That -- after everything written on the subject over a thirty-year period -- a Senior Editor of one of America's foremost highbrow magazines can make the following statement is truly staggering (“The Numbers War” by Joshua Green, The Atlantic Monthly, May 2006, p. 36):
For most of the war [in Iraq], a kind of reprise of the Vietnam body-count dispute has been taking place over the size and strength of the insurgency.
Apparently, Mr. Green not only cannot think, he is incapable of making simple registrations. Being able to write fine sentences with internal rhyme schemes isn't good enough, and possibly is an obstacle. The Viet Nam body count was not a “dispute” -- it was a moral issue for the antiwar movement -- and it had nothing whatsoever to do with the enemy strength estimates controversy. This is not an opinion; it is a matter of the historical record. To say “size and strength” -- my god! -- is to flunk out of preschool. The phrase Green adopts for enemy strength in Iraq (p. 37), “insurgents under arms”, was never controversial relative to the Viet Nam war. What was controversial were insurgents not under arms, who had never been under arms and never would be under arms. And how all these noncombatant insurgents were to be categorized and counted, if they were to be categorized and counted. And what to do about them. And what their presence implied for U.S. grand strategy in Viet Nam and strategic questions like expansion of the geographic boundaries of the war. And what the consequences of such an expansion might be. Wolf, No Wolf. Holocaust, no holocaust. That was the 1T2-logical controversy. The body count -- those “insurgents under arms” killed -- was altogether unrelated to these issues. The bodies not counted -- collateral damage -- were, however, or rather, should have been, related to the subject matters of the strength estimates in controversy by some very complex algorithm. It is the up to 580,000 unarmed insurgents (30 times the 20,000 strength estimate for those under arms minus those armed) not being discussed in the Iraq “numbers war” that are the most important component of the Iraqi insurgency. Historically speaking, the tooth-to-tail ratio in insurgency warfare has ranged from approximately 1-to-10 to 1-to-30 (which was about what it was in Viet Nam). 10-to-30 noncombatants required to keep one insurgent under arms (many variables are involved in determining what this ratio is in any given case of insurgency warfare, and, in Viet Nam, these variables were, in part, evaluated by the Hamlet Evaluation Survey -- or, more accurately, an unsuccessful attempt at such evaluation was made). And what that one insurgent under arms can accomplish is largely a function of how well self-organized -- not “organized”, “self-organized” -- are the 10-to-30 noncombatants in support. Go after the teeth all you want; the more you pull, the more will grow in. The insurgent combatant is far from being the most difficult insurgent to recruit and train. Point and shoot; build a bomb, place it, detonate it; run and hide; strap an explosive belt on the body and find a good place for an explosion; drive explosives to an objective and detonate them as close to the objective as possible: these are fairly simple tasks to learn. Conducting clandestine noncombatant operations 24/7 involves much more elaborate acquired characteristics. Ask Oriana Fallaci. She was acquiring such characteristics as a 13-year-old girl commo-liaison agent.
What is it about the American psyche that prevents it from assimilating these basics? The same thing that makes National Correspondent James Fallows (“The Nuclear Power Beside Iraq”, page 32 of the same issue of The Atlantic Monthly) unable to see that to “create 'excess demand' for military action” is the actual intent in any pre-Pearl-Harbor situation, for how else is the unconscious collective will for all out war to be established in a multitude of conscious minds? The same thing that makes National Correspondent Mark Bowden (article on Desert One in the same issue and attributed conversation written into Black Hawk Down) suffer myopia when it comes to assessment of personality and motivation in America's special service corps, particularly as regards Delta operators? The same thing that makes National Correspondent Robert Kaplan (“Colonel Cross of the Gurkhas” in the same issue) eulogize exemplars of The Forceful Forties? The same thing that makes Contributing Editor Christopher Hitchens (“Blood for No Oil!” in the same issue) say (p. 136) “…a foe that does not even pretend to share the values of the Enlightenment…”? Aha! This last might be the revelation. America needs, needs, needs, needs, needs -- whew! -- to create a situation where it can unleash the weapons at its disposal, because it is not equipped, psychologically and otherwise, to fight types of warfare which do not conform to the dictates of its worldview construct. Find me a sit-she-A-sion where I can USE all these weapons -- and you WILL have fun! That's an order! America has not only refused to make a “correlation of forces” (Fallows, p. 32), but has refused to make a correlation between evolving worldview construct and frozen metaphysical assumptions informing the institutional base. Another of those 1T2-logic schizophrenogenic double binds. Damned if you don't, damned if you do. And America refused to count the insurgents not under arms in Viet Nam, and now in Iraq, because to count them meant, and now means, that in such counting the American mind would come face-to-face with forms of self-organization not derivative of Cartesian-Newtonian Enlightenment perspectives -- rather, face-to-face with bizarre quantum-relativistic metaphysics, “Off the Beat” Tao of Physics, you know. But we are further behind the eight ball than this implies, for at the moment we are decisively moving into a post-quantum, post-relativity worldview far more “bizarre” than quantum-relativity physics, while the institutionalization of the world construct is based on… When was that Enlightenment, anyway? Wasn't that somewhen like three centuries of memetime ago? And Hitchens, in reviewing Peter Beinart's book on what liberals can do to win the terror war, does not even mention that Beinart does not mention that Truman created the Viet Nam war by reversing FDR's International Trust Territory policy orientation to postwar Indochina, the French portion of the ensuing war being largely, if indirectly, funded by Marshall Plan monies, and that Truman more or less created a MAD, MAD, MAD Cold War world by the demonstration bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, thus constellating the need for the USSR to establish a Newtonian “correlation of forces” in an Einsteinian postwar world. Not to mention thus diverting the social structure of panhuman attention away from pressing foreseeable global dilemmas like cheap energy crisis and climate shift dynamics and humans in excess of global carrying capacity and… Can anyone doubt, reading The Atlantic Monthly and Harper's and The New York Review of Books that America will continue to refuse correlation between worldview construct and institutional base? And what, dear Mr. Roberts -- another exemplar of The Forceful Forties -- are the full consequences of The Great American Refusal, that surly epochal insolence before Nature and History huddling as persona inside a worn-out leather bomber's jacket and carried around in an olive drab B4 bag like just so much globalony wrapped in projective identification? One consequence is a global leadership style, aptly described by Sebastian Junger (appropriate name) writing about Afghanistan for, oh so appropriately, Vanity Fair (“America's Forgotten War”, April 2006 issue, p. 150):
He is energy personified: every sentence ends in an exclamation point; every greeting turns into a hearty back thump or headlock; every idea is acted upon as fast as possible.
And this Lite Colonel describes a little one-on-one scrimmage thus:
“He was in a hole, and I didn't have a hand grenade, so I shot him with my Beretta when he stood up! Dude, what a horrible time to stand up!”
Dude! So says the Colonel Lite. This is certainly not a leadership style likely to prevail in insurgency war anywhere in Asia. It certainly didn't prevail in Viet Nam, despite eulogies offered to it as A Bright Shining Lie.
For further consequences of The Great American Refusal, who can gainsay Jared Diamond's global assessment? Though he, in his “cautious optimism”, certainly went to a great deal of trouble to make that assessment palatable to his prospective readership (Collapse, Viking, 2005, p. 496):
Even if the human populations of the Third World did not exist, it would be impossible for the First World alone to maintain its present course, because it is not in a steady state but is depleting its own resources as well as those imported from the Third World… What will happen when it finally dawns on all those people in the Third World that current First World standards are unreachable for them, and that the First World refuses to abandon those standards for itself?
Clearly, 9/11 was the beginning, just the beginning, of the answer to that question, an answer which, for obvious reasons implicit in Diamond's assessment, will involve radical Islamism self-transcending: insurgency against the very idea of the Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian nation-state system and its supraordinal agglomerations potentially has a recruitment base vastly larger than that of the Islamic world. Diamond, page 495, in discussing per capita environmental impact, says:
On the average, each citizen of the U.S., western Europe, and Japan consumes 32 times more resources such as fossil fuels, and puts out 32 times more wastes, than do inhabitants of the Third World… [and here is one example of Diamond trying to make his assessment palatable to his First World readers] …the biggest problem is the increase in total human impact, as the result of rising Third World living standards, and of Third World individuals moving to the First World and adopting First World living standards.
Bull, so much bull! The actual biggest problem is the 32 times greater per capita impact of each First Worlder. On page 522 Diamond asserts that “We don't need new technologies to solve our problems…” To which I would add: if the population of the planet were reduced by something like half or total human per capita impact were reduced by a factor of 32/5, which is a mathematical way of saying that First Worlders join Third Worlders at Third World environmental impact level. Speaking here not heuristically about an idealized model from which friction has been removed; speaking of the present human world as it actually is on the ground. But I'd rather die, Gertrude! I'm simply not going back to a 56k modem! So says the First Worlder, and thus was the collective unconscious decision for yet one more all out global war long ago made. Diamond recommends long-term thinking and revaluation of values, along with big businesses, enhanced government regulation, consensus science, multilaterals, consumer-group pressure to take only sustainable harvests. Pressure brought by over-consumers upon bad-boy producers will reduce consumption so as to no longer “spend down environmental capital”. There is not a single innovative idea offered about changing the fundamentals of how human beings organize themselves and manage their thermodynamic interface with Nature. Why is that, from a Pulitzer winning UCLA professor with decades of interdisciplinary hard and soft science background? Because of The Great American Refusal! The refusal to establish and maintain correlation between prevailing world view construct and institutional base. But the very idea of “correlation” is not very practical, not back-thumping headlocking gung-ho pragmatism, for it is the very basis of the very idea of mathematical function explicated by Euler and at the very foundation of all those very bizarre characteristics of quantum-relativity theory so very scary to the very essence of the American mind. “Correlation” is over, over the top. Enhancing the level of market self-organizational competency such that the market itself self-organizes the taking only of sustainable yields, for instance, would require employment of economic Bose-Einstein condensates, and the only way that could be accomplished would involve implementation of m-logically-valued monetary units. But the American mind cannot embrace such a scheme until it allows bare registration of the deep connection between success of the 1968 Tet offensive (which Joshua Green, of course, by PC conventional wisdom, misinterprets: “The Numbers War”, p. 37) and collapse of the Bretton-Woods gold-exchange mechanism. Humph! The Humpty-Dumpty American mind is so tangled (which is not quantum “entangled”) no amount of “Computing with Quantum Knots” (Scientific American, April 2006) interpreted under 1T2 logic will ever straighten it out and put it back together againe.
Well, I certainly can't disagree with you about Richard Falkenrath's review (“Grading the War on Terrorism”, Foreign Affairs, January/February 2006) of The Next Attack by Daniel Benjamin and Steven Simon, a book which I also felt was of little or no interest. What did interest me, however, was one of Falkenrath's excoriations (p 127):
THE REAL WORLD: WASHINGTON
Criticizing the government is easy; doing so constructively is not. Useful policy prescriptions set out proposals that offer a better chance of achieving desired objectives while being both practical and politically feasible. Advancing them requires an analyst to take seriously the pressures and constraints that policymakers face, as well as the complexity and interrelationships of the issues they confront.
Horray! Horray! Very well repeated. That has been said to me, certainly, more dozens of times than I can remember. It is almost word for word what I got sitting across the table from Ned Beech (Run Silent, Run Deep) twenty-five years ago when I criticized the 1953 coup in Iran as a typical expression of postwar AmerAnglo oil policy leading inexorably to horrendous terminal-policy cusp-events. The above-stated characterization of the “real world” by one of the powers behind the throne is a mind-numbing cliché of the '50s so far beneath contempt one can only pity the poor immigrant who will suffer the stupendous consequences of such minds. Constructive criticism and policy suggestions prescribed permissible are only those that change nothing of significance. Come up with a better policy without altering any of the assessments or assumptions. Ha! Derek ranted about this in MOON when Toussaint hit him with the same stock lecture. So stock, nearly by word for by word. The “desired objectives”, the “policy prescriptions” and basic values, the worldview construct analogically modeled into “pressures and constraints that policymakers face” are utterly unspeakably anathema. And this fact was a very big part of why I quit AU's School of International Service in 1965. Great decision! Clearly, nothing significant has changed in the intervening period. Nor will it. Not until the BIG DENOUEMENT in the anterior sky descends.
A Choice Choice Theory
Rational 1T2-logic choice theory in
An anarchic political context as
“Realism”;
Theory of evolutionary robust
Neural networks engineered by
Killer genes
Applied to the terrorist adversary;
Law in capital,
Capital as law
Deeming casualties, not as
Commodity price,
But as combat price entered
In the red column of
The red, white, and blue ledger with
The black-and-blue cover:
All social Dawinisms embraced by
Jesus Freaks in Gov-ment when
Jesus was
Anti-gov-ment and
Pro-creationist.
Moreover, these guys to
A man
Disparage Immanuel Velikovsky, but
Embrace the apocalyptic prong of
The Fertile Crescent Religion
Trident.
Adoration of the Apocalypse!
God Himself
The secret agent of
Destruction
Not no common
Comet.
So, arch-individualists worship
Collective suicide, while
The tribal-collectivist
Arch-enemy practices
Suicide of the individual, no doubt
In imitation not
Of the Magi, but
Suicide genes.
My God! This
Sounds like reciprocity, a
Violation of rational choice, an
Invocation of the commons soon
To become the vocation of
Us all.
John Banville's The Sea, a brilliant portrait of PTSD in the guise of survivor shock, first nine-and-a-half pages introducing the reader to the characteristic heightened sensation function and then thirty-five pages of relative debaissement initiated by a visit to the doctor's office -- stylistically in comparative drab -- followed by portraits of the disconnect, the automatisms, the reviewings, the detached self-assessments, the anomie, the struggle with the transference and existential games which have precluded authenticity but went without comprehension, until removal of the transference figure(s) thrust the whole existential dilemma front and center, the stylist effusions or lack thereof -- trick-mirror images -- reflecting in their shapes this and that process portrayed… lapse of the living, they say, those fillips, that group, them by the swell, black blister blue, journeying the night sea in all their rackety, raucous ways.
This, I did not know (quoting John Mueller, “The Cost of War”, Foreign Affairs, 85:1, 2006, p. 142):
…support for the Vietnam War declined by 21 percentage points in the two and a half years before Tet but by only 14 percentage points in the three years after it.
But these polling stats only support the position I argued at SRA/MACV-J2 in the spring and early summer of 1968: degrees of American public support, or degrees of absence thereof, for the war in Viet Nam, and hence public opinion effects of press assessment of the Tet-'68 offensive, played a significant but only a small role in both strategic planning of NVN and LBJ's decision to not seek re-election. It was after the war that the Command and General Staff College and the anti-war movement came to see eye-to-eye: the anti-war movement, both agreed, was instrumental in ending the war. Replay! Dolchstosslegende II. Rerun of the Weimar-era stab-in-the-back myth, inducement to Nazification. Actual determining factors, however, were the spiraling into exponential growth of the GLOBAL economic costs to the U.S. and its corporate exemplars, and the stunning on-the-ground success of the VCI at accomplishing, by means of preparations for the Tet offensive, a countywide synoptic far-from-equilibrium self-organizational phase transition in presence of 500,000 U.S. ground combat troops. Preparations! What happened during the offensive was incidental, almost besides the point, a foregone conclusion. The VCI, on verge of victory in 1964, were forced by massive U.S. troop deployments to organizationally return from the newly instituted AAC's -- the Autonomous Administrative Committees pre-government infrastructural format preliminary to, and indicative of, a successful shift to general counter-offensive stage of the war -- and back to the NLF (National Liberation Front infrastructural format) which is apropos only of the stage of contention or equilibrium (and which was progressively dismantled countrywide post-Tet and replaced by Northerner-dominated AAC's) -- according to the communist lexicon, of course. These two states-of-autopoiesis are radically different forms of organization and transitions between them are enormously complex. Success at this osmotic thermodynamic transit -- organizational adaptation by resource exchange across phase boundaries, both geographic and bureaucratic -- accomplished during the year prior to Tet-'68 allowed NVN, by controlling the environment of the combat, to dictate the U.S. response: Get out! or expand the geographic boundaries of the war. In the event, having no conceptual understanding of the circumstance, the U.S. did both, thus shooting itself in two feet. And, later, it also shot itself in the head -- with a scatter gun -- by cultivating Dolchstosslegende II. Had there been no global exponential growth of economic costs (e.g., beginnings of a Japan, Inc., only brought to heel by the sting operation called The Plaza Accords) bombs could have gone off daily in Washington, D.C., like Saigon, and The Good Life of corporate exemplars would have continued unabated. So much self-propaganda, the notion that politics in America is controlled by public opinion: part of the stab-in-the-back myth. Nixon-Kissinger had to prolong the war in order to completely bring down the Bretton Woods gold-exchange mechanism, otherwise “libability financing” unchained could not have come into being and permitted, for instance, the leverage yielding The (bubble-creating) Plaza Accords.
