Jacques Chirac, now, 18 January 2006, brings French strategic military doctrine into conformance with that of the United States, perhaps even trumps the U.S. -- it's hard to say -- by explicitly threatening deterrence of state-sponsored terrorism with nuclear strikes, presumably, at least initially, tactical in nature. Proximal cause: Iran stepping up to nuclear deterrence. CICV-Targets hysteria all over again! just as Derek predicted in 1968. Cul-de-sac, cul-de-sac… check, check, check… damned if you do; damned if you don't… The objective being to insure continued flow of cheap oil -- Israeli issues being secondary -- not doing anything means losing access to cheap oil, while anything one might do means losing access to cheap oil… Rat in a cage having a stroke in a state of high ambivalence. Schizophrenogenic double-bind conducive to dissociation, fugue, and… oh my God! Catherine Deneuve's revulsion-repulsion convulsion. This is an old Sufi teaching story: mankind cannot do! as Gurdjieff translated the message for Western consumption. G even went so far as to ask: Is there life on Earth? Prescient, for a fellow speaking in the 1920s. Maintenance of the Existentialist claim to the ability to do is an essential prerequisite to action-based sociologies, with their actors in possession of Cartesian simple-identity: I am iff I think I am (an Italian twist on a French theme). Ah, Pirandello. But Chirac is only rattling the Iranian cage -- whose cage? who behind and who in front of the bars? -- with rage display, for inflicting a Carthaginianism upon the Iranians with radioactive nuclear salt or CBU-DU salts would make obtaining the sweet crude hazardous duty and therefore not cheap. Moreover, destroying the Iranian nation-state -- something the mullahs themselves have been unable to accomplish with a quarter-century of intense effort -- would be playing directly into the hand of the radical Islamist terrorists whose, admittedly long-term, objective is precisely to destroy the Westphalian nation-state system and its foundational claim to being able to do without God's willing of lesser wills. So, clearly, there are two things happening with the Jacques of this world: [1] they have no understanding of their adversaries' strategy and MO because, for generations, there has been enormous collective self-lying about what transpired in places like Viet Nam and Algeria; and [2] the West is over the worst possible barrel, butt in the air, because it is running out of cheap energy to feed its “machine for living” and the only way to solve its energy problem is to go completely over to quantum-relativity perspectives, which means utterly abandoning its foundational commitment: I am iff I think I am. Issue [2] will thematically orchestrate (by collective unconscious processes of projective identification) the West's response to the crisis, particularly its bombing behaviors -- for one way to get existential confirmations of simple-identity is to issue existential denials in the form of demonstrations of bombability: that which is bombable must, by definition, be simply-identifiable; while [1] will be used by psychological defense mechanisms to develop conscious rationalizations for carrying out actions thematically orchestrated by [2]. Mon, watjusay! Done seed ever' bit a dis at dat ol' Sick-V. Sheee-it!
So, what do you make of the following statement? by Noam Chomsky (The Last Word [if only]: “A Tale of Two Quagmires”, Newsweek, January 9, 2006, p. 52):
The United States went to war in Vietnam for a very good reason. They were afraid Vietnam would be a successful model of independent development and that would have a virus effect -- infect others who might try to follow the same course.
Newsweek designates Chomsky a “political theorist”. Phooey! What a hoot. C equals D sub-i. Brilliant! Communism is equivalent to independent development. Why do you think a “linguistics prodigy” would turn his attention to such deep structures in political grammars? No ascetic Essene, not in Boston. A Job? Maybe. Securities, of course! Because of the intellectual investments made while being a prima donna-- oops! Errr, prodigy. Fear and loathing of communism is far more recursive than mere economics with its phony phonemics, even if its semantics, its theory of value as distinct from its capital formation, cannot accurately be said to be generative -- but it is not surprising that a moral upbraider, phonologist, and prodigy like Chomsky would ignore this fact. Your moral upbraider or my moral upbraider? that has always been the question in ethics of war: the immoralist and the amoralist are far less instrumental than the moralist, for the man of principle will sacrifice everything to the principle in a way the others won't. After one of his public lessons at Cornell during the mid-'70s, I asked Chomsky what he thought the relationship is between elements of a universal grammar and Jung's archetypes of the collective unconscious. He said “probably an intimate one” but that someone else would have to investigate it, as he was unable to read Jung: “I simply don't understand what Jung is talking about.” Sigh. As memory serves, words to that effect. I then asked him what level of the genome he thought the elements of a universal grammar were encoded within. Again, he claimed not to know, but it was clear from the recursive postulate -- Church's hypothesis: calculable iff recursive -- informing his general discourse that he assumed this would be the level studied in molecular biology, not, say, a level exhibiting quantum non-locality as a characteristic property. Were the latter the case, that would mean… well, that universal grammar is in the water we are immersed in, like whale song, like dolphin-speak -- or in the air we breathe, like the songline, like the mantra, like the call to prayer, like some Cabalistic specter. Ah, now we are getting somewhere! Rabbinical (orthodox and secular) Judaic (involving Jews and non-Jews) anti-Cabalism treats Hebrew (and Sanskrit and 3-logically-valued Andean Aymara and…) via the lens of recursive generation, not atemporal decompositional involutes, because involutes are the engine of animistic identity transparency, of the unconscious as infinite sets, of the Cabalist's “Every number is infinite!” The deep-structure communal, collective, transpersonal, identity transparency implications of the “C equals D sub-i” formulation are suppressed by calculating grammars, “natural” or universal, according to the rules of Church. And this suppression is potent P-n-P -- part and parcel -- in fulfillment of the prerequisites to pathogenesis in genocide-holocaust onset. Ever since Abel's solution to the quintic was misnamed the Impossibility Theorem -- finite-process algebra was impossible; while transcendental numbers, functions, logics were suddenly all possible -- there has been a rising crescendo of collective hysteria insistent upon finding a final solution to the atemporal Cabalistic tree of life. Non-denumerable devadaru: the gods' very own timber, and the gardener's cedrus deodara (I've personally transplanted well over a thousand large). Burn that mother! And maybe we will finally find a way.
One major reason for the continued gross misassessments of the evolving global circumstance is the widespread belief that the Second World War was unprecedented in its severity. Speaking in terms of percentage killed of involved total population, WWII was actually rather a mild case of warfare -- as human history goes. Consider the following statement made by Derek in MOON (Vol. 1, p. 689):
“Mass killing is mass killing -- regardless of the method employed. Dead is dead. Whether by napalm or gas chamber, fire storm or atomic detonation, smart bombs or nerve agents, machine-gunned in a cacophonous crowd or before a formal firing squad, RPG in the chest or 30 cal. in the face, by the effects of torture or exposure, malnutrition or falciparum, dead is dead: the imposition of premature demise. The 20th century has not outdone past ages. Never before had so many been killed? You want to talk numbers, think about this: in the ten years that the Tibetans invaded China during the 8th century, the population of the country plunged from 52 million to 16 million. That's MILLION, now! During the 13th century Mongol invasion, the decrease in population was from 100 million to less than 60 million. A million people died during the siege of just one city. These were pretty fair attempts to wipe out a whole ethnic group (and a very large one at that): undoubtedly planned, surely motivated by irrational and unwarranted hatred. World War II was not unique; it can and probably will happen again… It is interesting to ask oneself where this uniqueness idea came from and who it was designed to exonerate.”
They both sat there in silence for awhile thinking about all that had been said.
“Well,” observed Ilse finally, “it sure does put a lot of press and urge on the task of finding those new social, political, and economic ideas, doesn't it?”
Discussion of these numbers can be found, for instance, in Dennis Bloodworth's The Chinese Looking Glass (Dell, 1966). And how much has human population, planet Earth, grown since the 8th century?
Tribalize and disintegrate. The rules of war -- as opposed to the rule of war. Ethnic cleansing. Massacre. Innocent civilians. Holocaust. Humanitarian law. War crimes. Genocide. Terror. Terrorists. Collateral damage. Atrocities. Barriers. Borders. Bloodbath. Boundaries of the conflict. People who in all sincerity use these terms -- including most counter-terror experts: wearers of tailored club cammies or not, desk jockeys or not -- are not merely sticking to the party line and producing in one war or another good propaganda for their sides, they, experts all, experts in their own way, are incapable of sophisticated thought about warfare, low-intensity and otherwise. In most cases, they -- they behind the desks, they hidden inside role attributions, they on the scenes, they in war and remembrance -- actually believe what they say. This statement, statement of mine, justifies nothing, attempts to justify nothing, no, not a travesty, nothing; it does, however, assert that use of those words -- them, them, them -- the aforementioned terms, and implementation of their implied proscriptions and punishments, prevents nothing. It is not only recently, not solely under radical Islamism, that perpetrators -- be the perpetrator the responsible agency, be the responsible agency a first cause preceding presence of the perpetrator -- of various sorts have embraced the possibility, the likelihood, the inevitability of their own deaths. How, right now, presently, threaten those in future who will voluntarily embrace such an embrace -- death? If you can find a responsible agency that is a person, not a process, threaten them, them, that person, legalistic entity, separate identity, no mere lapse, living lapse -- though lapse of the living, perhaps; that might work. If 36 million of the total Chinese population of 52 million died during the 8th century Tibetan invasion of China, which wars before or since have not only been won, but were winnable, without the killing of civilians? Historically speaking, what class of non-innocent, non-civilians has in most cases been responsible for the onset of warfare? And how blank must be the genetic tabula rasa for a civilian to be born innocent? We shall leave aside the non-innocent middle-class masses of civilian consumers of disposable unnecessaries whose cheap-energy good-life way of life is directly responsible for human-induced climate change and one-quarter-of-a-million species extinctions (discounting, of course, the role “electron temperature enhancements” may be playing in supplementing global warming by greenhouse gases, as well as how the venting and flaring of billions and billions and billions of cubic feet of natural gas over decades and decades from oil field after oil field may have contributed -- more than cow farts and canned CFCs -- to the ozone-depletion component of planetary warming and intensification of the severe storms which make electromagnetic injections into Earth's crustal dynamics producing volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis). Your butterfly flap or my butterfly flap? says the lady to the tramp. Find me a Special Forces operative who actually worked face-to-face with tribal peoples during the Viet Nam war who equates tribalization with disintegration. There are none! For those with direct experience of animistic identity transparency, this equation is an impossible proposition. People who sincerely use terms like those in the above-given list are engaged in acts of historical preservation and sustainable development: preserving the legality of war as a conflict resolution algorithm; sustaining development of warfare policies as legitimate options of nation-states faced with contingencies. The only way I personally could view formulation of the Geneva Convention as not being one such act of historical preservation and sustainable development would be if Article 49 were made indefinitely retroactive. If law is to enforce what force has forced, as clearly it is -- law as it is, not law as it is supposed to be -- how can proactive enforcement of Article 49 be justified absent retroactive enforcement, except by appeal to legitimization through force of arms? Disparaging landlord-landladyese, Article 49 disallows forced population movements by occupying powers or powers intent upon occupation: depending upon how boundaries to the given conflict are defined, of course, no free-fire zones; no Huntingtonesque “forced-draft urbanization”; no collective unconscious compensatory Khmer-Rougesque forced-draft deurbanization; no importation of third-party populations to Malaya or Ceylon by the British colonial authorities; not only no slave ships and no “house niggers” for North America in wake of the AmerIndian genocide -- was it holocaust? -- but no wave upon wave of smiling immigrants -- Bring me your… whatever -- to repopulate the thus-made-free land. Indeed, under retroactive enforcement of Article 49, Geneva Convention, every nation-state -- Westphalian, pre-Westphalian -- is a war crime! And under proactive enforcement there can be no formation of new nation-states, or dissolution of old ones, a dissolution proactive enforcement would proscribe, that is not reprehensibly criminal by methods historically employed. Moreover, since “the mobility of labor” required by capitalism is hardly unforced, hardly unchanneled, indeed, a globalized form of Dr. Huntington's “forced-draft urbanization” by the occupying powers -- nation-states, whatever their canny provenance, howsoever they may become uncannily revenant during this post-Newtonian, post-Westphalian era -- capitalism, under both retroactive and proactive enforcement of Article 49, is itself a war crime. Subject to interpretation, of course.
Not only do the adversaries quite obviously not understand each other, they clearly do not even understand themselves -- and this is the kind of situation sure to ripen into a perfect storm likely not to remain merely a desert storm. “We believe [emphasis added] that our lifetime [emphasis upon “time” added] is always predicted [emphasis added] and that our death has already [emphasis added] been determined by God, and this cannot change [emphasis added].” Thus, according to Robert Fisk, spoke the Hamas leader Abdul-Aziz Rantissi sometime before being martyred in being killed (The Great War for Civilization, Knopf, 2005, p. 505). If this belief were a direct knowing, would it be expressed in the same fashion? Always predicted already: predestination -- first-cause, last-effect determination by the Absolute -- is invoked as pusher of antecedent-consequent relations. No teleological puller-attractor here: always predicted already. It is the always that is out of accord, revealing belief -- not a direct knowing; as converse, predicted already would be out of accord, revealing a direct knowing. Were the “always” all ways, the belief would be a direct knowing. When Niels Henrik Abel's “Possibility Theorem” of 1826 established presence of that which is transcendental to al-jabr, the by-then-secular mathematics of the period permitted inanimate transitive selfhood only, thus requiring Abel to name his demonstration the Impossibility Theorem. This oxymoron of a title reduced the theorem to a semantic tautology: formally, that which cannot be realized in a finite number of operations in finite time cannot be finite, it must be impossible. And on mirroring, impossible equals incalculable by being non-analytic in recursive redundancy. QED: there can be no always already, let alone could such be predicted. Prefiguring dissimulation of Schrödinger's cat-O'-nine-lifetimes (“times” here meaning, not nine tensor-bundle tails gauge-connected to the function, but the operations of multiplication-exponentiation involved in nonlinear complex-imaginary operator-time, O' which Steven Hawking gave us a simpleminded version), if not its predestination by divine predetermination. Note that Abel's theorem was not named the “I-Theorem” -- God forbid! -- (Infinity Theorem) or the "3Ts" (Transfinite-Time Theorem). The lifetime is inarguably a finite time, so long as its termination is all ways all ready in the limit and can not-change. Death of life (apropos of jihad asghar, the lesser-outer jihad), as a prescribed not-change, is clearly a matter for al-jabr, but what of death in life (apropos of jihad akabar, the greater-inner jihad) as a proscribed change? Is carrying death on your shoulders transcendental to al-jabr, and hence no matter of the time of your life? Don' mean nothin', huh. I-verb, no-noun. Transitive selfhood <<>> object; transitive objecthood <<>> subject: a matter for al-jabr. Intransitive selfhood <<>> no-object; intransitive objecthood <<>> no-subject: no-matter for al-jabr. All ways, not always! The secular inanimate versus the sacred animate: flight from nature in opposition to its enfolded implication. The turning of Abel's theorem into a semantic tautology was not always already, though perhaps it was well-readied -- and this transform over the meaning Abel meant has been instrumental in demerging the present global conflict nested within the present climate-change dynamic.
Avoidable social conflict is particularly demoralizing, totalizing; so only the pigeons are ecumenical these globalizing days; their homing of roost-collectives is upon flux-gradient vibrations and infrasound-signature songlines. Birdbrains, at least, have metal: pigeon palavering, no pall-mall political economy. A truce is proposed by bin Laden. Wrestling champs, football stars, and skeet shooters say they don't negotiate with terrorists. Agreed, says The Hoover Institution. The Navy's higher school in Monterrey demurs: there is much to be gained by a public discourse with AQ&A, not the least of which is that it would put UBL at risk. Told are we by graduates of Harvard, Oxford, and the National Security Council that bin Laden is only talking to his own people in offering their enemies a truce, and we -- their enemies -- should learn from this. They looked unnaturally white, that day, those birds -- to quote from the sea John Banville lecturing before the Higher Intelligence school, perhaps. Where lies the truth? Give us your nukes, or at least your DU projectiles, we'll give you the belts of our martyrs. Though they watched The Battle of Algiers in the Tank -- and were fire bombed, just as had been theaters in France -- to learn about guerrilla warfare, those birds, that day, apparently, unlike Derek in MOON, Pentagoners skating five ways don't read Mao “On Chungking Negotiations”. Quoting Derek quoting Mao (Vol. 2, p. 31):
Our policy was also set long ago to give tit for tat… He [Chiang Kai-shek] was realistic in inviting us and we were realistic in going to negotiate with him. How to give tit for tat depends on the situation. Sometimes, not going to negotiations is giving tit for tat; and sometimes going to negotiations is tit for tat. We were right not to go before, and also right to go this time; in both cases we have given tit for tat. We did right to go this time, for we exploded the rumor that the Communist Party did not want peace and unity.
