu and Shikoku. Okayama was the boundary between the two.” He then spoke to the whole group. “The note says: 'F. Heger. 1902. Alte Metallstrommelm aus Südestasien. Old Metal Drums of Southeast Asia. Drum of Heger type I. 79 cm diameter tympanum; 62.5 cm height of mantle…' He appears to be classifying the drum according to Heger's categories.”
Looking at the drawing of the tympanum, Thuy Tien exclaimed, “That's my father's handwriting!”
“What does De Thich mean?” asked Tadao, stretching his neck to see the drawing.
“It's the Vietnamese designation for Indra, the Indian god of rain,” Thuy Tien informed.
“Indra in Viet Nam?” Tadao asked in doubtful tones.
“Yes, there are many Hindu cultural influences in Viet Nam, the Chams for instance. Tra Kieu southwest of Danang was once called Singhapura; Dong Duong in the same area was originally Indrapura… It's thought that Indra came to the region by sea during the second missionary effort initiated by the fourth Buddhist Council in the 2nd century A.D. I am a bit skeptical of this. One can well ask: Why would Indra, who is definitely no part of Buddhism, be brought along by Buddhist missionaries? There is a famous Ngoc Lu drum -- 7th to 6th century B.C., according to current dating schemes -- exhibiting on the tympanum the four world corners, each with a female figure drumming. In the same region of Viet Nam are a number of pagodas dedicated to the cult of the four Lady Buddhas symbolizing lightning, rain, thunder, and clouds… some say, possible incarnations of Indra. Did Buddhism assimilate Indra to Viet Nam, or was Indra assimilated to Buddhism in Viet Nam?”
“Interesting, this focus on the weather,” mused Yoshio.
“Look at all the different scale levels of equilateral triangular nets and categories of coordination points indicated,” Derek suggested. “Indra's net is surely what Trang Minh was thinking.”
“Indra's net?” Thuy Tien asked.
“The word 'tantra' roughly means thread or weaving… or interwoven-ness. Indra's net is the matrix out of which the cosmos manifests.”
“Oh.”
“See.” Derek pointed. “Above the most dense nets, the object-world emerges: birds and plants. And along each side--” He pointed again. “--are portrayed stylized helices, each with a bubble core. Superconductant DNA? And look at that solar image in the center of the tympanum. How many points does it have?”
“Twelve,” said Ilse.
“And a tone field,” added Derek.
“A calendar, too… and maybe a clock,” said Tadao.
“Yes, a tonal calendar,” agree Derek. “The object-world is partitioned into a series of scale levels or key signatures by the concentric circles emanating from the sun. The cabalistic 'ray of creation'… powers of ten? Oh, God!” he exclaimed in sudden recognition.
“What?” asked Thuy Tien.
“The 'Spindle of Necessity' from the Myth of Er: Book Ten, Plato's REPUBLIC. Brumbaugh analyzed it geometrically. It's exactly the same as the concentric nest on this tympanum! I can just about quote him: 'It is their songs -- the Fates -- and their spinning, with the sirens' music of the spheres as contrapuntal background, that activates and explains the revolutions of the Spindle of Necessity.' And also Plato's CRITIAS. The plan of the inner city of Atlantis has the exact same geometric layout.”
Everybody sat quietly for a moment after that. Ai Jiro had a quizzical expression on his face and clearly was no participant in this conversation.
“And if it's a clock, maybe a climatological clock…” Yoshio speculated. “What do you think the bird and worm figures, the washer-like disks, the hatch marks represent?”
“Hmmmm,” mused Derek.
“I said it's a calendar,” Tadao reminded. “The concrete images represent large numbers; the abstract marks, smaller numbers.”
“Look at the human figures converging on the solar image,” said Ilse. “What does that represent?”
“The Gnostics talked about traveling to other worlds through the sun,” Derek announced. “If that image represents a rotating mini-blackhole…”
“Or a spacetime gate,” mused Yoshio.
“The invariants represented in any given musical matrix or yantra are numerological signifiers representing 'wave trace velocities',” proclaimed Derek.
Yoshio raised his eyebrows at that.
“You think this suggests that Southeast Asian Bronze Age culture derived from the Hindu?” asked Tadao of Derek.
“Or the other way around, perhaps. Some lost civilization produced the knowledge of which the Vedas is a remnant.”
“Hmmmm.” The skepticism of a fly confronted by a black widow spider filled the voice.
“Father apparently thought something of the sort,” Yoshio said to Tadao. “Translate the characters.”
Tadao proceeded to do just that. “Is this the origin of ancient Shintoist cosmology?…” Hmmmm. I don't see it.
Yoshio had been skimming the journal again. “Here he quotes from Imbe Masamichi,” Yoshio announced. “From SHINDAI-NO-MAKI-KUKETSU, Oral Traditions in the Age of the Gods. 'The mirror -- yata-no-Kagami -- is believed to have been made by Ishi-kori-dome-no-mikoto to draw Amaterasu-o-mi-kami'… uh, the Sun Goddess, 'out of the Rock-Cave of Necessity', I mean 'Heaven.' He points out her emblem is an eight-petaled mirror.”
“Ua! Troi oi!” exclaimed Thuy Tien.
“Cayley's 8-tuples,” said Derek.
Yoshio again raised his eyebrows.
“What is Amatersu's mirror?” asked Derek. “How many trigrams are there, how many pedals… uh, I mean, petals… does it take to generate the sixty-four hexagrams? The Sun Goddess' mirror is the reflector in the cosmic cipher machine! It's the universal grammar, uh, I mean the universal semiotic! The DNA base sequences are not the cipher; they're only the key. The complete DNA cipher system -- including the quantum wave structure -- is a special case, conforming to the same rules, of spacetime cipher which generates all classes of the object-constancy. The covert quantum wave properties hidden behind the periodic table of elements, obviously, are involved in this. Would a cosmic cryptologist, called the Sun Goddess, have created a spacetime cipher that did not also embrace the stellar alchemy of inorganic chemistry?”
“Do you mean to suggest that Amaterasu came from China?” asked Tadao with an aggressive set to his jaw.
“No,” replied Derek. “I'm beginning to suspect that the mathematics of the I-CHING and Amaterasu had a common source before China.”
“Hmmmm.” Again the skepticism.
Thuy Tien pulled out the bronze mirror -- given to her by Trang Minh -- hanging like a lavaliere from a chain upon her chest, and showed it to everyone.
“It was handed down through the Vietnamese royal family,” said Derek.
”There are a number of such mirrors known,” explained Thuy Tien. ”Hanoi Museum has one nearly identical on display.”
“I still don't see the connection,” said Tadao. “That mirror has a hexagonal etching, not an eight-sided figure upon it. Hmmmm. Where did that scratch come from?”
“It's always been there,” replied Thuy Tien.
“I don't think tonight is the time to go into how Hamilton constructed his quaternions, and how Cayley built upon his work,” said Yoshio, looking over at Derek.
“There's a simple illustration. In the cabalistic 'tree of life',” observed Derek, “one projects from a tiling pattern to a three-dimensional cosmological 'maze'. I believe that if you view an octahedron from the proper angle, you will see a hexagon… Let's just say that in Cayley's cabalistic arithmetic, if you want three of space and three of operator-time, you need eight.”
“Hmmmm,” muttered Tadao, doing his best to shrug off the implications of interpreting cosmological myths in such fashion as this.
“But there is a lot more here than we've already discussed,” Derek proclaimed.
“How is that?” asked Yoshio.
“Enter Trang Minh's poem,” said Derek with a smile as mysterious as an Incan hierophantic calendarical screed.
“Really?” asked Thuy Tien.
“What poem?” asked Tadao.