Absolutely nothing of significance will be done until it is too late to do anything significant. Only with terminal cusp events will the prod be hot enough. I've been saying this over and over all along -- and explaining the reasons why. The present conundrum is not something thermodynamics has imposed on humanity; it is all our fault. There have been people smart enough; therefore, the reasons are overwhelmingly psychological. Point of irreversibility is never objectively viewable at that point, only later. The very narrow window of opportunity falls just before the point nonviewable. Surmise. Inference. Feeling into. These are the instrumental instrumentalities. There are many aspects, all of which will not come to cusp exactly simultaneously. Climate shift is irreversible no matter what is done; severity may somewhat still be modulated. Who knows? Do you know? Given how falsified the models are? Rescaling; renormalization; filtering. But I know meteorologists who, in the late-'70s, were then saying in private (for what purpose would have been served by saying it in public?) that they believed the shift had already become irreversible: thirty years ago. Post-peak oil dynamics are moving into high-gear. Just try to overcome the established momentum and bring them to a stop. Breakaway point for collapse in human and other species, both animal and plant, of immune competency was in the early-'80s. Is that reversible? Who could possibly know, when molecular and genetic medicine filters quantum biochemistry of nucleic acid and protein? How omnipresent mimetic estrogens! How altered the ambient radiation environment! Is the NSA going to permit rectification of that environment? I am totally and unalterably uninterested in preventing the unpreventable. Don't to me talk Norman Vincent Peale, Dale Carnegie, Will Rogers -- Jane Roberts, maybe. In remains of the day, our remains will remain nonviewable. What I am intensely interested in is doing what is doable relative to what comes after the unpreventable has not been prevented.
What do I think? I think contents of the document found at al-Zarqawi's unsafe safe house and published by the press soon after his death are virtually indistinguishable from many criticism/self-criticism strategic assessment documents produced by the Viet Cong (political) Infrastructure (VCI) approximately one-and-a-half years before the Tet-'68 offensive: the same sort of observations. I closely studied dozens of such documents, many of which were derivative of COSVN-level party-committee kiem thao and even of cellular phe binh at high echelons (two different forms of criticism/self-criticism necessary to cultivation of the identity-transparency responsible for critical state self-organization). All of this was prerequisite to country-wide reorganization that was largely in place by mid-summer of 1967 and preparatory to mounting the Tet-'68 offensive. What the al-Zarqawi safe-house document means relative to the present situation in Iraq, I couldn't possibly speculate upon, as I know nothing of the actual situation in Iraq, being only a reader of newspapers, magazines, journals, and internet postings. I can assure you, however, that the U.S. Government will release to the press no document that cannot be presented as supporting its own position on issues. Wording of this particular document suggests to me extremely non-literal translation. This “I think” does not mean I think there is a valid parallel between the war in Iraq and the war that was in Viet Nam. The actual parallel is between the Viet Nam war and the global insurgency against the very idea of the Cartesian-Newtonian-Westphalian nation-state system qua system. Iraq is a very small battle relative to what is to come. As a representative of Habitat recently announced at a UN conference in London, the urbanized squatter population of the Third World (approximately 80 percent of six billion people by 2030) is a ripening recruitment base for revolutionary activities. “Forced-draft urbanization”, to use the term coined by Samuel Huntington in 1968 (“The Bases of Accommodation”, Foreign Affairs, July 1968, which was the object of as much hysterical laughter at SRA/MACV-J2 as was Doug Pike's assessment of Tet-'68) so as to provide moral justification for free-fire zones. What happens in Iraq and Afghanistan is really small potatoes in terms of global insurgency nested within post-peak oil conflict, nested within death of the institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm responsible for the climate-shift dynamic: N. H. Abel was the shooter in 1826 with his “Impossibility” Theorem. Yea! Abel. Hu-ah, hu-ah, hu-ah! Continued psychopathic clinging behaviors and back reaction against Abel will insure trending toward human species extinction in face of gathering challenges.
A wonderful example of this pathology has recently appeared. In a letter of response to criticism of his article, “The Right Way: Seven Steps Toward a Last Chance in Iraq”, which was written before the targeted killing of Zarqawi, Kenneth Pollack says (The Atlantic Monthly, June 2006, p. 20):
Once General Creighton Abrams took over as commander of the Military Assistance Command in Vietnam, and Robert Komer was brought in to head the civilian side of the effort, the United States pursued an extraordinary successful counterinsurgency campaign, presided over by precisely the sort of unified command structure that is needed in Iraq. Far from being a failure, as conventional wisdom would have it, the Komer-headed Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program virtually eradicated the Vietcong as a force in South Vietnam by about 1970. At that point, Hanoi was forced to begin mounting conventional invasions. The first was smashed by U.S. airpower in 1972, in the Linebacker II campaign, while the second, in 1975, ultimately succeeded because of the absence of U.S. airpower.
Actually, I don't remember a Kenneth Pollack in MACV-J2 under Abrams; he certainly never came into Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2. Truth is, Mr. Pollack could not possibly have entered SRA/MACV-J2, for the above-given capsule summary of the war is extraordinarily ill-informed, though a passing good rendition of Col. Harry Summers On Strategy and R. W. Komer's Bureaucracy Does its Thing (Rand, 1972). The system worked! The system worked! The system worked! The Cartesian-Newtonian system, that is. Heh-heh-heh! And SRA/MACV-J2 knew far more about the self-organizational dynamics of the VCI than did the CIA, which focused on its agents, not intensive analysis of bureaucratic minutia. Truthfully, SRA in certain respects knew more than the VCI knew about the VCI -- because there was nowhere in the VCI or in Hanoi, no Organization Section at whatsoever echelon -- in possession of SRA's information access to VCI internal documents and the capacity to correlate and analyze in bulk. And not only because of information fractionation on a need to know basis for security purposes. To know details of the VCI transport and commo-liaison systems, and limitations of their paper process, is to know much of why they were largely decentralized.
The major difference between the VCI's compartmentalized access to their own documents and the access SRA/MACV-J2 had via the enormous quantity of captured enemy documents was the often very considerable time lag. A great example of that has recently become available in the State Department's history series Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), Vietnam, the period early August 1967 to the end of January 1968. Relative to the following there were documents in VCI information channels, but they were not captured until well after the events in question. Highly classified internal U.S. Government documents recently declassified: memos for LBJ and between Rostow, Rusk, Bundy, Helms, McNamara, Bunker and the CIA station in Viet Nam. On December 29, 1967, just one month before the Tet-'68 offensive, in a cable to Rostow, the CIA station says, in reference to a prisoner being held in Saigon, “…she knows no route into MR-4 and would be equally helpless getting through to COSVN…” First of all, MR-4 was the English translation of the uncoded VCI designation for the Saigon-Cholon-GiaDinh-BienHoa area, so she was already in MR-4 -- had MR-4 still existed, that is. MR-4 had ceased to exist during mid-summer of 1967, as the country-wide VCI reorganization was brought to conclusion in preparation for Tet-'68. This was one thing Kenneth Pollack (and so many other “experts”, clearly including, at the time, the CIA Station Chief) apparently knew nothing of and continues to know nothing of. Not only did Mr. Pollack not come into SRA/MACV-J2, neither did any member of the CIA station or Komer's CORDS. Had they, they would have learned that in the period December 1966 to December 1967 a massive country-wide program of “lateral personnel transfers” of political cadres from the VCI to military units transpired -- largely gutting the VCI of long-experienced and irreplaceable bureaucratic administrators and command cadres. Thousands and thousands of personnel transfer orders -- documents containing only alpha-numeric codes of bureaucratic minutia, which “authoritative” testimony at the Westmoreland versus CBS trial deemed of so little importance as to warrant being ignored -- indicated this, as anyone so inclined can verify today in the William Joiner document collection, UMass.
Now I suspect that were Mr. Pollack to learn of this, he would not see its significance. If the CIA Station Chief, who surely must have read, if he didn't write, the above-quoted cable before it was sent, did not know what MR-4 was -- which means he knew virtually nothing about the bureaucratic organization of the VCI -- how could Mr. Pollack understand the significance of these lateral transfers? Pollack says “…the Komer-headed Civil Operations and Revolutionary Development Support program virtually eradicated the Vietcong as a force in South Vietnam by about 1970”. Actually, the ICEX-Phoenix program of CORDS did the “eradicating”, but those thus eradicated were long since dead -- killed in the military meat grinder to which they were laterally transferred -- when supposedly eradicated. So, those actually killed by ICEX-Phoenix, who do you think they were? Mr. Pollack really doesn't know much at all about the subject he so confidently waxes upon. Moreover, as his statements about U.S. bombing and how the war ended in 1975 indicate, there are whole continents of “stuff” Mr. Pollack doesn't even suspect the existence of. Reviewers of our novel, The Moon of Hoa Binh, Viet Nam scholars and other “knowledgeable” persons, asserted that the account of the war offered was historically very inaccurate, even bizarre. Well… the woman referred to above, in the recently declassified CIA cable to Rostow, who didn't know a route into MR-4, where she already was, was the wife of Tran Bach Dang, inaccurately referred to in a 15 December 1967 cable from Ambassador Bunker to Rostow as the “Saigon Party Committee Secretary” (vague designation appropriate to popular articles and PDOs -- Public Disinformation Officers -- not intelligence-related cable traffic between the Ambassador and the President's National Security Advisor). This wife, Mai Thi Vang, who was then a U.S. prisoner, had lived for years with her husband only a few blocks from the U.S. Embassy in downtown Saigon, a domicile out of which the affairs of MR-4 had been conducted from 1965 until mid-summer of 1967 -- early-July, actually. Mai Thi Vang, at the time of the Bunker cable, was being debriefed in a safe house located across the canal at the backside of the Saigon Botanical Gardens. I know this house -- the one which was always used for the highest level interrogations -- because six months later I debriefed Tran Van Dac, the highest ranking VC rallier of the war, in the same safe house. My area of assignment within SRA/MACV-J2 was the Saigon-Cholon-GiaDinh-BienHoa area and Dac had been the commander of the VCI headquarters located out beyond the Binh Loi Bridge area used by General Tran Van Tra to direct the military dimensions of the attack upon Saigon during the Tet-'68 offensive. Tran Bach Dang directed political aspects of that offensive on Saigon from a separate headquarters located in Long An. Prior to May of 1963, “Saigon Party Committee Secretary” was a quasi-correct designation for the position of Vo Van Kiet, the career of whom that of Tran Bach Dang followed in lock-step until the war ended. Postwar, these two careers diverged, conjointly, in due course, creating the doi moi Renovation Movement, but that's a different story. There was a huge pre-government-type reorganization in 1963 as preparations were made for shift to general counter-offensive end-stage of the war. The Eastern Nam Bo Party Committee was dissolved, along with its subordinate party committees (PCs) of Inter-Provinces 7 and 8 and the Saigon-Cholon-GiaDinh-Special Zone. In place of this, with different geographical boundaries and vastly different organizational format, appeared MR-4, Military Region 4, of which Vo Van Kiet was made PC Secretary. In 1965, Kiet moved to the Current Affairs Committee of COSVN, with special responsibility for Saigon, and Tran Bach Dang took over as MR-4 PC Secretary. Over the next two years, the shift to general counter-offensive end-stage was rolled back by commitment of 500,000 U.S. ground combat troops. However, by July of 1967, with so many U.S. troops in country, a country-wide pre-government-type (not front-type) reorganization was again well in hand. MR-4 had been dissolved and a radically new form of organization implemented, with Tran Bach Dang becoming PC Secretary of K-6 (incorporating only the quan, wards, of Saigon city proper), concurrent Current Affairs Committee, COSVN, special responsibilities for Saigon. But his “shop” was never physically located in the area of Cambodia COSVN was in constant motion through, over, and about, as contents of the recently declassified FRUS documents assume. These documents from the period (August 1967 to January 1968) are about secret negotiations to end the war -- covered as negotiations over prisoner exchange -- in which T.B. Dang and his wife played roles. A memo for LBJ from Rostow in October of 1967 even mentions a list “…of South Vietnamese they [the VCI and Hanoi] are willing to work with”. In all probability, all the relevant material will never be fully declassified. The fictional storyline of The Moon of Hoa Binh reviewers found to be historically inaccurate, even bizarre, relates specifically to secret negotiations and VCI organizational dynamics. It should be noted that though the prisoner Mai Thi Vang was released in poor health by the CIA on January 5, 1968, this was -- as explicitly stated in the declassified U.S. documents -- not at the request of T.B. Dang. Though certainly he must have been very happy about her release, it is not plausible that in the six months prior to Tet-'68, knowing what he knew as to what the future held, that prisoner exchanges were high on his list of priorities. It also stretches the imagination that LBJ and a long list of his immediate subordinates would have taken personal direct interest in the details of such. A truly bizarre twist on this story is that my final decision to quit American University's School of International Service and volunteer for Special Forces training in 1965 came receiving elbows in the ribs while sitting next to my professor, Elspeth Rostow, W.W.'s wife, listening to him debate Stanley Hoffman in a small seminar room at the Sheraton Park Hotel where the First National Teach-in Against the War was being held. I either knew personally, or came to know personally, several key players on both sides of the secret negotiations. T.B. Dang became my visa sponsor when I returned to Viet Nam for the first time following end of the war, a visit made at Tet of 1993. Less than twelve hours in country Mai Thi Vang was serving me an excellent lotus tea on her terrace. Studies of the organizational dynamics (self-organizational adaptation by resource exchange across fluctuating boundaries) of T.B. Dang's underground political infrastructure sowed the seeds of both the notion of m-logically-valued monetary units to be democratically implemented by bringing LETS up from below (much better than imposing dictatorial Kyoto Protocol top-down 1T2-logical carbon dollars) and that of VirFut Q-Pro.
There is certainly something between literal flesh and dermal concept, but I sincerely doubt it is meaningful unless deconstructed. So I am genuinely sorry if my thought on AIDS upsets you or offends the funding “strategies” of the Gates Foundation. But the fact remains that, not only are there thousands of documented cases of AIDS where there is zero evidence of HIV presence and the patient, moreover, is HIV-negative, but there appears to be many people immune to AIDS and who remain HIV-negative in face of enormous exposure. This is exactly what I said in 1977 could happen in immune system collapse by processes associated with superconductant p-electron gas core of DNA.
When a choice must be made between the market and the society in which one lives, the market rules; when a choice must be made between the market and the planet on which one lives, the market rules. Ask any of 793 billionaires; they will tell you. Ask any of the billion or so middle-class over-consumers and four-billion or so over-consumer aspirants; they will tell you. I do not advocate doing away with the planet, societies, billionaires, or the market. Over-consumers, which obviously includes billionaires… Hmmmm. I advocate changing the fundamental properties of money so those properties conform to F. von Hayek's m-logically-valued notion of the time-shapes of total capital stock, such that the level of self-organizational competency of the market expands to incorporate externalities. This can only be implemented from the bottom up. The fundamental notion involved here did not issue out of studies in communism; it issued out of analysis of a dynamical process exhibiting correspondence between age-old animism with its immersion in states of identity transparency characteristic of Unbounded Wholeness (see the book by that title written by Anne Klein and Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Oxford, 2006) and the quantum mechanics of collective, cooperative, and critical phenomena in material systems -- a correspondence that just happened to manifest itself in context of national-liberation war, whereupon a Marxist-Leninist-Maoist gloss was superimposed. That gloss was largely counterproductive, as postwar events quickly confirmed. And this confirmation was very well anticipated by the group of participants who were killed by the ICEX-Phoenix program after they were already dead. The mega-event that made this obvious to any intelligent participant-observer was the Cultural Revolution in China, about which these people, killed once dead, were informed. I know this for a fact because I was fortunate enough to talk with a fair number of survivors I searched out in POW camps, old cadres who had been stay-behinds in 1954 when exodus to the north had ensued. Whatever Mao's personal pathology, personality inflation, brutality, non-registrations, the fundamental impetus for the Cultural Revolution was what the twice-killed VCI cadres wanted to prevent happening in postwar Viet Nam: the Marxist-Leninist-Maoist gloss become the vehicle itself. At his core Mao was a Taoist animist, not Confucian. One mode of being dominates the left side to the Chinese brain; the other, the right. And the two are utterly incompatible, no matter how persistently they may pose as brothers. There are only fixed opinions on this matter, so it is hardly worth airing, but, nonetheless, once his war was over, Mao was horrified to discover that the vehicle he had created to achieve national liberation -- the party apparat -- rapidly became the foremost obstacle to achievement of the social transformation for which the war had been only a prerequisite. In due course, therefore, Taoist Mao set about destroying the Confucian monster he had created. “The Country Lives If Confucius Dies” as a recent bestseller in South Korea is entitled (see the cover article of Newsweek, 20 March 2006, p. 23). But the Chinese brain is lopsided, and Confucianism won out, as it always has in China. Besides, Mao was by then an old man, and the second war he undertook was far more difficult than the first: it was a war that had been raging in China for millennia. And it is still raging, as witness the contemporary situation in rural China. The monster Mao created and failed to destroy is still the foremost obstacle to transformation. “What China has now is the worst of a planned economy and the worst of capitalism.” This is the evaluation of Christine Wong, a university professor and specialist in Chinese local government (see the cover article of Time, 13 March 2006, p. 22). And what is the party apparat's proposed solution? Why, Confucianism, of course. While the Chinese brain may be syncretistic, it has a low aptitude for synthesis -- especially for synthesizing the unsynthesizeable. The general gist of this was prefigured for the cadres I talked with in Viet Nam during 1968; they knew the Cultural Revolution would fail, for they were the twice-dead; and they knew what that failure would mean: all the sufferings and sacrifices of the war -- that war, their war -- would have been for… what? But this is not only a Chinese problem, even were China not becoming a primo performer on the Globe Theater's spherical stage. For the worst of both worlds -- the planned economy and capitalism -- have the same agenda: forced-draft urbanization, universally viewed as equivalent to “development”. Move those farmers -- 900 million in China alone -- into the cities by cutting off their livelihood. This is the only way the economy can grow, be it by ten percent or two percent. When a choice must be made between the market and the society in which one lives, the market rules; when a choice must be made between the market and the planet on which one lives, the market rules. Forced-draft urbanization is being planetarized at an ever-accelerating rate. This is the same forced-draft urbanization used to create free-fire zones in Viet Nam -- matter of methods being largely incidental to the fact of forcing and the fact of urbanization. War is economics by other means; economics is war by other means. Politics is epiphenomenal on these spheres. Moreover, forced-draft de-urbanization -- a collective unconscious hysterical back-reaction orchestrated by the Khmer Rouge on the metric of free-fire zones maintained by B-52s -- was compensatory to the policy of forced-draft urbanization inflicted on Cambodian society. As planetarization of this method of “development” continues to ever-accelerate around the globe, what is to prevent a planetarization to the Whole Earth of the collective hysteria which drove Cambodian holocaust? Nothing. Certainly not politics. Nothing short of m-logically-valued monetary units.