Kissinger, the romper-stomper schoolboy palooied in the smacker, doesn't negotiate with terrorists, uh-- only when he has no alternative remaining but to take his ball and go home: peace with honor being succor for the ego's bloody nose. As MOON's Toussaint well knew, the same for de Gaulle parleying the FLN maquisards: the 10th Division's Chasseurs Parachutistes (airborne rangers) had taken it on the kisser.
Living in a human hen house, on what level of verisimilitude shall we speak? That most probable -- or those least likely, those cockamamied by the media and its roosters? In the latest aired audiotape, bin Laden said: “The delay in similar operations [to 9/11] happening in America has not been because of failure to break through your security measures.” Maybe, maybe not, oscillate the talking heads swishing their combs. On what level of verisimilitude are the various speakers clucking, warbling, and crowing? As has been repeated over and over here -- this strategic assessment -- 9/11 was a sting operation planned to evoke a response capable of catalyzing a synoptic organizational phase transition. Always create a role for the pigs, as Abbie Hoffman once said, understanding the principle well. In insurgency warfare, military initiatives support organizational activities of non-combatants, not vice versa. The insurgent wins only when a plurality of innocent civilians is enticed-induced into becoming non-combatant facilitator of military initiatives in support of organizational activities directed at innocent civilians: insuring a virtuous circle of positive reinforcement by whatever means available. Never, just never, materialize to attack a strong point, particularly the center, unless there is a very good ORGANIZATIONAL reason for doing so. Long ago, this strategic assessment -- here -- predicted there would be no second attack on the ZI until preparations for a new, higher-order synoptic organizational phase transition were complete. The current truce-or-dare proffered by bin Laden comes as the evolving Iranian situation readies the ORGANIZATIONAL groundwork for another phase transition. Who is prepared to argue that networkcentric organization is no organization at all, and therefore does not permit topological transforms? The Battle of Iraq has been a sidebar, hopefully not with consequences as horrorific as the last sideshow. But this level of speaking does not address the highest order of verisimilitude, pure Keystone Cops. 9/11's “sting” was awaited with anticipation, for all it would permit. Though knee-jerk declaration of GWOT ceded control of the space-and-time variables to the insurgent, thus hooking the counterinsurgent on the manpower and materiel exponential growth curve that will doom him, that hook was taken knowingly so as to address dilemmas of the post-peak oil dynamic. All players emulating Massine and wishing well Machiavelli, still -- or thereby -- do they misread the situation and their adversaries. AQ&A+I do not understand the depth of unconscious compulsion they probe in eliciting bombing behaviors of the West so as to drive their phase transitions. Israel was established and maintained as an integral aspect of Anglo-American oil policy, which means that that policy is subtended by all the collective unconscious forcing functions associated with holocaust behaviors and holocaust hysteria: not something to be toyed with. The Western counterinsurgents -- having stigmatized a whistler's White boy for destroying currency of the Gearwheel, thus losing China, having lied to themselves about how they lost Algeria and how the loss in Viet Nam had everything to do with destruction of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism: black auto-propaganda self-metaprogramming biocomputer of the body politic -- do not understand that ceding space and time to AQ&A+I means GWOT absolutely cannot be won, no matter what. And presently -- and foreseeably -- the U.S. dollar is no peg to tie a counterinsurgent's cockhorse to. Keep it low-tech and low-intensity and the American COW (coalition of the willing) is outgunned. Step up to nation-statehood (as the Sandinista learned, as the Taliban liability demonstrated, as Hamas seemingly is about to experience), step up to nuclear deterrence, and you enter realms of the “big” -- particularly so since the game theory involved is not rational, as regressed collective unconscious gradients decisively control mass action these days. We learned from LBJ that Americans, especially Texans, like things big; it doesn't matter so much if it's a big success or a big failure, just so it's big. While the Chinese certainly understand big, who else in the world comprehends the American “big”? Even what is little has to be big: Little Big Horn. These are factors conducive to a perfect storm. Considerable speculation can be marshaled as to whether recent policy makers have been singularly stupid or surpassingly smart, but whether consciously mediated or unconsciously driven, once GWOT is seen clearly to have failed, the American meaning of “big” will be demonstrated. Demonstration bombings. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings were largely for the benefit of those Born in the USSR! you know. Backed into a corner by the low-tech game… How many orders of magnitude increase over WWII casualty figures are you speculating? Even so, that exponential growth curve will have its way with the counterinsurgent, and -- synchronicity being as reliable as it is -- likely in polyphonic stack of climate shift and cheap-energy dearth.
However grievous, the point I am making is precisely this: how could anyone who conceived of the notion of a generative universal grammar not advocate formation of a world state? Alternatives to this cognitive cohabitation are inconceivable. Generative generates the bigger class out of the less big class (the biggest of the big being regarded progeny of the universal) -- and does so by extension over-and-over over a linear-time. But by what warrant is erection of a universal based on specific cases of the generative? Chomp-sky -- for anti-Cabalistic reasons, without relevant reason, Chomp! Chomp! Chomp! corrupting discourse on linguistic theory, by implication the physics of measurement of the cosmos, and offering a political economy of morals posing as the moral economy of politics as the decision science it needs not necessarily be -- doesn't believe in involutory decomposition, Chomp! Chomp! Chomp! one essential feature of a non-dissimulated quantum mechanics of cooperative behavior based on Schrödinger's version of the Schrödinger equation for spontaneous order at critical states over transfinite correlation length; Chomp-sky, by implication, buys into Dirac's historical revisionism, a revisionism due to the unverified assumption that there is history, a world-line -- unverified, if time-independent Schrödingerian quantum process is inherent to a cosmos suffering m-logically-valued m-valued universal (grammatical) constants, i.e., is multiply enfolded and in possession of semantic implicates (as Hegel prefigured Schrödinger, and Marx stormed out of Germany, through Paris, and into London in protest over) -- or, alternatively stated following a Steven Hawking some suppose Newton's peer, the notion that time has a history (without, it should be noted, according to Hawking, so much as the presence of a non-linear, second-order imaginary time over which a short history of linear-time could extend its not-very-straight arrow into an imaginary temporal dimension of whatever involved black hole computer -- be that computer's spacetime processing light-like, sound-like, light-sound interactive, or optico-acoustically integrated in the acoustically-modified gravity-wave-mode fashion of the bottle-nosed dolphin's sonic-visioning system Musculpt-Montague topological M-Theory universal DNA-waveform grammar). The organizational notions behind SIMPOL (simultaneous policy) are quintessentially Cartesian-Newtonian: the UN is to be transformed into a facsimile of a world state wherein the officials of this state will not be elected, but appointed by the executive branches of the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-states (sixty percent of which will have elected representatives to appoint representatives to represent them, a small percentage of the sixty percent of which will have elected representatives who choose representatives to the electoral college which selects candidates for the status of representatives) agglutinating to the great state. Somehow, without invoking new principles, all the problems created by the smaller-scale echelons of the Cartesian-Newtonian hierarchy are to be solved by a larger-scale nesting echelon of the very same hierarchy with even greater centralization of decision making and enforcement powers. And this notion represents itself as anti-authoritarian! Chomp-sky, Chomp! Chomp! Chomp! thinks this might work, that it should be given a try. And this assertion is featured with a photo-op on the SIMPOL website. A true intellectual from Arkansas could probably get into an idea like this.
I think pushing the mind as regards likely outcomes of the prevailing circumstance is very much in order; this exercise may not be rewarded by significantly extended lifelines or beamtimes, but if cultivated as a collective occasion of experience, something may be salvaged which otherwise would altogether be lost. Dry salvage, perhaps. Just because GWOT, once declared, absolutely is unwinnable, just because the “long war” like the “long emergency” may not be so long, just because the new global strategy for defeating terrorism is clearly no strategy anyone into strategic thought would wish to speak of does not mean radical Islamism will “win”. When “recognition” of unwinnability comes with the cusp surface buckle… man-O'-man. Several dozen nukes against several score thousand nukes? Come on! Mothballs, you say? And that is not to mention the weapons systems developed over the last 20 years we don't even know about -- rockets maneuverable in flight or no. If back in the '60s and '70s you read The War of the Flea and Autopsy on People's War -- both of which are, in principle, fundamentally mistaken, but still contain some useful insights -- you will have realized that the counterinsurgent reserves the right to win, which he can exercise at any point he chooses, not by bombing the adversary back to the Stone Age, but by literally destroying absolutely everything. This was pioneered by the Romans in North Africa, and has been a residual memory ever since. No case for Goliath. Think of Hercules. Wasn't it Hercules who pulled the temple down on himself? Pretty interesting psychology there: psychopathology of Hercules. It appears that the Islamists do not know enough intellectual history of the West to have accurately assessed their adversary's impulse ensembles. There are a lot of forcing functions on the scene today, not just oil-peak and climate-shift dynamics, not just a pandemic of psychological clinging behaviors: e.g., the planet is several billion people over ecologically-balanced carrying capacity with prevailing and projected technological regimes, this fact being marked by a quarter of a million species extinctions, the human species not yet being one of them -- and there are overwhelming psychological blocks to transit. Schizophrenogenic double-bind, big time! Under such conditions, BACK OFF! may be heard as a MAKE MY DAY! event. Particularly if a provocation is required for pursuit of an unstated, because unstateable, policy. He thinks that you think that he doesn't think that you couldn't think that he would think… and the rules to this game are not rational or even irrational; they are antirational. Anyone who has watched the World Watch Institute's watching of the deteriorating world situation over the past 30 years has realized that “not on my watch” has become an assertion of diminishing returns. No one wants -- or is likely to want -- to take the karmic responsibility for explicitly enumerating downsizing criteria. But if some subclass of the human species volunteers… Islam and Muslims, not only Islamism -- right along with other dimensions of The Fertile Crescent religion-of-personification and its population corpora -- may not even survive the defeat of GWOT. Our religion, Our society, Our territory: if you want to be like that about Our culture and Our history, well, then, we'll just take Our personification and go home, Our home. What home is that? At home in the universe? Whosoever returns, returning to find nothing to find is not the recommended end-times outcome for encounter group therapy. Pushing the mind as regards likely outcomes of the prevailing circumstance is very much in order; this exercise may not be rewarded by significantly extended lifelines or beamtimes, but if cultivated as a collective occasion of experience, something may be salvaged which otherwise would altogether be lost. Psychological transits in orders of magnitude and qualitative shift -- lynching, atrocity, massacre, genocide, holocaust, nuclear salting -- are far easier made, and far more difficult to stop once started, than people imagine, people who have never worked at a place like CICV-Targets in the days before onset of the Cambodian self-holocaust (the perpetrators not being identical to those responsible). If decontextualization drove modern art, and deconstructing decontextualization defined modernism's degree-zero, then M&M-ized (Marxism and MoSoSo-modernized) Islamism has not only not successfully decontextualized, it has not succeeded in contextualizing its hereditary strengths, which speak strongly to post-Cartesian-Newtonian perspectives on transformation of the existing institutional base. In order to tap a heritage in a contemporaneously relevant fashion, it is necessary to have a creative idea, and that idea cannot be cultivated if the seed is not properly prepared for germination and correctly planted. There are many alternative scenarios for downsizing. The more collectivities can bring unconscious predisposing factors into explicit awareness, the less likely the more unpleasant old records will be set to spinning when the play button is hit on the cosmic jukebox.
Look, I am sorry for being unpleasant, over the top, verbally aggressive, for being abusive, insulting, name calling, all the rest -- caged violence, so on -- sorry, but, quite frankly, it is a fact, a fact inescapable, that you just simply are uninformed, have no sense of history, don't know what is transpiring around you, blabber on and on in some fantasy world, and in doing so become a responsible agent for the very thing you decry. And if your push compels me to state as much, then I have no apologies for the shove involved in my responding statements. Anyone who can speak calmly and rationally about so much blood has never had it in his face, is deranged, out of all proportion, has lost the capacity for judgment, should never be allowed into a position of authority and given decision-making responsibility. I have near-zero personal sympathy for radical Islamic positions on virtually every issue, but that in no way obscures my ability to SEE. How many deaths has UBL been responsible for? And even if he and his cohort push and push and push -- push without deep insight into the impulse ensembles governing collective behaviors of their adversaries -- until megadeath ensures, however mega the mega, who will be the perpetrators of the involved acts? Not UBL and his cohort -- though they will have some responsibility. Whatever they might manage to do in provocation, the response escalation ladder that will be climbed will involve orders of magnitude magnification of the level of violence of the stimulus to the knee-jerk response (dissimulated as rational policy formulation). There are a thousand things, facts, recent relevant historical facts, that could be cited here. Let's pull an unexpected one out of the hat. In the thirty-year history of the Indochina war -- August of 1945 through April of 1975 -- the Vietnamese communists never, absolutely never, took out the water pipe without which Saigonese could not have survived. Don't believe me? Think this is false, misleading? Then I invite you to study the water system for that city during the period in question. Look at the Thu Duc pumping station. How the water got from there into the city. Miles and miles, over-ground piping in many locations and for appreciable distances. Read the Hydrotechnics Corporation reports, the brown-end appendices to the Doxiades Comprehensive Plan for the Saigon Greater Metropolitan Area. And try to imagine some easier target for sapper teams to blow time and time again that could have wreaked equal or greater damage upon their adversaries. I don't think you'll come up with something easier to suggest. During the first nine months of 1968 I racked my brain trying to imagine an easier target, and did not find it. But they never blew that pipe! Now, for comparison, look at what the U.S. and its cohort did to civil infrastructure in Iraq in wake of the first Persian Gulf war -- and how many people died as a result of this destruction, DU-induced Gunther's disease (falsely deemed leukemia), and the UN embargo. Ask yourself: What were the actual motivations for these bombings? How many classes of boundaries, how many order-types, were breached when Saddam's forces invaded Kuwait? What was going on in the cognitive-intellectual environs of the European psyche when it became compulsive-obsessive about imposed borders during the WWI era? How does that C-O syndrome relate to the fact that Saddam inappropriately adopted WWI-era strategies and tactics for his various marshal enterprises? Why? Why? Why? The list of unasked questions is very long, indeed. And look at the embargo the U.S. and its cohort threw on Viet Nam -- and the damage that embargo did to humans, landscape, and endangered species -- in order to punish the Vietnamese for stopping the Cambodian self-holocaust collective psychosis provoked in large measure by U.S. Kissinger megabombing and its associated Huntington policy of “forced-draft urbanization”. You don't know what you are talking about! The bombing itself and what it provoked are not identical to the collective (not merely mass) American psychopathology motivating the bombing behaviors (the Dennis-the-Menace rage-state tantrums involved, as exhibited at places like CICV-Targets where B-52 strike locations were chosen for Indochina). The Nazis were not exactly historical bit-players when it came to killing people, but it is important -- if you want to have a handle on the magnitude of what is gunna happen early on in this century, the 21st century -- to keep perspective. The U.S. was most responsible, while not the sole perpetrator, for approximately six million deaths in Southeast Asia in the post-WWII era. That is only Southeast Asia. Study the details of transition between FDR's “UN trust territory” policy orientation and that policy orientation with which Truman replaced it. And these millions of Indochinese deaths began within days of the atomic demonstration bombings of Japan. I can, right now, this very instant, see the USAF general rising out of his chair, and the body language sickens me, literally makes me want to puke. “We are not going to tolerate…” he says. 1953. Imperial Hotel, Tokyo. A particular chair. A particular instance -- one of oh-so many. As far back as I can remember into my childhood, I can see myself seeing that body language, I can hear myself hearing those words… You have no idea. No idea at all.
I don't know of anyone else who has studied self-organizational dynamics from so many perspectives, in so many different disciplines, over so many years -- theoretically and practically. But what good is it to have done so, except in preventing choice of the wrong thing or the right thing in the wrong way? Undertaking a corpus of recruitment initiatives relative to -- re: re: re: yeah, yeah, yeah -- prompting people to attempt doing something intelligent is an utterly thankless misadventure: thirty-five years experience at that. Not like a national-liberation struggle when the nation-state system is half a century cognitively dead in all but inane senses. Not like recruiting one sectarian zealot to extremely prejudice another sectarian zealot of The Fertile Crescent Religion in process of tripartite self-annihilation. That's kid stuff! With regard to intelligent undertakings, there is little option but to opt for interpersonal theater referenced to prospective events sure to transpire only decades hence. People think you are crazy -- or unduly offensive.
Finally! Something real in the newspapers about bird flu. Not in the New York Times. Not in the London, Singapore, or Sydney papers. An unsyndicated article printed in the Bangkok Post, 27 February 2006 (“Factory Farms Behind Bird Flu Spread” by Achara Ashayagachat, p. 4):
The spread of industrial poultry production and trade networks has actually created ideal conditions for the emergence and transmission of lethal viruses like the deadly H5N1 strain of bird flu, said Devlin Kuyek, of the Montreal-based international non-governmental organization Grain.