Thuy Tien briefly explained about the poem and then asked Derek: “It's what you noticed before about the tone sequence, isn't it?”
“Right you are. B-T-T-T-B-T-B-B-B-T. This is what Sherman Stein, the mathematician, calls a 'memory wheel'. It can be translated into a series of zeros and ones. 0111010001. George Perle, the specialist in twelve-tone music, pointed out that this is something like a Grungestalt, the basic shape of a tone-row. If you take zero for a short beat and one for a long, it notates a Hindu raga: in Sanskrit, yamatarajabhanasalangam. This is a nonsense mnemonic for learning complex rhythmic structures. It has an interesting property: it's a snake eating its own tail, Ouroboros. Have the head come around and 'eat' the 1 and 0 off the end, and you have a 'wheel'. Pick triplets, reading counterclockwise, and binary notation of the eight trigrams of the I-CHING are generated: another sort of eight-petaled mirror… and that's not to mention picking triplets of nucleotide pairs, translocations, inversions, spools, loops, pseudoknots, genetic palindromes!”
“Fascinating,” was Yoshio's reaction.
“But Stein shows this leads right into the heart of higher mathematics, into, I can see, the math needed to characterize self-organizing systems. Euler's Koenigsberg Bridge problem in topology, for instance. And more: Stein lists some fourteen known specific applications: everything from the binomial distribution, to Bruijn's theorem, to generation of n-tuplets, to error-correcting codes.”
“In plus yo to the nth power yields the binomial expansion,” said Yoshio with the humming laugh of a kazoo player.
“Yeah,” Derek agreed, also laughing, “yields the Involution, you mean… The trigrams generated, of course, can be represented in tableau form or--”
“Like the Old Citadel in Saigon?” asked Thuy Tien, cutting in.
“Well, the Citadel would constitute one representative cell of the tableau.” Derek hesitated, trying to pick up the interrupted thought.
“You were going to say more,” prompted Yoshio.
“Oh, yes… in tableau form or, more simply, as a Kerckhoffs slide -- the binary form of which can be treated as a Turing machine.”
“You think my father was aware of all this?” asked Thuy Tien.
“I have no idea what he was and was not aware of in creating his musical motive, his algorithm of multi-identity. I seem continually to be forced to revise my opinion. And, clearly, more revision even than this is needed.”
“You see more?” Yoshio asked.
“There is a lot more to be said about the triangular net on the tympanum: the 'wormhole mesh', I call it. The equilateral triangular grid -- as architectonics of the brain's cortex teaches us -- can, on all but the most dense sheet, also be viewed as a nested hexagonal network, a sea of Bénard cells. Each hexagonal cell, on any scale level, can represent a hexagram of the I-CHING in circular motion, by mapping, on each of its six sides in binary notation, one line of trigraphic cipher. We have here a notation of space generated from a rotational logic, the fundamental generative elements of which are spinors. The idea of time implicit in the I-CHING is intimately involved with these spinors, and the circular motion of yin and yang in the Tai Chi symbol is merely a simplified referent to this more complete graphic exposition.”
“I don't see it,” admitted Yoshio.
“Let's keep it simple. I mean, let's not talk about spacetime cipher in relation to quaternions, 8-tuples, twisting axes of spin, rotational operators, double-helical involutes, et cetera.”
“Yes, let's leave that for another time,” adjured Yoshio.
“Take an infinitely dense equilateral triangular network,” suggested Derek. “Each intersection identifies a point. In a regular equilateral triangular fashion, drop from view the interior points. What do you have?”
“Another equilateral triangular net -- on a larger scale level,” said Yoshio.
“Iterate this procedure indefinitely and you have a manifold composed of an infinite number of sheets, a tiling pattern of nested triangles of increasing scale on each member of the collection. Now, on the most dense sheet attach m logical values to each point. Not n degrees of freedom; we are not talking state space or phase space. Call this sheet the 'multivalued reference space'. It's a layered space stacked like Irene Pereira's.”
“And,” suggested Yoshio, “on each sheet with larger triangles, attach m-1, m-2, m-3…m-n values to each point on each sheet as you move from smaller to larger networks.”
“No,” Derek replied, “that is not my idea. Each subsequent sheet has only one value attached to each point, one value of a given logical domain… but! since interior points are regularly dropped out of view to generate each subsequent sheet, you can stack all the values of each single-valued sheet on the equivalent points on the reference sheet to constitute a multivalued reference space. Now call the collection of single-valued sheets scale levels of ponderable spacetime.”
This discussion continues in a similar vein for quite some time.
“Filtering” is an avoidance mechanism that facilitates displacement through regression. One of Derek's themes is that the mortification suffered was so enormously deflating -- when, with Tet-'68, the IDHS mainframes were clearly shown to have failed to find, fix, and finish the grid computing of indigenous human chess -- that the associated stab-in-the-back myth resulted in an incredible ramp up of cognitive suppression and consequent projective identification, yielding an internet technology wherein the offending notion of animistic identity transparency is analogically modeled in regressed form because not consciously available. The regression, of course, predisposes to infantile collective violence: Dennis the Menace type bombing behaviors like the Kissinger-Nixon campaign against Cambodia, a repeat performance of which could only be avoided, according to Derek, by implementation of something along the lines of VirFut Q-Pro.
Ah, yes, Peter Turchin's War and Peace and War (Pi Press, 2006 in 2005). Hardly necessary to actually read all these books, as one pretty much already knows what they are going to say. As if EveryAcademic was but OneAcademic. They're all just the same book: different title, unique set of concrete contents, but the basic ideas are invariant. Not surprising, given the funding formula. Nonlinear (Newtonian) dynamics, with the “Newtonian” left out of the title but not the theory. Feedback feeding back upon feedback: A and not-A and A. Actor-and-action-based intra-actionism -- and interactionism, of course. Statistical ensembles, complexity, chaos dynamics. Process in time, over time, with time, under time. Non-linear dynamics in-over-with-under linear-time only. Butterflies released into linear-time as nonlinearities. As much as possible, reflexivities suppressed (so as to keep 1T2 logic intact, and the Cantorian universe at least relatively at bay). All the actor-actions at the phase boundaries. Far from equilibrium, of course: no relative-state. Cooperation and cohesion as theoretical properties. Simple-identity claimed and verified by definition of framework conditions, initial and boundary. Cooperation between discrete entities in full possession of simple-identity; such cooperation a cohesion within the group of entities, a cohesion which in no way challenges simple-identity. Even with all the feedback, no fundamental self-reentries. Selfish multilevel selection evolving ultrasociality through punishment and extermination -- experimentally verified with imperial data. With a grafting of tropes, of course! Symbolic interactionism stacked on actor interactionism. Collective action without a collective occasion of experience. Magic without magic; new paradigm without new paradigm. Yet one more book falsifying, distorting, dissimulating, denying, suppressing the quantum properties of collective, cooperative, and critical behaviors, such that the prerequisites to holocaust of the Whole Earth become more and more constellated. Thus Sparch Derek Dillon.