I now learn (“The Resurrection of Al Gore” by Karen Breslau, Wired, May 2006, p. 145) I was wrong about Al Gore. He was doing something about climate change during the late-'70s: delivering climate-shift slide shows. This is admirable and I regret my asking where Gore was on this issue during the 1970s when some young meteorologists were concluding that the shift was already irreversible no matter what mankind did and others felt there was still some possibility things could be done to reverse it. In order to get a real feel for the thing, I recommend reading Tim Flannery's The Weather Makers: How Man is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth (Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005). An excellent accessible survey of recent technical literature in many involved fields is provided. But don't read the book to absorb Flannery's conclusions and recommendations; read it to absorb the information provided. Draw your own conclusions; make your own recommendations. For one thing, Flannery is not engaged with the fundamental theoretical issues of the science of meteorology -- or at least this book gives no evidence of that. Take what the book has to offer, which is nonetheless considerable. Without developing much in the way of page by page commentary, quotes, and citations, as there is much I find myself questioning -- but that is my problem -- I will briefly state what I see the book as documenting. The decisive phase-shift announcing climate change kicked off before Silent Spring was published, 1950 being the critical year. Quoting page 88:
They found that prior to 1950 there is little evidence of any trend, but since that date, right around the globe, a strong pattern has emerged… These trends accord so strongly with the scale and direction of temperature increases brought about by greenhouse gas emissions that Parmesan and Yohe's findings have been hailed as constituting a globally coherent “fingerprint of climate change.”
And on page 137 it is noted that “Perhaps the most marked change in hurricanes since around 1950 -- when global warming began to be felt -- is a change in their tracks.” On page 139 we find that:
After 1950, however, the story was very different, for they found abundant evidence that the burning of fossil fuels had not only caused a mean increase in temperature, but also decreased the temperature gradient from north to south, altered the temperature contrast between land and sea, and reduced the daytime temperature range.
By the early-1960s, the shift had become elaborate enough to be (p. 125):
The true origin of the Sahel [desertification] disaster… a single climatic variable was responsible for much of the rainfall decline: rising sea-surface temperatures in the Indian Ocean, which resulted from an accumulation of greenhouse gases.
To this single variable responsible for rainfall loss to the Sahel has now been added realization that (p. 126) “cooling of the ocean around Europe” due to “global dimming” by pollutants produced by Europe was also responsible. Flannery rightly points out that one must, therefore, conclude that the Darfur holocaust is one contemporary outcome of climate-shift.
Since the 1960s, there have been two subsequent phase shifts and a sliding spin off. Quoting page 84:
Climatologist Julia Cole refers to the leaps made by climate as “magic gates” and she argues that since temperatures began rising rapidly in the 1970s, our planet has seen two such events -- in 1976 and 1998. These dates are important, for again and again they mark the onset of remarkable phenomena.
It was the winter of 1976 that convinced some young meteorologists that the shift had become irreversible. The impact in the Cornell Meteorology Department at the time was sufficient to wrench the interest of some away from modeling severe local storms toward solar-terrestrial interactions and climate modeling. Intense discussions between this department and people then associated with the Cornell Neurobiological Behavior Laboratory. The sliding spin off came during the 1980s with the gathering evidence of widespread species extinctions. 1998 was decisive for the El Nino and La Nina cycle and associated pattern modulations. These days, it's mainly continuing extinctions, melting ice, coral reefs and Gulf Stream changes -- signatures of another phase shift. Over half a century since kick off and three or four -- depending on how you wish to count -- subsequent far-from-equilibrium transitions. The big transitions, once they come, are generally abrupt as lip of the cusp is reached, and once the cusp surface has been climbed off the equilibrium surface floor mere reductions in increases of values of forcing functions surely won't stop the climb to cusp lip, such climbs being largely self-driven wheels. Moreover, anthropogenic forcing could only be muscular in the early stages, if it is muscular at any stage, for somewhere well below the cusp lip so many other mutually interactive forcing functions become entrapped by the self-driven wheel that the initiating anthropogenic impulse must lose its muscularity -- which means any anthropogenic reductions in the amplitude of that impulse also must lose muscularity. If you look with a little bit of comprehension at the primitive equation set for dynamical meteorology, you quickly realize how far removed the actual controlling variables are from direct measurables. Equivalent potential temperature, for instance, is two levels of abstraction removed from being a direct measurable. This realization alone, is enough to give one pause. By the time the far-from-equilibrium phase transition has become elaborate enough to work its way down to direct measureables, the transition may already have become irreversible. That was 1950, over half a century ago, according to current evaluation of the direct measureables.
And this leaves aside altogether the fact that everything discussed in Flannery's book -- including general circulation climatic models -- assumes that the Earth's atmosphere is a classical domain to which the principles of relativity theory and quantum mechanics do not apply. During the 1970s, presentations by young meteorologists of modeling results based upon the contrary assumption were sufficiently destabilizing as to produce fistfights at the back of conference rooms. Related paper submissions were even more inflammatory, yielding the social equivalent to a volcanic eruption with pyroclastic flow. Such scholarly atmospherics remained largely innerdisciplinary. These days, there are even people arguing that the solar system itself is heating up. If that is the case, it certainly could have something to do with setting Earth-bound thermostats. Even so, anthropogenic signals could still play a significant role in determining the local effects of extraterrestrial forcing. Flannery mentions solar-terrestrial interactions, but, quoting an authority as to how there is no known mechanism by which sunspot cycles could influence Earth's climate, does not give it a significant role in the present climate-shift dynamic. Were such interactions to have such a role, that would almost certainly mean that relativistic-quantum processes are important factors in determining atmospheric behaviors. Such could not be the case, however, unless quantum and relativity physicists permitted it to be so, for they are the ones who mandate presence or absence of a “classical limit”. But non-atmospheric physicists are “not familiar with the equations of atmospheric physics” as John A. Wheeler confessed when sent during the mid-1970s a paper arguing that the Earth's atmosphere is not a classical domain. This was not a surprising response on Wheeler's part, for the hiatus is not anyone's personal problem; it is a problem in the structure of science and its institutionalization -- an institutionalization largely imposed by the political, economic, and social institutionalization of the Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm. Independent of atmospheric science, the classical limit is a confounded issue, as witness, for instance, explications offered in the last several books by Roger Penrose. Moreover, there is all manner of unconscious collective psychological insistence upon maintaining a classical limit for extra-scientific reasons.
Personally, I don't doubt the reality of greenhouse warming, or its severity. But I know I don't know how muscular, or muscular at what stage, anthropogenic forcing is -- or how muscular, or muscular at what stage, anthropogenic counter-forcing could be. Not to mention sufficiently muscular a counterforce as to bring about a reversal. I am very far from having expert knowledge, but one makes personal judgments nonetheless. Part of my personal judgment -- based on many factors -- is derivative of the conviction that the Earth's atmosphere is not a classical domain, so I think that a lot of basic science is at issue, going into domains of physics well beyond what is currently regarded atmospheric science proper, and that intelligent strategic responses are unlikely to come primarily through corporate technological innovation and a shift in patterns of venture capital flows. I am not opposed to such innovation or such a shift -- or to making gobs of money off the global crisis: keep on truckin' -- but it does seem extremely unlikely that this will turn out to have been an optimal strategic response, even though it may be for some an optimal personal response. For instance, transformation of traditional investment analysis, as Gore apparently believes, is not sufficient to factor other dimensions -- green dimensions -- of value into market micro-decisions. Early on, this transformation might vector venture capital flows as new areas offer first-starter advantage (after the fashion of muscular anthropogenic forcing at first rise from floor of the equilibrium surface in climb toward the cusp lip), and media muscle might, early on, strongly influence consumer discretionary spending -- pay more to be part of the current fad: buy a USD7,000 off-road bicycle -- but as the crunch comes and starts to bite into over-consumer hyper-affluence, the temporary alterations in market micro-behaviors of First Worlders intent on solving the problem by a change in style will flag -- for there is nothing in the market qua market capable of delivering sufficient incentives and sanctions to maintain those behaviors when the going gets tough and costs of participating in the media-reinforced morally-excoriated fad transcend the discretionary funds available to market micro-actors. The only way those other dimensions of value can be permanently factored into market micro-decisions, with support of the requisite incentives and sanctions, is with m-logically-valued monetary units tagged to externalities. And these cannot be implemented from the top down.
Yes, it is true that the metaphor of a self-driven wheel is a misnomer; but this leads into the issue of the “classical limit” -- whether or not Earth's atmosphere is a classical domain. The bestsellers in the current climate change debate do not appear to be written by meteorologists. That in itself is quite significant. And the policy people and venture capitalists are all speaking from 17th and 18th century memetime mind. Feedback -- positive in the self-driven wheel -- is not a “new paradigm” concept, no matter how much the policy people intone the mantra. As long as information has to propagate from a Point A to a Point B over a linear-memetime, the involved notion is old paradigm. The new paradigm replacement for feedback is non-simple identity and nonlocality: the EPR paradox. Not only is the center everywhere, every point is everywhere every point all ways and always -- spatially and temporally, that is (insofar as the space and time of spacetime are orientable and real-numbered, as opposed to complex- and hypercomplex-numbered, an issue Hawking broached). And physicists, when they turn away from their equations on the whiteboard, still speak of electrons as simply-identifiable entities requiring x-period of time to traverse x-distance. Turning away from the whiteboard, they are still in 19th century memetime mind. We are now 21st century and who has yet entered 20th century memetime mind? Clinton, for instance, was regarded an intellectual among his peers, an intellectual who recommended to his cohort Robert Wright's Nonzero (Vintage, 2000) as a point of access to new thinking about how the world ought to be run. But theory of games, be they zero-sum or nonzero-sum, is old paradigm thinking. John Nash was chemically convulsed because he hallucinated his Anima in projection and because -- quite reasonably -- he tried to communicate on her behalf with the Shadow via a dead drop. “Photic and post-death tropes” are essential concomitants to fundamental-breakthrough conceptualization. And the chemical convulsions were induced synchronistically just as Princeton University Press was beginning publication of volume after volume of C. G. Jung's Collected Works. Nash received a Nobel for finally acquiescing to compliance and producing “The Bargaining Problem” (Econometrica, 18, 1950). It was after writing this paper that his anima in projection went into hallucination, for he had engaged in massive “neutralization antagonizing forms of resistance” by producing the compliance document, thus cutting off his engagement with fundamental-breakthrough conceptualization. Final resolution came when chemically-induced convulsions rid the system of “photic and post-death tropes”. Game theory -- zero-sum and nonzero-sum -- assumes prisoners, an apt designation, with simple-identity: and thus is the “tragedy of the commons” manufactured. This type of ratiocination cannot possibly lead to optimum strategies for meeting the current array of ever-accelerating global dilemmas.
The problem is not science; it is scientists. No matter what their equations tell them, it has no effect on their personality structures. And given their unaffected personality structures, they choose to remain prisoners of the dilemmas of institutional structures uncorrelated with the worldview construct implied by their equations and the other “sublime mathematical structures” they discover. The problem is not finance; it is financiers. Whatever their financial analyses tell them determines their personality structures. And given the parameters of those personality structures, they choose only those innovations in financial instruments which are highly correlated with their personality structures. This is one expression of the reflexivity George Soros founded his approach to investment upon, but Sorosian reflexivity could not have been the whole story on market reflexivity for he did not make enough money to gift 37 billion dollars of discretionary funds to the foundation of Bill Gates' discretionary funds. And now Al Gore is trying to convince us that a greening of the hedge fund is the way to hedge the future of life on Earth -- and that this greening is to be achieved in Go-Go fashion. Partners in his investment Generation firm have all agreed not to take any profits for at least three years. Who can doubt that the time-step of this zero-sum decision was the result of non-traditional analysis of the time-step involved in the physical processes green hedging is projected to effectively hedge? The two time-steps, one must suppose, just simply had to have been arrived at by a high-correlation discovery made by non-traditional analysis. And if these time-steps are not highly correlated, what is to prevent the green hedge in due course from becoming green junk? Perhaps we should place our trust in Rubbish Theory, a big seller during the early period of Al Gore's climate-change slide shows.
Buddhist economics has a bad rep; we all know that. Even Buddhist societies no longer place their trust in it. But let me try to show the degree to which George Soros trended toward becoming a Buddhist financier and money market speculator in the early days when he bested the Bank of England. Probably as a result of exposure to Karl Popper's thought on “the liar's paradox” -- e.g., “this statement is false”: a self-referential proposition -- which later informed Popper's interpretation of the meaning of the wave-function in Schrödinger's wave equation, i.e., as indicative of “propensities” rather than the consensus “probability amplitudes”, Soros realized that market reflexivity must involve something more elaborate than mere feedback. With this realization Soros entered upon “new paradigm” thought in the areas of market behaviors and financial strategies. The non-traditional methods of financial analysis and strategy formulation Soros evolved out of this realization helped him best the Bank of England, an institution wedded to traditional methods of analysis. Quoting from Tranche 2 of the m-valued LETS website:
There does appear to be some connection between what George Soros calls market reflexivity and what I am calling -- by adapting quantum concepts of self-organization to monetary theory -- the relative-state of a reserve asset like the Composite Reserve Unit once associated by the French with Special Drawing Rights. Reflexivity is, essentially, the economic correlate of the n-body problem in physics. Human prescience, human nescience, and human moral fallibility, according to Soros’ concept, feed forward and feed backward, conditioning and multiply-conditioning market behavior in self-reinforcing fashion, both on the upswing and downswing of economic cycles, such that equilibrium prices are never met and markets are never cleared -- contrary to mainstream theory of laissez-faire markets. Soros suggests that moral suasion, appropriate legal frameworks, and satisfactorily empowered regulatory agencies, national and multilateral, can remove or substantially reduce market reflexivity, thus allowing market equilibrium conditions to emerge and stabilize. According to his own description, Soros’ initial insight into market reflexivity came in context of considering the logical paradoxes associated with self-referential statements. He regarded such statements as an indication of inherent human nescience concerning the functioning of systems -- which is sort of like Heisenberg’s indeterminacy or Gödel’s undecidability and is an issue of importance in the quantum theory of measurement. But there is another way to look at self-reference, a notion that over the past 30 years has played a significant role in attempts to unify quantum and relativity physics. Self-referential statements and processes may be interpreted as involving a breakdown in the traditional Western notion of identity -- as does quantum relative-state. Soros seems to regard reflexivity primarily as a negative factor, the effects of which need to be overcome, if order is to prevail. This is largely because market reflexivity is viewed in terms of information availability to market actors and time evolution of variables like price. Quantum relative-state, however, steps out of time evolution and notions of information exchange in such a way that the concept of equilibrium (derived in economics by analogy with thermodynamics) becomes indefinable. Relative-state could be considered reflexivity to the mth degree -- to the degree, that is, that self-identity undergoes a critical phase transition such that part and whole in systems can no longer be absolutely distinguished one from the other. Such relative-state of a system is holographic in nature, and the involved transparency in identity -- i.e., the fact that part and whole cannot be absolutely distinguished -- can be viewed as the fundamental impetus to spontaneous order, as, that is, the “magic hand”. In this conception, the “magic hand” is not self-interest, but self-transparency. If this is, indeed, the case, then “carriers” of reflexivity -- normally regarded as “externalities” -- can be tagged and these tags can be stacked on a currency base as a system-composite operative within the market mechanism and employed as part of a self-regulatory system. It is in this manner that I see m-logically-valued reserve and exchange units as system-composites in relation to market reflexivity.
Now readers of Unbounded Wholeness, a book on the “nonconceptual” logic of Buddhist and Bon Tzog-chen (Anne Klein and Geshe Tenzin Wangyal Rinpoche, Oxford, 2006) will be cognizant of the fact that “reflexive open awareness” is prerequisite to the recognition of unbounded wholeness -- the holographic property of the natural systems which greening of the hedge fund is projected by Al Gore as being capable of restoring. Soros, the financier and money market speculator, in contemplating the import of market self-referential reflexivity, and putting the results of that contemplation into action, took an important but preliminary step away from the consensus financier personality structure which establishes preferences as regards innovation in financial instruments -- and moved toward financially-engaged Buddhism. This is something the Dalai Lama could have no opposition to. Dependent Origination, the notion of conditionality espoused by Buddhism, has for long been interpreted to the larger population as a cause-effect time-evolutionary process, and limitation of market reflexivity to time-evolutionary feedback mechanisms is a related notion. Stepping behind the overt expression, however, as Soros did by contemplation of the self-referential propositions which are the basis of m-valued logics, lifts reflexivity out of time evolution and into holography. Buddhism has long since been aware of this dimension of reflexivity, but has not interpreted it for popular consumption. Perhaps the moment has arrived, that Ksana, that instant signified by the critical state life on planet Earth has arrived at. The Abhidhammabhajaniya section of the Sammohavinodani commentary on Vibhanga (see Appendix 1, to P.A. Payutto's Dependent Origination, Buddhadhamma Foundation, Bangkok, 1994) explicates Dependent Origination as transpiring in “one mind moment”, an explication which removes the time element and effectively makes the notion of Dependent Origination equivalent to identity-transparent quantum relative-state, which is a physics way of designating unbounded wholeness with a universal wave-function, however unapparent this might be so long as the wave-function is interpreted in relation to probability amplitudes and not m-valued logics. Not only was this recognized by some quantum physicists as being codified by F. von Hayek's notion of the superposed time-shapes of total capital stock, but it appears that such understanding is not too far off the radar screen of some contemporary Buddhist societies, as witness a recent monetary theory Ph.D. dissertation tendered to Harvard University by a Thai candidate (the dissertation was accepted and the author is presently working for The Bank of Thailand): Essays on Monetary Theory by Don Nakornthab (Harvard University, 2000). Though this highly mathematical dissertation does not mention Dependent Origination, it focuses upon the monetary policy implications of market reflexivity in such a way as to treat the corpus of involved reflexivities as inducing fast far-from-equilibrium phase transitions, which, in a manner of speaking, transpire in “one mind moment” of the market.