Air thick with viral load from infected farms was carried for kilometers, while integrated trade networks spread the disease through many carriers: live birds, day-old chicks, meat, feathers, hatching eggs, eggs, chicken manure and animal feed, he added.
Networkcentric warfare against humanity and many other species by national and transnational megacorporate agglomerations. And please, just paaaleeeease, don't tell me they don't know what they are doing. Because they are bad people? All the usual suspect vices? Or because they ain't got no, ain't got no… imagination? Just like the fast-food joints pushed all the ma-and-pa places out by dumping, and once they had the requisite market share, raised prices well above what ma-and-pa used to charge for far-higher-quality offerings. When the Hansford of the food service industry goes down, people will swallow it just as they have done with all other intentional releases. Who can doubt, however, that a diarhetic-emetic cusp will be reached as émeute? So much having been gobbled down, collective hysteria at cusp will not be manageable short of annihilation. Even the monkey won't get the cork back in. For, you see, while management of public opinion on bird flu may in the short-term prevent panic and/or collective slashing out, it simultaneously -- along with discretionary Gatesian megafunding of consensus research -- prevents development of insight into actual etiology (even if pathogenesis is understood): a Miss Manners information climate absolutely quenches… oh-so-many things! You have to know something about the politics of prevailing paradigm conflict to creatively fund creative research. How much does Gates know? Clearly, not much. This is not an exhortation, only an analytic projection based upon insight into collective occasions of experience denied existence by the prevailing politically correct paradigm. But, even in this article, still -- just as regards AIDS -- the issue of how the balance of vector virulence versus host anti-viral immunity became sufficiently swayed to the vector's advantage as to allow establishment of its pandemic foothold (for this has long since been a pandemic for poultry species and other birds, if not yet for the human species) is not actually addressed -- except in respect to implied poultry life-style issues. My oft-stated bet since the mid-'70s has been that real insight into instantaneous collective far-from-equilibrium phase shifts in balance between vector virulence and host immune competency will not be achieved so long as Schrödinger's wave-function remains falsified by the physicists, and m-logically-valued interpretations of that wave-function are not brought to bear by submolecular biologists upon interpretation of frequency-response windows of superconductant DNA as immunological markers of non-simple self-identity. And in terms of the ever more likely autoanaphylactic émeute, cooperative communitarian F.M.C. will not be achieved by J.B.J. transform under m-logically-valued monetary units -- F.M.C. Fourier, that is; J.B.J. Fourier, that is -- until the EM-geon reciprocal transform superconductivity of the (double-helical spacetime) DNA of Schrödinger's atemporal-cat superposition is sorted out in n-dimensional Hilbert space under m-valued logics interpreted relative to animistic identity transparency.
There obviously are aspects of the prevailing “polyphonic stack of climate shift and cheap-energy dearth” global dilemmas -- non-Chomskyan “aspects”, of course; useless moral upbraiding over those Chomskyan having transpired so intensively for so long no one could possibly be unaware of them -- people don't know about, even journalists making semiserious reference to presumably decades-old weapons systems the rest of us have never heard of: “…thunderstorms triggered… with microwaves…”; “'Smart' clouds of microscopic nano-computers…”; “…focus atmospheric electricity to achieve 'precisely aimed and timed lightning strikes'…” (Ando Arike, “Owning the Weather”, Harper's Magazine, January 2006, p. 73). The microwave region of the EM spectrum being not only the valley of minimum sky noise, but dead center of the spectrum of DNA frequency-response-window immune signifiers. Alzheimer's waltz: jitterbugging the quantum-wave properties of intraneuronal DNA-RNA (even those of such molecules involved with acephalic viruses) -- a real Lamont Young tone-color lick, here, however, with pathogenic potential. A species with childhood onset Alzheimer's become pandemic and normative and not reversed by an adequate endogenous ketamine flood which is never forthcoming. Just part of the character armoring involved in the mass psychology of a radical-extremist scientism devoted to indiscriminate technological innovation. You see, ever since the mid-'30s when control-freak John von Neumann subverted quantum logic (thus fathering Alfred E. Newman: really! that's how thematic orchestration works in unconscious collective psychology) there has been a direct link people don't know about between climate shift dynamics and coming cheap-energy dearth. Wherever and whenever meteorological models have run into m-valued functions, these functions have been suppressed by means of “scaling” the equations involved: those features of atmospheric processes responsible for m-valued functions -- say, acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes -- are thus treated as noise, not information. Excommunicated. Filtered from the system. Renormalized. All “possibility theorems” disallowed; only “impossibility theorems” herein embraced. Though part of the world, no part of the world-picture embodied in the models employed for numerical weather forecasting and climate-shift prognostication. By such means as this is the “pathetic fallacy” in quantum measurement -- a falsification of authentic animistic identity transparency -- reversed: Abelian transcendental holographic introjection retrograde-inverted to infinitesimal Galois-Lie algebraic projective-identification. Psychopathology writ large upon the world. And since compounding of butterfly-effect “errors” propagates from microscale to macroscale, just as do the filtered acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes, one just has to wonder at etiology of the butterfly-effect, doesn't one? And whether or not John von Neumann's subversion of m-valued logics (thus endorsing Gödel's fancy footwork) was involved in pathogenesis of chaos theory? And what of particles created near black holes? Aren't they carriers of m-valued functions propagating from the microscale to the macroscale? And what about this scaling? Couldn't one regard a calculus of bivalent propositions only -- John A. Wheeler's notion of the pregeometry as a bucket of binary Borel-set dimensionless dust -- as a scaled calculus, a calculus scaled such that only the 1T2 order of logical-value is visible in light with a single-valued absolute limiting velocity? Which light, eh what? Been wondering why I never got rich as a popular science writer, right? Reach people? I don't subscribe to the notion there is efficacy in reaching people. What needs to be fundamentally restructured is the collective unconscious cognitive infrastructure and its institutionalization -- not conscious public opinion and belief. No iota sum will do the trick. The collective unconscious will deal with the individual state of consciousness, as it always has. Looking at form in process through the lens of simple-identity will lead to no solutions. And also because to be a popular popular science writer, you've got to agree with popular science. But if you think for yourself? Heh! Who ever got rich who actually thought for himself? Only those who so posture, who so claim. Masters of pretense. Technology innovation in the business of consensus science. I am that I am. Riiiiight! What actual god-goddess -- no mere pathetic fallacy of a collective psychological projection: the physicists' self/anti-self duality -- would thus reduce him-herself to the ego sphere? No demergence I am aware of. Ha! Not only does the meteorological community not have any significant suggestions as to how to adequately deal with oncoming climate-shift dynamics, members thereof couldn't possibly have, for their models are to such an extent falsified -- so as to cling to “I am that I am”: clingers and their clinging behaviors -- insight into solutions could never emerge there from. This is at least thirty-year-old information; just as is understanding of the inevitability of near-term climate shift. Worth noting here is the fact that John Wheeler, circa 1977, in rejecting the physics behind a computer model, then running on NASA's biggest mainframes, which explicitly (in so many words: “generation of acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes by an atmospheric black hole analogue”) treated the tornado as an information processing “black hole computer”, not an order-eating PacMan, admitted he did not know the primitive equation set of dynamical meteorology, or its elaborations, but, nonetheless, felt that meteorologist colleagues would appreciate not mixing up “exotic physics” with atmospheric science, a field devoted to studies of a classical domain. Polite hubris. I mean, uh, uh, sensitivity to carbon-dioxide accumulation has developed an awareness since the 1950s, just as have emerged projections of oil-peak dynamics from the same period. Atmospheric heteroautotropic metabolism. Mirrors have two sides, you know. Not only would UV be reflected back toward the Sun by electron-temperature enhanced electromagnetic space-shield mirroring, but… Oh-ho-ho, Dr. Jason, what kind of weapons system is that? Microwaves can't “trigger” thunderstorms, you know. (Military) service-funded Hollywood writers aside, even semiserious journalists don't know about this other side of the star-wars mirror. The “counter-space control” (Youngian rotor “control”: third-order counter-temporal operator: control a helicopter, control a tornado in complex-imaginary time: a time storm the writer of Time Storm exhibited no interest in) MOON talks about has nothing to do with “battlespace dominance” -- even if a turncoat spin-off company mistakenly thought so. It’s the pilot-wave's “wet thrust” we're after! All us Tantric deviants -- Schrödinger foremost among us -- hard onto cooperative communitarian hypersociality facilitated by mobile social software (and the oh-so-so delicious GIS dominance directly implied). Ummmmmmm! The bomber pilot's son speaking here, pejoratively, of Aurobindo's apocalyptic spiritosocial-Darwinian millenarianism. So, what, then, is the un-understood connection? Suppress carriers of m-valued functions, suppress the m-logically-valued features of quantum logic -- Penrose certainly ought to have understood this, even if Hawking couldn't have possibly! -- and not only are severe-storm and climate-shift models falsified, but the very-wholly zero-point insights prerequisite to solution of cheap-energy dearth, in clean fashion, are, in turn, suppressed. The m-valued acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes not only poke holes in the tropopause boundary (on their way to “mirror modes”: Ha!), they are intimately involved in ozone metabolism: “…burning of fossil fuels, which causes nitrogen in the air to react to form nitrogen oxides…” (Rowan Hooper, “Something in the Air”, NewScientist, 21 January 2006, p. 40: still no mention of the billions upon billions of cubic meters of flared and vented natural gas over decades and decades from oil field after oil field globally, as opposed to cow farts and canned CFCs as “causes” of atmospheric ozone destruction) which are, as Hooper does mention, p. 42, greenhouse gases -- the nitrous oxides -- involved in stratospheric ozone depletion (in the daytime f1 sector of the F-layer of the stratosphere's exhibitionistic diurnal bifurcation behavior?). Can't get up there without puncturing the tropopause boundary, eh? Just like with Bikini radiation, eh? Even in the planetary case, spiritual uplift requires puncturing of one or another ego sphere. Atmospheric Swiss cheese. Holes in (Riemann surface) sheets (as a gravitational -- black hole -- computer analogue). Ever hear of that? I bet A. Turing did -- and just about the time the models were being aggressively falsified in run up to the cipher code project. You should look into the history of this. Even if the academy didn't allow interdisciplinary studies, the luminaries, of course, could not have become luminaries unless they had (clandestinely) gained insight from studies disallowed by the paladins pumping the luminaries. All the zero-point processes any clean-energy activist could ever hope for, Nature long ago placed in tornadoes, but these processes can't be seen so long as m-valued logics are not employed to evaluate m-valued functions. PoP. Panmictic omniPantheism. You should think about this, and all the various countrasexual flip-flop interpretations of reincarnation involved. Base state of Tzog-chen in one mind moment. Yes, one mind moment. Think about what that means. My “i/I” certainly wouldn't attempt to tell you. Too much experience for that. Might take a tap. Reared on ground-level ozone -- which surely ain't pure stratospheric Oh-Three! Oh-Oh-Oh… ah.
There is no possibility that institutions based on 17th- and 18th-century notions can organize sustained global coordination of human affairs -- what some call SIMPOL -- so as to adequately deal with the coming climate-shift dynamic and cheap-energy crunch. Nor can this be done on the basis of falsified models of natural processes. The required institutionalization must be analogically modeled upon undissimulated contemporary understanding of natural processes if it is to effectively interface with such processes. That’s why I have for 30 years advocated implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units.
No, you can't validly think of it like that, it seems to me. Through that lens, you are certain to grossly underestimate: failures to meet projections of what you suppose a comprehensive plan, you will view indications of misjudgments where, quite possibly, there were none. Comprehensive planning has only a small role to play in military undertakings and foreign policy formulation and implementation: mostly as regards operational matters. Interests, goals, and objectives. Maximize your alternatives. Interests are best left as vague as possible, and have nothing to do with military planning. Goals should be relatively clarified, yet still somewhat vague, and posited as attractors, as teleological pull factors used to guide the disjointed incrementalism informing policy implementation along a zig-zag path in the general direction of the goal. Objectives need to be more crisply formulated, otherwise there could be no comprehensive operational planning for their obtainment. Yet, even objectives are rarely met by following a comprehensive plan, and that is why the flexibility of adept tactical improvisation is almost always required for success. Now, map all these levels of policy formulation and implementation onto the neocon approach to the Middle East and oil-peak dynamics. It has long been known that post-WWII oil policy would eventually reach a cusp, a circumstance where no additional input of coercion could keep the policy on track. How handle the cusp? Posit a somewhat vague goal: remake the map of the Middle East. Employ disjointed incrementalism while approaching this goal, with full awareness that tactical improvisation will be lavishly required. In such circumstances, a failed policy in Iraq might actually be a precondition for reaching the goal. I think it very unwise to attribute too great a role to comprehensive planning.
I think you miss my point: all players attribute to themselves rhymes and reasons, which Rs-n-Rs can be treated as sophisticated and intelligent; yet, this is mere pretense and self-attribution, for collective impulse and unconscious gradient overwhelmingly govern behaviors -- and will continue to do so, no matter what. The process will play itself out. Period. Only at cusp, in the thinnest of windows, is there opportunity for effective intelligent action -- and, then, only an opportunity. No guarantees. No high likelihood. Moreover, this is an opportunity for a limited array of possibilities only, because 150 years have passed since the human species made the subliminal decision for mass suicide, a decision which it has relentlessly pursued ever since: we will not tolerate non-simple identity and its implications about the nature of Nature; we choose to die instead. The species has read its fate in the stars, just as a subset once did, the Inca. Any clean, real solution to the cheap energy crunch -- and hence to the climate-shift dynamic -- will end this civilization as surely as would nuclear holocaust. M-valued hypercomplex functions under m-valued logics over n-dimensional Hilbert space covered in stacks of stacked Riemann surfaces Regge-latticed and numbered with numbered Gödel numbers is the only context from which zero-point solutions could demerge. But such demergence would wipe clean all traces of simple-identity. Poof! The present civilization is gone. Thus, the decision not to tolerate, the decision to die instead. Degenerative organic brain disease become the norm: error formation of such magnitude as to permit reformatting only. Nature will recover readout to consciousness of m-logically-valued processing by one means or another.
It's hard to imagine a more destructive monoculture actor than Pico Iyer has been, unless, of course, it is Time Magazine. And Iyer now writes (“A Tale of Two Kingdoms”, Time, February 20, 2006, p. 56) as if he never read his own book Video Night in Kathmandu. Iyer's book was published in 1988 and much has happened since then, and not only in Nepal. Below, I reproduce the annotation given in MOON to the bibliographic entry devoted to Iyer's book (Vol. 2, pp. 734-5):
Provides a rose-colored account of contemporary acculturative processes in Asia. Derek Dillon, contrary to the tenor of Iyer's TIME-LIFE impressions, does not view these processes as benign. Indeed, his breath is taken away in contemplation of the scale of violence which inevitably will result. The following letter to the editors of Time Magazine was deemed not publishable, for obvious reasons: Dear Sir: I've been reading Pico Iyer for sometime, and traveling for years in many of the circles and locations he writes about. I do not share your readers' enthusiasm for what he has to say. His perspective exemplifies the “politically correct” naively optimistic American editorial assessment of technology-driven forced global acculturation to the dominant world monoculture -- and expectation that this homogenization can continue at manageable levels of violence. The violence will not remain manageable for two reasons: [1] the dominant culture is not an authentic universal, but merely the institutional and behavioral analogue of the Cartesian-Newtonian Weltansicht, a view clearly in its terminal death throes. One can, of course, conveniently not notice the intimate and inseparable connection between worldview construct and institutional algorithm. Then, one can ignore the political significance of subtitles to recent physics textbooks like, “In Conservative Classical Systems: Quantum Manifestations”. Five-star world monoculture will not survive these quantum manifestations, all of which have to do with collective behaviors. [2] Collective human behaviors are cropping up all over the place, and in regions and groups Iyer tells us not to worry about, tells us that the people are dealing well with the assimilation of their cultures to the dominant culture. But collective behaviors are not manageable by institutions predicated on the thesis that such behaviors do not exist, that they result from the behaviors of authoritarian personalities. Particularly so when the long-repressed secret is out: classical material systems, once thought to be governed by atomistic-individualistic principles, in fact, are expressions of collective quantum behaviors, behaviors in principle having much more in common with the animism of traditional and tribal societies than anything in the dominant monoculture. So, when writers from once-colonized societies dissipate their creative energies in efforts to assimilate traditional literatures to the dominate five-star world literature -- the only one addressing universal issues, you know -- it is hard to see this as not contributing to the fundamental causes of those collective behaviors which will, in due course, prove Iyer's thesis gravely in error. Sincerely, Derek Dillon, American Expatriate, Ho Chi Minh City.