No. I am not saying that brown-end cadastral factors -- germs, steel, guns -- in sequence, one little thing leading to another, until there is a big pile of patterns in the repertoire of the historical conductor are of no importance, be he force, the fates, a great man, or a strange teleological attractor. Bearing down may well be a part of the historical engine. Just because Derek in MOON referred to this as the “Asscan School of history” does not mean that the authors necessarily agreed with him. There are, of course, pink-end factors, the five F's -- food, fuel, funding, fu-----, and fuddle -- as historical functors. One's preferred theory of history may well be dependent upon the Freudian stage one has achieved. Nor am I disparaging cooperation and cohesion, or the dominance of the frontier, about which I have essayed extensively. What is at issue is precisely what the words “cooperation” and “cohesion” and “boundary” might denote and connote. Turchin, for instance, says (p. 46, War and Peace and War) “No contradiction inherently exists between cooperation and cruelty.” Even on a most superficial level, this is a misleading statement. In a less misleading fashion, one could say: No contradiction inherently exists between internal cooperation and external cruelty. Internal cruelty is not cooperation but coercion. On a less superficial level yet, one could mention the social anthropologists' “participation mystique” or the less profound general notion of “participation” (neither of which appear in the index to Turchin's book). One could also note that War and Peace, as distinct from War and Peace and War, appends its Tolstoyian-Laplacian qua Newtonian historiography as a mere afterthought: the material was not integrated into the storyline or character interactions like the historiography presented in MOON. Which is an observation significant to evaluation of the validity or non-validity of Tolstoy's historiographic perspectives. The most curious thing about Turchin's book, however, is the lack of a chapter devoted to collapse of imperial USSR. A book assimilating chaos-complexity to Tolstoy could hardly be anything but dissimulative to the quantum account of self-organization. Sensitive dependence (on initial conditions) is absolutely dependent on linear-time being unmolested: no Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even. Which is an issue not wholly unrelated to the USSR case, given how N. A. Kozyrev's ideas about the rotational properties of time dovetailed with influence of Vernadsky's biospheric ecology to undermine elite “cohesion”… uh, speaking in terms of cognitive sociology. But if you want to have something more like a quantum account of how a virtual handful of Spaniards performed so spectacularly against a Native American empire, I recommend William Sullivan's The Secret of the Inca: Myth, Astronomy, and the War Against Time (Crown, 1996). As for myself, there is nothing but astonied astound at the very notion the Inca occupied only real 3-space in-over-with-under linear-time only. The time they were warring with was clearly active-topological operator-time, with, à la Kozyrev, a rotational moment to impart, not time as a mere passive reference frame, real or complex, plus or minus in numerical designation. Moreover, this operator the Incas assaulted, attempted to bring under their control, clearly was “imaginary”. Contemplate the notion that the Inca had no beef with the Spaniards, who were received as their conductors, their “superstrings”, as they caught the long-awaited “comet”. If Alte Metallstrommelm aus Südestasien depict traveling to other worlds through the sun, and the Gnostic Gospels spoke of the same, how is it the Inca failed to find out about it? Who wants to be food for MOON? Maybe there are more things in the world, Horatio, and all that… And just so you don't think this sort of thing is confined to bizarre sects and Native Americans, try reading Giorgio Santillana and Hertha von Dechand on “invariance” and the origins of Western science in Hamlet's Mill (Nonpareil, 1969). Bill Sullivan brilliantly applied the principles explicated there to his analysis of Inca-Spaniard “relations”.
You think I am a little bit “out of line”, do you? The fact that I am still talking is a measure of the degree to which I am still very much in line. Check the following quotation out, if you can endure a stimulus to contemplation of what is and is not in line (Jim Yardley, N.Y. Times, “China Says Three Cases May Be Bird Flu”, 7 November 2005):
The announcement was made as China fought its fourth recent bird flu outbreak among fowl, this time in northeastern China where the disease killed more than 8,940 chickens. Health workers in the region slaughtered more than 369,000 birds within a two-mile radius of the outbreak, state media reported.
The three cases suspected of being bird flu, if confirmed, would be the first people infected in China this year with the H5N1 strain. International health officials are closely watching China because of fears that the proximity between people and poultry in rural areas could leave the country susceptible to a dangerous outbreak of the deadly flu.
Back-to-back paragraphs: “…slaughtered more than 369,000 birds within a two-mile radius…” and “…the proximity between people and poultry in rural areas could leave the country susceptible to a dangerous outbreak…”
Who are the liars here? Who isn't lying? And if you don't get it, so be it. When the time comes -- just like in immediate aftermath of WWI in Russia as anyone and everyone and their progeny suspected of being associated in anyway whatsoever with the old regime was hunted down and eliminated -- ain't nobody gunna take the belly achin' seriously. Won't be any meek left to inherit nothin'. It's not as if history hasn't adequately warned us.
People -- including psychologists, psychiatrists, and neurologists -- certainly do have a near complete incapacity to comprehend that the psychological transference has a subject-(physical)object level which is intimately involved with the quantum measurement problem. Some are so psychologically reactive to the involved thematics, they imagine the fossil-fuel-peak energy crisis will be solved by going back to the pre-Rutherford-Bohr conception of the structure of the atom's electron orbitals (rather than by expanding insight into quantum numbers via applications of m-valued logics, which would fundamentally alter the nature of the notion of a quantum leap, but not carry it back to the pre-Rutherford-Bohr conception). Even if they have read Lewis Mumford's Technics and Civilization and his Art and Technics, and thereby know that human beings conceive of and produce technical artifacts and art objects, still, this insight somehow does not get generalized to physical objects qua objects. This is because of the state of identification cultivated and because of lack of insight into dimensions of that state of consciousness. Even the general properties of identification are poorly understood, for lack of systematic experiential exploration (e.g., actual practice -- not merely thinking about, as in Ideas, what such practice must be -- of “reductive phenomenology”), as the phrase “identification with nature” indicates. There is no such thing as “identification with nature”. There is empathy with nature; there is generative empathy with nature; and there is a transfinite m-logically-valued set of deeper states than those -- none of which are identification, for identification is always a negative state, even if it often “feels good”. Identification is always a capture of consciousness, always a restriction, always an introjection -- even if that which is introjected happens to be a projection. Don't have time for the practice of reductive phenomenology? Then, apparently, you no longer walk down the street or across the room: Philokalia. Such understanding from experiential exploration, such insight, such comprehension is essential to grasping the notion espoused here and in MOON concerning the origins of warfare and present-day dynamics of meltdown toward collective human species self-immolation. Even C. G. Jung did not fully “get” subject-(physical)object-level transference, did not carry such insight into his metapsychology of Nazification as portrayed in, for instance, Modern Man in Search of a Soul -- and this is why he virtually uncritically embraced Lévy-Bruhl's pejorative “participation mystique”, transforming the social anthropology term into the “participation inconsciente” of analytical psychology. “Object populations” subject to final solutions obviously keep changing their definition: nowadays, the objective might soon become the “Islamic imbeciles” or the “licentious Latinos”. Projective identification of the objective of final solutions mutates like viruses. Jean Gebser in The Ever-Present Origin made a very close pass at characterizing deep properties of subject-(physical)object-level transference with his notions of the “concretion of time” and the “haptification of space”, but the fact that late in the book he fumbled treatment of multivalued logics belies the utility of his characterizations of the “unperspectival” as distinct from the “aperspectival” -- and also the fact that he does not map his Cubism-derived understanding of the “concretion of time” into his concept of history, which, by virtue of the notion of evolution he embraces, remains linear-time bound. A similar inconsciente, incomprehension, nescience plagued Jung's and Wolfgang Pauli's notion of “synchronicity”, an “acausal connecting principle” they hoped to substitute for “probability amplitude”. Pauli was most at fault here, for he innovated one take on the nature of “operator-time” only to reject it for lack of the psychological capacity to process the fact that “synchronicity” is epiphenomenal to the fact that Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation can only be dissimulated absent interpretation with m-valued logics.