Contemporary policy people and some “new financiers”, say, believe that additional information -- green information -- must be brought to market actors, if present problems on planet Earth are to be adequately met. But this is a profoundly non-market-oriented notion. The green information, resident in externalities, needs to be brought, not to market actors, but to market mechanisms that generate market action-directives to which market actors respond. The attempt to bring the additional information directly to the actor is an attempt to bypass the “magic hand” which is the raison d'être of the market. To bypass market mechanisms with this additional information is to leave it free of the incentives and sanctions by which the market frames its action-directives. Absent such framing, there can be no “magic hand”. Bringing the information resident in externalities to market mechanisms can only be accomplished by monetary units -- both reserve and vehicle currencies. An electron in motion creates a field of magnetic event gradients in its wake. Money in motion pulls organization after itself. An atom in the old physics possessed simple-identity; it was itself-and-only-itself. An electron in the new physics possesses non-simple identity, or relative-state, a holographic property by which the unbounded wholeness of system qua system is manifest in each of its units undergoing constant exchange. In F. von Hayek's terms, the electron carries in its very identity the superposed time-shapes of total capital stock resident in the unbounded wholeness of the system qua system, any particular moment of that system being represented by a given time-shape. Contemporary monetary units do not possess this information carrying capacity, so the organization they pull after themselves by motion through markets does not mirror a highly integrated natural system. If you want to overcome ecological and climate change problems significantly created by economic activities, then you have to create an economic system which functions to a similar level of self-organizational competency as that of a highly integrated natural system -- and in order to do that, economic exchange units must carry superposed information after the fashion of an electron. The only way this can be achieved is by instituting m-logically-valued monetary units whereupon externalities are tagged to these m-values and stacked upon the currency base -- which, of course, would have to be an e-currency. Employment of such monetary units would carry the additional green information, not to market actors, but to market mechanisms generating market action-directives. The place for game theory is in computer gaming the process by which weighted tags are placed on the e-currency base by electronic referenda. Playing the game would be to “vote” in the given referendum: bottom-up implementation, not top-down imposition. The corpus of currency bases in such a monetary system full-blown would be multiples, nests nested within nests, and would correspond to what in Buddhism and Bon is called “the base state of Tzog-chen”. Working within such a monetary system, a huge range of financial-instruments innovation would open up, not otherwise available. Reform of open property funds would be one logical place to start. This was attempted in Cesky Krumlov, CR, but did not get very far because the requisite monetary units could not be put into place -- there being insufficient cooperation between the non-profit sphere (which should fund the preliminaries required to institute the monetary system) and the profit sphere (which should develop and utilize the implied financial instruments). The reason the requisite cooperation did not materialize is because the stakeholders could not adequately pull away from the prevailing personality structures establishing institutional preferences. And so it goes.
It is hard to see exactly how a greening of the hedge fund could possibly deterministically infer a greening of the firm, even under unabrogated 1T2 logic. Even by top-down imposed carbon-dollar trading. Surely a greening of the theory of the firm is a prerequisite. By now, everyone knows that old-type Theory-X firms -- top-down, like carbon dollars -- are ungreenable. But are new-type Theory-Y firms greening? Are they even greenable? And if they are not greenable, how could they mediate an adequate strategic response to climate change and related ecological dyscrasias? Swedenborg formulated an apt aphorism: To the degree one is in the form of Heaven, one is in Heaven. Same for the firm. Does Theory Y codify form in general process of Nature? I don't think so. I have a lot of respect for Booz Allen Hamilton because one of my early mentors took his graduate degrees at The Wharton School and moved on in 1964 to BAH. As a member of AIESEC, the business student exchange organization, I made several trips to Wharton during 1963 and 1964 to confer with him -- a member of the AIESEC national committee -- on the design of a proposed civil service traineeship program endorsed by Douglas Dillon in face-to-face meeting, but opposed by Senator Mundt, who sat on the Board of Advisors to AIESEC-US. Senator Mundt's opposition to this prospective international student-exchange program is highly relevant to the issues we address here, because it is an example of prevailing personality structures establishing inappropriate institutional preferences determining permissible and impermissible instrumental innovations. I was dragged onto the carpet of Mundt's office and harried vociferously. The legendary riot act was paced behind The Desk. Three lectures on laissez-faire capitalism were delivered. But I was implacable for I was traveling Washington and Wharton on a letter of introduction signed by HHH -- and I could not let him go unspoken. Though that was the end of the civil service traineeship program, it was not the end of my interest in theory of the service or theory of the firm. Theory of the service is deeply inter-related with theory of the firm -- particularly, as theory of corporate staffing under Theory X borrowed assiduously from theory of military staffing from at least as early as the American Civil War. Booz Allen Hamilton is mentioned here because of the DNA analogical model for theory of the firm produced by BAH consultants Gary Neilson and Bruce Pasternak. Results -- is the promise. This is a major step forward in the greening of Theory Y. But I would hasten to point out, being a co-author of a 1979 paper describing DNA as having a superconductant p-electron gas core, that the DNA they are analogically modeling to theory of the firm is only the DNA of molecular biology, not also that of quantum biochemistry. James Watson's bestseller recounting history of the discovery of the double-helix of DNA came out during 1968 while I was working at SRA/MACV-J2 studying the Viet Cong (political) Infrastructure (VCI). Several of the analysts I worked with read the book and many discussions developed wherein self-organizing processes of the VCI were compared in detail to the replicative activity of DNA as described by James Watson. But there were major lacuna -- clearly, no one-to-one mapping was possible. This is described in MOON. My contemplation of the mapping failure contributed significantly to development of the ideas which eventually emerged as my contribution to formulation of the mathematical model of superconductant DNA described in our paper.
Strategic Research and Analysis, MACV-J2, was not only a precursor of the Bin Laden Station -- with a similar personality profile and like history -- but was an early “skunk-works” project. And temperamentally, at least, I have always been a “mule”. Mules are catalysts; they can't really do anything on their own because the bore setting on their sawed-off mental Remington pump is too broad; they suffer from what the neurologists call “field-dependent digression”, a symptom of frontal lobe disease. The wide bore of this disease allows them to see connections where others don't. Living in the wide bore is a little bit like being unbounded wholeness. Everything in Buddhism is pathological to somebody. I was not the knowledge mule who created POLOB, Political Order of Battle, but we immediately resonated when we first met. He was the person who handed me a copy of Watson's book. POLOB went to skunk-works over the enemy strength estimates controversy provoked by Sam Adams (which eventually led to the Westmoreland versus CBS trial). POLOB underwent name change to SRA, Strategic Research and Analysis, and was physically moved out of CICV, Combined Intelligence Center, Vietnam, where it had self-generated-from-below by the evolved practices of a “community of practice” -- that is to say, it was sequestered, removed from direct day-to-day, face-to-face, across-the-desk contact with Vietnamese at the Combined Center and the Joint General Staff compound physically adjacent, and, thus, was largely ignored. It was isolated by way of apparent promotion: kicked up to MACV Headquarters itself where it could be assiduously, effectively, and resolutely dissed: LIMDIS and NODIS. This “move” gave it enormous discretion and no influence. It had major access, could go anywhere and do pretty much whatever it liked. I -- for various administrative reasons, separation of promotion allocations between admin and operations, an unpromoteable E-5 who had turned down the offer of a direct commission -- always, for instance, traveled in civvies on classified courier orders. Civvies, because I was doing things only a captain or a major normally would do, and civvies provided cover. Walking and talking the rounds, servicing the “community of practice” that spanned the PIOCCs and DIOCCs in the field I had earlier touched bases with while a member of TID, Technical Intelligence Detachment, of the 525th MIG (Military Intelligence Group). TID had a very small number of personnel, a three-person admin office in a hotel in downtown Saigon, and several operatives in each province of South Vietnam frequently interfaced with personnel detached to the field by J-2, the intelligence branch, of the VNAF, Vietnamese Armed Forces, JGS, Joint General Staff (which was physically located adjacent to CICV). Anyone familiar with Theory X of the firm will recognize the walking and talking as exemplary of two historically famous approaches to management under Theory X. Face-to-face was necessary in those days, when, in spite of the MACV mainframes and the IDHS, Intelligence Data Handling System, there was not enough computing power and IT to mount Theory-Y-type “jams” and “wikis”. Yes, there were people at SRA who had read Douglas McGregor's classic: how could you get through Harvard Law School in the early-'60s (taking Kissinger's course on National Security Policy) specialized in corporate structure and bankruptcy law, otherwise; or, for that matter, get a Masters in PPE from the London School of Economics without reading the prevailing masterpieces? These were the backgrounds of two of my fellow analysts at SRA. We had all weaseled our way in by hook and crook -- which is the nature of skunk-works.
Walking the walk and talking the talk was a simulation, within our administrative and information management bureaucracy, of similar processes carried out within the commo-liaison system of the VCI -- only, I could get on aircraft at a moment's notice with my classified courier orders and empty hand-cuffed briefcase and Bianci shoulder holster, while Mai Thi Vang had to be led from one commo-liaison station to the next by teenaged girls slinging gui, rattan backpacks, and finding their ways through the bomb-damaged ripped landscape with flashlights wrapped in gauze. This is an important contrast because it illustrates that even improvements on Theory-Y-type organizations, as was the VCI, don't require elaborate technologies, as is the prevailing opinion today. If memory serves, Sam Adams wrote the definitive American intelligence account of the VCI commo-liaison system. My functional-element focus was the Organization Section at each echelon of the VCI -- but I wrote no definitive account because Why waste the time? under LIMDIS and NODIS? Too much to be learned, for larger purposes than this measly war! And I'm starting to become a short-timer. Time's a wastin'! Another property of mules is their ear-flapping stone-winnich insolence: part of the disease of always being in wide bore. The turning point for my theorizing the service and the firm came during several weeks debriefing Tran Van Dac. I've told this story before, but it bears retelling from a somewhat different angle in the present context. Tran Van Dac -- who fed a line to Bob Oberdorfer, misvectoring his book Tet -- was the commander at the time of Tet-'68 of the administrative sub-unit of COSVN encoded K-1, geographically one of the pie-shaped sub-regions encircling Saigon. Soon after General Tran Van Tra and Dac rapidly evacuated the headquarters site of K-1, it was overrun by ARVN troops who captured intact its whole document store, a cache containing deep historical memory. Once translated by CDEC, Combined Document Exploitation Center, located within the CICV compound adjacent to the JGS compound, they all ended up in huge piles on and around my desk. I spend three months studying these documents and produced, among other things, what was known as the “superchart” (provided along with each copy of MOON, with flaws: no matter how many times I sent it back to the printer, they always got it wrong, which tells you something). It was a highly-documented (no box, line, or color placed on the chart without many substantiating documents) generic line-and-block-chart representation of the total apparat of the VCI in the South including every echelon, presented in a single image. By current theory of the firm, this chart mapped the silo structuring, ad hoc committee framework, and matrix (party cell, chapter, committee webwork) overlay articulation of the VCI, along with its military and Front lateral extensions (“extended organizational form” in today's theory of the firm). I was rather proud of that chart, but I was even more proud of the series of historical charts I had developed, from the deep historical memory contained in the document cache, to map the world-line of organizational phase transitions leading to the K-landscape (oh yes, I am going to get to Stuart Kaufman's nk-fitness landscape, which was first developed to map codon behaviors of DNA: the collective unconscious is an amazing plenum when it comes to playful synchronicities) of the VCI in the Saigon-Cholon-GiaDinh-BienHoa area used to mount the Tet-'68 offensive on Saigon. This collection of world-line charts illustrated what, in parlance of today's theory of the firm, is called the process of “disaggregation” undertaken by the VCI in shifting from the Stage of Contention to the Stage of General Counter-Offensive of the war, such far-from-equilibrium transitions being adaptive responses to environmental changes, changes, that is, in the field of the combat, as implemented relative to the Greater SMA, Saigon Metropolitan Area. This is important because superconductant DNA is a pulse-code receiver and transmitter; it responds to changes in its ambient radiation field. Introduction to Field Theory in Sociology: that's what it was! Except that this particular case of disaggregation was in many respects simultaneously a hyper-aggregation -- which confused my 1T2-logical mind, if not its brain. MR-4, Military Region 4, the responsibility of Tran Bach Dang, Mai Thi Vang's husband, had been disaggregated into multiple smaller subunits, and new horizontal and vertical administrative boundaries had been established, with all the involved new geographical boundaries, personnel reallocations, new mission statements and job descriptions, new recruitment procedures, and tax structure levies and collection procedures, new accounting practices, and so on and so on, endlessly into transfinite classes of minutia, it seemed, while -- woe is me -- the new subunits were pushed up the echelon hierarchy to sub-COSVN status: there was no flattening of the organization, no removal of rungs of the ladder, while the benefits of having done so nonetheless seemed to have accrued to the system. Indeed, new rungs had been added, while the silos (multiple chains of command and distinct information flow channels) were even more multiplied into evermore parallelism, yet processes transpiring within the silos were streamlined by mechanisms like reverse-representation which were, in critical areas, rolled over onto the party webwork overlays and out across the extensions. Wholy-moly! What is that? Ever seen that before? But, hey, they probably just didn't know what they were doing, right? Weren't they so screwed up they couldn't even get the offensive off the ground at the same time all across the country? Yeah, they were just confused. I knew it. But, high and behold, another amazing thing happened on the way to the superconductant DNA paper. During the period of the May Offensive, Tran Van Dac became a rallier. There were transfer orders and many other categories of bureaucratic minutia stamped with his alpha-numeric codes in the captured cache going back over ten years. He'd carried some of his papers along with him as his career had unfolded. Why didn't the sky fall? Now I could talk personally with the man whose professional communications I, by then, knew virtually by heart. So, when the MACV PIOs, Public Information Officers, and Don Oberdorfer, finished with Dac -- shows you MACV priorities -- I carried along to the debriefing sessions my cache of world-line charts as a visual aid to the discussions. Visual aids were emphasized in Special Forces Training Group and I never forgot that. Dac and I didn't talk Theory X and Theory Y, of course. I won't recount the discussions, as they would bore you to tears. Nothing but minutia, minutia, minutia. Dac immediately recognized how proud I was of my charts. He always winced when I brought them out, but tolerated them until late in the period of debriefings, when, for one or another reason, he could no longer stomach them. He lashed into me, telling me that the charts gave the wrong impression, that things didn't work anything like the charts indicated, that, if I didn't get rid of the charts, I'd never understand what I wished to understand. It was a rabbit punch, not only to the solar plexus of my ego, but to my enteric nervous system's projections to the lumbar spine. I was not only pounded back in the chair, I was clamped down into a slump. We went round and round and round. I abandoned every other aspect of the debriefings, focused right in trying to understand what he was talking about. The facts were right and many, but the picture was wrong. My head hurt. Nothing made sense! And the debriefing sessions ended like that. The slough of despair. What were these people all about?