But events leading to- and post-9/11 are only early results of processes Iyer has sung praises over. Newsweek's Christian Caryl (“Turning Un-Japanese”, February 13, 2006) claims that the Japanese have finally, after all these years of claiming to be uniquely Japanese, given up the ghost of Japaneseness (p. 35):
It was 150 years ago that Japan's leaders were confronted by the superior firepower of the “black ships” led by American Commodore Mathew Perry, and made a fateful decision. Japan opened to the West as a way to catch up with its technology, and thus became the first non-Western country to opt for what, nowadays, we would call “globalization.” As a Westerner whose experience of Japan has been short but intense, I can't quite escape the feeling that this grand experiment is coming to a point of resolution. For better or for worse, we're no longer aliens to one another.
America continues to push Japan to rearm, and Japan, as a whole, reluctantly and slowly complies. Won't America be surprised if Japan is not on the American side in a war with the Chinese, if she is a part of a Greater China aligned to a Germano-Russian Bloc? Contemporary Japanese, as Donald Richie maintains, may not remember the family system and world (Caryl, p. 32) “portrayed in the 1953 classic [film] 'Tokyo Story'”, but I have vivid memories of 1953 Tokyo and Kyoto and rural Kyushu -- and have lived in Japan for some period, if only briefly, every decade since. Were Caryl to learn a little bit about psychiatry in Japan, get some exposure to the Shintoist content of contemporary clinical records, he might revise his opinion. This does not even require mastery of the Japanese language. Monkey-brain sashimi run through a blender made in America. Just as with other cultures once highly integrated, massively troped, and deeply animistic, the more the Japanese conscious mind gives up the ghost of cultural identity -- the more this identity is suppressed by technologically-forced acculturative assimilation, the more regressed becomes the rampant eclecticism -- the more obsessed does the collective unconscious become with that thus suppressed and regressed, consequently predisposing breaks into mass hysteria. Recent events in South and Central Asia, the Middle East, and Latin America are just the beginning. The more successful imposition of global monoculture becomes, the more thoroughly will military and geopolitical alliances be determined by suppressed cultural factors. What is sown is reaped -- if only after many seasons.
Well, if you have a problem with that, I would recommend you read Robert Fisk's chapter “The Plague” in The Great War for Civilization (Knopf, 2005). DU projectiles are just one phase transition on the way to… But what I find hard to believe is that Fisk, with all his resources and movements over the Middle East, did not hear of Günther's disease until “the summer of 1997” (p. 727) -- when, as far away as Colombo, I heard of that malady in early 1994. This is mystifying. Günther was THE person who made DU known to the public, and it is my understanding he received multiple gunshot wounds in return for the involved act of publicity (followed by imprisonment and torturous treatment). Moreover, Fisk apparently never heard of Horst Günther and bought into various highly-stressed, extremely overworked, distraught, and demoralized M.D.s' assimilation of the symptoms of conditions like thrombocytopenia to previously known illnesses: myloblastic leukemia (p. 730); myeloid leukemia (p. 731); lymphoma (p. 732); lymphoblastic leukemia (p. 739); encephalitis (p. 740). By early 1993, according to my understanding of my conversations with Günther a year later, Günther, an M.D. with nearly 40 years experience at places like the Albert Schweitzer Institute and 10 years of working in a pediatric hospital in Baghdad, had by clinical and pathological studies ruled out such diagnoses: the illness in question was, according to his judgment, a new form of radiation sickness never before seen. This conclusion on part of Günther, right or wrong, was what made my understanding of the quantum-wave properties of superconductant DNA -- derivative as that understanding was of studies of pathogenesis of SLE, another disease with radiation-induced fulminations, dissected and dialogued-over extensively with Wolfgang Luthe, M.D.-- appear relevant to the emerging portrait of Günther's disease. According to the superconductant DNA model and its extensions, ionizing radiation and oxidative damage to DNA are not required for induction of degenerative disease; alteration in frequency response window and p-electron parcel oscillation rate are sufficient. DU, chemicals, and EMP, each and jointly, can induce such alterations. Of course, even if DU projectiles were to be dropped from the TOE of the U.S. Army, the fundamental issues in question would remain of the utmost importance: no MERE synchronicity is the circumstance that the involved factors of killing in war and its aftermath mirror with utmost verisimilitude quantum components of DNA hysterically fretted over for two generations and derivative of earlier negative-emotional conundrums related to “Schrödinger's cat” and Cantor's seizures and Abel's consumptive “impossibility” -- collective psychological debaissement over each of which having been intimately involved in establishing the preconditions necessary for onset of the Second World War.
Yes, I have to agree, the journalist's engagier is of such a nature as somehow to prevent real insight. One could see that that was the case with the Oriana Fallaci of A Man and the Gloria Emerson of Winners and Losers; one can also see it with a Robert Fisk. Especially so if the reportage is pristine, perfect, the work of a totally “fair witness”. Oriana produced, for instance, probably the most accomplished account of the man-woman level of the transference existing in all of world literature. Yet, this was unreworked experience. Moreover, there have been hundreds of excellent such accounts -- what happened, to whom, where, when, in what cognitive and emotional contexts, and so on -- and what effect on human behavior have they had? Gordon Walker, the consummate Christian Science Monitor bureau chief for Asia during and immediately after WWII, experienced similar problems. Unfortunately, his personal journals have never been published. Perhaps recrudescence of the reporter is because persisting as a journalist -- of whatever stripe, no matter what the ideological axe being ground: his-her habitus -- involves embrace of certain assumptions about the nature of things which must remain sacrosanct. In desuetude of a certain kind is the raw reborn. When has cinematic or verbal hyperRealism prevented a war? There is something religious about the psychological state of being a mere witness. Fisk provides a perfect example of this in his The Great War for Civilization -- over and above the fact that war, great or small, can never be for civilization, only against. Fisk, a surpassing reporter, one cannot at all doubt, listened and observed that (p. 950) “As each survivor talked, the dead regained their identities.” TALKED… REGAINED… IDENTITIES. Redivivus. Childhood roof-brain-chattering of an enculturated simple-identity into a claimed “self” absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct? Redintegration. Talking Habermas hyperbole. Shits reading shit as a religious calling? Panic obsession with words as purgative agencies, as capable of raising the dead. Overcoming THE existential denial incumbent upon supposition of the arbitrary, chance nature of what is deemed entry into absolute nihil? Death -- and its avoidance, and the need to avoid repeat avoid repeat avoid repeat… Back to the battlefield, and back and back. If you are going to be there and do that sort of witnessing over and over, in midst of all the incumbent dangers… and without the identity transparency resident only in… What? What was that? The idea that witness, accounting, acknowledgement, contrition, public apology, documentation PREVENTS the next war: what evidence is there of that? None. So one does not do what could actually prevent the next war. But I am a journalist! Just a journalist. I have a job to do, a career. Religious blinders… OBSTRUCTION for a Fisk, for a journalist, something never to be countenanced, never penetrated, never understood. Never possibly could be understood: back-react only. And Fisk says (p. 939):
…and now I would see the Iraqi dead again. Inside my brain was a memories box in which I would see as many Iraqis dead as alive, their bodies as vivid as the living.
And it dawned on me over a long period that Iraqis must have been themselves this way. They were both dead and alive.
Both dead and alive: Schrödinger's cat. The m-valued; the m-logically valued. This is a brilliant piece of self-observation, but there is no reworking of experience, no categorical insight, for Fisk does not connect this “state” to the “logic” of martyrdom operations, let alone to that of quantum relative-state, animistic identity transparency, and spontaneous localization and fusion at autogenic brain discharge. Quote the first entry to Derek's “Studies for Liana”, a phenomenological journal of the man-woman level of the transference (MOON, Vol. 1, p. 353):
When I was five or six years old I had a close girl friend; we played together everyday and were deeply attached. When my father was transferred to a new base, and my family had to move away, I knew I would never see my little friend again. The same thing had happened a number of times before with others, but the attachment had never been so strong. This time, when we left, I refused to say goodbye and decided that my friend was dead. Oh, Liana! I couldn't see that there was any difference between being left behind and dying. I would never see her again; that was death. Dying really confused me and I spent a lot of time talking to myself and acting out little scenes about what it meant for someone to die. On one occasion, while in the midst of this play acting, I was suddenly inspired to pretend that I was my friend watching me depart. In the ensuing episode, she decided that I was dead. For awhile after that, I felt like I was dead and nobody knew it but me and my dead friend.
A “memories box” of electro-chemical records, records which, if not discharged, are pathogenic. But these “records” are not personal, not proprietary to the individual; they are residual of collective induction, a ghosting of the brain of any witness. Electro-chemical interlock, clamping down on frequency-response windows of intraneuronal DNA, invasion, contagion, possession, occupation by the demon, persistence of the collective component in any and every kill. For even the physically isolated “individual” participates in the collective unconscious; indeed, encompasses it. We can be sure of this Fiskian disconnect, this non-registration to consciousness, by his demeaning of one of his interviewees, Mullah Abdullah, (pp. 870-71): “…a man in denial…” In denial because he said of the U.S. invasion and occupation of Afghanistan, “…we don't think we have been defeated…” and “…martyrdom…is victory” and “…we don't care about the land we have lost.” To Fisk, this is simply a refusal to acknowledge the facts on the ground, facts like American boots. How could martyrdom possibly be victory? Martyrdom operations are only ostensibly directed against the enemy; they are primarily for the recruitment base and the corpus of existing insurgents; for, that is, systemic self-organization by inculcation of animistic identity transparency, quantum relative-state, spontaneous fusion. For and against, not for or against. Just as in the old “party of the new type”, that of Leninist cellular organization, accretions from utopian socialism -- e.g., the “criticism” of the Oneida Perfectionists -- produced the criticism/self-criticism sessions with their assaults upon ego boundaries, existential separatism, alienation, anomie, so, in the new party of the new type, AQ&A that is, martyrdom adds another dimension to the attack upon 1T2-logical boundaries, boundaries that are closed circles where inside can be absolutely distinguished from outside: borders with properties definable only in bivalent logic. Identity incorporation by means of martyrdom operations expanding the order of logical-value operative in the system. Regressed expression, mediated by projective identification: no doubt about it. But 1T2-logical boundaries nonetheless destroyed. And if one's strategic purpose is to destroy such boundaries -- one of the defining properties of the Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian nation-state system -- how could one possibly care about the land lost? One wouldn't, would one. At the very most, one would want fractal boundaries -- holes within holes within holes -- for the Caliphate sought in opposing the very idea of the C-N-W nation-state system. This is not a war for or against civilization, or between civilizations; it is a war over the prevailing notion of identity as a metaphysical category -- as were the Franco-Prussian war, WWI, and WWII. And as this contention over the nature of identity rises to crescendo, the assertion similarly rises in insistency that there is no collective occasion of experience, no collective responsibility, that, no matter what the facts on the ground, absolute 1T2-logical distinction prevails between combatant and non-combatant, military and civilian. If this were not the case, skew curve: martyrdom would be victory, control over 1T2-logically-bounded land would be unimportant. Planck and Einstein would have slain Descartes and Newton: rotational logic over a hyperspace governing the combat. So this simply cannot and will not be allowed to be the case, and legal prescription -- in face of nature, the unspeakable in quantum mechanics, outcomes of the Aspect experiments, presence of Bose-Einstein condensation, Curie temperatures, infinite correlation lengths, superposed quantum phase-digits, collective and cooperative behaviors in material processes -- proscribes the facts on the ground, mandates 1T2-logical identity only, will impose its will. My way! Forgodsake, he is responsible, not us! The authoritarian personality. Him! The more people there are who accept the proscribing legal prescriptions, the more multi-valued identity becomes suppressed and hence regressed, and the more therefore does the collective unconscious constellate the projective identifications eliciting the collective behaviors driving the will to proscribe the permissible notions of identity with legal prescriptions. The “virtuous” circle in the self-driven wheel. In this case, the denominator is all ways very common, and always prevails -- until, that is, a biosphere no longer exists.
It's much more intractable than that, I'm afraid. Not only is the general population far behind the leading edge of science, the general population of scientists is far behind the leading edge of science. Moreover, the leading edge of science is not leading; it's dissimulating -- and has been for a hundred years and more. This is one major component in the catastrophic insolvability of the current corpus of global problems. I've been arguing since the 1970s that this circumstance needs to be unreservedly admitted if losses are to be minimized and, indeed, if there is to be any other-side to the crisis to emerge to. In over thirty years I have personally become acquainted with no like minds on this issue. Peter Russell, however, has expressed a similar assessment (The Consciousness Revolution, A Transatlantic Dialogue: Two days with Stanislav Grof, Ervin Laszlo, and Peter Russell, Element, 1999, pp. 81-2):
Yes. I do not think we are going to avoid disaster in one form or another. It is too late. We have gone too far, and reform will take too long. We are rather like the crash-test dummy in a car. It is as if the car had started hitting the wall. In slow motion the front of the car is beginning to crumble and the dummy inside is saying, Oh dear, it looks like we are going to crash. I'd better do something. Maybe I should get out. Or maybe I can put the car in reverse.
But it is too late for that, far too late. We are reaping the consequences of years of wrong thinking. It is no good trying to change all that now. The question is, how do we navigate our way through what is almost certainly going to be the most calamitous time in human history. It is not going to be an easy time. It's going to be very, very uncomfortable. But I do not think there is any avoiding it now.
Problems of material culture, environmental damage, and climate shift are not primarily what I base my assessment upon; these I consider secondary to debilitation of human collective psyche. My point of departure over the last couple of decades, relative to reading global events, increasingly has become that the policy principals of the major nation-states -- without public announcement -- have long since been predicating action on the assumption of catastrophic unsolvability and have adopted a “get what you can while you can” policy orientation. While this predication may not be fully conscious, that qualification seems not to matter much.
MOON's Derek Dillon could agree more with Tony Judt's review (“A Story Still to Be Told”, The NY Review of Books, 23 March 2006) of John Lewis Gaddis' The Cold War: A New History, as Dillon can only guffaw crocodile tears at Gaddis' quoted (p. 11) assertion: “And so the Cold War transformed American leaders into Machiavellians.” And so we are to believe that progeny of those European conquistadors-settlers-colons responsible for the deaths of up to 95 percent of the population of two continents -- somewhat under 100 million when population of the planet was still not much more than one billion -- and for instituting several hundred years of slavery, were somehow not expert at the Renaissance modus operandi essayed by Machiavelli? Such MO had to be learned so late as the cold war? Not likely. Particularly as the American holocaust prefigured subsequent holocausts in principle and practice -- if not in complete isomorphism. But this, unfortunately, if not the least of it, certainly was not the most of it. The cold war was made “inevitable and necessary”, to quote Judt recapping Gaddis, in my opinion only because of the atomic bombings of Japan, and the psychopathology which made those bombings “inevitable and necessary”. If the Versailles Treaty is implicated as prefiguring WWII, then the cold war stands in the same position to what is presently unfolding. By preventing for 40 years devotion of adequate attention and resources to fundamental global problems -- problems like mass mental difficulties with basic principles of 19th century mathematics and 20th century physics inducing collective psychoses, oncoming oil peak dynamics, and evolving climatic consequences of fossil-fuel burning -- the cold war made these and many other problems not only intractable but almost certainly catastrophically unsolvable on a timely basis. Of course the story is still to be told! And now that the species is confronted with what is likely the catastrophically unsolvable, attention and resources are being, and will continue to be, marshaled in inanition by reaction to estimates of the degree of that likelihood, not by straightforward vigorous efforts at problem solving.
Just great, great, I say: the pompous personas of the popular science writers exposing their bullet-point paraphasia and commercialized keyword paramnesia. They quote quotable quotes from each other's palimpsest paperbacks, for Buddha's sake! Whatever speed-reading method employed, one must plow through 500 pages to get the equivalent of five pages of value. The longer they manage to keep this rusty ruse going, the more thoroughly will everything they hold dear evaporate from their search-engine optimized cosmological neighborhood.
That's like saying Third World countries imposed an oil embargo; when, actually, it was the Vietnam-war-imposed collapse of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism and involved devaluation of the dollar denominating oil transactions as well as the consequent losses to store of value in reserve currency over the period 1945-73 that imposed an oil embargo -- occasioned by the Yom Kippur war, of course. The common assumption behind all your arguments is that high culture and population concentrations are a “good”: how high? how concentrated? good for what? good for whom? good for how long?