This is, however, a very old human problem -- a problem rooted in consciousness-state and behavioral modulation of brain chemistry and neural network structure, and brain chemistry-structure modulation of consciousness-state and behavior -- certainly not something restricted to the modern era. Consider recent portraits of the Arabic notion of group cohesion: asabiya. Peter Turchin, in War and Peace and War, characterizes Ibn Khaldun's historiographic treatment of the notion -- What are the origins of asabiya? -- by way of a negative (p. 92) “…no constant struggle occurs for survival within the civilization zone that would nurture and maintain high asabiya” and a positive (p. 91) “…mutual affection and willingness to fight and die for each other”. Constant struggle against the “other” as “object” and an embrace of death of the “self” as “subject” seem to be the engines of asabiya. Little, but something, is added to this level of understanding by Farhad Khosrokhavar, in Suicide Bombers, Allah's New Martyrs (p. 25): “…asabiya, or the principle of group cohesion that cements a group's coherence and identity”. A behavioral indicator of high group asabiya is members acting out a (p. 22) “…desire to ascend to Allah by literally 'annihilating himself' in Him… by becoming a martyr”. Turchin's treatment of what asabiya signifies is wholly sociocentric. This is about as insightful as claiming that communitas is wholly non-hierarchical! Khosrokhavar enters the psychological domain. Even amongst Bedouin tribal itinerants of the Maghreb, the logocentrics of asabiya had to have had animistic origins. This is simply in the nature of the case anywhere on the planet. Struggle of self with other, of subject with object, by combat, by murder, by simple suicide, by non-simple means of “'annihilating himself' in Him” is analogical embodiment -- by projective identification -- of the act of denying or embracing validity to the “law of distributed middle”. Embrace of the “fallacy of undistributed middle” is precisely an annihilation of himself in Him. Simple combat, as opposed to martyrdom operations and “high combat”, is analogical affirmation of validity of the “law of distributed middle”. Been there; almost done that! Large portions of the corpora of literatures produced by the fertile crescent religions are devoted -- by surrogate referents -- to the various “dilemmas” and “paradoxes” associated with the involved issues of logic. What do you think Abelard and Heloise argued about, when they were not lashing out at each other? Thomism differs from Augustinism which way? Unamuno and Our Lady of Guadalupe? How many angels can sit on the head of a pin? Being of German-Dutch Evangelical Grace Reformed stock, progeny of ministers and military men back to early 18th century south central Pennsylvania, I should be able to answer that question. Turchin touches on this -- again without real insight -- on page 84, with his discussion of the “symbolic markers” signifying geographic distribution of sects torn apart by centrifugal tendencies into irreconcilable Nestorians, Monophysites, and Chalcedonians. Bishopric sectarianism over permissible properties of Christic identity was (and is) surrogate argument over order-of-value in logic and whether truth-value or animistic identity transparency is the foundation of logic. Turchin even admits that the Calcedonian notion of what the very idea of identity can and cannot be “sounds like compete gibberish to many readers and it does to me”, as he says: this is given as “Christ was completely human and completely divine, one and the same Christ having two natures without confusion or change, division, or separation”. A perfectly apt propositional account of 2T3-valued logic interpreted in relation to animistic identity transparency, not truth-value. It may be noted that as a kid in Pennsylvania I swam in a lake locally known as New Calcedonia. Truth-value is a notion fully applicable only to 1T2 logic, which is the Nestorian position on the nature of Christ's identity -- as given by Turchin: “…Christ had two separate natures, one human and one divine, in the same person, but not commingled”. The “not commingled” is in conformance with the “law of distributed middle”, whereas the Monophysites' 2T2-valued Christic logic of identity embraced the “fallacy of undistributed middle”: in Turchin's phraseology, “Christ's two natures were fully combined into one”. In generalizing upon these sorts of considerations, Jan Lukasiewicz, the “discoverer” of multivalued logics, was fully within the religious tradition of his ethnonymic collectivity. Here we have an aspect of the subject-(physical)object level of the transference and how it works itself out in projective identification over a population corpus. This is an example from the eastern and southern “conflict-prone band” phase-boundary frontier of the Roman Empire, whereas the rise of Odin as Allfather (“everyman” of the psychological transference) is an example from the western and northern frontier. Turchin provides an account of this on pages 70 and 71, without discussion of the logocentric aspects of its Germanic generative-empathic earth-spirit import. Magical rune, Odin drank from the well-potential of Mimir and hung himself with quantum well-wires on the Yggdrasil world tree; thus, as sung by the skalds-poets, he “sacrificed himself -- to himself --” (p. 70) as “myself to myself/ on that tree,/ of which no man knows/ of what roots it runs” (p. 71). This Cabalistic tree-of-life magical-thinking “fantasy” is a tropological-analogical embodiment of the propositional self-reference and reentry upon which Polish m-valued logics of identity transparency are based, those logics required for non-dissimulative interpretation of the “nine lives” of “Schrödinger's cat”. As the Moscow State University logician Alexander Karpenko has recently demonstrated, m-valued logics are “rooted trees” and functionals over prime numbers, the very numbers employed by Gödel to define the “Gödel numbers” numbering the propositions constituting the world tree. Having had enough history, it's about time for a bit of hertory -- which means going back farther/further yet, in order to see into the future.
I've been thinking about these issues for a long time. Certainly since 1953 as an eight-year-old standing in FLW's Imperial Hotel, Tokyo watching treatment of Japanese shoe-shine boys by American officers and diplomats; since almost nine, standing at the end of the Ashiya AFB runway watching the C-119s take off to re-supply Dien Bien Phu; since braced as a ten-year-old next to my bomber-pilot father looking at yet to be fully restored Hiroshima. In Viet Nam, the night-operating Hashishim, stoked on their opium-cured “Big O's”, were either bootless dagger teams moving across the paddies or the highlands hatchet forces: dagger teams carried no firearms (k-bars, not box-cutters); sometimes, also the hatchet forces. Actually, my thought in these areas very likely goes back to well before 1953, one indicator of the likelihood of this being the fact that, in 1951-2, Greencastle, Pennsylvania sported three notorious child sleepwalkers, who went their separate ways in 1953. These three night-walkers, chums by day, each, unbeknownst to the others, at different times later went through Special Forces Training Group and found themselves leading night operations for some period of their Viet Nam tours. The night vision apparatus used by sleepwalkers is far superior to star-light devices. Seeing with eyes closed: not only optical, not even only optico-acoustical, but primarily logocentric. Attempts to psych-out sleepwalker mind eventually get down to logic. There is just no way that cruelty-induced internal in-group “cooperation” and “altruism” are cooperation and altruism in the usual other-directed out-group fashion these words denote-connote. Calling the thing by the name of its opposite is a postmodernist literary ploy-become-convention epiphenomenal to certain features of the present historical conjuncture coming to cusp over issues long brewing. That which collapses, yields; that which assaults, generates: this is a thesis? A description? Boundaries come in how many Russellian logic-types? How many values to a given boundary?
Infinite Lukasiewicz µTm yielding to finite Lukasiewicz µTm: peace succumbing to tribal conflict. Finite µTm yielding to 1Tm: tribal conflict succumbing to mass warfare. 1Tm yielding to 1T2: mass warfare succumbing to total war. Politico-military aspect of total war: conquer or fragment; political-economy aspect of total war: growth or failure. Far from equilibrium cusp between two regimes of heuristically-idealized, but actually non-existent, stable equilibria: consequence of the 1T2-logic, linear-time-bound nature of nonlinear (Newtonian) dynamics. This is acted out in surrogate form as hard and soft monotheism. For a “perspectival” 1T2 proposition, there are two possible truth-values, only one of which can be true. Soft monotheism seeks to convert to the one true value; hard monotheism mandates that the apostate value be killed. Atemporal polytheism, however, has many “types” understood not in terms of truth-value, but as animistic identity transparency (quantum relative-state): the myriad “aperspectival” transfinte and finite µTm types; the many “unperspectival” 1Tm types. Spontaneous µTm fusion (an expression of the quantum potential inherent to relative-state: engine of self-organization) expresses as Einfuhlung, generative empathy, amae, yielding holographic animistic identity transparency with nature (generalized to human affairs). But monotheism, soft or hard, is the cult of those who submit, submit, ultimately, to the determinism of bivalent logic: spiritual obedience to the laws of syllogism. 1T2 internally-coerced, teleological attractor-pull cohesion plus 1T2 external-cause, forced-push cohesion expresses as projective identification in transference yielding Auftragstaktic, asabiya, esprit de corp within the group only. Submission of the monotheist is insured by imposition of hyperprescription upon enculturated glutamaturgic neuronal etching and alteration of the electromagnetic properties of subclinical autogenic brain discharges and their psychoneuroimmunologic consequences. Lacuna-on-the-brain: historicizing and 1T2-izing to institutionalized monotheistic cults over an amorphous polytheistic µTm religious base. One can see nothing on the present scene suggesting the human species is likely to arrest the race to collective self-annihilation over issues involved in all this.