I didn't give it up, however. I left Viet Nam and the Army soon thereafter. But before leaving Saigon, I tried to set something up. People remaining in SRA agreed to work on the Chieu Hoi Ministry to try to liberate Dac, if I could get something going back in Washington. So, through contacts at Human Sciences Research, Inc., a just-inside-the-beltway think tank with Viet Nam research contracts, I worked out an arrangement whereby application to DOD would be made in someone else's name -- a person with the required academic credentials -- for a project to debrief Dac for a year in the PI. There was no problem in Saigon. It appeared to be set. Everyone felt DOD would go for it. But, to make a short story shorter, it appears someone in DOD leaked to a major news magazine the story that Dac was to soon head a Chieu Hoi delegation to the Paris Peace Talks. We all fell for it, and the project was abandoned. I later learned there had never been any prospect of Dac going to Paris. I approached several universities to feel out whether or not it would be possible to simultaneously study quantum physics and political science relative to what I had learned about the VCI. My impression after the interviews was that I would be able to do this after completing a standard post-doc -- if I was willing to do it on my own dime in my own good time. So, I decided to abandon everything up through the post-doc and do it on my own dime in my own good time. And I've been doing that ever since. The only clue I had came, not from post-doc studies, but from post-high-school studies. The summer after graduation, I had spent six weeks with a friend of my mother -- my mother had a stroke during the period of my interrogation of Dac, and soon thereafter died, causing me to leave Viet Nam prematurely -- who was a child psychologist, and she had walked me through a first reading of Heinz Hartmann's Ego Psychology and the Problem of Adaptation. This was the classic from the 1930s which had launched the Structural Theory that had come of age during the 1950s. This book treated structures as functions automatized. Adaptation involved deautomatization of structures to functions and their re-automaization back to different structures. Functions were primary, not structures, which were disposable. Maybe Dac and his buddies thought in terms of functional requisites, not structural architectures. This thought seemed to make some sense out of his protestations over my structurally-oriented charts. So I started thinking about the multiple functions of roles and their mappings across the matrix overlays, silos, modules, extensions. And these mappings, in my bureaucratic world-picture, took on the properties of function-spaces and fields, in neurology known under the rubric of "distributed functions". I also knew that there were other sorts of "silos" bridging other sorts of matrix sheets and modules in various natural systems: architectonics of the brain's cortex, the Gulf Stream waterfalls, tornadoes in the earth's atmosphere, metabolic-pathway cascades disturbed in pathogenesis of degenerative disease. By intent and happenstance I ended up studying these in one way or another, with one mentor or another, eventually learning something about the bridged multi-sheeted Riemann surfaces and m-valued logics necessary to understand the multiple functions of roles and their spaces. This was later mapped onto monetary theory. But all along I had sensed that there was something missing from this picture that was critical, and that it related to the effects of the criticism/self-criticism session upon the whole unbounded cognitive expanse -- the “culture” in current theory-of-the-firm jargon -- of the organization. Criticism/self-criticism, with its history back through utopian socialism and into Christian monastic practice, was an assault on the ego of the participant. Ego psychology and the problem of adaptation, indeed. Animism! Multiple functions of roles and what Weberian sociologists disparagingly call “parallelism” can only work well when the involved people experience non-simple identity and view the world in terms of such. Identity transparency between subject and object, self and other, and every other pair in the set of binaries. Ah, the mapping problem -- no one-to-one correspondence -- in all those discussions at SRA/MACV-J2 of correlations between DNA replication and VCI dynamical transitions. This recognition was the trigger for the notion that the frequency response window of superconductant DNA is a signifier for immunological self-identity, which quantum-mechanically speaking is a superposition, not a singlet, and can be properly handled only under m-valued logics. This observation led to the speculation that the immune system could collapse without the DNA molecule being subjected to ionizing radiation, oxidative processes, or discrete disease vectors. Later yet, when I ran across Kaufman's nk-fitness landscape, I was taken aback by the “k”, because I immediately knew it was an attempt to represent the index of holographic identity-transparency prevalent in the system-state, absent recourse to m-valued logics: k is the factor representing the number of correlations allowed between the elements, numbered to n. For DNA, n is 4: the four nucleotide pair codons taken three at a time; thus k equals 3. Kaufman found that as k increases in computer models of general systems, the ability of the system to transit to self-organized criticality is lost. SOC can be achieved only at low k-values. This is a denial of the roles of identity transparency, unbounded wholeness, and the sociality of animistic states of identity transparency in facilitating self-organizing processes in nature. My conclusion is that Kaufman's conclusion is due to the fact that he limits his modeling to systems with 1T2-logical properties: the elements of the system must be either on or off. Makes sense: k subverts the individualism of the polar opposites, and therefore would not be long tolerated by a 1T2 system as its index increases, thus inculcating, by ever greater degrees, a polar transparency. Breakdown of ability to transit to SOC is one sort of cusp catastrophe. Conclusion: the more successfully you elaborate mechanisms of sociality in a Theory-Y-type organization with participants who experience only simple-identity, the closer you bring the organization to cusp catastrophe where SOC becomes impossible. The system will rebel against the initiative because the critical variable is not being fulfilled. Under m-logically-valued systematics, however, what the neurologists call "gradiential distributed functions" -- without, however, their yet seeing the necessity of m-valued logics -- enter the picture, the fuzzy-set elements of the system being permitted to assume any fuzzy state, and the higher the k-value the greater the level of self-organizational competency, for the “magic hand” is not self-interest but self-transparency, and no matter what the order of k, it always has its place on the m-logically-valued reference space, which is the base state of Tzog-chen. Thus, the indication is: find ways to mirror m-logically-valued states of animistic identity-transparency in theory and practice of the firm and the service and you will have begun a greening of the firm and a greening of the service.
Yes, there is a double-bind here, but though it cannot be resolved in 1T2-logic terms, it can be transcended. Periodically entering µTm-states of identity-transparency is difficult enough, let alone sustaining such states in a non-supportive environment. This is not even possible for a spiritual Hercules, as Aurobindo maintained, not by assertion or authority, or even by spiritual experience, but by formal logic of the case which is the case of all cases including itself: Matte-Blanco's The Unconscious as Infinite Sets. The meaning of the Buddha's renunciation: acknowledgement of a framework law: quantum relative-state. This is the foundational notion of “unbounded wholeness”, its base state. By what means could any “reflexive open awareness” violate it? Induction by the median state will pull even the spiritual Hercules back from the “heights”: these were the words used by Aurobindo. The Buddha renounced the final state of Buddhahood until all others had attained it: the basis for Mahayana engagement. Make the firm the base state. Speaking from the 1T2 position, the position of Mahayana engagement, you can't create the supportive environment without sustaining the state, and you can't sustain the state without creating the supportive environment: Bateson's schizophenogenic inducer in theory and practice of the firm's greening. In 1T2 general systems, by Kaufman complexity, self-organized criticality is attainable only at low k-values over long iterative trains. But low indices of correlation preclude incorporation of externalities: “extended organizational form” of the firm cannot proceed by incorporation of identity, which exclusion undermines integrity and integration of culture of the firm. Financial stakes in outsourcers in lieu of “relationships of trust” to insure maintenance of mutual interest: corporate culture of the contract and the leveraged buyout. This is why there is the practice of koans: address this problem at its foundations, on the base state of the firm. But these koans are not just Zen word tangles practiced in the artificial environment of the sangha. Koans can be framed in relation to any sense modality, and cross-modally so as to inculcate synaesthetic apperception, which is p-adic (polyadic) rather than monadic. With p-adic calculi comes the m-logically valued. Each traditional Japanese art form, for instance, presented the practitioner with a koan of the practice appropriate to its form, and in conformance with laws of form: Here, take these specific materials, follow this recipe of rules (kata) and execute the flower arrangement with absolutely unfettered spontaneity; here, string this bow, which cannot be strung by mere application of physical force, then hit the bull's-eye without looking at the target; here, overpower strength of the adversary by employment of your weaknesses. Each koan posits validity and utility of the 1T2-logical Fallacy of Contradiction. This is explicit, and the traditional exoteric resolution of the koan generally came by means of rotation of opposites: which the tai chi symbol signifies: rotational 1T2 logic (and the appearance of imaginary numbers -- kami dust-sparks: Kusama dots -- upon rotational mappings over ma, sacred space). Culture of the firm has to embody base state of the firm. How is that? By esoteric aspects of the koan, which are in the field of its expressions: positing validity and utility of the 1T2-logical Fallacy of Undistributed Middle. Without validity or authenticity of this fallacy, which invokes µTm logic, workforce of the firm is excluded. What does your exclusion exclude? asked the Third Voice in MOON. No mere gradient; no mere fuzziness; no mere grey scale: these are 1T2-logical pictures of µTm identity transparency: correct insofar as they go. There is no flattening here; no disaggregation: on every point is stacked signifiers of every other point -- over ma, sacred space, the most-dense sheet of which is the base state. This -- not in the case, but in the set of all sets of the case, including the case itself -- is invocation of µTm states of identity transparency, a collective occasion of experience. How could an absolutely-in-so-far-as-distinct individual experience identity transparency? Look for identity transparency in one's own experience? Hmmmm. Not only did execution of the flower arrangement have to transcend the built-in double-bind, but the final expression had to capture p-adic references spread out across the whole cultural field: materials, color, line, form, articulation, texture -- each of these were tropes, tropes extended beyond text and intertextuality, beyond words and the reach of word pointing, even word pointing by mantric poetry (why else sustain forms of plastic and aural art?); they had metareferential reach; being multi-utilities, they signified metaphysical values established by feeling-into and stacked on the base state, and they did so echoingly, thus tying all concrete expressions into a meta-meaning unbound to particulars, generals, generals of general cases. These meta-meanings were instantly recognized by all as possessing gei (unspeakably “suchness” -- transcending isness and is-notness), thus helping to establish and reinforce by facilitation long-range phase correlations within and between brains: facilitative metareferential phylacteries tuning to the same superposed frequency-response windows. By culture of the sangha, one could practice the practices behind koan by sitting, by tea, by flower and bow, by sweeping and pulling pine needles, by sword and jujitsu, by placing stones in the garden and in the garden of life of the sangha. These shapes of style in practices of the practice behind koan are not their substance; it is substance, not shapes of style, which can be analogically embodied in theory and practice of a greening firm. In Southeast Asia, for instance, before Western incursion, there were no 1T2-logical geographic boundaries; where inside could not be absolutely distinguished from outside, where boundaries were unbound, incorporation of identity in “extended organizational form” proceeded by gaming: the metareferential tropes of cockfighting, human chess, poetic duals, and children's games. In the Japan of the traditional Japanese house, tatami mat cut-outs metrically framed to a standard unit length were moved around a base-state dimensioning grid by all members of the family, including the children, until the most appropriate arrangement was obtained: the design of the modular design system was so sophisticated every detail of space articulation and structure was determined by the mat arrangement. The mat arrangement was handed to the carpenter; “architect” designed the design system by cosmographic analogical modeling over ma, sacred space. These were the prevailing “jams” and “wikis”. Consensus emerged from playing the game (animistic forms of national liberation warfare, as conducted in Viet Nam, owed much to the unconscious residue deposited by these “strategy” games). Referenda, not on issues, but on strategies; not by voting but by gaming. Games as intermediators of identity transparency; multiple functions of roles; parallelisms; superimpositions; constantly shifting modules and matrix overlays; constantly changing boundaries, boundary changes simulating band-pass fractal boundaries in “organizational adaptation by resource exchange across boundaries without boundary: cellular plasmahaut as the null set, a set of holes”. VirFut Q-Pro is such a game in modern guise, µTm-logic multiple scenarios strategic planning computer gamed. It would be written in generic software modules. Replace the generic modules with one set of proprietary modules and you have an in-firm strategic planning game that can be played by all participants in “extended organizational form” of the firm. The multi-utilities and metareferential reach of such a game would be unbounded over culture of the firm. Replace the generic set of software modules with another set of proprietary modules and the game can be used to arrive at consensus on weighting of tags to be stacked on m-logical values of currency bases. Modulation of proprietary modules can interface strategic planning game of the firm with strategic planning game of the monetary system. Argentina, where local currencies spontaneously emerged in response to systemic monetary crisis, is again an innovator pointing the way. Argentina's GDP warrants are a significant step in the direction of m-logically-valued monetary units. Stacking values on a currency base can be thought of in relation to GDP warrants (see The Economist, 8 April 2006, p. 73), an innovation employed by Argentina to generate an additional income stream over the bonds issued to cover its debts. These are securities tagged to the differential between GDP growth-rate projection and future performance. Gravitating toward m-logically-valued monetary units in wake of a crisis. Any indicator, not only economic indicators, could be thus tagged. In the case of m-logically-valued monetary units, however, what the indicator would be tagged to would not be a variable-income security, but one of m-values initially stacked on a reserve-currency base like the old French-proposed Composite Reserve Unit, and later on vehicle e-currency bases: thus can externalities be internalized to the market by identity incorporation in extended organizational form of the service and the firm. These are examples of how the substance of the practices of the practice behind the koan can be practiced by greening firm and greening service.
I am not trying to defend Mao or in any way justify all the killing and upheaval which transpired on his watch. But put the onus where it actually belongs: the Theory-X-type service. Mao was one man, even if a personality-cult man -- and how could anyone, doing what he did, in a society that so overwhelmingly institutionally embodies in Confucian world-construct the psychological transference (described in its many dimensions by C.G. Jung) as do the Chinese, possibly escape becoming a personality cult? Take the transference as it congealed around a Rajneesh, say, and multiply it by a factor of one billion. Just try to imagine the psychological wherewithal required to deal with all that. What he tried to do and what actually happened are two different things. An intensely hierarchical Confucian organization, superposed by a largely-Leninist webwork, stood between him and implementation of any initiative he might have taken. When Western academics and media stigmatize Mao personally for what actually transpired, they reinforce legitimacy of the Theory-X-type service through which he had to implement, and which still rules China today. As The Economist points out (“How to Make China Even Richer”, 25 March 2006, p. 11), Mao, from as early as 1940, made clear his intent to undertake authentic land reform whereby the peasants would obtain actual private ownership of the land they tilled. It didn't turn out that way because the Theory-X-type service subverted the actual intent of the “land to the tiller” initiative. And this was inevitable, given the nature of such a service. Only the highly proprietary internal CCP party-affairs archives, which only party political-affairs officers have ever had access to, contain information adequate to assess the degree to which Mao and those close to him anticipated this problem in the period post-1940. And this would be readable only via synoptic qualitative assessment of minutia, minutia, minutia -- the bureaucratic nuts-and-bolts documents viewed en masse: personnel transfer orders, new job descriptions and functional-element mission statements, new administrative and geographic boundaries, changes in recruitment policies and vehicles, institution of reverse representation, creation of new echelons, creation of new agencies, reorganization of agencies within an echelon, changes in taxation structures and procedures, details of changes in the relationship between the party, civil administration, and the military -- and, in the days before 1949, modulation of the front organizations employed and how they were transformed into the pre-government transitional committee formats, and later the post-revolutionary civil administration. No Western academic has ever been in a position to make an actual assessment. Judging from the Vietnamese case, where such documents in their millions, as captured enemy documents from the period before 1975, have been available to Western academics -- but largely unused by them -- it is highly likely that the jockeying began in the late-1920s and rose to a crescendo in the late-1960s, with periodic fulminations, also rising in intensity over that period. I knew something of what to look for when I came into proximity of such documents in Viet Nam because of brief prior engagement with two men. During 1963-4, I was fortunate enough to have several discussions at SORO, AU's Special Operations Research Office, with Lord Lindsey of Bircher, who had been along with Mao on the Long March, and still received Christmas cards from him. It was in these discussions that I learned some history of the pao chia defensive system of village and city neighborhood voluntary associations and how they deteriorated, spawning the Tongs, long before the appearance of Mao. This precedent was powerful, and prefigurative -- even if the extended organizational forms took on a modern guise during the period of Mao's watch (thus becoming largely responsible for gestating what became the Cultural Revolution). Later, in Tokyo at Christmas of 1967, fresh from the Mekong delta with Technical Intelligence Detachment, 525th Military Intelligence Group, a tenure terminated by multiple-fragment wounds, I met a man who had been a Japanese intelligence officer in North China during the late-1930s -- a behind-the-scenes leader, in 1967, of the Japanese anti-Vietnam-war movement. Reflections on bitter experience had taught him a lot. We talked of the failed Japanese attempt to turn the pao chia system back against itself. I came away from these discussions aware that Japanese intelligence did not intensely study the minutia, minutia, minutia of the bureaucratic nuts-and-bolts documents they captured. Their focus, like that of the later American intelligence effort in Viet Nam, was largely placed upon policy-type documents, which reveal little of what is required to make an actual assessment. The success of pao chia against the Japanese -- like the much earlier deterioration to the Tongs -- was also precedent setting for the Chinese and carried enormous inertia and a certain legitimating influence in its wake. All of this, Taoist Mao, the personality cult, was up against.
Where do you think factionalism within the Viet Cong (political) Infrastructure (VCI) apparat came from? Many sources, of course, but one very big factor involved the “land to the tiller” issue, which the Southern cadres were particularly committed to. But they had heard of “Truong Chinh's” -- another imputation of personal responsibility for failure -- land reform in the North during the 1950s. And this vectored their assessment of the Cultural Revolution in China, and its implications for postwar Viet Nam. The Southern apparat had evolved a different approach, which was embodied in the decentralized dynamics embedded in their organization as they had brought it up largely independently in the immediate period post-1956 when the North was telling them to hold back -- and which the North spent the remainder of the war recapturing control over, ridding the organization of as much local autonomy as it could. A price was paid for this “ridding” in immediate aftermath of the war, and extending through initiation of the doi moi renovation movement (orchestrated by leadership remnants of the Southern VCI). The VCI, by employing a combination of incurred debt, corvée, barter, piasters, and MPC (U.S. military payment currency) in their taxation structures and procedures, evolved a low-tech ad hoc monetary system where “price” -- the conveyor of information in the market -- was a superposed quantity (and which, though they certainly didn't think of it in any way like this, thereby simulated certain aspects of a superposed quantum wave-function over the unit of exchange). This, I believe, evolved largely by cognitive osmosis from animistic decision algorithms prevalent for well over a thousand years in the bao giap, the village voluntary associations, which the VCI infiltrated and subverted in building up their organization: it owed nothing, in its origins, to the largely-Leninist webwork overlay of the party. Moreover, the tax system, with its superposed wave-function over the unit of exchange, was mapped on geographical and administrative boundaries in near-constant topological motion by ongoing adaptation to a changing combat environment. Boundaries were modulated -- and every bureaucratic administrative variable changed in the wake such modulations -- in order to facilitate operational requirements, which resolved to differential resource (manpower and materiel) exchange across those boundaries: just as a biological cell accomplishes adaptation by resource exchange across its cellular boundary by an active-transport system (electron-transport chains) with band-pass properties orchestrated by electronic means at bonding-exchange sites, and which in many ways acts like a fractal boundary, a plasmahaut, a boundary-without-boundary phase-barrier between unstructured and structured water (leitmotiv of Gilbert Ling's career as a cell biologist). The VCI cellular-organization case was primitive in the extreme by comparison to a biological cell, but it nonetheless simulated many of the essential features of biological adaptation: these features were the subject of discussions at SRA/MACV-J2 comparing DNA replication with VCI organizational dynamics, discussions facilitated by the reading of James Watson's popular book of the time.