I can state it very, very simply: short, but not sweet. One cannot have unadulterated m-valued logics applied to physics and retain thermodynamics. This lack of a thermodynamics is solution to the cheap energy crunch. The human species not only chose not to apply m-valued logics to physics (Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation), it also chose to adulterate m-valued logics. These were choices for collective suicide. And these choices were made for many reasons, with the underlying principles of which the average person strongly and compulsively concurs. We will not live in a place we don't like and can't date! Accelerator mass spectrometry dependent upon interpretation of Schrödinger's equation? Horrors! In order to survive into the idea of a future, we would have to give up the idea of a past. No. No. Nothing, and so be it… Those two decisions about logic, and their precursors, have gathered much more than a hundred years of momentum.
Sorry, but I get tired of hearing the same old drone. Why can't we have a different drone? 1T2 all against 1T2 all. The µTm commons a tragedy. Small 1T2 kingdoms always at war. Warfare chronic, warfare intense, warfare without resolution for the simple reason that no one managed to bring together a 1T2 empire -- and solar-cycle forced droughts of course… United, archaeology and the paleo-“sciences” are the best Rorschach test ever devised. Under such unification, for instance, can frequency analysis yield a “results from”. The psychogenic revelations are stupendous! Quantum probabilities (not µTm logical-values in operator-time) causing results across the 1T2-logical boundary established by the “classical limit”. Whoa! Got that?
At this point, I can't even force myself to read press reports on global warming, severe storms, earthquakes, and so on. That's thirty-year-old high emotional ground for me. Fist fights at the back of severe storms conferences. Four-letter words scrawled in bold red ink across papers submitted to the best journals around the world. Cornell Department of Meteorology. Those who stayed in the field… hmmmm. People walked away from the field at the end of the '70s having concluded that it was already -- then, twenty-five years ago -- a done deal, even if every human instigated see-Oh-too source on the planet instantly stopped producing and never produced again, dah-da, dah-da, dah-da. Not to mention all the other likely contributory factors, anthropocentric and otherwise. Near instantaneous far-from-equilibrium phase transitions: the heyday field of that decade. Just ask Nobel laureate Ilya Prigogine. So don't even talk to me about how nobody understood how fast it could happen. Department chairmen, maybe. Those who predicted it weren't taking about “could”; they were taking “will”! And where was Al Gore on this in 1975 when it was already too late? I'm not about to read this stuff.
I record this for posterity, on the off chance there is to be a posterity. Georgetown's foreign service school may have been a great place from which to launch a career in the early-'60s, but it was not then the best location in D.C. to learn things; that was AU's SIS. Don't even mention George Washington at that time; the late-'50s, perhaps. As an SIS student living in the Q Street household of two of the luminaries, I couldn't have tripped over a Clinton in 1964. Preened by Radcliff just as Betty Freidan became a bestseller. Bruce Kuklick's book reviewed in The Economist (25 March 2006, pp. 87-8), Blind Oracles: Intellectuals and War from Kennan to Kissinger, resurrects some of the old issues and starts to set the record straight. Anyone who regularly attended SIS teas, yes teas, in the months following JFK's assassination, and who listened closely to the conversations in the hallways, knew that Khrushchev knew there was a huge American nuclear and delivery superiority, and that the Kennedy Administration, from the beginning, knew that Khrushchev knew, and knew that Khrushchev knew the Administration knew. Derek vents on this in MOON. No pretty picture. Kuklick starts to almost get this right -- as testified to by The Economist. Such information was the sort of thing one learned at SIS, as the requisite occasions were created there; such things were not to be learned at Georgetown. SIS students spent a lot of time, not only in bedroom communities like Spring Valley, but also milling around Georgetown University events, keeping ears to the ground -- just as they did at dozens of locations around the city; Georgetown students spent no time at SIS events. Experience at analyzing bureaucracies to identify changing locations of maximum raw data flows, learning to establish and regularly service sources at those locations (e.g., getting Library of Congress researchers to produce reports that could be submitted as term papers), becoming expert at crashing embassy parties, and so on was experience that served an SIS dropout (with excellent grades), and even a graduate, very well in the intelligence underworld of Saigon 1968 -- where “discovery” was essential to information access and regular servicing was the requisite daily ritual of the creative analyst. The interesting thing is, as far as I know, no SIS adept of that generation ever became an FSO or a politico -- only the nerds. And the whys and wherefores of that have reverberated down through the decades right into present-day dilemmas.
I have to admit that I was naive, a believer. Brought up that way, enculturated that way. Even getting around so much as I did so young. Riding in the backseat of a '49 Ford seeedan through little towns, trucker's whistle stops, passing Indian stalls in Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, West Texas -- or maybe it was while counting out-of-state license plates while cruisin' Route 66 -- askin' questions, gettin' told; sometime about that time was when I learned about how all the Indians died of small pox. Blankets for the destitute and freezing, a Jesus sort of thing to do. And every now and then, right up through high school, I'd see some reference to it. That's what happens when you live in isolation, when you don't get around so much -- in those days before vaccinations. After that I never paid it much attention, certainly no mind. So it was quite a surprise -- See! it's always worse than you can imagine, always -- to recently read (“Barbarians at the Gates” by J. H. Elliott, a review of Barbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment by David J. Weber, printed in The NY Review of Books, 23 February 2006, p. 38) that:
General Sir Jeffrey Amherst, who approved a proposal for inoculating blankets in order to infect the Indians threatening Fort Pitt, had his Spanish equivalent in the governor of Paraguay who sent smallpox carriers into a camp of Mbaya Indians.
How many tens of millions of people were killed in this way? Certainly there has yet to be a larger scale act of successful biological warfare. Pretty Machiavellian, it seems to me.
And so James Lovelock's The Revenge of Gaia advocacy for going nuclear is based on his conclusion that the planet is locked on positive feedback loop for global warming which cannot be exited until after the catastrophe has run its course. What took him so long to reach that conclusion? And what is the real connection between energy politics and meteorological assessment? He ignored the role played in ozone depletion by flaring and venting of huge volumes of natural gas for decades and decades from oil fields around the planet, and now he comes out for nuclear power. Strange stuff. When I left the environs of Cornell's Department of Meteorology (I was never really there) in the late-'70s, I had a year or two earlier reached “the inevitability” conclusion. I did not advocate going nuclear, however -- why compound the problems? -- I vigorously argued abandonment of the ship of Staatsnation (my personal preference over Nationenstaat: put the horse before the cart) analogically embodying the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm responsible for “the inevitability”. And I continue to argue such abandonment to this day by advocating implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units tagged to local sustainable development indicators and all that would go with them. Here's my take on why it took Lovelock so long. Lovelock put ozone depletion primarily on CFCs because his science is old paradigm thought, wherein a classical limit is tacitly assumed: Gaia's atmosphere, according to his notion, is a classical domain where quantum and relativity theory do not apply. And his biological analogy to Gaia is drawn from molecular biology, not submolecular quantum biochemistry. Thinking only in that box postponed his insight for a couple of decades. He didn't look at the role of acoustically-modified gravity-wave modes (filtered from the models since the late-1940s so as to maintain the fiction that the global atmosphere is a classical domain) in ozone metabolism: poking holes in the tropopause boundary allowing exchanges between upper and lower atmosphere (to include exchange of, not only fallout, but also ozone). And he was not aware of the fact that severe storms are analogues of black hole computers whereby quantized packets of hydrothermodynamic information are exchanged across all wavelengths of the global atmosphere in response to minute variations in the solar cycle, not just UV absorbed and reflected. The solar wind does play a role in solar-terrestrial interactions, you know, and the complex angular momentum carried by solar wind elementary particles communicates relativistic-quantal information transposed to hydrothermodynamic angular momentum cascade into lower atmospheric dynamics, and, transposed again, even into geomorphological processes. This is the real butterfly effect of importance, not that described by chaos and complexity theorists in their eagerness to banish m-valued logics: Nature does not employ 2nk systematics; She prefers Mnk processes. Superintegration is a prominent feature of quantum-relativistic systems transiting to critical states which classical systems do not exhibit. Chaotic self-organized criticality is not equivalent to quantum superintegration. The global situation may be a lot worse than scientists thinking in the box constructed with the classical limit have yet begun to imagine. “Is the Situation in Physics Stranger than we Think?” That was the title to a little paper I sent to Steven Hawking from Cornell in 1977. Paradigmatic myopia seems a particularly British disability: in the late-'70s both Hawking and Penrose were exposed to technical material and computer modeling products (outputted by NASA's then-biggest mainframes) describing the Earth's atmosphere as being a relativistic-quantum information processor, and they had no interest in this. Only recently has Hawking done an about face on black hole computers; he is certainly not ready yet to acknowledge that the material he was sent in the late-'70s described in detail black hole computers in the Earth's atmosphere. So we've lost 30 years of response time already. A real assessment of the climate-shift dynamic long in motion will not be forthcoming so long as the fiction that the Earth's atmosphere is a classical domain is maintained. And as long as that remains the case, there is no hope of finding the best policies, let alone finding effective ways to implement them. Nor will real solutions to depletion of cheap energy be found until a real paradigm shift is actually made. One way to do an end run around the physicists is to implement m-logically-valued monetary units, which will carry the required paradigm shift decisively forward.
As I learned from a friend in Elmira -- such telephone conversations! -- that (better put that that in there) there is a profound difference between a speaker and a communicator. Got that? Good. Got that that? Hmmm. Party lines in the Northern Tier, the upper tier in those days, days long past the real experts: Cayugas, Senecas, Oneidas, Onondagas, Tuscaroras, Iroquois. Trance reading on the collective need. Base of Seneca Falls, the meeting ground. Been there? Really been there? I'd doubt it. Live there for five years and see what it does to a sensitized psyche. If you're sensitized. Sensitized to infrasound, maybe. Or this or that holocaust. You got to learn to talk between the lines, walk between the lines! Sulk the soundings, the sounded sounds of no-sound. Had you being there, this wouldn't been a problem. Only where identity transparency fails… Hop, hop, hop! Where the Scotch came from is hard to say: scotch it. It's the little library, you know, with the local history, the local historical society, that edge into the past which is an edge into the psyche of the genius of the place present -- that's place present and only present, not the present place in the past -- throughout… well, time, if you insist. Time. My, what large automatisms you have! Lived across the street from that library for about a year of memetime: Trumansburg. Could I have lived so close and not have delved into the recordings of that society historical? But I've never had the slightest interest in communication, as I think it plays no significant role in self-organized quantum superintegration, which is far superior, yes, superior, to chaotic self-organized criticality -- and the only thing that can save this species, this planet. Propagation of messages through space over time is just a Newtonian way of dissimulating m-logically-valued relative-state identity transparency, (which requires no propagation, no space, no time) you know. “Through” and “over” and even “in” being largely interchangeable, even though they are not interchangeable from any authentically topological perspective on the interchangeable. In parentheses (no propagation, no space, no time), just in case you wanted to know -- which I have learned is possible, but not probable. People not “the people”, but only people, you know, just people and those not just-people, the whole people, then, that are not “the people” just don't understand that Fred-the-von-Hayek was so far Right he was Left, so far Left he was right -- right, not Right. What does cute-wordy Christopher Hitchens (“What's Left?”, The Atlantic Monthly, March 2006) know of left from right, right from left, what's left of right, what's right in left, what the right left to the left and left left to the right? Right? Say, what you say have something to say when you say. Hey! Me, the Anarch. CH can't see the political spectrum as a unit circle -- where anarchosyndicalism touches anarchocapitalism -- let alone that Fred-the-von-Hayek in his later years twisted the loop of the unit circle with “the time-shapes of total capital stock” into a Mobius strip: political nonorientability. You really ought to learn that the political spectrum has always actually been a disk -- and that (can't forget that that) there are ways to step off the disk. And that's that! As You Have (and may Like) It, but not as Atlantic has it and likes it… Actually, I don't like this writing style. My legs ache; too much swimming.
If you want to get “Present Situation, Human Species, Planet Earth” in proper perspective, just go find Olav Stapleton's Last and First Men. You won't have a top of the head left to be lifted off. Living the 20th century without having read this is to have contributed to not-living the 21st century. And while you're at it, read his Starmaker, one of the best essays ever on cosmogonist Plato's involutory decomposition, and just the right non-technical preparation for A. Sakharov's “Multi-Sheet Model of the Universe”. Only Plotinus is purer! Stapleton, a physicist and mathematician, wrote these two books during the 1920s. A true traveler in other worlds, other Aions (not merely times), other incarnates, he clearly had an utterly prescient take on this world and its… demise. Sakharov published his multi-sheet model in 1968, whereupon every manner of anti-collapse sheet is matched by a corresponding collapse sheet. Not exactly a temporal notion thus elaborated. Novikov dust unto Novikov dust. People are fed pabulum: they know diddly-squat of the littlest of what the elite of the leitmotiv done did promulgate. I read Stapleton in 1972. I tried, somewhere in there, to study Rudiments of Riemann Surfaces with their multiple sheets somewhere in there. Who knows exactly? Let me tell you… Is there any better way to get some appreciation of “Present Situation, Human Species, Planet Earth”?
It was Abel what done it! Killed the Westphalian Nationenstaat system, he did. Killed it only 50 years after the American Declaration of Independence with an impossibility demonstration that demonstrated existential possibility of the whole transcendental domain superior to algebra, yet incorporating it. The Transcendentalist movement of Emerson, et al., was a not even somewhat belated synchronistic expression: visionary idealism sometimes reduced to a mere Kantianism. O, the abstruse. O, the abstract. Incapacity has its flip side in capacity: incapable of being a root of an algebraic equation with rational roots means representing a function that cannot be represented by an expression expressed in a finite number of algebraic operations. O, time dilation (under active three-fold -- and I do mean fold -- operator-time). Three Pie-space plus I-time, Eeeeeeee, Eeeeeeee! O, the irrational! O, the imaginary complex! O, the visionary hypercomplex! O, transcendens, transcendere: high school Latin. O, the infinite set of Os! Such axioms. Such choices. Such order-types. Not beyond comprehension, not beyond the multiverse. Riemann surfaces; transfinite set theory; functions of complex m-valued variables; supra-“algebras” of transcendental numbers; cuts and cuts and more cuts; Hilbertian formalistic axiomatization; m-valued Lukasiewiczian logics, L sub-infinity; Schrödinger's m-logically-valued wave-function of his time-independent wave equation; the reactionary probablization of All-That-Is; Gödel's challenges to formalizability; “philosophical disease”; Turing's two-valued machines to the rescue: all came directly out of Abel's possibility demonstration codified as the “Impossibility Theorem”. The first clear example of postmodern language use right there at the birth of modern higher pure mathematics, which was simultaneously the death knell of the very impure Westphalian Nationenstaat system and nub of the deep-structure origins of subsequent European-instigated warfare converging on yet higher-tech total war, genocide, holocaust, omnicide. Don't spread simple salt like the Romans; spread fallout, CBUs, and DU salt. We had to destroy the self in order to save it, you see. Removing the origin of the Cartesian coordinate system is a witchery destructive of passive, passing linear-time and prerequisite to riding fiber-bundle brooms arithmetically through the chimney up the ray of creation into transcendental domains so as to make a clean sweep of the algebraic realms. O, the deformed transformed! O, you satanic male-devouring Catharist anti-physicist! Operator-time: Maxwell's demon. The collective unconscious works like that: thematic orchestration and thematic evasions. But those hyperenculturated normotic persons psychologically overcommitted to the ego sphere -- rather than disidentified by direct ontic awareness of the universally-covered by Riemann-surfaces Riemann-sphere synaesthetic neural-patch immediacy, which is touchable but should not be touched -- and expressing overcommittment in being committed to mappings from ego sphere to 1T2-enclosure-act either/or-here/there boundaries of the Westphalian Nationenstaat and its legal tenders as personified concretization of projective identification, developed, and O how they developed, impossibility interpretations prescriptively designed to prevent the possibility of anything but the Nationenstaat. The Nationenstaat, and its supraordinal agglomerations, were inevitable according to the laws of Evolution (which Evolution indubitably is not a matter of evolutes). Ha! so they have it according to their Rorschach reading of what they call history. Multiply-replicated controlled experiments, holding everything constant but that one variable, eh, and double-blind statistical studies, yes-- how do the paleo-sciences stack up against that? Couldn't even get a drug registered with the FDA! Not fragmentary evidence; mere piffles of moots of fragments of fragmentary motes of evidence from amongst all the evidence there is, not to mention there was. In Anglo-Saxon inquisition, legalistic arguments in ice cores, mud readings, spores and seeds, bone chemistries and physics, dating techniques that depend upon one and only one interpretation of quantum mechanics, that interpretation developed to protect integrity of Leviathan, the Westphalian Nationenstaat system, with an enclosure act: proclamation of a classical limit. Witch Bull! Reading piffles of moots, one can see any pattern established by higher enculturation, like, for instance, those patterns and only those patterns substantiating inevitability of the Nationenstaat according to the laws of Evolution (not according to Platonic decomposition by pure mathematical involutes in time-independent wave equation). Why do you think the Nationenstaat and its corporate surrogates took control over the purse strings on research? It's necessary to separate data from noise, you know; a little bit like separating the dollar from gold. Defense of such calumnies -- misrepresenting data as noise -- is the ultimate inducer of nature rape, total war, omnicide, however green the mean call themselves. Why else was Husserl warned about psychologizing numbers? Don't interrupt the nature rapist at his work. And this is not poetry, so I won't put it on the page that way.