But you can't possibly orchestrate an effective relief effort for billions of people! No matter how great the available resources. Just as you cannot orchestrate an effective global “war” on drugs, or global poverty, or even global hunger. We are not talking about vaccinations for smallpox. We are not talking about spraying for malaria. We are not talking about MEDCAPS (medical civic action patrols) within borders or without borders. We are not talking about a golden revolution, an orange revolution, a violent revolution, a hurricane, an earthquake, a tsunami, a volcano, a tornado outbreak, a pandemic, a currency meltdown, the human counter-ecological scourge, or even a hot-housed new ice age accompanied by global coastal flooding. Each of these event categories -- even all of them together -- is conceivably manageable. What we are talking about is not conceivably manageable, no matter how good a conceiver you might be. These things -- including oil peak dynamics and fulmination in global terrorism -- are mere symptoms, not what is going to transpire; not even causes of what is going to transpire. What is going to transpire is collective, not mere mass, hysteria. Collective hysteria over a whole species -- humanity -- a species with the weapons currently available to mankind. What my writings attempt to address are the various dimensions of how the impetus to collective hysteria has come to pass, and what can be done about it. I have been arguing since the late-'60s that the realities of what is to transpire will be far worse than what is argued by James Howard Kunstler (The Long Emergency, Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century, Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005) unless -- not something, but -- the right things are done -- not to prevent, but -- to prepare for dealing with the inevitable. Absent the right preparation, there will be no dealing with the inevitable, no limiting its full play out. Forget orchestration -- orchestration by nation-states, multilaterals, transnationals, NGOs, deep pockets, rock stars, local voluntary associations, friends, SmartMobs… smart lynch mobs, maybe. The right nascent structures, functions, processes have to be in place, at the right places, before -- if processes of self-organization are to have prerequisites about which to congeal when utter “intellectual void” falls upon the scene. The panoply of such right requirements has yet to be identified! This will not be a virtual crisis solvable by cooperative and cohesive non-place communities and telepresencing. It will actually happen, on the ground in real placed places. Over the decades, I have unreservedly expressed this opinion to many, many people. The reactions have been stereotypic: “People don't want to hear that!” and “No one is going to act under the assumption this cannot be prevented” and “If it comes to that, well, then, it's just, well… all over” and “Even if what you say is true, and I don't believe it for a second, there is nothing someone in my position could do” and “With opinions like that, it's surprising you're still alive” and “I simply don't know what to do about it, so I'm not going to think about it” and “Just what they deserve” and “Obsession, an obsessed mind, that's what you have” and “God's will, my boy, God's will” and “This is the most nihilistic, un-American thing I have ever heard” and “What you are describing is necessary if the required transformation is to occur” and “So what?” and “You are the most arrogant son-of-a-bitch” and “Sure makes you glad to be old” and “You don't know what you are talking about” and “That was the best monologue I've heard in years” and “So, just driving to work everyday, mowing the lawn, Sunday dinner, holidays in the Caribbean is killing off species after species, eh” and “I've just received a lecture on, uh… whatever” and variations on “Get a life!”. A life like yours? A state of consciousness like yours? That this common tragedy will happen is not an assumption; it's a conclusion. And it will be no mere consequence of “the tragedy of the commons”. Nor is it necessary that so many should die. Collective hysteria has been preceding the shell shocks, not following upon them -- just as in run up to, say, World War Two. The denial precedes the event denied. Staggering there, dripping blood, the debris raining down, shouting oaths as if nothing had happened -- and the more it happens, the more such oaths are shouted. Of that, much there is and much there will be. But that is the norm. What is not normative, what is ominous, is acceleration in slope of the incidence of such behavior before the nothing that has not happened happens. If collective shell-shock-intensity PTSD comes on before the trauma, then the trauma supposed is not the actual trauma: something unidentified is at work. What has to be dealt with is that which is not yet -- and will never be -- identified by those shouting normative oaths of denial.
Melismata of mellifluous Musculpt. Vir-Fut Q-Pro. Computer-gamed, quasi-real imaginary-time, multiple-scenarios town, watershed, eco-niche planning (urbanology assimilated to ecology, not vice versa). Indicators, nested local to global. Indicator-tagged, composite, m-logically-valued, superposed monetary units over quantum economies. LETS to GETS and GETS from LETS. EscherFormDance. TankTantra. Smart holographic biofeedback-dancewear. DolphinSpeak as involutory universal semiotic (not generative: genetics is not linear-time recursive, not about emergence; it's decomposing, about nonlinear-atemporal demergence). Cogitate, cogitate, cogitate… Demystification of mantra. Provide an integrated cabalistic-gematric, mantric-yantric, GothicArabesque, TaoistTantric ma-medium, a platform; not a prescriptive system; not a systematic prescription. A medium through which to design design-systems, not to design systems. Architects design design-systems; people design buildings with the design-systems designed. Musculpt is for intelligent design of design-systems. Meta-Musculpt as meta-ArtScience is for explorations in the designs of intelligence. Hail to failed first attempts: Yannis Xenakis' Formalized Music. This is how the panoply of right requirements will be identified. There is no solving the energy problem without learning to think in a new way, and there is no learning to think in a new way absent creation of a new medium: “pencils of skew-parallels” drawing diversely-identical, non-selfsame, m-logically-valued Musculpt forms-in-process with the neo-Alberti, Ghiberti, Piero della Francesca, Dürer superstring meshwork Pereira-Kusama-Goode layered-transparent looking-through screen grid of n-dimensional nonlinear perspective. The Internet, as it currently exists, is not a convivial tool, not among tools for conviviality; it is a spin-off of Milnet, which was a spin-off of the MACV-J2 IDHS and its indexing and search algorithms, which was a spin-off of the Turing machine used to solve the Nazi codes (calling a 1T2-logic machine a universal computing machine twenty years after µTm logics had been formalized was so insufferable a vacuous arrogance Tuning could not maintain). Made-for-war has no authentic adaptation to peace: intimations of war always bleed through. Bivalent-logic Net, Matrix, microwave MeshWork design criteria were not, have not become, and are not vectored upon the design criteria of the required platform, the required medium, through which to develop the required discovery algorithms. Multimedia is not an integrated medium, and cannot so become, unless and until fused to µTm logics as Musculpt. Deep “internal necessities” are involved here: something painter Kandinsky understood well; something composer Schoenberg understood well; something quantum physicist Fröhlich understood well (see the commentary on Fröhlich's meliorism offered by his wife, Fanchon, as provided in the volume dedicated to him: Cooperative Phenomena, H. Haken and M. Wagner, editors, Springer-Verlag, 1973). But putting a word on internal necessities is not explicating what they are. These days, even more than early in the 20th century, even more than during run up to WWII, markers are everywhere in view. The collective unconscious -- which is universal, pure, unsullied, contentless consciousness “in reflection” -- will not permit the human species to persist on this planet without making amends. Genocide is worse than mere mass murder; species genocide is worse than mere genocide; phylum genocide is worse than mere species genocide. Biospheric ecocide is worse than mere phylum genocide. A first right step in making amends would be for humans to relearn DolphinSpeak, rather than persisting in attempts to force dolphins to learn to speak Human. Human melons will be grown with TankTantra. The closer the language is to Nature's universal semiotic, the more general its utterances can be. There is no authentic route of entry into Musculpt for humans without their relearning DolphinSpeak sonic-visioning topology.