In the same editorial referred to above, The Economist says of the present situation in rural China (p.11):
Now is the time to revive Mao's vision of a new landowning order. This would ease rural strife, fuel growth and help develop the genuine market economy the leadership claims to want. Giving peasants marketable ownership rights, and developing a legal system to protect them, would bring huge economic benefits. If peasants could mortgage their land, they could raise money to boost its productivity. Ownership would give them an incentive to do so. And if peasants could sell their land, they could acquire sufficient capital to start life anew in urban areas. This would boost urban consumption and encourage the migration of unproductive rural labour into the cities. For China to sustain its impressive growth rate and reduce inequalities, getting the many tens of millions of underemployed peasants off the land and into wealth-creating jobs is essential. The exodus would help those left behind to expand their land holdings and use them more efficiently. [emphasis added]
No government, least of all the control freaks who run China, would embark on such a momentous exercise lightly. Communist Party ideologues are all too aware that a failure to handle rural issues properly can be destabilizing. They worry that allowing peasants to sell their land could restore a rural landowning class, and that peasants would sell up in huge numbers and descend upon ill-prepared cities, throwing up shanty towns and pushing up crime.
The emphasized portion of the quotation is a restatement of the near-universal policy of “forced-draft urbanization” in preparation for agro-industrialization, which has contributed immeasurably to many aspects of the prevailing global crisis. It is also largely, or at least by implication, the recommendations made by Hernando de Soto in The Mystery of Capital. Moreover, in the remainder of the editorial, The Economist provides no actual workable suggestions as to how the Chinese government could carry out such a “momentous exercise” without provoking “destabilizing” events. What say the old VCI from their graves of almost forty years ago? With the elaborate technology now available, create LETS (Local Exchange Trading Systems) with taxation structures and procedures, land titling, financial instruments, and other legal infrastructure, in evolution over a sophisticated monetary system where “price” -- the conveyor of information in the market -- is a superposed quantity, and which thereby simulates certain aspects of a superposed quantum wave-function over the unit of exchange. Let the tax system, with its superposed wave-function over the unit of exchange, be mapped on geographical and administrative boundaries in near-constant topological motion by ongoing adaptation to a changing economic environment. Let these boundaries be modulated -- and every bureaucratic administrative variable change in the wake such modulations -- in order to facilitate operational requirements of the service and the firm, which modulations will resolve to differential resource (plant, labor, capital, raw materials) exchange across these boundaries: just as a biological cell accomplishes adaptation by resource exchange across its cellular boundary by an active-transport system (electron-transport chains) with band-pass properties orchestrated by electronic means at bonding-exchange sites, and which in many ways acts like a fractal boundary, a plasmahaut, a boundary-without-boundary phase-barrier between unstructured and structured water (leitmotiv of Gilbert Ling's career as a cell biologist). Depending upon what values (tagged to indicators of externalites) are superposed on the units of exchange employed by the LETS, will this or that macro-behavior be encouraged or discouraged by market-mediated incentives and sanctions. Begin implementation from below, so that consequences of the inevitable mistakes will be limited in extent and duration until the requisite learning-through-use has transpired. Let each society which tries to use this means arrive, by its own characteristic devices of choosing -- how centralized, how decentralized, for instance -- at which indicators to employ for superposition upon the LETS exchange units. In due course, the appropriate devices for each society will evolve in situ.
Yes, indeed, it's more complicated than that; but the basic idea has to make an initial registration. By virtue of belief in the spontaneous self-organization of natural systems by unbounded self-transparency, I am fundamentally more libertarian than the most unregenerate Libertarian who believes no government is the best government, for I believe governance per se, of whatever type, is a self-fulfilling prophesy. But the human species has had governance, and predominantly governance of the worst types, since at least the last ice age. Regardless of the press and urge elicited by climate-change events and the like, think in terms of centuries relative to a fundamental human phase shift and millennia for overcoming the effects sustained from long subjection to governance. This governance has habituated human brain functions such that, for instance, bringing up m-logically-valued monetary units from below, though mandated by the involved systemic requisites, cannot actually be brought up from below because of the human factors involved: too great a complement of prescriptively enculturated inertias. Any such attempt would be like yanking people out of prison schools and immediately dropping them into Summerhill free-school. It wouldn't work; the notorious “destabilizing events” would dominate the attempted transition, and there would be a back-reaction into greater centralized control than characteristic of the prior state (this is the “Weimar effect”): so there is a double-bind involved here, too. In order to actually accomplish such a monetary system transition, it has to be worked both from above and below simultaneously. So as to address the climate-shift crisis, post-peak oil dynamics, and so on, think of an initial just-in-time minimally-adequate phase shift with open-ended possibilities for improvement built in. The set of levels of self-organizational competency possible is open and roughly correlated -- relative to monetary dimensions -- with orders of logical-value that can be stacked on monetary units, m in the case under discussion. The possibility of improvement is built in. Look at China, a big player in determining whether or not the human species does or does not -- a double negative speaks for the side of hope, as we all learned in elementary arithmetic -- respond in minimally-adequate optimal strategic fashion to the multifaceted global crisis, and look at her relative to the top-down, bottom-up double-bind issue. Does China have a centralized or decentralized political system? Neither, is the correct answer: it has a very effective “Mutt and Jeff routine” that has evolved within fractionated party organs over a long period of time. Everybody knows that; it is characteristic of the bureaucratic form, a fact that has been understood and expertly exploited since the 1930s. The Lenin associate Willi Muenzenberg worked this out in relation to united fronts long ago, as explicated, for instance, by Lenin in What Is To Be Done? and Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder: the minimum-maximum program, which can also be run as the maximum-minimum program. Depending on the nature of the case: advocate the minimum, deliver the maximum; advocate the maximum, deliver the minimum. The way to make this a workable program is to separate as widely as possible in public awareness those who advocate from those who deliver. Just keep the two connected by the webwork overlay of party fractionations. Elizabeth Economy of the Council on Foreign Relations in a Time Viewpoint essay entitled “The Lessons of Harbin” (5 December 2005, p. 17) maintains that China has a “highly decentralized political system”. Whenever there is one pole or the other -- centralized, decentralized -- enunciated as regards China's political system, try to discover the subliminal agenda of the enunciator. She goes on to observe that:
While officials in Beijing routinely pass laws to protect the environment, local officials and factory managers collude to evade them. Many enterprises and municipalities are so confident in their ability to ignore the law that even when they possess appropriate waste-treatment facilities, they elect not to use them in order to avoid operational costs. Local environmental protection bureaus and courts are also beholden to local governments rather than to central government agencies, making them particularly susceptible to political and economic pressure.
Why is the Council on Foreign Relations advocating the benison of centralization? Is there a global “Weimar effect” already in motion? The “new economy” post-industrial economies have followed the “flying geese” and exported many of their dirty industries to China and other emerging economies where costs are kept down by Mutt and Jeff, client and comprador operating as unregistered foreign agents of “cognitive capitalism” and the like of the post-industrial new economies -- which keep their industrializing partners separated in the public mind as far from themselves as they can, all the while maintaining fractionated financial connection. Subterfuge squared -- whilst climate change is occurring over a sphere with a circular ozone hole. Square pegs and round holes.
One imponderable (Derek and Toussaint broached in MOON in relation to Toussaint's counter-intelligence experience in Korea during the first six months of 1950) concerning the situation with North Korea today and the three-year-old 13-nation “secret war” against it (“West mounts 'secret war' to keep nuclear North Korea in check”, Michael Sheridan, The Sunday Times, 9 July 2006) is the degree to which hagiographic American accounts of the origins of the First Korean War will predispose present-day U.S. policy principals (no less aggressively Christian-fundamentalist motivated that were Swingman and Fosterite John) to errors in situational assessment as to what the minimal threshold of incursion is that will elicit a North Korean invasion of the South or the presently equivalent reaction -- and how undesirable or desirable such a reaction might be, given that there are no viable initiatory military options available to the “West” so called (Japan, Singapore, Taiwan, and Macao being included). This is an issue that also plays into one dimension of the question of how it is that a long-starving people have never seriously challenged oppressive leaders in more than half a century. Sheridan's article is, I might add, the first time I've seen noted in the press what has long been obvious. Quoting Sheridan quoting Timperlake:
“China is the source of the problem, not the source of the solution,” argued Edward Timperlake, a defence official in the Reagan administration and author of Showdown, a new book on the prospect of war with China.
There are Mutts and Jeffs, and then there are Mutts and Jeffs. If, by one mistake or another, by one or another party, the Korea situation pops off, the High Noon of the Timperlake “showdown” may come earlier than people have anticipated, and the OK Corral of the conflict may be somewhat displaced from what it otherwise would have been. Moreover, the “showdown” may not be a flashover, but a much lower intensity war fought over a much longer period of time, gathering fury by one phase transition following upon the next. The Japanese seem finally, after all this time, to be getting the picture of how enormously precarious their situation has long been: small islands hugely over population carrying capacity by forced-draft urbanization largely completed; can't feed themselves (one of the long list of demands contained in the U.S. Structural Impediments Initiative); can't feed their economy the natural resources it requires; can't feed their economy the cheap energy it requires (how many national days of wood do their plantation forests contain?). And -- when the shooting starts -- the American “umbrella” will be incapable of long guaranteeing any of these -- given the physical location of the Japanese home islands relative to the great land mass of the foe and the high price of jet fuel. Geopolitical considerations played no small parts raising the notion of a Greater China in due course aligned to a Germano-Russian bloc. The question has always been: What is the time-step? Subordinate questions regarding this particular macro-scenario involve what the Japanese and German micro-event-sequences will be. VirFut Q-Pro, anyone? The German would have to be one of the late sequences; while the Japanese, one of the early ones. Oh, it will be hard for the Japanese to get with the Chinese program; they certainly will drag their feet. Nowadays, we have Starlifters, not merely C-123s. Yes, that just might work, lift the stars; there's quite a precedent, you know, quite a precedent for that. Imagine the promo posters and the propaganda value. The Tokyo Airlift! We ride you to the stars, bringing today what was only imagined in days of yore. It will be yet one more grand technological achievement. Yesiree. But that could be only an early step in the Japanese sequence. This is merely a scenario, remember. Don't get the wrong hypothetical idea.
The reason why gifting strategies have so little to do with strategic variables of the prevailing global equation in this age of globalization is that such strategies have no actual intent to address such variables: they address the fact of being a combat arm of this or that nation-state; they address the needs of generating “community” goodwill, personal aggrandizement, redemption of self-image, grinding of ideological axes, and the like. 1T2-logical money does not encourage, indeed, may not even permit, actual address of actual strategic variables. But one must admit that media-directed gifting is compensatory (for the collective unconscious) to media-directed terrorism. Making money off variations in those strategic variables, now that is another thing. What does possession of 1T2-logical money do to a person, as compared to, say, 3T4-logical money, or 5T8-logical money? Bill Gates just loves to write 1T2-logical software. Now that he is going into partial retirement and has something like one-tenth of a trillion 1T2-logical dollars to try to program biosphere, planet Earth, what do you think this 1T2-logical bias will do to the µTm-logical frequency domain of life in this cosmological neighborhood? Probably a lot more than the writing of 1T2-logical software has already done to human brain.
There is only one solution in two aspects to every problem, whatever the problem: more Cartesian-Newtonian centralization/coercion (implied coercion, of course) and forced-draft urbanization. The Kurdish problem is a case in point (“Kurds in Turkey: The Big Change”, Stephen Kinzer, The New York Review of Books, 12 January 2006, p. 34):
The European Union has been one of the most effective peacemaking institutions of the modern era. It eased transitions from dictatorship to democracy in Spain, Portugal, and Greece. More recently, it helped manage the peaceable breakup of the Soviet empire. Now, although torn by internal problems, the EU is the main factor drawing Turkey toward democracy.
And the way the EU will actually accomplish this democratization of Turkey and resultant solution to the Kurdish problem -- beyond benisons of anticipation -- is by employment of the second aspect (p. 36):
Many of Hakkari's [a small town in southeast Turkey] residents consider themselves Kurds first, then Turks. In this they are different from millions of their fellow Kurds who have moved westward and established themselves in big cities like Istanbul and Izmir. Many of those who left are now assimilated into Turkish society. More than a few have risen to high positions in business, entertainment, government, and the army. In Hakkari, however, people cling to their Kurdish identity.
Oops! I forgot. There is a third aspect to the only solution to every and any problem: the economic growth that follows inevitably upon forced-draft urbanization, that growth essayed in the same issue of The Review: “The Way to a Fair Deal” by Jeff Madrick reviewing Harvard economist Benjamin M. Friedman's book The Moral Consequences of Economic Growth. This book shows, with a few minor caveats, to be sure, that there is no other way to progressive policies of the state and suppression of the impetus to regressive populism than by steady and sustained growth of the economy. And if the EU would just stop being such a slacker in regards to meeting the prerequisites of economic growth, then the “internal problems” tearing at the fabric of the EU, particularly its urban housing projects, would dissipate in inspired progressive policies. Moreover, were every problem everywhere in the world met with this three-aspect solution to every problem in the world, then thermodynamic spending-down of resources and cheap energy, and the involved climate-change dynamic, would be dissipated in the inspired progressive policies and explosion of inspired progressive techno-innovation which inevitably would become the emergent properties of universal employment of the three-aspect solution to every problem in the world. This outcome is insured by the "magic hand" of self-interest hand-in-hand with the glad hand of the progressive state. How do I know? Because 17th and 18th century accounts of self-organization in natural systems tells me so, that's how.
I don't remember having ever said I think that the primary role of suicide-terror martyrdom operations is to inculcate esprit de corps within the terrorist network. It certainly does that, I believe, but that would be the least one could say of it. Little evidence exists in the literature crossing my purview that there is any real understanding of the depths to which this “phenomenon” conditions the whole framework of network-centric terrorist warfare, in all of its various dimensions. Let me run through some notions that will at first seem off the subject but in the end will return to it. As an illustration of the absence of understanding, I turn to Jean Gebser's The Ever-Present Origin (Ohio U. Press, 1985 English translation of the 1953 edition of the 1949 German original). On page 9, Gebser says:
Not until the Gothic, the forerunner of the Renaissance was there a shift in emphasis. Before that space is not yet our depth-space, but rather a cavern (and vault), or simply an in-between space; in both instances it is undifferentiated space.
On page 10, Gebser treats us to a translation of excerpts from Wilhelm Worringer's 1927 book on ancient Egyptian Art, wherein the existence of “pre-spatial” human experience is essayed. Quoting Gebser's translation of Worringer:
The Egyptians were neutral and indifferent toward space… They were not even potentially aware of spatiality… The Egyptians lacked utterly any spatial consciousness.
And well into his book, in footnote 46, page 390, Gebser says that:
Today we know that Gothic sprang forth from the wealth of forms in the Islamic heritage that penetrated Europe via Spain; see for example Ars Hispaniae (Madrid: Ediciones Plus Ultra), the first volumes of which were published in 1950 and 1951.
But Gebser does not quote from or refer to Worringer's book Form in Gothic or Worringer's earlier and preparatory Ph.D. dissertation Abstraction and Empathy (about which C.G. Jung wrote an inspired essay when it was first published). No mention is made of these two books (which Gebser could not possibly have been unaware of) because they do not support Gebser's thesis that Gothic was a forerunner of Renaissance linear-perspective articulation of depth-space. Indeed, Kandinsky assiduously studied Worringer's dissertation and Form in Gothic before writing his On the Spiritual in Art which he completed before painting what was possibly the first “non-objective painting”. The title of Kandinsky's book was an expression of Worringer's theme that abstraction is the spiritual in art, a conclusion Worringer drew from his studies in Gothic which “we now know sprang forth from the wealth of forms in the Islamic heritage”, forms giving expression to what has been called “Islamic heat”. One conspicuous, and I believe revealing, lacuna in Gebser's book is a near-absence of discussion of medieval European art, architecture, and music. He more or less jumps from “the ancients” to 1250, treated as the beginning of the Renaissance, where, according to his view, ancient themes of space articulation were again picked up, resurrected, as it were. A sense of “I” re-emerges as a prerequisite to drawing depth-space out of the soul, out of the Platonic “cavern”, out of the shadow “vault” -- this “I” being first expressed by the Troubadours in their lyrical poetry and song. It is interesting to note in this regard that The Oxford History of Western Music by Richard Taruskin (reviewed in The New York Review of Books by Charles Rosen, two parts, 23 February and 9 March 2006) begins with the Troubadours, not plainsong, Gregorian chant, organum, medieval polyphony (none of these terms being found in the extensive index to Gebser's book). At the same time as the Troubadours, 1250 or so, Thomist Catholicism arises and separates itself from Augustinian Catholicism -- each with completely different implied notions of space, and very different accompanying emotivities, different psychological “heats” or affect-charges: Thomas Aquinas leads the Christian Church on to a rationalist Aristotelian-logic path extending toward an inevitable Reformation crisis just as Gothic falls away, while the Platonic-Augustinian form of Catholicism, which a century earlier had begun expressing itself in northern France as Gothic, hides its covert aspects in the Spain of Moorish al-jabr, only to later emerge as Our Lady of Guadalupe and Unamuno's The Tragic Sense of Life. So very hidden, it seems, we only learn of this underground Moorish life of the informing “wealth of forms” in Gothic so late as 1950 and 1951, all along having attributed origins of Gothic to influence of the Goths. So, perhaps Gebser should be somewhat excused, for clearly he did not know of this in preparing the 1949 original of The Ever-Present Origin. Moreover, the difference in notions of space available to human experience may even be greater than Worringer suggests in saying that “The Egyptians lacked utterly any spatial consciousness”. Shigehisa Kuriyama's The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (Zone Books, 1999) leads me to the suspicion that a sense of being in the body, as the post-Renaissance-enculturated “I”-person experiences it, may also have been absent to those utterly lacking spatial consciousness.