Introduce me to one person in the over-thirty set who has not psychologically crashed into substitute memory in subjective clash with the prevailing global circumstance -- and clash with suppression of their own personal history in relation to that evolving conundrum catastrophic. I'm all the time trying to introduce my me to my other-I-am. That's why they can't be trusted. Nope, not over thirty, no sir. I didn't screw me; I screwed them: I'm no hermaphrodite! so they self-assess. Like MOON, in your face it's gotta be. Twelve-year-old girls believe it, in compensatory abreaction to their parents' mind-bent, if recent sex surveys are to be believed (“Are You There God? It's Me, Monica or How nice girls got so casual about oral sex” by Caitlin Flanagan, The Atlantic Monthly, January/February 2006). After the event, the fallen God. American youth, even White House interns, without realizing it, following Japanese Zengakuren, yet again. Soon they'll be getting hundreds of dollars each for their soiled panties and smiling pictures. After that, 30 minutes twice a day on their knees in aeternum going down, derry derry down, on supernumeraries (i.e., personified, and hence degenerative, numbered Gödel numbers: none of these people have ever experienced the consciousness states required to give them any idea whatsoever where they come from, purport to be, and hope to go, when they more efficaciously and more insightfully would merely be more optimistic of being found -- foundlings found somehow) twisting the cilice to attain resolution of inordinate desires turned purely petty. No such thing as a non-regressive repeal of regression, or so it seems. Not even in SoapLand sanctity! I'd love to meet that person not crashed. It's a vanishing subset, anyway, that in any way clashes with reality of what's prevailing, insofar as so very few have any engagement whatsoever with awareness of that reality, let alone not crashing. Who has not crashed? Show me that person! That Rocky, that practices-everyday person, building up steam for not crashing before what is coming down upon us. Show me! Not Maxwell's silver hammer, the cosmic sledge hammer: war gods pale to Paris emotivity. “The minorities” is a signifier of substitute memory. Look around you; look back into the past. Don't talk to me from the Wall Street Journal about overcoming “white guilt” constraint and reasserting “white [moral] supremacy”. Guilt over supremacy, supremacy over guilt: another schizophrenogenic double-bind (while cultivating the hobby farm purchased and sustained by proceeds from participation in the system so vehemently despised: cognitive dissonance, anyone?). When -- including over the Neanderthal/Cro-Magnon interface -- have whites been anything but a minority on this planet? Only after what has become white took over the commons -- in Cities of Dreams collapsed µTm cognition to 1T2 mind and thus by monotonic bipolar disorder coercively imposed banishment of Frigg, that frigging Moon Goddess depicted on the tympanum of The Moon of Hoa Binh (abstract geometric iconography actually on a bronze drum located in Museum Pusat Jakarta: another unrecognized treasure) Hump! Hump! Hump! Hump! hump that ruck into injun cuntry -- was there a “tragedy of the commons”. That tragedy is dependent upon imposition of 1T2 mind, 1T2 identity! Before the commons was enclosed, there was no tragedy of the commons. Staar Bright. Lite of the Moon. Dances with Wolves. Brook Clear. Restricting the ancestors to the bloodline was a Confucian population control measure mounted against Taoist animism -- the center in the midst of the conditions -- long before it was a strategy of Christendom ensconced in the Holy Grail. Family names for rural peasants existed in Vietnam from the time of Chinese conquest, maybe even under the Hung Kings, but surely not in the precursor matrisystem society. Vietnamese women were forced to cover the little rice paddy with Chinese pants at the same time they were tied down with family names. Greek similes of apposition in recursive generation of naming sequences melding to medieval The Younger, The Sweetest, The Fairest of the Fair… and down, down, derry down to occupation names: Workman, Treegardener, Pennsinger, Shitkicker, Gooseneck… oops! It was not until 1916 that a national law was passed in Thailand requiring that all citizens, meaning all peasants, must have a family name: one class of enclosure acts. Identity cards a further enclosure. Whereas identity was once read in features of the natural surround, geobody of the unenclosed commons, henceforth identity was to be placed in the bloodline and the population control family registry of the landowner, point man of the enclosures upon geobody. Ancestors removed from identity transparency with the land qua land and placed under ownership of living memory: a Thai response to WWI and Wilsonian democracy. Substitute memories are a substitute, right? Cognitive dildo, haptic harigata. Stone god. How 'bout the real thing, eh what? Who's come a long way, baby? The Powell Doctrine, for instance, was a measure of how far from overcoming post-Vietnam syndrome Americans managed to get: a squad leader's lesson from the war. What was a leg-unit commander but a glorified squad leader? Only people who took such lessons stayed in the military, and some of them rose to the top. Even those Tay Ninh types who later created Delta Force who died in Somalia who spawned those who created Triple Canopy who went back to Southern Command for their cheap-labor pool (ex-SF, let alone ex-DF, are going to take pedestrian PSDs?). Nowadays, now that back-reaction upon the metric of post-Vietnam syndrome is so omnipresent and so omnipotent in policy circles as to be invisible, the real problem is to find a way to cast aside “white guilt” for sins of the fathers: loops of the spiral inside loops of the spiral. Deniable claims to white supremacy at The Hoover Institution to complement a fixation on M1 targeting (recently replaced by abandonment of M3 targeting). Eldridge Cleaver would dig it, maybe even because of The Man being thus fried. Even this was tried in Vietnam: fragging, not frigging, the fathers. The Moon Goddess kept her distance. Couldn't get enough ancestors with those methods. What methods, then? Methods to all at once exorcise the specter of white-guilt constraint, a species of existential-guilt constraint imposed by invariants of the human condition. That's not ontological guilt, mind you: only survivors of WWII combat talked about such things! And if that allusion doesn't register, that tells you how deeply you've read into the literature on modern warfare written by those non-journalists who actually experienced it and actually processed that which they actually experienced -- and thus how little you have transcended reality of the fact that “so very few have any engagement whatsoever with awareness of that reality”. Casting aside the stigmata and attendant constraints of white guilt-attribution-internalized requires of the BBW a huge cathartic act, given strength of the ancestral line of such guilt-imputations. And how self-justify such act against LRRH? If all of this sounds a little bit like projective identification due to imposition of family-name enclosures, well… Only chaos, utter chaos, could call forth such a cathartic act, a satanic threat of such magnitude full force is justified. How else use full force? The only way force can win a full-blown insurgency war (not like Malaya where the rural insurgents were a different race from the population base and physically separated from their recruitment-base cohort resident in the cities) is to destroy absolutely everything, right? The counter-insurgent reserves that right, right? as essayed in The War of the Flea (who doesn't flee) and the premature Autopsy on People's War. So, the problem has become how to engineer the chaos that can justify employment of full force such that white guilt-constraint can be exorcised. If Al Qaeda & Associates plus Iran plays into that bid, all the better to… well… My dear. Does America own the policy? That policy from the beginning -- way back administrations ago -- was to take total control over post-peak oil so as to set favorable terms of rational global rationing. Clear intimations of the policy were viewable even so far away as JFK Special Warfare Center, Ft. Bragg, even in run up to the Six Day War. And the policy and its extensions will persist into administrations subsequent to that of George Bush the Younger. Orchestratable chaos moved by periodic escalation-control-optioned increasing infusions of violence toward omega-point policy transition into satanic chaos justifying employment of full force, the only thing capable of establishing total control over post-peak oil by thoroughly remapping the Middle East. Who says Operation Iraqi Freedom and post-assault occupation has been poorly managed? If we don't do it -- rationalize the rationing -- who will? And how else could we get on the soft end of “the inevitable”? Vietnam war was prolonged by the Nixon-Kissinger bombing campaign that largely induced the Cambodian holocaust, not to induce a holocaust, but to get back at White for subverting white interests, get back at him by separating the dollar from gold, which required extending LBJ's dilemmas a little bit longer -- this separation being a prerequisite to unconstrained “liability financing” of the American agenda to strategically place itself on the soft end of “the inevitable”. Congressman Nixon sat on the committee (which committee was that, eh?) what charged White with collapsing the GearWheel's currency. And it was President Ike who created homeland security by appointing a clandestine shadow government just as the experts were putting finishing touches on oil peak dynamics projections of “the inevitable” (and everybody who needed to know knew that America had overwhelming nuclear superiority and delivery capacity vis-à-vis the Russki). Unconstraining liability financing by separating the dollar from gold is one dimension of overcoming white guilt-constraint. Dump that Pinko FDR's commodity reference! We need a fiat dollar beholding only to dollar confidence suborned to American control over the global agenda: fiat dollar comes out of the barrel of a gun! Put the pistol back in Mao's mouth! The end of liability financing (Greater China left holding bulk of the IOUs) is total national mobilization (which won't take too many Kent State's). If you think these people's collective unconscious is not that smart, then you never been in their personal proximity. That doesn't mean AQ&A didn't run a sting these people consciously fell for. Imams become sheiks become emirs become mujahids; mujahids become emirs become sheiks become imams. Groups coalescing to shuras; shuras disgorging groups. That doesn't mean AQ&A+I aren't walking into a trap. Six things happening simultaneously at every strategic contingency bifurcation, trifurcation… Comprehensive planning nested by disjointed incrementalism nested by tactical improvisation. But since Western omelets every morning in the first-floor snack bar directly beneath Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, I've been arguing the next big one being against a Greater China (incorporating the Koreas, Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam: more recently designated Mahayana Buddhist Bloc) aligned to a Germano-Russian Bloc. France, again, can't make up its mind. India aligns with the AmerAnglos. The Islamic crescent is a free-fire zone arrowed into Sikang-Urumchi, Minya Konka, Sinkiang-Tibetan ground zero: home of m-logically-valued base state of Tzog-chen (deeper yet than the Polish origins of m-valued logics, Hitler's first target: thematic orchestration by collective unconscious). How much more plausible today than in 1968 when first expressed straight up! Space-based nano-drone-war, which the AmerAnglos won't lose. The soft underbelly, however, is megaKarma in Latin America. Denouement comes by domestic insurrection and a field army deciding “don' mean nothin', let's walk home”. Contextualized by post-peak-oil and climate-shift dynamics, of course. Oil is not even $100/barrel and Japan is already starting to glimpse the future of its alliances. And who can tell the difference between state capitalism under post-peak oil and national socialism? Certainly not the Chinese! Post-WWI AngloAmeroEuropean oil policy cusp event, I've been arguing since Special Warfare Center in 1967, is the end of oil as a commodity. It is not that oil will be nationalized; it will be transnationalized. Some single event will be associated with oil ceasing to be a tradable commodity -- quickly followed by natural gas, high-grade coal, and uranium. Gotta have a big gun to get some! They'll be transnationalizing peanut shells and dwarf bamboo. If I were a zaibatsu, a chaebol, a keiretsu, a multinational, member of the sogo shosha, a state-owned mega-enterprise investing billions and billions and billions in the energy sector so as to take excessive profits off the singular disability of a crippled species, a crippled biosphere, I'd be speculating obsessively on the nature and timing of this cusp event. Nuclear or non-nuclear? Space-based or terrestrial? Anyone who still thinks there will be no generalized global war with, at least, tactical nuke exchanges, has left Oz and set up shop in NeverNeverLand. The only part of this scenario that does not yet have concrete precursors presently visible is Germany separating itself from the EU in order to secure its access to energy. A few terrorist nukes here and there, what does that matter in face of full-force projection by those unconstrained by white-guilt constraint? And how many survivors do you think there will be? Stapleton, in Last and First Men, described multiple complete extinctions on planet Earth of the human species, and its subsequent reappearances. Another “Scenario C” which could only become infamous after final acts and facts (assuming survivors). You couldn't possibly think this so crazy as those on the receiving end in 1968! No matter how little consciously understood, m-valued logic is the only factor that cuts across every variable involved in the present crisis and its prefigurations back for thousands of years. None of the prevailing problems, particularly cheap energy, will be solved without unbridled embrace of such logic. And there is no indication on the scene that the human species is even contemplating such an embrace. That may well be epitaph of the species. History is deep-sixed, not driven by external forces. No history as force!
No. We never sent MOON off to a publisher or an agent. We knew before writing commenced that it would never be published by any publisher As We Liked It, so we never contemplated anything but self-publication. What novel or Hollywood film with a psychology does not dump on Freud or fixate on the id-ego-superego level of Freudian thought? I mean, what sort of person, what sort of mentality, desires to become the Chief Editor or the Producer-Director -- and what sort actually so becomes? And what psychological, metaphysical nouveau roman war story takes off from spontaneous autogenic brain discharges and passes directly into the Freudian structural theories of Heinz Hartmann, David Rappaport, Merton Gill, Jacob Arlow, and Margaret Brenman on route to… Music-Sculpture? We did, however, on a lark, send a copy to one mainstream reviewer, who, years earlier, had observed, in reviewing several big-selling novels set in Vietnam, that no one seemed to have the courage to take the risk to address the whole breadth of the war. The cover letter sent to Michiko Kakutani with the copy of MOON quoted this statement by Michiko Kakutani. No response was forthcoming, and the copy was not returned. Maybe it was the first scene set in Kyoto she had trouble with -- even so exceptional a Kyoto girl as Yayoi Kusama clearly was not prepared for such contents of consciousness. And on another lark, an improbable attempt to sell Musculpt, we did send a copy to one Producer-Director, but you'd be embarrassed to hear about that.
I give very little significance to the conscious thoughts of policy principals, except as reflections from a convoluted trick mirror set in the Carnival's House of Horrors. The unconscious is conscious, not consciousness. You can verify this by seeing how long you can maintain unbroken awareness of being aware, as opposed to simply being identified with the state of awareness. Only a spiritual Hercules can do this longer than he can hold his breath! Once the person identifies with the socially conferred role attribution, his/her decision processes are totally suborned to the collective unconscious; contents of conscious mind are simply attempts of the person-become-persona to explain-away to him/herself and to others the decisions made long before the conscious mind became aware of and rubberstamped those decisions. None of this is conscious, of course (this “of course” is by way of giving some credit to the reader, not a crutch for the writer as automatisms of NYC power editors suppose), for if it were conscious, then there would be no identification with the role attribution socially conferred. It is instructive to consider that mind-dead is distinct from brain-dead only as a matter of degree. My major point here being that no one who is compliant enough, automated enough to move to the top of any existing institution has the psychological wherewithal required to successfully withstand the collective induction which imposes the state of identification: degrees of identification are effectively removed by the up-the-organization filter, whatever the nature of that filter in a given case. Psychologically speaking, a large-scale institution is a lynch mob in slow motion, in a time warp; only the most other-directed move to the head of mobs, dumb or smart, slow or fast. Wild-dog pack, the mob frequently turns on those identifying with its conferred role attributions. The sole significant distinction between a conspiracy and an institution is that those in the membership of a conspiracy generally are not identified with socially conferred role attributions. Institutions are gestalts of collective regression constellated and automatized into sociopolitical structures by means of the processes of projective identification.
By way of example, I can note that in the past four years I've seen several dozen statements equivalent to the following by David Cole: “…justifiable campaign in Afghanistan…” (“Are we Safer?”, The NY Review of Books, 9 March 2006, p. 15). This parenthetical judgment by a Georgetown professor comes during review of Daniel Benjamin's and Steven Simon's book The Next Attack: The Failure of the War on Terror and a Strategy for Getting it Right, which I have read in its entirety. The lack of strategic insight revealed by Cole's statement is a measure of the worth of both the book and the review. The Bush invasion of Afghanistan was strategically equivalent to the Nixon-Kissinger Cambodian incursion toward the end of the Thirty-Years IndoChina War -- the NK case of which induced a holocaust, the B case of which is presently in process of inducing a holocaust. Insurgency warfare is rubber-sheet combat: it exists on many different scale levels, both spatial and temporal; there are many handles on the spaces of contention, and some of those handles are time-like, the governing principles involved being topological invariants invariant no matter how the rubber sheet is twisted, so long as it is not cut (holocaust, non-nuclear or nuclear, being one sort of “cut”). There are psychological and logical reasons why people in positions of institutional power are constitutionally incapable of thinking effectively across scale levels or simultaneously on multiple scale levels. Let's have a brief look at how small a role the conscious mind played in both of these “events” (a success is deemed an “initiative”, a failure deemed an “event”; if “shit happens”, as Rumsfeld has observed, then the involved events should be deemed “denitiatives”).