There is almost no connection between my cognitive framework and the realms you speak of. It is not generally understood -- unfortunately for all of us -- the degree to which people do not live in the same reality. This seems never to have been accepted because codified culture, whatever the concrete culture considered, always operates under the tacit assumption that reality is selfsame, self-identical, the same as itself, is itself and only itself -- and that, therefore, there can be only one correct description of it. Our description, and our criteria and means of verifying our description; not that of you and yours! Whenever I make this statement, I am asked to explain how reality could be otherwise. And when I say non-selfsame reality is not multiple realities, not multi-worlds, not a multiverse, the confusion becomes even greater. It is not actually a question of same reality as opposed to otherwise reality, altered reality, virtual reality, or the reality entertained by the “other”. Not a question of another world separated in space or another world separated in time. Not a question of initial conditions and/or boundary conditions. It is a question of the non-selfsameness of the unitary reality of this one and only universe. But such non-selfsameness cannot be adequately explained to a person insisting that understanding be limited to ratiocination under 1T2 logic only. This is because 1T2 logic categorically imposes selfsameness in identity, the identity of any whatnot whatsoever. Non-selfsameness becomes increasingly comprehensible to the degree one non-reductively assimilates import of µTm logics, to the degree, that is, one psychologically enters full-blown animism with its notion of identity transparency. The demonstrable incapacity for this non-reductive assimilation spans all realms of contemporary human activity -- and its consequences magnify as the planet is packed with more and more people.
This incapacity was greatly involved, for instance, in creation of the circumstances leading to 9/11 and in determining U.S. response to 9/11. And people simply don't see it: slapped in the face, and no awareness of the slap. Four years later, September of 2005, and a book comes out on the battle for Khe Sanh (Voices of Courage, Ronald Drez and Douglas Brinkley, Bulfinch). This is a book I read when handed to me, as I had several friends die when Lang Vei Special Forces Camp, located near Khe Sanh, was overrun in early February of 1968. When this event transpired, I was sitting safely in the MACV-HQ building in Saigon, at my desk in Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, from which it was possible to keep abreast of events to fair detail transpiring anywhere in the country. Now, almost 40 years later, I can only remember the name of one of these people killed -- a name not mentioned in the book, and a name that has not appeared to my awareness for over 20 years. Concrete point of personal consciousness fanning out into evermore abstract reality nests. The book is based primarily on oral histories taken from participant survivors on the U.S. side, a couple of NVA soldier profile studies produced by the South Vietnamese JGS and MACV, standard histories and memoirs, and the usual corpus of after-action reports and so on available at the various centers for military history. The details of specific events, acts of heroism, et cetera make for very interesting reading -- and this is certainly a substantial contribution. But the book also attempts to contextualize, with regard to both U.S. war fighting strategy and that of the Vietnamese communists. Observations are periodically made about Vietnamese communist strategy, and brief discussion is even provided as to one high-level briefing document -- a party resolution, which is to say internal phe-binh/kiem-thao self-propaganda, not an actual policy statement by the policy principals -- but, other than this resolution, though there are references and footnotes offered throughout the book, no such are offered when statements are made about Vietnamese communist overall war strategy. A DIA intelligence bulletin is referenced with regard to immediate Khe Sanh battlefield strategy. The reader must take on faith that the authors know something about the overall war strategies pursued by the Vietnamese communists. What they have to say on this subject, however, is not only highly unlikely, but more importantly to my mind, involves the tacit assumption that the Vietnamese communists engaged in comprehensive planning relative to a unitary war fighting strategy in a fashion logically similar to that employed by Western military thinkers. People, it is assumed, pretty much live in the same reality. But there is virtually no possibility that Westmoreland's “big unit war” played the same role in thinking of, say, Giap, as it did in Westmoreland's thinking. Reading Truong Chinh, for instance, from whom Giap assiduously borrowed in producing his People's War, People's Army, one does not get the impression that the Vietnamese communists thought of Dien Bien Phu as anything remotely like what the French took it to be, and the Americans after them. Bernard Fall was important here. Though I used his personal library at Howard frequently and had occasional discussions with him, I never asked him about Dien Bien Phu. We talked mostly about French precursors of the Strategic Hamlets Program. In the corpus of military, political, social, psychological, cultural, economic, and financial factors Chinh identifies as significantly contributing to the defeat of France, Dien Bien Phu certainly gets a mention, but it is not dwelled upon. A wealth of documents -- generally cadre study documents, not party resolutions and policy documents -- some before, most after, eventually were captured concerning Vietnamese communist planning and preparations carried out between mid-'66 and the end of '67 for the Tet-'68 offensive. This was a large volume of documents. Overwhelmingly, the sources of analytic comparisons, analogies, metaphors, similes employed by the cadres were the writings of Truong Chinh, which treated disposition of military forces and their actions as only one factor among many, and no more important than any other. This orientation has not been the case in Western histories. And the strategy intercalations to this book on the battle for Khe Sanh, mistakenly based as they are on the assumption of Vietnamese communist comprehensive planning and unitary strategy -- when the actual case was strategic improvisation upon a base of weighted multiple strategies simultaneously projected -- were part of the “lessons learned” from Viet Nam that strongly predisposed U.S. response to 9/11. During the second half of 1967 and the first half of 1968, as clash-of-arms diversion and horn locking transpired in I-Corps, the biggest, most extraordinary countrywide organizational phase transition of thirty years of war was carried successfully to completion, with virtually no one on the GVN/U.S. side comprehending what had transpired or what the import was for outcome of the war. Indeed, this organizational transformation, all these years later, is still not understood. Nor is there insight into its formal and process relationship to the globalizing organizational transformation carried out by Al Qaeda as facilitated by the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. The spread of response options to 9/11 actually on offer -- by consensus American tacit assumptions -- to decision makers, of whatever political persuasion, was extremely narrow. Al Qaeda understood this before the event; Americans still don't understand it. Moreover, there is zero American tolerance for such understanding. Just say: No!