So, the Gothic cathedral, which many believe the ultimate architectural expression of Christianity, may, according to this treatment, have had its subtle origins in Islam -- and only to a far lesser degree in a mystical Masonic tradition -- or these Islamic origins and the Masonic tradition had some connection other than merely that of Spain, a connection we know nothing of, possibly as a result of the 11th and 12th century Crusades. Gebser apparently believed the architectural space of the Gothic cathedral was a “forerunner” of the perspective depth-space of the Renaissance. But can this possibly be so? Gebser thought so, in my judgment, for two reasons: [1] he experienced architectural space in the Renaissance and post-Renaissance manner, not in the ancient Egyptian manner, not in Shigehisa Kuriyama's pre-Hellenic manner, and not in the Gothic manner; [2] Gothic came onto the European scene approximately 100 years before the Renaissance (lasting until the early-1500s) and -- though Gebser in The Ever-Present Origin elaborates a theory of the “concretion of time” as an aperspectival spatialization of the temporal -- his overall theme is of a linear-time evolution in human history from the unperspectival to the perspectival and on to the aperspectival, the first and final of these being quite distinct, the former being akin to un-self consciousness and the latter being akin to supra-self consciousness. Gebser is at pains to demonstrate validity of this consciousness distinction and the superiority of the latter, and this requires that the overall theme of his book not be constructed in terms of a concretion of time to many simultaneous “facets”; rather, in terms of the linear notion of time associated with the perspectival. But Renaissance and post-Renaissance time is surely not time in Gothic, any more than Renaissance and post-Renaissance space is space in Gothic. Though one could certainly make “transitional” arguments by speaking of the architectural contextualization of Platonic “vaults”, for instance, as an “in-between” type of space -- between pre-Renaissance and Renaissance -- this is altogether to miss Gothic experience of the Gothic, which was more a “forerunner” -- misspeaking again in Renaissance terms -- of present-day multi-media than it was of Renaissance perspective depth. The experiential Gothic cathedral was no less music and light than architecture. The cantus firmus of medieval polyphony was heard on the floor of the building, while the stacked simultaneous monophonic melodies were sung across incense-misty angelic sheets, ghostly visible, filling the void beneath the vaulting, as divine light poured through colored transparencies of Platonic ideal-types delineated in leaded arabesques, and on through the angelic sheets to illuminate the incarnate world regulated by sacred geometries embodied in the foundational floor plan, made aurally emphatic by the cantus firmus and fully apprehended only in God's-eye view. Architectural projections were Renaissance and post-Renaissance takes on God's House, the Gothic cathedral as Wholeness Himself (Himself being a Gothic gender glaze over the Augustinian-Platonic Herself later explicit as Our Lady of Guadalupe). The Meeting of East and West, on a real first-time basis, may have taken place in Gothic, not in Mexico as F.S.C. Northrop essayed during WWII.
Time in Gothic was not in the meandering (hence: upon a 2-D sonic sheet) horizontal line of the individual monophonic melody; it was in polyphonic verticality of the stacked corpus of all such simultaneous line-meanders, illuminated by divine light as music-sculpture, Musculpt. Time was between the angelic sheets, so to speak. And form in music being largely temporal, or in a spatialization of the temporal, form in Gothic polyphony was quintessentially vertical. This is in stark contrast to the Renaissance and post-Renaissance conception, fully realized in the diatonic system during the Classical Period, where musical form is not to be found in the verticality of the chords themselves, but in the horizontal relations between chords, their motion, and the involved key-signature modulatory schemata. Time -- as distinct from form -- in Gothic was 90-degrees “imaginary” to Classical-Period time -- which in a very real sense was a pre-Renaissance return, a musical return to at least Pythagoras (and possibly much earlier, by virtue of the Vedic idealism in Plato). Not everyone experienced Gothic form fully -- synaesthetically, that is -- we can be sure; those best “positioned” for that were the master choristers. And in what sort of space were such choristers positioned? This was certainly not rigorously -- in the modern mathematical sense -- understood in 1150 or 1500, but it was most assuredly understood in some sense: the involved poly-space (p-adic in present-day mathematical parlance) is predicated upon Presence of an origin ever-absent (a claim contrary to that made by Gebser's book title). But rather than proceeding by syllogism, let's follow the meandering metaphorical path I traveled toward some understanding of this ever-absent origin. I was, several hours a day, doing a type of walking meditation based on self-observation while taking studio art courses from a specialist in Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting techniques and studying music composition under a professor who internationally performed dodecaphonic vocal works. I became intensively absorbed with all three activities and in due course began to have some fleeting colored-hearing synaesthesia. Thereupon, I started trying to “paint music”. This was not very successful in the finished products, as I had little real interest in technique and materials: the focus was placed upon immediacy of the direct experience, which I “projected” into the employed practices of walking meditation. One way in which I did this was initiated by being told that Dürer used an actual screen-grid to look through while he painted the scene being depicted on his canvass. So I constructed a square-mesh of heavy-gauge wires upon a canvass stretcher and looked through it just as Dürer had done, trying to discover how this might have facilitated his insight into the “laws” of linear perspective. After several weeks of this “looking through” I found that whenever I engaged in walking meditation it was as if I had carried along Dürer's screen-grid: wherever I looked while walking, there was spontaneously a psychological feeling of the space having been framed, and properties of the space articulation within this “frame” empathically “jumped out” just as if I were looking through the screen-grid. I used the word “empathically” in my internal discourse about this because, from previous experience, I knew that one characteristic of generative empathy involves an aspect of the empathized-with object perceptually “jumping” into unusual clarity relative to other aspects, such that the high-lighted aspect suddenly reveals an internal emotive content present in the object not normally perceived, and awareness of this content transforms the object into a subject. Space between subject and subject in these circumstances begins to collapse, which can be quite frightening, usually eliciting a “pushing back” of the other-subject into its object-state by yanking attention away from the content revealed by the high-lighted aspect. Screen-grid “jumping out”, however, is much more abstract in that it involves properties of the whole space, not just of an object in the space; it's as if abstraction itself is being empathized with. The grid helps to get the proportions on canvass correct in relation to the perspective lines-to-vanishing-point of the objects viewed in the visual field. Dürer probably meticulously measured and studied all this between screen-grid and canvass in great detail. My purpose, however, by virtue of the walking meditation, became rather different: I sought to understand the psychology of the spatial “framing” and “jumping out”. I sensed these two had something to do with the relation between “projection” in the psychological transference and “projection” in linear-perspective -- if there was a relation, and I wanted to find out if there was. So, while in walking meditation, I began experimenting with the “jumped out” properties of space inside the psychological “frame”: for instance, I'd try to push the period I could block awareness of all space articulation properties except for a chosen one, say, the perspective lines, or the relative proportional lengths determined by the perspective lines. This, in part, involved learning how to walk without falling in the simulacra of reduced spatial cuing, and required daily practice. Once, without intending to, almost by accident, as I pushed the period of concentration on the perspective lines, awareness “slid down” those lines to the vanishing point. This was very frightening and I immediately jerked out of it. In linear perspective, we don't go to that point; we are safe in the eye-I at the other end of the perspective lines. But I found that after this one experience of the vanishing point, whenever I did this spatial type of practice in walking meditation, I could no longer stay completely away from the vanishing point. I would always jerk away, of course. As this became a familiar part of the practice, it settled into a periodic oscillation: slipping down to the point and jerking away. But a “point” came, a “time” arrived, where, without actually deciding, the period at the vanishing point got longer and longer -- speaking only of the briefest instants -- before the jerking away. On one occasion I crossed the threshold, a threshold I had no suspicion of being-there: an inversion took place. Normally the perspective lines originate at the vanishing point and pass through the screen-grid to the eye-I; but in this case they converge upon the vanishing point from the infinite-away. All the lines converging on me! Something like me. Yet, this something-like-me is nothing, a vanishing point at the intersection of lines arriving from the infinite-away. At the instant of recognizing this nothing as me, a something-like-me, there is sudden knowing of a different kind of space, a multiple space, a space not singular, not itself alone. This knowing is not by seeing, but by hearing, hearing the absence, the no-sound. No-sound hidden inside of no-sound, the no-sounds which are the source, the source of sound. White noise hiss inside of white noise hiss, layer after layer which become sheets only when the sounds hidden in no-sound are separated out. I had no way to understand this. And I didn't know how to go about trying to understand it. All I could do was try to become aware of clues, if any happened to pass my way. Many attempts were made to read into the higher mathematics of projective geometry, but the notation, in so far as I came to understand it little by little, seemed not to have much to do with the exact nature of “'my' inversion”. But over the years inklings appeared and I started to have a better understanding. One of the best accounts I've seen is given by Roger Penrose in his book The Road to Reality (Jonathan Cape, 2004, p. 341):
Another important notion, associated with the general vector space, is that of a projective space [emphasis in original]. The vector space itself is “almost” a bundle [of Clifford parallels, which are mutually “skew” by imaginary numbers while remaining mutually parallel by real numbers, roughly speaking] over the projective space. If we remove the origin of the vector space, then we get a bundle over the projective space, the fibre being a line with the origin removed; alternatively, as with the particular example of BC [a complex line bundle] given above… we can “blow up” the origin of the vector space.
When the origin is “blown up”, the result is (p. 339) “a Riemann sphere's worth of zeros” associated with (p. 338) a “family of multiples” -- multiples which are the many fibers of the bundle, each such fiber associated with a sheet-intersection of the sphere. Penrose goes on to describe how this is a generalization of the linear-perspective at the foundation of Renaissance and post-Renaissance painting.
Each master chorister, I strongly suspect, was psychologically and synaesthetically at the ever-absent origin yielding the set of zeros generating the multiple angelic white-noise no-sound sheets out of which “jumped” (or were “pulled”) the multiple monophonic melody lines woven together into a polyphonic bundle of complexly skew, yet realistically parallel, fibers. Divine light poured, not only through leaded-glass windows, but through these aural fibers, projecting sacred-geometry signifiers of the conventions of cosmic autopoiesis onto the floor, the ground state, of the House of God: form in Gothic, which we now know “sprang forth from the wealth of forms in the Islamic heritage”. An amazing synthesis, collective conscious integration by metaphor, analogue, trope. But what happens when such integration is suppressed, is driven back into the collective unconscious? As the centuries pass and the tropes progressively lose their metareferential reach, regressive fulminations appear, intensifying with each occasion until a cusp is reached. As Penrose informs us (p. 338) “the vector can now be 'scaled up and down' by a positive real number”. With such means -- in psychological analogue -- is the Riemann sphere regressed to a “Bucky ball” collapsed to a single scale level, the flat-management “floor”, which, by projective-identification, takes the (p. 326) Kaluza-Klein “internal dimensions” of the fiber bundle over onto a regressed metaphor: the extrojected external dimensions of the network-centric infrastructure of suicide-terror martyrdom operations. For the master bomber -- no longer a master chorister -- psychologically at the ever-absent origin, the sense of “blown up” takes on new meaning, a regressed concrete meaning.
Civil law is more than an application of force; it justifies force. Take away force and there is no civil law; it does not work. Newton's laws of motion codified civil law as nature. But Einstein's General Relativity took away the force in giving it to spacetime curvature: Einstein's law is not in force; it is in the shape of relations. Take away force and Einstein's law still works, still has a basis. Newton, in psychologically projecting civil law onto nature, inverted cosmological metareference: this transference regression is why we have a global crisis today, a crisis we may not survive.
I beg to differ. The Palestinians are not being “walled in”; the Israelis are. Israel has put its faith in a Maginot Line, a 1T2-logical phase boundary rapidly become a chaotic strange attractor. Where once there were no formal boundaries on the land, now there are concrete walls reaching for the sky. They are a parochial lot, the Israelis, viewing everything only from their own perspective. They were naive enough to believe that Israel was allowed existence because of the Nazi Holocaust, when the primary reason was the need for a paddle to stir petroleum soup of the Middle East, so as to keep production up and prices down. Twenty years later, it was clear the soup was on the verge of changing phases: the gold-exchange mechanism of the Bretton-Woods monetary system was reaching a boil. The paddle needed some nails driven through it because the currency denominating oil transactions soon would become fiat. So the oil-consuming nations recognized that the Occupied Territories had been occupied. But Israel, in being a paddle, is also an exemplar. Quoting Amos Elon reviewing Gershom Gorenberg's The Accidental Empire: Israel and the Birth of the Settlements, 1967-1977 (“What Does Olmert Want”, The New York Review of Books, 22 June 2006, p. 53):
Raymond Aron, then [1967] visiting Israel, asked Prime Minister Levi Eshkol if he wasn't worried about a rebellion by the Arabs as had happened in Algeria. Gorenberg cites Eshkol's answer: “No. This isn't Algeria. We can strangle terror in the occupied territories.”
So also says George Bush, not of the Occupied Territories, but of the Whole Earth: GWOT. If you want some small intimation of what this planet will be like twenty years from now, study the security measures employed in the Occupied Territories. Look at the photograph provided with Elon's review: there stands Sharon and Olmert in deep concentration over a four-color map of the Occupied Territories. With intellectual giants like these setting agendas -- exemplars of the MacArthur, end-run, Euclidian mind -- how can anyone imagine escape from utter chaos?
I haven't the slightest interest in opposing the existing system. The opposition is part of the system it opposes. Haven't you heard of countervailing forces? Nothing could destroy the system faster or more thoroughly than the system itself is doing. In forty years I have not heard a better idea than the system itself has evolved. What interested me forty years ago, what interests me today is what replaces the existing global system when it goes into incendiary collapse of its own accord.
As far as I know MacArthur is dead, so it doesn't seem wise to generalize too far his sentiments about old soldiers: old-paradigm believers may fade away, but they never change their beliefs. The trouble with this is that Einstein's notion of law -- evolved out of higher mathematical events, precipitated by Lobachevsky and Abel, and transpiring during the 1820s -- is nearly one-hundred-years old and still virtually all humans believe in the old paradigm. The question is: are they going to fade away or are they going to die?
But this is the absolute worst case! The Franco-Prussian War was a local war; World War One was largely confined to Europe proper, with Middle East sideshow and Russian revolution; World War Two was somewhat of a global war: the Americas, sub-Saharan Africa, Siberia, Australia, India and Central Asia went largely unscathed. All these wars were fought over exactly the same fundamental paradigm-conflict issues driving global events today. And it's even worse than that. Reading into the history of irregular warfare at Special Operations Research Office in 1963 (e.g., Andrew Molnar, et al., Undergrounds in Insurgent, Revolutionary, and Resistance Warfare, SORO, 1963) I learned that U.S. counterinsurgency operations in Viet Nam owed a great debt to the counter-partisan operations of the elite Nazi Jagd-Kommando mobile strike forces: the U.S. Army made no in-principle innovations, not search-and-destroy, not even rapid-reaction forces delivered by air. And it was not long before I learned that on a quasi-subliminal level American troops viewed the Viet Nam war through the lens of Indian Country. I now learn that the Nazi Holocaust was explicitly inspired by the North American Holocaust. Quoting William H. McNeill summarizing and quoting from David Blackburn's The Conquest of Nature: Water, Landscape, and the Making of Modern Germany (“Watch on the Rhine”, The New York Review of Books, 22 June 2006, p. 52):
…the Nazis likened the Slavic East to the American West, equating Poles, Jews, and Russians with American Indians, peoples destined to be swept aside… Even when the tide of war began to turn against him, Hitler clung to the analogy by equating struggles against the partisans with “the Indian Wars in North America.” I found it a surprise, and a sobering one, to learn how influential American examples of ethnic cleansing were in Nazi ideology and practice.
And on the other side, that of the Allies, there was Churchill, who I now learn shared these American-inspired Nazi views (Churchill, quoted by Geoffrey Wheatcroft, “A Man So Various”, Harper's Magazine, May 2006, p. 92):
I do not admit, for instance, that a great wrong has been done to the Red Indians… by the fact that a stronger race, a higher race, or a more worldly-wise race, to put it that way, has come in and taken their place.
There has been, is, and will be only one episodic holocaust: that of The Enclosures, enclosing the natural commons by enclosing the psychosocial commons. Holocaust of the Whole Earth. This present war is not peace one day, an assassination or an invasion, and global war the next; it is slow-motion onset, a long incubation period crossing one threshold after the next such that no fundamental is ever adequately addressed, a war that will be authentically global and fought on every level of intensity, low-intensity to the highest of intensities, including space-based, drone, and chemo-bio-EM-weather-radiologic-info-nano-warfare, contextualized by climate change, energy-resource failure, massive extinction of species, and immune system deterioration. Just try to imagine some worse case!
Well, now that the G-8 leadership, all smiles and laughter, handshakes and shoulder thumps, has unanimously indorsed neocon policy to remake the Middle East, what do you imagine the outcome will be?