Being the person at Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, (SRA/MACVJ2) in early 1968 (I took over the desk during the third week of January) responsible for Political Order of Battle in the Saigon-Cholon-BienHoa area, in due course I received information requests from the U.S. negotiators at the Paris Peace Conference. Since I took my job description very liberally, it was not only the underground Viet Cong Political Infrastructure (VCI) I studied; I also studied American Political Order of Battle in the Saigon-Cholon-BienHoa area. One side could accomplish only what weaknesses of the other permitted, so the study of either side provided insight into the other. There were many kinds of probes I sent out to gather information, and information requests sent to me always provided opportunity for a probe. From intensive study of, literally and accurately stated, several thousand nuts-and-bolts bureaucratic documents (personnel transfer orders, letter-box number code re-assignments, orders indicating changed mission statements for functional elements, and the like: all in alphanumeric code) I was the person who had discovered the fact that, approximately one year prior to the 1968 Tet offensive, the VCI had administratively broken up the Greater Saigon-Cholon-BienHoa area into pieces-of-pie-shaped wedges, the center of the pie being downtown Saigon. From this document analysis, substantiated by many personally-conducted interrogations, I was able to draw a map indicating in detail the new administrative areas, by then just short of 18 months old. The process of doing this spread over a period of approximately five months, and many, many short reports describing the sequence of discoveries involved were written up and disseminated through intelligence channels to nearly 150 recipient U.S. intelligence units around the world. I was perplexed, however, as none of this information seemed to register, even as close by as other offices located in the same building, Pentagon East, MACV Headquarters: intelligence assessments continued to pour out which blatantly contradicted the information I had placed in distribution to the 150 U.S. intelligence units. So, even though the staff of the Paris peace negotiators had not specifically requested a map, only the most general and elementary of information about the VCI, with special emphasis on Saigon, I included a copy of my pie-wedge VC Admin map of the Greater Saigon Metro Area. Administrative details were too difficult, too involved, too different from familiar forms of administration to form the content of a decent probe; the map was perfect. I had a pretty good idea, but only pretty good, of through where the material I sent to Paris would move: certainly through the Director of Intelligence Production at MACV-J2; the Sensitive Intelligence Section of the Command Operations Center of MACV-HQ (SIS-COC/MACV-HQ); U.S. Embassy, Saigon, with likely copy to the Office of the CIA Chief of Station; likely to several locations at the Pentagon, the Department of State, and those White House sub-offices involved with oversight of the peace negotiations. Since weaknesses play against strengths between contenders, in order to make an accurate intelligence assessment leading to insight into enemy intentions, I had to have some gauge as to how much was known to U.S. officials at the various echelons of U.S. political order of battle. So the version of the map I sent to Paris contained an error on the order of magnitude of leaving Philadelphia off the map of Pennsylvania. I hoped, but was not confident, that this map would come back from somewhere with something scrawled across it in big angry letters indicating the error -- given that the correct version had already been disseminated to 150 U.S. intelligence units. The map came back, all right. Two weeks later it was published, uncorrected, in a major international circulation weekly news magazine. I was sure that the only persons, excepting me, who noticed the error were the Vietnamese negotiators at the Paris conference, and whomever of their comrades back in Viet Nam who had the leisure time required to read the international English language press. This was depressing, to say the least. But it was an accurate read on what was to come.
Foreign Relations, 1969-76; Vietnam, January 1969-July 1970, a U.S. Department of State publication, provides some documentation on conscious “deliberations” related to the Nixon-Kissinger bombing campaign and incursion into Cambodia, just as Bob Woodward's Bush At War (Simon & Schuster, 2002) surely must provide some small insight into conscious “deliberations” prior to the U.S. invasion of Afghanistan. Any real analysis of strategic “initiatives” or “events”, whichever the case turns out to be or to have been, must distinguish between collective unconscious, personal unconscious, and conscious “deliberations”. Student live-in's from AU's School of International Service (SIS) in Spring Valley and along Foxhall Road during 1963, for instance -- and there were over 100 peppered around the town -- learned all about psychedelic clandestine meets with Blond Beauty in the loft of Bad Boy's Tractor Barn, under which a candy-apple red 1956 300 SL gull-wing Mercedes coup was frequently parked for joyrides. There is no sensible denial that JFK's “deliberations” had personal unconscious psychosexual components at least as synchronistic and elaborate relative to The Bay of Pigs as that essayed in the name West-more-land relative to the war in Viet Nam even then escalating. Bush at War is itself a rather provocative title, but we will herein stay away from that particular provocation. It is largely beyond contention that Everyone has a psychology, you know! and there is no begrudging that fact even to presidents, but the unique circumstance of Great Leaders is that institutions are gestalts of collective regression constellated and automatized into sociopolitical structures by means of the processes of projective identification, and, when Great Leaders in possession of a personal unconscious informing a personal psychology identify with socially-conferred role attributions, their personal unconscious becomes a sink for collective unconscious sources of constellated regression. This happens in every institution, most omnipresently in the fundamental institution, the nuclear family. And when the nuclear family is C-sectioned from the extended family, there are no alternative role models to those with which the parental dyad identify: extroverted mesomorphic father, introverted endomorphic mother, where does a well-balanced ectomorophic child turn? Though much violence (psychological and physical, psychophysical) emerges out of such familial circumstances -- directed within the family, directed without the family -- with involvement of large-scale institutions, there are not only differences in scale involved, but differences in kind. When Great Leaders within big institutions, like nation-states, identify with conferred role attributions and thus draw down regressed libido from the collective unconscious reservoir, millions of lives, even species and biosphere, are put at risk under a collectively innervated personal unconscious expressing as a personal psychology. Such a constellation, which one can hardly regard a person, must, by institutional writ, stand in as the surrogate locus of decision -- even though, actually, decisions are made nonlocally by the collective unconscious and delivered to the population corpus through the activated complex designated Great Leader (Great Leader, being unconscious of this, making conscious deliberations as rationalization of subliminally received decision). This is, in large measure, why intelligence levies -- Great Leader seeks such and such information from his afferents so as to direct his efferents -- are prescriptive: provide me with the justifications I need to rationalize the received decision. It should be noted that in a population corpus constellating a collective gestalt of regression, there will be no individual's conscious standpoint that will conform to the collective gestalt of regression; if there were, it could not be unconscious, and certainly not collectively unconscious. Jung understood all of this extremely well in writing Modern Man in Search of a Soul (which I read several times in the two years before quitting AU's SIS to volunteer in 1965 for Special Forces training and Viet Nam).
We learn from Foreign Relations, 1969-76; Vietnam, January 1969-July 1970 that West-more-land's focus of conscious deliberation in regards to issues involved in contemplation of a prospective Cambodian incursion was how many thousand sterile AKs could be surreptitiously delivered to Lon Nol's forces arrayed protectively around Phnom Penh and how many thousand M-1s could be delivered to the roving small-unit Cambodian forces allied to clandestine U.S. operatives prior to an incursion to be undertaken largely by ARVN troops. These were the primary expressed concerns of the then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Nixon fixated on parallels to Eastern Europe in aftermath of WWII in assessing how the Khmer Rouge were acting just like communists always have acted in regards to good friends of America like Lon Nol, and in trying to anticipate what direct involvement, if any, the Chinese were contemplating. SECDEF Laird keeps iterating Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries and the others pick up the mantra. Kissinger, clearly the intellectual in the group, assessed the contingency options available to NVN in numbered bullet-points, each possible option rated as to probability for action and likely consequences if chosen for action -- along with rated alternatives for countermeasures. These Kissinger memos are exquisite examples of utter mastery of Dog and Pony Show, as they nicely skirt every actual strategic issue involved with expansion of the geographical boundaries of an insurgency war. These were conscious deliberations, the rationalization of prior decision delivered to Great Leader by collective unconscious through personal unconscious.
The drone Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries was the basso ostinato, which, for lack of knowledge, never became a basso profundo. Since my primary purpose in springing from AU's SIS to Viet Nam on the back of Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul (assigned reading in 1963 for the required first semester freshman course Introduction to World Politics taught each year by Abdul Aziz Said) was to understand, just understand, I made every possible effort to move through as many “scenes” as a career Bomber Pilot's one-time military brat could finagle. One such brief assignment was Targets Branch, Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam (TB/CICV) which chose locations of B-52 strikes, including those inside Cambodia (such strikes taking place well before the historical record indicates). The reader is referred to “Who Caused the Cambodian Holocaust, Anyway?” for details, but briefly, by, actually, late-'66, certainly by early-'68, it was very well understood at TB/CICV and SRA/MACVJ2 that COSVN, the Central Office for South Viet Nam, the communist headquarters for the war in the South, which was “located” in the Mimot Plantation area of the Parrot's Beak border area of Cambodia quite near Saigon, was inherently unbombable. Evidence as to why this was the case had accumulated massively and was incontrovertible. And Targets Analysts (of which I had briefly been one) never tired of explaining this to whomever inquired. Contents of the debate -- which by late-'67 was a mere moot point -- over localizability of COSVN, and hence its bombability, we now know, by the Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries basso ostinato, never penetrated the U.S. political order of battle so far as Danny Graham's SI Section of COC/MACV-HQ, let alone to COMUSMACV (West-more-land) and back to Washington. Information flowed in the other direction, that from collective unconscious, to personal unconscious, to conscious rationalization deliberations. The notion of Sanctuaries! instead of a nonlocal headquarters named COSVN, I take to be a signifier of the interface between the collective and personal unconscious.
People became hysterical when told that a headquarters existed without location (even though materiel dumps and hospitals and tunnels thereto had location). If you do not believe this, I recommend you talk with James G. (Rambo) “Bo” Gritz (or my dead friend, his subordinate, David Richard Simons, to whom MOON is dedicated, or my dead friend Larry Friedman, one very-long-term NCOIC of Delta Force) whose Nui Ba Den (Mountain Miss Black) TayNinh-based SOG Team wandered all over the area for years trying to localize the non-localizable. Talk to someone who was actually there! And then a strange thing happened on the way to TET-'68. Several large NVA units parked themselves in the Parrot's Beak area (an element of one of them engaging Gritz's Team on 4 January 1968 when SF medic Sgt. Simons was killed making a successful attempt to save the life of a fellow team member) to watch from the sidelines as that offensive transpired. Many, many VC “political operators” died during the offensive when directly engaged in military operations they normally never engaged in, while these military units close to Saigon sat on their duff and smiled. But that's another story. After the offensive, these units faded away into smaller units, into yet smaller units, just as other units which had moved down the HCM Trial had earlier done, and would do in future, and even though these large units which no longer existed were often sighted, often reported, and no reputable engagements were ever sufficiently verifiable as to have been verified (all of which was dutifully recorded on the Order of Battle [OB] pin maps at CICV), the notion of the Parrot's Beak area being filled with Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! arose and could not be expiated. Sanctuaries have simple-locality and hence are bombable, unlike radically-fractionated, constantly moving, ant-swarming through thousands and thousands of square miles of Triple Canopy, nonlocal headquarters like COSVN. Displacement, psychological displacement. The psychosexual dimensions of this collective-personal unconscious-interface displacement, Sanctuaries! are legion, going back at least as far as Abel's Impossibility Theorem demonstrating possibility of sanctified transcendental (i.e., not localizable) domains.
A to-me-most-interesting aspect of the Sanctuaries! drone relates to a long paper I wrote over a period of months while at SRA/MACVJ2. This was a strategic assessment of the 1968 Tet Offensive based upon analysis of captured enemy documents and many other categories of classified information, information classified “Secret” and below (and documents I personally turned up which later were classified “Top Secret, SI” which I was not permitted to remember having read). Actually, I never wrote such a “paper”. I made voluminous hand-written notes, which I never had the chance to type up, these notes remaining in my desk when I left Viet Nam on an emergency leave from which I never returned, a leave related to my mother suffering a stroke (magnitude of what is learned has a commensurate price: in this case a testicle wound and death of the mother). Others in SRA took these hand-written notes, typed them up, made additions, and produced a paper which was sent up in first-draft form to the DIP, the Director of Intelligence Production. I was later told about this by several people, each with substantially the same story, slightly different details (a story each person remembered more and more differently as the years passed). The DIP ordered for this paper NODIS (no dissemination, laterally or vertically through intelligence channels) all copies of which were to be locked in a classified safe. Some bootleg copies, however, never were placed in the safe. One of these copies made it into the hands of a Colonel in SIS-COC/MACV-HQ, who (possibly Danny Graham), briefed it to SECDEF Laird. Given that Laird later ululated Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! I can now imagine just how little verisimilitude to the original paper that SIS-COC briefing to SECDEF must have had. In 1970, I was handed my hand-written notes, which someone valued enough to carry back to the ZI. Many years later, I was handed a copy of the typed paper (no classification stamps, as the paper was never formally classified) which someone had sent back in a packet through intelligence channels and made available only after the period it would have been declassified had it ever been formally classified. I later incorporated this paper into Volume 2 of MOON (a book which could not have been earlier written because of the declassification issues).
There was much in the paper highly germane to the question of expanding geographical boundaries of the Viet Nam war, whether that expansion be into Cambodia or across the HCM Trail in Laos. The most startling, perhaps, being citation of documentary and other types of COSVN-level information indicating that, prior to Tet-'68, Politburo, NVN, was briefing strategy saying the U.S. must be forced to choose between pulling out of Viet Nam altogether or expanding the physical boundaries of the war. In the event, the U.S. first announced that it was pulling out (Vietnamization), then expanded the war into Cambodia, then all but completely pulled out, then flew air cover for the ARVN operation Lam Son 719, a failed attempt to expand the war into Laos so as to block the HCM Trail (this ARVN operation being a much scaled-down version of the what-for West-more-land had requested 200,000 more troops of LBJ, only to be turned down). So, the U.S. fulfilled both of NVN's strategic either/or dictates, and did so in a way well beyond the Politburo's wildest dreams! None of the myriad considerations related to geographical expansion of insurgency war -- space and time in insurgency warfare, and all that -- were in any significant way broached by Kissinger's Pony Show memos preceding Cambodian incursion (at least as revealed in the above-cited volume). Stopping systemic phase transitions to higher and higher levels of self-organizational competency is the only way a counter-insurgent could possibly win an insurgency war (short of destroying absolutely everything); this is not achieved by facilitating organizational phase transitions.
Now, rubber-sheet-wise, transpose from a national-liberation scale-level insurgency war to a terrorist organization aspiring to become a global insurgency against the nation-state system as a system qua system. Since we are talking planetary scale level here, not the scale level of a single nation-state, the terrorist organization cannot dictate that its opposition pull out altogether, which would require that that opposition take a rocket to the moon; the terrorist organization can only dictate that its opposition help it successfully expand the geographical boundaries of the conflict to the planetary scale, such that localized pockets of terrorism can successfully transit to full-blown global insurgency (and the organizational formats requisite to that condition of conflict). The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan was just the help the terrorist organization required and dictated to its opposition. Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries! Sanctuaries!