For instance, my preadolescent induction by landscape (as introduced by rural Japanese women) into animistic modes of comprehension thoroughly subverted my ability to unquestioningly attribute objective reality-value to linear-time. Many concrete occasions and several categorical aspects of my personal direct experience simply don't impart such a conviction. This was reinforced by 15 years of empathic interlock in nurturing and digging trees. I was never much able to resonate with plants in pots. I regard linear-time -- as taken by the normatively functioning modern person -- to be largely fabricated by the processes of prescriptive enculturation. These processes, I believe, impose linear-time experience, as the only time experience, by electrochemically stripping down the brain's logic-handling capacity to the 1T2 order of logical-value only. And even morphologically: neural network wipeouts involve morphological changes. The properties commonly attributed to linear-time cannot be fully defined absent the 1T2 order of logical-value. Because contemporary Western ontic immersion is rooted perspectivally in selfsame selfhood, attempts to elaborate operator-time so as to be communicated to Westerners must begin with the first-order operator and differentiate to the third-order: time over time (in active operator-time), not time over space (in passive linear-time). But this is an inversion of the actual anti-derivative case. The lower order operator demerges atemporally (which is to say without passive linear-time reference) by involutory decomposition from the higher order: time from within time. And this is precisely what Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation describes. A concrete, in immediacy, immersive experience of this is analogically captured, by spatial simile, as walking “in” the trick mirror image of oneself, if that imago be regarded dislocated in time, rather than in space. But this is a mixed-state experience, the experience as given to an awareness clinging to the attribution of ontic selfsameness in face of existential denial thereto. Such clinging behaviors in their collective expressions are roots of fundamentalisms and even world wars. Though there be three Russellian types of temporal operators, there are actually n to the mth power spectra kinds of time: as many as there are kinds of µTm logics. Temporal operators are concretions of logics. Not believing in an objective linear-time, how then could I believe in an objective evolution, or Darwinian or Neo-Darwinian natural selection, or group selection, or any sort of individual-selectionist notion, or even any idea that there is any sort of unit of selection, be it gene, kin, or whatever? I could not, of course. And thus not believing, I regard superconductant DNA (quenched DNA is another matter) a pulse-code receiver-transmitter, where the decoder ring is not to be mistaken for an information store and processor, and the code involved is not a single-level cipher. Indeed, helix-coil transition, itself, is viewed as first-order temporal curl, a decomposition product of higher orders of the mathematical involute described by Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation. Clocks as waves; waves as clocks: and clocks within clocks within clocks. All that being the case, I cannot view social norm as counterpoise to coercion. Social norms are somehow not coercion? Not only are they coercion, they are brain antagonizing to the degree of inducing electrical, chemical, and even morphological change. Culture as codification of selfsame reality has no socially redeeming value -- in and of itself, that is. Codified culture has such value only when fused to metaculture. And so on and so on.
Contextualized thus, and realizing that time-reference is an obscure-to-nonexistent factor of the spoken Vietnamese language (no tense conjugations at all, but only in the modern Portuguese-priest created chu quoc ngu written form is a word added to indicate past or future, thus separating these written modernist domains off from the orally ever-present “ancestral” origin, the nonperspectival-aperspectival heuristic point of involutory decomposition: see Dao Thi Hoi, Representation of Time and Time Relationship in English and Vietnamese, Ph.D. dissertation, Columbia U. Teachers College, 1965), the language of a deeply animistic people, it is no reach at all to suppose that no singular comprehensive plan, even no formalized disjointed incrementalism, linear or nonlinear, informed Vietnamese communist actions, formed their “reality”, in response to the U.S. troop build up in 1965 and culminating in the synoptic organizational transformation brought to fruition during 1967-8. Drez and Brinkley -- citing no substantiating documentation from communist sources -- tell us that the communist overall war strategy during the critical '67-'68 period was to shock the world by inflicting major defeat on American military forces in a decisive battle, take the two northern provinces of South Vietnam, and bring about a general uprising during the Tet-'68 offensive. Communist actions and self-propaganda were taken relative to all three of these and a dozen others simultaneously: no doubt about that. But the probability of success given to each of these three by the policy principals was very low, indeed. This is quite clear in the captured enemy document record -- though the involved documents are not generally found in pre-selected collections, those collections selected to illustrate some preconceived notion as to how losing is actually winning. So, nowadays, anyone truly interested in this would have to go to the voluminous and unsorted CDEC document store (facilitating the search, perhaps, by using Derek's suppressed 1968 strategy analysis paper, proffered in MOON, as a shortcut and guide). Probabilities for success of these three communist initiatives being rated very low, they were still pursued, along with numerous other initiatives, and not overtly discounted, but given much higher probabilities for success in fulfilling secondary, tertiary, or quaternary purposes. Popular uprising was projected and pursued, as it was highly probable that this semi-self-propaganda would be a successful morale builder prior to the fight, even though it was quite likely there would be proportionally enhanced disenchantment after the fight when the expectation was not met, a disenchantment that would translate into increased numbers of defectors, and so on. The synoptic level of concrete detail for the Tet-'68 reorganization-offensive had been explicitly conceived and articulated by the end of 1966 (general counteroffensive is a stage of the heuristic model of national liberation war mandated by the stalemate incumbent upon the 1965 U.S. troop build up, and, therefore, was the implicit strategic goal all actions converged upon from the moment the Marines landed in March of 1965) and on-the-ground implementation of the countrywide organizational transformation began in March and April of 1967. It was also at this time that the Khe Sanh locking of horns began. Unprecedented movement of high-level political cadres, greatly elevated supply caching, explosion in recruitment efforts, and dozens of other such factors of increased countrywide exposure were prerequisite to carrying through the organizational transformation the Tet-'68 offensive was conceived to effectuate. Raising the specters of another Dien Bien Phu and capture of the two northern provinces of South Viet Nam, and carrying these specters into actual accomplishment, though theoretically possible, was practically improbable: this was the assessment. But these theoretically possible improbabilities could very probably be used to draw attention away, away from all the activities required for countrywide organizational transformation. The battle of Khe Sanh came to an end during the same period as the second phase of the Tet-'68 offensive, which was launched in May. This was the phase of the offensive that finalized purging of the errant southern communist cadres (assisted to a very small extent by the U.S./GVN Phoenix Program) who would have become an insufferable and potent opposition in the post-liberation period, possibly inflicting a Chinese Cultural Revolution type event upon Viet Nam, thus challenging dominance of the party hierarchy -- something the northern bo doi wished to avoid at all costs. Drez and Brinkley make reference to Oriana Fallaci's interview of Vo Nguyen Giap, wherein, according to their recounting (p. 179), “…he actually denied any involvement with Tet and Khe Sanh, passing it off to the Viet Cong who were nowhere present at Khe Sanh”. The governing word here, of course, is “involvement”. Given Giap's position in the party at the time, the way responsibilities were partitioned, not only at Central, i.e., Hanoi, but equivalently at every other echelon of the party hierarchy, partitioned between the current affairs committees, the central executive committees, the military affairs party committees, the military affairs committees, and the command committees, it is a near impossibility that Giap played any role whatsoever in activities related to Khe Sanh, and certainly, for the very same reasons, he had virtually nothing to do with conceiving or planning the military aspects of the countrywide Tet-'68 offensive. For him to have done so, in either case, would have been arbitrary meddling. The only way this formally could have been brought about was by establishing a case of “reverse representation”, a micro-management procedure employed predominantly at the lower end of the echelon hierarchy. In all the thousands and thousands of captured enemy documents I perused, I rarely saw evidence of instances of reverse representation above province level, and then only with regard to political infrastructure current affairs committees, never with regard to military affairs or command committees. And given the political transformation aspects of Tet-'68, the northern party had to distance itself, and has ever since: Tet-'68 was a southerners' affair. Plausible denial. On the other hand, Drez and Brinkley misrepresent, by omission, why LBJ chose not to seek reelection. Regardless of what LBJ said about the anti-war movement and defection of Walter Cronkite, the trigger factor for sudden reversal of his stance -- if we rule out hidden factors -- was undoubtedly the financial circumstance that had emerged and was greatly heightened as a result of the Tet offensive. The speculative attack on the dollar became so critical in January of 1968 that LBJ at that time announced a program of mandatory capital controls. This speculative attack on the dollar heightened after the offensive and there was wringing of hands and great clamor in exclusive circles as to how U.S. foreign policy options across the board, trade negotiations, et cetera, were being held captive by Viet Nam policy, and that the price being paid had simply become unsupportable. The U.S. forced the European Common Market into tariff concessions as a way of taking pressure off the dollar. But the effect was small and in March, just as LBJ decided not to seek reelection, the U.S. announced it would no longer support the price of gold at $35 per ounce. That was the end of the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton-Woods monetary system, the primary global casualty of the Viet Nam war -- and the stone David threw to bring down Goliath.