Frankly, I have been unable to discover any significant differences between neocon policy and Al Qaeda and Associates policy: they both seek to fundamentally remake Central Asia and the Middle East. The one significant difference I see is that the neocons have been unsuccessful at setting AQ&A policy, while AQ&A has virtually taken over the policy formulation process in Washington. And lately they have also managed to set policy in Tel Aviv and at a G-8 summit. The predominant TACTIC of insurgents, be they engaged in national-liberation war or anti-national global-liberation war, is to provoke disproportionate responses on part of the state. This is because insurgents never have the capability to destroy states; only the state can destroy states. So, the insurgency must take command of the resources of the state if it is to achieve its purposes. AQ&A has been very successful at taking over the militaries of the U.S. and Israel, and soon it will do the same with NATO and the UN. Let me offer an historical example: the VC created one of their main supply infiltration corridors into Saigon prior to the 1968 Tet offensive by attacking elements of the 11th Armored Cavalry and then retreating along the required route slow enough for the CAV -- knocking down nature all along the path -- to keep up with them. The current situation in the Middle East is a perfect illustration of the general principle involved: Hamas and Hezbollah ran a few cross-border raids, killed a dozen soldiers and captured three; by such a small investment were they able to greatly undermine integrity of the state of Lebanon. If this eventually spreads to Syria, all the greater will be return on such a small investment. The fact that it was Hamas and Hezbollah that undertook this initiative, not AQ&A, is irrelevant: once GWOT had been declared, AQ&A had set the global agenda; by that declaration, all other related initiatives were made subtext -- and credibility of the U.S. was tied to maintenance of infrastructure and services planet wide, in each and every nation-state. Such are the rules of the game the neocons decided the U.S. would play. It was the U.S. that declared GWOT, not other nation-states and not the UN: unilateral declaration. No other nation-state, however sympathetic to the U.S., thus put its credibility on the line, not even Britain. He who first speaks… and so on. The Middle East cannot be remade, by either the neocons or AQ&A, unless its states are destroyed. When the state cannot provide the services which are its only justification for existence, it has failed utterly at counterinsurgency. And once the infrastructures, physical and human, required to deliver those services are destroyed, they are NEVER rebuildable under the conditions of insurgency warfare. Generally, that requires decades and enormous investment, and can be successfully undertaken only after the insurgency war is over. Whose remake will the final remake be? By my count, there are not many neocons living in the Middle East; this gives AQ&A an enormous home court advantage once the states of the Middle East have been destroyed by exercise of the resources of the state. The neocons have failed to direct AQ&A policy because they have foolishly chosen to kill off the leadership of AQ&A. Distributed functions are much harder to take control of than are centralized functions: a far greater number of people must be affected. Centralization has organizational, spatial, and temporal aspects: GWOT has distributed with respect to all of these. Not only did the U.S., by invading Afghanistan, facilitate an enormous organizational phase transition AQ&A could not have achieved without assistance, American headhunters have distributed AQ&A functions in a way the AQ&A leadership would, by definition, have been incapable of accomplishing. Even mass suicide by the AQ&A leadership could not have done it. But why has AQ&A had such an easy time of taking control over the resources of its opposition? Not only because the leadership of its opposition has become ever more centralized. Provision of services under the prevailing systems of state governance requires invocation of civil law; civil law does not work without the exercise of force. I quote from above:
Civil law is more than an application of force; it justifies force. Take away force and there is no civil law; it does not work. Newton's laws of motion codified civil law as nature. But Einstein's General Relativity took away the force in giving it to spacetime curvature: Einstein's law is not in force; it is in the shape of relations. Take away force and Einstein's law still works, still has a basis. Newton, in psychologically projecting civil law onto nature, inverted cosmological metareference: this transference regression is why we have a global crisis today, a crisis we may not survive.
Western civil law arose upon waning of the Middle Ages -- with acts of enclosure perpetrated upon nature -- when divine writ went into abeyance. Because of this, present-day state leadership elites stand behind civil law which stands behind force; so, when challenged, elites, by knee jerk, by hysteria, and by lack of other options, respond by exercise of force. This is a circumstance readymade to fulfill the needs of AQ&A. The reverse is not the case. AQ&A does not have to provide the services provided by the state. Another rule of the game the neocons decided the U.S. would play. Moreover, AQ&A does not stand behind a civil law that, in principle, stands behind force. Though AQ&A employs force, it stands behind a notion of law that, in principle, is sanctified by divine writ, not force. This is an enormous psychological advantage, particularly so on its home court: there is no level playing field between AQ&A and the neocons.
Japan once, by the cultural visa, employed foreigners to valorize and interpret traditional Japanese culture to the world. But as Japanese interest in Japanese culture dissipated, the cultural visa fell by the wayside. A somewhat skew-parallel process is presently transpiring in the West (actually, accelerating, as it has been going on for quite some memetime): as validity, utility, and authenticity of post-medieval European world-construct dissipates to vacuum under relentless challenge marshaled by post-Newtonian beamtime, discovery, verification, and analogical generalization into the techno-base, exemplars who can be identified with the once-colonized are fêted into defending that which has lost its validity, utility, and authenticity. Agents of influence intromitted to Western higher enculturation and expectorated upon the world by academic and literary projectile vomiting. The resultant emetic excursus, while appendix to digression of Western culture, is simultaneously a Western glazing of the vanquished native threatening to return as higher mathematics and avant-garde theoretical physics with massive implications for the social sciences -- this glazing being required because of a veritable landslide become a fulsome avalanche of threatening resonances between the post-Newtonian and the pre-colonial. Complement to psychological eating by introjection, one more form of collecting ears to display in the world's Great Museums-Mausoleums-Libraries-Networks: prefiguration to holocaust of the Whole Earth. While the once-colonized are still trying to assimilate 16th, 17th, and 18th century Westernisms, intelligent Westerners have for generations always abandoned ship; this has reached such epidemic proportions that immigrant laborers and academic imports are the only cogs who anymore actually believe in institutionalization of Cartesian-Newtonian paradigm as Westphalian nation-state system protecting 1T2-logical economies, be they industrial, post-industrial, or cognitive-capitalistic: not only have the intelligent jumped overboard, so have the fundamentals. Hence, the imported once-colonized are by far the best recruits for producing defense testimonials. Take Alan Ryan's interpretation of Amartya Sen and Kwame Anthony Appiah in “Cosmopolitans” (The New York Review of Books, 22 June 2006) by way of example. Reviewing Sen's Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny, Ryan (p. 46) quotes Sen:
“Violence,” Sen writes, referring to conflicts in Rwanda, Congo, Israel, Palestine, and other places, “is fomented by the imposition of singular and belligerent identities on gullible people, championed by proficient artisans of terror.”
Ryan goes on to summarize Sen's notion of what once was called the “terrorist index” (p. 46): “…the idea of identifying people by one trait or another.” Or, not and: get it? He then quotes a long passage where Sen lists the various simultaneous traits by which he personally identifies himself (and, not or: get it?): non-singular, multiple traits in a list. This is a glazing of the Western glazing of the Vedic “all points of view equally valid” -- a translation from the Sanskrit almost certainly metaphysically malapropian. Antonio T. de Nicolas (Four-Dimensional Man: The Philosophical Methodology of the Rg Veda, Bangalore, Dharmaram, 1971) tried to get beyond T. S. Eliot's wasteland of hermeneutic “polo bears” and “neon stockings”, but somehow didn't quite make it -- though he was on the right tract.
Reviewing Appiah's Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers, Ryan summarizes thus (p. 46):
Appiah's exploration of cosmopolitanism begins with an elegant demolition of two common ideas: the first is that different cultures live to all intents and purposes in different universes; the second is that if we all live in the same universe, one story about that universe must be right and the rest just wrong.
This is explained in greater detail by recourse to an outsider's extremely reductionistic interpretation of witchcraft and shamanism in animistic notions of disease pathogenesis: certainly not written by a Special Forces medic long experienced running MEDCAPS to tribal peoples around the planet, let alone such a medic who has happened upon, say, participation mystique. Ryan then explicates the lemmas Appiah infers from his two fundamental counter-common premises (p. 46): “We live in one world, but have many ways of interpreting it…” and, that being the case, “…we can only engage in conversation…”. Habermas hyperbole: how invigorating this new prescription!
What Ryan doesn't explicate is that the “cosmopolitanism” essayed here is actually a Cartesian-Newtonian-Lockean Anglo-Saxon parochialism black-propagandized as if it were a universal. Morale operations: puke, puke, puke, out it spews, splatter-splat across our most sophisticated output to the printed page. Ryan notes that Appiah “…reaches back to Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments and Smith's invocation of the 'internal spectator' who judges our actions from a moral point of view.” This is straight out of The Gong Show! Appiah argues against Smith's moral utilitarianism, but -- how could it be otherwise? -- demurs at actually taking on the “internal spectator”. This is one place the minds of Sen and Appiah meet. Guf-all! Guf-all! Guf-all! in their hundreds of thousands, millions maybe, all those who have systematically engaged the “internal spectator” be it by mediation of Gurdjieff or Vipassana, Special Forces training, Tao yoga, Nyingma or Dzogchen, Jacobson's progressive relaxation instruction or Luthe's autogenic training, by sitting, standing or walking, breathing or stretching. The first principle learned is that if the “internal spectator” judges, from a moral point of view, or from any other point of view, the practitioner absolutely “cannot do” whatever the practice is a practice of. Gotta trade that spectator in for a spectator of that spectator -- over and over and over until there is a spectator of a spectator of a spectator… wherein no judgment is involved. “Bare” self-observation is the ticket! And if you were to do bare self-observation long enough, you yogi, you yogini, with deep enough concentration, far enough into regress -- which any animistic shaman also is doing in contemplating a leaf of herb, by virtue of the identity exchange involved in participation mystique -- then you know that Sen's list of multiple traits in no way authentically alters singular personal identity. Not any more than a list of “stories” -- each equally valid -- about “the same universe” alters the conviction of people -- each with their own list of multiple self-identity traits -- that there must be one accurate fundamental description of the one-and-only universe we all inhabit. Why is that?
Because -- regardless of lists -- the person is taken to be selfsame, the same as himherself, himherself and only himherself -- not, himherself and simultaneously not-himherself. Because -- regardless of lists -- the universe is taken to be selfsame, the same as itself, itself and only itself -- not, itself and simultaneously not-itself. A list of traits, a list of stories in no way challenges the selfsameness of person or universe. Sen and Appiah do not actually address the real issue because they are dissimulating, spreading a Cartesian-Newtonian gloss and thus attempting to hide the resonances between the post-Newtonian and the pre-colonial. As the practitioner of self-observation knows, the Vedic “all points of view equally valid” is a Westernization of the Vedic: the points of view in the actual Vedic are not listable, cannot be enlisted; they are superposed as a “concretion of time” like a Cubist image where that being represented is simultaneously itself and not-itself -- nonselfsame -- over and over and over again, not in linear-memetime, but in independence thereof. That's what direct immediate experience of animistic identity transparency is. M-times over nonselfsame! And rigorous modern mathematical accounts of this have been on the scene for almost 100 years: Lukasiewicz's m-valued logics and the wave-function of Schrödinger's time-independent wave equation interpreted with Lukasiewicz's logics. “Nonselfsame” is a word not so scary, but if you replace it with the word “dissociation” then you get some idea why it is necessary to import academics to gloss the issues, to make sure the pre-colonial is not understood to be related to the post-Newtonian. When stimulus fatigue sets in -- re: glossolalia -- that's when cusp events begin.
Look, it's really not necessary to study long historical cycles, even short cycles, to get a very good idea of what absolutely will happen in near-term memetime. One does not have to speculate on the general character of memecoming current events, only on the particulars -- and knowing those particulars could be of value mostly only for making money mostly only off public pain. Personality assessment is all you need to be good at to see into the future of memetime. Look, look, look. Look around you. Look at all the personalities there are to assess. Forget the standard tests! Those are social programming tools used by the psychiatric police field forces and aligned helping-profession professionals. One, two, ten, a hundred personalities in your immediate cosmological neighborhood to assess. How good are these at nonselfsameness, at dissociation? Are they likely to have a bad trip in deeply entering dissociated states? Can you find one personality to assess that is really good at dissociation? Think you will find any personality in your vicinity which has truly mastered the art of dissociation? Ah, those into the dissociative psychotropic drugs, you think. How many of them are good at non-drug-induced dissociative states, at dealing with onset they have no role in producing, cannot anticipate, cannot terminate, are “at the mercy of, mercilessly”? Those who have truly mastered the dissociative arts walk around all day appearing totally unitary egoic personalities, whilst internally… Oh, my God! Bet you can't find one of those. Why is this personality assessment so prognosticative? Now here is where a little historical knowledge is useful; but no need to get sophisticated, to get into yugas, and loops of cosmic spirals, and all that. This is not a cycle: with his “Impossibility” theorem, Abel demonstrates existence of transcendental mathematics, a mathematics over and above al-jabr, a mathematics necessarily involving the transfinite and the overwhelming omnipresence of nonsingular, m-valued variables; with the “theorem of the acute angle” (more than one parallel to a given line through a given point) Lobachevsky and dissociates demonstrate existence of non-Euclidian geometries; Dedekind “cuts” of the continuous line segment into Cantor “dust” as portrait of the real numbers makes reality of Cantor's oh-so-so very discombobulating “diagonal proof” that part and whole in a countable transfinite set (like the existing-all-at-once real numbers) are, in significant fashion, wholly indistinguishable (if a given number-part cannot be distinguished from all-the-numbers-whole, what is a given number?); the “axiom of choice” -- details aside -- postulates the reality of instantaneously taking a countable transfinite set all-at-once-wholly (if a given number is indistinguishable from all the numbers, then taking a given number is taking all the numbers: every number is holy-infinite, Cabalistically speaking of the Cantorian universe), not, as before, non-instantaneously taking an infinite sequence not-existing-all-at-once (therefore not real) in the limit of extension of an unlimited real-numbered linear-time; realizing that the demonstrated part-whole indistinguishability of the real numbers is based upon the “liar's paradox” (i.e., “this [true] statement is false”) where the involved proposition refers to itself (self-referentially) Lukasiewicz successfully challenges many fundamental properties of traditional Western Aristotlian-Baconian logic and develops m-valued logics to complement Abel's m-valued variables; Planck and Einstein, realizing that the “liar's paradox” speaks to “the tortoise and the hare”, apply the insight to “Brownian motion”, demonstrating existence of quanta “cuts” and photoelectric effects and Lorentzian contractions leading directly to birthing of part-whole indistinguishabilities in both space and time, eventually designated indeterminacies, nonlocalities, and time warps; Schrödinger, practicing Tantric sexual yoga and taking the “axiom of choice” at face value, writes a time-independent wave equation, with a wave-function employing Abel's m-valued variables which can only be interpreted, at face value, by Lukasiewicz's self-referential m-valued logics; Gödel, ignoring Lukasiewicz, uses self-reference to demonstrate incompleteness and undecideability of traditional logic, and in so doing, by ignoring Cantor, develops the notion of a Gödel number wherein a given prime number is somehow inexplicably distinguishable from all the real numbers; Turing, by ignoring Gödel, Lukasiewicz, Cantor, and Schrödinger creates the Turing machine to fulfill the Information Research Department's need to give the mistaken impression of decidability and calculability by nonselfsame numbers, in the end getting really tripped up because -- regardless of lists -- the person is taken to be selfsame, the same as himherself, himherself and only himherself -- not, himherself and simultaneously not-himherself; studies of nonlocalities and indeterminacies in photoelectric effects leads to discovery of the laser and the hologram, both of which are physical manifestations of the part-whole indistinguishability in the very definition of the real number system used to number the time dimension of both Euclidian-Newtonian absolute space and time and the time dimension of non-Euclidian relativistic Minkowski-Einstein spacetime. No need to go much further with this; it just gets more and more detailed, more and more nonselfsame, more and more dissociative: the schizophrenic “multi-worlds hypothesis” of Hugh Everett, III, being exemplary. And now -- skipping astral superfluid second-sounds, yogic superconductant levitations, and Tibetan supersolid penetrations -- we have arrived at quantum computing by superpositioning of phase-digits, a most direct evocation of the animistic “non-simple identity” of the tribe, of cross-cousin marriage, of uninhibited group-sex participation mystique, of all-on-all and all-in-all if not all-against-all (boot-strapping, goose-stepping specter which social contract theory was created to dissipate). And the M Theory of superstring theory is right on the verge of submitting universal physical constants to Abel's and Lukasiewicz's m-valuedness. My God! My God! My God! Oh, the dissociation, the nonselfsameness. And across every scale level! Oh where, oh where has my “classical limit” gone? Maybe the Deconstructionists can help us. Yes, the Deconstructionists. That's it! They'll save us. Oh, I forgot. They haven't even got Marx out of their system, yet; so what could they possibly do? My God! It's true. There is nothing to save us from this dissociation. Nothing, just nothing, nothing. Because of all this nothing, nothing, nothing, The Trinity died at Trinity, Little Boy was transferred to a portion of Asia which finally agreed to trade, and the tripartite (“extended organizational form”) Fertile-Crescent religion has just begun to enter the domain of self-immolation (“disaggregation”). Three-valued logic in no way simulates a world complex enough to embrace a continuum infinity of a denumerable infinity of Lukasiewiczian logical-values to a given proposition, whereas the Unbounded Wholeness of the base state of Tzog-chen does so embrace. Looking at your collection of personality assessments, what do you think is going to happen in memecoming current events as a result of this state of affairs? From me: the big boys are going to win every battle. Ha-ha-ha!
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