No, no. There are all sorts of handles on the spaces of contention -- and each handle is also a gauge. I saw many captured enemy documents with contents dating to 1965-68 that incorporated observations on the U.S. economic situation into strategic assessments, particularly as regards considerations of timing shift to general counter-offensive stage of the war. Such a shift, the communists understood, could not be successfully accomplished unless the requisite spectrum of weaknesses appeared in their opponent. How deeply and insightfully NVN evaluated U.S. economics I cannot say, as I was, at the time only vaguely aware of the critical issues. I never made an effort to look for the relevant information, just generally without real focus registered that there was this component of assessment relative primarily to timing issues. After the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton-Woods system collapsed, however, I did try to look at this issue -- by speculation only, as I was long since out of the Army and had no access to captured enemy documents. I believe that if you go back and study the detailed history of Germany's, France's, and Italy's shifts between official (as opposed to private) foreign-exchange (i.e., primarily dollars) versus gold portions of monetary reserves (which related in considerable part to obligations of these countries to the Gold Pool for the London gold market) in the period 1963 to March of 1968, you will find strong correlation with history of the Viet Nam war over the same period. Shifts from foreign exchange to gold came in waves with peaks that came after significant events like the 1964 LBJ tax cut (a major event in relation to funding of the war), the 1965 commitment of ground combat troops, the Tet-'68 Offensive. March of 1968 because this is when the crisis of the gold-exchange mechanism started to cusp and the Gold Pool arrangements were rescinded in response. Six weeks after the Tet Offensive. At the very least, one must give NVN much credit for exquisite timing. That there was a gathering crisis was recognized by the IMF over and over at meetings beginning with that in September of 1963 and leading to the innovation of Special Drawing Rights at the Rio meeting held in September of 1967. The rules are all changed now, of course: no gold-exchange mechanism, many factors present now not present then. Fiat dollar, free-floating currencies, bandwidth pegs and crawling pegs and dollarization all demonstrated by experience to have heavy downsides. But there are similarities between then and now which are almost Malthusian. Space and time variables in insurgency war exact an exponential growth curve in resource commitments upon the counter-insurgent in order simply to maintain the status quo (provision of public safety, protection of LOCs, et cetera) if the insurgent is able to obtain arithmetic growth in noncombatant infrastructural support to its combatants: the tail to tooth ratio. But if the insurgent can protract the struggle or entice the counter-insurgent into expanding the geographical boundaries of the conflict, the exponential growth curve can be imposed on the counter-insurgent without the insurgent reaching arithmetic infrastructural growth. If the counter-insurgent is liability financing the war, and even better cutting taxes and increasing entitlements at the same time, as LBJ did and as Bush is, then this greatly affects the deficit in balance of payments (balance of goods and services, balance of international transactions) as well as liquid and not-so-liquid liabilities to foreign holders of dollars. It may even affect reserves demand for dollars and transactions demand for dollars. You've got both dollar overhang from the past and dollar overflow from the present accelerating into exponential growth in payments deficit, current account and otherwise. But just like enemy strength estimates, balance of payments can be changed by changing the statistical conventions: announce the deficit calculated upon a basis of liquidity, a basis of settlements, on foreign reserves, on a goods and services base, and so on. The big differences between then and now, however, are [1] geographical boundaries of the Viet Nam war were expanded at the end of the war after the U.S. had already made clear it was pulling out (even so, still the expansion caused a holocaust), while the first response of the Bush Administration to 9/11 was to publicly announce expansion to the nth degree of the geographical boundaries of the conflict, to, that is, the planetary scale, i.e., declaration of a GWOT interminable, which meant the insurgent could impose exponential growth in resource commitments on the counter-insurgent with infrastructural growth very much less than arithmetic; [2] during the Viet Nam war, the gold-exchange mechanism was a brake on actual ability to reach exponential growth in resource commitments, as rescinding of the Gold Pool arrangement and innovation of Special Drawing Rights clearly indicate; whereas, today, under a fiat dollar, there is liability financing unchained, such that actual exponential growth (one component of dollar confidence is U.S. military prowess, thus creating a positive feedback loop: dollar drives gun; gun drives dollar) is a distinct possibility before materialization of the inevitable humongous consequences. The series of inter-looped loops created by dissolution of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism cannot be repaired by Special Drawing Rights, re-creation of a gold-exchange mechanism, re-creation of a gold standard, more use of pegs, more dollarization. You watch. When the big unraveling takes place, as it will, it will happen virtually in the space of a single day (they have all sorts of techniques for closing the day and extending the day, these days, but at the end of the day, none of these will save the day). The only real candidate for replacement I see is implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units. Can't solve this problem? Then what hope is there of dealing with post-peak-oil and climate-shift dynamics? Look around you. Who is killing this species, this biosphere?
Their bet is not my bet. They wager a global surveillance-and-total-threat state can be brought up from space-based platforms on down to sea level before conflict management strategies fail to maintain acceptable levels of violence in face of runaway upheaval. For the 38 years since my time at MACV-J2, I have bet that the nation-state system and its supranational agglomerations will reach their greatest lethality at just the moment of their precipitous incendiary collapse. A case in point is the fact that computerized crime analysis and GPS mapping systems -- supposedly pioneered by you know whom: NYPD -- are the Viet Nam war's HES (Hamlet Evaluation Survey) and airborne photo interpretation and mapograph machines run on fast microcomputers with software that actually works, rather than on the slow MACV mainframes and the poorly written IDHS (Intelligence Data Handling System) software (the actual origin of word-search Googlization of planet Earth's noosphere). The question is: Will crime-mapping criminology solve the problems economically forced-draft urbanization to mega-urban-region squatter settlements create, or will it force countermeasure innovations in the forms of criminal syndicate organization? And will it be a major factor inducing close cooperation between criminal syndicates and insurgents acting against the nation-state system qua system? Is there any possibility that crime mapping will catalyze far from equilibrium organizational phase transition whereby global insurgency jumps the ethno-religious demarcation containing radical Islamic terrorists and separating them from the truly voluminous non-Islamic recruitment base daily ballooning in dozens of Third World urban environments? (((Having until today not read the news for over a week, I now, 18 May 2006, map back and realize this posting was uploaded three days before the Sao Paulo gang-police/police-gang mutual assassination fulmination. The question is: Come on! you know the question. Are the counter-terror experts even examining the right “theater” in assessing the global threat? More support in these “forced-draft urbanization” events -- upwards of 20 million squatters in the Sao Paulo greater metro area -- for m-logically-valued monetary units than just that provided by the Argentina meltdown. There actually are ideas provided here as to what to do about it all! It was not for nothing that my rounds in Saigon involved frequent regular visits to the humungous National Police Headquarters compound, Special Branch most often being the objective assaulted.)))
I note that 4 pages out of 576 are devoted to “Reasons for Hope” by Jared Diamond in his book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking, 2005). I'm far more optimistic than that! And I am not against molecular ecology (ecology based upon the principles of molecular biology: metabolic pathway theory, notions of feedback, thermodynamic random-heat-motion forcing such that collective behaviors conform to the laws of mathematical statistics, and so on and so on, as applied by democratic institutions conceptualized during the 17th and 18th centuries to, say, rabbits, for instance, and their browsing of native grasses, not to mention their -- “their” in both cases being the rabbits -- unmentionables); I just believe that in science, as in Nature, molecular ecology ought to be subsumed by sub-molecular ecology. As Dean Radin observes (Entangled Minds, Paraview, 2006, p. 2): “Some scientists suggest that the remarkable degree of coherence displayed in living systems might depend in some fundamental way on quantum effects like entanglement.” But such a prospective condition of science -- molecular ecology subsumed by sub-molecular ecology -- is held hostage by consensus-opinion interpretation of quantum mechanics, which has been vectored by Cartesian-Newtonian politico-social and psycho-economic values. Superconductant p-electron gas core of DNA disallowed. And most certainly not of the DNA in neuron cells! Collective behavior at body temperature-- why do we need that? Diamond, by case in point, maintains (p. 326) that “…complex 73-factor explanation for a genocide doesn't alter the personal responsibility of the perpetrators…” Why is that? This is indubitably not a sub-molecular perspective on collective behaviors, and their forcing functions (collective, cooperative, and critical behaviors being the foremost purview of quantum mechanics). Quoting Radin's Entangled Minds again (p. 1): “One of the founders of quantum theory, Erwin Schrödinger, dubbed this peculiarity entanglement, and said 'I would not call that one but rather the characteristic trait of quantum mechanics.'” Why should perpetrators be more responsible than those responsible for creating the circumstances wherein the appearance of perpetrators -- if not this perpetrator, then that perpetrator -- is inevitable? Perpetrators are oh-so easy to find! I believe the worldview conflicts involved here will never be experimentally or rationally resolved. Never, never, never. Nevermore, quoth the raven. Another planetary total war will be fought in projective identification and collective unconscious thematic orchestration over the involved issues, which will remain largely subliminal. Just like the first two world wars. Same themes! In aftermath, assuming survivors, it will be as if there never were such issues. The third time is the charm! If he had a brain, it would be lonely. Pretty optimistic, eh? Just as I don't claim to actually know that climate-shift dynamics are worse than consensus atmospheric scientists characterize them to be (or, for that matter, better) because the Earth's atmosphere has never been climatically analyzed under the notion that it is not a classical domain, so too I do not claim to know what a sub-molecular ecology would be, as the requisite notions have been banished by strategically localized department chairpersons. I do claim, however, to know, in principle, that everything political conservatives and spiritualistic evangelicals (right intuition, wrong conclusion by politico-spiritualistic conflation) claim to gain with superluminal velocities can be obtained with nested subluminal absolute limiting velocities and nested finite-valued absolute limiting accelerations and nested finite-valued absolute limiting time rates of change of acceleration (all three under m-valued logics). People don't understand this, but they don't want to so understand. Nothing, and so be it! Stigmatize Einstein all you want; just leave alone the insight provided by his first wife.
What do these quantum ideas have to do with intelligence analysis and strategic assessment? Okay. One observation periodically made by intelligence personnel in Viet Nam was that VC units isolated from their chain of command sometimes acted as if they were receiving information and instructions, when, clearly, this was not the case. David Marr, who was an intelligence officer in Viet Nam, if memory serves, makes mention of one such case in the introduction to his book Vietnamese Tradition on Trial, 1920-1945 (UC Press, 1981). My personal conclusion was that this “phenomenon” had its origins in the peasant animism endemic to the area, and I later came to speak of “animistic identity transparency”. Present-day radical decentralization of Al Qaeda and Associates may be an expression, and further elaboration, of the same “phenomenon”. With regard to this, let me quote Dean Radin's recent book Entangled Minds (Paraview, 2006, pp. 1-2):
One of the most surprising discoveries of modern physics is that objects aren't as separate as they may seem. When you drill down into the core of even the most solid-looking material, separateness dissolves… The deeper reality suggested by existence of entanglement is so unlike the world of everyday experience that, until recently, many physicists believed it was interesting only for abstract theoretical reasons… Scientists are now finding that there are ways in which the effects of microscopic entanglements “scale up” into our macroscopic world… There are theoretical descriptions showing how tasks can be accomplished by entangled groups without members of the group communicating with each other in any conventional way.
And there are many reasons to believe that terrorist and insurgent infrastructures are composed of “entangled groups” and that unconventional communication within and between such groups is characteristic of what Toussaint, in MOON, called the “high combat” engaged in by special service operatives. Indeed, it was as a result of contemplation of psychoneuroimmunologic phenomena associated with a wound received in combat that the notion of DNA superconductivity first appeared in my awareness. I have been discussing entanglement all along using equivalent or corresponding terms: long-range phase correlation; coherency; collective, cooperative, and critical phenomena; correlation length goes to infinity. Formation of p-electron parcels and superconductivity of body-temperature DNA could not transpire independent of entanglement, nor without this property could the molecule generate coherent waves. The quantum perspectives on autogenic brain discharges I developed during the 1970s presupposed particle entanglement within the brain mediated by superconductant p-electron gas core of intraneuronal DNA. And anyone who was ever part of a combat-experienced Special Forces half-team like that described by Toussaint could not doubt existence of particle entanglement between brains, such entanglement being inculcated by long and continuous stress-oriented training of a small group with team integrity, and brought to fruition at combat under conditions like being ambushed. What do you think transpires psychoLOGICally in the kill zone? Stop doing this only at war! Bring it into the social mainstream as a way of undercutting pandemic psychophysiologic need for war. This is why I advocate creation of Musculpt holographic projection domes for biofeedback-equipped flotation-isolation tanks as training modules for members of a human pod attempting to learn sonic-visioning Dolphin-speak via EcherForm dance. Entanglement across brains transpires via the brain not contained by the brain. Long-range phase correlation is not an on-off affair; it can be modulated; greater and greater numbers of neurons can participate in the entanglement within and between brains. But the word “entanglement” is something of a misnomer; it is a 1T2-logic way of speaking about µTm-logic identity transparency. The question is not how coherency arises, but how the impression of decoherency arises.
And what lessons has the U.S. learned from all its lessons-learned conferences? Let's look to the leader of America's most high-tech intelligence agency -- NSA -- for an answer, USAF General Michael Hayden, as quoted by Time (“The Spy Master Cracks the Whip” by Michael Duffy, 15 May 2006, p. 29):
“Let me tell you what we've learned,” Hayden said. “There is no way to get a self-aware, self-synchronizing intelligence system without a kick-ass center because no one plays nice with each other voluntarily.”
“Self-aware” and “self-synchronizing” are pretty big words. Yes they are. You gotta ADmit that. They almost sound like quantum physics. And the “kick-ass center” bit, that could even be regarded Hegelian -- “centered structure”, you know -- except that Hegel ain't PC these days. But is a “kick-ass center” a centered structure like Hegel imagined or is it what deconstructionists mistakenly imagine Hegel imagined -- most of them not having actually read Hegel? Whatever! Nonetheless, “kick-ass” sounds like just the ticket to deal with terrorist and insurgent infrastructures that are composed of highly decentralized “entangled groups” spontaneously self-organizing over a corpus of volunteers, don't it? The center is everywhere! The center is everywhere! The center is everywhere! Thus sayeth not only The Lord, but also AQ&A. This is a centered structure as Hegel actually imagined it, imagined it as a Platonic ideal form super-self-entangled -- not as detached material implication of 1T2-order-type Gödel-normal logic. Jus' what we learned in Vet-naam from analyzin' dem VietMANese, huh, when we laced together a “single-manager system” with CORDS. The system worked. Ifin ya don't believe it, read the Rand assessment by that title to the folks in Hanoi McNamara tried to jawbone at his after-the-war conclave. And “kick-ass center” is sure to be as successful this time as it was back then. If you look through these Strategic Assessments posted here, you will find a prediction that the current situation will replicate the CORDS Solution just as the Afghan situation toyed with the Bao Dai Solution as it was toyed with at the same stage in Viet Nam. People this readable are not difficult for their opposition to anticipate. Hayden is the type to have a bad trip like that described by Robert Masters in his book Darkness Shining Wild (Tehmenos Press, 2005) -- and for exactly the very same reasons! This is not a guess. A USAF brat, I grew up dating the daughters of colonels and generals. Been there too long and too much. Know just what THAT'S about.
Who are they kidding? Anyone with an ounce of remaining unetched gray matter extrapolated to the right conclusion when coin-op public phones began disappearing across America and were not replaced with anonymous phone-card phones like those then blanketing Japan, for instance. Wasn't this two decades before 9/11? People thought I was crazy when I pointed out to them the right conclusion. So, at this very late date, don't gripe to me about post-9/11 data mining of audibles and link analysis. If this is a read on the DEPTH of their intelligence gathering, god help us. I've also been saying that there will not be another major strike on America soil until another global-scale synoptic self-organizational phase transition is required by the “franchised” global insurgents against the very idea of the Cartesian-Newtonian nation-state system qua system. So, link analysis has very likely not had the actual magnitude of success claimed for it. And what knucklehead imagined that personalized food-chain cards were instituted without national security edges? If so, what edges do you imagine those are? And who imagined a decade ago, when it became ten times as difficult to become MSG-free in America as it was then to remain so in East Asia, that this fact was agenda-free (given the by-then very well understood role played by glutamate in the enheaded brain and the enteric brain)? Just think how intake of prescribed psychotropic drugs is monitored in every coo-coo nest flown over. Think you're not drug addicted? You've been glutamated since literally before you were born. The only way to know the effects of that addiction is to find a way to sustain generation of some “excess” endogenous antidote. You think you're not being monitored? Not being profiled as to this or that intake? How many labeling aka's does MSG have? Our world does not run on oil; it runs on stupid ideas. A technically-elaborated stupid idea looks smart, but it is still a stupid idea. If there has ever been a worldview more regressive and more anathema than that essayed by Wired, it has not crossed my awareness. Little can be extrapolated from the black propaganda published in publications like Newsweek, but, little as it is, something can be gleaned, as some subset takes this material seriously -- hopefully, not those writing it. Karen Lowry Miller, for instance (“Will We Hit $100?”, Newsweek, 22 May 2006) tells us:
Since no one has found a way to X-ray the planet to determine exactly how much oil is left, peak-oil theory is based in part on faith in pessimistic geology. Oil bulls respond with their own article of faith: that there is oil down there, and improving technology can and will find it.
To support the latter position on geoscience (and the many involved assumptions in fundamental physics), she quotes experts from Barclays Capital and Goldman Sachs. We are told that oil is a “cyclical commodity” and that the idea of a peak is a “red herring”. And all the non-peak reasons why there will be a sustained “superspike” in the price of oil are given. How far is it possible to get behind the eight-ball? Rack 'em up, Charlie. Thank lucky stars this sort of stuff only appears in the propaganda press. AmeroAngloEuro post-WWII oil policy has proceeded apace down the tunnel it was placed in -- by Yalta, actually -- without the slightest hesitation or momentary visits to sidings, on its direct course to post-policy cusp event: oil abruptly ceases altogether to be a tradable commodity, cyclical or otherwise. It won't be long now, for when Nixon cut the dollar loose from gold-exchange, liability financing became limited only by the limits of American military prowess at maintaining dollar confidence. Cusp of this self-driven wheel: total national mobilization. The Vietnamese troop sent into Cambodia to stop a holocaust was issued a rice-filled cloth tube to sling over his shoulder, and a big bag of MSG. So, prepare yourself; the government certainly has.
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