Quite consciously, explicitly, and publicly stated, Al Qaeda & Associates has picked up the very same stone and is in process of throwing it again. This is the crux of their strategies, as it once was for the Vietnamese communists. But not only has AQ&A chosen the signal vulnerability to focus their efforts upon, they have adopted a similar strategic planning posture: strategic improvisation upon a base of weighted multiple strategies simultaneously projected. Moreover, just as Khe Sanh was a hook used at secondary and tertiary levels of probabilistic weighting as raising a specter and as diversionary, thus concealing organizational activities transpiring elsewhere, so, in a similar manner, has AQ&A used Afghanistan and Iraq in the post-9/11 period. What is different, perhaps even fundamentally different, is the scale of conception involved: global war, not merely national-liberation war. Another aspect of Voices of Courage offers considerable insight into why the U.S. allowed circumstances to evolve such that 9/11 transpired and why the U.S. could only have responded in the manner it did. Parallels were discussed at MACV Headquarters in 1968, relative to Korea. Quoting from MOON (Vol. 2, p. 514):
Toussaint scoffed, churning and billowing like a stream reaching the rapids. “What do you mean? 'history for the bureaucrats'.”
“Reading 'histories' of the Chosin Reservoir, for instance, one encounters two basic factors: criticism (of MacArthur's judgment and associated intelligence failures) and praise (of individual acts of Marine heroism). This, to my mind, does not a history make. Two different concepts of warfare came face to face at the Yalu; little or no analysis of this circumstance is provided. Absent such analysis, it is not history. Moreover, and I have no wish to demean the heroic acts of courageous Marines, but many of these 'histories' are little more than a litany of these acts. This is absolutely incongruous when the Chinese had no logistical support to speak of, few crew-served weapons, little ground vehicular support, no air supply to ground forces, no bomber or fighter aircraft in support, no napalm, no 500-pound bombs, no artillery, limited firepower, and all they had to throw at the Marine's incommensurately superior technology were 'individual acts of heroism'. Up is called down; back, front: this is history for the bureaucrats.”
“Humph!”
In principle, the same applied at the battle for Khe Sanh, as Voices of Courage so lavishly describes. Again, I have no wish to demean heroic acts of courageous Marines, but the distortion involved in self-justifying larger failure by appeal to the micro-effectiveness of techno-brutality reflects and inculcates a collectively reinforced temperamental predisposition profoundly influencing situational assessments and policy formulations. That there has been no significant development in strategic insight through September 2005 is an augury prefiguring how the U.S. will deal with the larger failure of its global counter-terror strategy.
Yes, an interesting article on the Tonkin Gulf Incident and the National Security Agency (San Francisco Chronicle reprint from the New York Times, “Tonkin Gulf Reports Cooked?” by Scott Shane, October 31, 2005). Dong chi is so common a term, I even STILL remember it. I queried a native speaker, just to be sure. Dong chi for “comrade” is correct. Vietnamese for “warship” is tau chien. “Warship” in Sino-Vietnamese is chien ham. There is no significant possibility translators confused these terms, particularly with dong chi being one of the first terms learned by intelligence personnel during that period. The straight way the Times-Chronicle article is written illustrates how deep remains the refusal by the American psyche to assimilate reality -- and is one more indication of the severity of what the future holds. Mid-level NSA personnel -- decryptors and translators, who hardly can be regarded mid-level managers, at least they were not so regarded within the intelligence community in Viet Nam during that era -- confused these terms, saying warships were sacrificed instead of comrades were sacrificed, then discovered the error and immediately covered it up. No high-level NSA or other government officials were involved. Just like file cabinet after file cabinet after file cabinet of data was not intentionally completely fabricated under direct orders to support the command position on the enemy strength estimate, and those who produced the fabrications were not given medals for completing the task. Just like there was no ASA slow-down in the computer center at Naked Fanny during the battle for Khe Sanh. Just like similar falsifications -- particularly in the realms of CI actions against the North prior to the invasion -- were not accomplished at USAK and higher headquarters in Japan. And from even before Pearl Harbor on through WWII, there are many examples of such falsifications emanating from the highest levels never having happened. Think of the non-existent streets-of-San-Francisco funding for the Flying Tigers in China, for instance, and how this was not precedent setting for funding of proprietaries like Civil Air Transport, pilots of which picked up in Hanoi the fully-loaded USAF C-119s which did not arrive there from Ashiya AFB, Japan, and flew them on to cargo-chute drops over Dien Bien Phu, and the proprietary precious metals and money companies and banks used for black currency operations. Consider falsification of Heydrick's black document operations as a way of misrepresenting factors involved in origins of the Stalin purges, for another. Apparently, no such operations ever transpired. Historians still promulgate this dissimulation, and even contextualize it to the oh-so-well documented 16th century behaviors of Ivan the Terrible (see Orlando Figes, “The Divine Terrorist”, The New York Review of Books, September 22, 2005). All of this dissembling is psychologically necessary, if fantasy worlds are to be sustained! Government justification to the public of nation-state actions, to include actions of democracies, is not and has never been explanatory; it is always manipulative -- and documentation is configured such that manipulation appears justification. Fabrication, no less than shredding, with history in mind is and always has been SOP -- for “history for the bureaucrats” is psyops. And the press supports hagiography with straight reporting of such matters as the fact that high-level retired defense officials sat on the American bank holding company under which BCCI was financially fretted. Public justifications of the U.S. invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq could not possibly have had significant connection with the actual reasons. Anyone who thinks that they did, or even that they should have, simply is living in a fantasy world as regards how nation-states have always functioned. If you don't like it, fundamentally change the system: implement m-logically-valued monetary units, for instance. Do something real for a change! Mass immersion in fantasy worlds -- insurance that such immersion will be the case being one function of the mass media -- is one component of the etiology of collective hysteria, one origin of mass warfare, one precipitator of holocaust, one impetus to total war. Nixon's fears of massive nuclear exchange with the USSR, for instance, as recently turned up by some researcher. Nixon saw the need for a diverse nuclear armory, so there could be appropriate-scale nuclear response: think globally, act locally. In this day of preventive-initiatory preemptive war, straight reporting of this Nixonian history is psycho-prep: black psyops to help prepare the American people for surgical use of nuclear weapons, use just beyond the horizon when the iceman cometh. Then, mourning becomes Electra! What I'd like to know is what kind of nuke Eisenhower offered to the French for Dien Bien Phu and what kind of nuke LBJ thought he might be forced into using. During 1968, there was every kind of rumor at CICV-Targets that tactical nukes were in-country, a thesis which was questioned by the intelligent among intelligence analysts, as everyone in Targets knew that significant ordnance was not delivered from in-country.
You said that what Bush needs now is another incident. Given that the mainstream media, and even much of the alternative media, still does not discuss Afghanistan or Iraq relative to oil peak dynamics, except in the vaguest of terms, one can only expect that what is needed will in one way or another in due course be found. As an aside, I would note that World Socialist Website had virtually nothing to say about the riots in France beyond noting their presence and echoing the standard causal thesis -- let alone provision of analysis of what these riots indicate about the beyond-Afghanistan and beyond-Iraq hidden organizational dynamic, and developments in the operational repertoire of radical Islamism (and those not Islamic who are watching and learning).
Personally, I am unable to come up with believable scenarios suggesting that either leaving Iraq or staying in Iraq will yield better or worse outcomes. It appears to me that whichever is done, the outcomes will be worst. And I think there is a whole series of such Batesonesque schizophrenogenic double-bind situations in the wings of collective mind, whether the neocons stay in or the neoisolationists move in or how conservative the neoliberals become or… Hardwiring the collective neuron may have some pragmatism, some utilitarianism, some fitnessism, some…
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